STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. I2l 



ARTHUR BRYANT. 

 BY J. B. TURNER. 



Said the Hebrew of old, " I would not live always." In a later 

 age the Greek responded, '' Call no man happy till he is dead.'' and the 

 number of persons, sound in mind. l)ut •' tired of life,"' I have ))er- 

 sonally seen and read of within a few years has surprised me. But 

 many 'men regard death as an unfeeling, if not needless Divine 

 a])p(untment. Suppose, then, that Death, '' the king of terrors and 

 of all our evils." as we call it. were abolished, what then? What 

 would inevitably follow? 



It can be, and has been, mathematically demonstrated, that if a 

 single pair of human beings had been put upon the earth at the 

 time of our reputed Adam and Eve, with* no attending death, 

 doiibling in every ordinary generation till this time, and allowing to 

 each the space for a medium man, we should now have upon the 

 earth a compact cylinder of })opulation. covering half the globe, as 

 thick as they could stand; and standing on each others heads^ in a 

 full line, reaching beyond the sun; while many of the insects and 

 fish, and some of the birds and animals (none of ir/ioin cirr sinned) 

 would form a like cylinder reaching beyond the fixed stars. This, 

 incredil)le as it may seem, is only the old game of shoeing the horse 

 for a penny a nail, doubled at every nail, which every tolerable school 

 boy can verify for himself; and the farther back we remove dates the 

 more astounding the case must liecome. 



Such results would make population quite too dense for our com- 

 fort, and lead us all to say, '' I would not live always," and to thank 

 our Father ix the Heavens that He (and not we and our teachers) 

 is at the head of the universe of being; and that He has vouchsafed 

 to give us LABOR and toil, as our Ijest earthly discipline here, and in 

 his own wise and good time, through death, the crowning gift of all, 

 to release and relieve us of evils sure to come, and pass us onward 

 and n]nvard to higher realms of light and life. 



In every phil(js()})liical as well as christian view of the case, we 

 may all times well exclaim, "oh death, whei'e is thy sting; oh grave, 

 where is thy victory," and thank God for the inestimable blessings 

 of Idhor and deafji. and our final victory over each of them. 



Our friend Bryant, here yesterday, gone to-day; a full-grown 

 flower plucked from our garden — only its perfume left; a chrysalis 

 winged for the skies, instead of i)iled into an infinite hea]) of strug- 

 gling death, miscalled life, covering all the earth and darkeJiing all 

 the sun. It was his privilege and is his glory, that he lived and 

 thought and labored and toiled ;ind suffered among us — and died; 

 our loss indeed, but his unspeakable gain. — the highest privilege, the 

 best use, destiny and end that the allwise and infinite Father of all 

 can ever accord to any of his children on the earth; and I have rea- 

 son to believe that our departed friend so regarded it. 



