A Dead Lion
[Delivered in Brooklyn, N. Y., March 30, living dog is better than a dead liony Eccles. lx, 4.
THE Bible is the strangest, the loveHest, the might-
^iest, the weirdest, the best of books. Written by Moses the lawyer, Joshua the soldier, Samuel the judge, Ezra the builder. Job the poet, David the shepherd, Daniel the prime minister, Amps the herdsman, Matthew the custom house officer, Luke the doctor, Paul the scholar, John the exile; and yet a complete harmony from the middle verse of the 1 1 7th psalm, bo th ways to the upper and lower lids, and from the shortest passage, which is the thirty-fifth verse of the eleventh chapter of John, to the longest verse, which is the ninth verse of the eighth chapter of Esther, and yet not an imperfection in all the 773,693 words which it is composed of. It not, only reaches over the past, but over the future; has in it a ferryboat, as in second Samuel, and a telegraphic wire, as in Job, and a railroad train, as ln Nahum, and introduces us to a foundr^man by the name of Tubal Cain, and a shipbuilder by the name
(299)
l^ALMAGE^S SERMONS.
of Noah, and an architect by the name of Aholiab, and tells us how many stables Solomon had to take care of his horses, and how much he paid for those horses. But few things in this versatile and comprehensive book, interest me so much as its apothegms; those short, terse, sententious epigrammatic sayings, of which my text is one, ‘’A living dog is better than a dead lion.’’
Here the lion stands for nobility, and the dog for meanness. You must know that the dog mentioned in the text is not one of our American, or European, or Scottish dogs, that, in our mind, is a synonym for the beautiful, the graceful, the affectionate, the sagacious, and the true. The St. Bernard dog is a hero, and if you doubt it, ask the snows of the Alps, out of which he picked the exhausted traveler. The shepherd dog is a poem, and if you doubt it, ask the highlands of Scotland. The Artie dog is the rescue of explorers and if you doubt it, ask Dr. Kane’s expedition. The watch dog is a living protection, and if you doubt it, ask ten thousand homesteads over whose safety he watched last night. But Solomon, the author of my text, lived in Jerusalem.
As most of the Bible was written in regions lionhaunted, this creature appears in almost all parts of the Bible as a simile. David understood its habits ofniglitprowling and day slumbering, as is seen from his description: “The young lions roar after their prey and seek their meat from God. The sun ariseth they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens.’^ And again he cries out: “My soul is among lions. ‘^ Moses knew them and said “Judah is couched like a lion.’^ Sampson knew them, for he took honey from the carcass of a slain lion, Solomon knew them, and says, “the king’s wrath is as the roar of a lion,” and again, “the slothful man says there is a lion in the way.”
Isaiah knew them, and says, in the millennium, ‘’the lion shall eat straw like an ox.” Ezekiel knew them, and says, ‘’the third was the face of a lion.” Paul knew them, and s ays, ‘I was delivered out of the mouth of a lion. ‘Peter knew them, and says, “the devil as a roaring lion walketh about.” St. John knew them, and says of Christ, ‘’behold the lion of the tribe of Judah!”
SMALL FACULTIES-GREAT FACULTIES.
Now, what does my text mean when it puts a living dog and a dead lion side by side, and says the former is better than the latter? It means that small faculties actively used are of more value than great faculties unemployed. How often you see it! Some man with limited capacity vastly useful. He takes that which God has given him and says: “My mental endowment is not large and the world would not rate me high for my intelligence, and my vocabulry is limited, and my education was defective, but here goes what I have for God and salvation, and the making of the world good and happy.” He puts in a word here and a word there, encourages a faint hearted man, gives a scripture passage in consolation to some bereft woman, picks up a child fallen in the street and helps him brush off the dust and puts a five-cent piece in his hand telling him not to cry, so that the boy is singing before he gets round the corner; waiting on everybody that has a letter to carry or a message to deliver; comes into a rail train, or stage coach, or depot, or shop, with a smiling face that sets everybody to thinking. “If that man can, with what appears small equipment in life, be happy, why cannot I, possessing far more than he has, be equally happy?” One day of that kind of doing things may not amount to much, but forty years of that — no one but God himself can appreciate its immensity.
talmage’s sermons.
There are tens of thotisands of such people. Their circle of acquaintances is small. He is a clerk, or weigher, or drayman, and he is known among those who sit near him clear back in the church under the galleries, and at the ferry gates where he comes in knocking the snow from his shoes and threshing his arms around his body to revive circulation on some January morning. But if he should die to-morrow there would not be a hundred people who would know about it. He will never have his name in the newspapers but once, and that will be the announcement of his death, if some one will pay for the insertion so much a line for the two lines. But he will come up gloriously on the other side, and the God who has watched him all through will gill give him a higher seat and a better mansion and, a grander eternity than many a man who had on earth, before his name, the word honorable, and after his name L.L. D. and F. R. S. Christ said in Luke, the sixth chapter, that in heaven some who had it hard here would laugh there. And I think a laugh of delight and congratulation will run around the heavenly circles when this one of whom I spoke shall go up and take the precedence of many Christians, who in this world felt themselves to be of 99 per cent more importance. The whisper will go round the galleries of the upper temple: “Can it be possible that that was the weigher in our store?’’ “Can it be possible that that was the car driver on our street “Can it be possible that that was the sexton of our church?” “Can it be possible that is the man that heaved coal into our cellar?*’ ^’I never could have thought it. What a reversal of things! We were clear ahead of him on earth, but he is clear ahead of us in heaven. Why, we had ten times more brains than he had, we had a thousand times more money than he had, we had social position a mile higher than he had, we had innumerable opportunities more than he had, but it seems now that he accomplished more with his talent than we did with our ten;’^ while Solomon, standing among the thrones, overhears the whisper, and sees the wonderment and with, benignant and allsuggestive smile, says: “Yes. it is as I told the world many centuries ago — better is small faculty actively used than great talent unemployed, better is a living dog than a dead lion.”
A WORLD FULL OF DEAD LIONS.
The simple fact is that the world has been, and the world is now, full of dead lions. They are people of great capacity and large opportunity, doing nothing for the improvement of society, nothing for the overthrow of evil, nothing for the salvation of souls. Some of them are monetary lions. They have accumulated so many hundreds of thousands of dollars, that you can feel their tread when they walk through any street or come into any circle. They can by one financial move upset the money market. Instead of 10 per cent, of their income which the Bible lays down as the proper proportion of their contribution to the cause of God, they do not give 5 per cent., or 3 per cent., or 2 per cent., or V2 per cent., or V4, per cent. That they are lions, no one doubts. When they roar. Wall street, State street, Lombard Street, and the bourse tremble. In a few years they will lie down and die. They will have a eat funeral and a long row of fine carriages, and mightiest requiems will roll from the organ, and polished shaft of Aberdeen granite will indicate where their dust lies; but for all Uve to the world that man might as talmage’s sermons.
well have never lived. As an experiment as to how much he can carry with him, put a ten-cent piece in the palm of his dead hand, and five years after open the tomb, and you will find that he has dropped even the ten-cent piece. A lion! Yes, but a dead lion! He left all his treasures on earth, and has no treasures in heaven. What shall the stone-cutter put upon the the obelisk over him? I suggest, let it be the mans name, then the time of his birth, then the date of his death, then the appropriate scripture passage, ‘Better is a living dog than a dead lion.’’ But I thank God that we are having just now an outburst of splendid beneficence that is to increase until the earth is girdled with it. It is spreading with the speed of an epidemic, but with just the opposite effect of an epidemic.
LIVING PHILANTHROPISTS.
Do you not all, most gladly notice how wealthy men are opening free libraries, and building free churches in their native village? Have you not seen how men of large means, instead of leaving great philanthropies in their wills for disappointed heirs to quarrel about, and the orphan courts to swamp, are becoming their own executors and administrators? After putting aside enough for their families (for he that provideth not for his own, and especially those of his own household, is worse than an infidel they are saying: What can I do, not after I am dead but while living and in full possession of my faculties, to properly direct the build-, ing of the churches, or the hospitals or the colleges or the libraries that I design for the public welfare and while yet I have full capacity to enjoy the satisfaction of seeing the good accomplished?” There are bad in sh ions and good faslrioiis, and. whether good or bad talmage’s sermons.
fashions are mighty. One of the good fashions now starting will sweep the earth — the fashion of wealthy men to distribute, while yet alive, their surplus accumalation.
And this grand distribution is being helped by the fact that so many large estates have, immediately after the testator’s death, gone into litigation. Attorneys with large fees are employed on both sides and the case goes on month after month and year after year and after one court decides it ascends to another court; and is decided in the opposite direction; and then new evidence is found and the trials are all repeated. The children who at the father’s funeral seemed to have an uncontrollable grief, after the will is read go into elaborate process to prove that the father was crazy and therefore incompetent to make a will; and there are men on the jury who think that the fact that the testator gave so much of his money to the Bible society, and the missionary society, or the opening of a free library is proof positive that he was insane, and that he knew not what he was signing when he subscribed to the words: ‘4nthe name of God amen. I being of sound mind do make this my last will and testament.’’
The torn wills, the fraudulent wills, the broken wills have recently been made such a spectacle to angels and to men that all over the land successful men are calling in architects and saying to them: “How much would it cost for me to build a picture-gallery for our town?” or ‘’What plans can you draw me out for a concert hall?” or “I am specially interested in the incurables and how large a building would accommodate 300 of such patients?” or ‘The Church of God has been a’ great help to me all my life, and 1 want you to draw me a plan of a church, commodious beautiful, well ventilated, and with plenty of windoWvS to let in the lght; I want you to get right at work in making out plans of such a building, for, though I am well now, life is uncertain, and before I leave the world I want to see something done that will be an appropriate acknowledgement of the goodness of God to me and mine: now when can I hear from you?”
Who would attempt to write the obituary of the dead lions of commerce, the dead lions of law, the dead lions of medicine, the dead lions of social influence? Vast capacity had they, and mighty range, and other men in their presence were as powerless as the antelope or heifer or giraffe when from the jungle a Numidian Hon springs upon its prey. But they get through with life. They lie down in their magnificent lair. They have made their last sharp bargain. They have spoken their last hard word. They have committed their last mean act. When a tawny inhabitant of the desert rolls over helpless the lioness and whelps fill the air with shrieks and howls and lash themselves into lamentations, and it is a genuine grief for the poor things. When this dead lion of monstrous uselessness expires there is nothing but dramatized woe,, for ‘Better is a live dog than a dead lion,*^
My text also means that an opportunity of the living present is better than a great opportunity passed. We spend much of our time in saying: “If I only had.” We can all look back and see some occasion where we might have done a great deed, or might have effected an important rescue, or we might have dealt a stroke that would have accomplished a vast result. Through stupidity or lack of appreciation of the crisis, or through procrastination we let the chance go by. How much time we have wasted in thinking of what
TALMAGE’S SERMONS.
we might have said or might have done! We spend hours and days and years in walking around that dead lion. We cannot resuscitate it. It will never open its eyes again. There will never be another spring in its paw. Dead as any feline terror of South Africa, through whose heart 30 years ago Gordon Cummin sent the slug. Dont let us give more time to the deploring of the dead past. There are other opportunities remaining. They may not be as great, but they are worth our attention. Small opportunities all around — opportunities for the saying of kind words and doing of kind deeds. Helplessness to be helped, disheartened ones to be encouraged, lost ones to be found. Though the present may be insignificent as compared with the past. ^’Better is a living dog than a dead lion.^’
CHANCES GONE — CHANCES TO COME.
My text also means that the condition of the most wretched man alive is better than that of the most favored sinners departed. The chance of these last is gone. Where they are they cannot make any earthly assets available. After Charlemagne was dead he was set in an ornamental sepulcher on a golden throne, and a crown was put on his cold brow, and a scepter in his stiff hand, but that gave him no dominion in the next world. One of the most intensely interesting things I saw last winter in Egypt was Pharaoh of olden times, the very Pharaoh who oppressed the Israelites. The inscription on his sarcophagus and the writing on his mummy bandages prove beyond controversy that he was the Pharaoh of Bible times. All the Egyptologists and the explorations agree that it is the old scoundrel himself. Visible are the very teeth with which he gnashed against the Israehtish brick-makers. There are the sockets of the merciless eyes with which he looked upon the overburdened people of God. There is the hair that floated in the breeze off the Red Sea. There are the very lips with which he commanded them to make bricks without straw. Thousands of years afteirwards when the wrappings of the mummy were unrolled, old Pharoah lifted up his arm as if in imploration, but his skinny bones cannot again clutch his shat’ tered scepter. He is a dead lion. And is not any man now living, in the fact that he has opportunity of repentance and salvation, better off than any of those departed ones who, by authority or possessions or influence, were positively leonine, and yet wicked?
What a thing to congratulate you on is your life. Why, it is worth more than all the gems of the universe kindled into one precious stone? I am alive! What does that mean? Why it means that I still have an opportunity of being saved myself, and helping others to be saved. To be alive! Why, it means that I have still another chance to correct my past mistakes, and make sure work for heaven. Alive are we? Come let us celebrate it by new resolutions, new self-examination, new consecration, and a new career. The smallest and most insignificant to day is worth to us more than five hundred yesterdays. Taking advantage of the present, let us get pardon for all the past, and security for all the future. Where are our forgiven sins? I dont know. God doesn’t know, either. He says: *^Your sins and iniquities will I remember no more.’’