The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1885-12-07
MEDITATION UPON SAINTS.
ArchdeacOn Farrar's Sermon in the Rev.
Phillips BrOoks's Church, Boston.
The Delight and Benefit Attending Upon a
Study of the Lives of Those Who Have
Reflected the Glory of Christ.
Report in the Boston Advertiser.

Psalm xvi, 3 Revised Version): GAS for the saints
that are in the earth, they are the excellent in
whom is all my delight" Since the seventh cent
ury the first day of this month has been dedicated
to the memory of all saints. And in many re-
religious communities. since the tenth century,
the second day of this month has been set apart
to the memory of all souls. This latter day has
been dropped from our calendar only because it
was mixed up with many Romish abuses about
purgatory and aims for the dead. Otherwise,
the day devoted to the meditation upon all souls
in the %strietest sense of the word, in connection
with the day devoted to the meditation upon all
saints, suggests thoughts as solemn, and | trust
as profitable, as any on which the mind can
dwell. The great procession of earths innu-
merable millions is ever sweeping across the
narrow stage of life, issuing from the darkness
in which they were not and passing into
the darkness in which they will be seen no
more. We watch that procession as it widens
through the long centuries of history, and note
its most striking figures. Some are men who
build pyramids and subdue nations; some
are poets, with their singing robes about them;
some are great discoveries who have enlarged
the powers of man over the forces of natives;
some are great philosophers who have wldened
the limits OF human thought; some are lovers OF
their fellow-men, reformers of abuses,
trlumphers over long-continued tyrannies; some
are men who have lifted up strong arms to bring
heaven a little nearer to this earth. But not OF
such as these is the great procession of humanity
commonly composed. The vast mass of that
procession consists of the average, the
ordinary, the commonplace; men whose little
lives cleaned out for a moment and then disap-
peared; who did but write their names in water;
who for one moment mounted upward to carve
their names upon the icy pillars, where the next
mornings sun has melted them again; who lie
In earths million nameless graves. To our eyes
mankind is only divided into the eminent and
the obscure, the known and the unknown, the
great and the small, the rulers and the ruled,
the learned and the Ignorant. 1t IL to the latter
class, to those whom the world calls unlmportant
and insignificant, that the great multitude or
every generation have always belonged; the
great multitude of this as of every other assem-
blage of worshippers. Tine immense majority
of men seem to have withered like the flower
and the grass, vanished like the bubble. sunk
like the lead In the mighty waters. After a
year or two they lie in the grave like sheep.
There the wicked cease from troubling and
the weary are at rest" The small and the
great are there and the servant is free from his
master. Yet to the eve of God, to the eye, it
may be, of all good and evil spirits, the aspect
the distinctions of human rank have no exist
ence. To them the castles of human loftiness
have no elevation and the mole-hills cast no
sh adow. They, as they gaze on this marvellous
procession of human life, know only the differ
ence between the good and the evil, between
those who fear God and those who reject Him,
between those who love and those who only hate
and injure their neighbours, between the holy
and the unholy, between the forgiven and the
unforgiven, between the saved and the unsaved
souls Human wealth, human success, human
greatness-the wretched things we are all
tempted to honor more than that which is pure
and lovely, and to covet more than
Gods benediction and heavens own
gold-what are they? when | for
get my king, may my God forget mep said
one who had risen from obscurity to become
Lord High Chancellor of England. '"That is the
best that could happen him." said edmund
Burke, who heard the apostrophe. O how in
finitely better it would have been for many of
earth's successful men if they could have been
unknown here, failures here, not rich, not pros
porous, not renowned, but at the same time not
left with Gods contempt upon them.
In the limitations and complexities of human
motives and human actions, it is only in certain
marked instances that We can make any of
the distinctions which can be made by those
spiritual beings who see with other eyes than
ours. We can perceive that some men have
dared to be eminently good, and that some men
have been conSpicuOusly and UNANIMOUSLY bad.
But most mems characters and lives bear in our
eyes a mixed aspect. They are not carved in mar
BILE, they are robed in gossamer. Most men are
Laodiceans, neither good nor evil, neither cold
nor thot; so interchangeable are the dement's
of good and evil, like warp and wool in the
varying web. We see human sin and weakness
even in the good and CLEANS of saintliness even
in the insanity. He alone who puts the just
weights into the even scale can pronounce upon
most men whether they did good or evil. 1t is
significant OF this complexlty that while the
church of God has canoniZed and b~eatlfied so
large a number of her saints, scarcely one, if
one, except Judas Iscariot-and III that case
without authority-has she ventured to doom to
everlasting woe. But though we cannot pass
judgment on the future of any man, we cannot
help seeing, unless we indulge in a useless oD-
timism. that, according to all human judgment,
there have been and there are some bad men
and bad women, and that some men and
some women have been and are the saints of
God. Bad men and bad women we think
of with pain and shrinking sorrow. We
think that for mankind at any rate it
would have been better if they had never been
born. All those who have lived only to crafty
mean and sensual egotism; all those whose lives
by example have deepened the feverish thirst
for gold; all those who have heaped up riches
by oppression and robbery; ali those who,
by unlawful indulgence Of their lowest appe-
titles, have contributed to poison the life blood of
mankind; all those who have plucked the rose
from the cheek of innocent shame to set a bis
ter there; all those whose words of rottenness
have infected the stream of life with a leprous
distillment of polluted thoughts; all those who,
by shameful perversion of art or literature, have
offered unhallowed incense on the affairs of gent
us, and. minglirg strange flames with her vestal
fires, have kindled feverish passions
and morbid imaginations; all who have
helped to degrade life from a sweet
and serious sanctity into a vulgar frivolity; all
who have been greedy and cruel and dissemina-
tors of gossip and scandal; all who have striven
to hand on or to perpetuate the evil traditions Of
mankind: all those who have advanced by caus-
ing human misery and ruin; all those whose god
is their belly and who glory IN their shame, and
who mind earthly things-the world may give
them coronets AMI loud applause, but those have
been bad men and bad woman. And if all mankind
had been as those have been, if there had been
no salt of the earth amid its corruptions, no
twinkling stars amid its midnight; if, like the
settings In the unclean wine vat, earth had
been nothing but a mass of vileness, vanity and
lust, then the earth had been az anticipated hell.
For without are adulterers, and sorcerers, and
whoremoneers, and idolators, and every one
that loveth and maketh a lie."