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[Illustration: coverpage]

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  _The World's Great Sermons_

  VOLUME IX

  CUYLER TO VAN <DW18>

  THE
  WORLD'S
  GREAT
  SERMONS


  COMPILED BY
  GRENVILLE KLEISER

  Formerly of Yale Divinity School Faculty;
  Author of "How to Speak
  in Public," Etc.


  With Assistance from Many of the Foremost
  Living Preachers and Other Theologians


  INTRODUCTION BY
  LEWIS O. BRASTOW, D.D.

  Professor Emeritus of Practical Theology
  in Yale University

  IN TEN VOLUMES

  VOLUME IX--CUYLER TO VAN <DW18>

  FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
  NEW YORK and LONDON




COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY

_Printed in the United States of America_




CONTENTS


VOLUME IX

  CUYLER (Born in 1822).                  Page

  The Value of Life                          1

  BROADUS (1827-1895).

  Let us Have Peace With God                19

  WILBERFORCE (Born in 1840).

  The Mother Church                         37

  SPALDING (Born in 1840).

  Education and the Future of Religion      49

  MACARTHUR (Born in 1841).

  Christ--The Question of the Centuries     73

  CARPENTER (Born in 1841).

  The Age of Progress                       91

  PARKHURST (Born in 1842).

  Constructive Faith                       111

  PATTON (Born in 1843).

  Glorification Through Death              129

  SCOTT HOLLAND (Born in 1847).

  The Story of a Disciple's Faith          145

  STALKER (Born in 1848).

  Temptation                               165

  BURRELL (Born in 1849).

  How to Become a Christian                183

  WATSON (1850-1907).

  Optimism                                 199

  NICOLL (Born in 1851).

  Gethsemane, the Rose Garden of God       211

  VAN <DW18> (Born in 1852).

  The Meaning of Manhood                   231




CUYLER

THE VALUE OF LIFE




BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, Presbyterian divine, was born at Aurora,
New York, in 1822. He took his degree at Princeton in 1841, and
studied theology in Princeton Seminary. He was ordained to the
ministry in 1848, but after discharging the duties of three pastoral
positions, took up the prosecution of more general activities,
including temperance and philanthropic work. He has been a
voluminous writer, having contributed some four thousand articles to
leading religious organs. He died February 26, 1909.




CUYLER

1822-1909

THE VALUE OF LIFE

     _The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty
     hath given me life._--Job xxxiii., 4.


There are two conflicting theories, nowadays, as to the origin
of man. One theory brings him upward from the brute, the other,
downward from God; one gives him an ascent from the ape, the other
a descent from the Almighty. I shall waste no time in refuting the
first theory. The most profound physicist of Europe, Professor
Virchow, of Berlin, has lately asserted that this theory of man's
evolution from the brute has no solid scientific foundation. Why
need you and I seek to disprove what no man has ever yet proved or
will prove? The other theory of man's origin comes down to us in the
oldest book in existence, the Book of Job, and tallies exactly with
the narrative in the next oldest books, those compiled by Moses:
"The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath
given me life." That is the Bible account of your ancestry and mine.

We make a great deal of ancestry. The son of a duke may become a
duke; the child of a king has royal blood in his veins; and a vast
deal of honor is supposed to descend with an honorable descent.
Grant this true, it proves a great deal; it proves more than some
of us imagine. It proves that there is something grander than for
man to have for his sire a king or an emperor, a statesman or
a conqueror, a poet or a philosopher. It looks to the grandest
genealogy in the universe, the ancestry of a whole race; not a few
favored individuals, but all humanity. My brethren, fellow sharers
of immortality, open this family record. Trace your ancestry back to
the most august parentage in the universe: One is our Father, God;
One our elder brother, Jesus. We all draw lineage from the King of
kings and the Lord of lords. Herein consists the value and dignity
of human life. I go back to the origin of the globe. I find that
for five days the creative hand of the Almighty is busy in fitting
up an abode of palatial splendor. He adorns it; He hollows the seas
for man's highway, rears the mountains for his observatories, stores
the mines for his magazines, pours the streams to give him drink,
and fertilizes the fields to give him daily bread. The mansion is
carpeted with verdure, illuminated with the greater light by day,
lesser lights by night. Then God comes up to the grandest work of
all. When the earth is to be fashioned and the ocean to be poured
into its bed, God simply says, "Let them be," and they are. When man
is to be created, the Godhead seems to make a solemn pause, retires
into the recesses of His own tranquillity, looks for a model, and
finds it in Himself. "And God said, let us make man in our image,
after our likeness.... So God created man in his own image, in the
image of God created he him; male and female created he them.... So
God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life and he became a
living soul." No longer a beautiful model, no longer a speechless
statue, but vivified. Life, that subtle, mysterious thing that no
physicist can define, whose lurking place in the body no medical eye
hath yet found out--life came into the clay structure. He began to
breathe, to walk, to think, to feel in the body the "nephesh": the
word in the Hebrew means, in the first place, the breath of life,
then, finally, by that immortal essence called the soul.

Now, it is not my intention to enter into any analysis of this
expression, "the spirit," but talk to you on life, its reach and
its revenue, its preciousness and its power, its rewards and its
retributions, life for this world and the far-reaching world beyond.
Life is God's gift; your trust and mine. We are the trustees of the
Giver, unto whom at last we shall render account for every thought,
word and deed in the body.

I. In the first place, life, in its origin, is infinitely important.
The birth of a babe is a mighty event. From the frequency of births,
as well as the frequency of deaths, we are prone to set a very
low estimate on the ushering into existence of an animate child,
unless the child be born in a palace or a presidential mansion, or
some other lofty station. Unless there be something extraordinary
in the circumstances, we do not attach the importance we ought to
the event itself. It is only noble birth, distinguished birth,
that is chronicled in the journals or announced with salvos of
artillery. I admit that the relations of a prince, of a president
and statesman, are more important to their fellow men and touch them
at more points than those of an obscure pauper; but when the events
are weighed in the scales of eternity, the difference is scarcely
perceptible. In the darkest hovel in Brooklyn, in the dingiest attic
or cellar, or in any place in which a human being sees the first
glimpse of light, the eye of the Omniscient beholds an occurrence
of prodigious moment. A life is begun, a life that shall never end.
A heart begins to throb that shall beat to the keenest delight or
the acutest anguish. More than this--a soul commences a career
that shall outlast the earth on which it moves. The soul enters
upon an existence that shall be untouched by time, when the sun is
extinguished like a taper in the sky, the moon blotted out, and the
heavens have been rolled together as a vesture and changed forever.

The Scandinavians have a very impressive allegory of human life.
They represent it as a tree, the "Igdrasil" or the tree of
existence, whose roots grow deep down in the soil of mystery; the
trunk reaches above the clouds; its branches spread out over the
globe. At the foot of it sit the Past, the Present, and the Future,
watering the roots. Its boughs, with their unleafing, spread
out through all lands and all time; every leaf of the tree is a
biography, every fiber a word, a thought or a deed; its boughs are
the histories of nations; the rustle of it is the noise of human
existence onward from of old; it grows amid the howling of the
hurricane, it is the great tree of humanity. Now in that conception
of the half savage Norsemen, we learn how they estimated the
grandeur of human life. It is a transcendent, momentous thing, this
living, bare living, thinking, feeling, deciding. It comes from God;
He is its Author; it should rise toward God, its Giver, who is alone
worthy of being served; that with God it may live forever.

II. In the next place, human life is transcendently precious from
the services it may render to God in the advancement of His glory.
Man was not created as a piece of guesswork, flung into existence as
a waif. There is a purpose in the creation of every human being.
God did not breathe the breath of life into you, my friend, that you
might be a sensuous or a splendid animal. That soul was given you
for a purpose worthy of yourself, still more of the Creator.

What is the purpose of life? Is it advancement? Is it promotion? Is
it merely the pursuit of happiness? Man was created to be happy, but
to be more--to be holy. The wisdom of those Westminster fathers that
gathered in the Jerusalem chamber, wrought it into the well-known
phrase, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever."
That is the double aim of life: duty first, then happiness as the
consequence; to bring in revenues of honor to God, to build up His
kingdom, spread His truth; to bring this whole world of His and lay
it subject at the feet of the Son of God. That is the highest end
and aim of existence, and every one here that has risen up to that
purpose of life lives. He does not merely vegetate, he does not
exist as a higher type of animal: he lives a man's life on earth,
and when he dies he takes a man's life up to mingle with the loftier
life of paradise. The highest style of manhood and womanhood is to
be attained by consecration to the Son of God. That is the only
right way, my friends, to employ these powers which you have brought
back to your homes from your sanctuary. That is the only idea of
life which you are to take to-morrow into the toils and temptations
of the week. That is the only idea of life that you are to carry
unto God in your confessions and thanksgivings in the closet. That
is the only idea of life on which you are to let the transcendent
light