The Syracuse Calamity

“What is your life?” — James iv., 14.

THIS day seems oppressive to me with solemnities. About to come up through the “Narrows” of New York harbor is a vessel of the Bremen line, brinmns: all that, remains on earth of the pleasure-party that went out on the 14th of last month, on Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Of the three young men who perished there, only one body has been reclaimed, and parental arms from our city are stretched out to receive it. Welcome back to thy native shores, O loved one! though thou comest asleep. Welcome, though it be amidst a rain of tears and the snapping of heart-strings! Eemorseless lake, give back thy dead! We would have them pillowed in our cemeteries.

While meditating upon these things, there comes a more startling and overpowering cry from the central city of our own State. Many whom we knew were in that catastrophe. And now the call from New York harbor, louder than the dash of the wave, and the call from Syracuse, louder than the crackling of the timbers, unite with the call of my text in demanding, “What is your life?”

The anatomist, with knife and skillful analysis, bas sought to find out the secret hiding-place of the principle of life; but there is a barred gate-waj’- that he can not enter. No satisfactory definition has ever been given of what life is. In complete swoon, when all muscular action of the heart has stopped and the brain lies dormant, life may still exist, and, rallying its scattered forces, march on to three-score years and ten. But I have a lamp in the light of which I can give an intelligent answer to this question; and so, leaving the anatomist to his curious, fascinating and sublime investigation, I come in the light of the Word of God to answer the question, “What is your life?”

There may be, now and then, in our existence a staccato passage; but, for the most part, our daysjand years pass in a sort of monotone. We rise in the morning, we breakfast, we go to our daily occupation, we dine, we shake hands, we taste our evening meal, we sleep; and Tuesday is a copy of Monday, and Wednesday is an echo of Tuesday. If you are forty years of age, then you have passed fourteen thousand six hundred days; and yet, without the use of memorandum, you can not give me an account of fifty of them. Our days pass on with even pace, so that we seldom estimate what we are, what we have been, and what we will be. Oh that, this morning, this solemn and overwhelming providence in a sister city might come to our ears, and give startling emphasis to this interlocutory of the apostle, “What is your life?”

In answering this question of my text, I reply, in the first place, our life is a test If you buy goods, you very soon want to find out whether they are really worth what you paid for them. Every new ship must make a trial trip. If you bring a man into some important position, and there is a crisis where his behavior will either make or break you, you say, “Now I will have a chance to find out what he is.” Well, every man is on his trial trip. Men, angels, and devils are finding out what is in you, what you are worth, and what your weaknesses are. No man livctli to Limself. Every word you speak, every action you perform, has a thousand echoes. Earth and heaven and hell are gazing upon your behavior, and you are passing the trial. You are watching me to see whether I am faithful or unfaithful; I am watching you to see whether you are faithful or unfaithful; and each one of us is going now through the solemn, unmistakable, tremendous test.

I reply still further to the question of my text, that our life is an apprenticeship. A man works at a trade four or five years, or he studies for a profession six or ten years, and then he enters what he considers his chief mission. But, my brethren, our entire life on earth is an apprenticeship. Not until death do we begin our chief employment. This world is not our principal workshop. All the inhabitants of heaven are busy forever. The Bible says they rest not day nor night. If to carry on the little business of this world it requires so many hands and feet and minds, who can estimate how many activities will be required to carry on the enterprises of heaven? When our little world is finished and burned up, is the whole universe to stop business? Because one thread-and-needle store on a back alley fails, is all the commerce of a metropolis arrested? Oh no. In heaven there will be no sleeping, no idling. That Christian woman who feeds the sick pauper on the back street will be a queen over an infinite realm of light and joy and glory. And that Christian man who can hardly make his way to church on crutches, will be a ministering spirit, flying to one of the farthest outposts of God’s dominion. We do not work in this world; we are only getting ready to work. We are apprentices, and have not served our time out. AYe are students, and have not got our diplomas. Death is to be graduation. It will be commencement-day

I go on and answer the question of my text, by saying that our life is a conflict. If you have never tried to control your passions, if you have never tried to subdue your temper, if you have never tried to rouse yourselves up to a better manhood or womanhood, you do not know what I mean. But if you have attempted to live a holy life, and to be better and to do better, then you sympathize with the Apostle Paul when he represented our life on earth a war with the world, a war with the flesh, a war with the devil. In addition to the struggle you have within, you have had a thousand outside battles. Sometimes it has been against poverty, against physical distresses, against bad social position, against an unhappy family name. In one case it has been one thing, and in another case it has been another thing; and with many of you, up to this point, it has been a hand-to-hand fight; and so it will be even unto the end. There is no tent for peaceful encampment but the grave. Life a conflict; so the Bible announces it. Life a conflict; so your own experience afl&rms it.

“Must I he carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease,
While others fought to win the prize
And sailed through bloody seas?”

Again I answer the question of the text, by saying that our life on earth is a prophecy. By that I mean that what we are in this world we will be in the world to come, only on a larger scale. If a hero here, a hero there. If a cheat here, a cheat there. If a Christian here, a Christian there. I know sometimes there are marvelous changes in the last

202 TEE SYEACUSE CAEiMITT.

hour of life, and the dying thief, repenting, goes into paradise; but that is the exception. The probability is, my brethren, that what you are in the present time you will be in the future — what you now are you will always be, only with wider range. The prophecy is, if you now love that which is unclean and unrighteous, you will always love it. If your highest joy is in God, and your chief ambition to be like him, you are on your way to grandeurs that no dream ever was bright enough to depict. I judge from the blossoms what the fruit is going to be when it sets. He that is filthy shall be filthy still, and he that is holy shall be holy still. On banks of celestial joy walks the consecrated Alfred Cookman. In dungeons of starless night sits John Wilkes Booth.

I reply further to the question of my text, “What is 3’our life?” by saying that our life is a yrejjaraticn. If we are going on a long journey, we want some time to get ready. We must have extra apparel. We want our guide-book. Our comfort on the journey will depend very much upon what we start with. If we arc going among blood-thirsty savages, we must take knife and pistol. God has started us out on a journey that will have no terminus, and, once started, we never come back. Arc we getting ready? Are we armed? That question you hear to-dny; but if I should utter it an hour from now, perhaps you might not hear it. Life is a preparation. If you have any weapons to sharpen, you had better sharpen them now. If you have any lamps to light, you bad better light them now. When death once shuts the door of the sepulchre, the angel of repentance never opens it. ‘As the tree falleth, so it must lie.” So far as I can tell your case, your great need is to get rid of your sins. I know of only one way to do it. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin; and though you may this morning count yourself the worst sinner, you may, by the grace of God, become the best saint. “Where sin abounded, grace shall much more abound.”

Again, I answer this question of my text by saying our life is a great uncertainty. Nobody steps out of life as he expects to. Though a man may have been sick for thirty years, he is surprised at last when he goes. And though you may have known some one in invalidism for a quarter of a century, when you hear he has departed you throw up your hands, and saj’-, “Is it possible?” We can make no calculation about the future. The world is full of temptation and of peril. We do not know how our children will turn out. We do not know what we ourselves might be tempted to do. We resolve on one thing; we do another. Our associations change. Our plans change. Our friends change. We change. And life is such a complete uncertainty, that I would not want to live one hour without the grace of God, and I very certainly would not want to die without it. Blessed be God, I feel under my feet, this morning, a rock firmer than the everlasting hills. That keeps me hopeful and confident. No overbearing autocrat sits on the throne of the universe. My father is King; and the mountains may depart, and the hills be removed, but his goodness and his kindness and his grace, never, never. In this Christian hope I have indulged for about twenty-two years; and while I should be sorry to know that there is any one in this house more unworthy than I have been, still I can tell you that I know enough of this religion to recommend it everywhere and always, and to say that the kindest, the gentlest, the grandest friend a man ever had is Jesus. I know him. I believe in him. I have put all my hope on him. He bas never betrayed me. He will never betray you; and the best thing that you can do now is this moment to surrender yourselves to him for time and for eternity. But do not take ray experience. It is comparatively brief. There are some, as you look over the audience, who have frost on the brow; ask them what they think of Jesus, Ask them whether he ever betrayed them. In what dark hour? By what grave? In what sickness? Ah, these old people can tell you a better story than I can of how in sickness Christ was their best physician; and how — when they came to give the last kiss to the cold lips that never might speak again, and to stand on the verge of a grave deep enough to bury all — they found Jesus the Comforter; and that this morning their brightest anticipation of the future is the presence of him whom, having not seen, we love; in whom, though now we see him not, yet believing, we rejoice with a joy unspeakable and full of glory.

I thought it best to say some of these things as I stand on the verge of my summer vacation, for I will be absent from you until September. I thought I would give my testimony for Jesus, and then urge you to look after this matter immediatelj’-, while I put to you the question of the text, “What is your life?”

There never was a better illustration of its uncertainty than we find in the disaster of our sister city. Some of you think of Syracuse only as a depot through which you pass on the way West. Some of you who know it better know it to be one of the most industrious and busy cities on the continent. It is the Golden Gate between the East and the West. Through its heart rolls the tide of a nation’s life, beating bard with the motion of the great lakes on the one side, and the ocean on the other. Its convention halls filled with popular assemblages that have come there to decide great questions of philanthropy or politics. On either bank of this rushing stream of life are mansions, counting-rooms, stores, shops — hives where the voices of busy men hum while they gather in the honey of wealth. Feet shufEing, anvils ringing, bridges rumbling, printing-presses rattling. Illumined lyceum, and literary club, and churches lighted for week-night services, and houses swarming with fashionable levee. But it does not appear to me especially in that light. When I think of Syracuse, I think of it as the place of beautiful homes, and warm sympathies, and ardent friendships, and blessed associations. Among the happiest years of my ministry were those spent in that city, and the sorrow comes from there to my heart to-day. The young pastor of that church, the son of the leading minister of his denomination in this country, had only a few months ago gone to his new field; and last Tuesday night, surrounded by his congregation, in a merry festival, every thing going pleasantly and profitably on, with a sudden crash that I have not the heart to depict, many were ushered into the eternal world, and more were taken out half dead. Awful wreck of youth and old age; bride and bridegroom; the distinguished and the unknown. That city to-day is frantic with grief, and already the long processions have gone out to Oaklands, that beautiful cemetery where I have helped to put down some of my very best friends. It is a good place to sleep in. O men and women who know how to praj’, pray for those broken hearts! 0 men and women who have had troubles of your own, cry unto God for that groaning city — for companions bereft, for parents suddenly made childless, for homes ^Yhere father and mother will never come, for the pastor of that church, that he may come forth from this anguish of soul newly set apart and ordained by the “laying on of hands” of this calamity! Issuing from such a scene, he will be mightily in earnest now, and his cry will ring through the city, “What is your life?” But while we pray for them, let us also pray for ourselves. Be ye also ready. Risk not one moment away from Christ. For all the unreenerate and unpardoned there is not one hour of safety between this and the judgment-day, and after that there will be a tumbling- in of eternal calamities. Your first, your second, your hundredth, your thousandth, 3-our last want is a heart changed by the almighty grace of God. Oh! get it now. Bow your head on the back of the seat in front of you, and be quick in surrendering yourselves to Jesus. He is mighty to save, and he would just as lief do it now as any other time. I do not think that cowardice is a characteristic of my nature, and yet I tell you plainly that I would not dare to walk down the street or cross the ferry were it not for a hope in Christ that whatever happens to my body my immortal soul shall go free. Why, the air is so full of perils, flying this way, flying that, flying before your face, flying behind your back, flying within, flying without, that we need God’s promises hovering over us like a canopy, and marshaled all around us like an armed host. ‘Standing as we do at the beginning of a season when there is more sickness than at other times in the same year, and when many of us will be exposed to additional perils by travel, I thought it this morning better for me to cry out with an emphasis deepened by the calamity at the

West, asking you, “What is your life?” Is it a test? Make a successful experiment. Is it an apprenticeship? Make it an industrious one. Is it a conflict? Fight a brave fight. Is it a prophecy? Let it foretell glorious results. Is it a preparation? Make sure work. Is it an uncertainty? Get a Divine insurance. You say, “I will do this, I will do that. I will go into this city, and -I will get gain.” Whereas you know not what shall be on the morrow; for “What is your life?” “It is even as a vapor that appeareth for a little season, and then vanisheth away.”