Is the Believer's Life a Happy One?
By Austin Phelps
RICHARD BAXTER was a life-long sufferer. Incurable disease kept him for years at death's door. "I live with one foot in the grave," he used to say. For twenty years he probably did not know the sensations of health. The jubilant spring of life in other men became a forgotten joy to him. As if this were not enough, he was persecuted for his religion. For preaching five sermons, he was condemned to imprisonment for five years. Sermons were costly luxuries in those days; a year of prison life for each one! He escaped only by the interposition of his physician, who swore that the execution of the sentence would cost him his life. Not a very fascinating life, this, to a looker-on! We should not have thought him querulous against the providence of God, if he had been the author of an essay published not long ago, entitled, "Is Life Worth Living?" But the invalid and persecuted preacher published no such thing as that. He had no time to ask or answer such a question. He was living, and he made the best of it by living to some purpose. He published a hundred and forty-five distinct works in the intervals of his pains. He was one of the busiest of men, as, indeed, Christian invalids have commonly been. Of all men in the world, he was the one who was moved to write "The Saint's Rest." And so understandingly did he write of it, that to a million of readers since his day, it has seemed as if he must have had a foretaste of the heavenly blessedness himself. It is supposed that nearly half a million of copies of that book have been published, and the popular verdict upon it has everywhere been the same. It is one of the few books so profoundly written from the heart that their insight into truth borders on inspiration. Suffering men are the happiest men. Women on beds of anguish sing most honestly our hymns of Christian triumph. Men in prisons know most of Christian liberty. People who have least of this world have most luminous foresight of Heaven. Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, yet possessing all things; such, ideally, is the privilege of holy living. St. Paul appears to have been another of the great Christian contradictions. As we read his autobiography, it does seem to lend reason to the conundrum, "Is Life Worth Living?" He is a man of bold nerve who would select St. Paul's life as the model of his own. On the human scale of measurement, the apostle cannot be pronounced a happy man. He was not hilarious in his temperament. He did not sing comic songs. Men who do, cannot make much of him. The world would not call his life a fortunate one. It went hard with him at the best. What a history of ill-luck he gives us! Flogged like a slave in the market-place five times, and three times in court; shipwrecked three times; pelted with stones by vagabonds till he was left for dead; in prison so many times that he does not count them; hungry, cold, thirsty, naked, robbed, hunted by murderers, with nothing but a wicker basket between him and death; betrayed by friends whom he trusted and prayed for; in the city, in the country, in the wilderness, on the sea, everywhere in the wide world, beset by dangers; always guiltless, yet always an outlaw; he was saved at last from being clothed with pitch and used as a candle to light the streets of Rome, by having his head cut off. And as if the cruelty of man were not enough, he must find the devil on his track, and must put to hazard body and soul in fight with invisible foes more ferocious than the beasts of Ephesus. Yet, of all men in the world, this man is the one to say, "I will glory in my infirmities." This hunted and outlawed man is the man to tell us what a blessed thing life is, how grandly worth living, what a good fight it is, full of what magnificent chances, what a precious thing suffering is, and what a lordly coronation glorifies it at the end. This is the man who goes to his grave exultingly, and celebrates a victory over death. He really seems to have been one of the happiest of men, yet one of the most illustrious of sufferers. Where in all history shall we find his peer—his peer in sorrow, his peer in joy? What is the secret of it all? Christian history is full of such contradictions. Unwritten biography abounds with them. Men and women are now living such lives in secret. The world does not know them, and never will while time lasts. But they are a great multitude whom no man can number. Not that there are many Baxters, or a crowd of St. Pauls. But there is an innumerable host of plain men and women, and children even, whose lives do approximate, and honestly claim rank with, illustrious saints. Martyrs, as a class, have been the most cheerful of men. This is the Christian theory of holy living, that such life is a victory, not a conflict only; and least of all is it a losing fight. Let us not overlook here the fact that God does not sit aloft in remote and inaccessible seclusion from our human trials. They are more real to God than they are to us. No being in the universe feels the woes of human life so deeply as he feels them. This is the working of infinite sympathies in the heart of a loving Creator. "In all their affliction he was afflicted." Yet over and above the billows of human sorrow, the blessedness of God remains intact. In those very sorrows he finds cause of joy, because they are the instruments of his own benevolence. They have never taken him by surprise. He has made no mistakes in them; nor has he ever permitted one of them which he could not use to more loving purpose than he could use ease and comfort and indulgence in its place. He is blessed, therefore, not only in spite of them, but in them. And the principle of Christian living is, that what God enjoys we can enjoy. For example, the works of God, the word of God, the plans of God in redemption, the joy of God in Christ, his delight in his own love to man, his enjoyment of his own perfections, his outgoings of benevolence to the universe, his complacency in the reciprocated love of angels and of saints, his beneficent vigilance over human sorrows, his blessed foresight of their fruits in the holiness and happiness of men—all these objective tributaries to the infinite ocean of felicity which fills the heart of God, are equally fitted to be tributaries to ours. Why not? Are we not made in God's image? Are we not called to be like him in our better nature? Why not like him, then, in our resources of joy? These were the resources of the happiness of Christ. This was the nature of the joy set before him. "I have meat to eat that ye know not of." "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me." The true value of any human life consists in just this—identifying it with the life of God. In such supreme alliance, no man can be unhappy. And no man can be happy without it. Life without God is not worth living. There is such a thing as living in sympathy with God. It is the most real thing there is in any man's life. Christ has come to us to make it a reality. The fruit of it is to make us participants of the life which God lives. His will becomes our will, his plans ours, his joy ours. We become one with him, as Christ was and is. Whether such a life is worth living admits of but one answer.—Austin Phelps, D. D., in S. S. Times.