The Brandon news. (Brandon, Miss.) 1892-1961, 1903-04-16
A SERMON FOR SUNDAY
ASTRoNc AND UPLlFTINcsDIscoURsE
BY THE REV. DONALD S. MAcKAY.

neV. LIT. DOndlu sage MAckay, presented
Life" The text was from Matthew vi:
1882: 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
a young man and comparatively unknown.
wrote sonnet entitled 'Plain Living and
High Thinking" 1t is so significant that I
quote it in full:
20 friend, know not which way I must
For comfort, being as am opprest
| 70 think that now our life is only drest
| For show; mean handiwork of craftsman,
cook,
Or groom We must run glittering like
brook
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest!
| The wealthiest man among us is the best!
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delights us. Rapine. avarice, expense
This is idolatry, and these we adore.
Plain living and high thinking are no
Hhe homely beauty of the good old cause
Is concur peace, our simple innocence,
And pure religion, breathing household
laws"
The remarkable thing about these lines
is that although. describing the follies of
100 years ago, they are exactly applicable
to the conditions of life to-day. What
Wordsworth criticised so forcefully in 1903
is still prevalent in 1903. In spite of the
Wanted progress of the nineteenth GEN.
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 this same criticism of our over-elabor-
ated life has been set forth in that remark
able little book by Charles Wagner, s'The
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, a man of keen
sensibility, prose poet, a shrewd philoso-
book of his, 'The Simple Life" he has put
forward plea to his fellow Parisians pre-
clsely as Wordsworth did to his contempo-
raries century ago. Like Wordsworth,
Wagner sees in the elaboration and COM
plexity of modern life not merely 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 sanctifed common sense in.
terposes, it needs no prophet to predict
Already the shrewd, hard-headed men in
Wall Street are seeming the approaching
danger from the commercial standpoint
They tell us that the limit of over-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 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
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
warning note. 1t is indeed thankless task
for the preacher. He must say things, es.
peclalIy in pulpit such as this, that will
sciences, of those whom he addresses New
ertheless, because there is still residuum
OF good sense even in the most extrava-
CANT of us, venture this Lenten Sunday
morning, in the name of Jesus Christ, to
bring before you this plea for plain 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-al and the
end-all of our days. The two most Hitter
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. ''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
tials 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 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,
hey did not find anything exactly the same
and just as comfortable as at their own
freside. They criticise the temperature of
the houses and wildly describe to you the
horrors of shivering in temperature lit
tie below the fever heat in which they live
at home. They denounce the cooking and
complain because at an altitude of 5000 feet
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. II. produces a
mental imbecility which is unable to APP
preclate those truths which give dignity to
life and add strength to character.
What Is luxury? It NAV he defined az