The Sacredness of Life

’ He asked life of Thee and thou gavest it him, even length of days for ever and ever.” — Psalms xxi. 4.

The poetry of the twenty-first Psalm is very picturesque. King David is the writer, but the whole people of Israel are represented as the speakers. First they address themselves to God and praise Him for the blessings which he has given to their monarch. Then they turn to the king himself and rejoice with him upon the victory over his enemies and the escape from his troubles which is before him. And then in the last verse they turn back again to God and ascribe the glory and power entirely to Him. “Be thou exalted, Lord, in thine own strength, so will we sing and praise thy power.”

The Psalm is therefore, in most spirited and poetic form, the expression of David’s own gratitude and hope and devotion.

The verse which I have quoted for our text fixes our attention on the first part of the Psalm, the gratitude of David. The people are singing of God’s mercy to their beloved king. They remember how, perhaps in some special emergency when his life seemed in danger, perhaps in that long aspiration of youth which is one long prayer for life, David had begged God to let him live. “He asked life of thee,” and then they record how God was better to David than his prayer. “Thou gavest it him, even length of days forever and ever,” or, as our Prayer-Book version has it, “He asked life of thee and thou gavest him a long life, even for ever and ever.” It is this verse which I wish to study with you. What does it mean? Surely David does not dream that God in answer to his prayer for life had really made his life immortal. Already as he wrote he must have felt in eye and hand some of those symptoms of advancing age which even in the full strength of maturity prophesy decay. It must have been that David caught sight of that other kind of earthly immortality which has always fascinated noble minds. He saw the perpetuation of his influence. He saw that the spiritual dynasty which was represented in him was to continue in long power over unborn generations of mankind. The Christ who was to come in the fulfilment of that which he prefigured was to reign forever. This was the immortality which he heard God promising him. He asked life. Asked to be saved from death by sickness, or by the paw of the lion or the paw of the bear, or by the soldiers of Saul. And God gave him life. And at first, it may be, he thought that God had given him no more than he had asked for, only the immediate escape from dying. But by and by he found that the life which God had given him was a long and deep and mysterious thing. It was vastly richer in character and destiny than he had dreamed of. Slowly it opened to him and he saw that it was something with vast connections, something whose power touched spiritual forces and never should decay, something belonging to the unending life of God. It was eternal life which God had given him. “He had asked life and God had given him a long life even for ever and ever.”

It is thus that these words of David have suggested to me the subject of which I wished to speak to you to-day. I have wondered whether I could make you see how that same deepening sight of life which came to David may come to us, does come to many men who get below the first appearance, the mere surface of life and see its deeper meaning. We too ask God for life. Every struggle for self-support; every shudder at the thought of dying, every delight in existence is a cry for life. We may not mean it for a prayer. We may not turn it Godward. With us, as we utter it, it may be a mere vague cry into the darkness, but God hears it as a cry to Him, just exactly as if you walked upon the beach at night and heard a drowning man shouting in terror, his shout would be in your ears a prayer to you, although he did not know that you were there, and only shouted in the vagueness of his terror. So every struggle that we make to live is a prayer to God for life. And the continuance of our existence is God’s answer to our prayer. But when we first take the life which He gives us we do not know what it is. Its depth, its richness only opens to us gradually. Only gradually do we learn that

God has given to us not merely the power of present being and present enjoyment, but that wrapt up and hidden in that He has given us the power of thinking, feeUng, loving, living in such deep and lofty ways that we may be in connection with the great continuous unbroken thoughts and feelings and movements of the universe. The life which He has given us is in its capacities not merely a thing of this moment. It is a part of the life of the universe. It is eternal life.

We can understand it best perhaps if we look back to the very beginning of life and follow the human spirit in its development. It is possible for our imaginations even to picture the soul praying for life before it has begun to live. We all remember those verses from Pope’s Messiah which are made into one of the hymns of our hymnal. The poet is singing of the kingdom of God that is to come, the new Jerusalem and its inhabitants:

“See a long race thy spacious courts adorn,
See future sons and daughters yet unborn,
In crowding ranks on eveiy side arise
Demanding life, impatient for the skies.”

The cry of the unborn for life! That is the sound which fills the poet’s vision. By and by comes God’s answer to that prayer. The unborn come to the birth and life is given. We all know how that life seems to be merely life, life in its first and simplest form at the beginning, and so it goes on through all the earliest years. The unconscious infant lives in a mere animal existence, and later no THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE.

when the strong and healthy boy begins to grow conscious of the delight of life, it is pure life, life simply as a fact, life not with reference to the deeper powers it contains or the far-off issues with which it has to do that gives him such hourly delight in living. There comes back to many of us, I am sure, the ringing verse in which Browning has made this very David, when he was a boy, sing in the presence of King Saul of this pure consciousness of joy in the mere fact of being alive.

*’ Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree; the cool silver

shock Of the plunge in a pool’s living water, — the hunt of the bear, And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. And the meal — the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine And the locust’s flesh steeped in the pitcher! the full draught of

wine, And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy.”

“Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.” So Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, sings the same truth, the truth of man’s, the healthy man’s, pure delight in life, long before he has looked down into the depth of life to ask what treasures are hidden there, or looked out along the distant vista of life to ask what he shall do with it. In his placing of a bright, unquestioning boyhood at the beginning of every man’s career, does it not seem as if God had meant to indicate that this sense of life as a blessing in itself must be the basis out of which all the sense of the special blessedness of special events in life must grow, as if He meant to have us take life as a whole and thank Him for our creation before we looked deeper and saw what were the true purposes of life. But by and by the time for that deeper look must come. Not always can David be content with the leaping from rock to rock, the plunge in the pool and the sleep in the dry bed of the summer brook. The thoughts and anxieties and duties of a man come crowding up into the life of the light-hearted boy. Care for things to which he once was all indifferent, hopes of things about which he once never dreamed, ambitions and desires of influence and power, the delight in half-discovered faculties, and as the crown of all, conscious religion or the realized relationship with God, the love of and the obedience to Christ, all of these become his one after another. One after another life comes to mean these things. And now what shall we say? How have these things come to the man. See him at forty rich in all these, the earnest, thoughtful, religious man, full of associations with the world and with his fellow-man and God. This is the same being with the boy who played in simple health and thoughtlessness thirty years ago. How have all these things come to him? Have angels come down one by one, each bringing one of these new gifts and put them one by one into his life. Have they not rather opened one by one out of that life itself, called out by God, urged out by the half-blind desire to be all that it had within itself the capacity of being, but certainly coming forth out of the very substance of the life itself, and therefore having been in the life from the beginning. There never was a moment when the hand of God touched Shakespeare’s lips and bade him be the poet. Never a time when as a new endowment a breath from Heaven gave to St. John the capacity to be a saint. Never a day when the nature of Raphael was filled with genius. These things were in these men from the beginning of their lives. When as in Pope’s imaginative picture their spirits prayed for life, and when God gave them life, this was what God gave them. This poetry, this genius, the sublimeness was all wrapped up in that first gift of life when God said “Let this man be.” All that has to do with His own unending life was there. The eternal life of these men, this God gave to them. All that was to open out of their being forever, all that they were to be on to the endless end, all this God gave them when He answered the prayer of their unborn spirits. They asked life of Him, and He gave them a long life, even forever and ever.

We talk of Raphael, and Shakespeare, and St. John. But we might talk of any men. We talk of them only because their illustrious excellence makes glorious and clear what is true of all mankind. In all men the life which God gives has in it the capacity of all which the man forever hereafter is to be. In all men, the first life that appears, that which we commonly call life, the mere vitality, is the foundation of the entire life, the basis upon which must rest all the structure of the growing character. How interesting this makes the beginning of a life appear. Some day I walk along one of our streets and men are laying the foundations of a new house which is going to be built. It is interesting in itself, — the driving of the piles, the laying of the massive stones, the exercise of power and of skill. But the true interest of what they are doing lies in the consciousness that this is a foundation. The lines on which these great stones are laid mark the dimensions and partitions of the coming house. I look up and the air already seems to be quivering with the yet unbuilt walls. He who is laying these stones has the walls in his brain and is already building them. That makes it interesting. But let it stop, and then you feel instantly how destitute of value the foundation is in itself. A foundation that has never been built upon is the saddest sight upon a city street. A crumbling foundation on which a building which is now burnt down once stood is sad. Still it has the memory of having once done its true work. But a foundation that has been well laid and then stopped short and had no house built on it is the most sad of all. At once it suggests its human parallel, “This man began to build but was not able to finish,” we say. “So is he who layeth up treasure for himself but is not rich toward God,” The first life that has stopped short and never gone on to complete itself in the higher lives, mere vitality which has advanced and opened into no great character and usefulness, these are the human parallels of the foundation stones upon which the bankrupt or discouraged or fickle-minded builder never has gone on to build his house.

You have only to add one element to our simple metaphor and it becomes complete. You have only to conceive of the foundation stones becoming conscious of themselves and knowing what is happening to them, and then they represent completely that earliest, rudimentary life upon the basis of which all the other lives rest and which finds its value in its power to carry and develop them. Let the foundation feel the unbuilt building, and what joy must fill it as it finds itself growing more compact and solid. Every blow of the hammer which makes it more fit for what it is to carry rings like a bell from the steeple that is some day to pierce the sky. Surely there is something which corresponds to that in the human life. Surely the mere vitality, the mere animal living, if we choose to call it so, may be a different thing in the young human animal from what it is or can be in the young animal of any other kind, because of the premonitions, however dim and vague, of the life of intellect and of love and of religion which are to rest upon it. And when the years pass and no house is built, when only the foundation stands, must not that, too, if we imagine into it a consciousness, be disappointed and full of the sense of failure in a way which will find its parallel in the life of every man whose life lingers as the years go by in the first rudimentary conditions and never advances to any of the higher uses for which it was made. O the unused foundations of character which stand along our human streets and make the city of our human life so tragical, O the men here who are nothing but grown-up boys, who have never built upon their boyhood any real manly life. O the bodily vigor that has never been put to any strong work for God or fellow-man; the quick senses that have never been put to any higher employment than the shooting of a bird; the observation of our brethren that once was healthy sympathy but has developed into no true interest in our brethren’s best good and so remains to-day only in the wretched shape of the old man’s or the old woman’s taste for gossip and scandal. O the fresh spontaneity which never having found its true task wanders still in dilettante dissipation among a thousand fancies. O the first crude imaginations about God, which never having been refined and elevated by careful and loving thought about Him have settled down into the bigotries and idolatries of middle life. These are the specimens of what I mean by the primary, rudimentary life becoming sad and miserable because it does not go boldly and freely on to fulfil itself in the higher lives. The temporal life which is not allowed to open into the eternal life becomes corrupt and feeble in its temporalness. The man who does not carry forward his care for himself and complete it with a loving care for God and for God’s children, loses the best power of self -care. He who having asked God for life does not take the deeper and longer life which comes in answer to his prayer loses the best joy of the life which he does try to take.

I have prolonged these definitions and illustrations because I was very anxious to make clear even by much reiteration how there are these two lives in every full grown man, the life for which man asks and the deeper life which God gives; and how these two stand always related to one another, as the house to the foundation on which it is built, or, perhaps better, as the pattern to the stuff into whose substance it is woven. And I have done all this because I wanted to get at this further question which seems to me to be very pressingly important. What effect upon our treatment of the lower life will such a vision of the higher life which ought to be built on it produce. At first it might seem as if the mere physical life and all that belongs to it would seem contemptible and only worthy of neglect to one who had caught sight of the diviner purposes of living. But very soon we see that that is not so. It gives us new ideas about the mere fact of life when we thus discern the loftier purposes of life, but it does not make life contemptible or insignificant. Let us see what one or two of such ideas are.

The first of them is obedience. Any man who knows that his bodily life and all that immediately belongs to it has its real value as the scene of experience and the material of operations which belong to the mind and the soul, must of necessity seek for some power to whom the mind and body belong and ask of Him to make the body ready for the high and mysterious functions of which it can itself be most imperfectly aware, for which it can but most imperfectly prepare itself. To give ourselves into the will of God that He may do in us that which He made us for, which we ourselves but dimly understand, that is the only true completion of our life. O how we talk of submission to God as if it were the hard concession to necessity or else as if it were the last refuge of despair instead of being what it is, the fulfilment and consummation of our life. As if you took the chisel which had been trying to carve by itself and put it into the hand of Michael Angelo, so only infinitely higher is it when you teach your soul to say “O Lord, not my will but thy will be done.” It is no cry of a defeated man. It is the soul seizing on the privilege and the right of having itself completed after God’s pattern. The parable of the prodigal son has the whole story in it. The man submitting is the man completed. O if our brave, self-confident young men only knew this. Full of pure joy in life as life, full of the delight of “mere living,” they look forward and the dream comes to them that sometime or other life may break and then they will go to God for repair, sometime or other (so they shuddering feel) they may fall into terrible sin and then they will go to God for forgiveness. But to go to God now for completeness, to go and lay life into the obedience of God as a diamond lays itself into the sunshine that the mere surface brilliancy may deepen and region behind region of splendor be revealed below, that does not seem to come into their thought. The cry “submit, submit,” “obey, obey,” seems to them to mean “come down! come down!” But it really means “come up!” Let God who has given you so abundantly the earthly life, the life of time, give you into and through it, the life of Heaven, the eternal life.

2. Again our doctrine enforces most impressively, I think, the need of purity in the life of the body for the soul’s sake. Here are you, let us say, just where King David was when as a boy he lived in that bright, sunny, superficial life which Mr. Browning describes in the verses which I quoted some time ago, the life of the mountain and the fountain and the river bed, the life of physical spirits and the joy of mere existence. Not yet have opened the deeper depths to you. Not yet have you begun to hunger after truth, to puzzle over the problems of the world, to seek for spiritual holiness. But you know the time for all those deeper lives must come to you. You would not bear to think of yourself as possibly going on forever living thus only on the outside. You mean to be religious some day. Of course the true, the only true way is to be religious now. Now is the real time to open these deeper lives which you do mean some day to live. But till you open them, while you are lingering and hesitating and living still in the fresh delights of the external life, it is good that you should feel already the influence of that deeper life which is to be some day, begging you to keep the life in which you are living even now pure for its sake. O if I could let you see the men who, when they come to the great effort to be Christians, find a terrible remonstrance in the dulness and heaviness of their whole being brought on them by years of dissipation or of idleness. Here is the young man who is not a Christian yet. He might be. Let him not think for a moment that it is only for old men to give themselves to the gracious service of the Son of man. Thank God, there are some boys among you who have learned better than that the chances and privileges of our human life. But this young man is not a Christian yet. Can he do anything even now? Surely he can! If ever he gives himself to God’s service it must be with these hands that he will do the will of the Lord whom he will then love with all his heart. Therefore let him keep these hands pure and make them alert and strong. If ever he seeks for the signs of his then acknowledged God in all creation, it must be through these eyes and through all these senses that the rich, overwhelming witness must pour in. Therefore let him guard those senses from the least taint of impurity, from the sluggishness and obstruction which falls like a curse upon the body in which a man has lived a dissipated life. If this young man ever, made a Christian, is to enter into the deep and helpful associations with his fellow-men which are the delight and duty of the Christian life, it will be by the profounder opening and the broader extension of these social relations in which he is living now that that new social life will come, therefore let him keep these social relations scrupulously clean and true. This is the way in which you may be faithful already to whatever unguessed deeper life God has in His intentions for you. No man is living worthily who is not faithful already to the future life which he does not yet understand, but which he knows must come. “Your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost,” says Paul. Before the God has occupied the temple, the temple must feel the influence of his promised coming and keep its empty courts clean for Him. Are there not some men here, not yet devoted to the highest life which is Christ’s service, who are yet conscious enough of some mysterious richness of experience of life before them, to make them ready to listen when one begs them to keep their whole present life, their whole bodily life pure and true and active, so that whatever may claim them in the days to come shall find them with natures so fresh and sound that they can answer to its claim.

I know indeed that it is out of the very substance of our sins that God’s unbounded and ingenious mercy can make the new life. I know that into the shattered structure of a misused and degraded body He can pour His spiritual strength. I know that on the tattered canvas of a profligate life he can weave the glorious patterns of His grace. But truths like these, confirmed by multitudes of notable histories, must never make us think so base a heresy as that a man must go through wickedness to get to goodness, or that a pure youth does not display a fairer theatre for the work of grace than a young life all torn and stained with sin. Every man’s youth, be it as pure as it may, will offer enough for God to forgive, enough from which the soul, come to its conversion, can gather the fruits of humble penitence. But it will always be the hills which lift themselves the highest in the dark and look most frankly toward the quarter from which the promising must come when it does come; it will always be these hills that will first and most easily and most richly catch the glory of the rising sun. Therefore keep your life pure that some day God may make it holy! Be faithful already to the faith which shall be yours some day.

3. Let me say one single but most earnest word about the necessary sacredness and inviolability which this truth of ours when it is thoroughly accepted gives to our physical life. Nothing, I believe, can give a man a sure, reliable conviction that under no circumstances of pain or disappointment has he a right to cast away his life, nothing can give and keep to a man a true and manly certainty that he is bound, no matter how he hates it, to stand at the post where God has put him till the God who put him there calls him away, except the clear perception that this physical life is but the material and condition of deeper spiritual life which is the only finally valuable thing. The man whose whole nature is steeped in and pervaded by that truth will stand in spite of everything, while God in any way, through the pain of the body, if need be, calls up the soul and bids it live its life, and makes the man by suffering which he will not run away from, a spiritual man.

Every now and then a strange phenomenon appears which shows how the sacredness of life depends upon the preservation of clear ideas of the deepest purposes of life. Every now and then some physician or some other man whose eye is fastened principally on man’s physical structure stands up with the plea that if a man is sick with an incurable disease and doomed to hopeless suffering it is the right and even the duty of science to relieve him of his sufferings by gently taking away his life. It is ar» atrocious insult to the essential and inalienable sacredness of life. “There is nothing but suffering for this poor creature,” cries such an arrogant doctor, “therefore let him die!” Nothing but suffering! As if God were not every day using the body’s suffering to cultivate the soul’s eternal life. As if just as soon as there was a hard lesson to be learned you ought to kill the scholar. One trembles as he thinks what pictures of human patience, what visions of ripened character which have been revelations and inspirations to generations of mankind, what spectacles of the spiritual possibilities of humanity, nay, what sights of refined and exalted happiness in the triumph of the spirit over the flesh, must have been lost to the world if doctors such as these had had their way from the beginning. No! The life of the human body is a sacred thing, because in it and through it comes the deeper life. Man must stand by his post, and no other man must drive him from it, because so only can God give man His best revelations and use him for His most effective work. And so we come back to King David and our text. The old, old prayer for life. How the whole world has rung with it! In what various tones it has gone up to God. Not merely from sick beds where life seemed to be just slipping away out of the grasp of desperate men. Not merely at the foot of thrones where wretches begged their tyrants not to cut short their wretched days. But all the stir of living is a cry for life. All the struggle of business is an appeal of man to live. All industry, all enterprise, all thought, echoes with the dread of death, the prayer for life! And God hears it and gives the world, and gives to you and me, day by day, the life we ask. But oh, that as He gives it to us day by day we may know the full richness of what He gives. Every morning He puts into our hands anew the mystery of our existence. The chance to think true thoughts, to do brave and kind deeds, to love him, and to help our brethren — these, the great chances of the soul, these, the eternal life, the “long life even forever and ever” He gives us day by day when we ask for life. O may He give us something more, the gift of His own sight that we may know as He knows all the depth of this life which He gives to us, and live it obediently and purely and patiently, and so come in it and by it always nearer to Him who gives it to us.