The World's Great Sermons, Volume 06: H. W. Beecher to Punshon
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 06: H. W. Beecher to Punshon
Sermons
may have left for our advantage. Few will doubt that such an one
was he who yesterday was taken from us. It may be that he will not
be laid, as might have been expected, among the poets and scholars
and sages, whose dust rests within this Abbey; it may be that he
was drawn by an irresistible longing toward the native hills of his
own Dumfriesshire, and that there, beside the bones of his kindred,
beside his father and his mother, and with the silent ministrations
of the Church of Scotland, to which he still clung amidst all the
vicissitudes of his long existence, will repose all that is earthly
of Thomas Carlyle. But he belonged to a wider sphere than Scotland;
for, tho by nationality a Scotchman, he yet was loved and honored
wherever the British language is spoken. Suffer me, then, to say a
few words on the good seed which he has sown in our hearts.
In his teaching, as in all things human, there were, no doubt,
tares, or what some would account tares, which must be left to
after-times to adjust, as best they can, with the pure wheat which
is gathered into the garner of God. There were imitators, parasites,
exaggerators, of the genuine growth, which sometimes almost choked
the original seed and disfigured its usefulness and its value;
but of this we do not speak here. Gather them up into bundles and
burn them. We speak only of him and of his best self. Nor would we
now discourse at length on those brilliant gifts which gave such
a charm to his writings, and such an unexampled splendor to his
conversation. All the world knows how the words and the deeds of
former times became, as Luther describes in the apostle's language,
"not dead things, but living creatures with hands and feet." Every
detail was presented before us, penetrated through and through with
the fire of poetic imagination, which was the more powerful because
it derived its warmth from facts gathered together by the most
untiring industry. Who can ever, from this time forward, picture the
death of Louis XVI, or the flight of the king and queen, without
remembering the thrill of emotion with which, through the "History
of the French Revolution," they became acquainted with him for the
first time? Who can wander among the ruins of St. Edmunds's at
Bury without feeling that they are haunted in every corner by the
lifelike figure of the Abbot Samson, as he is drawn from the musty
chronicle of Jocelyn? Who can read the letters and the speeches of
Cromwell, now made almost intelligible to modern years, without
gratitude to the unwearied zeal which gathered together from every
corner those relics of departed greatness? What German can fail to
acknowledge that, not even in that much-enduring, all-exhausting,
country of research and labor--not even there has there been raised
such a monument to Frederick the Second, called the Great, as by the
simple Scotchman who, for the sake of describing what he considered
the last hero-king, almost made himself, for the time, a soldier and
a statesman?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account