---
title: 'Talmage on the Christian Way of Measuring Life'
type: post
author: 'R. Andrew Myers'
date: 2022-12-28
url: https://confessional.org/blog/2022-talmage-on-the-christian-way-of-measuring-life
---

# Talmage on the Christian Way of Measuring Life

“I remark again: there are many — and I wish there were more — who are estimating life by the good they can do.

John Bradford said he counted that day nothing at all in which he had not, by pen or tongue, done some good. There have been men who have given their whole life in the right direction, concentrating all their wit and ingenuity and mental acumen and physical force and enthusiasm for Christ. They felt in the thrill of every nerve, in the motion of every muscle, in every throb of their heart, in every respiration of their lungs, the magnificent truth: ‘No man liveth unto himself.’ They went, through cold and through heat, foot-blistered, cheek-smitten, back-scourged, tempest-lasht, to do their whole duty. That is the way they measured life — by the amount of good they could do.

Do you want to know how old Luther was; how old Richard Baxter was; how old Philip Doddridge was? Why, you can not calculate the length of their lives by any human arithmetic. Add to their lives ten thousand times ten thousand years, and you have not exprest it — what they have lived or will live. Oh, what a standard that is to measure a man’s life by? There are those in this house who think they have only lived thirty years. They will have lived a thousand — they have lived a thousand. There are those who think they are eighty years of age. They have not even entered upon their infancy, for one must become a babe in Christ to begin at all.

This is a good day in which to begin a new style of measurement. ‘How old art thou?’ You see the Christian way of measuring life and the worldly way of measuring it. I leave it to you to say which is the wisest and best way.” — [Thomas De Witt Talmage](/authors/thomas-de-witt-talmage), *Standards For the Measurement of Life: A New Year’s Sermon* (1899)