The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-02-02
BY REV. FRANCIS I. BROWN
sERMoNDELIHERED ETERNITY
 ME. CHURCH.
Speak. on shs Tras mi.sion and End of
 Human Life and Aspirations.

Human Life and Aspirations.
 Rev. Francis T. Brown. of Middle town, one of the ablest of the younger men in the New York East conference. and a graduate or Yale, class of 's1, ex- changed with Dr. Rall, the pastor or Trinity M. E. church, Sunday. Many friends were interested listeners to this talented preacher at both morning and evening services. Mir. Browns text was as follows:
 Text, III. John; 2: Beloved, wish that in all things thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul pros perest."
 MT. Brown spoke in part as follows;
 The present, the visible, the human in these to-day, as never before, man IS finding God. With this mood the writer of our text would have felt Himself not out of harmony. This wish of his has nothing ghostly about it; it might be passed any day in the market-place with flesh and blood grasp of the hand and the kindling of comradeship in the eye--"Health and success to youl''
 St. John evidently believed in the life that now is-in it's transformation, but not in it's abandonment. But not long after his "absence" men fell away from the sanity of our text. They made the present and the eternal mutually exciu- sive; placed all true values in future life and essayed to live meanwhile in a vacuum. So far from seeking to be in health, they visited all manner of abuse upon their bodies; so far from seeking to prosper they made nendicancy a badge of sainthood. Such was asceti- cism, the first of four possible ways of looking at life, which I ask you to con- sider briefly in passing to the world view of our text We have come to see that it is sacrilege to despise human life and that the present hour is as much a part of our eternal heritage as any that shall strike in the aeons to be. And yet we cannot wonder at asceticism when we realize from what it was a reaction; the ascetic abandoned the world be- cause all around him men were being drowned by the world.
 We begin by thinking that life is for sshaving a good time;" that is our first naive philosophy and the great trouble with it is that it does not work for long. We soon find that we are not guided to our good tinae' by infallible instincts, but are continually getting hurt and were evidently meant to learn some les son of self-control, and if this be learned we find forces of nature and so- ciety beyond our control sweep often across our plans and wrecking our hopes until we conclude that life has been built to allow for discipline. And if we be very fortunately circumstanced ! in our pursuit of our good time'' we find that happiness is still kind of by product; we get at it by indirection; to gain the keenest zest from the hunt we must think we are after the brush; and the prizes themselves disillusion us. We look before and after and sigh for what is not.' Life evidently has g. SIfeaning of aspiration and endless ad-. vance.
 And if we dwarf ourselves to low con- tent we look around us and find count less brothers thrust as innocently as ourselves upon this stage of life, who are having anything but good time, sMfld their signing spells our music; then if we build the walls of our pleasure garden higher and bid the musicians play the faster to drown these means, -as did the pitiless noblesse in the days of Joan of Arc turned unheeding from the 'sHelas Helasl" of the down-trod- den peasantry that cry swells at last to the thunder of "On to the Bastile" and revolution breaks in with torch and sword, overturns our tables of feasting, silences our music and tramples the me- morials of our selfishness in the dust. And so is borne home upon selfish and generous alike the fact of our common humanity and we see that life has a meaning of brotherhood and ministry and that we can never hope for a sat- isfying and permanent good time" un- til every man has part in it according to his capacity and merit.
 sVery true" say a third class of men; we must be unseldsh; we must live for others and fill the present hour with all possible nobility; but why inn port any uncertain factors into the question; there is no need to name God or the soul or personal immortality, of which we know nothing-to provide for this programme of altruism. Deal with positive values; live for humanity that is to be.
 But this attitude is, as Professor James has said, but the "consecration of superficiality." It becomes intolera- ble when the forfeited light of Chris tian meaning no longer gleanls through its poetic imagery. Then it is that the darkness as of Thompson's City of Dreadful Night" closes in upon the soul. It was the nature Judgment of Tenny- son in his "Vastness'' that without personal without the me- dium of individual character to trans init value from this vanishing stage of earthly life-all the busy ways of men, their art and science and literature, their commerce and their wars--is
 s'But the trouble of ants in the gleam
 of a million million of suns."
 I am not here to make pessimists this morning, but am here to say that on the basis of positivism the pessimist is the only man of logic and vision. Noth- ing but the enduring worth of personal character can redeem human life from utter vanity.
 And so St. John says, Beloved in tzfr