The Penn's Grove record., 1903-04-10
SERMON FOR SUNDAY
AsTRoNc AND UPLIFTING DISCOURSE
BY THE REV. DONALD S. MAcKAY.
Subject "A Plea For the Simple Life"-
Duty OF the Pulpit to Sound q Warn
ing Note In Regard to Modern Extrava-
gance In Living.

ing Note In Regard to Modern Extraya-
gance In Living.
NEW YORK CITY. At the Colleoiate
Church., Fifth avenue and Forty-eighth
street. Sunday morning, the minister, the
Rev. DR.. Donald Sage Mackay, presented a
strong sermon on ga Plea for the Simple
Life" The text was from Matthew vi:
Sl-32: Take no thought saying, What
shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or
Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For
your. heavenly Father knoweth." DR..
Mackay said:
just 100 years ago, in 1903, William
Wordsworth, the great English poet, then
! young mar and comparatively unknown,
wrote a sonnet entitled sPlain Living and
High Thinking" 1t is SO significant that /
quote it in full:
u friend, ! know not which way I must
look
For comfort, being as I am opprest
70 think that now our life is only drest
For show; mean handiwork of craftsman,
Or groom! We must u glittering like a
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest!
The wealthlest man among US is the best!
No grandeur now in nature CT in book
Dellghts US. Raplne. ~avarice, expense
This is idolatry, and these we adore.
Pialn living and high thinking are no
Hhe homely beauty Of the good old cause
Is gone-our peace, our simple innocence,
And pure religion, breathing household
laws"
The remarkable thing about these lines
y that although describing the follies Of
100 years ago, they are exactly applicable
to the conditions of life to-day. What
Wordsworth criticised so for~cefully in 1903
is still prevalent in 1903. In spite Of the
Wanted progress of the nineteenth CEN
fury, Notwithstanding the enormous adj
vance IN every sphere of human activity,
it is a sad commentary on our civilization
that to-day we are just as much the slaves
OF vulgar ostentation as our fathers were
when the last century still was young.
l need scarcely remind you how power
FULLY tins same criticism of our over-elabor-
ated life has been set forth in that remark
able little book by Charles Wagner, tsThe
Simple Life" Everybody is reading it and
admiring it, but not every one, I fear, is
ready to accept its teaching. Wagner is a
Protestant pastor in Paris, q man Of keen
senslbllity, a prose poet, a shrewd philoso-
pher and trenchant critic. In this latest
book OF his. "The Simple Life" he has put
forward q plea to his fellow Parisians pre-
clsely as Wordsworth did to his contempt
raries a century ago. Like Wordsworth,
y vo6ASA = IL VIC CldUOIdtlOu anu COm-
pleMty Of modern life not merely a menace
to the stability of the state, but to the in
tellectual and spiritual life of the individ-
uals who compose the state. Nowhere.
surely, Is this complex life of luxurious
pleasure seeking extravaganza SO visible
as In this metropolis Of the New World.
Everywhere the drags are off, and the
wheels OF commerce and society are run
ming wild. When the ~stoppage will come,
as come it must, or how it will come, no
one can tell, but that this career of extrav-
agance in living, which New York has been
following, especially for the past five years,
is bound to end in catastrophe, moral and
social, unless sancti6ed common sense in
terposes, it needs no prophet to predict.
Already the shrewd, hard-headed men in
Wall Street are scenting the approaching
danger from the commercial Standpoint.
They tell us that the limit of o~ver-capitali-
cation and headstrong speculation is
reached, and the reaction, unless it comes
gradually and under proper control, will
spell panic from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
How true that may be as a Commercial pre-
diction | do not know; but from the stand
point of religion, in the interests of moral
ity, the evil results of this over-elaborated
mode OF living, common even among the
poor as well as the rich, are already with
us. One does not require the vision of a
seer to recognize them.
1t is in the face of such conditions that
the pulpit Of to-day, if it be brave and true
to its duty, is called upon to sound forth a
warming note. It is indeed a thankless task
for the preacher. He must say things, es-
peclally in a pulpit such as this, that will
cut sharply the feelings, if not the con.
licences, Of those whom he addresses. New
ertheless, because there is still a ~residuum
of good sense even in the most extrava-
CANT OF US, l venture this Lenten Sunday
morning, in the name Of Jesus Christ, to
bring before you this plea for 'splain living
and high thinking"
My first remark is an obvious inference.
Plain living is an absolute condition of high
thinking. Strenuous thinking cannot come
from pampered living. There can be no
life. OF worthy thought where existence is
loaded down with the vulgarities of luxury.
Thought, which is the life of the soul, not
only deteriorates, it dies when we make
the cares of the body the be-all and the
end-all of our days. The two most litter
ate classes in society to-day are the abject
poor, who by necessity must think of the
needs of the body, and, therefore, can
think Of nothing else, and the idle rich,
who by choice devote every hour of the day
to the trivial problem of what they shall
eat and what they shall drink and where
withal they shall be clothed. s'The body it
is" says Bossuet, the great French preach
er, in one of his sermons, (which drags us
down from the loftier levels of thought,
which chains us to the earth when we
ought to be breathing the pure air of
heaven" So it is that to-day we are put
ting an undue emphasis upon the merely
outward life. We are celebrating the mere
framework of the picture, ornamenting the
gilded trappings, Indifferent to the essen
tiaIs which alone give lasting beauty to
life and character.
What are some of the causes Of this over
elaboration in the material comforts of life?
Primarily, there is the passion for luxury
itself. We are to-day essentially a luxuri-
GUS race: The pitiful thing is that we are
proud of it. We boast about our luxury
as something that lifts us above other ma
tions. You meet people, for example, who
go abroad, and when they return what is
the burden Of their conversation? Not to
tell you of beautiful scenes Of nature which
they have visited, but to complain that,
having gone abroad confessedly for change,
they did not find anything exactly the same
and just as comfortable as at their own
fireside. They ~criticise the temperature of
the houses and wildly describe to you the
horrors of shivering in a temperature a lit
tie below the fever heat in which they live
at home. They denounce the cooking and
in the Alps they did not find the delicacies
which they were able to enjoy six months
before the season in their own New York
homes. We may smile at such things, and
yet it is this craving for luxury that is de-
structive Of high thinking. It produces a
mental imbecility which is unable to ap-
preciate those truths which give dignity to
life and add strength to character.
What is luxury? 1t may be defined as
whatever is costly and superauous. And it
is just this craving for what is costly and
superfiuous that is making this city a hot
bed Of extravaganza.
OF course, not everything is super1uous
which is costly. Luxury is to be distiu-
guished from good taste, and it is certainly
not to be counfounded with high art There
is a sense in which things once regarded as
l~uxuries are to-day rightly looked upon as
necessities. This is so because life has adj
vanced nationally and its outward wants
have so far become more varied. An Eng
lish writer, for example, in 1877, denounces
the efeminacy Of his age because people
were introducing chimneys instead Of allow
ing the smoke to escape by the door, and
were beginning to use vessels of earthen-
ware in place Of the o~ld-fashioned wooden
utensils. Formerly" he says, shouses
were Of willow and men were OF oak; now
adays houses are Of oak and men are Of
willow"
But nevertheless the fact remains that in
this foolish craving for things which are
both costly and superhuous lies one fertile