The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Sermons
ground, the Westminster divines were not inspired. If they said what
was true, it is because of the truth of what they say that we hold
on to it, not because they said it. And what is true in regard
to these formulas holds true in reference to our own individual
life. But there are times, I suppose, when people who live in a
city as busy as this is, and where the engagements of the week run
over into two weeks, and where every hour has its own employment,
there are times, I suppose, even here that people have leisure to
sit still while the fire burns; and in these choice stolen hours,
I suppose, figures of long ago come out upon the canvas, and stand
there in bold relief; and we say that they were happy days. Imagine
that dear old room, and those pictures of long ago coming before
us, when our imagination was all aglow. I can imagine that the
door-bell might ring, and that one of those that we have not seen
for fifty years was announced. I can imagine the conversation that
would ensue. We would talk excitedly for twenty minutes, and then
the conversation would flag, and before the hour was up we would be
completely disillusioned, and would see that our paths had diverged.
All that sort of thing was good in its way and time, but it is not
the time for it now. Of course, we must have a foundation for the
house. Still we do not live in the cellar. We live upstairs in the
sunlight, and experience says we do well. These past incidents of
life are just the foundation, and it is the superstructure after
all that you build upon; and unless a man is willing to part with
the past, he is going to make a mistake. Unless we learn to do
better to-day the things that we did yesterday, and paint a better
picture to-day, and write a better poem than the last, and are
more proficient in our arts, we are just as good as dead. We are
eternally improving and moving on. There is a conservation, stedfast
and still; and there is a forgetfulness and a generous prodigality
of past attainments that is prolific of vast results. There is
your health. What are you going to do with it? You had better wear
out than rust out any day. You can see people who make themselves
obnoxious to you by their everlasting attitude of complaint. There
is something better for a man to do than to take care of his health,
and he will probably live longer if he does not. Is a man who has
an intellect expected to have nothing better to do than to play
nurse to his body that he has to summer in the North, and winter
in the South, and to clothe with purple and fine linen, and fare
sumptuously every day, and give it now and then a trip to Europe--a
body that is bound to die? There is your life. What are you going
to do with it? There is your money. What are you going to do with
it? Why, invest it, and be careful about your security, and don't be
careful about the interest, and keep on investing and reinvesting,
until it will take the figures of astronomy to count it. As fortunes
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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