Grand New Year's Sermon

Yesterday morning at the First Baptist church, the Rev. J. A. French delivered a most interesting and eloquent New Year sermon to a very large congregation. His theme of the morning was 'The Time is Shortened,' and with this as his subject matter, he quoted his text as follows:

'The Time is Shortened' — 1 Cor., 7:29, (R. V.)

'The year has gone and with it many a precious thought / Of happy dreams. Its mark is on each brow, / Its shadow in each heart.'

The death of one year and the birth of another is serious and suggestive. It is like the death of a parent who leaves a cradled infant behind, or the passing away of one generation and the coming on the stage of another. It is a time for review and anticipation, a time for retrospection and resolutions.

Bidding farewell to the year is a solemn thing. For, while its cares and labors, its heartaches and yearnings are gone, gone also are its privileges. Whatever our hands or heads or hearts have wrought by ministration, by reason, by emotion, has passed forever from our grasp. The mistakes of the year, the unkind words that have smitten loving hearts, the wrongful deeds that have weakened confidence in Christian character, the sinful thoughts that have marred our own souls, cannot be recalled and rectified. The book has been shut and sealed, thus to remain until it is opened before the great white throne. But we may rejoice that we are still here to redeem the time and rise on stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things.

The noble apostle to the Gentiles reminds us that life is hastening to its close, that our great business is so to use its narrow limits as to be prepared for a higher, better life. The primary truth conveyed by the text is that the time of the Corinthian Christians was shortened in virtue of the impending persecution of Nero, but it is equally and always true that time is shortened, that it will soon glide away and be no more. The implication of the text is that our plans of life should not be formed in view of this truth, that we should engage in no business, form no ties, indulge in no pastime in which the truth here taught would be unwelcome. Oh, if I might only get into your hearts with my message this morning, the harps of heaven would strike their sweetest notes and angels sing their most joyous songs, for that ye have learned this all-important lesson.

First: The time is shortened in which you can attend to your temporal affairs. How old are you this morning? It may be you are strong, robust and young, that you felicitate yourself on your manly, erect, close-knit and sinewy frame, and you say, 'I have a good lease on life.' I knew such a young man, a splendid specimen of physical manhood, tall, straight, broad-shouldered, athletic. He was envied by the young men around him. He was full of business, and in the midst of his employments this fine-looking young fellow was stricken down with fever and died. It may be you are in the meridian of life, or that you are beyond 35 years of age, which is the average of human life, and imagine the immunity you have enjoyed from disease assures you of a long life, or that because longevity has characterized your family therefore it will obtain in your case. But how many the exceptions to this law none can tell. My own father lived until he was 61 and my mother lives today at the age of 71, and yet I have lost four brothers under 35 years of age, all of them stirring business men.

Physicians, whose business it is to cure others, frequently expose themselves unduly, and, having to go at all hours of the day and night, become themselves the victims of disease.

Ministers, who are proverbially temperate and long-lived, must regularly perform their work and, despite their physical condition, must prepare and deliver the expected discourses, however many hearers may excuse themselves; and, if they expend the nervous energy they should in preparation and delivery, it is constant wear and tear on the system. Even the youths grow faint and be weary and the young men utterly fail in many cases. Multitudes; nay, millions, observe no moderation, but utterly disregard the laws of health, while the elements of peril abound on the right hand and on the left. Severe climatic changes threaten on this side and our own physical organism on that. The moment we begin to live we also begin to die, and the forces of nature keep at work in their established measure until at last we succumb.

In view of these truths, what should be our attitude toward our temporal affairs? What does wisdom suggest? What does observation teach? That we ought to consider nothing as our own in real or permanent possession; that we should so adjust our temporal affairs that they shall neither annoy us on our beds of sickness nor give trouble to those nearest us in the event we should be taken from them and the scenes which engage us. I have known men to refuse to insure their lives or to make a will, as if somehow this would precipitate their death. I have known others who allowed their policies to lapse, after carrying them for years, on the presumption that they could be renewed at any time in the future. I have known wives who strongly objected to such provisio[...]