The Project Gutenberg EBook of Strong Souls, by Charles Beard

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Title: Strong Souls
A Sermon

Author: Charles Beard

Release Date: January 29, 2007 [EBook #20478]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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STRONG SOULS:

A SERMON,

PREACHED IN

RENSHAW STREET CHAPEL, LIVERPOOL,

ON

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1882.

BY

CHARLES BEARD, B.A.

PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. GREEN AND SON,
178, STRAND.

In Memory of

ELIZABETH RATHBONE,

OF GREENBANK,

AGED 92.

STRONG SOULS.

JOHN x. 10 p. (Revised Version):

"I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly."

Life is a gift of very unequal distribution. I am not speaking merely of
length of life, though that is an important element in the case: there
may be sad and quiet years which do not count: we have known existences
which crept on in one dull round, from petty pleasure to petty pleasure,
from monotonous occupation to monotonous occupation, never roused to
storm by any noble passion, never thrilled by an electric touch of
sympathy. Some lives are complete within narrow limits: in the few
years which are all they have, they ripen into perfect sweetness, or
expend themselves in such a flash of heroism, as would make subsequent
days, were they given, mean and poor by contrast. What shall we say of
that nameless engine-driver in America, who last week, measuring his own
life against six hundred more, rushed through the flames and saved them?
Dead of his glorious wounds, who would dare to pity him, or to think his
end untimely? Life may be measured by its breadth as well as by its
length: by the number of its intellectual points of contact with
humanity, by the width of its sympathies, the largeness of its hopes.
Still more, there is a quality of intensity in which lives differ: some
live more in a week than others in a year: it is not that they are
consuming themselves under stress of circumstance or in agony of
passion, but that their fibre is stronger