The World's Great Sermons, Volume 04: L. Beecher to Bushnell — John Shaqi
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 04: L. Beecher to Bushnell
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 04: L. Beecher to Bushnell
Sermons
Love may be regarded in two different conditions. The first is when
its object is at a distance, and when it becomes love in a state of
desire. The second is when its object is in possession, and then it
becomes love in a state of indulgence. Under the impulse of desire,
man feels himself urged onward in some path or pursuit of activity
for its gratification. The faculties of his mind are put into busy
exercise. In the steady direction of one great and engrossing
interest, his attention is recalled from the many reveries into
which it might otherwise have wandered; and the powers of his body
are forced away from an indolence in which it else might have
languished; and that time is crowded with occupation, which but for
some object of keen and devoted ambition, might have driveled along
in successive hours of weariness and distaste--and tho hope does
not always enliven, and success does not always crown the career
of exertion, yet in the midst of this very variety, and with the
alternations of occasional disappointment, is the machinery of the
whole man kept in a sort of congenial play, and upholden in that
tone and temper which are most agreeable to it; insomuch that, if
through the extirpation of that desire which forms the originating
principle of all this movement, the machinery were to stop, and to
receive no impulse from another desire substituted in its place, the
man would be left with all his propensities to action in a state of
most painful and unnatural abandonment. A sensitive being suffers,
and is in violence, if, after having thoroughly rested from his
fatigue, or been relieved from his pain, he continue in possession
of powers without any excitement to these powers; if he possess a
capacity of desire without having an object of desire; or if he have
a spare energy upon his person, without a counterpart, and without a
stimulus to call it into operation. The misery of such a condition
is often realized by him who is retired from business, or who is
retired from law, or who is even retired from the occupations of the
chase, and of the gaming-table. Such is the demand of our nature for
an object in pursuit, that no accumulation of previous success can
extinguish it--and thus it is, that the most prosperous merchant,
and the most victorious general, and the most fortunate gamester,
when the labor of their respective vocations has come to a close,
are often found to languish in the midst of all their acquisitions,
as if out of their kindred and rejoicing element. It is quite in
vain, with such a constitutional appetite for employment in man, to
attempt cutting away from him the spring or the principle of one
employment, without providing him with another. The whole heart
and habit will rise in resistance against such an undertaking. The
else unoccupied female, who spends the hours of every evening at
some play of hazard, knows as well as you, that the pecuniary gain,
or the honorable triumph of a successful contest, are altogether
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