Is Life Worth Living?*

A SERMON

By F. W. Farrar, D.D., CANON OF WESTMINSTER, IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY, Νον. 4, 1877,

So we Thy people and sheep of Thy pasture will give Thee thanks for ever: we will show forth Thy praise to all generations.-Ps. lxxix: 13.

As the first day of this month was the grand festival of All Saints, so in past centuries the second day of November was set apart in commemoration of All Souls. The motives which led to the abolition of the festival were doubtless adequate; but yet we may well be allowed to regret its abandonment. No doubt, on the whole, there was a certain grandeur, a certain catholicity, a certain triumphant faith, a certain indomitable hope in that ancient commemoration of the departed. It was the feast of All Souls;-there were no exceptions made of all the souls; of all the souls of all the innocent little ones that have passed away like a breath of vernal air since time began; of all the souls which the great and the wise and the noble have sighed for after great and noble lives; of all the souls of all the fishermen in all the seas; of all the souls of all the hunters of the boundless prairies, and of those who have spent their lives amid the ice-flows of the northern seas; of all the souls that have passed weary and heavy-laden from these city streets; of all the souls whose tides have ebbed away in the angry waves; of all those who have passed "unknelled, uncoffin'd and," save to their God "unknown"; of all the souls made reckless by misery, of those who have rushed unbidden into their Maker's presence. It was a day of commemoration of all these; because these, too, are all souls which God has made; into these, too, He breathed the breath of life; and all these lie in the hollow of His hand like the water-lilies, whether white and immaculate, or stained and smirched! Yes, there is a thought of sublimity in the thought of all human souls; and a day might have been set apart in humble reverence and commemoration of their immortality. Our finite imagination might grow dizzy at the thought of this infinite multitude of human souls who at each ticking of the clock pass away from the land of the living; and all the tribes of all the centuries, the millenniums of the past, are but the leaves, green or fallen, on the tree of existence; the wave after wave of its illimitable tide!

* This sermon is the one alluded to by Canon Farrar in his sermon on Endless Punishment, which we published in our January number, and belongs to the series.-ED.]

When we think of these we recall the language of the poet of the "Inferno," and seem to be gazing on the wild, rushing tide of life, sweeping on to an horizon of infinite extent-infinite, multitudinous and innumerable as the motes which people the sunbeam! All calculation is lost. Human calculation reels at it; but it is not so with Him to whom is known the number of the stars of heaven and the sands of the sea, and by whom every leaf in every nook, every wave in every brook, is heard as they sing forth their unending pæan all the day long!

And knowing this we are not appalled at the thought of those vast multitudes-"multitudes in the Valley of Decision" -whose days are now in the bosom of the solid earth; and though they have passed away we can say with the Psalmist of Israel-"Oh, let the sighing of the prisoners come before Thee; according to Thy power preserve Thou those that are appointed to die. So we that are Thy people and sheep of Thy pasture shall give Thee thanks for ever and will always be shewing forth Thy praise from generation to generation.'

But if we cannot say this at all, how does life appear to us then? There are many who have lost their faith in God; my brethren, it is not for us to judge them or to blame them. Nay, we most heartily pity them; not, believe me, with any supercilious sense of superiority, not with any pharisaic taint of pride, but for their own sakes, and in sincere and humble brotherhood of sympathy. Even if they reject and despise such sympathy, yet, knowing how terrible, how irreparable would be the loss of such faith to us, we pity them, and pray that they no less than we may be folded at last in the arms of God's infinite mercy, and led at last into the radiance of His eternal light! Oh, seeing that the faith of their childhood and of their fathers has suffered shipwreck; seeing that they think, or think that they think, that there is no God, and that we die as the beasts of the field-can we then wonder that they ask themselves whether life be at all worth living? Nay, we are glad that they should face such questions; because the deeper their bark sinks, the more sure are we that they must come at last to that bed on which the ocean rests-that God, whose offspring we are, and "in whom," whether we deny Him or whether we believe in Him, we all "live, and move, and have our being."

But since the question is now being deliberately discussed, Is life worth living? we are not, as Christians, to pass it quite lightly and thoughtlessly by without consideration. It is not desirable that we should separate the pulpit from the thoughts of the week-day world, or avoid the questions which men who scorn religion discuss among themselves. I do not believe, my brethren, in the faith which can only be maintained by fall

ing back upon an isolated clericalism, I desire that the creed of a Christian should be a manly creed, which need not be shirked or spoken with bated breath. I desire that our faith should be no mere exotic, covered with a glass lest the winds of heaven should visit it too roughly; but rather it should be like the green blade of corn, on which the rain may descend, and the snows lie, and the scorching sun shine, and the winds blow, but which, because God's sun does shine on it, and as a result of that, has a vital power; then, not in spite of, but because of these influences, should still grow up to the tiny blade, the tender ear, and to the rich, ripened corn.

Is this life worth living? life, I mean, regarded by itself; life on this earth, life apart from God; life-your life, my life, human life in general-considered under its purely earthly aspects and relationships? Let us, it must be inadequately, it may be mistakenly, it must be quite superficially, yet let us, with perfect honesty, glance at this this afternoon. And let us in nowise exaggerate; let no personal circumstances, let no melancholy temperament, no pressure of immediate passing trials bias our verdict. Let us, so far as we may, look at it steadily, and look at it as a whole.

It is not all darkness; it has its crimson glows and its golden sunsets. It is not all clouds; and even those we have have their silver linings. It is not all winter; it has its summer days on which it is a luxury to breathe the breath of life. Life has its May when all is glorious. Then the words are vocal, the winds breathe music, the very breeze has mirth in it. Ask the little child, with its round cheeks, and its bright eyes, and its flaxen curls, with the tender love and care which enfold and encircle it, and smooth its path the whole day long. Ask the happy boy, tingling with joy to the finger tips as he roams through the fields, in generous friendships, in strong health, in freedom from all cares, in the confidence of all happiness, with his will as free as the wind's will, when all the days are long! Ask happy lovers, when all the days are bright, and they are all in all to each other, and in their gaze a lovelier emerald tinges the grass! Ask brave soldiers on the field of victory; ask some of the great thinkers when some new truth dawns upon them; ask the father and the mother when cares do not press, and the little ones are gone to bed, and they sit together by the fireside quietly the evening through; and at such times perhaps they will all be ready to answer that life is worth living; and though darkness comes alike to all, yet we all have such periods-call them intervals, at least-between storm and storm, interspaces of sunlight between the breadths of the gloom, until over every one of us the night at last sweeps down!

Yes, my brethren, let us acknowledge, let us cherish, let us

be grateful for, let us, as far as we may, without selfishness, multiply these natural pleasures, these innocent and simple and holy joys! Let us admit, too, that God is very, very good to us; and that the lesser evils of our lives are often only in anticipation, or of our own making, not of God's. The Christian is no pessimist, to encourage in himself a view of life needlessly discouraging; no ascetic, thinking that God cares for pain and sorrow for sorrow's sake; no optimist, dwelling in the groves of myrtle. Yet, if I ask if these colored threads are strong enough to weave the warp or the woof of life, I think I know what your answer must be.

Let us grant that childhood, keen as are its little trials, can hardly be otherwise than happy, and that its tears are dried as soon as the dew upon the rose. Let us grant that boyhoodalthough St. Augustine says that the boy's sufferings, while they last, are as keen as those of men are-is happier, happier certainly since the day when Arnold purified and ennobled the schools of England; since the days when Shelley loathed and scorned the treatment he received at Eton; or the gentle Cowper dwelt here at Westminster.

And sometimes also life-life has saddest memories, and we are too often forgetful of the inevitable incongruity between fruit and seed; and when swiftly and imperceptibly boyhood passes into youth, and youth merges into the manhood which is upon us, and the golden gates close silently behind us, and we step forth into the thorny wilderness; when the splendid vision has faded into the white light of noon-day; when the brilliant ideals and the enthusiasms of communities have been smirched and dimmed; when not one single ray of enchantment rests for one instant over the black hills and the barren path of life--and we are men, yea, we are men who must work, and beside us are the women who must weep-brothers, how is it with us then?

I will not take any of the great crimes of life as they are sometimes revealed to us when the light of day falls for us upon some suburban villa or small farm. Clergymen especially know these are too common; and I feel there are some here on whose bosom is lying like lead the awful burden of some undiscovered sin. Still I will not take these great crimes into account, for sin tries to creep upon us all, silent and tragic and stealthy as a serpent's sting, or to bound upon us with irresistible force with a tiger's leap; and although there must be some here who have been struck with that poison or seized by that tiger leap, I will not take the case of one sunk into shame unutterable, who has come to a felon's end; or that one who has lived honorably before men but has been tempted by fatal men to take crooked ways, and comes to plead with tremulous voice against a sentence which, to him, is the agony of death!

I will not take the too common case of a man who wakes to the consciousness that he is under the fatal spell of drunkenness or any other such sin. Which of us can say he is quite safe from such sin as this? I will not take those great crimes or the great tragedies of life. Who has not known a case in which a man has been suddenly beaten down to earth, bruised and beaten under the shock of some wholly inexplicable and quite intolerable catastrophe? Who has not seen-certainly I have-families bright and happy, but their whole happiness shattered, aye, in a moment, by the crash of doom? Who shall say, “I am safe from such ruin as this"?

But I will only take the common cases of life-its daily fevers, its necessary trials. Our sorrows are quite different sorrows; but which of us all here, be he rich or poor, be he noble or insignificant, be he senator or shop-boy, is exempt from them? Take pain; is there one of us here who has not known the throbbing head, the aching nerve, the sleepless night? Take health; are there not some here who rarely know what perfect health is? Take reputation; have you not been in anguish when cruel and untrue things have been said of you, and not the less cruel and none the less painful if true? Take households; is there no household whose "graves are scattered far and wide"? Is there no father who has seen the dust sprinkled over the head of his bright, happy child? Is there no mother who has seen the rose of her family suddenly wither and fade from view? Is there no father whose life has been darkened at a stroke? No man whose friends have been taken from him in a moment, and their loss marked by gravestones? No parents whose sons wrung their hearts by folly and ingratitude, or who have, in some far land, a prodigal who will come home no more? And of all the hundreds who are listening to the voice of a weak fellow-sinner like thyself, are there not some, perhaps a great many, whose lives seem to dwindle as life goes on, on whom no morning dawns but it dawns with heavy cares as they think with a sigh of the dreary routine before them, of the insufficient means, of the debts which hang like a mill-stone round their necks, of the chill burden of poverty? And are there not some who are looking forward almost with agony for the day of death-not for themselves at all, but because they think how they must leave their dear ones, left sorrowful, and little sons and daughters unprotected and unprovided for, left to the cold pity and grudging charity of a frosty world? Indeed, many of us could say with the poet by the seashore:

Alas, I have no hope, no rest, nor peace within,

Nor calm of mind, nor passing health, nor contemplation kind!
To me that cup hath been dealt in far other measure."

Ah! my brethren, I have not time to say anything like the