LIFE WORTH LIVING.

Southern Cross, Volume 2, Issue 31, 27 October 1894, Page 3

LIFE WORTH LIVING.

Christian life is always worth living. I would not find it hard to persuade you that the life of Susannah Wesley was worth living. She sent out one son to organise Methodism and the other son to ring his anthems all through the ages. I would not find it hard work to persuade you that the life of Frances JUeere was worth living, as she established in England a school for the scientific nursing of the sick, and then when the war broke out between France and Germany, went to the front, and with her own hands scraped the mud off the bodies of the soldiers dying in the trenches, Major-generals standing back to let pass this angel of mercy. Neither would I have hard work to persuade you that Grace Darling lived a life worth living—the heroine of the lifeboat. You are not wondering that the Duchess of Northumberland came to see her, and that people of all lands asked for her likeness, and that the proprietor of the Adelphi Theatre in London offered her a hundred dollars a night just to sit in the lifeboat while some shipwreck scene was being enacted. But I know the thought in the minds of hundreds who read this. You say: “ While I know all these lived lives worth living, I don’t think my life amounts to much.’ Ah ! my friends, whether you live a life conspicuous or inconspic-

nous, it is worth living, if you live aright. And I want my next sentence to go down into the depths of all your souls. You are to be rewarded, not according to the greatness of your work, but according to the holy industries with which you employed the talents you really possessed. The majority of the crowns of heaven will not be given to people with ten talents, for most of them were tempted only to serve themselves. The vast majority of the crowns of heaven will be given to people who had one talent but gave it all to God. And remember that our life here is introductory to another. It is the yestibule to a palace; but who despises the door of the Madeleine because there are grander glories within ? Your life, if rightly lived, is the first bar of an eternal oratorio. And the life you live now is all the more worth living because it opens into a life that shall never end, and the last letter of the word “ time ” is the first letter of the word “ eternity ! ” —Talmage.