Glass once broken may be restored, not so man.
Glass though broken does not decay, but man’s flesh becomes corrupt.
Having thus amused and rested his hearers, Deza begins another earnest appeal to them; he explains that the soul of man does not descend to the grave, and he solves a difficulty in the text, Genesis iii. 19, Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Having done this, it is proper that the congregation should be given a little breathing-time, and so the preacher takes the sentence, Dust thou art, and plays with it, by giving a description of dust agitated by the wind. Oh, into what fantastic shapes does the wind whirl the dust! how the dust-cloud runs along, rushes forward madly, stops and spins awhile, and tosses itself up, up, till it seems verily to fly; it ascends higher and higher, it is carried above the tree-tops, it will reach the clouds of Heaven. Stay!—the wind drops. Where is the dust? It falls, it obscures the landscape, it is scattered every where, it parches the tongue, it blinds the eyes, it clogs the throat; and that which just now dulled the air and obscured the sun, has returned to itself again; dust it was, and nothing more, and unto dust has it returned.
Is not this a picture of man? asks the preacher; man, poor dust carried up and hurried forward by the winds of his vain fancies? Ambition puffs him up on high, only to fling him to earth again; passion drives him forward, and then drops him a helpless atom to his native soil.
Look how high those giddy particles are flung—Thou takest away their breath, they die, and are turned again to their dust.
Yes, toss yourselves in pride, rush on in the storm of passion, eddy up in the struggle of life, spin in the giddiness of pleasure, penetrate every where in the eagerness of curiosity—Thou takest away their breath, they die, and are turned again to their dust.
Deza then examines the words of Solomon, There is a time to be born and a time to die, and he asks why the King did not say there is a time to live. Having answered this question to his own satisfaction, by showing that Solomon spoke of definite moments of time, but that life was not a point of time, but a fleeting succession of moments, he enters on the subject of the shortness of time, and quotes Wisdom v. 10. The life of man, says Solomon, is as a ship that passeth over the waves of the water, and leaves no trace—no trace but the foam-bubbles; and those foam-bubbles are like the life of man, now appearing in the wake of the vessel, and then brushed away by the next wave,—and this wave is like the life of man, sweeping on resistlessly to the rock on which it will be shivered with a roar—a roar like the life of man, loud and fierce for the moment, and then carried off on the wind—the wind like the life of man sinking into a lull and lost.
And so throughout the sermon.
I will now give an analysis of one of Maximilian Deza’s most characteristic and striking discourses, with a translation of a portion of it as a specimen of his style of oratory.