the end of evil and futile misery by the extinction and annihilation of the human race.1 9. But oh, my brethren, if you will listen to me for a moment more, how, when it is touched by one ray out of God's eternity, does this blank materialism,—this grotto of icicles in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,-melt into mud and nothingness! How does this glaring metal colossus, with its golden head of intellectualism, tumble into impotency when the rock of faith smites it on its feet of miry clay! If there be no hope, and no God, and no things unseen, if there be no atonement for the intolerable wrong, if praying nations uplift their hands in vain, if only a hollow echo followed Christ's prayer of agony upon the Cross, then, as far as I can see, life is a revolting nullity and a hideous dream. which no poetic make-believes can redeem from its intolerable weariness. But let but one whisper of God's voice thrill the deafened sense; let but 1 Schopenhauer. one gleam of His countenance flash on the blinded eyes; let His hand hold forth to us but one green leaf from the Tree of Life; and how is all changed! Ah, how can we then thank God for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life! How can we cry then with bursts of exultation, "Thou, O God, art our Father, our Saviour, our merciful God; and we that are Thy people and the sheep of Thy pasture will give Thee thanks for ever." If our thoughts have come to us this afternoon "clothed in a cloud," let them depart "encircled with a rainbow." That rainbow may seem at times to be but a watery image, yet it arches the spray of the cataract, it shines upon the menace of the storm. Sorrows? Yes, but to us they are but mercies in disguise. Sins? Ah, yes! But they are forgiven and cast away. Is life worth living? Ask the atheist, and if he tells you his real thought it must be that of the Greek poet "That it were best never to have been born, and next best to depart as soon as possible; "1 poet: or that of the English "Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free; 'Tis something better not to be." But ask the Christian, " Is life worth living?" and he will answer, ay, indeed, life is infinitely worth living, and death is even infinitely more worth dying; for to live is Christ, and to die is gain to live is to have faith in God, and to die is to be with Him for evermore. "Death is the veil which they who live call life; We sleep, and it is lifted." 1 Soph. Oed. Col. 1224 : μὴ φῦναι τον ἅπαντα νι κᾷ λόγον ' τὸ δ' ἐπεὶ φανῇ κει πολὺ δεύτρον, ὡς τάχιστα. "Non nasci] homini longe optumum esse, proxumum autem quam primum mori."-Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 48, 114; cf. Alexis, Com. 3, p. 447. This was indeed one of the commonest sentiments of the Greeks and Romans, whose life it is the fashion to represent as so natural and so happy. It was in fact the grand revelation of the imprisoned Silenus. See Hdt. viii. 138; Aristot. ap. Plut. Consol. § 27; Theogn. 543, ap. Weicker, p. 31; Creuzer, Studien, i, 224, &c. "For for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead." WHEN I spoke from this place last Sunday on the question, "Is life worth living?" when I preached three Sundays ago on Heaven, some of you may possibly have thought, This is all very well for true Christians; all very well if in this world there were only saints; but the saints are few in number, and this world is full of sinners. See what a spectacle it presents! Look at the coarseness and foulness exhibited at every turn in the streets around us. Walk at night in squalid purlieus, not 1 Preached in Westminster Abbey, Nov. II. F a stone's throw from this Abbey, where glaring gin-palaces are busy, and amid the reek of alcohol you may hear snatches of foul oaths and odious songs; where women sit shuddering in wretched garrets, to think of the brutal hands which will strike, of the brutal feet that will kick them, when the drunkard staggers home; where the young lads of the schools over which we spend so many millions of money are being daily ruined and depraved by being allured into low haunts of gambling and degradation. Or walk in the thronged haunts of commerce, where myriads are utterly and recklessly absorbed in that hasting to be rich which shall not be innocent; or judge from the viler phases of the stage and the opera, that vice in higher places is none the less dangerous from being gilded and perfumed; note all these facts-you may say and then tell us, not in an ideal world, but in this world, which looks too often as though it were a world without souls-in this world where there is so much of cruel selfishness, of degraded |