The Monitor-register., 1897-09-17
WHAT Is YOUR LIFE?

REV. DR.. TALMAeE DISCUSSES THIS
MoMENToUS QUESTION.
The Kind of Life That Is Not Worth Liv-
ing and the Kind That Opens Into Eter-
nity-The Struggle For Wealth, Position
and Happiness.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 12.-In this SER
mon Rev. DIR. Talmage discusses a sub
ject vital to all, and never more timely
than now, when the struggle for power,
position, wealth and happiness is so abb
sorbing. Ghe text is James iv, IA,
"What is your life?"
If we leave to the evolutionists to
guess where we came from and to the
t~heologians to prophesy where we are
going to, we still have left for consid-
Grafton the important fact that we are
here. There may be some doubt about
where the river rises and some doubt
about where the river emptles, but
there can be no doubt about the fact that
we are sailing on it. So I am not sur
prised that everybody asks the ques-
lion, is lie worm living!
Is Life Worth Living?
Solomon, in his unhappy moments,
says it is not. Vanity, ~"vexation OF
spirit, - "no good" are his estimate.
The fact is that Solomon was at n
time a ~polygamist and that soured his
disposition. One wife makes a man
happy; more than n makes him
wretched. But Solomon was converted
from polygamy to monogamy, and the
last words he eyer wrote, as far as we
can read them, were the words "moun-
tains of spices" But jeremiah says life
is worth living. In a book supposed to
be doleful and lugubrious and sepulchral
and entitled Lamentations, " he plain
ly intimates that the blessing of merely
living is so great and grand a bless
ing that though a man have piled on
him all misfortunes and disasters he
has no right to complain. The ancient
prophet cries out in startling i%ntonation
to all lands and to all censuries,
Wherefore doth a living man com-
plain?"
A diversity of opinion in our time as
we'll as in olden time. Here is a young
man of light hair and blue eyes and
sound digestion and generous salary
and happily affianced and Oh the way
to become a partner in a commercial
firm of which he is an important clerk.
Ask him whether life is worth living.
He will laugh in your face and say,
Eyes, yes, yes!'' Here is a man who
has come to the forties. He is at the
tiptop of the hill of life. Every step
has been a stumble and a bruise. q The
people he trusted have turned out de-
s~erters, and the money he has honestly
made he has been cheated out of. His
nerves are out of tune. He has poor ap-
petite, and the food he does eat does
not assimilate. Forty miles climbing
up the hill of life lave been to him like
climbing the Matterhorn, and there are
40 miles yet to go down, and descent is
always more dangerous than ascent.
Ask him whether life is worth living,
and he will drawl out in shivering and
lugubrious and appalling negative,
"No, no., mol"
How are we to decide this matter
~righteously and intelligently? You will
find the same man vaoillating, oscillat-
ing in his opinion from detection to ex-
uberance, and if he be very mercurial
in his temperament it will depend very
much on which way the wind blows.
If the wind blow from the northwest
and you ask him, he will say, Yes"
and if it blow from the northeast and
you ask him he will say, "No." How
are we, then, to get the question right
eously answered? Suppose we call all
nations together in a great convention
on eastern or western hemisphere, and
let all those who are in the affirmative
say, AYE" and all those who are in
the negative say, "No." While there
would be hundreds of thousands who
would answer in the affirmative, there
would be more millions who would an
swer in the negative, and because of
the greater number who have sorrow
and misfortune and trouble the noes
would have it. The answer | shall give
will be different from either, and yet it
will commend itself to all who hear me
this day as the right answer. If you
ask me, SIS life worth ~living?" I an
swer, sit all depends upon the kind of
life you live"
Money Getting.
In the first place, 1 remark that a life
OF mere money getting is always a fail
ure, because you will never get as much
as you want. The poorest people in this
country are the m~illionaires. There is
not a scissors grinder ON the streets of
New York Or Brooklyn who is so anx-
ious to make money as these men who
have piled up fortunes year after year
in storehouses, in government securi-
ties, in tenement houses, in whole city
blocks. You ought to see them jump
when they hear the fire bell ring. You
ought to see them in their excitement
when a bank explodes. You ought to
see their agitation when there is pro-
posed a reformation III the tariff. Their
nerves tremble like harp strings, but no
music in the vibration. They read the
reports from Wall street in the morning
with a Government that threatens par
alysis or apoplexy, or more probably
they have a telegraph or a telephone in
their W house. SO they catch every
breath of change in the money market.
The disease of accumulation has eaten
into them-eaten into their heart, into
their lungs, into their spleen, into their
liver, into their bones.
Chemists have sometimes analysed
the human body, and they say it is so
much magnesia, so much lime, so much
chlorate of potassium. If some Chris
tian chemist would analyze one of these
financial behemoths, he would find he
is made up of copper and gold aAd sill
yer and zinc and lead and coal and iron.
That is not a life worth living. There
are too many earthquakes in it, too
many agonies in it, too many perditions
in it. They build their castles, and
they open their picture galleries, and
they summon prima donnas, and they
offer every inducement for happiness to
come and live there, but happiness will
not come. They send footmanned and
postilioned equipage to bring her. She
will not ride to their door. They send
princely escort. She will not take their
arm. They make their gateways tri-
umphal arches. She will not ride under
them. They SGT q holden throne before
a golden plate. She turns away from
the banquet. They call to her from up
holstered balcony. She will not listen.
Mark you, this is the failure of those
who have had large accumulation.
And then you must take into consid-
Grafton that the vast majority of those
who make the dominant idea of life
money getting fall far short of affluence.
1t is estimated that only about two out
Of a hundred business men have anything
worthy the name of success. A man
who spends his life with the one DOM
inant idea of financial accumulation
spends a life not worth living.