The Sadness of a King; Where is Peace and Joy?

1910

By Dr. Robert Hugh Morris

"The Sadness of a King" was the sermon theme of the Rev. Robert Hugh Morris, pastor of the First Presbyterian church of Evanston. Dr. Morris spoke feelingly of the causes and the cure of sadness, and said that many men and women bear about with them the burden of a restless and disquieted spirit because they have not found the way to peace through Christ.

Dr. Morris took as his texts:

"The spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him." — 1 Samuel 16:14
"My tears have been my meat day and night." — Psalms 42:3
"Why art thou cast down, O my soul, and why are thou disquieted within me?" — Psalms 42:5.

"The noble spirit of King David is disquieted within him," said Dr. Morris. "The weakening spirit of Saul is troubled. As the world calls goodness and badness, we may say here is a bad king and here is a good king, and both these kings are unhappy. Then here is the cry of Jesus: 'My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.' Here is also the saying of Paul: 'I am the chief of sinners,' and his pathetic cry, 'Who shall deliver me from this bondage of death?'

"We are going to think this morning of sadness as we find it manifested in human life. We shall endeavor to think of it, not that we may be sadder, but in order that we may cured of our sadness. But let us frankly admit that sadness as such is not sinful, and that the whole sum and substance of religion is by no manner of means joyousness. This is said because we hear so much about the duty of being joyful and so much about the wickedness of being sorrowful.

"We seem to live in an optimistic age. Now optimism, if by that term we mean a cheerful view of life, is essentially Christian; but optimism, if by that term we mean that everything is all right just as it is, and could not be any better, is essentially pagan. This contrast, in terms is made after very careful consideration of the meaning of those terms.

Christian Optimism Defined

"A bright and hopeful outlook upon life is Christian because Christ taught us that God is our father and that He is taking care of His children. He said, you know, that God fed the sparrows and the ravens and clothed the lily and sent rain on the just and the unjust.

"But the other kind of optimism is pagan, because it means, in its ultimate analysis, essentially this, 'Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.'

"If serious minded hearers are disposed to question the truth of such a view, let him read from pages of ancient history the stories of orgies performed in Baal worship; of Saturnalia, Bacchic revels, feasts of Nero or celebrations in honor of Apollo in the Grove of Daphne at Antioch. In all these pagan celebrations you find the much lauded picnic view of life as its theory works out in practice.

What is the Purpose of Life?

"Now let's understand each other just here. If you believe that you were created and put into this world to have a good time you will not respond to a single thing in my sermon. But if you believe 'the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever,' you are in a position to follow and to accept what he said.

"It cannot be urged that there any virtue in being sad, or any sin in being happy and joyous. It all depends on why you are sad and why you are happy, and what is the motive that underlies your joy.

Laughter Not Sin

"The world no longer permits itself to he imposed upon with the idea that anything that gives pleasure is necessarily wrong, and anything that gives pain is ipso facto right or virtuous. To be concrete, it is no longer considered sin, even by the later day disciples of John Wesley for Christians to wear olden ornaments, for women to adorn themselves with beautiful garments and becoming bonnets. It is only when these things go to such an extreme that they become the ruling motive of life that we consider them wrongful or sinful.

"Christians for the most part no longer draw an imaginary line in front of every temple of Thespis and say, 'Hitherto shall thou come no further.' It is only when the representation on the stage within this temple is immoral or degrading, or inane and calculated to waste valuable time, that it becomes a sin in our eyes to enter the doors of those temples.

"It certainly is not considered a sin for us to laugh. Grouchy as was Thomas Carlyle, we none the less find him paraphrasing Shakespeare by saying: 'The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.' Neither will the modern Christian permit some mournful friar, who digs his own grave in the solemn hour of midnight, singing doleful songs the while, to foist upon him the false doctrine that God is pleased when we are sorrowful.

"Nor will the flagellating brothers, with bare, bleeding shoulders, whipping themselves from pillar to post, ever make us believe any more that we honor God by dishonoring this frame which His Book has called His temple. Nevertheless, friends, there is essentially a great truth underlying this world of error, and that truth, it seems to me, may be summed up in this statement: The life of man, the soul of man, the immortal destiny of man, are too vast, too complicated too Godlike, to be made absolutely happy by the things that can be seen and handled and heard and tasted in this present world. 'Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness. It is because there is an infinite in him which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the finite.'

"Of course, our subject really is 'the causes and the cure of sadness.' We shall speak very briefly of certain causes and indicate with similar brevity the cure of each kind.

Melancholia is a Disease

"The materialistic view. We may as well admit a large element of truth in the view of the materialist. If we change the word sadness to melancholy we have a clearer idea of what is meant here, for melancholia is a disease. No demonstration is needed, for your own experience has proven to you that, all other things being equal, life looks fairer when the sun shines than it does when the clouds lower.

"You and I are less prone to propound to ourselves and others the dialectical donkey's question, 'Is life worth living?' when all the functions of our body work well, when digestion is perfect and altogether we are free from the hamperings of headache or the racking of rheumatism.

"The cure for such melancholy, and a goodly part if it is undoubtedly due to these physical causes, is likewise physical. The disease being physical, certainly the remedy must touch the physical nature. The remedy required for a large part of our melancholy is a little more fresh air, a little more exercise, a little more Fletcherizing, and a little less highly seasoned food.

"But there is a kind of sadness found amongst us which is not due to such physical causes as we have just mentioned, but which is due rather to a feeling of uselessness, a feeling of failure. One may have set for himself the accomplishment of a certain end in life and failing of that
accomplishment, he may be thrown into a heavier or lighter state of sadness by feeling that he has failed.

"There would be manifold manifestations of this if we could read the heart lives of many of our most serious minded friends all about us in this present day. The trouble seems to be that we have set some impossible or some incorrect standard and have been unable to measure up to it, or else to keep up to it.

Walking Ice Plants Not Popular

"I know a clergyman who occasionally preaches very able, very helpful sermons, but on the principle that the clock cannot strike 12 every time it strikes, this clergyman does not preach his best in every sermon. If you meet him on Monday after he has delivered one of the sermons which he considers a failure you will feel, when you have gotten within fifty feet of him, that you are approaching an ice plant and an indigo factory combined into one.

"You find him in that state of mind spoken of by the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, who bemoaned that 'I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that, this also was a striving after wind. I said of laughter, it is mad, and of mirth, what doeth it, and I hated all my labor wherein I labored under the sun, Vanitas vaniotumomnia est vanitas."

"What is said of sermons is true of other lines of endeavor. You have not jarred the good old world out of her track, or changed her axis, or delayed her in her course, but the few mistakes you have made this past week, and so without completely underrating your labor you may none the less improve your life's happiness by considering it as a bit less necessary to the destiny of the world.

External Causes Produce Sadness

"Sadness is sometimes the result of a state of affairs that is objective, by which we mean, it is occasioned, it is brought about, by events external to our own minds and hearts, even absolutely beyond our control. The coming of sorrow through sickness and absence and death may be classed under this head. Shall I be blamed if, when my friend has gone from me, I am unable to show the world as smiling a face as I showed when that face was reflecting the sunlit life of him who walked at my side?

"For this specie of sadness, which is largely the result of external conditions, over which the many may in time come to have control, but which it has not yet conquered, one cannot so easily state a cure. Of course, it is even true that there are conditions which, as the world now goes, seem to be irremediable, at least for this life. Such perhaps were in the mind of the poet Edwin Markham when he spoke of 'immedicable woes.'

Infinite in Man Years for Eternity

"There is a specie of sadness, perhaps close akin of this last, but which also goes beyond it, and which cannot be explained in any one of the three preceding ways. It is due to man's infinite nature. Nothing absolutely satisfies him, because he is essentially unsatisfiable.

"The mere animal takes his fill of material comforts and seems to rest in perfect satisfaction, but with a man it is different.

"A great pathetic spirit was Lincoln, around whose very laughter there glitters a tear, whose smile is overspread with a nameless sadness, as some morning in May when sunshine and shower are strangely blended.

"Long ago St. Augustine felt this sorrow, this sadness, this melancholy of the orphan spirit of man, and long ago St. Augustine correctly stated the meaning: 'Thou, O God,' he says in his Confessions, 'Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless within us until they rest in Thee.'

"The singer of Israel a long while before Augustine had said. 'Thou hast made man a little lower than God,' and because he is made thus infinite, finite things will never quite satisfy. And as the old Bishop of Hippo has suggested, the cure for this specie of melancholy is to rest in God.

"O heart of man, restless like the surging sea which cannot be still; O heart of man, hungry like the hungry sea which cannot be satisfied, there is one stillness and one satisfaction for thee, and only one. It is that peace and that satisfaction which cometh only when thou hast quaffed the divine elixir, breathed the ambrosial air and feasted upon the heavenly fruits which all are in the presence of thy Creator and thy Father, the one all-giving and all-satisfying."

—Waterloo Reporter, Waterloo, Iowa, July 2, 1910, p. 2.