New Starts in Life, and Other Sermons

Wherein no foot of man as yet has trod;
The City of Man’s Life fulfilled in God.

Bathed all in light, with open gates of gold,

Perfect the City is in tower and street;

And there a Palace for each mortal waits, Complete and perfect, at whose outer gates

An Angel stands its occupant to greet.

Still shine, O patient City on the height,

The while our race in hut and hovel dwells. It hears the music of thy heavenly bells

And its dull soul is haunted by thy light.

Lo, once the Son of Man hath heard thy call

And the dear Christ hath claimed thee for us all.

Phillips Brooks.
S. S. “Pavonia,”

September, 1892,

The parable from which these words are taken is one of the most complete in its details of any that the Saviour ever spoke. It covers a whole day, and as we read it the whole course of the day stands out clear before us. In the words which I have quoted we are set at one moment of the vivid story and can see exactly what is going on. The master of a vineyard having gone out into the highways and found some workmen waiting there now stands at his vineyard gate and, coming to an agreement with each man about the wages which he will receive, he sends each in succession into the great field where the work is waiting. It is a bright, fresh picture. Everything is sparkling in the morning light. The men all ready for work stand waiting. The master, thoughtful and considerate, stands talking with them. Through the open door we see the vineyard with its long rows of young vines. Here is strength waiting for work. Here is work waiting for strength. The two are just upon the point of touching one another. There is no sense of exhaustion anywhere. Everything shines with vigor and hope. There is no limit to the work which we dream may be done before the day is over. The exhilaration of beginning fills the verses.

A man has faded out of the real happiness and strength of life who does not know what that exhilaration is, who does not feel the brightness of the picture which this verse draws. It is sad indeed when any man comes to that state in which each new day does not seem in some true sense to begin the world anew, recalling every departed hope and brightening every faded color of the night before. There is a human instinct which tells us that our life, while it is meant to have a great continuousness and to be always one, is no less meant to be full of new starts, to be ever refreshing its forces and beginning once again. The true proportion between these two feelings, between the sense of continuity and the sense of ever new beginning, makes the finest, the freshest, and the primest life. We may picture to ourselves two rivers of wholly different kinds. One is a great, broad, quiet stream, ever moving swiftly but smoothly on, unbroken by rapids, majestic in its calm and noble monotony, each mile of its great course seeming like every other mile, so perfectly and evidently is it everywhere itself. Its great thought is continuity. The other river is a mountain torrent. Broken and stopped perpetually, it is always gathering itself up in a pool, at the foot of the rock that stopped it, for a fresh start. It is always full of new beginnings. It is different in each mile of its course from what it is in every other mile; when it grows calm for a moment it seems as if it had wholly stopped, until it finds an outlet and plunges down another precipice, and with a new cascade begins its life again. Like the first stream, like the majestic and continuous river, is the life of God. Continuousness and identity is our great thought of Him. “From everlasting to everlasting thou art God,” we cry. Full of movement, the impression of His life is stillness, like the impression of the vast and solemn Nile. But like the mountain torrent is the life of man. With a true continuity, so that it is the same life from its beginning to its end, it yet forever is refreshing its vitality with new beginnings. It loves to turn sharp corners into unseen ways. It loves to gather itself into knots and then start out with the new birth of a new resolution. It loves to take into itself the streams of new-born lives that its monotony may be refreshed with their freshness. It is wonderful how ingenious men will be in making artificial new starts in their lives, as if at midday they shut up the house and lighted all the lamps and made believe that it was night, only in order that in a moment they might fling the shutters back again as if a new morning had come with its enthusiasm. So all live men covet the exhilaration of beginning.

I want to speak to-day about beginnings or new starts in life. It is a subject which the time suggests. For, beside the aspect of perpetual renewal of which I have been speaking, life here among us in the city in these autumn days has a peculiar look of newness which belongs to the season and the place. For in our city life we have changed the feeling of the seasons. The autumn is the real spring-time of the town. It is then that the gray pastures of our paved streets begin to blossom once again with their bright flowers of enterprise and fellowship and charity. And I am speaking this morning to more of the spirit of expectation, of experiment, of new hope in new circumstances than I should find here at any other season of the year. The schools have just begun; the college boys have started their new year. The young recruits in all the old professions are making the old ranks look young again with that perpetual youth which one of the great professions always keeps. In many ways there is a sense of stir and start about us. He must be dull who does not feel it. And so I want to speak about the true dignity and beauty of beginnings.

The essential power of a new beginning, then, seems to be very simple. It is that it recalls and freshens the principle and fundamental motive under which a work is done, and so keeps it from degenerating into mechanical routine. When the stream starts over a new fall it cannot help being conscious anew of its own fluidness and of the force of gravitation. It is the renewed sense of these things, of what it is and of what a great power is at work upon it, that sparkles in it and fills it full of life as it begins its new career, which is simply the old career with its fundamental consciousness freshened and revived. And so when a man starts afresh, either with the newness of a new day, or with the stimulus of altered circumstances, or with the inspiration of a new work, what his new start ought to do for him is to refresh the deepest principles by which he lives. You feel the engine when the steamer starts. After that when the steamer is on its long monotonous voyage you feel as if the machinery moved itself. So in a new beginning men ought to feel, and in some way more or less real and clear they do feel, what they are and what great powers are at work upon them, as they do not ordinarily feel these things in common times.

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