OR, How to Live. ILLUSTRATED IN THE BIOGRAPHIES OF BUNYAN, TERSTEEGEN, MONTGOMERY, BY THE REV. JOHN BAILLIE, AUTHOR OF "MEMOIRS OF HEWITSON," "ADELAIDE NEWTON," ETC. "He hungereth to feed on facts." NEW YORK: ROBERT CARTER & BROTHERS. 1860. BRI700 B3 STEREOTYPED BY THOMAS B. SMITH, 82 & 84 Beekman-street. 88339 S. B. THOMSON, BINDER, 82 & 84 Beekman-st. PRINTED BY E. O. JENKINS 26 Frankfort-st. PREFACE. B3 HOW TO LIVE-how to dispose worthily of that one life which is all wherewith each of us has to face Eternity-is confessedly the gravest problem which a sane man can be called to solve. A lump of salt is dissolved in a basin of water; the salt is gone, but its savor has reached the remotest atom in the basin. Our ONE LIFE is like that lump of salt gradually it is melting away, and in a brief season it will be gone; but its savor will reach the remotest hour in the Eternity to come. How is this ONE LIFE to be lived? Where is the POWER which shall carry me victoriously through its struggle? It will not do to take me to the monk's pillar, or to the hermit's cell-you must show me how to go up to life's battle, and to go through it, erect and unharmed. It was a fable of the ancients, that the god who presided over each river had his residence in a cavern at its source. Is not the fable an intense reality in each man's course? Is not the presiding power of each man's life at its source? It is of no use to deliver homilies about the beauty of virtue or of self-sacrifice, or about the vanity of this passing scene; men go from such homilies, complacently as before, to their worldliness or to their sins. There is one power, and only one, which can energize the heart. And it is the purpose of this book to call up certain scenes where that power put forth its strength. "I want,” said a young corporal one day to Hedley Vicars, "to have more of Jesus in this life." CHRIST CRUCIFIED is not a mere fund in reserve-a kind of "extreme unction"-to teach men how to die; it is the lever which is to move the life. The savage, in certain regions, is said to have a belief that the spirit of every enemy he slays passes into his own bosom-giving to his heart new courage, and to his arm new power; and therefore his one watchword is "Slay, slay, slay !" Is it not true that each new victory we gain over sin, is a new accession of moral power? To retire from life's conflicts, is only to keep the passion in abeyance; to meet the temptation and to overcome, is that by which alone we "live." The Christian athletes here sketched are marked |