their neighbors and their friends, in sitting on the shore and seeing the great rushing stream of modern life go by,— nay, in the feeling that they are being borne along upon its flashing tide. On the other hand, who does not know that there are men and women who have a great abundance of material possessions, into whose overflowing cup has fallen some poisonous drop of conscious misery or shame, some failure at the heart of life, some loss that, weighed against a thousand gains, outweighs them all, some sacrifice of life's ideal ends to its materialistic pomps and vanities, after the manner of the lovely woman whose tragedy Charles Dudley Warner has depicted with so much force and beauty in his "Little Journey in the World"? Do you say that she is but a woman in a novel? Nay, but in real life there are a great many like unto her, and some who from a higher height than hers descend to lower depths, while still they seem to be the favorites of fortune, and to lack nothing which the heart can wish. Can you bear to hear again that terrible poem which I read to you a year ago, that one by Mr. Howells, which sears our eyeballs with a flash by which we see what misery inheres in the damnation of a mean success?

"If he could doubt on his triumphant cross,
How much more I in the defeat and loss
Of seeing all my selfish dreams fulfilled,

Of having done the very thing I willed,

Of being all that I desired to be!

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!"

Of such mean successes who shall say that there are more than of the splendid failures of mankind,— failures in the race and struggle for material things, failures to win some crown of peace or joy,- splendid because there was no bending of the sturdy heart, the upright will, before the cruel blast. But, thank Heaven, life does not divide itself into these streams that flow through such far separated channels onward to the sea. "In medio tutissimus ibis." The middle

course is best; and there how many thousands sail secure, what time life's lovely pageant is unrolled on either hand! How many in life's common ways are well content with what therein they find, and in no wise deceive themselves in thinking that it is exceeding good!

You will say, perhaps, that I have not much advanced, if any, the solution of the general question as to the worth of life. But I shall not be greatly troubled if you do. I imagine that the physiologists are right in their opinion, that it is joy that builds the total structure of the animal and human world, and that, if the preponderance were upon the side of pain and misery, this structure would tend to ruin with an irresistible momentum. But this huge abstraction interests me far less than the concrete particulars of human life as it unfolds itself from day to day. Considering these, I see that there are many thousands whose lives are not worth living, seen from some outward point of view, which are thought to be well worth living by the people who are most intimately concerned; and that their judgment is just, for the most part, I have little reason to doubt, and less inclination. "Who knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man that is in him?” But I cannot, as I have shown, accept this test as absolute. As I look abroad upon the world, I see innumerable lives that do not seem to be worth living, either because they are so full of wickedness or folly or because they are so full of pain, unless some such experience is God's rough way of shaping them into his image; but at the same time I see that "a man's life is not in the abundance of the things that he possesses," and that the persuasion that it is so leads to all manner of mistakes in estimating the average worth of life. There are joys unspeakable "in huts where poor men lie," and there are sorrows black as night and terrible as hell in palaces where wealth and luxury abound. To say this is not to pretend indifference to external benefits. The extremes of poverty and wealth are about equally deplorable; but what we must in

sist on is that the habitual exaggeration of the material circumstance is monstrous and absurd, and that the amount of happiness and the quality of life are entirely incommensurate with this.

Meantime that there are lives worth living, there is not the slightest doubt. There would be just as many such, or more than ever, if the pessimist were right in his persuasion of the general worthlessness of life. If pessimism is a true doctrine, then the more meliorists the better. If this is the worst possible world, blessed are they who try to better it, and do! If all that life amounts to is the fellowship of wanderers "in a barren waste, who share the same dire thirst and therefore share the scanty water," there is at least the fellowship, there is the sharing of the scanty water with those whose necessity is greater than ours. If we are merely fellow-heirs of this small island life, it is something, it is much, that we can "plough and sow and reap like brothers." To do this is to live a life worth living. Here is at least "a fighting chance" for "some small good beyond self-satisfaction," and for a good deal of that, because, as William James has shown, the human animal is full of fight, and never happier than when he takes up arms against a sea of troubles, if haply, by opposing, he may end them, or at least beat some of the most overtopping of them down.

But, to be assured that there are lives worth living, it is by no means necessary to accept the pessimistic view of life, if haply we may have the joy of battle to the full, in fighting against hopeless odds. For the most radiant optimist there is enough of concrete evil in the world to pique his courage. Those are the lives worth living that are spent in resolute endeavor to make life's evil less, whatever its proportion to the whole, in widening the skirts of light, in diffusing beauty and happiness, and joy, and peace. They are not few. They are such a multitude that no man can number them; and, as one star differeth from another star in glory, so these from one another, so various are they,

these saints and soldiers, these thinkers and poets, these sculptors and painters, these builders and inventors, these discoverers and founders, these honest merchants, these workers at the press and loom and plough, these mothers with their children in their arms, these statesmen following the things that make for justice and for peace, seeking the good of all, and not some partisan advantage, these thousands who have no memorial, and who will never have any in bronze or marble, who in all sorts of quiet, unpretending ways are making life for those who live with them a sweeter, holier thing. Supposing that you cannot give any satisfactory answer to the question, "Is Life Worth Living?" here is the fact that there are lives worth living; and they present to us a question which each one of us can answer if he will: Is my life one of these?

With the afterglow of Christmas still lingering in the west, and all the east aglow with the bright promise of another of God's glorious years, how can our hearts but turn to him who lived a true man's life, a life worth living, in Galilee and in Judea eighteen centuries ago? how can we but be glad that there have been so many of his elder and his younger brethren filled with his spirit, anticipating his devotion, carrying on his work? and how can we but make haste to range ourselves with these, and make our lives worth living both for ourselves and for those who have a right to look to us for help and cheer? There will never be a better time than this for us to make a brave beginning, though we should live an hundred years.

"Up, up! All fame, all power,

Lies in this golden text:

This is my hour,—

And not the next, or next!"

THE GREAT PERHAPS.

THE title which I have given to my sermon is one which some of you, no doubt, are able to trace, as I am not, to its original source. I have the dimmest possible persuasion that it originated (Le Grand Peut-être) with Rabelais or some other French writer, and that, as first used, it was used as a definition or delimitation of God, and not as a definition or delimitation of immortality. But this is sure: that, whatever its original source or meaning, the expression has been used, of late, quite as often to synonymize "immortality as to synonymize "God"; and it is as synonymizing "immortality" that I have taken it this morning as the title of my discourse.

As synonymizing immortality, it is, I think, significant of the body and direction of a great deal of thought and sentiment which have been latterly developed. I have conversed with many of you on this head; and I should like to with many more, in order that I may determine whether I am right or wrong in my persuasion that many of you here, who formerly regarded immortality as a blessed certainty, now think of it as the Great Perhaps, some of you emphasizing the Perhaps. Let me be entirely frank about this matter, and say that, when I came to Brooklyn, thirty-four years ago, to find persons in my society having any doubt of the reality of a future life was difficult, but that to find such now is easier than I could wish. For this change has not coincided with any weakening of faith on my part. The progress or - if I may not without presumption say the progress —the change has been from less to more confident affirma