Activity Betokens Life

14

There may be the appearance of life, but certainly not its presence, where there is no activity; as they rightly concluded, who, sailing in Arctic seas, fell in with a ship for long years imprisoned in the ice, and looked in its cabin on a strange, appalling, wierd-like scene.

Fifty years had come and gone since living voice or step had sounded there, yet there were all the crew.

They lay in couches on the floor, each attired in the dress and presenting the form and flesh of life; while their captain sat by the cabin table, pen in hand, and the log spread out before him.

The spectators of so strange a sight, with mingled feelings of doubt and terror, shouted; but no response came back. Nor crew nor captain stirred.

All were dead, and had been corpses for half a century—the frosts that killed preserving them. Life-like as he looked who bent over the table with a pen in his fingers and paper before him, in which, the last survivor, he had recorded their sufferings, he also was dead; as they knew on seeing him sit unmoved by their shouts; his eyes retaining their glassy stare, and his form its fixed and frozen posture.

The activity that thus marks all other kinds of life, is characteristic of the Christian’s. Sometimes distinguished by heroic daring, and prodigal of noble deeds, at all times, it is a life of doing.—GUTHRIE.

You will get out of this world just so much as, under God, you earn by your own hand and brain. Horatius was told that he might have so much land as he could plow around in one day with a yoke of oxen, and

I have noticed that men get nothing in this world, that is worth possessing, of a financial, moral, or spiritual nature, save as they get it by their own hard work.

It is just so much as, from the morning to the evening of your life, you can plow around by your own continuous and hard-sweating activity.” —TALMAGE.