LONG JOY AND SHORT SORROW They err who speak of long sorrow and short joy. The reverse is the truth. Real joy rarely ends, while most sorrow is short-lived. People are built that way. God never intended man for eternal mourning, any more than He made the winds to be always sighing. Nature's days are mostly bright; cloudy ones are exceptions. Summer warmth lasts longer than winter cold. The genial sunshine never flits away to leave us sad. The brightness of summer is a flash of divine love; the lesser brightness of winter is not a frown, but a resting spell. Winter snow is Nature's bridal robe, not a burial shroud; the long night-shadows are transitory, while the glory of sea and sky is enduring. Nature exhibits more light colors than blacks. Morning and noon are dazzling, and few are the evenings without their moonlight or star-shine. Man's experience of grief comes only at intervals; it may be keen while it lasts, but his seasons of delight are numberless. Many are too prone to magnify their sorrows and to minify their joys. This is inconsistent. Were experience the reverse of what it is, such a habit would be shocking. Most of us live in long rounds of joyous reverie and happy experience, broken only now and then as needful reminders that heaven is not yet quite ushered in. When life is what it should be, man is gathering fruit for the future, and certainly the harvest time is generally propitious. Good times are ours, friends, if we only know it, and heaven can be no more than growth eternal of everything good. A PROMOTER OF HEARTACHES In ages past a habit was formed among mankind which has ever been the promoter of heartaches. It is the liquor habit. With its accompanying evils, it has produced more misery in human life than war, famine, and pestilence combined. It exempts from its ravages no class or clan, sex or age, position or vocation, but turns its victims everywhere into tubs of swill, spirits of unrest, things below beasts. Its effects on the home are ruinous-houses without windows, barns without roofs, gardens without fences, fields without tillage, children without clothing, sons without principle, daughters without morals, wives without hope. A drunkard is his own shame, his neighbor's scoff, his family's sorrow, his nation's burden, his Creator's cast-off. Drunkenness is a voluntary madness; it makes man a maniac; it brutalizes, demoralizes, and mutilates; it is destructive of self, and evokes no sympathy, hardly ever pity. A drunkard, when sober, despises himself, is filled with remorse, wishes himself dead, and often becomes a suicide. Drunkenness qualifies for other vices, but never blots out a vice. It aggravates other diseases, but never itself leaves the system. It is the prime minister of death, always anticipates the work of age, and utilizes fevers, palsies, dropsies, gouts, asthmas, dyspepsias, and all the other ills of earth to drive man out of the world as long as possible before his time. ROUGH SPECIMENS There are some bad people in this world—no mistake about that; but even the worst probably do not consider themselves much worse than the best. They are more likely to think themselves unfortunate than absolutely bad. Go into any public prison and talk with the inmates. One man will tell how he drifted along in crime, not meaning to be an abandoned character, but was held in crime, as it were, by some sort of a strange spell until he woke up and found himself behind the bars. Another will lay the blame for his misfortune upon drink, or bad associations, or extreme poverty, or irresistible temptation, or to some other circumstances beyond his control. He did not mean to be a wretch. Badness is, of course, a matter of degree. The thief is not considered so brutal as the murderer, nor the defaulter quite as low as the thief; and every criminal in the land is believed to be capable of becoming worse. It is also a fact that people who are convicted of crime and condemned to prison uniformly believe that there are just as many bad ones out of prison who ought to be in it, as there are bad ones in it who think they ought to be out. Here, again, the idea of being unfortunate crops out. But, out of prison or in, there really are bad people on earth. Life is never quite safe, nor property secure. Dissipation is manifest on every hand. Wicked faces mirror wicked character. There are dens of iniquity bordering on the abandonment of hell. Demons in human shape vie with demons in the infernal pit. If perdition gets no recruits except from earth, it must be growing rapidly. But there have always been bad people in the world. Murder has as old a history as anything except the giving of life, and there was darkness and chaos before that time. I am not writing theology into this book, but it really looks as though the average man has, and always has had, a bent toward the bad. Shakespeare speaks of those who are "damnable, both sides rogue." A greater than Shakespeare declares that "they are all under sin." BETTER Better than pelf a thousand fold, Better than diamond, ruby, or pearl, Better than etiquette ever yet gained, Better than conquests ever yet dreamed, WICKED FOR PAY Men do not reason themselves into wickedness. There may be method in the madness of some, but none can feel that their own wickedness is wise. Neither does wickedness proceed upon any ground of benefit. Crime helps no one, and every man knows it. Wickedness is a matter of bargain and sale. Sin has wages. Vice is a toilsome pursuit, but men are in it for pay. Satan offered one person a kingdom if he would turn bad. Wicked men are the greatest drudges in the world. Excess in badness is the biggest drag on energy that mortals know. It is the pay that holds them in it. Nothing so quickly exhausts the Carnality is martyrdom to the devil. when wicked passion steers the ship. The wages of sin is death. powers of life as viciousness. Nobility is always wrecked |