The Russellville Democrat., 1890-03-20


 sadnesses over again Would you want to try again the gricfs and the heart breaks and the bereayements through which you have gone? What mercy that VIC shall never bc called to suffer them againi We may have others bad enough. but those old ones never again. Would you want to go through the proc ess of losing your father again. or your mother again, or your companion in life again, or Jolr child again? If you wore permitted to stop at the sixtieth mile- stone, or the fiftieth milestone. or the fortieth milestone, and retrace your stops to the twentieth, your experience would be something like mine one day last November in Italy. I walked through great city with a friend and two guides, and there were in all the city only four persons, and they were those of our own group. We went ap and down the streets, we entered tho houses, the museums, the temples, the theaters. We examined the wonderful pictures on the walls and the most ex- quisite mosaics on the floor. In the streets were the deep-worn ruts of wagons, but not a wagon in the city. On the front steps of mansions the word ''Welcome," in Latin, but no human be- ing to greet us. The only bones of any of the citizens that we saw were petri- fed and in the museum at the gates. Of the thirty-five thousand people who once lived in those homes and worshiped in those temples and clapped in those theaters, not one left For eighteen hundred years that City of Pompeii had been buried before modern exploration scooped out of it the lava of Vosuvius. We'll, he who should be permitted to re- turn on the pathway of his early life and live it over again would find as lonely and sad pilgrimage. It would be an exploration of tho dead past. The old school-house. the old church, the old home, the old playground either gone or occupied by others, and for you more depressing than was our Pom peiian vi sit in November.
 Beside that. would you want to risk the temptations of life over again? From the fact that you are here I con clude that though in many respects your life may have been unfortunate and un-
  erably well, if nothing more than toler- able. As for myself, though my life has been far from being as consecra ted as would like to have had it, I would not want to Ny it over again, lest next time would do worse. Why, ;sst look at the temptations we have all passed through. and just look at the mnltitudes who have gone completely under. Just call over the roll of your school-mates and college-mates, the clerks who were with you in the same store or bank, or the operatives in the same factory, with just as good prospects as you, who have come to complete mishap. Some young man that told you he was going to be a millionaire and own the fastest trotters on Westchester turnpike, and re- tire by the time he was thirty-fiye years of age, you do not hear from for many years, and know nothing about him until some day he comes into your store and asks for five cents to get mug of beer. You, the good mother of house. hold, and all your children rising up to call you blessed, can remember when you were quite jealous of the belle of the village. who was so transcendently fair and popular. But while you have these two honorable and queenly names of wife and mother, she became a poor waif of the street and went into the blackness of darkness forever
 Live life over again? Why, if many of those who are now respectable were permitted to experiment, the next jour ney would be demolition. You got through, as Job says, by the skin of the teeth. Next time you might not get through at all. Satan would say;
 q know him better than did before. and have for fifty years been studying his weaknesses, and I will weave a stronger web of circumstances to catch him next time"
 And Satan would concenter his forces on this one man, and the last state of that man would be worse than the first. My friends, our faces are in the right direction. Better go forward than back ward, even if we had the choice. The greatest disaster l can think of would be for you to return to boyhood in 1890. Oh, if life were smooth Lncerne or Cayuga lake, l would like to get into yacht and sail over it, not one, but twice-yea, thousand times. But life is an uncertain sea, and some of the chips crash on the icebergs of cold in- difference, and some take fire of evil passion, and some lose their bearings and run into the skerries, and some are never heard of. Surely on such treacherous sea as that one voyage is enough.
 Besides all this, do you know if you could have your wish and live life over again it would put you so much further from reunion with your friends in Heav- en? If you arc in the noon of life or the evening of life you are not very far from the golden gate at which you are to meet your transported and cmpara- dised loved ones You are now. let us say, twenty years or ten years or one year of from celestial conjunction. Now suppose you went back in your earthly life thirty years, or forty years, or fifty years, what an an awful post ponement of the time Of reunion! It would be as though you were going to San Francisco to great banquet and you go to Oakland, four or five miles this side of 1t, and then came back to Hoboken or Harlem to get better start; as though you wero going to En- gland to be crowned, and having come in sight of the mountains of Wales you put back to Sandy Hook in order to make better voyage The further on you get in life, if a Christian, the nearer you are to the renewal of broken up com pSnionship. No; the wheel of timo truns in the right direction, and it is we'll it turns so fast. Three hundred and sixty-five revolutions in year and forward. rather than three hundred and sixty-tive revolutions in year and backward.
 But hear ye! hear ye! while l tell you how you may practically live your life over again, and be all the better for it. You may put into the remaining years of your life all you have learned of wis dom in your past life. You may make the coming ten years worth the preced- ing forty or fifty years. When man