======================================================================== 500 SELECTED SERMONS BY T. DE WITT TALMAGE - VOLUME 1 by T. De Witt Talmage ======================================================================== The first volume of a curated collection of over 500 sermons by the renowned 19th-century Presbyterian preacher T. De Witt Talmage, selected from the thousands he delivered across multiple continents. Known for his vivid imagery, dramatic oratory, and broad popular appeal, Talmage's sermons represent a distinctive era of American pulpit eloquence. Chapters: 99 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TABLE OF CONTENTS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. 000.2. Introduction 2. 000.3. Preface 3. 001. Genesis 4. 002. The Pomology of the Bible; or, God Among the Orchards 5. 003. The Ichthyology of the Bible; or, God Among the Fishes 6. 004. One Week's Work 7. 005. The Number Seven 8. 006. Marriage 9. 007. The First Woman 10. 008. Organ Dedication 11. 009. The Fatal Line 12. 010. A Broad Gospel 13. 011. Come 14. 012. The Shut-In 15. 013. Hunting for Souls 16. 014. Which Church? 17. 015. Midnight Exploration 18. 016. A Fearful Conflagration 19. 017. Hagar in the Wilderness 20. 018. Isaac Rescued 21. 019. Machpelah: Or. Easter Thoughts 22. 020. Duties of Husbands to Wives 23. 021. Expansion 24. 022. Struggle and Victory 25. 023. The American Sheaf 26. 024. Next to the Throne 27. 025. A Bloody Monster 28. 026. Life Insurance a Duty 29. 027. Corn-Crib of Egypt 30. 028. The Lad's Life 31. 029. The Old Folks' Visit 32. 030. A Delicate Question 33. 031. Return From the Chase 34. 032. Exodus 35. 033. Sisters and Brothers 36. 034. The Sheik's Daughter 37. 035. The Plague of Corrupt Literature 38. 036. The Finger of God 39. 037. The Plague of Narcotics 40. 038. Onward 41. 039. Moral Character of Candidates 42. 040. Plagiarism 43. 041. The Conchology of the Bible; or, God Among the Shells 44. 042. Abolition of Sunday 45. 043. The Golden Calf 46. 044. The Ballot-Box 47. 045. The Gospel Looking-Glass 48. 046. Leviticus 49. 047. An Obnoxious Diet 50. 048. Sprinkled and Cleansed 51. 049. Numbers 52. 050. Among the Bedouins 53. 051. Deuteronomy 54. 052. The Giant's Bedstead 55. 053. Half a Planet 56. 054. The Hornet's Mission 57. 055. The Christ-Land 58. 056. Spiritualism an Imposture 59. 057. Martyrdom at Lucknow 60. 058. Dominion of Fashion 61. 059. The Chronology of the Bible; or, God Among the Centuries 62. 060. The Drowned Lads 63. 061. Joshua 64. 062. Triumph All the Way 65. 063. The Scarlet Rope 66. 064. The Jordanic Passage 67. 065. Corn in Place of Manna 68. 066. The Uses of Stratagem 69. 067. A Wedding Present 70. 068. The Old Homestead 71. 069. Judges 72. 070. A Summer-House Tragedy 73. 071. Shamgar's Ox-Goad 74. 072. Where's Mother? 75. 073. The Broken Pitchers 76. 074. Stormed and Taken 77. 075. Broken Promises of Marriage 78. 076. Massacre of the Innocents 79. 077. Concerning Bigots 80. 078. Angelology 81. 079. Brawn and Muscle 82. 080. The Choice of a Wife 83. 081. The Shears of Delilah 84. 082. Amusements 85. 083. Mightier Dead Than Alive 86. 084. Ruth 87. 085. The Choice of a Husband 88. 086. Orpha's Retreat 89. 087. The Beautiful Gleaner 90. 088. Employers and Employees 91. 089. A Brooding God 92. 090. 1 Samuel 93. 091. The Christian Mother 94. 092. Parental Mistakes 95. 093. The Stolen Grindstones 96. 094. Rocks of Trouble 97. 095. Forbidden Honey 98. 096. Heredity 99. 097. Harp and Javelin ======================================================================== CHAPTER 1: 000.2. INTRODUCTION ======================================================================== Introduction By Clarence E. Macartney When I was a senior at the University of Wisconsin, I heard Talmage lecture at the Monona Lake Chautauqua. How clearly I can see him now after the lapse of all these years! He stood well back from the edge of the platform, above the medium height, well-proportioned, a large powerful frame, frock coat with black string tie tucked under a lie-down collar, his hair gray and his face broad, human, and kindly. He commenced speaking with his eyes closed. The voice, although not melodious like Bryan’s, was powerful, arresting, and stirring. He began with a description of a man riding in a buckboard over the Illinois prairies in the springtime when the flowers were blooming. It was a vivid picture of the flowers of the field sweeping the bellies of the horses as the buckboard was driven across the plains. This went on for a minute or two. Then, opening his eyes, he leaped forward to the front of the platform, and with a mighty voice pronounced a sentence which I have not forgotten. There was something about the man that at once appealed to you. He had the air of friendliness, and also of complete command of the situation, as if there were no doubt at all that he would carry his audience with him, which, of course, he did. Many of those who formed their conceptions of Dr. Talmage from the unfriendly caricatures and criticisms in the newspapers had conceived an intense dislike for him; but that dislike generally disappeared when they saw the man and heard him speak. It was so with the renowned actor Joseph Jefferson. Jefferson and Talmage became intimate one winter during a stay in Florida. Jefferson recalled the famous sermon of Talmage against the theater, preached in the tabernacle at Brooklyn, and how he and other actors had gone to hear the sermon. “When I entered that church to hear your sermon, Doctor,” said Jefferson, “I hated you. When I left the church I loved you.” Talmage was a unique and remarkable man. As his son expressed it in his memorial sermon for his father, no matter what it was that he did, he was sure to do it differently from anyone else. Talmage himself said: “Each life is different from every other life. God never repeats himself and he never intended two men to be alike.” Certainly there was never another Talmage. T. DeWitt Talmage was born January 7, 1832, at Middlebrook, New Jersey, where his father kept a tollgate. He was the youngest of eleven children. Four of the sons became honored ministers of the gospel, one of them, John Van Nest, a distinguished missionary in China. His father and mother, like the parents of John the Baptist, were “both righteous before God” and came of a godly line. His grandparents on the Talmage side had been converted at one of Finney’s evangelistic meetings. Talmage said of his mother that when she led the family prayers she would often pray, “O Lord God, I ask not for my children wealth or honor; but I do ask that they all may be subjects of thy converting grace.” When Talmage was still a very young child his parents removed to a farm near Somerville, New Jersey. This farm, with the farmhouse, and the barn and the brook, and the watering trough, and the horses and the carriages, frequently appears in Talmage’s sermons. At nineteen years of age Talmage entered the University of the City of New York, where he studied law. He then went to the New Brunswick Seminary of the Dutch Reformed Church. At the seminary he evinced the same extraordinary, original, and somewhat sensational style of expression in preaching as characterized him in after life. One of his instructors said to him, after he had preached his first class sermon, “DeWitt, if you don’t change your style of thought and expression, you will never get a call to any church in Christendom as long as you live.” I once talked with a classmate of Dr. Talmage and asked him about his early impressions of the great preacher when he was a student in the seminary. His reply was, “Exactly the same in personality and style as he was in the days of his fame. His first sermon,” he said, “was on the text, Proverbs 18:24, ‘There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.’ In the sermon he described the scene in heaven when Christ set out on the mission of redemption. The astonished angels said to him, ‘Shall ten thousand of us weave our wings together to make a fit chariot for thee to ride upon in thy descent to that fallen world?’ This offer Christ rejected with a wave of his hand. The angels then exclaimed, ‘Shall we bring together all the clouds of heaven and make a fit throne for thee to sit upon?’ But this offer, too, Christ refused, saying, ‘No, I cannot go in such a way.’ And then he commanded them, ‘Take off these royal robes,’ and the angels reluctantly obeyed. And then he started away from them on his descent to earth without any of his royal insignia, alone, without a single attendant, and the angelic hosts, amazed, crowded out on heaven’s vast balcony to see him descend, and they gazed after him, they talked so loud together about his wonderful condescension and love for men that the shepherds of Bethlehem heard them.” Anyone who is familiar with the sermons of Talmage will at once recognize him in this first sermon. On July 26, 1856, Talmage was ordained and installed as pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church at Belleville, New Jersey, near Newark. He gave an amusing account of how on the first Sabbath he had his sermon at his side as he sat on one of the great horsehair sofas which were the pulpit style in that day. To his consternation the sermon slipped down through an opening in the back of the sofa, and while the congregation were singing the hymn before the sermon he had to get down on his hands and knees and recover the manuscript. On another occasion, when gas was being introduced for the first time into the church, he planned to read an introductory part of his sermon and then launch out upon the great sea of extemporaneousness. But as he drew near the end of the written part, he became terrified and prayed that the lights would fail. His prayer was answered and the gas lamps went out, leaving the room in darkness. He then said to the congregation, “It is impossible to proceed.” But when he got home he felt it to be humiliating that a man with a message from the Lord God Almighty should be dependent upon paper mills and gas meters. This made him resolve to strike out on a new line of preaching without notes. As an extemporary preacher he had few peers. In 1859, Talmage was called to a Dutch Reformed Church in Syracuse, New York. There he attracted some little attention, and at Hudson, New York, delivered his first lecture, for a fee of $50. In 1862 he became the pastor of the Second Reformed Church of Philadelphia. In this same year Phillips Brooks began his notable ministry in Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia. Nothing could have been more striking and, in a way, sensational to the Philadelphians than the pulpit style of Talmage. His preaching at once attracted great throngs. The period of the Civil War was a great age for the preacher. The times were stirring, the atmosphere was charged with electricity. A great period like that is stimulating to the intellect and imagination of the preacher. It is not strange, then, that when one calls the roll of America’s famous preachers, he discovers that so many of them, Theodore Parker, Henry Ward Beecher, Matthew Simpson, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, Phillips Brooks, and DeWitt Talmage, belong to that age. During this Philadelphia pastorate, the wife of Talmage was drowned when they were boating on the Schuylkill River. By 1869 the fame of Talmage had gone abroad. In that year he was called to churches in Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco, and the Central Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn. He accepted the call to the depleted and faction-torn church in Brooklyn, and was installed as pastor by the Presbytery of Brooklyn, March 22, 1869. In a short time the congregations were so large that the church was not able to accommodate them. A new church, which was called the Tabernacle, was hastily built. This was destroyed by fire December 22, 1872, the first of three tabernacles to suffer such a fate. Talmage, like Beecher, held that the conventional church architecture and the pulpit arrangement were a hindrance to the preacher. Like Beecher, he had no pulpit, but a long platform. He made full use of his long platform and roamed to and fro over it, preaching with every inch of his body. The people were all seated near him, in front, around him, and above him. There is no doubt that for a direct appeal to an audience this is the best arrangement. The second Tabernacle was destroyed by fire in 1889, and the third in 1894. At this time Talmage had the largest congregation of any preacher in the world. His unconventional manner and his sometimes extravagant statements made him the object of much ridicule and hostile attack. In 1879 he was accused before the Brooklyn Presbytery of falsehood and deceit, and of using improper methods of preaching which tended to bring religion into contempt. On all these charges he was aquitted. Talmage attributed much of his world-fame to the attacks that other preachers, and later, the newspapers, made upon him. Talmage created an early sensation in Brooklyn by his explorations into the night life of New York, accompanied by elders of his church and police officers. This gave him material for some of his most graphic descriptions. They remind one of another great pictorial preacher, Thomas Guthrie, of Edinburgh, and his moving descriptions of the submerged populace of Edinburgh. Like most great preachers, he preached to the heart. He made it the aim in his preaching always to help somebody. He said: “A preacher should start out with the idea of helping somebody. Everybody wants help except a fool.” One of the secrets of his success, undoubtedly, lay in the fact that he had a warm heart. There was a deep vein of sentiment in him. He would never allow the spot on the barn door at East Hampton, Long Island, where his deceased son, DeWitt, had carved his initials to be painted over or changed. He had unshaken faith in the Bible. “Science and revelation,” he said, “are the bass and soprano of the same tune.” Colonel Ingersoll, with his attacks on the Bible, Talmage likened to a grasshopper on a railway line when the express comes thundering along. The preacher kept himself in physical condition by walking every day of his life; every day except Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, regardless of the weather, he covered five miles. His physical energy was inexhaustible. He said Gladstone was the only man he ever met who walked fast enough for him. After the destruction of his third Tabernacle, Dr. Talmage became the Associate Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Washington. For his installation sermon he preached one of his most picturesque discourses, “All Heaven Is Looking On,” from Hebrews 12:1, “Compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” After four years as pastor in Washington, he resigned his charge in 1899 and until his death in 1902 gave himself to lecturing, preaching, and editorial work. He was taken ill on a trip to Mexico and returned to his home in Washington, where he died April 12, 1902. Talmage was a great traveler. He found it easy to meet distinguished men, and even the crowned heads of Europe. Through the Christian Herald, he loaded a ship with food supplies for the victims of a famine in Russia. A remarkable thing about the career of Talmage is that from the time he began to draw great crowds in Philadelphia until his death in 1902, almost forty years, his popularity never waned. One of the secrets of his appeal undoubtedly was his invincible optimism. This radiated not only in his written and spoken sermons, but in his personal appearance, his expressive and mobile and ever smiling mouth. When he commenced his ministry he was not strong. Now and then he would overhear people say, “Ah, he is not long for this world.” This made him resolve that never in meeting other people or in conversation with them would he say anything that was depressing. He was a great optimist. He believed that there was as great a number of people out of the Church as in it who followed the teachings of Christianity. It was in keeping with this invincible optimism that the last sermon that he wrote was a sermon on thanksgiving, Psalms 33:2 : “Sing unto him with the psaltery.” Although not a doctrinal preacher at all, Talmage was true to the great evangelical doctrines of Christianity, and all his sermons, while they do not set forth or analyze those doctrines, are radiant with their light. He was brought to a decision for Christ by an evangelist, Truman Osborne, who was visiting the Talmage home. Osborne asked Talmage’s father if all the children were Christians. His father told him that all were Christians but DeWitt. Then Osborne, looking into the fireplace, told the story of the Lost Sheep. It was this that brought Talmage into the fold. One of the most far-reaching features of Talmage’s ministry was his printed sermons. Looking one day at a pile of sermons that he had written and preached, he said to his wife, “God must have some other use for these sermons, and intend them for others than just those who heard me preach them.” This conviction led him to make the arrangements for the weekly publication of his sermons. A contributory cause also was the visit to Talmage of a young man, who afterward became eminent as a lawyer. He told Talmage that he was studying law in a distant city and that he must give up his studies unless he could be permitted to take down the sermons through his skill as a stenographer and arrange for their sale. At the time Talmage declined. But after some months had passed he began to reflect that it would be too bad if this brilliant young man was not able to get a legal education. He then allowed the young man to take down the sermons. Within three weeks from all over the United States requests began to come in for the sermons. They were published weekly by as many as three thousand, five hundred newspapers, and by this means Talmage spoke to a greater multitude than had any preacher of Christianity up to that time. Thousands of persons living today will remember the weekly sermons of Dr. Talmage as they appeared in the newspapers on Monday morning and in the Christian Herald, the weekly magazine of which he became the editor. His style was pictorial and, like most of the great preachers, his homiletic method was topical rather than textual or expository. Illustrations came naturally to him. He said: “It has always been the question with me how to get rid of illustrations. I naturally think in metaphor.” Dr. David Gregg, a contemporary in Brooklyn, thus describes his style: “He thinks in pictures and he who thinks in pictures thinks vividly. He paints with a large brush, with colors that burn and glow, and nations gather round his pictures and feel an uplift and an holy thrill.” Perhaps his sermon, “All Heaven Looking On” is as good an example as might be quoted of his vivid imaginative style. The thread of the atonement ran all through his preaching. Christ to him was central and the cross was central and cardinal. The future life and heaven were very real to him. Bidding good-by to an old friend who was on his deathbed, Talmage said, as if the man were going to leave for another city, “Give my love to my boy” (referring to his son DeWitt who had died years before). His emphasis on the grand particularities of the Christian faith was one of the secrets of his popularity with the masses of the people. Senator Beveridge, who heard him frequently, said: “The American people are tired of hearing learned and entertaining lectures delivered under the guise of sermons. They hunger and thirst for the preaching of the faith, unweakened by doubts, criticisms, or explanations, uncompromisingly delivered as Dr. Talmage gave it.” The desire to help and to save sounded in all his sermons. One of his famous themes on the text, “The people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits,” Daniel 11:32, was “The Three Greatest Things to Do—Save a Man, Save a Woman, Save a Child.” The contagious optimism and hopefulness of Dr. Talmage comes out in all his sermons. His last sermon, on “David’s Harp,” strikes this characteristic note of hope: “The greatest victories are yet to be gained; the grandest churches are yet to be built; the mightiest anthems are yet to be hoisted; the most beautiful Madonnas are yet to be painted; the most triumphant processions are yet to march. Oh, what a world this will be, when it rotates in its orbit a redeemed planet, girdled with spontaneous harvests, and enriched by orchards whose fruits are speckless and redundant; and the last pain will have vanished, and the last tear wept, and the last groan uttered, and there shall be nothing to hurt or destroy in all God’s holy mountain!” Most of the texts of Talmage’s sermons were taken from the Old Testament. Three hundred and five of his texts are Old Testament texts and one hundred and eighty-five New Testament texts. Very often the sermons deal with some Old Testament scene or history, and this gives the preacher an opportunity to introduce his sermon with a piece of description or historical narrative. A good example of this is his well-known sermon, “The King’s Wagons,” on the text from Genesis 45:27, “And when he saw the wagons.” The sermon commences with a description of the capital of the Pharaohs: “There were temples aflame with red sandstone, entered by gateways that were guarded by pillars bewildering with hieroglyphics, and wound with brazen serpents, and adorned with winged creatures, their eyes and beaks and pinions glittering with precious stones. There were marble columns blooming into white flower buds. There were stone pillars, the tops bursting into the shape of the lotus when in full bloom along the avenues lined with sphinx and fane and obelisk. There were princes who came in gorgeously upholstered palanquins, carried by servants in scarlet, or else drawn in vehicles with snow-white horses, golden-bitted, six abreast, dashing at full run. There were fountains from stone-wreathed vases climbing the ladder of the sun.” Thus the great word painter made the palace of Pharaoh, with all its splendor, live before his hearers. “Overdone! Too ornate!” the critic would say. But the fact is that the people enjoyed it. Talmage knew that there is a poet hidden away in the common man, and to that man he made his appeal. In these sermons on Old Testament themes, Talmage always is able to draw simple, straightforward, and helpful lessons. For instance, in this sermon on “when he saw the wagons,” his two chief points are: First, that the king’s wagons bring us corn and meat and many changes of garment. By this he means God’s provisions for our needs in this world. Secondly, the king’s wagons bring us good news. Here he strikes the high note of immortality and union with Christ and with our departed friends. Our faith brings us word that our Joseph, Jesus, is yet alive, and that he sends messages of pardon, of peace, of life, from heaven—corn for our hunger, raiment for our nakedness. “Glorious religion!” A religion made not out of death’s-heads and cross-bones and an undertaker’s screw driver, but one abounding with life and sympathy and gladness! “The king’s wagons will take us to see our lost friends.” Here the great preacher has a beautiful description of a stormy Sabbath at the New Jersey farmhouse where he was brought up. On those Sabbaths the children were left at home. He tells how at twelve o’clock they would go to the window to see if their father and mother were coming, and then at half past twelve, and then at one o’clock. “After a while Mary or Daniel or DeWitt would shout, ‘The wagon’s coming.’ And then we would see it winding out of the woods and over the brook, and through the lane and up in front of the old farmhouse, and then we would rush out, leaving the doors wide open, with many things to tell them, asking them many questions.” The clearness of Talmage’s homiletic style is brought out in his sermon, “The Laughter of the Bible.” The sermon has five divisions: First, Sarah’s laugh, or the laugh of skepticism. Secondly, David’s laugh, or that of spiritual exultation: “Then was our mouth filled with laughter.” Thirdly, the fool’s laugh, or that of sinful merriment, or “the crackling of thorns under a pot.” Fourthly, God’s laugh, or that of infinite condemnation: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.” And fifthly, heaven’s laugh, or the laugh of eternal triumph: “Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.” Another interesting example of Talmage’s use of Old Testament incidents is his sermon on the queen of Sheba, “Behold, the half was not told,” 1 Kings 10:7. The sermon opened with a description of Solomon’s palace. Here, as we have seen, Talmage was at his best when describing the glory and splendor of some Oriental capitol or palace. At the end of this description he says, “Why, my friends, in that place they trimmed their candles with snuffers of gold, and they cut their fruits with knives of gold, and they washed their faces in basins of gold, and they scooped out the ashes with shovels of gold, and they stirred the altar fires with tongs of gold. Gold reflected in the water! Gold flashing from the apparel! Gold blazing in the crown! Gold! Gold! Gold!” The lessons that he draws from the visit of the queen of Sheba, are, first, that it is a beautiful thing when social position and wealth surrender themselves to God; secondly, earnestness in the search of truth, how the queen of Sheba crossed mountains and deserts to get to Jerusalem; and, thirdly, that religion is a surprise to anyone that gets it. The more we have of it, the more surprised we are, and the greatest surprise of all will be heaven. Talmage always delighted to close his sermons in heaven. There is a true homiletic in that, for most of the great hymns close there, and there the Christian enters upon the final chapter of his life. On occasions, Talmage took one of the great doctrines and made a serious effort to expound it. An example of this is his sermon on “Vicarious Suffering”: “Without shedding of blood is no remission,” Hebrews 9:22. The sermon opens with an account of how John G. Whittier once asked Talmage after he had given out the hymn, “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” at morning devotions at a hotel in the White Mountains, “Do you really believe there is a literal application of the blood of Christ to the soul?” Talmage answered, “No,” and in the sermon’s introduction he properly explains how the blood stands for the life. It was Christ’s life which was given for our salvation. Then follow examples of vicarious suffering: the father toiling at his business to maintain the home; a mother watching for the sixth night with her sick child; another mother giving her life in prayer and thought and loving deeds for a prodigal son; then the soldiers of the Civil War giving life for the nation; then the doctors who gave their lives caring for the sick during a plague in the South; then William H. Seward, in 1846, sacrificing his popularity to defend an idiotic Negro who had slain a whole family. Thus he traces through all life the scarlet thread of vicarious substitution until he comes to the substitution of Christ on the cross. “Christ gathered up all the sins of those to be redeemed under his one arm and all their sorrows under his other arm and said: ‘I will atone for these under my right arm. Strike me with all thy glittering shafts, O eternal Justice! Roll over me with all thy scourges, ye ocean of sorrow!’ And the thunderbolt struck him from above, and the seas of trouble rolled up from beneath, hurricane after hurricane, and cyclone after cyclone, and then and there, in the presence of earth and heaven and hell, yea, all worlds witnessing, the price, the bitter price, the transcendent price, the awful price, the glorious price, the infinite price, the eternal price, was paid that sets us free.” The sermon comes to a conclusion with an account of the preacher’s visit to the battlefield of Waterloo, and Marshal Ney addressing his troops as he led them on the last charge. “But our great Waterloo was in Palestine. There came a day when all hell rode up, led by Apollyon, and the Captain of our salvation confronted them alone, the Rider on the White Horse of the Apocalypse going out against the Black Horse Cavalry of Death and the Battalions of the demoniacs and myrmidons of darkness. From twelve o’clock noon to three o’clock in the afternoon, the greatest battle of the universe went on. Eternal destinies were being decided. All the arrows of hell pierced our Chieftain, and the battle-axes struck him, until brow and cheek and shoulder and hand and foot were incarnadined with oozing life; but he fought on until he gave a final stroke with a sword from Jehovah’s buckler, and the Commander in Chief of hell and all his forces fell back in everlasting ruin, and the victory is ours! And on the mound that celebrates the triumph we plant this day two figures, not in bronze or ivory, or sculptured marble, but two figures of living light, the Lion of Judah’s tribe and the Lamb that was slain.” Talmage’s striking ability to make a Biblical scene real to his congregation is found in the introduction to his sermon, “The Wings of the Almighty”: “The Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust,” Ruth 2:12. Scene: An Oriental harvest field, grain standing, grain in swath, grain in sheaf; at the side of the field a white tent in which to take the nooning; jars of vinegar or sour wine to quench the thirst of the hot working people; the swarthy men striking their sickles into the rustling barley, others twisting the bands for the sheaves, putting one end of the band under the arm, and with the free arm and foot collecting the sheaf; sunburned women picking up the stray straws and bringing them to the binders; Boaz, a fine-looking Oriental, gray-bearded and bright-faced, the owner of the field, looking on and estimating the value of the grain, and calculating in so many ephahs to the acre. Happy is the preacher who can make a scene as real as that to his congregation! One of Talmage’s most characteristic sermons was the first sermon he preached as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Washington, D. C. The subject of this sermon was “All Heaven Is Looking On,” from the text Hebrews 12:1, “Seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” The theme and the text gave full scope for the play of Talmage’s imagination. He first describes a Roman amphitheater, with the cheering thousands, and the gladiators fighting with the beasts. The Christian fights in such an arena, surrounded by a throng of witnesses. The tigers and lions of sin come out of their dens and across the sand to attack him. One man’s lion is the passion for strong drink. Every man and every woman has his or her lion or tiger. But they do not fight alone. A cloud of witnesses look down upon them. He describes first the gallery of the angels, naming nearly all the great angels of the Bible, from the angel that swung his sword at the gate of Eden to the angel of the incarnation, and all the seraphim and cherubim of heaven. All these angels are the friends of man in his struggle with the beast. Then comes the gallery of the prophets and the apostles—Hosea, David, Jeremiah, Daniel, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, Moses, and Noah, all cheering the Christian on. Daniel cries out, “Thy God will deliver thee from the mouth of the lions.” David, “He will not suffer thy foot to be moved.” Isaiah, “Fear not: for I am with thee.” Paul, “Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Then comes the gallery of the martyrs: Latimer, and the Theban Legion, and Felicitas, who encouraged her children while they died for the faith. Then comes the gallery of the great Christians: Martin Luther, Lyman Beecher, John Calvin, George Whitefield, and Charles Wesley, and David Brainerd, and Adoniram Judson, Isaac Watts, who sings from his gallery to the Christian struggling in the arena: “Must I be carried to the skies On flowery beds of ease, While others fought to win the prize, And sailed through bloody seas?” Then comes the gallery of our departed friends: father, mother, children, all exhorting us to be “faithful unto death.” Talmage spoke to the average man and comforted and encouraged the average man. One of his rules for the pulpit was to remember that men need help and to try to help them. The best example of the sermon that helps is his famous, and perhaps favorite, sermon on the text 1 Samuel 30:24 : “As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff.” This was the last sermon preached by Dr. Talmage in an American church. The sermon opens with a graphic description of the drunken carousal of the Amalekites who had made a raid on Ziklag and had carried away the women and children, among them the wives of David. Then comes the account of David’s division of the spoil; how, in spite of the men who had gone down to the battle, those who had guarded the camp received an equal portion of the spoil. The preacher relates how the earl of Kintore once said to him, “When you get back to America I want you to preach a sermon on the discharge of ordinary duty in ordinary places.” It was this request which suggested to Talmage this famous and helpful sermon. He illustrates his sermon by describing the deference paid to a distinguished merchant at a fashionable watering place. When the confidential clerk gets his week off, no one notices him, whether he comes or goes, yet without such a clerk there could be no successful merchant. Men know the names of the presidents of the great railroads, but not the names of the faithful engineers, switchmen, flagmen, brakemen. When there has been an escape from disaster at sea, the passengers thank the captain; but the captain could have done nothing without the crew, without the engineer. Then comes a moving description of how a country family deny themselves to send a promising son to college. The hired help is discharged, sugar and butter are banished from the table. Then comes Commencement Day. The brother and son receives rounds of applause as he delivers the oration of the valedictorian; but hidden away in the back of the gallery are his old-fashioned father and mother and his sisters in their plain hats and faded shawls. They made his success possible. Then comes a passage of encouragement for the aged. The Lord will not turn off his old soldiers any more than the French did the soldiers who fought under Napoleon. The old ministers who preached on $400 a year will have their reward in heaven. The dominant note of Dr. Talmage’s preaching was that of hope and good cheer. The conclusion of the sermon strikes that note in an unforgettable way: “Cheer up, men and women of unappreciated services, you will get your reward, if not here, hereafter. When Charles Wesley comes up to Judgment and the thousands of souls which were wafted into glory through his songs shall be enumerated, he will take his throne. Then John Wesley will come up to Judgment, and after his name has been mentioned in connection with the salvation of the millions of souls brought to God through the Methodism which he founded, he will take his throne. But between the two thrones of Charles Wesley and John Wesley there will be a throne higher than either on which shall sit Susannah Wesley, who with maternal consecration, in Epworth Rectory, Lincolnshire, England, started these two souls on their triumphant mission of sermon and song through all ages. Oh, what a day that will be for many who rocked Christian cradles with weary feet, and out of a small income made the children comfortable for the winter! What a day that will be for those to whom the world gave the cold shoulder and called them nobodies and begrudged them the last recognition, and who, weary and worn and sick, fainted by the Brook Besor! Oh, that will be a mighty day, when the Son of David shall distribute the crowns, the thrones, the scepters, the dominions! Then you and I will appreciate as never before the height, the breadth, the columned, the domed magnificence of my text, ‘As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff’! Hallelujah! Amen!” This chapter is reprinted from: Clarence E. Macartney, Six Kings of the American Pulpit, The Westminster Press, 1942. (Public domain) ======================================================================== CHAPTER 2: 000.3. PREFACE ======================================================================== Preface In opening the front door of these twenty volumes—containing over five hundred sermons which were selected from thousands of sermons, first with reference to usefulness, and next with reference to variety—an explanatory statement is appropriate. Many of these sermons were preached during my pastorates in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Washington, and others in Europe and Asia and the Islands of the Sea. Chronological order has not been observed. Some of them were delivered thirty years apart, a fact that will account for certain dates and allusions. Some reference in almost every discourse will indicate the approximate time of its delivery. The publication of these volumes is partly induced by the kindness with which my previous books have been received by the press here and abroad. I am more indebted than any other man to the newspaper fraternity for the facilities they have given me for preaching the Gospel for over thirty years, without the exception of a single week, in almost every neighborhood of Christendom and in “the regions beyond;” and I gladly avail myself of every opportunity for thanking them and I thank them now. Of the more than fifty different books published under my name in this country and in other lands, the large majority were not authorized by me for publication, and were pirated. I knew nothing of them until I saw them advertised. I have personally corrected the proofs for these twenty volumes, and their publication is hereby sanctioned. If they shall alleviate the fatigue of some travelers on the rough road of this life, and help some to find the way to the sinless and tearless Capital, whose twelve gates stand wide open, my prayer will be answered. T. De. Witt Talmage Washington, D. C. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 3: 001. GENESIS ======================================================================== Genesis ======================================================================== CHAPTER 4: 002. THE POMOLOGY OF THE BIBLE; OR, GOD AMONG THE ORCHARDS ======================================================================== The Pomology of the Bible; or, God Among the Orchards Genesis 1:11 : “The fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind.” It is Wednesday morning in Paradise. The birds did not sing their opening piece, nor the fish take their first swim until the following Friday. The solar and lunar lights did not break through the thick, chaotic fog of the world’s manufactory until Thursday. Before that there was light, but it was electric light, or phosphorescent light, not the light of sun or moon. But the botanical and pomological productions came on Wednesday—first the flowers, and then the fruits. The veil of fog is lifted, and there stand the orchards. Watch the sudden maturing of the fruit! In our time, pear trees must have two years before they bear fruit, and peach trees three years, and apple trees five years; but here, instantly, a complete orchard springs into life, all the branches bearing fruit. The insectile forces, which have been doing their best to destroy the fruits for six thousand years, had not yet begun their invasion. The curculio had not yet stung the plum, nor the caterpillar hurt the apple, nor had the phylloxera plague, which has devastated the vineyards of America and France, assailed the grapes, nor the borer perforated the wood, nor the aphides ruined the cherry, nor the grub punctured the nectarine, nor the blight struck the pear. There stood the first orchard, with a perfection of rind, and an exquisiteness of color, and a lusciousness of taste, and an affluence of production which it may take thousands of years more of study of the science of fruits to reproduce. Why was the orchard created two days before the fish and birds, and three days before the cattle? Among other things, to impress the world with a lesson it is too stupid to learn—that fruit diet is healthier than meat diet, and that the former must precede the latter. The reason there are in the world so many of the imbruted and sensual is that they have not improved by the mighty, unnoticed fact that the orchards of Paradise preceded the herds, the aviaries, and fishponds. Oh, those fruit-bearing trees on the banks of the Euphrates, and the Gihon, and the Hiddekel! I wonder not that the ancient Romans, ignorant of our God, adored Pomona, the Goddess of Fruits, and that all the sylvan deities were said to worship her, and that groves were set apart as her temples. You have thanked God for bread a thousand times. Have you thanked him for the fruits which he made the first course of food in the menu of the world’s table—the acids of those fruits to keep the world’s table from being insipid, and their sweets to keep it from being too sour? At the autumnal season, how the orchards breathe and glow, the leaves removed, that the crimson, or pink, or saffron, or the yellow, or brown may the better appear, while the aromatics fill the air with invitation and reminiscence. As you pass through the orchard on these autumnal days and look up through the arms of the trees laden with fruit, you hear thumping on the ground that which is fully ripe, and, throwing your arms around the trunk, you give a shake that sends down a shower of gold and fire on all sides of you. Pile up in baskets and barrels and bins and on shelves and tables the divine supply. But these orchards have been under the assault of at least sixty centuries—the storm, the droughts, the winters, the insectivora. What must the first orchard have been? And yet it is the explorer’s evidence that on the site of that orchard there is not an apricot, or an apple, or an olive—nothing but desert and desolation. There is not enough to forage the explorer’s horse, much less to feed his own hunger. In other words, that first orchard is a lost orchard. How did the proprietor and proprietress of all that intercolumniation of fruitage let the rich splendor slip their possession? It was as now most of the orchards are lost, namely, by wanting more. Access they had to all the fig-trees, apricots, walnuts, almonds, apples—bushels on bushels—and were forbidden the use of only one tree in the orchard. Not satisfied with all but one, they reached for that, and lost the whole orchard. Go right down through the business marts of the great cities and find among the weighers and clerks and subordinates men who once commanded the commercial world. They had a whole orchard of successes, but they wanted just one more thing—one more house, or one more country seat, or one more store, or one more railroad, or one more million. They clutched for that and lost all they had gained. For one more tree they lost a whole orchard. There are business men all around us worried nearly to death. The doctor tells them they ought to stop. Insomnia or indigestion or aching at the base of the brain or ungovernable nerves tell them they ought to stop. They really have enough for themselves and their families. Talk with one of them about his overwork, and urge more prudence and longer rest, and he says: “Yes, you are right; after I have accomplished one more thing I have on my mind, I will hand over my business to my sons and go to Europe, and quit the kind of exhausting life I have been living for the last thirty years.” Some morning you open your paper, and, looking at the death column, you find he has suddenly departed this life. In trying to win just one more tree, he lost the whole orchard. Yonder is a man with many styles of innocent entertainment and amusement. He walks, he rides, he plays tenpins in private alleys, he has books on his table, pictures on his wall, and occasional outings, concerts, lectures, baseball tickets, and the innumerable delights of friendship. But he wants a key to the place of dissolute convocation. He wants association with some member of a high family as dissolute as he is affluent. He wants, instead of a quiet Sabbath, one of carousal. He wants the stimulus of strong drinks. He wants the fascinations of a profligate life. The one membership, the one bad habit, the one carousal robs him of all the possibilities and innocent enjoyments and noble inspirations of a lifetime. By one mouthful of forbidden fruit he loses a whole orchard of fruit unforbidden. You see what an expensive thing is sin. Sooner or later it is appalling bankruptcy. It costs a thousand times more than it is worth. As some of all kinds of quadrupeds and all kinds of winged creatures passed before our progenitor, that he might announce a name, from eagle to bat, and from lion to mole, so I suppose there were in Paradise specimens of every kind of fruit tree. And in that enormous orchard there was not only enough for the original family of two, but enough fruit fell ripe to the ground, and was never picked up, to supply whole towns and villages, if they had existed. But the infatuated couple turned away from all these other trees and faced this tree; and fruit of that they would have, though it cost them all Paradise. This story of Eden is rejected by some as an improbability, if not an impossibility; but nothing on earth is easier for me to believe than this Edenic story, for I have seen the same thing in this year of our Lord 1899. I could call them by name, if it were politic and righteous to do so, the men who have sacrificed a paradise on earth and a paradise in heaven for one sin. Their house went. Their library went. Their good name went. Their field of usefulness went. Their health went. Their immortal soul went. My friends, there is just one sin that will turn you out of paradise if you do not quit it. You know what it is, and God knows, and you had better drop the hand and arm lifted toward that bending bough before you pluck your own ruin. When Eve stood on her tiptoe and took in her right hand that one round peach, or apricot, or apple, Satan reached up and pulled down the round, beautiful world of our present residence. Overworked artist, overwrought merchant, ambitious politician, avaricious speculator, better take that warning from Adam’s orchard and stop before you are put out for that one thing alone. But I turn from Adam’s orchard to Solomon’s orchard. With his own hand he writes: “I made me gardens and orchards.” Not depending on the natural fall of rain, he irrigated those orchards. Pieces of the aqueduct that watered those gardens I have seen, and the reservoirs are as perfect as when, thousands of years ago, the mason’s trowel smoothed the mortar over their gray surfaces. No orchard of olden or modern time, probably, ever had its thirst so well slaked. The largest of these reservoirs is five hundred and eighty-two feet long, two hundred and seven feet wide, and fifty feet deep. These reservoirs Solomon refers to when he says: “I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees.” Solomon used to ride out to that orchard before breakfast. It gave him an appetite and something to think about all day. Josephus, the historian, represents him as going out “early in the morning from Jerusalem to the famed rocks of Etam, a fertile region, delightful with paradises and running springs. Thither the king, in robes of white, rode in his chariot, escorted by a troop of mounted archers chosen for their youth and stature, and clad in Tyrian purple, whose long hair, powdered with gold dust, sparkled in the sun.” After Solomon had taken his morning ride in those luxuriant orchards he would sit down and write those wonderful things in the Bible, drawing his illustrations from the fruits he had that very morning picked or ridden under. And, wishing to praise the coming Christ, he says: “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved.” And wishing to describe the love of the Church for her Lord, he writes: “Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love,” and desiring to make reference to the white hair of the octogenarian, and just before having noticed that the blossoms of the almond tree were white, he says of the aged man: “The almond tree shall flourish.” The walnuts and the pomegranates and the mandrakes and the figs make Solomon’s writings a divinely arranged fruit-basket. What mean Solomon’s orchards and Solomon’s gardens? for they seem to mingle, the two into one, flowers under foot, and pomegranates over head. To me they suggest that religion is a luxury. All along the world has looked upon religion chiefly as a dire necessity—a lifeboat from the shipwreck, a ladder from the conflagration, a soft landing-place after we have been shoved off the precipice of this planet. As a consequence, so many have said: “We will await preparation for the future until the crash of the shipwreck, until the conflagration is in full blaze, until we reach the brink of the precipice.” No doubt religion is inexpressibly important for the last exigency. But what do the apples and the figs and the melons, and the pomegranates and the citron and the olives of Solomon’s orchard mean? Luxury! They mean that our religion is the luscious, the aromatic, the pungent, the arborescent, the efflorescent, the foliaged, the umbrageous. They mean what Edward Payson meant when he declared: “If my happiness continues to increase, I cannot support it much longer.” It means what Bapa Padmanji, a Hindoo convert, meant when he said: “I long for my bed, not that I may sleep—I lie awake often and long—but to hold communion with my God.” It means what the old colored man said, when he was accosted of the colporteur: “Uncle Jack, how are you?” “I is very painful in my knee, but, thank my heavenly Master, I’m cause to be thankful. My good Master jus’ gib me nuf to make me humble.” “And do you enjoy religion as much now, Uncle Jack, as when you could go to church and class-meeting?” “Yes, ‘joys him more. Den I truss to de people, to de meetin’s, to de sarment; and when I hear de hymn sing and de pray, I feels glad. But all dis ain’t like de good Lord in de heart—God’s love here.” It means sunrise instead of sundown. It means the Memnon statue made to sing at the stroke of the morning light. It means Jesus Christ at the wedding in Cana. It means the “time of the singing of birds is come.” It means Jeremiah’s “well of gladness.” It means Isaiah’s “bride and bridegroom.” It means Luke’s “bad boy come home to his father’s house.” Worldly joy killed Leo X when he heard that Milan was captured. Talva died of joy when the Roman senate honored him. Diagora died of joy because his three sons were crowned at the Olympian games. Sophocles died of joy over his literary successes. And religious joy has been too much for many a Christian, and his soul has sped away on the wing of hosannas. An old and poor musician played so well one night before his king, that the next morning, when the musician awoke, he found his table covered with golden cups and plates, and a princely robe lying across the back of a chair, and richly caparisoned horses were pawing at the doorway to take him through the street in imposing equipage. It was only a touch of what comes to every man who makes the Lord his portion, for he has waiting for him, direct from his King, robes, banquets, chariots, mansions, triumphs; and it is only a question of time when he shall wear them, drink them, ride in them, live in them, and celebrate them. You think religion is a good thing for a funeral. Yes! But Solomon’s orchard means more. Religion is a good thing now, when you are in health and prosperity, and the appetite is good for citrons and apples and apricots and pomegranates. Come in without wasting any time in talking about them, and take the luxuries of religion. Happy yourself, then you can make others happy. I like what Wellington said after the battle of Waterloo, and when he was in pursuit of the French with his advance-guard, and Colonel Harvey said to him: “General, you had better not go any farther, for you may be shot by some straggler from the bushes.” And Wellington replied: “Let them fire away. The battle is won, and my life is of no value now.” My friends, we ought never to be reckless, but if, through the pardoning and rescuing grace of Christ, you have gained the victory over sin and death and hell, you need fear nothing on the earth or under the earth. Let all the sharpshooters of perdition blaze away; you may ride on in joy triumphant. Religion for the funeral! Yes; but religion for the wedding-breakfast; religion for the brightest spring morning and autumn’s most gorgeous sunset. Religion when aspiration is easy, as well as for the last gasp; when the temperature is normal, as well as when it reaches 104. It may be a bold thing to say, but I risk it, that if all people, without respect to belief or character, at death passed into everlasting happiness, religion for this world is such a luxury that no man or woman could afford to do without it. Why was it that in the parable of the prodigal son the finger-ring was ordered to be put upon the returned wanderer’s hand before the shoes were ordered for his tired feet? Are not shoes more important for our comfort than finger-rings? It was to impress the world with the fact that religion is a luxury as well as a necessity. “Put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet.” If in sermonic or exhortatory or social recommendations of religion, we put the chief emphasis on the fact that for our safety we must have it when the door of the next world is opened, poor human nature will take the risk and say: “I will wait until the door begins to open.” But show them the radiant truth—that the table of God’s love and pardon is now laid with all the fruits which the orchards of God’s love and pardon and helpfulness can supply—and they will come in and sit down with all the other banqueters, terrestrial and celestial. Fetch on the citrons and the apples and the walnuts and the pomegranates of Solomon’s orchard! But having introduced you to Adam’s orchard and carried you a while through Solomon’s orchard, I want to take a walk with you through Pilate’s orchard of three trees on a hill seventy feet high, ten minutes’ walk from the gate of Jerusalem. After I had read that our great-grandfather and great-grandmother had been driven out of the first orchard, I made up my mind that the Lord would not be defeated in that way. I said to myself that when they had been poisoned by the fruit of one tree, somewhere, somehow, there would be provided an antidote for the poison. I said: “Where is the other tree that will undo the work of that tree? Where is the other orchard that will repair the damage received in the first orchard?” And I read on until I found the orchard, and its central tree as mighty for cure as this one had been for ruin; and as the one tree in Adam’s orchard had its branches laden with the red fruit of carnage, and the pale fruit of suffering, and the spotted fruit of decay, and the bitter fruit of disappointment, I found in Pilate’s orchard a tree which, though stripped of all its leaves and struck through by an iron bolt, nevertheless bore the richest fruit that was ever gathered. Like the trees of the first orchard, this was planted, blossomed, and bore fruit all in one day. Paul was impulsive and vehement of nature, and he laid hold of that tree with both arms, and shook it till the ground all around looked like the morning after an autumnal equinox, and careful lest he step on some of the fruit, he gathered up a basketful of it for the Galatians, crying out: “The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” The other two trees of Pilate’s orchard were loaded, the one with the hard fruits of obduracy, and the other with the tender fruit of repentance, but the central tree (how will I ever forget the day I sat on the exact place where it was planted!)—the central tree of that orchard yields the antidote for the poisoned nations. There is in old England, the hollow of a tree where a king hid, and there is in New England a tree in which a document of national importance was kept inviolate; and there have been trees of great girth and immense shade and vast wealth of fruitage, but no other tree had such value of reminiscence or depth of root or spread of branch or infinitude of fruitage as the central tree of Pilate’s orchard. Before I pass from under it, I would like to drop on both knees and, with both hands outspread and uplifted, cry out with all the nations of earth and the hosts of heaven: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he arose from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” Now, in this discourse on the Pomology of the Bible, or God amid the Orchards, having shown you Adam’s orchard, and Pilate’s orchard, and Solomon’s orchard, I now take you into St. John’s orchard; and I will stop there, for, having seen that, you will want to see nothing more. St. John himself, having seen that orchard, discharged a whole volley of Come! Come! Come! and then pronounced the benediction: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” Then the banished evangelist closes the book, and the Bible is done. The dear old Book opened with Adam’s orchard and closes with St. John’s orchard. St. John went into the orchard through a stone gate, the black basalt of the Isle of Patmos, to which he had been exiled. That orchard which he saw was and is in heaven. One person will err in speaking of heaven as all material, and another person describes heaven as all figurative and spiritual, and both are wrong. Heaven is both material and spiritual. While much of the Bible account of heaven is to be taken figuratively and spiritually, it is plain to me that heaven has also a material existence. Christ said: “I go to prepare a place for you.” Is not a place material? God, who has done all the world-building, the statistics of stars so vast as to be a bewilderment to telescopes, could have somewhere in his astronomy piled up a tremendous world to make the Bible heaven true, both as a material splendor and a spiritual domain. I do not believe God put all the flowers, and all the precious stones, and all the bright metals, and all the music, and all the fountains, and all the orchards in this little world of ours. How much was literal and how much was figurative, I cannot say; but St. John saw two rows of trees on each side of a river, and it differed from other orchards in the fact that the trees bore twelve manner of fruits. The learned translators of our common Bible say it means twelve different kinds of fruits in one year. Albert Barnes says it means twelve crops of the same kind of fruit in one year. Not able to decide which is the more accurate translation, I adopt both. If it mean twelve different kinds of fruit, it declares variety in heavenly joy. If it mean twelve crops of the same kind of fruit, it declares abundance in heavenly joy, and they are both true. Not an eternity with nothing but music: that oratorio would be too protracted. Not an eternity of procession on white horses; that would be too long in the stirrups. Not an eternity of plucking fruit from the tree of life: that would be too much of the heavenly orchard. But all manner of varieties, and I will tell you of at least twelve of those varieties: joy of divine worship; joy over the victories of the Lamb who was slain; joy over the repentant sinners; joy of recounting our own rescue; joy of embracing old friends; joy at recognition of patriarchs, apostles, evangelists and martyrs; joy of ringing harmonies; joy of reknitting broken friendships; joy at the explanation of Providential mysteries; joy at walking the boulevards of gold; joy at looking at walls green with emerald and blue with sapphire and crimson with jasper and aflash with amethyst, entered through swinging gates, their posts, their hinges, and their panels of richest pearl; joy that there is to be no subsidence, no reaction, no terminus to the felicity. All that makes twelve different joys, twelve manner of fruits. So much for variety. But if you take the other interpretation, and say it means twelve crops a year, I am with you still, for that means abundance. That will be the first place we ever got into where there is enough of everything. Enough of health, enough of light, enough of supernal association, enough of love, enough of knowledge, enough of joy. The orchards of this lower world put out all their energies for a few days in autumn, and then, having yielded one crop, their banners of foliage are dropped out of the air, and all their beauty is adjourned until the blossoming of the next May-time. But twelve crops in the heavenly orchard, during that which we on earth call a year, means abundance perpetually. While there is enough of the pomp of the city about heaven for those who like the city best, I thank God there is enough in the Bible about country scenery in heaven to please those of us who were born in the country and never got over it. Now you may have streets of gold in heaven: give me the orchards, with twelve manner of fruits, and yielding their fruit every month; and the leaves of the trees are for “the healing of the nations; and there shall be no more curse, but the Throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him; and they shall see his face, and his name shall be in their foreheads; and there shall be no night there, and they need no candle, neither light of the sun, for the Lord God giveth them light; and they shall reign for ever and ever.” But just think of a place so brilliant that the noonday sun shall be removed from the mantle of the sky because it is too feeble a taper! Yet, most of all, am I impressed with the fact that I am not yet fit for that place, nor you either. By the reconstructing and sanctifying grace of Christ, we need to be made all over. And let us be getting our passports ready, if we want to get into that country. An earthly passport is a personal matter, telling our height, our girth, the color of our hair, our features, our complexion, and our age. I cannot get into a foreign port on your passport, nor can you get in on mine. Each one of us for himself needs a Divine signature, written by the wounded hand of the Son of God, to get into the heavenly orchard, under the laden branches of which, in God’s good time, we may meet the Adam of the first orchard, and the Solomon of the second orchard, and the St. John of the last orchard, to sit down under the tree of which the church in the Book of Canticles speaks when it says: “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste”: and there it may be found that today we learned the danger of hankering after one thing more and that religion is a luxury and that there is a divine antidote for all poisons and that we had created in us an appetite for heaven and that it was a wholesome and saving thing for us to have discoursed on the Pomology of the Bible, or God Among the Orchards. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 5: 003. THE ICHTHYOLOGY OF THE BIBLE; OR, GOD AMONG THE FISHES ======================================================================== The Ichthyology of the Bible; or, God Among the Fishes Genesis 1:20 : “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.” What a new book the Bible is! After thirty-six years preaching from it and discussing over three thousand different subjects founded on the Word of God, much of the Book is as fresh to me as when I learned, with a stretch of infantile memory, the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” In this course of sermons on God Everywhere I find many things I had not before noticed. To-day I speak to you concerning the Ichthyology of the Bible, or God among the Fishes. A fish was the early monogram of Christianity. It is found on the walls of the catacombs, and the Pope still wears “The Fisherman’s Ring.” The reason is that the Greek word for fish is composed of five letters, of which the first stands for Jesus, the second for Christ, the third for God, the fourth for Son, and the fifth for Saviour. So the word represented the initials of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, the Saviour. Our horses were lathered and tired out, and their fetlocks were red with the blood cut out by the rocks, and I could hardly get my feet out of the stirrups as, on Saturday night, we dismounted on the beach of Lake Galilee. The rather liberal supply of food with which we had started from Jerusalem was well-nigh exhausted, and the articles of diet remaining had, by oft repetition, three times a day for three weeks, ceased to appetize. I never want to see a fig again, and dates with me are all out of date. For several days the Arab caterer, who could speak but half a dozen English words, would answer our requests for some of the styles of food with which we had been delectated the first few days, by crying out, “Finished.” The most piquant appetizer is abstinence, and the demand of all the party was, “Let us breakfast on Sunday morning on fresh fish from Lake Gennesaret,” for you must know that that lake has four names—and it is worth a profusion of nomenclature—it is in the Bible called Chinnereth, Tiberias, Gennesaret and Galilee. To our extemporized table on Sabbath morning came broiled perch, only a few hours before lifted out of the sacred waters. It was natural that our minds should revert to the only breakfast that Christ ever prepared, and it was on those very shores where we breakfasted. Christ had, in those olden times, struck two flints together and set on fire some shavings or light brushwood, and then put on larger wood, and a pile of glowing bright coals was the consequence. Meanwhile, the disciples, fishing on the lake, had very “poor luck,” and every time they drew up the net it hung dripping without a fluttering fin or squirming scale. But Christ, from the shore, shouted to them, and told them where to drop the net, and one hundred and fifty-three big fish rewarded them. Simon and Nathaniel, having cleaned some of those large fish, brought them to the coals which Christ had kindled, and the group, who had been out all night, sat down and began mastication. All that scene came back to us when on a Sabbath morning in December, 1889, just outside the ruins of ancient Tiberias, and within sound of the rippling Galilee, we breakfasted. Now, is it not strange that the Bible imagery is so inwrought from the fisheries, when the Holy Land is, for the most part, an inland region? Only three lakes, two besides the one already mentioned, namely, the Dead Sea, where fish cannot live at all and as soon as they touch it they die, and the birds swoop on their tiny carcases, and the third, the Pools of Heshbon, which are alternately full and dry. Only three rivers of the Holy Land—Jabbok, Kishon and Jordan. About all the fish now in the waters of the Holy Land are the perch, the carp, the bream, the minnow, the blenny, the barbel (so called because of the barb at its mouth), the chub, the dog-fish—none of them worth a Delaware shad or an Adirondack trout. Well, the world’s geography has changed and the world’s bill of fare has changed. Lake Galilee was larger and deeper and better stocked than now, and no doubt the rivers were deeper and the fisheries were of far more importance then than now. Besides, there was the Mediterranean Sea only thirty-five miles away, and fish were salted or dried and brought inland, and so much of that article of food was sold in Jerusalem that a fish market gave the name to one of the gates of Jerusalem near by, which was called the Fish Gate. The cities had great reservoirs, in which fish were kept alive and bred. The Pool of Gibeon was a fish-pool. Isaiah and Solomon refer to fish-pools. Large fish were kept alive and tied fast by ropes to a stake in these reservoirs, a ring having been run through their gills, and that is the meaning of the Scripture passage which says: “Canst thou put a hook into his nose, or bore his jaw through with a thorn?” So important was the fish that the god Dagon—worshiped by the Philistines—was made half fish and half man, and that is the meaning of the Lord’s indignation, when in First Samuel we read that this Dagon, the fish-god, stood beside the ark of the Lord, and Dagon was by invisible hands dashed to pieces, because the Philistines had dared to make the fish a god. That explains the Scripture passage: “The head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him.” Now, the stump of Dagon was the fish part. The top part, which was the figure of a man, was dashed to pieces, and the Lord, by demolishing everything but the stump or fish part of the idol, practically said, “You may keep your fish, but know from the way I have demolished the rest of the idol that it is nothing Divine.” Layard and Wilkinson found the fish an object of idolatry all through Assyria and Egypt. The Nile was full of fish, and that explains the horrors of the plague that slaughtered the finny tribe all up and down that river, which has been and is now the main artery of Egypt’s life. In Job you hear the plunge of the spear into the hippopotamus, as the great dramatic poet cries out: “Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons or his head with fish spears?” Yea, the fish began to swim in the very first book of Genesis, where my text records, “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.” Do you realize that the first living thing that God created was the fish? It preceded the bird, the quadruped, the human race. The fish has priority of residence over every living thing. The next thing done, after God had kindled for our world the golden chandelier of the sun and the silver chandelier of the moon, was to make the fish. The first motion of the principle of life, a principle that all the thousands of years since have not been able to define or analyze, the very first stir of life was in a fish. What an hour that was when, in the Euphrates, the Gihon, the Pison, and the Hiddekel, the four rivers of Paradise, the waters swirled with fins and brightened with scales. All the attributes of the Infinite God were called into action for the making of that first fish. Lanceolate and translucent miracle! There is enough wonder in the plate of a sturgeon or in the cartilage of a shark to confound the scientists. It does not take the universe to prove a God. A fish does it. No wonder that Linnaeus and Cuvier and Agassiz and the greatest minds of all the centuries sat enraptured before its anatomy. Oh, its beauty, and the adaptness of its structure to the element in which it must live: the picture gallery on the sides of the mountain trout unveiled as they spring up to snatch the flies: the grayling, called the Flower of Fishes; the salmon, ascending the Oregon and the Severn, easily leaping the falls that would stop them; the bold perch, the gudgeon, silver and black spotted; the herring, moving in squadrons five miles long; the carp, for cunning called the Fox of Fishes; the wondrous sturgeons, formerly reserved for the tables of royal families, and the isinglass made out of their membrane; the tench, called the Physician of Fishes because, when applied to human ailments, it is said to be curative; the lampreys, so tempting to the epicurean that too many of them slew Henry II.; ay, the whole world of fishes. Enough of them floating up and down the rivers to feed the hemispheres if every ear of corn and every head of wheat and every herd of quadruped, and if every other article of food in all the earth were destroyed. Universal drought, leaving not so much as a spear of grass on the round planet, would leave in the rivers and lakes and seas for the human race, a staple commodity of food, which, if brought to shore, would be enough not only to feed but fatten the entire human race. In times to come the world may be so populated that the harvests and vineyards and land animals may be insufficient to feed the human family, and the nations may be obliged to come to the rivers and ocean beaches to seek the living harvests that swim the deep, and that would mean more health and vigor and brilliancy and brain than the human race now owns. The Lord, by placing the fish in the first course of the menu in Paradise, making it precede bird and beast, indicated to the world the importance of the fish as an article of human food. The reason that men and women lived three and four and five and nine hundred years was because they were kept on parched corn and fish. We mix up a fantastic food that kills the most of us before thirty years of age. Custards and whipped sillabubs and Roman punches and chicken salads at midnight are a gauntlet that few have strength to run. We put on many a tombstone glowing epithets saying that the person beneath died of patriotic services or from exhaustion in religious work, when nothing killed the poor fellow but lobster eaten at a party four hours after he ought to have been sound asleep in bed. There are men today in our streets so many walking hospitals, who might have been athletes if they had taken the hint of Genesis in my text and of our Lord’s remark, and adhered to simplicity of diet. The reason that the country districts have furnished most of the men and women of our time who are doing the mightiest work in merchandise, in mechanics, in law, in medicine, in theology, in legislative and congressional halls, and all the Presidents from Washington down—at least, those who have amounted to anything—is because they were in those country districts of necessity kept on plain diet. No man or woman ever amounted to anything who was brought up on floating island or angel cake. The world must turn back to paradisaic diet, if it is to get paradisaic morals and paradisaic health. The human race today needs more phosphorus, and the fish is charged and surcharged with phosphorus. Phosphorus, that which shines in the dark without burning. What made the twelve Apostles such stalwart men that they could endure anything and achieve everything? Next to Divine inspiration, it was because they were nearly all fishermen, and lived on fish and a few plain condiments. Paul, though not brought up to swing the net and throw the line, must of necessity have adopted the diet of the population among whom he lived, and you see the phosphorus in his daring plea before Felix, and the phosphorus in his boldest of all utterances before the wiseacres on Mars Hill, and the phosphorus as he went without fright to his beheading. And the phosphorus you see in the lives of all the Apostles, who moved right on, undaunted, to certain martyrdom, whether to be decapitated or flung off precipices or hung in crucifixion. Phosphorus, shining in the dark without burning! No man or woman that ever lived was independent of questions of diet. Let those who by circumstances are compelled to simplicity of diet, thank God for their rescue from the temptation of killing delicacies. The men and women who are to decide the drift of the twentieth century, which is only a short step off, are now five miles back from the rail station, and had for breakfast this morning a similar bill of fare to that which Christ provided for the fishermen-disciples on the banks of Lake Galilee. Indeed the only articles of food that Christ by miracle multiplied were bread and fish, which the boy who acted as sutler to the five thousand people of the wilderness handed over—five barley loaves and two fishes. The boy must have felt badly when he had brought out, after having caught them himself, sitting with his bare feet over the bank of the lake and expecting to sell his supply at good profit; but he felt better when by the miracle the fish were multiplied and he had more returned to him than he had surrendered. Know, also, in order to understand the ichthyology of the Bible, that in the deepest waters, as those of the Mediterranean, there were monsters that are now extinct. The fools who became infidels because they could not understand the engulfment of the recreant Jonah in a sea monster, might have saved their souls by studying a little natural history. “Oh,” says some one, “that story of Jonah was only a fable.” Say others: “It was interpolated by some writer of later times.” Others again say: “It was a reproduction of the story of Hercules devoured and then restored from the monster.” But my reply is that history tells us that there were monsters large enough to whelm ships. The extinct ichthyosaurus of other ages was thirty feet long, and as late as the sixth century of the Christian era, up and down the Mediterranean there floated monsters compared with which a modern whale was a sardine or a herring. The shark has again and again been found to have swallowed a man entire. A fisherman on the coast of Turkey found a sea-monster which contained a woman and a purse of gold. I have seen in museums sea-monsters large enough to take down a prophet. But I have a better reason for believing, the Old Testament account, and that is that Christ said it was true, and a type of his own resurrection, and I suppose he ought to know. In Matthew , 12 th chapter, 40th verse, Jesus Christ says: “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” And that settles it for me and for any man who does not believe Christ a dupe or an impostor. Notice, also, how the Old Testament writers drew similitude from the fisheries. Jeremiah uses such imagery to prophesy destruction: “Behold I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them.” Ezekiel uses fish imagery to prophesy prosperity: “It shall come to pass that the fishers shall stand upon it, from En-gedi even to En-eglaim; they shall be a place to spread forth nets; their fish shall be according to their kinds, as the fish of the great sea, exceeding many.” The explanation of which is that En-gedi and En-eglaim stood on the banks of the Dead Sea, in the waters of which no fish can live; but the prophet says that the time will come when these waters will be regenerated and they will be great places for fish. Amos reproves idolatries by saying: “The days shall come upon you when he will take you away with hooks and your posterity with fish-hooks.” Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, declares that those captured of temptation are as fishes taken in an evil net. Indeed, Solomon knew all about the finny tribe and wrote a treatise on Ichthyology, which has been lost. Furthermore, in order that you may understand the ichthyology of the Bible, you must know that there were five ways of fishing. One was by a fence of reeds and canes, within which the fish were caught; but the Herodic government forbade that on Lake Galilee, lest pleasure boats be wrecked by the stakes driven. Another mode was by spearing; the waters of Galilee so clear, good aim could be taken for the transfixing. Another was by hook and line, as where Isaiah says: “The fishers also shall mourn, and they that cast angle into the brooks shall lament.” Job says: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” And Habakkuk says: “They take up all of them with the angle.” Another mode was by a casting net or that which was flung from the shore. Another by a drag net, or that which was thrown from a boat and drawn through the sea, as the fishing smack sailed on. How wonderful all this is, inwrought into the Bible imagery, and it leads me to ask, In what mode are you fishing? for the Church is the boat and the Gospel is the net and the sea is the world and the fish are the souls, and God addresses us, as he did Simon and Andrew, saying: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” But when is the best time to fish for souls? In the night. Peter, why did you say to Christ: “We have toiled all the night and have taken nothing?” Why did you not fish in the daytime? He replies: “You ought to know that the night is the best time for fishing.” At Tobyhanna Mills, among the mountains of Pennsylvania, I saw a friend with high boots and fishing-tackle starting out at nine o’clock at night, and I said, “Where are you going?” He answered, “Going to fish.” “What, in the night?” He answered, “Yes, in the night.” So the vast majority of souls captured for God are taken in times of revival in the night meetings. They might just as well come at twelve o’clock at noon, but most of them will not. Ask the evangelists of olden times, ask Finney, ask Nettleton, ask Osborn, ask Daniel Baker, and then ask all the modern evangelists, Which is the best time to gather souls? and they will answer, “The night; by all odds, the night.” Not only the natural night, but the night of trouble. Suppose I go among this audience and ask these Christians when they were converted to God. One would answer, “It was at the time I lost my child by membraneous croup, and it was the night of bereavement,” or the answer would be, “It was just after I was swindled out of my property, and it was the night of bankruptcy,” or it would be, “It was during that time when I was down with that awful sickness, and it was the night of physical suffering,” or it would be, “It was that time when slander took after me, and I was maligned and abused, and it was the night of persecution.” Ah, that is the time for you to go after souls, when a night of trouble is on them! Miss not that opportunity to save a soul, for it is the best of all opportunities. Go up along the Mohawk or the Juniata or the Delaware or the Tombigbee or the St Lawrence right after a rain, and you will find the fishermen all up and down the banks. Why? Because a good time to angle is right after the rain, and that is a good time to catch souls—right after a shower of misfortune, right after floods of disaster. And as a pool overshadowed with trees is a grand place for making a fine haul of fish, so when the soul is under the long dark shadows of anxiety and distress, it is a good time to make a spiritual haul. People in the bright sunshine of prosperity are not so easily taken. Be sure before you start out to the Gospel fisheries to get the right kind of bait. “But how,” you say, “am I to get it?” My answer is, “Dig for it.” “Where shall I dig for it?” “In the rich Bible grounds.” We boys brought up in the country had to dig for bait before we started for the banks of the Raritan. We put the sharp edge of the spade against the ground, and then put our foot on the spade, and with one tremendous plunge of our strength of body and will, we drove it in up to the handle, and then turned over the sod. We had never read Walton’s “Complete Angler,” or Charles Cotton’s “Instructions How to Angle for Grayling in a Clear Stream.” We knew nothing about the modern red-hackle, or the fly of orange-colored mohair, but we got the right kind of bait. No use trying to angle for fish or angle for souls unless you have the right kind of bait, and there is plenty of it in the Promises, the Parables, the Miracles, the Crucifixion, the Heaven of the grand old Gospel. Yes, not only must you dig for bait, you must use only fresh bait. You cannot do anything down at the pond with old angleworms. New views of truth. New views of God. New views of the soul. There are all the good books to help you dig. But make up your mind as to whether you will take the hint of Habukkuk and Isaiah and Job and use hook and line, or take the hint of Matthew and Luke and Christ and fish with a net. I think many lose their time by wanting to fish with a net, and they never get a place to swing the net; in other words, they want to do Gospel work on a big scale, or they will not do it at all. I see feeble-minded Christian men going around with a Bagster’s Bible under their arm, hoping to do the work of an evangelist and use the net, while they might be better content with hook and line and take one soul at a time. They are bad failures as evangelists; they would be mighty successes as private Christians. If you catch only one soul for God, that will be enough to fill your eternity with celebration. All hail the fishermen with hook and line! I have seen a man in roughest corduroy outfit come back from the woods loaded down with a string of finny treasures hung over his shoulder and his game-bag filled, and a dog with his teeth carrying a basket filled with the surplus of an afternoon’s angling, and it was all the result of a hook and line; and in the Eternal World there will be many a man and many a woman who was never heard of outside of a village Sunday School or a prayer-meeting buried in a church basement, who will come before the Throne of God with a multitude of souls ransomed through his or her instrumentality, and yet the work all done through personal interview, one by one, one by one. You do not know who that one soul may be. Staupitz helped one soul into the light, but it was Martin Luther. Thomas Bailey brought salvation to one soul, but it was Hugh Latimer. An edge-tool maker was the means of saving one soul, but it was John Summerfield. Our blessed Lord healed one blind eye at a time, one paralyzed arm at a time, one dropsical patient at a time, and raised from the dead one young girl at a time, one young man at a time. Admire the net that takes in a great many at once, but do not despise the hook and line. God help us amid the Gospel Fisheries, whether we employ hook or net, for the day cometh when we shall see how much depended on our fidelity. Christ himself declared: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net that was cast into the sea and gathered of every kind, which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down and gathered the good in the vessels, but cast the bad away: so shall it be at the end of the world, the angels shall come forth and separate the wicked from the just.” Yes, the fishermen think it best to keep the useful and worthless of the haul in the same net until it is drawn upon the beach, and then the division takes place; and if it is on Long Island coast, the moss-bunkers are thrown out and the bluefish and shad preserved, or if it is on the shore of Galilee, the fish classified as siluroids are hurled back into the water or thrown upon the bank as unclean, while the perch and the carp and the barbel are put in pails to be carried home for use. So in the church on earth, the saints and the hypocrites, the generous and the mean, the chaste and the unclean are kept in the same membership, but at death the division will be made and the good will be gathered into heaven and the bad, however many holy communions they may have celebrated, and however many rhetorical prayers they may have offered, and however many years their names may have been on the church rolls, will be cast away. God forbid that any of us should be among the “cast away.” But may we do our work, whether small or great, as thoroughly as did that renowned fisherman, George W. Bethune, who spent his summer rest angling in the waters around The Thousand Isles, and beating at their own craft those who plied it all the year, and who the rest of his time gloriously preached Christ in a pulpit only fifteen minutes from where I formerly preached in Brooklyn, and ordering for his own obsequies: “Put on me my pulpit gown and bands, with my own pocket Bible in my right hand. Bury me with my mother, my father, and my grandmother. Sing also my own hymn— Jesus thou Prince of Life! Thy chosen cannot die; Like thee, they conquer in the strife, To reign with thee on high.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 6: 004. ONE WEEK'S WORK ======================================================================== One Week’s Work Genesis 1:31 : “And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” From Monday morning to Saturday night gives us a week’s work. If we have filled that week with successes, we are happy. But I am going to tell you what God did in one week. Cosmogony, geology, astronomy, ornithology, ichthyology, botany, anatomy are such vast subjects that no human life is long enough to explore or comprehend any one of them. But I have thought I might in an unusual way tell you a little of what God did in one week, and that the first week. And whether you make it a week of days or a week of ages, I care not, for I shall reach the same practical result of reverence and worship. The first Monday morning found swinging in space the piled-up lumber of rocks and metal and soil and water from which the earth was to be builded. God made up his mind to create a human family and they must have a house to live in. But where? Not a roof, not a wall, not a door, not a room was fit for human occupancy. There is not a pile of black basalt in Yellowstone Park nor an extinct volcano in Honolulu so inappropriate for human residence as was this globe at that early period. Moreover, there was no human architect to draw a plan, no quarryman to blast the foundation stones, no carpenter to hew out a beam, and no mason to trowel a wall. Poor prospect! But the time was coming when a being called man was to be constructed and he was to have a bride; and where he could find a homestead to which he could take her must have been a wonderment to angelic intelligences. There had been earthquakes enough and volcanoes enough and glaciers enough, but earthquakes and volcanoes and glaciers destroy instead of build. A worse-looking world than this never swung. It was heaped-up deformities, scarifications, and monstrosities. The Bible says it was without form. That is, it was not round, it was not square, it was not octagonal, it was not rhomboid. God never did take any one in his counsel, but if he had asked some angel about the attempt to turn this planet into a place for human residence, the angel would have said, “No, no; try some other world; the crevices of this earth are too deep; its crags are too appalling; its darkness is too thick.” But Monday morning came. I think it was a spring morning and about half-past four o’clock. The first thing needed was light. It was not needed for God to work by, for he can work as well in the darkness. But light may be necessary, for angelic intelligences are to see in its full glory the process of world-building. But where are the candles, where are the candelabra, where is the chandelier? No rising sun will roll in the morning. No moon or stars can brighten this darkness. The moon and stars are not born yet, or if created, their light will not reach the earth for some time yet. But there is need of immediate light. Where shall it come from. Desiring to account for things in a natural way you say, and reasonably say, that heat and electricity throw out light independent of the sun, and that the metallic bases throw out light independent of the sun and that alkalies throw out light independent of the sun. Oh, yes! all that is true, but I do not think that is the way light was created. The record makes me think that, standing over this earth, that spring morning, God looked upon the darkness that palled the heights of this world and the chasms of it and the awful reaches of it, and uttered—whether in the Hebrew of earth or some language celestial I know not—that word which stands for the subtle, bright, glowing and all-pervading fluid, that word which thrills and garlands and lifts everything it touches, that word the full meaning of which all the chemists of the ages have busied themselves in exploring, that word which suggests a force that flies one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, and by undulations seven hundred and twenty-seven trillions in a second, that one word God utters—Light! And instantly the darkness began to shimmer, and the thick folds of blackness to lift, and there were scintillations and coruscations and flashes and a billowing up of resplendence, and in great sheets it spread out northward, southward, eastward, westward, and a radiance filled the atmosphere until it could hold no more of the brilliance. Light now to work by while supernatural intelligences look on. Light, the first chapter of the first day of the week. Light, the joy of all the centuries. Light, the greatest blessing that ever touched the human eye. The robe of the Almighty is woven out of it, for he covers himself with light as with a garment. Oh, blessed light! I am glad this was the first thing created that week. Good thing to start every week with is light. That will make our work easier. That will keep our disposition more radiant. That will hinder even our losses from becoming too somber. Give us more light, natural light, intellectual light, spiritual light, everlasting light. For lack of it the body stumbles, and the soul stumbles. O thou Father of Lights, give us light! The great German philosopher in his last moment said, “I want more light.” A minister of Christ, recently dying, cried out in exultation, “I move into the light!” Mr. Toplady, the immortal hymnologist, in his expiring moments, exclaimed, “Light! Light!” Heaven itself is only more light. Upon all superstition, upon all ignorance, upon all sorrow, let in the light. But now the light of the first Monday is receding. The blaze is going out. The colors are dimming. Only part of the earth’s surface is visible. It is six o’clock, seven o’clock, eight o’clock; obscuration and darkness. It is Monday night. “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” Now it is Tuesday morning. A delicate and tremendous undertaking is set apart for this day. There was a great superabundance of water. God by the wave of his hand this morning gathers part of it in suspended reservoirs and part of it he orders down into the rivers and lakes and seas. How to hang whole Atlantic Oceans in the clouds without their spilling over except in right quantities and at right times was an undertaking that no one but Omnipotence would have dared. But God does it as easily as you would lift a glass of water. There he hoists two clouds each thirty miles wide and five miles high, and balances them. Here he lifts the cirrus clouds and spreads them out in great white banks as though it had been snowing in heaven. And the cirrostratus clouds in long parallel lines so straight you know an infinite Geometer has drawn them. Clouds which are the armory from which thunderstorms get their bayonets of fire. Clouds which are oceans on the wing. No wonder, long after this first Tuesday of Creation week, Elihu confounded Job with the question, “Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds?” Half of this Tuesday work done, the other half is the work of compelling the waters to lie down in their destined places. So God picks up the solid ground and packs it up into five elevations, which are the continents. With his fingers he makes deep depressions in them, and these are the lakes, while at the piling up of the Alleghanies and Sierra Nevadas and Pyrenees and Alps and Himalayas, the rest of the waters start by the law of gravitation to the lower places, and in their run down hill become the rivers, and then all around the earth these rivers come into convention and become oceans beneath, as the clouds are oceans above. How soon the rivers got to their places when God said: “Hudson and James and Amazon, down to the Atlantic; Oregon and Sacramento down to the Pacific.” Three-quarters of the earth being water and only one-quarter being land, nothing but Almightiness could have caged the three-fourths so that they could not devour the one-fourth. Thank God for water, and plenty of it. What a hint that God would have the human race very clean: Three-fourths of the world water. Pour it through the homes and make them pure. Pour it through the prisons and make their occupants moral. Pour it through the streets and make them healthy. There are several thousand people asleep in Greenwood, who, but for the filthy streets of Brooklyn and New York, would have been today well and in churches. Moreover, there never was a filthy street that remained a moral street. How important an agency of reform water is, was illustrated by the fact that when the ancient world got outrageously wicked, it was plunged into the Deluge and kept under for months till its iniquity was soaked out of it. But I rejoice that on the first Tuesday of the world’s existence the water was taught to know its place, and the Mediterranean lay down at the feet of Europe and the Gulf of Mexico lay down at the feet of North America and Geneva lay down at the feet of the Alps and Schroon Lake fell to sleep in the lap of the Adirondacks. “And the evening and the morning were the second day.” Now it is Wednesday morning of the world’s first week. Gardening and horticulture will be born today. How queer the hills look, and so unattractive they seem hardly worth having been made. But now all the surfaces are changing color. Something beautiful is creeping all over them. It has the color of emerald. Ay, it is herbage. Hail to the green grass, God’s favorite color and God’s favorite plant, as I judge from the fact that he makes a larger number of them than of anything else. But look yonder! Something starts out of the ground and goes higher up, higher and higher, and spreads out broad leaves. It is a palm tree. Yonder is another growth, and its leaves hang far down, and it is a willow tree. And yonder is a growth with mighty sweep of branches. And here they come—the pear and the apple and the peach and the pomegranate and groves and orchards and forests, their shadows and their fruit girdling the earth. We are pushing agriculture and fruit culture to great excellence in the nineteenth century, but we have nothing now to equal what I see on this first Wednesday of the world’s existence. I take a taste of one of the apples this Wednesday morning, and I tell you it mingles in its juices all the flavors of Spitzbergen and Newton pippin and Rhode Island greening and Danvers winter-sweet and Roxbury russet and Hubbardston nonesuch, but added to all and overpowering all other flavors is the Paradisaical juice that all the orchards of the nineteenth century fail to reach. I take a taste of the pear, and it has all the lusciousness of the three thousand varieties of the nineteenth century; all the Seckel and the Bartlett of the pomological gardens of later times, an acidity compared with it. And the grapes! Why, this one cluster has in it the richness of whole vineyards of Catawbas and Concords and Isabellas. Fruits of all colors, of all odors, of all flavors. No hand of man yet made to pluck it or tongue to taste it. The banquet for the human race is being spread before the arrival of the first guest. In the fruit of that garden was the seed for the orchards and gardens of the hemispheres. Notice that the first thing that God made for food was fruit, and plenty of it. Slaughter-houses are of later invention. Far am I from being a vegetarian, but an almost exclusive meat diet is depraving. Savages confine themselves almost exclusively to animal food, and that is one reason that they are savages. Give your children more apples and less mutton. The world will have to give dominance to the fruit diet of Paradise before it gets back to the morals of Paradise. May God’s blessing come down on the orchards and vineyards of America, and keep back the frosts and the curculio. But we must not forget that it is Wednesday evening in Eden, and upon that perfect fruit of those perfect trees let the curtain drop. “And the evening and the morning were the third day.” Now it is Thursday morning of the world’s first week. Nothing will be created today. The hours will be passed in scattering fogs and mists and vapors. The atmosphere must be swept clean. Other worlds are to heave in sight. This little ship of the earth has seemed to have all the ocean of immensity to itself. But mightier craft are to be hailed today on the high seas of space. First, the moon’s white sail appears and does very well until the sun bursts upon the scene. The light that on the previous three mornings was struck from an especial word now gathers in the sun, moon, and stars. One for the day, the others for the night. It seemed as if they had all within twenty-four hours been created. Ah, his is a great time in the world’s first week. The moon, the nearest neighbor to our earth appears, her photograph to be taken in the nineteenth century, when the telescope shall bring her within one hundred and twenty miles of New York. And the sun now appears, afterward to be found eight hundred and sixty-six thousand miles in diameter, and put in astronomical scales, to be found to weigh nearly four hundred thousand times heavier than our earth; a mighty furnace, its heat kept up by meteors pouring into it as fuel, a world devouring other worlds with its jaws of flame. And the stars come out, those street lamps of heaven, those keys of pearl, upon which God’s fingers play the music of the spheres. How bright they look in this Oriental evening! Constellations! Galaxies! What a twenty-four hours of this first week—solar, lunar, stellar appearances. All this Thursday and the nights immediately before and after it employed in pulling aside the curtain of vapor from these flushed or pale-faced worlds. Enough! “And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.” Now it is Friday morning in the first week of the world’s existence. Water, but not a fin swimming it; air, but not a wing flying it. It is a silent world. Can it be that it was made only for vegetables? But, hark! There is a swirl and a splashing in all the four rivers of Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. They are all a-swim with life, some darting like arrows through split crystals, and others quiet in dark pools like shadows. Everything, from spotted trout to behemoth; all colored, all shaped, the ancestors of finny tribes that shall by their wonders of construction confound the Agassizs, the Cuviers and the Linnæuses and the ichthyologists of the more than six thousand years following this Friday of the first week. And while I stand on the banks of these Paradisaical rivers watching these finny tribes, I hear a whirr in the air and I look up and behold wings—wings of larks, robins, doves, eagles, flamingos, albatrosses, brown-threshers, creatures of all color, blue as if dipped in the skies, fiery as if they had flown out of the sunsets, golden as if they had taken their morning bath in buttercups. And while I am studying the colors they begin to carol and chirp and coo and twitter and run up and down the scales of a music that they must have heard at heaven’s gate. Yes, I find them in Paradise on this the first Friday afternoon of the world’s existence. And I sit down on the bank of the Euphrates and the murmur of the river, together with the chant of birds in the sky puts me into a state of somnolence. “And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.” Now it is Saturday morning of the world’s first week and with this day the week closes. But oh, what a climacteric day! The air has its population and the water its population. Yet the land has not one inhabitant. But here they come, by the voice of God created! Horses grander than those which in after time Job will describe as having neck clothed with thunder. Cattle enough to cover a thousand hills. Sheep shepherded by him who made for them the green pastures. Cattle superior to the Alderneys and Ayrshires and Devonshires of after-times. Leopards so beautiful, we are glad they cannot change their spots. Lions without their fierceness and all the quadrupedal world so gentle, so sleek, so perfect. Look out how you treat this animal creation, whether they walk the earth or swim the waters or fly the air. Do you not notice that God gave them precedence of the human race? They were created Friday and Saturday morning, as man was created Saturday afternoon. They have a right to be here. He who galls a horse or exposes a cow to the storm or beats a dog or mauls a cat or gambles at the pigeon-shooting or tortures an insect, will have to answer for it in the Judgment Day. You may console yourself that these creatures are not immortal and they cannot appear against you, but the God who made these creatures and who saw the wrong you did them will be there. Better look out, you stock-raisers and railroad companies who bring the cattle on trains without food or water for three or four days in hot weather, a long groan of agony from Omaha to New York. Better look out, you farmer riding behind that limping horse with a nail that the blacksmith drove into the quick. Better look out, you boys stoning bullfrogs and turning turtles upside down and robbing birds’ nests. But something is wanting in Paradise and the week is almost done. Who is there to pluck the flowers of this Edenic lawn? Who is there to command these worlds of quadruped and fish and bird? For whom has God put back the curtain from the face of sun and moon and star? The world wants an emperor and empress. It is Saturday afternoon. No one but the Lord Almighty can originate a human being. In the world where there are in the latter part of the nineteenth century over fourteen hundred million people, a human being is not a curiosity. But how about the first human eye that was ever kindled, the first human ear that was ever opened, the first human lung that ever breathed, the first human heart that ever beat, the first human life ever constructed? That needed the origination of a God. He had no model to work by. What stupendous work for a Saturday afternoon! He must originate a style of human heart through which all the blood in the body must pass every three minutes. He must make that heart so strong that it can during each day lift what would be equal to one hundred and twenty tons of weight. About five hundred muscles must be strung in the right place and at least two hundred and fifty bones constructed. Into this body must be put at least nine million nerves. Over three thousand perspiring pores must be made for every inch of fleshly surface. The human voice must be so constructed it shall be capable of producing seventeen trillion five hundred and ninety-two billion one hundred and eighty-six million forty-four thousand four hundred and fifteen sounds. But all this the most insignificant part of the human being. The soul! Ah, the construction of that God himself would not be equal to if he were any the less of a God. Its understanding, its will, its memory, its conscience, its capacities of enjoyment or suffering, its immortality! What a work for a Saturday afternoon! Ay! Before night there were to be two such human and yet immortal beings constructed. The woman as well as the man was formed Saturday afternoon. Because a deep sleep fell upon Adam and by divine surgery a portion of his side was removed for the nucleus of another creation; it has been supposed that perhaps days and nights passed between the masculine and feminine creations. But no! Adam was not three hours unmated. If a physician can by anæsthetics put one into a deep sleep in three minutes, God certainly could have put Adam into a profound sleep in a short while that Saturday afternoon and made the deep and radical excision without causing distress. By a manipulation of the dust, the same hand that molded the mountains molded the features and molded the limbs of the father of the human race. But his eyes did not see and his nerves did not feel and his muscles did not move and his lungs did not breathe and his heart did not pulsate. A perfect form he lay along the earth, symmetrical and of God-like countenance. Magnificent piece of Divine carpentry and omnipotent sculpturing, but no vitality. A body without a soul. Then the Source of all life stooped to the inanimate nostril and lip, and, as many a skilful and earnest physician has put his lips to a patient in comatose state and breathed into his mouth and nostril, and at the same time compressed the lungs, until that which was artificial respiration became natural respiration, so methinks God breathed into this cold sculpture of a man the breath of life, and the heart begins to tramp and the lungs to inhale and the eyes to open and the entire form to thrill, and with the rapture of a life just come, the prostrate being leaps to his feet—a man! But the scene of this Saturday is not yet done, and in the atmosphere, drowsy with the breath of flowers and the song of bobolinks and robin-redbreasts, the man slumbers, and by anæsthetics, divinely administered, the slumber deepens until without the oozing of one drop of blood at the time, or the faintest scar afterward, that portion is removed from his side which is to be built up the Queen of Paradise, the daughter of the great God, the mother of the human race, the benediction of all ages, woman the wife, afterward woman the mother. And as the two join hands and stroll down along the banks of the Euphrates toward a bower of mignonette and wild rose and honeysuckle, and are listening to the call of the whip-poor-will from the aromatic thickets, the sun sinks beneath the horizon. “And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” What do you think of that one week’s work? I review it not for entertainment, but because I would have you join in David’s doxology: “Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty;” because I want you to know what a homestead our Father built for his children at the start, though sin has despoiled it; and because I want you to know how the world will look again when Christ shall have restored it, swinging now between two Edens; because I want you to realize something of what a mighty God he is and the utter folly of trying to war against him; because I want you to make peace with this Chief of the Universe through the Christ who mediates between offended Omnipotence and human rebellion; because I want you to know how fearfully and wonderfully you are made, your body as well as your soul an Omnipotent achievement; because I want you to realize that order reigns throughout the universe, and that God’s watches tick to the second, and that his clocks strike regularly, though they strike only once in a thousand years. A learned man once asked an old Christian man who had no advantages of schooling, why he believed there was a God, and the good old man, who probably had never heard an argument on the subject in all his life, made this noble reply: “Sir, I have been here going hard upon fifty years. Every day since I have been in this world I have seen the sun rise in the east and set in the west. The north star stands where it did the first time I saw it; the seven stars and Job’s coffin keep on the same path in the sky and never turn out. It isn’t so with man’s work. He makes clocks and watches; they may run well for awhile, but they get out of fix and stand stock-still. But the sun and moon and stars keep on this same way all the while. The heavens declare the glory of God.” Yea, I preach this, because I want you to walk in appreciation of Addison’s sublime sentiment when he writes: The spacious firmament on high With all the blue ethereal sky And spangled heav’ns, a shining frame, Their Great Original proclaim. In reason’s ear they all rejoice And utter forth a glorious voice; Forever singing, as they shine, “The Hand that made us is divine.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 7: 005. THE NUMBER SEVEN ======================================================================== The Number Seven Genesis 2:3 : “God blessed the seventh day.” The mathematics of the Bible is noticeable: the geometry and the arithmetic; the square in Ezekiel the circle spoken of in Isaiah; the curve alluded to in Job; the rule of fractions mentioned in Daniel; the rule of loss and gain in Mark, where Christ asks the people to cipher out by that rule what it would “profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul.” But there is one mathematical figure that is crowned above all others in the Bible: it is the numeral seven, which the Arabians got from India, and all following ages have taken from the Arabians. It stands between the figure six and the figure eight. In the Bible all the other numerals bow to it. Over three hundred times is it mentioned in the Scriptures, either alone or compounded with other words. In Genesis the week is rounded into seven days, and I use my text because there this numeral is for the first time introduced in a journey which wends its way through the law, through the symbolism of the tabernacle and the ritual and the prophecies, and halts not until in the close of the book of Revelations its monument is built into the wall of heaven in chrysolite, which, in the strata of precious stones, is the seventh. In the Bible we find that Jacob had to serve seven years to get Rachel, but she was well worth it; and, foretelling the years of prosperity and famine in Pharaoh’s time, the seven fat oxen were eaten up of the seven lean oxen; and wisdom is said to be built on seven pillars; and the ark was left with the Philistines seven years; and Naaman, for the cure of his leprosy, plunged in the Jordan seven times; the dead child, when Elisha breathed into its mouth, signaled its arrival back into consciousness by sneezing seven times; to the house that Ezekiel saw in vision, there were seven steps; the walls of Jericho, before they fell down, were compassed seven days; Zechariah describes a stone with seven eyes; to cleanse a leprous house, the door must be sprinkled with pigeons’ blood seven times; in Canaan were overthrown seven nations; on one occasion Christ cast out seven devils; on a mountain he fed a multitude of people with seven loaves, the fragments left filling seven baskets; and the closing passages of the Bible are magnificent and overwhelming with the imagery made up of seven churches, seven stars, seven candlesticks, seven seals, seven angels and seven heads and seven crowns and seven horns and seven spirits and seven vials and seven plagues and seven thunders. Yea, the numeral seven seems a favorite with the Divine mind, outside as well as inside the Bible, for are there not seven prismatic colors? And. when God with the rainbow wrote the comforting thought that the world would never have another deluge, he wrote it on the scroll of the sky in ink of seven colors. He grouped into the Pleiades seven stars. Rome, the capital of the world, sat on seven hills. When God would make the most intelligent thing on earth, the human countenance, he fashioned it with seven features—the two ears, the two eyes, the two nostrils and the mouth. Yea, our body lasts only seven years, and we gradually shed it for another body after another seven years, and so on; for we are, as to our bodies, septennial animals. So the numeral seven ranges through nature and through Revelation. It is the number of perfection, and so I use it while I speak of the seven candlesticks, the seven stars, the seven seals, and the seven thunders. The seven golden candlesticks were and are the churches. Mark you, the churches never were, and never can be, candles. They are only candlesticks. They are not the light, but they are to hold the light. A room in the night might have in it five hundred candlesticks, and yet you could not see your hand before your face. The only use of a candlestick and the only use of a church is to hold up the light. You see it is a dark world, the night of sin, the night of trouble, the night of superstition, the night of persecution, the night of poverty, the night of sickness, the night of death; ay, about fifty nights have interlocked their shadows. The whole race goes stumbling over prostrated hopes and fallen fortunes and empty flour barrels and desolated cradles and deathbeds. How much we have use for all the seven candlesticks, with lights blazing from the top of each one of them! Light of pardon for all sin! Light of comfort for all trouble! Light of encouragement for all despondency! Light of eternal riches for all poverty! Light of rescue for all persecution! Light of reunion for all the bereft! Light of heaven for all the dying! And that light is Christ, who is the Light that shall yet irradiate the hemispheres. But, mark you, when I say churches are not candles, but candlesticks, I cast no slur on candlesticks. I believe in beautiful candlesticks. The candlesticks that God ordered for the ancient tabernacle were something exquisite. They were a dream of beauty carved out of loveliness. They were made of hammered gold, stood in a foot of gold, and had six branches of gold blooming all along in six lilies of gold each, and lips of gold, from which the candles lifted their holy fire. And the best houses in any city ought to be the churches—the best built, the best ventilated, the best swept, the best windowed and the best chandeliered. Log cabins may do in neighborhoods where most of the people live in log cabins; but let there be palatial churches for regions where many of the people live in palaces. Do not have a better place for yourself than for your Lord and King. Do not live in a parlor and put your Christ in a kitchen. These seven candlesticks of which I speak were not made out of pewter or iron; they were golden candlesticks, and gold is not only a valuable but a bright metal. Have everything about your church bright—your ushers with smiling faces, your music jubilant, your handshaking cordial, your entire service attractive. Many people feel that in church they must look dull, in order to be reverential, and many whose faces in other kinds of assemblages show all the different phases of emotion, have in church no more expression than the back wheel of a hearse. Brighten up and be responsive. If you feel like weeping, weep. If you feel like smiling, smile. If you feel indignant at some wrong assailed from the pulpit, frown. Do not leave your naturalness and resiliency home because it is Sunday morning. If as officers of a church you meet people at the church door with a black look, and have the music black, and the minister in black preach a black sermon, and from invocation to benediction have the impression black, few will come; and those who do come will wish they had not come at all. Golden candlesticks! Scour up the six lilies on each branch, and know that the more lovely and bright they are, the more fit they are to hold the light. But a Christless light is a damage to the world rather than a good. Cromwell stabled his cavalry horses in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and many now use the church as a place in which to stable vanities and worldliness. A worldly church is a candlestick without the candle, and it had its prototype in St. Sophia, in Constantinople, built to the glory of God by Constantine, but transformed to base uses by Mohammed II. Built out of colored marble; a cupola with twenty-four windows soaring to the height of one hundred and eighty feet; the ceiling one great bewilderment of mosaic; galleries supported by eight columns of porphyry and sixty-seven columns of green jasper; nine bronze doors with alto-relievo work, fascinating to the eye of any artist; vases and vestments encrusted with all manner of precious stones. Four walls on fire with indescribable splendor. Though labor was cheap, the building cost one million five hundred thousand dollars. Ecclesiastical structure, almost supernatural in pomp and majesty. But Mohammedanism tore down from the walls of that building all the saintly and Christly images, and high up in the dome the figure of the cross was rubbed out that the crescent of the barbarous Turk might be substituted. A great church, but no Christ! A gorgeous candlestick, but no candle! Ten thousand such churches would not give the world as much light, as one home-made tallow candle by which last night some grandmother in the eighties put on her spectacles and read the Psalms of David in large type. Up with the churches, by all means! Hundreds of them, thousands of them, and the more the better. But let each one be a blaze of heavenly light, making the world brighter and brighter, till the last shadow has disappeared, and the last of the suffering children of God shall have reached the land where they have no need of candlestick or “of candle, neither light of the sun, for the Lord God giveth them light, and they shall reign forever and ever.” Seven candlesticks the complete number of lights! Let your light shine before men that they, seeing your good works, may glorify your Father which is in heaven. Turn now in your Bible to the seven stars. We are distinctly told that they are the ministers of religion. Some are large stars, some of them small stars, some of them sweep a wide circuit and some of them a small circuit, but so far as they are genuine, they get their light from the great central Sun around whom they make revolution. Let each one keep in his own sphere. The solar system Would be soon wrecked if the stars, instead of keeping their own orbits, should go to hunting down other stars. Ministers of religion should never clash. But in all the centuries of the Christian church, some of these stars have been hunting an Edward Irving or a Horace Bushnell or an Albert Barnes; and the stars that were in pursuit of the other stars lost their own orbit, and some of them could never again find it. Alas for the heresy hunters! The best way to destroy error is to preach the truth. The best way to scatter darkness is to strike a light. There is in immensity room enough for all the stars, and in the church room enough for all the ministers. The ministers who give up righteousness and the truth will get punishment enough anyhow, for they are “the wandering stars for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.” I should like, as a minister, when I am dying, to be able truthfully to say what a captain of the English army, fallen at the head of his column and dying on the Egyptian battle-field, said to General Wolseley, who came to condole with him: “I led them straight; didn’t I lead them straight, general?” God has put us ministers as captains in this battle-field of truth against error. Great at last will be our chagrin if we fall leading the people the wrong way; but great will be our gladness if, when the battle is over, we can hand our sword back to our great Commander, saying: “Lord Jesus! we led the people straight; didn’t we lead them straight?” Those ministers who go off at a tangent and preach some other gospel are not stars, but comets, and they flash across the heavens a little while and make people stare, and throw down a few meteoric stones, and then go out of sight if not out of existence. Brethren in the ministry, let us remember that God calls us stars, and our business is to shine, and to keep our own sphere, and then when we get done trying to light up the darkness of this world, we will wheel into higher spheres, and in us shall be fulfilled the promise “they that turn many to righteousness shall shine as the stars forever and ever.” The ministers are not all Pecksniffs and canting hypocrites, as some would have you think! Forgive me, if having at other times glorified the medical profession and the legal profession and the literary profession—I glorify my own. I have seen them in their homes and heard them in their pulpits, and a grander array of men never breathed, and the Bible figure is not stained when it calls them stars; and whole constellations of glorious ministers have already taken their places on high, where they shine even brighter than they shone on earth; Edward N. Kirk, of the Congregational Church; Stephen H. Tyng, of the Episcopal Church; Matthew Simpson, of the Methodist Church; John Dowling, of the Baptist Church; Samuel K. Talmage, of the Presbyterian Church; Thomas DeWitt, of the Reformed Church; John Chambers, of the Independent Church, and there I stop, for it so happens that I have mentioned the seven stars of the seven churches. I pass on to another mighty Bible seven, and they are the seven seals. St. John, in vision, saw a scroll with seven seals, and he heard an angel cry: “Who is worthy to loose the seals thereof?” Take eight or ten sheets of foolscap paper, paste them together and roll them into a scroll, and have the scroll at seven different places sealed with sealing-wax. You unroll the scroll till you come to one of these seals, and then you can go no farther until you break that seal; then unroll again until you come to another seal, and you can go no farther until you break that seal; then you go on until all the seven seals are broken, and the contents of the entire scroll are revealed. Now, that scroll with seven seals held by the angel was the prophecy of what was to come on the earth; it meant that the knowledge of the future was with God, and no man and no angel was worthy to open it; but the Bible says Christ opened it and broke all the seven seals. He broke the first seal and unrolled the scroll, and there was a picture of a white horse, and that meant prosperity and triumph for the Roman Empire, and so it really came to pass that for ninety years virtuous emperors succeeded each other—Nerva, Trajan, and Antoninus. Christ, in the vision, broke the second seal and unrolled again, and their was a picture of a red horse and that meant bloodshed, and so it really came to pass, and the next ninety years were red with assassinations and wars. Then Christ broke the third seal and unrolled it, and there was a picture of a black horse, which in all literature means famine, oppression, and taxation; and so it really came to pass. Christ went on until he broke all the seven seals and opened all the scroll. Well, the future of all of us is a sealed scroll, and I am glad that no one but Christ can open it. Do not let us join that class of Christians in our day who are trying to break the seven seals of the future. They are trying to peep into things they have no business with. Do not go to some necromancer or spiritualist or soothsayer or fortune-teller to find out what is going to happen to yourself, or your family, or your friends. Wait till Christ breaks the seal to find out whether in your own personal life or the life of the nation or the life of the world it is going to be the white horse of prosperity or the red horse of war or the black horse of famine. You will soon enough see him paw and hear him neigh. Take care of the present, and the future will take care of itself. If a man live seventy years, his biography is in a scroll having at least seven seals; and let him not during the first ten years of his life try to look into the twenties, nor the twenties into the thirties, nor the thirties into the forties, nor the forties into the fifties, nor the fifties into the sixties, nor the sixties into the seventies. From the way the years have got the habit of racing along, I guess you will not have to wait a great while before all the seals of the future are broken. I would not give two cents to know how long I am going to live, or in what day of what year the world is going to be demolished. I would rather give a thousand dollars not to know. Suppose some one could break the next seal in the scroll of your personal history, and should tell you that on the Fourth of July, 1901, you were to die—the summer after next; how much would you be good for between this and that? It would from now until then be a prolonged funeral. You would be counting the months and the days, and your family and friends would be counting them; and next Fourth of July you would rub your hands together and whine, “One year from today I am to go. Dear me! I wish no one had told me so long before. I wish that necromancer had not broken the seal of the future.” And meeting some undertaker, you would say: “I hope you will keep yourself free for an engagement the Fourth of July, 1901. That day you will be needed at my house. To save time, you might as well take my measure now, five feet eleven inches.” I am glad that Christ dropped a thick veil over the hour of our demise, and of the hour of the world’s destruction, when he said, “Of that day and hour knoweth no man; no, not the angels, but my Father only.” Keep your hands off the seven seals. There is another mighty seven of the Bible, viz., the seven thunders. What those thunders meant we are not told, and there has been much guessing about them; but they are to come, we are told, before the end of all things, and the world cannot get along without them. Thunder is the speech of lightning. There are evils in our world which must be thundered down, and which will require at least seven volleys to prostrate them. We are all doing nice, delicate, soft-handed work, in churches and reformatory institutions, against the evils of the world, and much of it amounts to a teaspoon dipping out the Atlantic ocean, or a clam shell digging away at a mountain, or a tackhammer smiting Gibraltar. What is needed is thunderbolts, and at least seven of them. There is the long line of fraudulent commercial establishments; every stone in the foundation and every brick in the wall and every nail in the rafter made out of dishonesty; skeletons of poorly-paid sewing-girls’ arms in every beam of that establishment; human nerves worked into every figure of that embroidery; blood in the deep dye of that refulgent upholstery; billions of dollars of accumulated fraud entrenched in massive storehouses, and stock companies manipulated by unscrupulous men, until the monopoly is defiant of all earth and heaven. How shall the evil be overcome? By treatises on the maxim: Honesty is the best policy? Or by soft repetition of the golden rule that we must do to others as we would have them do to us?” No, it will not be done that way. What is needed, and will come, is the seven thunders. There is drunkenness backed up by a capital mightier than in any other business. Intoxicating liquors enough in this country to float a navy. Good grain to the amount of sixty-seven million nine hundred and fifty thousand bushels annually destroyed to make the deadly liquid. Breweries, distilleries, gin shops, rum palaces, liquor associations; our nation spending annually seven hundred and forty millions of dollars for rum, resulting in bankruptcy, disease, pauperism, filth, assassination, death, illimitable woe. What will stop them? High license? No. Prohibition laws? No. Churches? No. Moral suasion? No. Thunderbolts will do it; nothing else will. Seven thunders! Yonder are intrenched infidelity and atheism, with their magazines of literature scoffing at our Christianity; their Hoe printing-presses busy day and night. There are their blaspheming apostles, their drunken Tom Paines and libertine Voltaires of the present as well as the past, re-enforced by all the powers of darkness from highest demon to lowest imp. What will extirpate those monsters of infidelity and atheism? John Brown’s Shorter Catechism about “Who made you?” or Westminster Catechism about “What is the chief end of man?” No. Thunderbolts! The seven thunders! For the impurities of the world, empalaced as well as cellared, epauletted as well as ragged, enthroned as well as ditched; for corrupt legislation which at times makes our State and national capitals a hemispheric stench; for superstitions that keep whole nations in squalor century after century, their Juggernauts crushing, their knives lacerating, their waters drowning, their funeral pyres burning, the seven thunders! O men and women, disheartened at the bad way things often go, hear you not a rumbling down the sky of heavy artillery, coming in on our side, the seven thunders of the Almighty? Do not let us try to wield them ourselves; they are too heavy and too fiery for us to handle; but God can and God will; and when all mercy has failed and all milder means are exhausted, then judgment will begin. Thunderbolts? Depend upon it, that what is not done under the flash of the seven candlesticks will be done by the trampling of the seven thunders. But I leave this imperial and multipotent numeral seven where the Bible leaves it, imbedded in the finest wall that was ever built, or will be constructed, the wall of heaven. It is the seven strata of precious stones that make up that wall. After naming six of the precious stones in that wall, the Bible cries out: “The seventh chrysolite!” The chrysolite is an exquisite green, and in that seventh layer of the heavenly wall shall be preserved forever the dominant color of the earth we once inhabited. I have sometimes been saddened at the thought that this world, according to science and Revelation, is to be blotted out of existence, for it is such a beautiful world. But here in this layer of the heavenly wall, where the numeral seven is to be embedded, this strata of green is to be photographed and embalmed and perpetuated, the color of the grass that covers the earth, the color of the foliage that fills the forest, the color of the deep sea. One glance at that green chrysolite a million years after this planet has been extinguished, will bring to mind just how it looked in summer and spring, and we will say to those who were born blind on earth, and never saw at all in this world, after they have obtained full eyesight in heaven: “If you would know how the earth appeared in June and August, look at that seventh layer of the heavenly wall, the green of the chrysolite.” And while we stand there and talk, spirit with spirit, that old color of the earth which had more sway than all the other colors put together, will bring back to us our earthly experiences, and noticing that this green chrysolite is the seventh layer of crystallized magnificence we may bethink ourselves of the domination of that numeral seven over all other numerals, and thank God that in the dark earth we left behind us we so long enjoyed the light of the seven golden candlesticks, and were all of us permitted to shine among the seven stars of more or less magnitude, and that all the seven seals of the mysterious future have been broken wide open for us by a loving Christ, and that the seven thunders having done their work have ceased reverberation, and that the numeral seven, which did such tremendous work in the history of nations on earth, has been given such a high place in that Niagara of colors, the wall of heaven, “the first foundation of which is jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite.” When shall these eyes thy heaven-built walls And pearly gates behold; Thy bulwarks with salvation strong, And streets of shining gold. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 8: 006. MARRIAGE ======================================================================== Marriage Genesis 2:23 : “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” Morning without a cloud. Atmosphere without a chill. Foliage without a crumpled leaf. Meadows without a thorn. Fit morning for the world’s first wedding. It shall be in church, the great temple of a world, sky-domed, mountain-pillared, sapphire-roofed. The sparkling waters of the Gihon and the Hiddekel will make the font of the temple. Larks, robins and goldfinches will chant the wedding march. Violet, lily and rose burning incense in the morning sun. Luxuriant vines sweeping their long trails through the forest aisle—upholstery of a spring morning. Wild beasts standing outside the circle looking on, like family servants from the back door gazing upon the nuptials. The eagle, king of birds; the locust, king of insects; the lion, king of beasts, waiting. Carpets of grass like emerald for the human pair to walk on. Hum of excitement, as there always is before a ceremony. Grass-blades and leaves whispering, and the birds a-chatter, each one to his mate. Hush all the winds, hush all the birds, hush the voices of the waters, for the king of the human race advances and his bride, a perfect man leading to the altar a perfect woman. God, her father, gives away the bride, and angels are the witnesses, and tears of morning dew stand in the eyes of the violets, and Adam takes the round hand that had never been worn with work, or stung with pain, into his own stout grasp, as he says: “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” Tumults of joy break forth, and all the trees of the wood clap their hands, and all the galleries of the forest sound with carol and chirp and chant, and the circle of Edenic happiness is complete; for while every quail hath answering quail, and every fish answering fish, and every fowl answering fowl, and every beast of the forest appropriate companion, at last man, the immortal, has for mate woman, the immortal. Married on the second Tuesday morning in May of the year one, Adam, the first man to Eve, the first woman, high Heaven officiating. Away with the coarse notion that marriage is a mere civil contract! It is a Paradisaical, six-thousand-year-old, divine institution, and all the laws since Blackstone, or before Blackstone, cannot appropriately marry two hearts unless the Lord Almighty has first married them. I propose to speak to you on the bitter enemies of the marriage relation. The first one that crawls out before our observation is polygamy. More people in this country than ever before believe in this doctrine, and there are those in all parts of the land, some under one name and some under another name, and some under no name at all, practicing it. Not only do Mormons, but a great many who despise that society, believe that the Bible sanctions polygamy, or plurality of wives, and there is not one Christian out of five hundred that can refute the slander. The Bible recognizes polygamy just as it recognizes all other styles of sin, but in no case sanctions it. On the contrary, God expressly thunders against it in the book of Leviticus, while St. Paul puts squarely before the world this passage: “Let every man have his own wife, and every woman her own husband.” How was it when the children of Israel were passing through the wilderness? For forty years there were two million five hundred thousand Israelites on the march. God especially looked after them, led them by pillar of cloud by day, and pillar of fire by night, slaked their thirst from the rocks, fed them with manna from heaven—especially looked after them—and in all the forty years among two million five hundred thousand Israelites, there was only one case of polygamy on record. Does that look as though God sanctioned it? No such crime attaches to Adam or Noah or Isaac or Joshua or Samuel or a hundred others I might mention. Who was the first polygamist mentioned in the Bible? Lamech; and he by his own confession was a murderer. And wherever in the Bible you find a man with more than one wife, you find him up to his neck in trouble! David and Solomon were grievously punished for their sins. David dates his letter from the “belly of hell,” and Solomon says, “There is no good under the sun. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Awfully depressed in spirit. Good for him! If he had had nine hundred and ninety-nine less wives, he would have taken a more cheerful view of human society. The whole drift of the Bible is against polygamy. God said at the beginning, “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a helpmeet for him.” Mark you the singular number—”a helpmeet.” If any one ever needed more than one companion, certainly that was Adam, for there was no society outside. God was there in Eden, starting the institution of marriage, and if plurality of wives had been right, that fact would have been demonstrated, and instead of one rib taken from Adam’s side, Adam would not have had a rib left. The race was to be bridged over the deluge. How was it done? How many wives did Noah take into the ark? His wife and the wives of his sons. If polygamy had been right, there would have been twenty wives for each, and so saved many more from the drowning. The Bible is not more thoroughly against theft and blasphemy and murder than it is against polygamy. Moreover, wherever civilization is in high advance, and wherever good morals dominate, you all know there they despise polygamy. Where polygamy exists there may be a house, a large house, and a splendid house, but no home. Suppose four or five or ten or twenty other queens tried to sit upon the same throne with Victoria—how much happiness in England would there be? Just as much as there will be happiness in any domestic establishment where more than one wife tries to be queen. God intended woman to be man’s equal, but in the polygamous state that is impossible. The whole implication is that it takes ten or twenty or thirty women to be equal to one man; it is very complimentary to the man, but not to the woman. All that poetry about man’s being the oak and woman the ivy is flat and stale and untrue. In tens of thousands of cases men in commercial disaster have been flung flat, and they have gone to their homes utterly discouraged, ready to give up the struggle of life, wishing they were dead—although when a man says he wishes he were dead he lies; try to kill him and see how he wishes he were dead—but still going home utterly discouraged, and the wife by her prayer and faith in God has given him encouragement, and told him never to mind his misfortune, that there was some way of escape, and planned this way and the other, after a while by her courage lifting him up again into commercial prosperity. Who now is the oak, and which is the ivy? Polygamy is one of the great enemies of the home circle. I like the ring of the utterance of that worldly merchant in New York who, when the secretary of the missionary society said to him, “I would like to have a contribution from you for our society,” replied, “Sir, I can’t see the importance of that institution, and therefore I have nothing to contribute; but you may call upon my wife, and perhaps she may take a different view of the subject, and she is always free to act at her discretion.” Such a beautiful thing as that could not have occurred in a polygamous family. Again I remark that all those entertainments which men a majority of evenings from their homes are enemies of the domestic relation. I make no indiscriminate assault upon club-houses. I must not be so reported. I know some of them which have a mission—an artistic mission or a social mission or a political mission or a religious mission. There is hardly a clergyman in these cities who does not belong to a theological club; and men in the same profession and in the same occupation and in the same position in life often club together. Indeed, if I had an unhappy home, or no home at all, I should seek out the very best club-house I could find, pay the admission fee, and spend my evenings there in conversation and in reading. But it has always been a mystery to me that men happy in their families, while compelled to go to business at eight or nine o’clock each morning, not getting back until the evening repast at six or seven o’clock—how they could find so many hours for absence. One would think that a man could once in a while, at any rate, stand it two hours with his family—from seven to nine o’clock. I have never known a man destroyed by being too domestic in his habits, or too fond of his home life, while I could unroll the scroll of thousands of names of men who lost their fortunes and lost their morals and lost their immortal souls by just the opposite course. When a man likes any place better than his own home, look out for breakers. How can you tell whether a man loves his home better than other places? By this infallible rule: a man always stays the most where he likes it the best. One man out of a hundred may have so firm a will, and be so confirmed in his morals, that he may spend every evening for forty years away from home, and yet be pure and good and honest; but the ninety-nine out of the hundred will go down under the process, and the years will be merely a pair of stairs to let them down into immorality and into death. Ask the good, intelligent, Christian men of your acquaintance what they think of all those institutions which take husband and father and son away the majority of the evenings. Some club-houses are very good; some are very polluted. I speak of neither when I say that the average club-house is the greatest foe to domestic life in America. But who built the club-houses throughout all our cities? I answer, in many cases the women. A woman is surprised that she has not as much attention paid to her now as before marriage, as when the man was a suppliant candidate for her preference. Perhaps there might be a retort, and she might be asked if she took as much pains to make herself attractive since marriage as before marriage. Those women make awful and eternal mistakes who, as soon as the hour of marriage is past, surrender all tastefulness of attire and all those little arts which, though indescribable, go to make up womanly attractiveness. How do you greet him at the door when he comes from the store or office or banking house? Are you as anxious to meet his admiration now as you were the first week of your acquaintance? The fact is that many women make their charms a net for one haul, and after they have made that haul they throw the net away. Before marriage you could play on the piano like a Thalberg or a Gottschalk; now you cannot play at all. Though you have been together sixty years, you ought still to be the bride adorned for her husband. Or do you spend the evenings fretting about the servants, or decrying the fact that your neighbors have it better than you have, or picking at your husband’s faults, putting him in a sort of infant class over which you are the superior, when you ought to make home a small heaven to his perturbed spirit. I believe that unwise, fretful and jealous women have built one-half of the club-houses of America. Let the women of this country read the newspapers and the books ten minutes a day, if they can afford no more time—and there is not one but can afford as much time as that—let women read books and newspapers ten minutes a day, and be familiar with the stirring questions of the hour, and be able to hold stout political argument, and that home will be a club-house to which many outsiders will flock. One intelligent woman has more attractiveness than twenty intelligent men. But the lawsuit has started, and the attorneys on both sides have been employed, and the witnesses are in the court-room, and the next case on the calendar is Average Club House versus Family Relation. Another foe of domestic life is the prevalent doctrine of free love There are newspapers flooding the country with that doctrine. Now the greatest argument against it is that all the advocates of it, without any exception, get to be libertines. First they break up their own home, then they break up the homes of others. Free lovers are nearly always Spiritualists, and they get the people of this world and the next world so mixed up that they do not know who belongs to that or who belongs to ours. Freelovism and Spiritualism are twin sisters, and they are so bankrupt in morals they do not pay one per cent. of righteousness. I tell the spirits of the next world, if they cannot find any better company in this world than that which they are said to pick out and pick up, they had better stay where they are if they have any regard for their reputation! When people in the marriage relation get what the Spiritualists call an affinity for some one outside that bond, they had better begin studying the ten commandments, beginning just after the middle of the Decalogue. When one gets such an affinity he is on the edge of a fall ten thousand feet down; but at that distance, when he strikes the rocks, he bounds off into the unfathomable. Again, I remark that a great foe of domestic life is easy divorce. People say, “We can go into this relationship somewhat recklessly, for if we get tired and want the knot untied, the law will untie it.” In France the law was established that all people who wanted to unmarry might by application be unmarried. Twenty thousand divorces in Paris in one year! Forty-eight thousand outcast children carried into the Foundling Hospital or kindred institutions—forty-eight thousand foundlings in one year! When the law lets down the bars all the cattle of beastliness break into the garden of home. While Rome was moral there was but one case of divorce recorded in five hundred years. She changed the law; then the deluge. Down went the home. Down went the empire. Divorce is too easy in this country. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, there were in one year seventy-six divorce suits; in Philadelphia there were two hundred and eighty-four in one year, and it was announced not long ago that in the State of New York divorce suits had increased five hundred per cent. Many get out of the bondage, as they call it, by passing a few months in Illinois or Dakota, where they find easy divorce. Now all this is right if marriage be merely a civil contract. Then you may dispose of a conjugal companion as you would of a barn or a house or a horse; but if it be a divine institution, then let legislators and judges of courts beware how on any other grounds than those announced by the Lord Almighty they unlock this relation. When it is found out that entering into the marriage contract a man puts his name to that contract not to be erased until it is erased on the marble slab of the sepulcher, then people will use more deliberation and more common sense and more prayer before they take this stupendous step. Instead of being lassoed by a curl or trading hearts in a philopena or marrying “just for fun,” they will find out that between cradle and grave the most tremendous place is the marriage altar, and that while before that altar the twain stand with joined hands, between them stands, all unseen, either the white-winged angel of blessing or the horned and hoofed and fire-nostriled Gorgon of despair. When a man marries he marries for heaven or for hell. Again, I remark corrupt literature is a powerful foe to the domestic relation. I refer to those slushy pamphlets and books which tell how impossible men met impossible women, and got into impossible difficulties and with impossible results, and villainy went unwhipped, and virtue fell dead. I mean those books. The fact is that many of the young married people of this day get their heads so filled with the false and sentimental notions in regard to the plain, serious, old-fashioned institution of marriage they are unfit for the common duties of life. There she goes, lounging around the house with a ten-cent novel over her arm, her slippers run down at the heel, the furniture undusted and the socks undarned, and everything from garret to cellar in domestic chaos. Go home and gather up all that infernal stuff and pitch it into the kitchen grate lest it blast you and ruin your children after you. I want to make you, my friends, the sworn enemies of everything that antagonizes the domestic relation. As I suppose the most of you had honorable ancestry, I want to adjure you today by the cradle in which you were rocked, and by the family altar where you knelt, and by the family Bible out of which you were instructed, and by the graves of your parents, if they have gone to their long sleep, to war against everything that would bring the marriage relation into disrepute. The best eulogy you can pronounce upon it is by making your own home relation right and beautiful. Do not take offense too easily from each other. Remember that hasty words and hasty action sometimes are not a matter of the heart, but merely a matter of the nerves. Husbands at the store worn out with anxieties, wives at home worn out with household cares, sometimes have their equipoise of spirit unbalanced. There are but few American men or women who have any nerves worth speaking of. These delicate telegraphic wires of the human body get damaged in the storm, and the lightnings of temper run over them very irregularly. And remember that this relation will soon end. Spare all the hard words, omit all the slights, for before long there will be a hearse standing at your front door that will take away out of your presence the best friend you have on earth, and the richest boon which God in his omnipotence and infinity has capacity to bestow—a good wife. If the wife go, that desolates all the house and all the heart and all the world. The silences are so appalling when her voice is still; the vacancies are so ghastly; the gloom is as though the midnights of fifty years hurtled. The little child running around the room with a hurt finger, calling for mother who will not come, and at night asking for a drink, and saying, “No, no; I want mamma to bring it.” Reminiscences that rush on the heart like a mountain torrent over which a cloud has burst. Her jewels, her books, her pictures, her dresses, some of them suggestive of banquet and some of burial, put into the trunk whose lid comes down with heavy thud as much as to say, “Dead!” The morning dead. The night dead. The air dead. The world dead. Oh, man, if in that hour you think of any unkind words uttered you would be willing to pay in red coin of blood every drop from your heart if you could buy back the unkind words, but they will not come back. Words gone from the lips do not fly in circles like doves coming back to their cote, but in a straight line, a million miles a minute across the eternities. They never come back. Flattering epitaphology, though a Dryden composed it, polished Aberdeen granite, though an Angelo chiseled it, cannot atone for unkindness to the living. While I speak my mind is full of the memory of a couple who were united in holy marriage December 19th, 1803. Their Christian names were old-fashioned like themselves. David the one, Catharine the other. Legal contract of course, but chiefly the Lord married them. They lived to see their crystal wedding, their silver wedding, their golden wedding, and nine years beside. They lived to weep over the graves of three of their children. They lived to pass through many hardships and trials, but they kept the Christian faith, they lived for God, for each other, for their children, and for everybody but themselves. Their hair grew white with age, and their steps became shorter and shorter, and their voice tremulous in the church psalm, though once they had led in the village choir. The one leaned heavily on a staff which I have in my house today, but heavier on the arm of God, who had always helped them. They were well mated. What was the joy of the one was the joy of the other, what was the sorrow of the one was the sorrow of the other. At last they parted. God gave to her three years precedence of departure. My father, though a very tender-hearted man, I never saw cry but once, and that at my mother’s burial. You see they had lived together fifty-nine years. My mother said in her dying moments to my father, “Father, wouldn’t it be pleasant if we could both go together?” But the three years soon passed, and they were reunited. Their children are gradually joining them, and will soon all be there; but the vision of that married life will linger in my memory forever. Together in the village church where they stood up to take the vows of the Christian just before their marriage day. Together through all the vicissitudes of a long life. Together this morning in the quiet of the Somerville graveyard. Together in heaven. And in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre, there they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife. There also they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife, and there I buried Leah.” Oh! there are many in the house this morning who can say with William Cowper: My boast is not that I deduce my birth From loins enthroned and rulers of the earth; But higher far my proud pretensions rise, The son of parents passed into the skies. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 9: 007. THE FIRST WOMAN ======================================================================== The First Woman Genesis 3:6 : “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.” It is the first Saturday afternoon in the world’s existence. Ever since sunrise Adam has been watching the brilliant pageantry of wings and scales and clouds, and in his first lessons in zoology and ornithology and ichthyology he has noticed that the robins fly the air in twos, and that the fish swim the water in twos, and that the lions walk the fields in twos, and in the warm redolence of that Saturday afternoon he falls off into slumber; and as if by allegory to teach all ages that the greatest of earthly blessings is sound sleep, this paradisaical somnolence ends with the discovery on the part of Adam of a corresponding intelligence just landed on the new planet. Of the mother of all the living I speak—Eve, the first, the fairest, and the best. I make me a garden. I inlay the paths with mountain moss, and I border them with pearls from Ceylon and diamonds from Golconda. There are woodbine and honeysuckle climbing over the wall, and starred spaniels sprawling themselves on the grass. And yet the place is a desert filled with darkness and death as compared with the residence of the woman of the text, the subject of my story. Never since have such skies looked down through such leaves into such waters! Never has river wave had such curve and sheen and bank as adorned the Pison, the Havilah, the Gihon, and the Hiddekel, even the pebbles being bdellium and onyx stone! What fruits, with no curculio to sting the rind! What flowers, with no slug to gnaw the root! What atmosphere, with no frost to chill and with no heat to consume! Bright colors tangled in the grass. Perfume in the air. Music in the sky. Great scene of gladness and love and joy. Right there under a bower of leaf and vine and shrub occurred the first marriage. Adam took the hand of this immaculate daughter of God and performed the ceremony when he said: “Bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh.” A forbidden tree stood in the midst of that exquisite park. Eve sauntering out one day alone, looks up at the tree and sees the beautiful fruit, and wonders if it is sweet, and wonders if it is sour, and standing there, says: “I think I will just put my hand upon the fruit; it will do no damage to the tree; I will not take the fruit to eat, but I will just take it down to examine it.” She examined the fruit. She said: “I do not think there can be any harm in my just breaking the rind of it.” She put the fruit to her teeth, she tasted, she allowed Adam also to taste the fruit, the door of the world opened, and then Sin entered. Let the heavens gather blackness, and the wind sigh on the bosom of the hills and cavern and desert and earth and sky join in one long, deep, hell-rending howl—”The world is lost!” Beasts that before were harmless and full of play put forth claw and sting and tooth and tusk. Birds whet their beak for prey. Clouds troop in the sky. Sharp thorns shoot up through the soft grass. Blastings on the leaves. All the chords of that great harmony are snapped. Upon the brightest home this world ever saw, our first parents turned their back and led forth on a path of sorrow the broken-hearted myriads of a ruined race. Do you not see, in the first place, the danger of a poorly regulated inquisitiveness? She wanted to know how the fruit tasted. She found out, but six thousand years have deplored that unhealthful curiosity. Healthful curiosity has done a great deal for letters, for art, for science, and for religion. It has gone down into the depths of the earth with the geologist, and seen the first chapter of Genesis written in the book of nature illustrated with engraving on rock, and it stood with the antiquarian while he blew the trumpet of resurrection over buried Herculaneum and Pompeii, until from their sepulcher there came up shaft and terrace and amphitheater. Healthful curiosity has enlarged the telescopic vision of the astronomer until worlds hidden in the distant heavens have trooped forth and have joined the choir praising the Lord. Planet weighed against planet and wildest comet lassooed with resplendent law. I say nothing against healthful curiosity. May it have other Leyden jars and other electric batteries and other voltaic piles and other magnifying-glasses with which to storm the barred castles of the natural world, until it shall surrender its last secret. We thank God for the geological curiosity of Professor Hitchcock, and the chemical curiosity of Liebig, and the zoological curiosity of Cuvier, and the inventive curiosity of Edison; but we must admit that unhealthful and irregular inquisitiveness has rushed thousands and tens of thousands into ruin. Eve just tasted the fruit. She was curious to find out how it tasted, and that curiosity blasted her and blasted all nations. So there are clergymen in this city, inspired by unhealthful inquisitiveness, who have tried to look through the key-hole of God’s mysteries—mysteries that were barred and bolted from all human inspection, and they have wrenched their whole moral nature out of joint by trying to pluck fruit from branches beyond their reach, or have come out on limbs of the tree from which they have tumbled into ruin without remedy. A thousand trees of religious knowledge from which we may eat and get advantage; but from certain trees of mystery how many have plucked their ruin! Election, free agency, trinity, resurrection—in the discussion of these subjects hundreds and thousands of people ruin the soul. There are men who actually have been kept out of the kingdom of heaven because they could not understand who Melchisedec was not! Oh, how many have been destroyed by an unhealthful inquisitiveness! It is seen in all directions. There are those who stand with the eye-stare and mouth-gape of curiosity. They are the first to hear a falsehood, build it another story high and add two wings to it. About other people’s apparel, about other people’s business, about other people’s financial condition, about other people’s affairs, they are overanxious. Every nice piece of gossip stops at their door, and they fatten and luxuriate in the endless round of the great world of tittle-tattle. Whoever hath an innuendo, whoever hath a scandal, whoever hath a valuable secret, let him come and sacrifice it to this Goddess of Splutter. Thousands of Adams and Eves do nothing but eat fruit that does not belong to them. Men quite well known as mathematicians failing in this computation of moral algebra: good sense plus good breeding, minus curiosity, equals minding your own affairs! Then, how many young men through curiosity go through the whole realm of French novels, to see whether they are really as bad as moralists have pronounced them! They come near the verge of the precipice just to look off. They want to see how far it really is down, but they lose their balance while they look, and fall into irremediable ruin; or, catching themselves, clamber up, bleeding and ghastly, on the rock, gibbering with curses or groaning ineffectual prayer. By all means encourage healthful inquisitiveness, but by all means discourage ill-regulated curiosity. This subject also impresses me with the fact that fruits that are sweet to the taste may afterward produce great agony. Forbidden fruit for Eve was so pleasant she invited her husband also to take of it; but her banishment from Paradise and six thousand years of sorrow and wretchedness and war and woe paid for that luxury. Sin may be very sweet at the start, and it may induce great wretchedness afterward. The cup of sin is sparkling at the top, but there is death at the bottom. Intoxication has great exhilaration for a while, and it fillips the blood, and it makes a man see five stars where others can see only one star, and it makes the poor man think himself rich, and turns cheeks which are white red as roses; but what about the dreams that come after, when he seems falling from great heights, or is prostrated by other fancied disasters, and the perspiration stands on the forehead—the night dew of everlasting darkness—and he is ground under the horrible hoof of nightmares shrieking with lips that crackle with all-consuming torture? “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth; but know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment!” Sweet at the start, horrible at the last. Go into that hall of revelry, where ungodly mirth staggers and blasphemes. Listen to the senseless gabble, see the last trace of intelligence dashed out from faces made in God’s own image. “Aha! aha!” says the roistering inebriate; “this is joy for you; fill high your cups, my boys. I drink to my wife’s misery and my children’s rags and my God’s defiance.” And he knows not that a fiend stirs the goblet in his hand and that adders uncoil from the dregs and thrust their forked tongues hissing through the froth on the rim. Sin rapturous at the start, awful at the last. That one Edenic transgression did not seem to be much, but it struck a blow which to this day makes the earth stagger. To find out the consequences of that one sin, you would have to compel the world to throw open all its prison doors and display the crime, and throw open all its hospitals and display the disease, and throw open all the insane asylums and show the wretchedness, and open all the sepulchres and show the dead, and open all the doors of the lost world and show the damned. That one Edenic transgression stretched chords of misery across the heart of the world and struck them with dolorous wailing, and it has seated the plagues upon the air and the shipwrecks upon the tempest, and fastened, like a leech, famine to the heart of the sick and dying nations. Beautiful at the start, horrible at the last. Oh, how many have experienced it! Are there among us those who are votaries of pleasure? Let me warn you, my brother. Your pleasure boat is far from shore, and your summer day is ending roughly, for the winds and the waves are loud-voiced, and the overcoming clouds are all awrithe and agleam with terror. You are past the “Narrows,” and almost outside the “Hook,” and if the Atlantic take you, frail mortal, you shall never get to shore again. Put back! row swiftly, swifter, swifter! Jesus from the shore casts a rope. Clasp it quickly, now or never. Are there not some of you who are freighting all your loves and joys and hopes upon a vessel which shall never reach the port of heaven? You near the breakers. One heave upon the rocks. What an awful crash was that! Another lunge may crush you beneath the spars or grind your bones to powder amid the torn timbers. Overboard for your life, overboard! Trust not that loose plank nor attempt the wave, but quickly clasp the feet of Jesus walking on the watery pavement, shouting until he hear you: “Lord, save me, or I perish.” Sin beautiful at the start—oh, how sad, how distressful at the last! The ground over which it leads you is hollow. The fruit it offers to your taste is poison. The promise it makes to you is a lie. Over that ungodly banquet the keen sword of God’s judgment hangs, and there are ominous handwritings on the walls. Observe also in this subject how repelling sin is when appended to great attractiveness. Since Eve’s death there has been no such perfection of womanhood. You could not suggest another attractiveness to the body or suggest any added refinement to the manner. You could add no gracefulness to the gait, no lustre to the eye, no sweetness to the voice. A perfect God made her a perfect woman, to be the companion of a perfect man in a perfect home, and her entire nature vibrated in accord with the beauty and song of Paradise. But she rebelled against God’s government, and with the same hand with which she plucked the fruit she launched upon the world the crimes, the wars, the tumults that have set the universe a-wailing. A terrible offset to all her attractiveness. We are not surprised when we find men and women naturally vulgar going into transgression. We expect that people who live in the ditch shall have the manners of the ditch; but how shocking when we find sin appended to superior education and to the refinements of social life! The accomplishments of Mary Queen of Scots make her patronage of Darnley, the profligate, the more appalling. The genius of Catherine II of Russia only sets forth in more powerful contrast her unappeasable ambition. The translations from the Greek and the Latin by Elizabeth, and her wonderful qualifications for a queen, make the more disgusting her capriciousness of affection and her hotness of temper. The greatness of Byron’s mind makes the more alarming Byron’s sensuality. Let no one think that refinement of manner or exquisiteness of taste or superiority of education can in any wise apologize for ill-temper, for an oppressive spirit, for unkindness, for any kind of sin. Disobedience Godward and transgression manward can have no excuse. Accomplishment heaven-high is no apology for vice hell-deep. My subject also impresses me with the regal influence of woman. When I see Eve with this powerful influence over Adam and over the generations that have followed, it suggests to me that great power all women have for good or for evil. I have no sympathy, nor have you, with the hollow flatteries showered upon woman from the platform and the stage. They mean nothing; they are accepted as nothing. Woman’s nobility consists in the exercise of a Christian influence; and when I see this powerful influence of Eve upon her husband and upon the whole human race, I make up my mind that the frail arm of woman can strike a blow which will resound through all eternity down among the dungeons or up among the thrones. I am not now speaking of representative women—of Eve, who ruined the race by one fruit-picking; of Jael, who drove a spike through the head of Sisera, the warrior; of Esther, who overcame royalty; of Abigail, who stopped a host by her own beautiful prowess; of Mary, who nursed the world’s Saviour; of Grandmother Lois, immortalized in her grandson Timothy; of Charlotte Corday, who drove the dagger through the heart of the assassin of her lover; or of Marie Antoinette, who by one look from the balcony of her castle quieted a mob, her own scaffold the throne of forgiveness and womanly courage. I speak not of these extraordinary persons, but of those who, unambitious for political power, as wives and mothers and sisters and daughters, attend to the thousand sweet offices of home. When at last we come to calculate the forces that decided the destiny of nations, it will be found that the mightiest and grandest influence came from home, where the wife cheered up despondency and fatigue and sorrow by her own sympathy, and the mother trained her child for heaven, starting the little feet on the path to the Celestial City; and the sisters by their gentleness refined the manners of the brother; and the daughters were diligent in their kindness to the aged, throwing wreaths of blessing on the road that leads father and mother down the steep of years. God bless our homes! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 10: 008. ORGAN DEDICATION ======================================================================== Organ Dedication Genesis 4:21 : “His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.” Lamech had two boys, the one a herdsman and the other a musician. Jubal the younger son was the first organ-builder. He started the first sound that rolled from the wondrous instrument which has had so much to do with the worship of the ages. But what improvement has been made under the hands of organ-builders such as Bernhard, Sebastian Bach, and George Hogarth and Joseph Booth and Thomas Robjohn, clear on down to George and Edward Jardine of our day. I do not wonder that, when the first full organ that we read of as given in 757 by an emperor of the east to a king of France, sounded forth its full grandeur, a woman fell into a delirium from which reason was never restored. The majesty of a great organ skilfully played is almost too much for human endurance, but how much the instrument has done in the reinforcement of Divine service it will take all time and all eternity to celebrate. Last April when we dedicated this church to the service of Almighty God our organ was not more than half done. It has now come so near completion that this morning I preach a sermon dedicatory of this mighty throne of sacred sound. It greets the eye as well as the ear. Behold this mountain of anthems! This forest of hosannas! Its history is peculiar. The late Mr. George Jardine recently made a tour of the organs of Europe. He gathered up in his portfolio an account of all the excellences of the renowned instruments of music on the other side of the Atlantic, and all the new improvements, and brought back that portfolio to America, declaring that Brooklyn Tabernacle should have the full advantage of all he had obtained, and although he did not live to carry out his idea, his son, Mr. Edward Jardine has introduced into this great organ all those improvements and grandeurs; so while you hear this organ you hear all that is notable in the organs of Lucerne and Fribourg and Haarlem and St. Paul and Westminster Abbey and other great organs that have enraptured the world. In it are banked up more harmonies than I can describe, and all foe God and the lifting of the soul toward him. Its four banks of keys, its one hundred and ten stops and appliances, its four thousand five hundred and ten pipes, its chime of thirty-seven bells, its cathedral diapason, and pedal double diapason, its song trumpet, and night horn, and vox humana, all, all, we dedicate to God and the soul. Its wedding marches, its thanksgiving anthems, its requiems will sound after all the voices that follow it today shall have sung their last song. To God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost we dedicate it! There has been much discussion as to where music was born. I think that at the beginning, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy, that the earth heard the echo. The cloud on which the angels stood to celebrate the creation, was the birthplace of song. Inanimate nature is full of God’s stringed and wind instruments. Silence itself—perfect silence—is only a musical rest in God’s great anthem of worship. Wind among the leaves, insects humming in the summer air, the rush of billow upon beach, the ocean far out sounding its everlasting psalm, the bobolink on the edge of the forest, the quail whistling up from the grass, are music. On Blackwell’s Island, I heard, coming from a window of the lunatic asylum, a very sweet song. It was sung by one who had lost her reason, and I have come to believe that even the deranged and disordered elements of nature would make music to our ears, if we only had acuteness enough to listen. I suppose that even the sounds in nature that are discordant and repulsive make harmony in God’s ear. You know that you may come so near an orchestra that the sounds are painful, instead of pleasurable, and I think we stand so near devastating storm and frightful whirlwind, we cannot hear that which makes to God’s ear and the ears of the spirits above us, a music as complete as it is tremendous. The Day of Judgment, which will be a day of uproar and tumult, I suppose will bring no dissonance to the ears of those who can calmly listen; although it be a boisterous piece of music. The musician sometimes breaks down the instrument on which he plays; so it may be on that Last Day that the March of God, played by the fingers of thunders and earthquakes and conflagrations, may break down the world upon which the music is executed. Not only is inanimate nature full of music, but God has so wonderfully organized the human voice, that in the plainest throat and lungs there are fourteen direct muscles which can make over sixteen thousand sounds, and there are thirty indirect muscles; it can make in all, it has been estimated, more than one hundred and seventy million different sounds. Now I say, when God has constructed the human voice and when he has filled the whole earth with harmony, and when he recognized it in the ancient temple, I have a right to come to the conclusion that God loved music. I propose, this morning in setting apart this organ for sacred use, to speak about sacred music; first showing you its importance, and then stating some of the obstacles to its advancement. I draw the first argument for the importance of sacred music from the fact that God commanded it. Through Paul he tells us to admonish one another in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs; and through David he cries out: “Sing ye to God, all ye kingdoms of the earth.” And there are scores of other passages I might name, proving that it is as much a man’s duty to sing as it is his duty to pray. Indeed, I think there are more commands in the Bible to sing than there are to pray. God not only asks for the human voice but for instruments of music. He asks for the cymbal, and the harp, and the trumpet as well as the organ. And I suppose that, in the last days of the church, the harp, the lute, the trumpet, and all the instruments of music whether they have been in the service of righteousness, or sin, will be brought by their masters and laid down at the feet of Christ, and then sounded in the church’s triumph, on her way from suffering unto glory. “Praise ye the Lord!” Praise him with your voices. Praise him with stringed instruments and with organs. I draw another argument for the importance of this exercise from its impressiveness. You know something of what secular music has achieved. You know it has made its impression upon governments, upon laws, upon literature, upon whole generations. One inspiring national air is worth thirty thousand men as a standing army. There comes a time in the battle when one bugle is worth a thousand muskets. I have to tell you that no nation, no church can afford to severely economize in music. Many of you are yourselves illustrations of what sacred song can do. Through it you were brought into the kingdom of Jesus Christ. You stood out against the argument and the warning of the pulpit; but when, in the sweet words of Isaac Watts, or Charles Wesley, or John Newton, or Toplady, the love of Jesus was sung to your soul, then you surrendered, as an armed castle, that could not be taken by a host, lifts its window to listen to a harp’s trill. There was a Scotch soldier dying in New Orleans, and a Scotch minister came in to give him the consolations of the Gospel. The man turned over on his pillow, and said: “Don’t talk to me about religion.” Then the Scotch minister began to sing a familiar hymn of Scotland, that was composed by David Dickinson, beginning with the words: Oh, Mother, dear Jerusalem, When shall I come to thee? He sang it to the tune of “Dundee,” and everybody in Scotland knows that; and as he began to sing the dying soldier turned over on his pillow, and said to the minister: “Where did you learn that?” “Why,” replied the minister, “my mother taught me that.” “So did mine,” said the dying Scotch soldier; and the very foundation of his heart was upturned, and then and there he yielded himself to Christ. Oh, it has an irresistible power. Luther’s sermons have been forgotten, but his “Judgment Hymn” sings on through the ages, and will keep on singing until the blast of the archangel’s trumpet shall introduce that very day which the hymn celebrates. I would to God that those who hear me would take these songs of salvation as messages from heaven; for just as certainly as the birds brought food to Elijah by the brook Cherith, so these winged harmonies, Godsent, are flying to your soul with the bread of life. Open your mouths and take it, oh, hungry Elijahs! In addition to the inspiring music of our own day we have a glorious inheritance of church psalmody which has come down fragrant with the devotions of other generations—tunes no more worn out than they were when our great-grandfathers climbed up on them from the church pew to glory? Dear old souls, how they used to sing! When they were cheerful, our grandfathers and grandmothers used to sing “Colchester.” When they were very meditative, then the board meeting-house rang with “South Street” and “St. Edmond’s.” Were they struck through with great tenderness, they sang “Woodstock.” Were they wrapped in visions of the glory of the church, they sang “Zion.” Were they overborne with the love and glory of Christ, they sang “Ariel.” And in those days there were certain tunes married to certain hymns, and they have lived in peace a great while, these two old people, and we have no right to divorce them. “What God hath joined together let no man put asunder.” But how hard-hearted we must be if all this sacred music of the past, and all the sacred music of the present does not start us heavenward. I have also noticed the power of sacred song to soothe perturbation. You may have come to God’s house with a great many worriments and anxieties, yet, perhaps, in the singing of the first hymn, you lost all those worriments and anxieties. You have read in the Bible of Saul and how he was sad and angry, and how the boy David came in and played the evil spirit out of him. A Spanish king was melancholy. The windows were all closed. He sat in the darkness. Nothing could bring him forth until Faraneli came and discoursed music for three or four days to him. On the fourth day he looked up, and wept, and rejoiced, and the windows were thrown open, and that which all the splendors of the court could not do, the power of song accomplished If you have anxieties and worriments, try this heavenly charm upon them. Do not sit down on the bank of the hymn, but plunge in, that the devil of care may be brought out of you. It also arouses to action. A singing church is always a triumphant church! If a congregation is silent during the exercise, or partially silent, it is the silence of death. If, when the hymn is given out, you hear the faint hum of here and there a father and mother in Israel, while the vast majority are silent, that minister of Christ who is presiding needs to have a very strong constitution if he does not get the chills. He needs not only the grace of God, but nerves like whalebone. It is amazing how some people, who have voice enough to discharge all their duties in the world, when they come into the house of God have no voice to discharge this duty. I really believe, if the church of Christ could rise up and sing as it ought to sing, that where we have a hundred souls brought into the kingdom of Christ, there would be a thousand. But I must now speak of some of the obstacles in the way of the advancement of this sacred music; and the first is that it has been impressed into the service of superstition. I am far from believing that music ought always to be positively religious. Refined art has opened places where music has been secularized, and lawfully so. The drawing-room, the musical club, the orchestra, the concert, by the gratification of pure taste, and the production of harmless amusement and the improvement of talent, have become great forces in the advancement of our civilization. Music has as much right to laugh in Surrey Gardens as it has to pray in St. Paul’s. In the kingdom of nature we have the glad fifing of the wind, as well as the long-meter psalm of the thunder. But while all this is so, every observer has noticed that this art, which God intended for the improvement of the ear, and the voice, and the head, and the heart, has often been impressed into the service of false religions. False religions have depended more upon the hymning of their congregations than upon the pulpit proclamation of their dogmas. Another obstacle has been an inordinate fear of criticism. The vast majority of people, singing in church, never want anybody else to hear them sing. Everybody is waiting for somebody else to do his duty. If we all sang, then the inaccuracies that are evident when only a few sing would not be heard at all; they would be drowned out. God only asks you to do as well as you can, and then, if you get the wrong pitch or keep wrong time, he will forgive any deficiency of the ear and imperfection of the voice. Angels will not laugh, if you should lose your place in the musical scale, or come in at the close a bar behind. There are three schools of singing, I am told—the German school, the Italian school, and the French school of singing. Now, I would like to add a fourth school, and that is the school of Christ. The voice of a contrite, broken heart, although it may not be able to stand human criticism, makes better music to God’s ear than the most artistic performance when the heart is wanting. I know it is easier to preach on this than it is to practice; but I sing for two reasons—first, because I like it, and next, because I want to encourage those who do not know how. I have but very little faculty in that direction, yet I am resolved to sing. God has commanded it, and I dare not be silent. He calls on the beasts, on the cattle on the dragons to praise him, and we ought not to be behind the cattle and the dragons. Another obstacle that has been in the way of advancement of this holy art, has been the fact that there has been so much angry discussion on the subject of music. There are those who would have this exercise conducted by musical instruments. In the same church, there are those who do not like musical instruments, and so it is organ and no organ, and there is a fight. In another church, it is a question whether the music shall be conducted by a precentor or by a drilled choir. Some want a drilled choir and some want a precentor, and there is a fight. Then there are those who would like in the church to have the organ played in a dull, lifeless, droning way, while there are others who would have it wreathed into fantastics, branching out in jets and spangles of sound, rolling and tossing in marvelous convolutions, as when, in pyrotechnic display, after you think a piece is exhausted, it breaks out in wheels, rockets, blue-lights, and serpentine demonstrations. Some would have the organ played in almost inaudible sweetness, and others would have it full of staccato passages that make the audience jump, with great eyes, and hair on end, as though by a vision of the Witch of Endor. And he who tries to please all will fail in everything. Nevertheless, you are to admit the fact that this contest which is going on in hundreds of the churches of the United States today, is a mighty hindrance to the advancement of this art. In this way scores and scores of churches are entirely crippled as to all influence, and the music is a damage rather than a praise. Another obstacle in the advancement of this art has been the erroneous notion that this part of the service could be conducted by delegation. Churches have said: “Oh, what an easy time we shall have: the minister will do the preaching, the choir will do the singing, and we will have nothing to do.” And you know as well as I that there are a great many churches all through this land, where the people are not expected to sing, the whole work is done by delegation of four, or six, or ten persons, and the audience is silent. In such a church in Syracuse, New York, an old elder persisted in singing, and so the choir appointed a committee to go and ask the squire if he would not stop. You know that in a great many churches, the choir are expected to do all the singing, and the great mass of people are expected to be silent, and if you utter your voice you are interfering. There they stand, the four with opera glasses dangling at their sides, singing “Rock of Ages cleft for me,” with the same spirit with which the night before they took their parts in the “Grand Duchess” or “Don Giovanni.” Have we a right to delegate to others the discharge of this duty which God demands of us? Suppose that four wood-thrushes should propose to do all the singing some bright day when the woods are ringing with bird voices. It is decided that four wood-thrushes shall do all the singing of the forest. Let all other voices keep silent. How beautifully the four warble. It is really fine music. But how long will you keep the forest still? Why, Christ would come into that forest and look up as he looked through the olives, and he would wave his hand and say: “Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord;” and, keeping time with the stroke of innumerable wings, there would be five thousand bird voices leaping into the harmony. Suppose this delegation of musical performers were tried in heaven; suppose that four choice spirits should try to do the singing of the upper temple. Hush now, thrones and dominions and principalities. David! be still, though you were “the sweet singer of Israel.” Paul! keep quiet, though you have come to that crown of rejoicing. Richard Baxter! keep still, though this is the “Saint’s everlasting Rest.” Four spirits now do all the singing. But how long would heaven be quiet? How long? “Hallelujah!” would cry some glorified Methodist from under the altar. “Praise the Lord!” would sing the martyrs from among the thrones. “Thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory!” a great multitude of the redeemed spirits would cry, myriads of voices coming into the harmony and the one hundred and forty-four thousand breaking forth into one acclamation. Stop that loud singing! Stop! No you might as well try to drown the thunders of the skies or beat back the roar of the sea; for every soul in heaven has resolved to do his own singing. Alas! that we should have tried on earth that which they cannot do in heaven, and, instead of joining all our voices in the praise of the Most High God, delegating perhaps to unconsecrated men and women this most solemn and most delightful service. Now, in this church, we have resolved upon the plan of conducting the music by organ and cornet. We do it for two reasons: one is that by throwing the whole responsibility upon the mass of the people, making the great multitude the choir, we might rouse more heartiness. The congregation coming on the Sabbath day feel that they cannot delegate this part of the great service to any one else, and so they themselves assume it. We have had a glorious congregational singing here. People have come many miles to hear it. They are not sure about the preaching but they can always depend on the singing. We have heard the sound coming up like “the voice of many waters,” but it will be done at a better rate after a while when we shall realize the height, and the depth, and the immensity of this privilege. I forgot to state the other reason why we adopted this plan. That is, we do not want any choir quarrels. You know very well that in scores of churches, there has been perpetual contention in that direction. The only church fight that ever occurred under my ministry was over a melodeon, in my first settlement. Have you never been in church on the Sabbath day and heard the choir sing, and you said, “That is splendid music”? The next Sabbath you were in that church and there was no choir at all. Why? The leader was mad or his assistants were mad, or they were all mad together. Some of the choirs are made up of our best Christian people. Some of the warmest friends I have ever had have stood up in them, Sabbath after Sabbath, conscientiously and successfully leading the praises of God. But the majority of the choirs throughout the land are not made up of Christian people, and three-fourths of the church fights originate in the organ loft. I take that back and say nine-tenths. Many of our churches are dying of choirs. We want to rouse all our families to the duty of sacred song. We want each family of our congregation to be a singing-school. Childish petulance, obduracy, and intractability would be soothed if we had more singing in the household, and then our little ones would be prepared for the great congregation on the Sabbath day, their voices uniting with our voices in the praises of the Lord. After a shower, there are scores of streams that come down the mountain side with voices rippling and silvery, pouring into one river and then rolling in united strength to the sea. So, I would have all the families in our church send forth the voice of prayer and praise, pouring it into the great tide of public worship that rolls on and on, to empty into the great, wide heart of God. Never can we have our church sing as it ought, until families sing as they ought. There will be a great revolution on this subject in all our churches. God will come down by his Spirit and rouse up all the old hymns and tunes that have not been more than half awake since the time of our grandfathers. The silent pews in the church will break forth into music, and when the conductor takes his place on the Sabbath day, there will be a great host of voices rushing into harmony. If we have no taste for this on earth what will we do in heaven, where they all sing and sing forever? I want to rouse you to a unanimity in Christian song that has never yet been exhibited. Come, now! clear your throats and get ready for this duty, or you will never hear the end of this. I never shall forget hearing a Frenchman sing the “Marseillaise” on the Champs Elysees, Paris, just before the battle of Sedan in 1870. I never saw such enthusiasm before or since. As he sang that national air, how the Frenchmen shouted! Have you ever, in an English assemblage, heard the band play “God save the Queen”? If you have, you know something about the enthusiasm of a national air. Now, I tell you that these songs we sing, Sabbath by Sabbath, are the national airs of Jesus Christ and of the kingdom of heaven, and if you do not learn to sing them here, how do you ever expect to sing the song of Moses and the Lamb? I should not be surprised at all, if some of the best anthems of heaven are made up of some of the best songs of earth. May God increase our reverence for Christian psalmody, and keep us from disgracing it by our indifference and frivolty. When Cromwell’s army went into battle, he stood at the head of them one day, and gave out the long-metre doxology to the tune of “Old Hundred,” and that great host, company by company, regiment by regiment, brigade by brigade, joined in the doxology: Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Praise him, all creatures here below; Praise him above, ye heavenly host, Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And while they sang they marched, and while they marched they fought, and while they fought they got the victory. O men and women of Jesus Christ, let us go into all our conflicts singing the praises of God, and then, instead of falling back, as we often do, from defeat to defeat, we will be marching on from victory to victory. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 11: 009. THE FATAL LINE ======================================================================== The Fatal Line Genesis 6:3 : “My spirit shall not always strive.” God was going to destroy the world with a universal deluge. He would give the people one hundred and twenty years in which to repent; but, in the chapter from which my text is taken he practically says: “That will be the utmost limit; I will not always importune men; my Spirit shall not always strive.” What was true and appropriate before the flood is true and appropriate since the flood. God is going to give you, my friends, a fair chance for heaven. It shall not be told in the Judgment Day, or in eternity, that Satan was permitted, unchallenged, to impose upon any man, or that one had no opportunity for escape. Some years ago a steamer burned on Long Island Sound. The hulk of it was beached, yet the bell of that steamer kept tolling during the day and tolling during the night and tolling for weeks, and it was very solemn to those who passed by. And I have to tell you, my brother, that wherever there is a moral shipwreck, wherever there is a spiritual catastrophe, God lifts a warning and it rings through day and through night and through month and through year. “Beware! beware!” When I first began to preach, I was very cautious lest I be misrepresented, and guarded the subject on all sides. I have got beyond that point. I find that I get on better when, without regard to consequences, I throw myself upon the hearts and consciences of men, telling them all I feel in regard to their present happiness and their eternal welfare. I come before you now with a special message. The trumpet shall give no uncertain sound. I stand between the living and the dead. Hear me, O immortal men and women! while I tell you how God’s Spirit strives with the soul, and then, as well as I may, set forth the fact that there is a limit to that merciful ministration. “My Spirit shall not always strive.” God help us! In the first place, I remark that God strives with us through silent contemplation. I take it for granted that you are thinking people, not among those absurd persons who pride themselves on having no thought about this life and no thought about the future. You do not belong to that class. Some day, perhaps, you were in the store, and a thought of the great future flashed across your mind. You opened your account-books. You bethought yourself: “Oh, that long debit account of God’s mercy toward me, and oh, that credit account—it is a blank page. “Are my accounts right with God?” You put your key into the money safe, you opened the door, you said to yourself: “If a fire should sweep down this street and destroy all my other valuables, those which I have put in this safe would be unharmed. Is my soul safe? Would it be safe in the conflagration which shall twist New York and Brooklyn and Boston and London and Paris with its tongue of flame as an ox’s tongue twists a grass blade?” Then there came a thought across your mind that brought the perspiration to your brow. Some one standing in the store said: “Do you feel well today?” A messenger had come to your store, the best messenger that ever came, a messenger from the Throne of God. It was a spiced gale from heaven that struck your cheek; it was a note from the heavenly bell that rang across your soul; it was the Spirit of Almighty God moving through your soul in the hour of silent contemplation. There, with your letters on the file above you, samples of goods all around you, the weigher whistling thoughtlessly on the step, all the surroundings completely secular, the Holy Spirit touched your heart. Did you realize it? Or perhaps you were in your front parlor on Sabbath morning. You saw the people going down the street. You said: “Where are they going? To church, I suppose. What is the use of all this praying and preaching and singing? I wonder if those people will be any better off than I at the last. Let me see. I am getting old. Am I getting better? What is this within me? They say it is a soul. What is a soul? Where am I bound? To eternity. What is eternity? Will I be happy, or will I be wretched?” And there, perhaps, under sudden impulse, you ejaculated the prayer which a man once offered: “O God! if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul, from hell, if there be a hell.” You did not hear the Holy Spirit stepping on the floor. You did not hear the rustling of his robes as he passed by, but he was there with a chalice. If you had taken one drop of water from that chalice it would have thrilled you with life eternal. Sometimes the Spirit comes in on the pavement of the sunlight, and then he comes floating in on the wave of the midnight; but come to every one of you he does, come to every one of you he has. No door can shut him out. No darkness can make him lose his way. No distance can weary him. He came to you and he said: “Child immortal, pilgrim to the grave, traveler to the Judgment Day, heir of eternity, are you ready?” But I remark in the second place that God strives with us through the preaching of the Gospel. The sermon may be a very poor sermon according to the rules of human criticism; but did it present a sympathetic and a pardoning Christ to the woes and the wants and the sins of men? What is preaching? Is it a philosophical disquisition? Is it scientific exploration? Then let us have our pulpits covered with philosophical apparatus, and let us have disquisitions about air currents and Faraday’s theory of electrical polarization. Preaching, I think, is hauling men out of their sins and starting them heavenward. If it do that, it does all. If it fail in that, it fails in all. Stand aside, then, with all your theories about how this thing ought to be done. Christ wants the people saved. That truth I mean to preach and pray and sing until every muscle of my body, every faculty of my mind, and every energy of my soul is exhausted. Glorious Gospel of the Son of God! Well now, how many sermons have you heard? A hundred? Some of you have heard five hundred, yea, a thousand. I suppose there are some of you who have heard two thousand sermons during the course of your life. Did you surrender your heart to God? God was striving through all those sermons. Have they been piled up and piled up against the last day? Some of you go back to boyhood. You remember the time when in the old country meeting-house, your father at one end of the pew, your mother at the other end of the pew, praying people all around, the aged minister bending over with his gray locks, pleading for your salvation. How long ago was that? Twenty, forty, fifty years ago? You remember it as though it were yesterday. O man! that was your chance for heaven. You have not had so good a chance since. The Holy Spirit was striving with your heart. Why, then, my brother, did you not surrender? But now you are in the house of God again. All things are propitious. Sun in mid-heavens shining brightly, many consecrated men and women present, ready to pray for your soul, the Holy Spirit striving with your heart, you feeling your sense of duty. What will be the result of this service? Will you now say, “Lord God, I now take thee for mine, I take thee for time, and I take thee for eternity?” In this vast audience there is not one with whom the Spirit of God is not striving. “Oh,” says some one, “I mean to become a Christian after a while, when I get rid of my bad habits!” My brother, you are going to work in the wrong way. Not the righteous, but sinners, Jesus came to call; and there is only one being in the whole universe that can get you out of your bad habits, and that is the Lord God, your Creator, Judge, and Saviour. “Oh,” says some one, “I am willing to become a Christian, but I can’t understand that doctrine of the atonement, how Christ died for my sins.” It is easily explained. You want it explained? During the Civil war, every day, you knew what substitution was—some man going into the war to save another from going, he taking the fatigues of the march, he taking the battle wounds, even dying for another. That is all there is in this doctrine of atonement. Christ taking our wounds, weeping our sorrows, bearing our burdens, dying our death. That is the meaning of the doctrine of the atonement. Substitution! Substitution! If you could get that doctrine into your soul you would march right out into the free land of the Gospel. In the name of the King of Heaven and Earth, I proclaim emancipation to all the enslaved. Oh, that God’s Spirit with his omnipotent hammer would strike that truth into your soul! Again I remark that God’s Spirit strives with a man through business annoyances and embarrassments. Where is your property? Gone. It may have taken you twenty, thirty, forty years to accumulate it. How long did it take you to lose it? A year, a month, a week, perhaps only just long enough to write your name on the back of a note. Oh, you have seen hard times in business! You have had struggles, trials, and annoyances enough to kill you. That was a dark day when the store rent became due and you had not the money to pay it. That was a dark day when the house rent became due and you had not the money to pay it. That was a dark day for you when the winter was coming on, and you could not clothe your household as it was your ambition to do. That was a dark day for you when the school bill became due and you could not meet it. You have hard times, some of you. That was a dark day when you called your friends together and told them you would have to suspend payment. That was a dark day when your household goods went down under the auctioneer’s mallet. That was a dark day when you had to give up your home. I stand before men whose life has been a business tragedy. You cannot tell me anything about it: I know it. Perhaps there was an evening when the boat was coming from New York, and the passengers came to the front of the boat to land on the Brooklyn side and you went to the back part of the boat and got outside the chain and looked down into the water and thought how calm and peaceful it must be under the wave. Oh, yes; you have had trial, my brother, and God was striving through all that, he was telling you to make a higher investment, to seek after treasures that never fail, in banks that never break. By every bank protest, by every insulting dun, by every snap judgment, by every foreclosed mortgage, God was telling you to look beyond this scene of grip and gouge and loss and gain. Did you do it? No, my brother, you went to the bank to get a discount, you went to the broker’s to get a note discounted, you went to your creditors to get an extension of time and you went to a friend to get his name on your paper and you borrowed here to pay there and you went to every one but God, to whom, first of all, you ought to have gone, for he never saw a good man in trouble but he helped him out. But some of you tomorrow morning, at seven, eight, or nine o’clock, will go over to business, and what will become of you in that whirl of New York life before Saturday night, I know not. Men all the time going overboard in morals, overboard in business, no one to help them. Plenty of friends to help when you do not want any help, but when you want help, no friends. “Oh!” you say when you see a man going overboard, “it’s only a man, only one man.” What is a man? A soul with imperishable hopes, high as the Throne of God. What is a man? The battle ground of three worlds, his hands taking hold of destinies of light or darkness. A man! No line can measure him, no boundary line can limit him, the archangel before the throne cannot outlive him. The stars will go out, but he will watch their extinguishment; the world will burn, but he will gaze on the conflagration; endless ages will march by; he will count their tramp! tramp! A man! A man! The masterpiece of the Lord Almighty. Yet you say it is only a man gone overboard! Oh, when a man goes overboard, try to help him, get over the side of the ship, with your left arm cling to the ship, with your right hand clutch for his immortal soul, and may God give grip to your fingers and strength to your arms until you bring him clear over the gunwales! Know that through all bankruptcy, through all panic, through all insolvency, through all business losses, through all financial embarrassments, God was striving, striving, striving with your soul. I remark again: God strives with man through bereavement. Are your families all together today? How many families represented in this audience are unbroken? Not many. It is a sad thing to lose property, it is a sad thing to lose social position, it is a sad thing to lose a name, a good name; but bereavement in addition to all this loss—bereavement with fiery fingers taking hold of the roots of your soul and pulling until the tendrils snap! We have all tasted of that cup of bereavement, we know what it is. If you can keep your home, it does not make much difference about anything else. If the world abuses us outside, we go home, and there all is forgotten; if the world misinterprets us, we go home, there we are understood; but if the home be abolished or shadowed by some great bereavement, unto what resource shall the soul then run? But God knows best. A mother in my parish came to me and said: “I have buried my child, and the beauty and the attraction of the world are gone, and I have only one desire, and that is to get up into his companionship.” You see that was the Holy Spirit drawing her upward into the kingdom. That is the way you got into the kingdom of God, my brother. I could indicate many who have told me this was the truth in regard to them. You see where Christ, the Shepherd, takes a lamb in his arms, the sheep will follow. A daughter was dying in a cabin in the West, and she said: “Father, lie down with me, it is so cold.” He said: “My child, is the flood strong?” and she said, “Yes, the flood is strong, but I see angels on the other bank. Father, there is a mist in the room. You will be lonely, father, won’t you? Is this death, father?” “My child, it is.” “Thank God,” she said as her spirit vanished into the skies. Through how many bereavements God has called you! Oh, you remember that day after the obsequies, when all your friends had left the house and you were alone. There was a voice whispering into your heart “Poor, beaten, broken spirit, in Christ is thy comfort. Go to him; not in wrath, but in mercy, cometh this stroke.” Who was it that whispered that? The Spirit! The Spirit! Through sickness that well-nigh took you away, through abuse of false friends, through losses that put their foaming mouth into the fountain of your strength and drank it dry, God’s Spirit has been striving with your soul. But my text says God’s Spirit will not always strive. What does that mean? It means that there is a line, a fatal line, beyond which if a man go unpardoned there is no mercy to be had. There are men who seem to have sinned away their day of grace. The city of Jerusalem was an illustration of this. That city was doomed to destruction forty years before it was destroyed. Christ said: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold your house is left unto you desolate.” That was the announcement. Thereafter it stood forty years. Then the destruction came. In the courts there is a space of time between the sentence and the execution, and in religious things it may be so; the sentence may come at one time and the execution of that sentence be postponed for months or for years. If you go through a forest you will sometimes find a mark around a tree; the woodman has come with his ax and marked that tree. It is to be cut down after a while. I am told by the woodman that that tree will not grow after it is marked in that way. It is girdled. So there are men who are marked for death. They have sinned away their day of grace. They have grieved away God’s Spirit. Their opportunity is gone. They are girdled. Says some one, “Do you suppose there is any one present who has come into that condition and who has crossed that fatal line?” I do not know. I think not. My reason for thinking that no one present has crossed the line is because you are still attentive, thoughtful about your soul, and ambitious for heaven. This is the work of the Holy Ghost, and it makes me think the Spirit has not been fatally grieved away, and that you have not yet crossed the line. Let me say, however, the line of the grave will certainly be a line beyond which an unpardoned soul may not go and yet find mercy. There will be no place in all the sepulchre where we can kneel down and pray. Our friends may call to us, we cannot answer. “As the tree falleth, so it must lie.” “My Spirit shall not always strive.” A minister came to a man eighty years of age, and implored him to be a Christian. “Why,” said the man, “there is no chance for me; when I was twenty years of age, the Spirit of God strove with my heart; I grieved him away, and I haven’t had a serious emotion since.” “Well,” said the minister, “it is not too late to pray.” The aged man said, “It will do no good.” But the minister persisted in praying and persisted in religious conversation. Some years passed on, and notwithstanding all that was done for that aged man’s soul, his last words were: “I know I shall be lost.” He had grieved away the Spirit, crossed the line. “The door was shut.” Why are you here today? Is it to hear what odd or peculiar thing the preacher may say? Is it because you are tired of your home that you come forth? Is it because you want to see many people gathered together? Is it accidental that you are here? My brother, you remember that accidental calls decided your life. You made a business call one day that decided all your financial history. The event which seemed of so little importance you hardly thought it worth mentioning, decided everything; and though your coming here may seem to be accidental, it may decide your eternity. God says to his Spirit this moment, “Go to that man, knock at the gate of his soul, say to him, ‘I come with pardon for thy sin, with comfort for thy trouble, with deliverance from thy captivity.’“ Oh, what a moment! Charged with eternal destinies. You know that there is no pillow soft in the last hours but the bosom of Jesus. You know that there are no hands that can help you up the steep of heaven but the hands of Christ. You are a captive, you want to be free, you dash against the door of your prison house, the door partially opens, you almost get out but the door slams shut against you and crushes you against the door-post. Oh, when will the day of deliverance come? I wish it might come now. But I am powerless. Omnipotent spirit of God, seize that man and pull him back from ruin. Plant his feet upon the eternal rock. Two men were standing among the Alps, and one of them remarked that the ground was insecure and they had better retreat; but before they could retreat, the ground broke under them. One was precipitated hundreds of feet. The other in his descent threw his arm around a tree and was saved. It seems we are standing, some of us, on a slippery place. Our hopes are going away, our prospects of heaven are going away, leaving us less and less chance. Some, perhaps, from this service will be precipitated. They will go out farther from God and farther from heaven. Oh, throw your arm around the cross; there is a tree that can save you. Throw both arms around the cross of the Son of God. Your life is in it, your eternal life is in it. Believe and live. Refuse and die. There will be many, I hope, who will start for heaven this morning. Here is a great multitude of young people. I think I hear them say, “I will not wait until my life is worn out, and I have nothing to surrender to the Lord; I will give him my best days, I will give him my physical health, I will give him ail the hilarities of my spirit. My Father! Thou are the guide of my youth.” There are young men here who are hardly beset in business matters—they had great temptations yesterday and Friday and Thursday and Wednesday, and they will have great temptations tomorrow—they will say this morning: “We want God, and we want him now. Lord God of my father, Lord God of my mother, have mercy on us.” Then I think there will be whole families who will this day turn into the kingdom of God. The father will say, “We have never had prayers at our house; we must have prayers today.” The mother will say, “We have too long neglected religion; we have not brought up our children in the fear and love of God.” The mother will come into the kingdom, and then the children will come, and there will be a whole family, one on earth and one in heaven. There will be an aged man tottering on his staff. Stand back and let him hasten to the cross. It is the eleventh hour with him. Let him pass. Put no impediment in the way. This is his last hour. God is waiting for him. Mercy even for the chief of sinners. The aged man will find the peace of the Gospel today. Here is some one in yonder gallery who says, “No one cares for my soul.” I care for it, immortal man, I care for it. Enter the kingdom of God. Do you know that you are very near it now? Do you know that there are only three steps?—I counted wrong; there are only two steps before you enter the kingdom of God. Nay, there is only one—one step. Believe, believe and live. Oh, take that step into the kingdom of God. You may have read in history that Constantine marching with his army saw the figure of a cross on the night sky, and over it the words, “By this conquer.” After this day is past and the night is come, I would God that you might see on the night sky the figure of a cross, the cross of a Saviour’s suffering in your behalf, and that you might read, “By this conquer; by this conquer sin; by this conquer trouble; by this conquer death and hell.” Come into the kingdom. I give a wide invitation. I do not allow one man, one woman, in all the audience to escape it. All, all may come. But not always. There is a fatal line that may be crossed. Sinner, perhaps this very day Thy last accepted time may be; Oh! shouldst thou grieve him now away, Then hope may never beam on thee.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 12: 010. A BROAD GOSPEL ======================================================================== A Broad Gospel Genesis 7:1 : “Come thou and all thy house into the ark.” We do not need the Bible to prove the Deluge. The geologist’s hammer announces it. Sea-shells and marine formations on the top of some of the highest mountains of the earth prove that at some time the waters washed over the top of the Alps and the Andes. In what way the catastrophe came, we know not; whether by the stroke of a comet, or by flashes of lightning, changing the air into water, or by a stroke of the hand of God, like the stroke of the ax between the horns of the ox, the earth staggered. To meet the catastrophe, God ordered a great ship built. It was to be without prow, for it was to sail to no shore. It was to be without helm, for no human hand should guide it. It was a vast structure, probably as large as two or three Cunard steamers. It was the Great Eastern of olden time. The ship is done. The door is open. The lizards crawl in. The cattle walk in. The grasshoppers hop in. The birds fly in. The invitation goes forth to Noah: “Come thou and all thy house into the ark.” Just one human family embark on the strange voyage, and I hear the door slam shut. A great storm sweeps along the hills, and bends the cedars until all the branches snap in the gale. There is a moan in the wind like unto the moan of a dying world. The blackness of the heavens is shattered by the flare of the lightnings, that look down into the waters, and throw a ghastliness on the face of the mountains. How strange it looks! How suffocating the air seems! The big drops of rain begin to plash upon the upturned faces of those who are watching the tempest. Crash! go the rocks in convulsion. Boom! go the bursting heavens. The inhabitants of the earth, instead of flying to house-top and mountain-top, as men have fancied, sit down in dumb, white horror to die. For when God grinds mountains to pieces, and lets the ocean slip its cable, there is no place for men to fly to. See the ark pitch and tumble in the surf; while from its windows the passengers look out upon the shipwreck of a race, and the carcasses of a dead world. Woe to the mountains! Woe to the sea! I am no alarmist. When, on the twentieth of September, after the wind has for three days been blowing from the northeast, you prophesy that the equinoctial storm is coming, you simply state a fact not to be disputed. Neither am I an alarmist when I say that a storm is coming, compared with which Noah’s deluge was but an April shower; and that it is wisest and safest for you and for me to get safely housed for eternity. The invitation that went forth to Noah sounds in our ears: “Come thou and all thy house into the ark.” Well, how did Noah and his family come into the ark? Did they climb in at the window, or come down the roof? No; they went through the door. And just so, if we get into the ark of God’s mercy, it will be through Christ, the door. The entrance to the ark of old must have been a very large entrance. We know that it was, from the fact that there were monster animals in the earlier ages; and, in order to get them into the ark two and two, according to the Bible statement, the door must have been very wide and very high. So the door into the mercy of God is a large door. We go in, not two and two, but by hundreds and by thousands and by millions. Yea, all the nations of the earth may go in, ten millions abreast. The door of the ancient ark was in the side. So now it is through the side of Christ—the pierced side, the wide-open side, the heart side—that we enter. The Roman soldier, thrusting his spear into the Saviour’s side, expected only to let the blood out, but he opened the way to let all the world in. Oh, what a broad Gospel to preach! If a man is about to give an entertainment, he issues one or two hundred invitations, carefully put up and directed to the particular persons whom he wishes to entertain. But God our Father makes a banquet and goes out to the front door of heaven and stretches out his hands over land and sea, and, with a voice that penetrates the Hindu jungle and the Greenland ice-castle and Brazilian grove and English factory and American home, cries out, “Come! for all things are now ready!” It is a wide door! The old cross has been taken apart, and its two pieces are stood up for the door posts, so far apart that all the world can come in. Kings scatter treasures on days of great rejoicing. So Christ, our King, comes and scatters the jewels of heaven. Rowland Hill said that he hoped to get into heaven through the crevices of the door. But he was not obliged thus to go in. After having preached the Gospel in Surrey Chapel, going up toward heaven, the gate-keeper cried, “Lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates, and let this man come in!” The dying thief went in. Richard Baxter and Robert Newton went in. Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America may yet go through this wide door without crowding. Ho! every one—all conditions, all ranks, all people! Luther said that this truth was worth carrying on one’s knees from Rome to Jerusalem; but I think it worth carrying all around the globe, and all around the heavens, that “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Whosoever will, let him come through the large door. Archimedes wanted a fulcrum on which to place his lever, and then he said that he could move the world. Calvary is the fulcrum, and the Cross of Christ is the lever; and by that power all nations shall yet be lifted. Further, it is a door that swings both ways. I do not know whether the door of the ancient ark was lifted, or rolled on hinges; but this door of Christ opens both ways. It swings out toward all our woes; it swings in toward the raptures of heaven. It swings in to let us in. It swings out to let our ministering ones come out. All are one in Christ—Christians on earth and saints in heaven. One army of the living God, At his command we bow; Part of the host have crossed the flood, And part are crossing now. Swing in, O blessed door! until all the earth shall go in and live. Swing out until all the heavens come forth to celebrate the victory. But, further, it is a door with fastenings. The Bible says of Noah, “The Lord shut him in.” A vessel without bulwarks or doors would not be a safe vessel to go in. When Noah and his family heard the fastening of the door of the ark, they were very glad. Without those doors were fastened, the first heavy surge of the sea would have whelmed them; and they might as well have perished outside the ark as inside the ark. “The Lord shut him in.” Oh, the perfect safety of the ark! The surf of the sea and the lightnings of the sky may be twisted into a garland of snow and fire—deep to deep, storm to storm, darkness to darkness; but once in the ark, all is well. “God shut him in.” There comes upon the good man a deluge of financial trouble. He had his thousands to lend; now he cannot borrow a dollar. He once owned a store in New York, and had branch houses in Boston, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. He owned four horses, and employed a man to keep the dust off his coach, phaeton, carriage, and curricle; now he has hard work to get shoes in which to walk. The great deep of commercial disaster was broken up, and fore and aft and across the hurricane-deck the waves struck him. But he was safely sheltered from the storm. “The Lord shut him in!” A flood of domestic troubles fell on him. Sickness and bereavement came. The rain pelted. The winds blew. The heavens are aflame. All the gardens of earthly delight are washed away. The mountains of joy are buried fifteen cubits deep. But, standing by the empty crib and in the desolated nursery and in the doleful hall, once a-ring with merry voices, now silent forever, he cried: “The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” “The Lord shut him in.” All the sins of a lifetime clamored for his overthrow. The broken vows, the dishonored Sabbaths, the outrageous profanities, the misdemeanors of twenty years reached up their hands to the door of the ark to pull him out. The boundless ocean of his sin surrounded his soul, howling like a simoom, raving like an Euroclydon. But, looking out of the window, he saw his sins sink like lead into the depths of the sea. The dove of heaven brought an olive-branch to the ark. The wrath of the billow only pushed him toward heaven. “The Lord shut him in!” The same door fastenings that kept Noah in keep the world out. I am glad to know that when a man reaches heaven all earthly troubles are done with him. Here he may have had it hard to get bread for his family; there he will never hunger any more. Here he may have wept bitterly; there “the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne will lead him to living fountains of water, and God will wipe away all tears from his eyes.” Here he may have hard work to get a house; but in my Father’s house are many mansions, and rent-day never comes. Here there are death-beds and coffins and graves; there no sickness, no weary watching, no choking cough, no consuming fever, no chattering chill, no tolling bell, no grave. The sorrows of life shall come up and knock at the door, but no admittance. The perplexities of life shall come up and knock on the door, but no admittance. Safe forever! All the agony of earth in one wave dashing against the bulwarks of the ship of celestial light shall not break them down. Howl on, ye winds, and rage, ye seas! The Lord—” the Lord shut him in!” Oh, what a grand old door! so wide, so easily swung both ways, and with such sure fastenings! No burglar’s key can pick that lock. No swarthy arm of hell can shove back that bolt. I rejoice that I do not ask you to come aboard a crazy craft with leaking hulk and broken helm and unfastened door; but an ark fifty cubits wide and three hundred cubits long, and a door so large that the round earth, without grazing the posts, might be bowled in! Now, if the ark of Christ is so grand a place in which to live and die and triumph, come into the ark. Know well that the door that shut Noah in shut the world out; and though, when the pitiless storm came pelting on their heads, they beat upon the door, saying, “Let me in! let me in!” the door did not open. For one hundred and twenty years they were invited. They expected to come in; but the antediluvians said, “We must cultivate these fields; we must be worth more flocks of sheep and herds of cattle; we will wait until we get a little older; we will enjoy our farm a little longer.” But meanwhile the storm was brewing. The fountains of heaven were filling up. The pry was being placed beneath the foundations of the great deep. The last year had come, the last month, the last week, the last day, the last hour, the last moment. In an awful dash, an ocean dropped from the sky, and another rolled up from beneath; and God rolled the earth and sky into one wave of universal destruction. So men now put off going into the ark. They say they will wait twenty years first. They will have a little longer time with their worldly associates. They will wait until they get older. They say, “You cannot expect a man of my attainments and of my position to surrender myself just now. But before the storm comes, I will go in. Yes, I will. I know what I am about. Trust me!” After a while, one night about twelve o’clock, going home, he passes a scaffolding as a gust of wind strikes it, and a plank falls. Dead! and outside the ark! Or, riding in the park, a vehicle with a reckless driver crashes into him, and his horse becomes unmanageable and he shouts, “Whoa! Whoa!” and takes another twist in the reins and plants his feet against the dashboard and pulls back. But no use. It is not so much down the avenue that he flies as on the way to eternity. Out of the wreck of the crash his body is drawn, but his soul is not picked up. It fled behind a swifter courser into the great future. Dead! and outside the ark! Or, some night, he wakes up with a distress that momentarily increases, until he shrieks out with pain. The doctors come in, and they give him twenty drops, but no relief; forty drops, fifty drops, sixty drops, but no relief. No time for prayer. No time to read one of the promises. No time to get a single sin pardoned. The whole house is aroused in alarm. The children scream. The wife faints. The pulses fail. The heart stops. The soul flies. O my God! Dead! and outside the ark! I have no doubt that derision kept many people out of the ark. The world laughed to see a man go in, and said, “Here is a man starting for the ark. Why, there will be no deluge. If there is one, that miserable ship will not weather it. Aha! going into the ark! Well, that is too good to keep. Here, fellows, have you heard the news? This man is going into the ark.” Under this artillery of scorn the man’s good resolution perished. And so there are hundreds kept out by the fear of derision. The young man asks himself, “What would they say at the store to-morrow morning if I should become a Christian? When I go down to the club-house they would shout, ‘Here comes that new Christian. Suppose you will not have anything to do with us now. Suppose you are praying now. Get down on your knees and let us hear you pray. Come, now, give us a touch. Will not do it, eh? Pretty Christian you are!’“ Is it not the fear of being laughed at that keeps, you out of the Kingdom of God? Which of these scorners will help you at the last? When you lie down on a dying pillow, which of them will be there? In the day of eternity, will they bail you out? Ah! they can keep you out of heaven; but can they keep you out of hell? My friends and neighbors, come in right away. Come in through Christ, the wide door—the door that swings out toward you. Come in, and be saved. Come and be happy. “The Spirit and the Bride say, Come.” Room in the ark! Room in the ark! But do not come alone. The text invites you to bring your family. “Come thou and all thy house.” That means your wife and your children. You cannot drive them in. If Noah had tried to drive the pigeons and the doves into the ark, he would only have scattered them. Some parents are not wise about these things. They make iron rules about Sabbaths, and they force the catechism down the throat, as they would hold the child’s nose and force down a dose of rhubarb and calomel. You cannot drive your children into the ark. You can draw your children to Christ, but you cannot coerce them. The Cross was lifted, not to drive, but to draw. “If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.” As the sun draws up the drops of morning dew, so the Sun of Righteousness exhales the tears of repentance. “Come thou and all thy house into the ark.” Be sure that you bring your husband and wife with you. How would Noah have felt if, when he heard the rain pattering on the roof of the ark, he knew that his wife was outside in the storm? No; she went with him. And yet some of you are on the ship “outward bound” for heaven; but your companion is unsheltered. You remember the day when the marriage ring was set. Nothing has yet been able to break it. Sickness came, and the finger shrank, but the ring staid on. The twain stood alone above a child’s grave, and the dark mouth of the tomb swallowed up a thousand hopes; but the ring dropped not into the open grave. Days of poverty came, and the hand did many a hard day’s work; but the rubbing of the work against the ring only made it shine brighter. Shall that ring ever be lost? Will the iron clang of the sepulcher gate crush it forever? I pray God that you who have been married on earth may be together in heaven. Oh! by the quiet bliss of your earthly home; by the babe’s cradle; by all the vows of that day when you started life together, I beg you to see to it that you both get into the ark. Come in, and bring your wife or your husband with you—not by fretting about religion, or ding-donging them about religion, but by a consistent life, and by a compelling prayer that shall bring the throne of God down into your bedroom. Better live in the smallest house in Brooklyn and get into heaven, than live fifty years in the finest house on Madison Square, and wake up at last and find that one of you, for all eternity, is outside the ark. Go home to-night; lock the door of your room; take up the Bible and read it together, and then kneel down and commend your souls to him who has watched you all these years; and, before you rise, there will be a fluttering of wings over your head, angel crying to angel, “Behold! they pray!” But this does not include all your family. Bring the children too. God bless the dear children! What would our homes be without them? We may have done much for them. They have done more for us. What a salve for a wounded heart there is in the soft palm of a child’s hand! Did harp or flute ever have such music as there is in a child’s “goodnight”? From our coarse, rough life, the angels of God are often driven back; but who comes into the nursery without feeling that angels are hovering around? They who die in infancy go into glory, but you are expecting your children to grow up in this world. Is it not a question, then, that rings through all the corridors and windings and heights and depths of your soul, what is to become of your sons and daughters for time and for eternity? “Oh!” you say, “I mean to see that they have good manners.” Very well. “I mean to dress them well, if I have myself to go shabby.” Very good. “I shall give them an education, and I shall leave them a fortune.” Very well. But is that all? Don’t you mean to take them into the ark? Don’t you know that the storm is coming, and that out of Christ there is no safety? no pardon? no hope? no heaven? How to get them in? Go in yourself!. If Noah had staid out, do you not suppose that his sons—Shem, Ham, and Japhet—would have staid out? Your sons and daughters will be apt to do just as you do. Reject Christ yourself, and the probability is that your children will reject him. An account was taken of the religious condition of families in a certain district. In the families of pious parents, two-thirds of the children were Christians. In the families where the parents were ungodly, only one-twelfth of the children were Christians. Responsible as you are for their temporal existence, you are also responsible for their eternity. Which way will you take them? Out into the deluge, or into the ark? Have you ever made one earnest prayer for their immortal souls? What will you say in the judgment, when God asks, “Where is George or Henry or Frank or Mary or Anna? Where are those precious souls whose interests I committed into your hands?” A dying son said to his father, “Father, you gave me an education and good manners and everything that the world could do for me; but, father, you never told me how to die; and now my soul is going out in the darkness.” O ye who have taught your children how to live, have you also taught them how to die? Life here is not so important as the great hereafter. It is not so much the few furlongs this side the grave as it is the unending leagues beyond. O eternity! eternity! Thy locks white with the ages! Thy voice announcing stupendous destiny! Thy arms reaching across all the past and all the future! Thy heart beating with raptures that never die and agonies that never cease! O eternity! eternity! Go home to-night and erect a family altar. You may break down in your prayer. But never mind, God will take what you mean, whether you express it intelligibly or not. Bring all your house into the ark. Is there one son whom you have given up? Is he so dissipated that you have stopped counseling and praying? Give him up? How dare you give him up? Did God ever give thee up? Whilst thou hast a single articulation of speech left, cease not to pray for the return of that prodigal. He may even now be standing on the beach at Hongkong or Madras, meditating a return to his father’s house. Give him up? Never give him up! Has God promised to hear thy prayer only to mock thee? It is not too late. In St. Paul’s, London, there is a whispering-gallery. A voice uttered most feebly at one side of the gallery is heard distinctly at the opposite side, a great distance off. So, every word of earnest prayer goes all around the earth, and makes heaven a whispering-gallery. Go into the ark—not to sit down, but to stand in the door, and call until all the family come in. Aged Noah, where is Japhet? David, where is Absalom? Hannah, where is Samuel? Bring them in through Christ the door. Would not it be pleasant to spend eternity with our families! Gladder than Christmas or Thanksgiving festival will be the reunion, if we get all our family into the ark. Which of them can we spare out of heaven? On one of the lake steamers there was a father and two daughters journeying. They seemed extremely poor. A benevolent gentleman stepped up to the poor man to proffer some form of relief, and said, “You seem to be very poor, sir.” “Poor, sir,” replied the man, “if there’s a poorer man than me a troublin’ the world, God pity both of us!” “I will take one of your children, and adopt it, if you say so. I think it would be a great relief to you.” “A what?” said the poor man. “A relief!” “Would it be a relief to have the hands chopped off from the body? or the heart torn from the breast? A relief, indeed! God be good to us! What do you mean, sir?” However many children we may have, we have none to give up. Which of our families can we afford to spare out of heaven? Will it be the oldest? Will it be the youngset? Will it be that one that was sick some time ago? Will it be the husband? Will it be the wife? No! No! We must have them all in. Let us take the children’s hands, and start now. Leave not one behind! Come, father! Come, mother! Come, son! Come, daughter! Come, brother! Come, sister! Only one step, and we are in. Christ, the door, swings out to admit us; and it is not the hoarseness of a stormy blast that you hear, but the voice of a loving and patient God that addresses you, saying, “Come thou and all thy house into the ark.” And there may the Lord shut us in! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 13: 011. COME ======================================================================== Come Genesis 7:1 : “Come.” Revelation 22:17 : “Come.” Imperial, tender and all-persuasive is this word “Come.” Six hundred and seventy-eight times is it found in the Scriptures. It stands at the front gate of the Bible as in my first text, inviting antediluvians into Noah’s ark, and it stands at the other gate of the Bible as in my second text, inviting the postdiluvians of all later ages into the ark of a Saviour’s mercy. “Come” is only a word of four letters, but it is the queen of words, and nearly the entire nation of English vocabulary bows to its sceptre. It is an ocean into which empty ten thousand rivers of meaning. Other words drive, but this beckons. All moods of feeling hath that word “Come.” Sometimes it weeps and sometimes it laughs. Sometimes it prays, sometimes it tempts, and sometimes it destroys. It sounds from the door of the church and from the seraglios of sin, from the gates of heaven and the gates of hell. It is confluent and accrescent of all power. It is the heiress of most of the past and the almoner of most of the future. “Come!” You may pronounce it so that all the heavens will be heard in its cadences, or pronounce it so that all the woes of time and eternity shall reverberate in its one syllable. It is on the lip of saint and profligate. It is the mightiest of all solicitants, either for good or bad. To-day I weigh anchor and haul in the planks and set sail on that great word, although I am sure I will not be able to reach the farther shore. I will let down the fathoming line into this sea and try to measure its depths, and, though I tie together all the cables and cordage I have on board, I will not be able to touch bottom. All the power of the Christian religion is in that word, “Come.” The dictatorial and commandatory in religion is of no avail. The imperative mood is not the appropriate mood when we would have people savingly impressed. They may be coaxed, but they cannot be driven. Our hearts are like our homes—at a friendly knock the door will be opened, but an attempt to force open our door would land the assailant in prison. Our theological seminaries, which keep young men three years at their curriculum before launching them into the ministry, will do well if in so short a time they can teach the candidates for the holy office how to say with right emphasis and intonation and power that one word, “Come!” That man who has such efficiency in Christian work, and that woman who has such power to persuade people to quit the wrong and begin the right, went through a series of losses, bereavements, persecutions, and the trials of twenty or thirty years before they could make it a triumph of grace every time they uttered the word “Come.” You must remember that in many cases our “Come” has a mightier “Come” to conquer before it has any effect at all. Just give me the accurate census, the statistics, of how many are down in fraud, in drunkenness, in gambling, in impurity, or in vice of any sort, and I will give you the accurate census or statistics of how many have been slain by the word “Come.” “Come and click wine-glasses with me at this ivory bar.” “Come and see what we can win at this gaming table.” “Come, enter with me this doubtful speculation.” “Come with me and read those infidel tracts on Christianity.” “Come with me to a place of bad amusement.” “Come with me in a gay bout through underground New York.” If in this city there are twenty thousand who are down in moral character, then twenty thousand fell under the power of the word “Come.” I was reading of a wife whose husband had been overthrown by strong drink, and she went to the saloon where he was ruined, and she said: “Give me back my husband.” And the bartender, pointing to a maudlin and battered man drowsing in the corner of the barroom, said: “There he is; Jim, wake up; here’s your wife come for you.” And the woman said: “Do you call that my husband? What have you been doing with him? Is that the manly brow? Is that the clear eye? Is that the noble heart that I married? What vile drug have you given him that has turned him into a fiend? Take your tiger claws off of him. Uncoil those serpent folds of evil habit that are crushing him. Give me back my husband, the one with whom I stood at the altar ten years ago. Give him back to me.” Victim was he, as millions of others have been, of the word “Come!” Now, we want, all the world over, to harness this word for good, as others have harnessed it for evil; and it will draw the five continents and the seas between them—yea, it will draw the whole earth back to the God from whom it has wandered. It is that wooing and persuasive word that will lead men to give up their sins. Was skepticism ever brought into love of the truth by an ebullition of hot words against infidelity? Was ever the blasphemer stopped in his oaths by denunciation of blasphemy? Was ever a drunkard weaned from his cups by the temperance lecturer’s mimicry of staggering step and hiccough? No. It was: “Come with me to church today and hear our singing;” “Come and let me introduce you to a Christian man whom you will be sure to admire;” “Come with me into associations that are cheerful and good and inspiring;” “Come with me into joy such as you never before experienced.” With that word which has done so much for others I approach you today. Are you all right with God? “No,” you say, “I think not; I am sometimes frightened when I think of him; I fear I will not be ready to meet him in the last day; my heart is not right with God.” Come, then, and have it made right. Through the Christ who died to save you, come! What is the use in delaying? The longer you wait the farther off you are and the deeper you are down. Strike out for heaven! You remember that a few years ago a steamer called the Princess Alice, with a crowd of excursionists aboard, sank in the Thames, and there was a terrible loss of life. A boatman from the shore put out for the rescue, and he had a big boat, and he got it so full it would not hold another person, and as he laid hold of the oars to pull for the shore, leaving hundreds helpless and drowning, he cried out: “Oh, that I had a bigger boat!” Thank God I am not thus limited, and that I can promise room for all in this Gospel boat. Get in; get in! And yet there is room. Room in the heart of a pardoning God. Room in heaven. I also apply the word of my text to those who would like practical comfort. If any ever escape the struggle of life, I have not found them. They are not certainly among the prosperous classes. In most cases it was a struggle all the way up till they reached the prosperity, and since they have reached these heights there have been perplexities, anxieties, and crises which were almost enough to shatter the nerves and turn the brain. It would be hard to tell which have the biggest fight in this world—the prosperities or the adversities, the conspicuities or the obscurities. Just as soon as you have enough success to attract the attention of others, the envies and jealousies are let loose from their kennel. The greatest crime that you can commit in the estimation of some is to get on better than they do. They think your addition is their subtraction. Five hundred persons start for a certain goal of success; one reaches it and the other four hundred and ninety-nine are mad. It would take volumes to hold the story of the wrongs, outrages and defamations that have come upon you as a result of your success. The warm sun of prosperity brings into life a swampful of annoying insects. On the other hand, the unfortunate classes have their struggles for maintenance. To achieve a livelihood by one who had nothing to start with, and after a while for a family as well, and carry this on until children are reared and educated and fairly started in the world, and to do this amid all the rivalries of business and the uncertainty of crops and the fickleness of tariff legislation—with an occasional labor strike and here and there a financial panic thrown in—is a mighty thing to do, and there are hundreds and thousands of such heroes and heroines who live unsung and die unhonored. What we all need, whether up or down in life or half-way between, is the infinite solace of the Christian religion. And so we employ the word “Come!” It will take all eternity to find out the number of business men who have been strengthened by the promises of God, and the people who have been fed by the ravens when other resources gave out, and the men and women who, going into this battle armed only with needle or saw or ax or yardstick or pen or type or shovel or shoe-last have gained a victory that made the heavens resound. With all the resources of God promised for every exigency, no one need be left in the lurch. I like the faith displayed years ago in Drury Lane, London, in an humble home where every particle of food had given out, and a kindly soul entered with tea and other table supplies, and found a kettle on the fire ready for the tea. The benevolent lady said: “How is it that you have the kettle ready for the tea when you had no tea in the house?” And the daughter in the home said: “Mother would have me put the kettle on the fire, and when I said, ‘What is the use of doing so, when we have nothing in the house?’ she said: ‘My child, God will provide; thirty years he has already provided for me, through all my pain and helplessness, and he will not leave me to starve at last; he will send us help, though we do not yet see how.’ We have been waiting all the day for something to come, but until we saw you we knew not how it was to come.” Such things the world may call coincidences, but I call them almighty deliverances, and, though you do not hear of them, they are occurring every hour of every day and in all parts of Christendom. But the word “Come” applied to those who need solace will amount to nothing unless it be uttered by some one who has experienced that solace. That spreads the responsibility of giving this Gospel call among a great many. Those who have lost property and been consoled by religion in that trial are the ones to invite those who have failed in business. Those who have lost their health and been consoled by religion are the ones to invite those who are in poor health. Those who have had bereavements, and been consoled in those bereavements, are the ones to sympathize with those who have lost father or mother or companion or child or friend. What multitudes of us are alive today and in good health and buoyant in this journey of life who would have been broken down or dead long ago but for the sustaining and cheering help of our holy religion! So we say, “Come!” The well is not dry. The buckets are not empty. The supply is not exhausted. There is just as much mercy and condolence and soothing power in God as before the first grave was dug or the first tear started or the first heart broken or the first accident happened or the first fortune vanished. Those of us who have felt the consolatory power of religion have a right to speak out of our own experiences and say, “Come!” What dismal work of condolence the world makes when it attempts to condole! The plaster they spread does not stick. The broken bones under their bandage do not knit. A farmer was lost in the snowstorm on a prairie of the far West. Night coming on, and after he was almost frantic from not knowing which way to go, his sleigh struck the rut of another sleigh and he said: “I will follow this rut and it will take me out to safety.” He hastened on until he heard the bells of the preceding horses, but, coming up, he found that that man was also lost and, as is the tendency of those who are thus confused in the forest, or on the moors, they were both moving in a circle, and the runner of the one lost sleigh was following the runner of the other lost sleigh around and around. At last it occurred to them to look at the north star, which was peering through the night, and by the direction of that star they got home again. Those who follow the advice of this world in time of perplexity are in a fearful round, for it is one bewildered soul following another bewildered soul; and only those who have in such time got their eye on the morning star of our Christian faith can find their way out, or be strong enough to lead others with an all-persuasive invitation. “But,” says some one, “you Christian people keep telling us to ‘come,’ yet you do not tell us how to come.” That charge shall not be true on this occasion. Come believing! Come repenting! Come praying! After all that God has been doing for six thousand years, sometimes through patriarchs and sometimes through prophets, and at last through the culmination of all tragedies on Golgotha, can any one think that God will not welcome your coming? Will a father at vast outlay construct a mansion for his son, and lay out parks white with statues and green with foliage and all a-sparkle with fountains and then not allow his son to live in the house or walk in the parks? Has God built this house of Gospel mercy, and will he then refuse entrance to his children? Will a government at great expense build life-saving stations all along the coast, and boats that can hover unhurt like a petrel over the wildest surge; and then when the lifeboat has reached the wreck of a ship in the offing not allow the drowning to seize the life-line or take the boat for the shore in safety? Shall God provide at the cost of his only Son’s assassination escape for a sinking world, and then turn a deaf ear to the cry that comes up from the breakers? “But,” you say, “there are so many things I have to believe, and so many things in the shape of a creed that I have to adopt, that I am kept back.” No, no! You need believe but two things, namely, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, and that you are one of them. “But,” you say, “I do believe both of those things.” Do you, really, believe them with all your heart? “Yes.” Why, then, you have passed from death into life. Why, then, you are a son or a daughter of the Lord Almighty. Why, then, if you are resolved to act on the belief and in Christ’s strength renounce sin, you are an heir or an heiress of an inheritance that will declare dividends from now until long after the stars are dead. Hallelujah! Prince of God, why do you not come and take your coronet? Princess of the Lord Almighty, why do you not mount your throne? Pass up into the light. Your boat is anchored, why do you not go ashore? Just plant your feet hard down and you will feel under them the Rock of Ages. I challenge the universe for one instance in which a man in the right spirit appealed for the salvation of the Gospel and did not get it. Man alive! are you going to let all the years of your life go away without your having this great peace, this glorious hope, this bright expectancy? Are you going to let the pearl of great price lie in the dust at your feet because you are too indolent or too proud to stoop down and pick it up? Will you wear the chain of evil habit when near-by you is the hammer that could with one stroke snap the shackle? Will you stay in the prison of sin when here is a Gospel key that could unlock the door that perpetuates your incarceration? No, no! As the one word, “Come,” has sometimes brought many souls to Christ, I will try the experiment of piling up into a mountain and then sending down in an avalanche of power many of these Gospel “Comes.” “Come thou and all thy house into the ark;” “Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest;” “Come, for all things are now ready;” “Come with us and we will do you good;” “Come and see;” “The Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come,’ and let him that heareth say ‘Come,’ and let him that is athirst ‘Come.’“ The stroke of one bell in a tower may be sweet, but a score of bells well tuned and rightly lifted and skilfully swung in one great chime fill the heavens with music almost celestial. And no one who has heard the mighty chimes in the towers of Amsterdam or Ghent or Copenhagen can forget them. Now, it seems to me, that in this Sabbath hour all heaven is chiming, and the voices of departed friends and kindred ring down the sky, saying, “Come!” The angels who never fell, bending from sapphire thrones, are chanting “Come!” Yea, all the towers of heaven, tower of martyrs, tower of prophets, tower of apostles, tower of evangelists, tower of the temple of the Lord God and the Lamb, are chiming, “Come! Come!” Pardon for all and peace for all and heaven for all who will come. When Russia was in one of her great wars, the suffering of the soldiers had been long and bitter, and they were waiting for the end of the strife. One day a messenger in great excitement ran among the tents of the army shouting, “Peace! Peace!” The sentinel on guard asked, “Who says ‘Peace’?” And the sick soldier turned on his hospital mattress and asked, “Who says ‘Peace?’“ And all up and down the encampment of the Russians went the question, “Who says ‘Peace’?” Then the messenger responded, “The Czar says ‘Peace.’“ That was enough. That meant going home. That meant the war was over. No more wounds and no more long marches. So today, as one of the Lord’s messengers, I move through these great encampments of souls and cry, “Peace between earth and heaven! Peace between God and man! Peace between your repenting soul and a pardoning Lord!” If you ask me, “Who says ‘Peace’?” I answer, “Christ our King declares it.” “My peace I give unto you!” “Peace of God that passeth all understanding!” Everlasting peace! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 14: 012. THE SHUT-IN ======================================================================== The Shut-In Genesis 7:16 : “The Lord shut him in.” Cosmogony has no more interesting chapter than that which speaks of that catastrophe of the ages, the submersion of our world in the time of Noah, the first ship carpenter. Many of the nations who never saw a Bible have a flood story—Egyptian flood story; Grecian flood story, of which Deucalion was the Noah; Hawaiian flood story; New Zealand flood story; Chinese flood story; American Indian flood story—all of which accounts agree in the immersion of the continents under universal rains, and that there was a ship floating with a select few of the human family and with specimens of zoological and ornithological and reptilian worlds, although I could have wished that these last had been shut out of the ark and drowned. All of these flood stories represent the ship thus afloat as finally stranded on a mountain top. Hugh Miller in his “Testimony of the Rocks,” thinks that all these flood stories were infirm traditions of the Biblical account, and I believe him. The worst thing about the great freshet was that it struck Noah’s Campania from above and beneath. The seas broke the chain of shells and crystal and rolled over the land, and the heavens opened their clouds for falling columns of water which roared and thundered on the roof of the great ship for a month and ten days. There was one door to the ship, but there were three parts to that door, one part for each of the three stories. The Bible account says nothing about parts of the door belonging to two of the stories, and I do not know on which floor Noah and his family voyaged, but my text tells us that the part of the door of that particular floor on which Noah stayed was closed after he had entered. “The Lord shut him in.” So there are many people now in the world as thoroughly shut in—some by sickness, some by old age, some by special duties that will not allow them to go forth, some surrounded by deluges of misfortune and trouble, and for them my sympathies are aroused, and from them I often receive messages, and this sermon, which I hope may do good to others, is more especially intended for them. To-day I address the shut-in. “The Lord shut him in.” Notice, first of all, who closed the door so that they could not get out. Noah did not do it, nor his son Shem, nor did Ham, nor did Japheth, nor did either of the four married women who were on shipboard; nor did desperadoes who had scoffed at the idea of peril, which Noah had been preaching, close the door: they had turned their backs on the ark and had gone in disgust away. I will tell you how it was done. A hand was stretched down from heaven to close that door. It was a divine hand as well as a kind hand. “The Lord shut him in.” And the same kind and sympathetic Being has shut you in, you invalid. You thought it was an accident, ascribable to the carelessness or misdoings of others, or a mere “happen-so.” No! no! God had gracious designs for your betterment, for the cultivation of your patience, for the strengthening of your faith, for the advantage you might gain by seclusion, for your eternal salvation. He put you in a school-room where you could learn in six months or a year more than you could have learned anywhere else in a lifetime. He turned the lattice or pulled down the blinds of the sick-room, or put your swollen foot on an ottoman, or held you amid the pillows of a couch which you could not leave, for some reason that you may not now understand, but which He has promised He will explain to you satisfactorily. If not in this world, then in the world to come, for He has said, “What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.” The world has no statistics as to the number of invalids. The physicians know something about it, and the apothecaries and the pastors, but who can tell us the number of blind eyes, and deaf ears, and diseased lungs, and congested livers, and how many jangled nerves, and neuralgic temples, and rheumatic feet, or how many took no food this morning because they had no appetite to eat, or digestive organs to assimilate, or have lungs so delicate they cannot go forth when the wind is in the east, or there is a fog rising from the river, or there is a dampness on the ground or pavement because of the frost coming out? It would be easy to count the people who every day go through a street, or the number of passengers carried by a railroad company in a year, or the number of those who cross the ocean in ships; but who can give us the statistics of the great multitudes who are shut in? I call the attention of all such to their superior opportunities of doing good. Those of us who are well can see clearly, and hear distinctly, and partake of food of all sorts, and questions of digestion never occur to us, and we can wade the snowbanks, and take an equinox in our faces, and endure the thermometer at zero, and every breath of air is a tonic and a stimulus, and sound sleep meets us within five minutes after our head touches the pillow. So we do not make so much of an impression when we talk about the consolations of religion. The world says right away, “I guess that man mistakes buoyancy of natural spirits for religion. What does he know about it? He has never been tried.” But when one goes out and reports to the world that that morning on his way to business he called to see you and found you cheerful and hopeful after being kept in your room for two months, and that you had not one word of complaint, and asked all about everybody, and rejoiced in the success of your business friends, although your own business had almost come to a standstill through your absence from store or office or shop, and that you sent your love to all your friends, and told them that if you did not meet them again in this world, you hoped to meet them in dominions seraphic, with a quiet word of advice to the man who carried the message about the importance of his not neglecting his own soul, but through Christ seeking something better than this world can give him—why, all the business men in the counting-room say, “Good! Now, that is religion!” And the clerks get hold of the story and talk it over, so that the weigher and cooper and hackman, standing on the doorstep, say, “That is splendid! Now, that is what I call religion!” It is a good thing to preach on a Sunday morning, the people assembled in most respectable attire and seated on soft cushions, the preacher standing in neatly upholstered pulpit, surrounded by personal friends, and after an inspiring hymn has been sung, and that sermon, if preached in faith, will do good; but the most effective sermon is preached by one seated in dressing gown, in an arm-chair into which the invalid has, with much difficulty, been lifted, the surrounding shelves filled with medicine bottles, some to produce sleep, some for the relief of sudden paroxysm, some for stimulant, some for tonic, some for anodyne, and some for febrifuge, the pale preacher quoting promises of the Gospel, telling of the glories of a sympathetic Christ, assuring the one or two or three persons who hear it of the mighty reinforcements of religion. You say that to such a sermon there are only two or three hearers. Aye! But the visitor calling at that room, then closing the door softly and going away, tells the story, and the whole neighborhood hears it, and it will take all eternity to realize the grand and uplifting influence of that sermon about God and the soul, though preached to an audience of only one man or one woman. The Lord has ordained all such invalids for a style of usefulness which athletics and men of two hundred pounds healthy avoirdupois cannot affect. It was not an enemy that fastened you in that one room, or sent you on crutches, the longest journey you made for many weeks being from bed to sofa, and from sofa to looking-glass, where you are shocked at the pallor of your own cheek and the pinchedness of your features; then back again from mirror to sofa, and from sofa to bed, with a long sigh, saying, “How good it feels to get back again to my old place on the pillow!” Remember who it is that appointed the day when, for the first time in many years you could not go to business, and who has kept a record of all the weary days and all the sleepless nights of your exile from the world. Oh, weary man! Oh, feeble woman! It was the Lord who shut you in. Do you remember that some of the noblest and best of men have been prisoners? Ezekiel was a prisoner, Jeremiah a prisoner, Paul a prisoner, St. John a prisoner, John Bunyan a prisoner. Though human hate seemed to have all to do with them, really the Lord shut them in. No doubt, while on that voyage, Noah and his three sons and all the four ladies of the antedulivian world often thought of the bright hillsides and the green fields where they had walked, and of the homes where they had lived. They had many years of experiences. Noah was six hundred years old at the time of this convulsion of nature. He had seen six hundred springtimes, six hundred summers, six hundred autumns, six hundred winters. We are not told how old his wife was at this wreck of earth and sky. The Bible tells the age of a great many men, but only once gives a woman’s age. At one time it gives Adam’s age as one hundred and thirty years, and Jared’s age as one hundred and sixty-two years, and Enoch’s age as three hundred and sixty-five years, and all up and down the Bible it gives the age of men, but does not give the age of women. Why? Because, I suppose, a woman’s age is none of our business. But all the men and women who tossed in that oriental craft had lived long enough to remember a good many of the mercies and kindnesses of God, and they could not blot out, and I think they had no disposition to blot out the memory of those brightnesses, though now they were shut in. Neither should the shut-in of our time forget the blessings of the past. Have you been blind for ten years? Thank God for the time when you saw as clearly as any of us can see, and let the pageant of all the radiant landscapes and illumined skies which you ever looked upon kindle your rapturous gratitude. I do not now see Raphael’s “Madona di San Sisto” in the picture gallery of Dresden, nor Rubens’ “Descent from the Cross” at Antwerp, nor Michael Angelo’s “Last Judgment” on the ceiling of the Vatican, nor “Saint Sophia” at Constantinople, nor the Parthenon on the Acropolis, nor the Taj Mahal of India; but shall I not thank God that I have seen them? Is it possible that such midnight darkness shall ever blast my vision that I cannot call them up again? Perhaps you are so deaf that you cannot hear the chirp of a bird or solo of cantatrice, or even organ in full diapason, though you feel the foundations tremble under its majestic roll, or even the thunder-storm that makes Mount Washington echo. But are you not grateful that once you could hear trill and chant and carol and doxology? I cannot this hour hear Jenny Lind sing “Comin’ Through the Rye” or Ole Bull’s enchanted viol, or Parepa Rosa’s triumphant voice over many thousands of voices and many thousands of instruments in the National Peace Jubilee of many years ago, all these sounds accompanied by the ringing of bells and the guns on Boston Common; but can I ever have my ears so silenced that I will not remember that I did hear them? Are you chained to your room now, your powers of locomotion all gone, or if coming to the house of God every step is a torture? Do you forget when, in childhood, you danced and skipped because you were so full of life you had not patience to walk, and in after years you climbed the mountains of Switzerland, putting your alpen stock high up on the glaciers which few others ever dared, and jumped long reaches in competition, and after a walk of ten miles you came in jocund as the morning? Oh, you shut-ins! Thank God for a vivid memory of the times when you were as free as the chamois on the rocks, as the eagle going straight for the sun. When the rain pounded the roof of the ark the eight voyagers on that craft did not forget the time when it gaily pattered in a summer shower, and when the door of the ark shut to keep out the tempest they did not forget the time when the door of their home in Armenia was closed to keep out the spring rains which came to fill the cups of lily and honeysuckle and make all the trees of the wood clap their hands. Again, notice that during those forty days of storm which rocked that ship on that universal ocean of Noah’s time, the door which shut the captain of the ship inside the craft kept him from many outside perils. How those wrathful seas would like to have got their wet hands on Noah, and pulled him out and sunk him? And do all of you of the great army of the shut-in realize that though you have special temptations where you are now, how much of the outside style of temptations you escape? Do you, the merchant incarcerated in the sick-room, realize that every hour of the day you spend looking out of the window, or gazing at the particular figure on the wall-paper, or listening to the clock’s ticks, men are being wrecked by the allurements and uncertainties of business life? How many forgeries are committed, how many trust funds are swamped, how many public moneys are being misappropriated, how many bankruptcies suffered? It may be, it is very uncomfortable for Noah inside the ark, for the apartment is crowded and the air is vitiated from the breathing of so much human and animal life; but it is not half as bad for him as though he were outside the ark. There is not an ox, or a camel, or an antelope, or a sheep inside the ark as badly off as the proudest king outside. While you are on the pillow or lounge you will make no bad bargains, you will rush into no rash investments, you will avoid the mistakes which thousands of as good men as you are every day making. Notice, also, that there was a limit to the shut-in experience of those ancient mariners. I suppose the forty days of the descending and uprising floods, and the one hundred and fifty days before the passengers could go ashore, must have seemed to those eight people in the big boat like a small eternity. “Rain, rain, rain!” said the wife of Noah. “Will it never stop?” For forty mornings they looked out and saw not one patch of blue sky. Floating around amid the peaks of mountains Shem, and Ham, and Japheth had to hush the fears of their wives lest they should dash against the projecting rocks. But after a while it cleared off. Sunshine, glorious sunshine! The ascending mists were folded up into clouds, which, instead of darkening the sky, only ornamented it. As they looked out of the windows these worn passengers clapped their hands and rejoiced that the storm was over, and I think if God could stop such a storm as that, He could stop any storm in your lifetime experience. If He can control a vulture in the mid-sky, He can stop a summer bat that flies in at your window. At the right time He will put the rainbow on the cloud and the deluge of your misfortunes will dry up. I preach the doctrine of limitation, relief, and disenthrallment. At just the right time the pain will cease, the bondage will drop, the imprisoned will be liberated, the fires will go out, the body and mind and soul will be free. Patience! An English proverb referring to long-continued invalidism, says, “A creaking gate hangs long on its hinges,” and this may be a protracted case of valetudinarianism; but you will have taken the last bitter drop, you will have suffered the last misinterpretation, you will feel the gnawing of the last hunger, you will have fainted the last time from exhaustion, you will have felt the last cut of the lancet, you will have wept under the last loneliness. The last week of the Noachian deluge came, the last day, the last hour, the last moment. The beating of the rain on the roof ceased, and the dashing of the billows on the side of the ship quieted, and peacefully as a yacht moves out over quiet Lake Cayuga, Como, or Luzerne, the ark, with its illustrious passengers and important freight, glided to its mountain wharfage. Notice, also, that on the cessation of the deluge, the shut-ins came out, and they built their houses and cultivated their gardens and started a new world on the ruins of the old world that had been drowned out. Though Noah lived three hundred and fifty years after this world-wide catastrophe, and no doubt his fellow-passengers survived centuries, I warrant they never got over talking about that voyage. Now, I have seen Doré’s pictures, and many other pictures, of the entrance into the ark, two and two of the human family and the animal creation into that ship which sailed between two worlds, antediluvian world and the postdiluvian world, but I never saw a picture of their coming out; yet, their embarkation was not more important than their disembarkation. Many a crew has entered a ship that never landed. Witness the line of sunken ships, like a submarine cable of anguish, across the ocean depths, from America to Europe. If any ship might expect complete wreckage, the one Noah commanded might have expected it. But no! Those who embarked, disembarked. Over the plank reaching down the side of the ark to the Armenian cliffs on which they had been stranded, the procession descended. No other wharf felt so solid or afforded such attractiveness as that height of Ararat when the eight passengers put their feet on it. And no sooner had the last one been helped down the plank upon the rock, than the other apartments of the ship were opened, and such a dash of bird music never filled the air, as when the entire orchestra of robin-redbreast, and morning lark, and chaffinch, and mocking-bird, and house swallow took wing into the bright sky, while the cattle began to low and the sheep to bleat and the horses to neigh for the pasture, which from the awful submergence had now begun to grow green and aromatic. I tell you plainly, nothing interests me more in that tragedy, from the first to the last act, than the “Exit” and the “Exeunt;” than the fact that the “shut-ins” became the “got-outs.” And I now cheer with this story all the inmates of sick rooms and hospitals, and those prisons where men and women are unjustly endungeoned, and all the thousands who are bounded on the north, and south, and east, and west by floods, by deluges of misfortune and disaster. The ark of your trouble, if it does not land on some earthly height of vindication and rescue, will land on the heights celestial. If you have put your trust in God you will come out in the garden of the King, among orchards bending with twelve manner of fruits, and harvests that wave in the light of a sun that never sets. As the eight passengers of that craft of Captain Noah never got over talking about their seafaring experiences, so you who have been the shut-ins of the earth will add unbounded interest to the conversation of heaven by recalling and reciting your earthly experiences, and the rougher those experiences, the more thrilling will they be to yourself and to others who listen. As when we sit amid a group of soldiers and hear their story of battle, or a group of sailors and hear their story of cyclones, we feel stupid because we have nothing in our life worth telling how uninteresting will be those souls in heaven who had smooth sailing all their lives and no accidents, while Noah tells his story of the deluge, and Lot tells his story of escape from destroyed cities, and Paul his story of the Alexandrian corn-ship, and you tell your story of the days and nights and years of the time when you were shut in. You will be interesting and sought after in heaven in proportion as you are martyrized of persecution and pain on earth. And surely you do not want to get the advantage of heavenly association and consideration without yourself adding some interest to the interview. I hail all the shut-ins because they will be the come-outs. Heaven will be all the brighter for your earthly privations and environments. For a man who has always lived in a mansion, and walked in fine gar-dens, and regaled his appetite on best fruits, and had warmest furs for winter attire, and coolest linens for August heat, and brilliant earthly surroundings, heaven will not be so much of a change of scene. He will be disposed to say, “Why, I am used to this. Don’t show me the gardens. Why, I was brought up at Chatsworth. Don’t invite me into the chariot; I always had a splendid turn-out. Don’t invite me to the feast; I have been accustomed to Belshazzarian banquets. It would be a relief to me if I could leave heaven a little while and rough it in some other world.” But what a heaven it will be for those whose limbs were so rheumatic they could not take a step when they find locomotion a delight. What a heaven it will be for those who were always sick when they are always well; and after twenty years of pain to have millions of years of health! What a light will be the light of heaven for those who on earth could not see their hand before their faces! And what will the music of heaven be to those the tympanum of whose ears for many years has ceased to vibrate! Denied on earth the pleasure of listening to Handel, and Haydn, and Mendelssohn’s symphonies, at last reaching a world where there has never been a discord and hearing singing where all are perfect songsters, and oratorios in which all the nations of heaven chant! Great heaven it will be for all who get there, but a hundred times more of a heaven for those who were shut in. Meanwhile you have all divine and angelic sympathy in your infirmities. That Satan thoroughly understood poor human nature was evidenced when, in plotting to make Job do wrong, the great master of evil, after having failed in every other way to overthrow the good man proposed physical distress, and then the boils came which made his wife advise him to swear right out. The mightiest test of character is physical suffering. Critics are impatient at the way Thomas Carlyle scolded at everything. His seventy years of dyspepsia were enough to make any man scold. When you see people out of patience and irascible and lachrymose, inquire into the case, and before you get through with your exploration your hypercriticism will turn to pity, and to the divine and angelic sympathy will be added your own. The clouds of your indignation, which were full of thunderbolts, will begin to rain tears of pity. By a strange Providence, for which I shall be forever grateful, I have admission through the newspaper press, week by week, to tens of thousands of God’s dear children who cannot enter church on the Sabbath, and hear their excellent pastors, because of the age of the sufferers, or their illness, or the lameness of foot, or their incapacity to stay in one position an hour and a half, or their poverties, or their troubles of some sort will not let them go out of doors, and to them as much as to those who hear me I preach this sermon, as I preach many of my sermons, the invisible audience always vaster than the visible, some of them tossed on wilder seas than those which tossed the eight members of Noah’s family, and instead of forty days of storm, and five months of being shut in, as they were, it has been for these invalids five years of “shut-in,” or ten years of “shut-in,” or twenty years of “shut-in.” Oh, comforting God! Help me to comfort them! Give me two hands full of salve for their wounds. When we were three hundred miles out at sea, a hurricane struck us, and the lifeboats were dashed from the davits, and all the lights in the cabin were put out by the rolling of the ship and the water which through the broken skylights had poured in. Captain Andrews entered and said to the men on duty, “Why don’t you light up and make things brighter, for we are going to outride this storm? Passengers, cheer up! Cheer up!” And he struck a match and began to light the burners. He could not silence either the wind or the waves, but by the striking of that match, accompanied by encouraging words, we were all helped. And as I now find many in hurricanes of trouble, though I cannot quiet the storm, I can strike a match to light up the darkness, and I strike a match: “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.” I strike another match: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” I strike another match: “We have not a High Priest who cannot be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, but one who was in all points tempted like as we are.” Are you old? One breath from heaven will make you everlastingly young again. Have you aches and pains? They insure Christ’s presence and sympathy through the darkest December nights, which are the longest nights of the year. Are you bereft? Here is a resurrected Christ, whose voice is full of resurrectionary power. Are you lonely? All the angels of heaven are ready to swoop into your companionship. Here is the Christ of Mary and Martha when they had lost Lazarus, and of David when he had lost his son, and of Abraham when he had lost Sarah, and of your father and mother when in time of old age they parted at the gates of the tomb. When last I was in Savannah, Georgia, at the close of the Sabbath morning service, I was asked to go and see a Christian woman for many years an invalid. I went. I had not, in all that beautiful city of splendid men and gracious women, seen a face brighter than hers. Reaching her bedside, I out out my hand, but she could not shake hands, for her hand was palsied. I said to her, “How long have you been down on this bed?” She smiled and made no answer, for her tongue had been palsied; but those standing around her said, “Fifteen years.” I said to her, “Have you been able to keep your courage up all that time?” She gave a very little motion of her head in affirmation, for her whole body was paralytic. The sermon I had preached that morning had no power on others compared with the power that silent sermon had on me. What was the secret of her conquest over pain and privation and incapacity to move? Shall I tell you the secret? I will tell you: The Lord shut her in. There is a good deal of fanaticism abroad about the recovery of the sick, but if we had as much faith as Martin Luther we would have Luther’s success. His friend, Myconius, was very ill, and Luther fell upon his knees and said, “O Lord, no! Thou must not yet take our brother Myconius to thyself. Thy cause will not prosper without him. Amen.” Then he wrote, “My dear Myconius: There is no cause for fear. The Lord will not let me hear that you are dead. You shall not and must not die. Amen.” Luther’s letter so excited Myconius that an ulcer on his lungs broke, and he got well. Would to God that like that we might be able to pray, that we might have similar results! Oh, men and women, visible and invisible! The probability is you will never write your autobiography. It is the most difficult book to write, because you are tempted to omit passages in your life that were not complimentary to yourself, and to quote from a diary, which is always incomplete, because there are some things which you do not think best to write down. As you will not undertake an autobiography, the story of yourself, I will take the responsibil-ity of presenting your biography, which is the story of one’s life by some one else. If you will give your love and trust to Him of Bethlehem and Calvary, this will be your biography: “Born at the right time, but the most important event in his life was when he was born again. Died at the right time, but long before that he had died unto sin. He had many crises, but in all of them he was divinely directed; weaknesses, but they were divinely sympathized with. In his life there were many sorrows, wave after wave, storm after storm, but he outrode everything and landed in eternal safety. Why? Why? Because the Lord shut him in.” But do not think that heaven is made up of an indiscriminate population. Some of my friends are so generous in their theology that they would let everybody in without reference to condition or character. Do not think that libertines and blasphemers and rejecters of God and His Gospel have “letters of credit” that will draw anything from the Bank of Heaven. Pirate crafts will not be permitted to go up that harbor. If there are those who as to heaven are to be “shut-ins,” there are those who will belong to the “shut-outs.” Heaven has twelve gates, and while those twelve gates imply wide-open entrance for those who are properly prepared to enter them, they imply that there are at least twelve possibilities that many will be shut out, because a gate is of no use unless it can sometimes be closed. Heaven is not an unwashed mob. Show your ticket or you will not get in—tickets that you may get without money and without price, tickets with a cross and a crown upon them. Let the unrepentant and the vile and the offscourings of earth enter heaven as they now are, and they would depreciate and demoralize it so that no one of us would want to enter, and those who are there would want to move out. The Bible speaks of the “withouts” as well as the “withins.” Revelation 22:15 : “Without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.” Through the converting, pardoning, sanctifying grace of God, may we at last be found among the shut-ins and not among the shut-outs! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 15: 013. HUNTING FOR SOULS ======================================================================== Hunting for Souls Genesis 10:9 : “He was a mighty hunter before the Lord.” In our day hunting is a sport, but in the lands and the times infested with wild beasts it was a matter of life or death with the people. It was very different from going out on a sunshiny afternoon with a patent breech-loader, to shoot reed-birds on the flats, when Pollux and Achilles and Diomedes went out to clear the land of lions and tigers and bears. My text sets forth Nimrod as a hero when it presents him with broad shoulders and shaggy apparel and sun-browned face and arm bunched with muscle—”a mighty hunter before the Lord.” I think he used the bow and arrow with great success practising archery. I have thought if it is such a grand thing and such a brave thing to clear wild beasts out of a country; if it is not a better and braver thing to hunt down and destroy those great evils of society that are stalking the land with fierce eye and bloody paw and sharp tusk and quick spring. I have wondered if there is not such a thing as Gospel hunting, by which those who have been flying from the truth, may be captured for God and Heaven. The Lord Jesus, in his sermon, used the art of angling for an illustration when he said: “I will make you fishers of men.” And so, I think, I have authority for using hunting as an illustration of Gospel truth; and I pray God that there may be many a man who shall begin to study Gospel archery, of whom it may, after a while, be said: “He was a mighty hunter before the Lord.” How much awkward Christian work there is done in the world! How many good people there are who drive souls away from Christ instead of bringing them to him! Religious blunderers, who upset more than they set right. Their gun has a crooked barrel, and kicks as it goes off. They are like a clumsy comrade who goes along with skilful hunters—at the very moment he ought to be most quiet, he is cracking an elder or falling over a log and frightening away the game. How few Christian people have ever learned the lesson of which I read at the beginning of the service: how that the Lord Jesus Christ, at the well, went from talking about a cup of water to the most practical religious truths, which won the woman’s soul for God! Jesus in the wilderness was breaking bread to the people. I think it was good bread; it was very light bread, and the yeast had done its work thoroughly. Christ, after he had broken the bread, said to the people: “Beware of the yeast, or of the leaven, of the Pharisees!” So natural a transition it was, and how easily they all understood him! But how few Christian people understand how to fasten the truths of God to the souls of men! Truman Osborne, one of the evangelists who went through this country some years ago, had a wonderful art in the right direction. He came to my father’s house one day, and while we were all seated in the room, he said: “Mr. Talmage, are all your children Christians?” Father said: “Yes, all but De Witt.” Then Truman Osborne looked down into the fireplace, and began to tell a story of a storm that came on the mountains, and all the sheep were in the fold; but there was one lamb outside that perished in the storm. Had he looked me in the eye, I should have been angered when he told me that story; but he looked into the fireplace, and it was so pathetically and beautifully done that I never found any peace until I was inside the fold, where the other sheep are. The archers of old times studied their art. They were very precise in the matter. The old books gave special directions as to how the archers should go, and as to what an archer should do. He must stand erect and firm, his left foot a little in advance of his right foot. With his left hand he must take hold of the bow in the middle, and then, with the three fingers and the thumb of his right hand, he should lay hold of the arrow and affix it to the string—so precise was the direction given. But how clumsy we are about religious work! How little skill and care we exercise! How often our arrows miss the mark! Oh, that we might learn the art of doing good, and become “mighty hunters before the Lord!” In the first place, if you want to be effectual in doing good, you must be very sure of your weapon. There was something very fascinating about the archery of olden times. Perhaps you do not know what they could do with the bow and arrow. Why, the chief battles fought by the English Plantagenets were with the long bow. They would take the arrow of polished wood, and feather it with the plume of a bird, and then it would fly from the bow-string of plaited silk. The broad fields of Agincourt and Solway Moss and Neville’s Cross, heard the loud thrum of the archer’s bow-string. Now, my Christian friends, we have a mightier weapon than that. It is the arrow of the Gospel; it is a sharp arrow; it is a straight arrow; it is feathered from the wing of the dove of God’s Spirit; it flies from a bow made out of the wood of the Cross. So far as I can estimate, or calculate, it has brought down four hundred million souls. Paul knew how to bring the notch of that arrow on to that bow-string, and its whirr was heard through the Corinthian theaters, and through the courtroom, until the knees of Felix knocked together. It was that arrow that stuck in Luther’s heart when he cried out: “Oh, my sins! Oh, my sins!” If it strike a man in the head, it kills his skepticism; if it strike him in the heel, it will turn his step; if it strike him in the heart, he throws up his hands, as did one of old when wounded in the battle, crying: “O Galilean, thou hast conquered.” In the armory of the Earl of Pembroke there are old corselets which show that the arrow of the English used to go through the breastplate, through the body of the warrior, and out through the back-plate. What a symbol of that Gospel which is sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing to the dividing asunder of soul and body, and of the joints and marrow! Would to God we had more faith in that Gospel! The humblest man in this house, if he had enough faith in him, could bring a hundred souls to Jesus—perhaps five hundred. Just in proportion as this age seems to believe less and less in it, I believe more and more in it. What are men about that they will not accept their own deliverance? There is nothing proposed by men that can do anything like this Gospel. The religion of Ralph Waldo Emerson is the philosophy of icicles; the religion of Theodore Parker was a sirocco of the desert, covering up the soul with dry sand; the religion of Renan is the romance of believing nothing; the religion of Thomas Carlyle is only a condensed London fog; the religion of the Huxleys and the Spencers is merely a pedestal on which human philosophy sits shivering in the night of the soul, looking up to the stars, offering no help to the nations that crouch and groan at the base. Tell me where there is one man who has rejected that Gospel for another, who is thoroughly satisfied and helped and contented in his skepticism, and I will take the car to-morrow and ride five hundred miles to see him. The full power of the Gospel has not yet been touched. As a sportsman throws up his hand and catches the ball flying through the air, just so easily will this Gospel after a while catch this round world flying from its orbit and bring it back to the heart of Christ. Give it full swing, and it will pardon every sin, heal every wound, cure every trouble, emancipate every slave, and ransom every nation. Ye Christian men and women, who go out to do Christian work, as you go into the Sunday-schools and the lay preaching stations and the penitentiaries and the asylums, I want you to feel that you bear in your hand a weapon, compared with which the lightning has no speed and avalanches have no heft, and the thunderbolts of heaven have no power; it is the arrow of the omnipotent Gospel. Take careful aim. Pull the arrow clear back until the head strikes the bow. Then let it fly. And may the slain be many! Again, if you want to be skilful in spiritual hunting, you must hunt in unfrequented and secluded places. Why does the hunter go three or four days in the Pennsylvania forests, or over Raquette Lake into the wilds of the Adirondacks? It is the only way to do. The deer are shy, and one “bang” of the gun clears the forest. From the California stage you see, as you go over the plains, here and there a coyote trotting along, almost within range of the gun—sometimes quite within range of it. No one cares for that; it is worthless. The good game is hidden and secluded. Every hunter knows that. So, many of the souls that will be of most worth for Christ, and of most value for the Church, are secluded. They do not come in your way. You will have to go where they are. Yonder they are, down in that cellar, yonder they are, up in that garret. Far away from the door of any church, the Gospel arrow has not been pointed at them. The tract distributor and the city missionary sometimes just catch a glimpse of them, as a hunter through the trees gets a momentary sight of a partridge or roebuck. The trouble is we are waiting for the game to come to us. We are not good hunters. We are standing in a city street, expecting that the timid antelope will come up and eat out of our hand. We are expecting that the prairie-fowl will light on our church steeple. It is not their habit. If the Church should wait ten millions of years for the world to come in and be saved, it would wait in vain. The world will not come. What the Church wants now is to lift their feet from damask ottomans and put them in the stirrups. We want a pulpit on wheels. The Church wants not so much cushions as it wants saddle-bags and arrows. We have to put aside the gown and the kid gloves, and put on the hunting-shirt. We have been fishing so long in the brooks that run under the shadow of the Church that the fish know us, and they avoid the hook, and escape as soon as we come to the bank, while yonder is Upper Saranac and Big Tupper’s Lake, where the first swing of the Gospel net would break it for the multitude of the fishes. There is outside work to be done. What is that I see in the backwoods? It is a tent. The hunters have made a clearing and camped out. What do they care if they have wet feet or if they have nothing but a pine branch for a pillow or for the northeast storm? If a moose in the darkness steps into the lake to drink, they hear it right away. If a loon cry in the midnight, they hear it. So in the service of God we have exposed work. We shall have to camp out and rough it. We are putting all our care on the thousands of people in the cities who, they say, come to church. What are we doing for the hundreds of thousands that do not come? Have they no souls? Are they sinless, that they need no pardon? Are there no dead in their houses, that they need no comfort? Are they cut off from God to go into eternity, no wing to bear them, no light to cheer them, no welcome to greet them? I hear surging up from the lower depths of our great cities a groan that comes through our Christian assemblages and through our Christian churches; and it blots out all this scene from my eyes today, as by the mists of a great Niagara, for the dash and the plunge of these great torrents of life dropping down into the fathomless and thundering abyss of suffering and woe. I sometimes think that just as God blotted out the Church of Thyatira and Corinth and Laodicea, because of their sloth and stolidity, he will blot out American and English Christianity, and raise on the ruins a stalwart, wideawake, missionary church, that can take the full meaning of that command: “Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned.” I remark, further, if you want to succeed in Gospel Jaunting, you must have courage. If the hunter stand with trembling hand, or shoulder that flinches with fear, instead of his taking the catamount, the catamount takes him. What would become of the Greenlander if, when out hunting for the bear, he should stand shivering with terror on an iceberg? What would have become of Du Chaillu and Livingstone in the African thicket, with a faint heart and a weak knee? When a panther comes within twenty paces of you, and it has its eye on you, and has squatted for the fearful spring, “Steady there!” Courage, O ye spiritual hunters! There are great monsters of iniquity prowling all around about the community. Shall we not in the strength of God go forth and combat them? We not only need more heart, but more backbone. What is the Church of God that it should fear to look in the eye any transgression? There is the Bengal tiger of drunkenness that prowls around, and instead of attacking it, how many of us hide under the church pew or the communion table? There is so much invested in it we are afraid to assault it; millions of dollars in barrels, in vats, in spigots, in corkscrews, in gin palaces with marble floors and Italian-top tables, and chased ice-coolers, and in the strychnine and the logwood and the tartaric acid and the nux vomica that go to make up our “pure” American drinks. I looked with wondering eyes on the “Heidelberg tun.” It is the great liquor vat of Germany, which is said to hold eight hundred hogsheads of wine, and only three times in a hundred years has it been filled. But, as I stood and looked at it, I said to myself: “That is nothing—eight hundred hogsheads. Why, our American vat holds four million five hundred thousand barrels of strong drinks, and we keep three hundred thousand men with nothing to do but to see that it is filled.” Oh, to attack this great monster of intemperance, and the kindred monsters of fraud and uncleanness, requires you to rally all your Christian courage. Through the press, through the pulpit, through the platform, you must assault it. Would to God that all our American Christians would band together, not for crack-brained fanaticism, but for holy Christian reform. I think it was in 1793 that there went out from Lucknow, India, under the sovereign, the greatest hunting party that was ever projected. There were ten thousand armed men in that hunting party. There were camels and horses and elephants. On some, princes rode and royal ladies, under exquisite housings, and five hundred coolies waited upon the train, and the desolate places of India were invaded by this excursion, and the rhinoceros and deer and elephant fell under the stroke of the saber and bullet. After a while the party brought back trophies worth fifty thousand rupees, having left the wilderness of India ghastly with the slain bodies of wild beasts. Would to God that instead of here and there a straggler going out to fight these great monsters of iniquity in our country, the sixteen million membership of our churches would band together and hew in twain these great crimes that make the land frightful with their roar, and are fattening upon the bodies and souls of immortal men. Who is ready for such a party? Who will be a mighty hunter for the Lord? I remark again, if you want to be successful in spiritual hunting, you need not only to bring down. the game, but bring the game in. I think one of the most beautiful pictures of Thorwaldsen is his “Autumn.” It represents a sportsman standing under a grape-vine as he is coming home. He has a staff over his shoulder, and on the other end of that staff are hung a rabbit and a brace of birds. Every hunter brings home the game. No one would think of bringing down a reindeer or whipping up a stream for trout, and then going away, letting them lie in the woods. At eventide the camp is adorned with the treasures, beak and fin and antler. If you go out to hunt for immortal souls, not only bring them down under the arrow of the Gospel, but bring them into the Church of God, the grand home and encampment we have pitched this side the skies. Fetch them in, do not let them lie out in the open field. They need our prayers and sympathies and help. That is the meaning of the Church of God—help. O ye hunters for the Lord! not only bring down the game, but bring it in. If Mithridates liked hunting so much that for seven years he never went indoors, what enthusiasm ought we to have who are hunting for immortal souls. If Domitian practised archery until he could stand a boy down in the Roman amphitheater, with a hand out, the fingers outstretched, and then the king could shoot between the fingers without wounding them, to what drill and practise ought not we to subject ourselves in order to become spiritual archers and “mighty hunters before the Lord!” But let me say, you will never work any better than you pray. The old archers took the bow, put one end of it down beside the foot, elevated the other end, and it was the rule that the bow should be just as long as the archer was high; if it were just that length, then he would go into the battle with confidence. Let me say that your power to project good in the world will correspond exactly to your own spiritual stature. In other words, the first thing, in preparation for Christian work, is personal consecration. Oh! for a closer walk with God, A calm and heavenly frame, A light to shine upon the road That leads me to the Lamb. I am sure that there are some here who, at some time, have been hit by the Gospel arrow. You felt the wound of that conviction, and you plunged into the world deeper; just as the stag, when the hounds are after it, plunges into Schroon Lake, expecting in that way to escape. Jesus Christ is on your track today, impenitent man! not in wrath, but in mercy. O ye chased and panting souls! here is the stream of God’s mercy and salvation, where you may cool your thirst. Stop that chase of sin today. By the red fountain that leaped from the heart of my Lord, I bid you stop. There is mercy for you—mercy that pardons; mercy that heals; everlasting mercy. Is there fn all this house any one who can refuse the offer that comes from the heart of the dying Son of God? There is in a forest in Germany a place called the “Deer Leap,” two crags about eighteen yards apart, between a fearful chasm. This is called the “Deer Leap” because once a hunter was on the track of a deer; it came to one of these crags; there was no escape for it from the pursuit of the hunter, and in utter despair it gathered itself up, and in the death agony attempted to jump across. Of course it fell, and was dashed on the rocks far beneath. Here is a path to heaven. It is plain; it is safe. Jesus marks it out for every man to walk in. But here is a man who says: “I won’t walk in that path; I will take my own way.” He comes on up until he confronts the chasm that divides his soul from heaven. Now his last hour has come, and he resolves that he will leap that chasm from the heights of earth to the heights of heaven. Stand back, now, and give him full swing, for no soul ever did that successfully. Let him try. Jump! Jump! He misses the mark, and he goes down, depth below depth, “destroyed without remedy.” Men! angels! devils! what shall we call that place of awful catastrophe? Let it be known forever as “The Sinner’s Death Leap.” It is said that when Charlemagne’s host was overpowered by three armies of the Saracens in the Pass of Roncesvalles, his warrior, Roland, in terrible earnestness, seized a trumpet, and blew it with such terrific strength that the opposing army reeled back with terror; but at the third blast of the trumpet it broke in two. I see your soul fiercely assailed by all the powers of earth and hell. I put the trumpet of the Gospel to my lips, and I blow it three times. Blast the first—”Whosoever will, let him come.” Blast the second—”Seek ye the Lord while he may be found.” Blast the third—”Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation.” Does not the host of your sins fall back? But the trumpet does not, like that of Roland, break in two. As it was handed down to us from the lips of our fathers, we hand it down to the lips of our children, and tell them to sound it when we are dead, that all the generations of men may know that our God is a pardoning God, a sympathetic God, a loving God; and that more to him than the anthems of heaven, more to him than the throne on which he sits, more to him than are the temples of celestial worship, is the joy of seeing the wanderer putting his hand on the door-latch of his Father’s house. Hear it, all ye nations! Bread for the worst hunger; medicine for the worst sickness; light for the thickest darkness; harbor from the worst storm. Dr. Prime, in his book of wonderful interest, entitled Around the World, describes a tomb in India of marvelous architecture. Twenty thousand men were twenty-two years in erecting that and the buildings around it. Standing at that tomb, if you speak or sing, after you have ceased you hear the echo coming from a height of one hundred and fifty feet. It is not like other echoes. The sound is drawn out in sweet prolongation, as though the angels of God were chanting on the wing. How many souls here today, in the tomb of sin, will lift up the voice of penitence and prayer? If now they would cry unto God, the echo would drop from afar—not struck from the marble cupola of an earthly mausoleum, but sounding back from the warm heart of angels flying with the news; for there is joy among the angels over one sinner that repenteth. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 16: 014. WHICH CHURCH? ======================================================================== Which Church? Genesis 13:8 : “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen. Is not the whole world before thee?” Uncle and nephew, Abram and Lot, both pious, both millionaires, and with such large flocks of bleating sheep and lowing cattle that their herdmen got into a fight, perhaps about the best pasture, or about the best water privilege, or because the cow of one got hooked by the horns of the other. Not their poverty of opportunity, but their wealth, was the cause of controversy between these two men. To Abram, the glorious old Mesopotamian sheik, such controversy seemed absurd. It was like two ships quarreling for sea room in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. There was a vast reach of country, cornfields, vineyards, harvests, and plenty of room in illimitable acreage. “Now,” says Abram, “let us agree to differ. Here are the mountain districts, swept by the tonic sea breeze, and with wide-reaching prospect, and there is the plain of the Jordan, with tropical luxuriance. You may have either.” Lot, who was not as rich as Abram, and might have been expected to take the second choice, made the first selection, and with a modesty that must have made Abram smile, said to him: “You may have the rocks anil the fine prospect; I will take the valley of the Jordan, with all its luxuriance of cornfields, and the river to water the flocks, and the genial climate, and the wealth immeasurable.” So the controversy was forever settled, and great-souled Abram carried out the suggestion of the text: “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen. Is not the whole land before thee?” Well, in this, the last decade of the nineteenth century, and in this beautiful land, which was called America, after Americus Vespucius, but should have been called Columbia, after its discoverer, Columbus, we have a wealth of religious privilege and opportunity that is positively bewildering. Churches of all sorts of creeds, and of all kinds of government and all forms of worship and all styles of architecture. What opulence of ecclesiastical opportunity! Now, while in desolate regions there may be only one church, in the opulent districts of this country there is such a profusion that there ought to be no difficulty in making a selection. No fight about vestments, or between liturgical or non-liturgical adherents, or as to baptismal modes, or a handful of water as compared with a riverful. If Abram prefers to dwell on the heights, where he can only get a sprinkling from the clouds, let him consent that Lot have all the Jordan in which to immerse himself. “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen. Is not the whole land before thee?” Especially is it unfortunate when families allow angry discussion at the breakfast or dining or tea-table as tor which is the best church or denomination, one at one end of the table saying he could never endure the rigid doctrines of Presbyterianism, one at the other end responding that she never could stand the forms of Episcopacy, and one at one side of the table saying he did not understand how anybody could bear the noise in the Methodist Church, and another declaring all the Baptists bigots. There are hundreds of families hopelessly split on ecclesiasticism, and in the middle of every discussion on such subjects there is a kindling of indignation, and it needs some old father Abram to come and put his foot on the loaded fuse before the explosion takes place, and say: “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen. Is not the whole land before thee?” I undertake a subject never undertaken by any other pulpit, for it is an exceedingly delicate subject, and if not rightly handled might give serious offense; but I approach it without the slightest trepidation, for I am sure I have the Divine direction in the matters I propose to present. It is a tremendous question, asked all over Christendom, often asked with tears and sobs and heart-breaks, and involving the peace of families, the eternal happiness of many souls: In matters of church attendance should the wife go with the husband or the husband go with the wife? First, remember that all the evangelical churches have enough truth in them to save the soul and prepare us for happiness on earth and in heaven. I will go with you into any well-selected theological library, and I will show you sermons from ministers in all denominations that set forth man as a sinner and Christ as a deliverer from sin and sorrow. That is the whole Gospel. Get that into your soul and you are fitted for the here and the hereafter. There are differences, we admit, and some denominations we like better than others. But suppose three or four of us make a solemn agreement to meet each other a week from now in Chicago on important business, and one goes by the New York Central railroad, another by the Erie railroad, another by the Pennsylvania railroad, another by the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. One goes this way because the mountains are grander, another takes this because the cars are more luxurious, another that because the speed is greater, another takes the other because he has long been accustomed to that route, and all the employes are familiar. So far as our engagement to meet is concerned, it makes no difference if we only get there. Now, any one of the innumerable evangelical denominations, if you practice its teaching—although some of their trains run on a broad gauge and some on a narrow gauge—will bring you out at the city of the New Jerusalem. It being evident that you will be safe in any of the evangelical denominations, I proceed to remark, first, if one of the married couple be a Christian and the other not, the one a Christian is bound to go anywhere to a church where the unconverted companion is willing to go, if he or she will go to no other. You of the connubial partnership are a Christian. You are safe for the skies. Then it is your duty to secure the eternal safety of your lifetime associate. Is not the everlasting welfare of your wife impenitent, or your husband impenitent, of more importance than your church relationship? Is not the condition of your companion for the next quadrillion of years a mightier consideration to you than the gratification of your ecclesiastical taste for forty or fifty years. A man or a woman that would stop half a minute to weigh preferences as to whether he or she had better go with the unconverted companion to this or that church or denomination has no religion at all, and never has had, and I fear never will have. You are loaded up with what you suppose to be religion, but you are like Captain Frobisher, who brought back from his voyage of discovery a shipload of what he supposed valuable minerals, yet, instead of being silver and gold, were nothing but common stones of the field, to be hurled out as finally useless. Mighty God! In all thy realm is there one man or woman professing religion, yet so stolid, so unfitted, so far gone unto death that there would be any hesitancy in surrendering all preferences before such an opportunity of salvation and heavenly reunion? If you, a Christian wife, are an attendant upon any church, and your unconverted husband does not go there because he does not like its preacher or its music or its architecture or its uncomfortable crowding, and goes not to any house of worship, but would go if you would accompany him somewhere else, change your church relations. Take your hymn-book home with you today. Say good-by to your friends in the neighboring pews, and go with him to any one of a hundred churches till his soul is saved and he joins you in the march to heaven. More important than that ring on the third finger of your left hand it is that your Heavenly Father command the angel of mercy, concerning your husband at his conversion, as in the parable of old: “Put a ring on his hand.” No letter of more importance ever came to the great city of Corinth, situated on what was called the “Bridge of the Sea,” and glistening with sculpture, and gated with a style of brass the magnitude of which the following ages have not been able to successfully imitate, and overshadowed by the Acro-Corinthus, a fortress of rock two thousand feet high—I say no letter ever came to that great city of more importance than that letter in which Paul puts the two startling questions: “What knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? Or how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife?” The dearest sacrifice on the part of the one is cheap if it rescue the other. Better go to the smallest, weakest, most insignificant church on earth and be copartners in eternal bliss, than pass your earthly membership in the most gorgeously attractive church while your companion stays outside of evangelical privilege. Better have the drowning saved by a scow or a sloop than let him or her go down while you sail by in the gilded cabins of a Majestic or a Campania. Second remark: If both of the married couple be Christians, but one is so naturally constructed that it is impossible to enjoy the services of a particular denomination, and the other is not so sectarian or punctilious, let the one less particular go with the other who is very particular. As for myself, I feel as much at home in one denomination of evangelical Christians as another, and I think I must have been born very near the line. I like the solemn roll of the Episcopal liturgy, and I like the spontaneity of the Methodists, and I like the importance given to the ordinance of baptism by the Baptists, and I like the freedom of the Congregationalists, and I like the government and the sublime doctrine of the Presbyterians, and I like many of the others just as much as any I have mentioned, and I could happily live and preach and die and be buried from any of them. But others are born with a liking so stout, so unbending, so inexorable for some denomination that it is a positive necessity they have the advantage of that one. What they were intended to be in ecclesiasticism was written in the sides of their cradle, if the father and mother had their eyes keen enough to see it. They would not stop crying until they had put in their hands as a plaything a Westminster Catechism or the Thirty-nine Articles. The whole current of their temperament and thought and character runs into one sect of religionists as naturally as the James river into the Chesapeake. It would be a torture to such persons to be anywhere outside of that one church. Now, let the wife or husband who is not so constructed sacrifice the milder preference for the one more inflexible and rigorous. Let the grapevine follow the rugosities and sinuosities of the oak or hickory. Abram, the richer in flocks of Christian grace, should say to Lot, who is built on a smaller scale: “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen. Is not the whole land before thee?” As you can be edified and happy anywhere, go with your companion to the church to which he or she must go or be miserable. Remark the third: If both the married couple are very strong in their sectarianism, let them attend the different churches preferred. It is not necessary that you attend the same church. Religion is between your conscience and your God. Like Abram and Lot, agree to differ. When on Sabbath morning you come out of your home together, and one goes one way and the other the other, heartily wish each other a good sermon and a time of profitable devotion, and when you meet again at the noonday repast, let it be evident, each to each, and to your children, and to the hired help, that you have both been on the Mount of Transfiguration, although you went up by different paths, and that you have both been fed by the bread of life, though kneaded by different hands in different trays, and baked in different ovens. “But how about the children?” I am often asked by scores of parents. Let them also make their own choice. They will grow up with reverence for both the denominations represented by father and mother, if you, by holy lives, commend those denominations. If the father lives the better life, they will have the more favorable opinion of his denomination. If the mother lives the better life, they will have the more favorable opinion of her denomination. And some day both the parents will, for at least one service, go to the same church. The neighbors will say: “I wonder what is going on today, for I saw our neighbor and his wife, who always go to different churches, going arm in arm to the same sanctuary.” Well, I will tell you what has brought them together, arm in arm, to the same altar. Something very important has happened. Their son is today uniting with the church. He is standing in the aisle, taking the vows of a Christian. He had been somewhat wayward, and gave father and mother a good deal of anxiety, but their prayers have been answered in his conversion, and as he stands in the aisle and the minister of religion says: “Do you consecrate yourself to the God who made and redeemed you, and do you promise to serve him all your days?” and with manly voice he answers, “I do,” there is an April shower in the pew where father and mother sit, and a rainbow of joy which arches both their souls, that makes all differences of creed infinitesimal. And the daughter, who had been very worldly and gay and thoughtless, puts her life on the altar of consecration, and as the sunlight of that Sabbath streams through the church window and falls upon her brow and cheek, she looks like their other daughter, whose face was illumined with the brightness of another world on the day when the Lord took her into his heavenly keeping years ago. I should not wonder, if, after all, these parents pass the evening of their life in the same church, all differences of preference overcome by the joy of being in the house of God where their children were prepared for usefulness and heaven. But I can give you a recipe for ruining your children. Angrily contend in the household that your church is right and the church of your companion is wrong. Bring sneer and caricature to emphasize your opinions, and your children will make up their minds that religion is a sham, and they will have none of it. In the northeast storm of domestic controversy the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley will not grow. Fight about apostolic succession, fight about election and free agency, fight about baptism, fight about the bishopric, fight about gown and surplice, and the religious prospects of your children will be left dead on the field. You will be as unfortunate as Charles, Duke of Burgundy, who in battle lost a diamond the value of a kingdom, for in your fight you will lose the jewel of salvation for your entire household. This is nothing against the advocacy of your own religious theories. Use all forcible argument, bring all telling illustration, array all demonstrative facts, but let there be no acerbity, no stinging retort, no mean insinuation, no superciliousness, as though all others were wrong and you infallibly right. Take a hint from astronomy. The Ptolemaic system made the earth the centre of the solar system, and everything was thought to turn round the earth. But the Copernican system came in, and made the sun the centre around which the planets revolved. The bigot makes his little belief the centre of everything, but the large-souled Christian makes the Sun of Righteousness the centre, and all denominations, without any clashing and each in its own sphere, revolving around it. Over the tomb of Dean Stanley in Westminster Abbey is the passage of Scripture: “Thy commandments are exceeding broad.” Let no man crowd us on to a path like the bridge Al-Sirat, which the Mohammedan thinks leads from this world over the abyss of hell into Paradise, the breadth of the bridge less than the web of a starved spider or the edge of a sword or razor, off the edges of which many fall. No; while the way is not wide enough to take with us any of our sins, it is wide enough for all Christian believers to pass without peril into everlasting safety. But do not any of you depend upon what you call “a sound creed” for salvation. A man may own all the statutes of the State of New York and yet not be a lawyer; and a man may own all the best medical treaties and not be a physician; and a man may own all the best works on painting and architecture and not be either painter or architect; and a man may own all the sound creeds in the world and yet not be a Christian. Not what you have in your head and on your tongue, but in your heart and in your life, will decide everything. In olden times in England, before the modern street lamps were invented, every householder was expected to have a lantern suspended in front of his house, and the cry of the watchmen in London as they went along at eventide was: “Hang out your lights.” Instead of disputing in your home about the different kinds of lantern, as a watchman on the walls of Zion I cry: “Let your light so shine before men that they, seeing your good works, may glorify your Father which is in heaven.” Hang out your lights! You may have a thousand ideas about religion, and yet not the great idea of pardoning mercy. It is not the number of your ideas, but the greatness of them. A mouse hath ten offspring in her nest, while the lioness hath one in her lair. All ideas about forms and ceremonies and church government put together are not worth the one idea of getting to heaven yourself and taking your family with you. But do not reject Christianity, as many do, because there are so many sects. Standing in Westminster Hotel, London, I looked out of the window and saw three clocks, as near as I can remember, one on the Parliament House, another on St. Margaret’s Chapel, another on Westminster Abbey, and they were all different. One said twelve o’clock at noon, another said five minutes before twelve, another said five minutes after twelve. I might as well have concluded that there is no such thing as time, because the three timepieces were different, as for you to conclude that there is no such thing as pure Christianity, because the churches differ in their statement of it. But let us all rejoice that, although part of our family may worship on earth in one church and part in another church, or, bowed at the same altar in a compromise of preferences, we are, if redeemed, on the way to a perfect church, where all our preferences will be fully gratified. Great cathedral of eternity, with arches of amethyst, and pillars of sapphire, with floors of emerald, and windows aglow with the sunrise of heaven! What stupendous towers, with chimes angel-hoisted and angel-rung! What myriads of worshipers, white-robed and coroneted! What an officiator at the altar, even “the great High Priest of our profession!” What walls, hung with the captured shields and flags by the church militant passed up to be church triumphant! What doxologies of all nations! Coronet to coronet, cymbal to cymbal, harp to harp, organ to organ! Pull out the tremulant stop to recall the sufferings past! Pull out the trumpet stop to celebrate the victory! When shall these eyes thy heaven-built walls And pearly gates behold? Thy bulwarks with salvation strong, And streets of shining gold. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 17: 015. MIDNIGHT EXPLORATION ======================================================================== Midnight Exploration Fourth Night Genesis 14:10 : “And the vale of Siddim was full of slime-pits.” About six months ago, a gentleman in Augusta, Georgia, wrote me asking me to preach from this text, and the time has come for the subject. The neck of and army had been broken by falling into these half-hidden slime-pits. How deep they were or how vile or how hard to get out of, we are not told; but the whole scene is so far distant in the past that we have not half as much interest in this statement of the text as we have in the announcement that our American cities are full of slime-pits, and tens of thousands of people are falling in them night by night. Recently, in the name of God, I explored some of these slime-pits. Why did I do so? In April last, seated in the editorial rooms of one of the chief daily newspapers of New York, the editor said to me: “Mr. Talmage, you clergymen are at great disadvantage when you come to battle iniquity, for you do not know what you are talking about, and we laymen are aware of the fact if you would like to make a personal investigation, I will see that you shall get the highest official escort.” I thanked him, accepted the invitation, and told him that this autumn I would begin the tour. The fact was that I had for a long time wanted to say some words of warning and invitation to the young men of this country, and I felt if my course of sermons was preceded by a tour of this sort I should not only be better acquainted with the subject, but I should have the whole country for an audience; and it has been a deliberate plan of my ministry, whenever I am going to try to do anything especial for God or humanity or the church, to do it in such a way that the devil will always advertise it free, gratis, for nothing! That was the reason I gave two weeks’ previous notice of my pulpit intentions. The result has been satisfactory. Standing within those purlieus of death, under the conduct of the police and in their company, I was as much surprised at the people whom I missed as at the people whom I saw. I saw bankers there, and brokers there, and merchants there, and men of all classes and occupations who have leisure, there; but there was one class of persons that I missed. I looked for them all up and down the galleries, and amid the illumined gardens, and all up and down the staircases of death. I saw not one of them. I mean the hard-working classes, the laboring classes, of our great cities. You tell me they could not afford to go there. They could. Entrance, twenty-five cents. They could have gone there if they had a mind to; but the simple fact is that hard work is a friend to good morals. The men who toil from early morn until late at night are tired out when they go home and want to sit down and rest, or to saunter out with their families along the street, or to pass into some quiet place of amusement where they will not be ashamed to take wife or daughter. The busy populations of these cities are the moral populations. I observed on the night of our exploration that the places of dissipation are chiefly supported by the men who go to business at nine and ten o’clock in the morning and get through at three and four in the afternoon. They have plenty of time to go to destruction in, and plenty of money to buy a through ticket on the Grand Trunk Railroad to perdition, stopping at no station until they get to the eternal smash-up! Those are the fortunate and divinely-blessed young men who have to breakfast early and take supper late, and have the entire interregnum filled up with work that blisters the hands, and makes the legs ache and the brain weary. There is no chance for the morals of that young man who has plenty of money and no occupation. You may go through all our great cities and you will not find one young man of that kind who has not already achieved his ruin, or who is not on the way thereto at the rate of sixty miles the hour. Those are not the favored and divinely-blessed young men who come and go as they will, and who have their pocket-case full of the best cigars, and who dine at Delmonico’s, and who dress in the latest fashion, their garments a little tighter or looser or broader striped than others, their mustaches twisted with stiffer cosmetic, and their hat set farthest over on the right ear, and who have boots fitting the foot with exquisite torture, and who have handkerchief soaked with musk and patchouli and white rose and new-mown hay and “balm of a thousand flowers;” but those are the fortunate young men who have to work hard for a living. Give a young man plenty of wines, and plenty of cigars, and plenty of fine horses, and Satan has no anxiety about that man’s coming out at his place. He ceases to watch him, only giving directions about his reception when he shall arrive at the end of the journey. If, on the night of our exploration, I had called the roll of all the laboring men of these cities, I would have received no answer, for the simple reason they were not there to answer. I was not more surprised at the people whom I saw there than I was surprised at the people whom I missed. O man! if you have an occupation by which you are wearied every night of your life, thank God, for it is the mightiest preservative against evil. But by that time the clock of old Trinity Church was striking one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve—midnight! And with the police and two elders of my church we sat down at the table in the galleries and looked off upon the vortex of death. The music in full blast; the dance in wildest whirl; the wine foaming to the lip of the glass. Midnight on earth is mid-noon in hell. All the demons of the pit were at that moment holding high carnival. The blue calcium light suggested the burning brimstone of the pit. Seated there, at that hour, in that awful place, you ask me, as I have frequently been asked: “What were the emotions that went through your heart?” And I shall give the rest of my morning’s sermon to telling you how I felt. First of all, an overwhelming sense of pity, deeper than I have felt at death-bed or railroad disaster. Why were we there as Christian explorers, while those lost souls were there as participators? If they had enjoyed the same healthful and Christian surroundings which we have had all our days, and we had been thrown amid the contaminations which have destroyed them, the case would have been the reverse, and they would have been the spectators and we the actors in that awful tragedy of the damned. As I sat there I could not keep back the tears—tears of gratitude to God for his protecting grace—tears of compassion for those who had fallen so low. The difference in moral navigation had been the difference in the way the wind blew. The wind of temptation drove them on the rocks. The wind of God’s mercy drove us out on a fair sea. There are men and women so merciless in their criticism of the fallen that you might think that God had made them in an especial mold, and that they have no capacity for evil; and yet if they had been subjected to the same allurements, instead of stopping at the uptown haunts of iniquity, they would at this hour have been wallowing amid the horrors of Arch Block or shrieking with delirium tremens in the cell of a police station. Instead of boasting over your purity and your integrity and your sobriety, you had better be thanking God for his grace, lest some time the Lord should let you loose and you find out how much better you naturally are than others. I will take the best-tempered man in this house, the most honest man in this city, and I will venture the opinion in regard to him that, surround him with all the adequate circumstances of temptation, and the Lord let him loose, he would become a thief, a gambler, a sot, a rake, a wharf-rat. Instead of boasting over our superiority, and over the fact that there is no capacity in us for evil, I would rather have for my epitaph that one word which Duncan Matthewson, the Scotch evangelist, ordered chiseled on his tombstone, the name, and the one word, “Kept.” Again, seated in that gallery of death, and looking out on the maelstrom of iniquity, I thought to myself: “There! that young man was once the pride of the city home. Paternal care watched him; maternal love bent over him; sisterly affection surrounded him. He was once taken to the altar and consecrated in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; but he went away. This very moment, I thought to myself, “there are hearts aching for that young man’s return. Father and mother are sitting up for him.” You say: “He has a night-key, and he can get in without their help. Why do not those parents go sound to sleep?” What! Is there any sleep for parents who suspect a son is drifting up and down amid the dissipations of a great city? They may weep, they may pray, they may wring their hands, but sleep they cannot. Ah! they have done and suffered too much for that boy to give him up now. They turn up the light and look at the photograph of him when he was young and untempted. They stand at the window to see if he is coming up the street. They hear the watchman’s step, but no sound of returning boy. I felt that night as if I could put my hand on the shoulder of that young man, and, with a voice that would sound all through those temples of sin, say to him: “Go home, young man; your father is waiting for you. Your mother is waiting for you. God is waiting for you. All heaven is waiting for you. Go home! By the tears wept over your waywardness, by the prayers offered for your salvation, by the midnight watching over you when you had scarlet fever and diphtheria, by the blood of the Son of God, by the Judgment Day when you must answer for what you have been doing here tonight, go home!” But I did not say this, lest it interfere with my work, and I waited to get on this platform, where, perhaps, instead of saving one young man, God helping me, I might save a thousand young men; and the cry of alarm which I suppressed that night, I let loose today in the hearing of this people. Seated in that gallery of death, and looking off upon the destruction, I bethought myself also: “These are the fragments of broken homes.” A home is a complete thing, and if one member of it wander off, then the home is broken. And sitting there, I said: “Here they are, broken family altars, broken wedding-rings, broken vows, broken anticipations, broken hearts.” And, as I looked off, the dance became wilder and more unrestrained, until it seemed as if the floor broke through and the revelers were plunged into a depth from which they might never rise, and all these broken families came around the brink and seemed to cry out: “Come back, father! Come back, my son! Come back, my daughter! Come back, my sister!” But no voices returned, and the sound of the feet of the dancers grew fainter and fainter, and stopped, and there was thick darkness. And I said: “What does all this mean?” And there came up a great hiss of whispering voices, saying: “This is the second death!” But seated there that night, looking off upon that scene of death, I bethought myself also: “This is only a miserable copy of European dissipations.” In London they have what they call the Argyle, the Aquarium, the Strand, the beer-gardens, and a thousand places of infamy, and it seems to be the ambition of bad people in this country to copy those foreign dissipations. Toadyism when it bows to foreign pretense and to foreign equipage and to foreign title is despicable; but toadyism is more despicable when it bows to foreign vice. Why, you might as well steal a pillow-case from a smallpox hospital or the shovels from a scavenger’s cart or the coffin of a leper, as to make theft of these foreign plagues. If you want to destroy the people, have some originality of destruction; have an American trap to catch the bodies and souls of men, instead of infringing on the patented inventions of European iniquity. Seated there that night, I also felt that if the good people of our cities knew what was going on in these haunts of iniquity, they would endure it no longer. The foundations of city life are rotten with iniquity, and if the foundations give way the whole structure must crumble. If iniquity progresses in the next one hundred years in the same ratio that it has progressed in the century now closing, there will not be a vestige of moral or religious influence left. It is only a question of subtraction and addition. If the people knew how the virus is spreading they would stop it. I think the time has come for action. Revolution is what we want; and that revolution would begin to-morrow, if the moral and Christian people of our cities knew of the fires that slumber beneath them. Once in a while a glorious city missionary or reformer like Mr. Brace or Mr. Van Meter tells to a well-dressed audience in church the troubles that lie under our roaring metropolis, and the conventional churchgoer gives his five dollars for bread, or gives his fifty dollars to help support a ragged school, and then goes home feeling that the work is done. My friends, the work will not be accomplished until by the force of public opinion the officers of the law shall be compelled to execute the law. We are told that the twenty-five hundred police of New York cannot put down the five or six hundred dens of infamy, to say nothing of the gambling-houses and the unlicensed grog-shops. I reply, swear me in as a special police captain, and give me two hundred police for two nights, and I would break up all the leading haunts of iniquity in these two cities, and arrest all their leaders and send such consternation in the smaller places that they would shut up of themselves! I do not think I should be afraid of lawsuits for damages for false imprisonment. What we want in these cities is a Stonewall Jackson’s raid through all the places of iniquity. I was persuaded by what I saw on that night of my exploration that the keepers of all these haunts of iniquity are as afraid as they are of death of the police star and the police club and the police revolver. Hence, I declare that the existence of these abominations are to be charged either to police cowardice or to police complicity. At the close of our journey that night, we got in the carriage, and we came out on Broadway, and as we came down the street everything seemed silent save the clattering hoofs and the wheels of our own conveyance. Looking down the long line of gaslights, the pavement seemed very solitary. The great sea of metropolitan life had ebbed, leaving a dry beach! New York asleep! No! no! Burglary wide awake. Libertinism wide awake. Murder wide awake. Ten thousand city iniquities wide awake. The click of the decanters in the worst hours of the debauch. The harvest of death full. Eternal woe the reaper. What is that? Trinity clock striking, one—two. “Good night,” said the officers of the law, and I responded “Good night,” for they had been very kind and very generous and very helpful to us. “Good night.” And yet, was there ever an adjective more misapplied? Good night! Why, there was no expletive enough scarred and blasted to describe that night. Black night. Forsaken night. Night of man’s wickedness and woman’s overthrow. Night of awful neglect on the part of those who might help but do not. For many of those whom we had been watching, everlasting night. No hope. No rescue. No God. Black night of darkness forever. As far off as hell is from heaven was that night distant from being a good night. Oh! My friends, what are you going to do in this matter? Punish the people? That is not my theory. Prevent the people, warn the people, hinder the people before they go down. The first philanthropist this country ever knew was Edward Livingston, and he wrote these remarkable words in 1833: “As prevention in the diseases of the body is less painful, less expensive, and more efficacious than the most skilful cure; so in the moral maladies of society, to arrest the vicious before the profligacy assumes the shape of crime, to take away from the poor the cause or pretense of relieving themselves by fraud or theft, to reform them by education, and make their own industry contribute to their support, although difficult and expensive, will be found more effectual in the suppression of offenses, and more economical than the best organized system of punishment.” I have only opened the door of this great subject with which I hope to stir the cities. I have begun, and, God helping me, I will go through. Whoever else may be crowded or kept standing or kept outside the doors, I charge the trustees and the ushers of this church that they give full elbow-room to all these journalists, since each one is another church five times, or ten times, or twenty times larger than this august assemblage, and it is by the printing-press that the Gospel of the Son of God is to be yet preached to all the world. May the blessing of the Lord God come down upon all the editors and all the reporters and all the compositors and all the proof-readers and all the typesetters! But, my friends, before the iniquities of our cities are eradicated, my tongue may be silent in death, and many who are here this morning may have gone so far in sin they cannot get back. You have sometimes been walking on the banks of a river, and you have seen a man struggling in the water, and you have thrown off your coat and leaped in for the rescue. So this morning I throw off the robe of pulpit conventionality, and I plunge in for your drowning soul. I have no cross words for you. I have only indignation for those who would destroy you. I am glad God has not put in my hand any one of the thunderbolts of his power, lest I might be tempted to hurl it at those who are plotting your ruin. I do not give you the tip end of the long fingers of the left hand, but I take your hand, hot with the fever of indulgences and trembling with last night’s debauch, into both my hands, and give the heartiest grip of invitation and welcome. “Oh,” you say, “you would not shake hands with me if you met me.” I would. Try me at the foot of the platform and see if I will not. I have sometimes said that I would like to die with my hand in the hand of my family and my kindred; but I revoke that wish this morning, and say I would like to die with my hand in the hand of a returning sinner, when, with God’s help, I am trying to pull him up into the glorious liberty of the Gospel. I would like that to be my last work on earth. O my brother, come back! Do you know that God made Richard Baxters and John Bunyans and John Newtons out of such as you are? Come back, and wash in the deep fountain of a Saviour’s mercy. I do not give you a cup or a chalice or a pitcher with a limited supply to effect your ablutions. I point you to the five oceans of God’s mercy. Oh, that the Atlantic and Pacific surges of divine forgiveness might roll over your soul! I do not say to you, as we said to the officers of the law when we left them on Broadway, “Good-night.” Oh, no! But, as the glorious sun of God’s forgiveness rides on toward the mid-heavens ready to submerge you in warmth and light and love, I bid you “Good-morning!” Morning of peace for all your troubles. Morning of liberation for all your incarcerations. Morning of resurrection for your soul buried in sin. Good morning! Morning for the resuscitated household that has been waiting for your return. Morning for the cradle and the crib already disgraced with being that of a drunkard’s child. Morning for the daughter who has trudged off to hard work because you did not take care of home. Morning for the wife who at forty or fifty years has the wrinkled face and the stooped shoulder and the white hair. Morning for one. Morning for all. Good morning! In God’s name, good morning. In our last dreadful war the Federals and the Confederates were encamped on opposite sides of the Rappahannock, and one morning the brass band of the Northern troops played the national air, and all the Northern troops cheered and cheered. Then on the opposite side of the Rappahannock the brass band of the Confederates played “My Maryland” and “Dixie,” and then all the Southern troops cheered and cheered. But after awhile one of the bands struck up “Home, Sweet Home,” and the band on the opposite side of the river took up the strain, and when the tune was done the Confederates and the Federals all together united, as the tears rolled down the cheeks, in one great huzza! Well, my friends, heaven comes very near today. It is only a stream that divides us—the narrow stream of death—and the voices there and the voices here seem to commingle, and we join trumpets and hosannas and hallelujahs, and the chorus of the united song of earth and heaven is, “‘Home, Sweet Home.” Home of bright domestic circle on earth. Home of forgiveness in the great heart of God. Home of eternal rest in heaven. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 18: 016. A FEARFUL CONFLAGRATION ======================================================================== A Fearful Conflagration Genesis 15:17 : “And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.” When the ancients wanted to take an oath they would slay an animal, divide it lengthwise, and lay the pieces opposite to each other. Then the parties would advance from opposite points, and midway between the pieces take the oath. God wished to take an oath. He ordered a heifer and some birds slain and divided, and the pieces placed opposite to each other; then between the pieces passed first a furnace, typical of suffering, and then a lamp, emblem of deliverance. So it is in the history of individuals, cities, and nations. First the awful furnace, then the cheerful lamp. The furnace of conviction, the lamp of pardon. The furnace of trial, the lamp of consolation. The furnace of want, the lamp of prosperity. The furnace of death, the lamp of glory. “And it came to pass that when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.” It is the duty of the ministry to interpret solemn providences. Shall a ship founder, carrying down hundreds of passengers; or a gunpowder plot be discovered; or a revolution break forth; or a pestilence put its leprous bandage over the white lips of an empire; or a great city crouch down at the nation’s gate, beggared, while the long tongues of the flame lick its sores, and the ministry be dumb? No; God’s writings, by the hand of apostle or prophet, are no more divine than are the capitals of alarm and warning written by plume of fire in the ruins of the great and beautiful Chicago. In that city the Sabbath had closed. The ministers of Christ had declared their message of peace and good will to men. The doxologies had been sung, and the people had gone to their dwellings. Children had folded their hands in evening prayer, and all over the city the “good-night” had been given. God looked down upon a great city asleep. But destruction broke forth. At the kerosene lamp of a poor woman a torch was lighted that made the earth shudder. The two coursers, Hurricane and Conflagration, yoked together, drew on the chariot in which white Want and cursing Despair and shrieking Terror were mounted. Under the red-hot hoofs the broken hearts of one hundred and fifty thousand people were flung like a shower of cinders. Storehouses that had been the pride of the continent, surrendered their bolts and bars and iron safes, at the first touch of this irresistible burglary. Churches of God, that had been reared with a self-denial worthy of an angel’s eulogy, dropped their organs, galleries, vestments, and consecrated plate into the ashes. And, worse than all, the homes took fire, and away went sacred relics, and the last pillow on which to sleep, and the last loaf of bread, and millionaire and pauper trudged down the street, the flaming sword swung at the gate of their paradise, forbidding them ever again to enter. Hark to that explosion of blocks, that fail to stop the ravages; to the shrieking of that family, gathered on the house-top, begging for help, until the wife falls, and the children faint, and the father staggers, and all die; and to the cry of those men and women who go down the street hatless, raving mad, wringing their hands and tearing their hair! This child cries: “Where is father and mother? I wonder if they are burned up?” And this man, seizing hold of another, cries: “I wonder if this is the Day of Judgment?” and another exclaims: “This is hell!” and an infidel, standing at the street corner, cries out: “Where is your God now?” Carry out these sick children in your arms and fly! Wrap up that corpse and get it away from this funeral pyre! Lift that sick woman, with the child just born, opening its eyes in torment! Get out this lifelong invalid, and do not stop for medicines or blankets, for the stairs are crumbling away—they are gone now! Quick! leap from the window! No use in flying to the water’s edge, for the army of horrors have crossed, and pulled up the bridges after them. With carts and drays, off to the prairies! The night may be cold, and the prospect hopeless, but anything is better than the sting of these cinders, and the falling of these walls, and the wailing of this dying city. But how shall they get out? To the north—fire! to the south—fire! to the east—fire! to the west—fire! Alas for our beautiful sister! She stands looking down into the mirror of the lake, at her scorched brow, and her bleeding cheek, and shivering with the horror of her own disfigurement. Oh! bitter night of October the eighth! It was a furnace—an awful furnace—a furnace which was five miles long and one mile wide—a furnace not seven times heated, but seven hundred times heated. Yet deliverance came. Telegrams from London, from Edinburgh, from Vienna, from New York, from Brooklyn—from two continents, promising help. The Cincinnati and St. Louis freight trains come with the speed of an express, bearing food and blankets; and he who, when things looked dark in the Shenandoah Valley, got into lightning stirrups, has just in time ridden into the scene to spread tents for the shelterless, to scatter rations for the hungry, and to proclaim, in behalf of our national government, that a people who have barns full of corn, and tables full of bread, will not let Chicago suffer. Lift up your head, O City of the Lakes! With bread enough and to spare, you shall not perish with hunger. It was an awful furnace! But it has passed, and now I see a light that gets brighter and brighter as it is fed by the alms and sympathies and prayers of a world. It is the glowing lamp, the cheerful lamp, the glorious lamp of God’s deliverance! From all this you learn, without any preacher telling you, that we are all one. The thrill of sympathy that went through all of this country, and through all of Europe, shows that we belong to one family. No more discussion between New York and Chicago as to which has the most swift-footed enterprise; no more contention between St. Louis and Chicago as to which is the more prominent city, but all the people, white, black, and copper-colored, Protestant and Catholic, find their hearts thrilled with the impulse of one common brotherhood. There are those who do not like this idea. They say that God made the Indian, and set him down this side of the Atlantic, and the Spaniard on the other side, and the African, and placed him in the snaky jungles, and so on, and that then from these different representative men the human family descended. But Paul knocks down that idea when, standing in the presence of one of the most aristocratic audiences of the world, he proclaims, in the name of God, this democratic doctrine: “God hath made of one blood all the nations of men.” They started from one garden, and they fell in one transgression; they are redeemed by the same almighty grace, and are to shine forever in the same heavenly kingdom. This feeling of consanguinity is constantly illustrated. A mine in England falls upon the workmen, and all nations feel the suffocation. Prince Albert dies, and Victoria has the sympathy of all Christendom. A plague falls upon London, and all the cities of the world weep at her agonies. An earthquake rocks down a Mexican city, and both hemispheres feel the shock. Famine stalks through Ireland or Russia or India and distant nations send their cargoes of bread. In 1863 a fire occurred in Santiago, Chili, that wrought worse damages than this Chicago fire, so far as the destruction of human life is considered. The Conception of the Virgin Mary was being celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church at Santiago. Great preparations had been made for the occasion, and perhaps the most wonderful scene ever witnessed in any church was about to be enacted. The wealth and pomp and intellect of that Chilian capital poured into the cathedral, and knelt beside the poorest devotee with cross and beads. Images, statues, transparencies, swaying festoons, and twenty thousand lamps, among which swung costly gauze and delicate draperies, like mists staggering, sunstruck, up the mountain. A camphene lamp explodes, and the flame leaps from point to point, and in fifteen minutes twenty-five hundred souls have passed up through the fire to meet their God. What of that? Why need we care about it? They were of a different nation and of a different religion. Ah! the groan of that dying multitude mounted the Cordilleras, and the sorrow came sobbing across the Caribbean, and all civilized nations felt a thrill of sympathy and an impulse to help. I know that this idea of a common origin is distasteful to some of high pretension; but the most lordly man’s ancestry, like ours, was in Eden built out of red mud. What then? Will you bring all men down to a dead level! No. If you did, they would not stay there fifteen minutes. How then? Let every man have just what he achieves. There ought to be an aristocracy—not one built upon the accidents of wealth or celebrated ancestry, but an aristocracy of industry and of large-hearted deeds. Meanwhile, let it be understood that sceptre and shovel are brothers. The epaulet has no right to overlay the blacksmith’s apron. Brocades must not despise calicoes. With your extravagant viands you have no right to cover up my plain bread. Cathedral must not look down upon sailor’s bethel. The whole Gospel tendency is to bring together what are called the higher and lower classes. Christ came from a throne to a manger to bridge the distance between the two; and this idea of the nineteenth century, which would put the rich in churches by themselves, and the poor in churches by themselves, is an erroneous, unevangelical, heathenish, God-defying, and inhuman plan, which I shall war against to my dying day. This doctrine of universal brotherhood will not make all alike. Differences in soil and climate will make differences in men. As with plants and animals, so with men. The torrid zone will yield the yams and tamarinds, and the best culture will only make better yams and tamarinds. The wintry regions will yield the barley and berries; and culture will only make this difference, that they will produce better barley and larger berries. You will not expect to find the same vegetable products in Paraguay as in Lapland. Cloves and cherries cannot well drink the same air. Nutmegs and currants will not grow side by side. When God made one part of the earth, he said: “You yield bananas”; and to another, “You yield plums and pears”; and that portion thrives best which attempts to produce and export that which God ordained it to raise. So, in the animal kingdom, you will not expect to find the ichneumon where you hunt for the otter and walrus. As with plants and animals, so with man. The tropical regions will make passionate natures, and Arctic severities will form temperaments, cold and stolid and sullen. In the region of the Gospel there will be the same great national characteristics as now, although somewhat moderated and modified. The Frenchman will be characteristically polite; the German, persistent and plodding; the English, self-reliant; the American, restless and enterprising; the Indian, aesthetic; the Spaniard, quick and impulsive. Gospel triumphs will not steal the Scotchman’s plaid, or break the German’s pipe, or dash down the Italian’s easel. Differences forever, but no quarrel. Christ spreading his treaty of peace over all monarchies and republics, the potentates, presidents, and princes of the earth will come up and sign it. Vessels of war, anchored at the shipyards, and changed into merchantmen, or swung into the navy-yard, to be kept as relics of a barbarous age, to be looked upon as in our museums we now examine scalping-knives and thumb-screws. The masterly treatises on military tactics will be sold for wrapping-paper, or kept for curious examination, as we now have in our libraries an old Koran or a Chinese almanac. The surgical discoveries made in the treatment of gun-shot fractures will be employed in alleviating the accidents to laborer, farmer, and mechanic. The hammer of the shipwright, as it beats against the spikes in the ship’s beam, will sound “Life!” “Life!” instead of, as now rattling “Death!” “Death!” What! is the Gospel going to take all the spirit and pluck out of the race? Shall our mariners be impressed, and the government seek no indemnity? Shall our merchant ships be damaged on the high seas, and no reparation be demanded? Shall privateers be fitted out in foreign ports, and there be no requisition for the loss suffered? Shall nations repudiate, and there be no force of armies to compel the payment of the national debt? Shall oppressed men suffer forever, when they might seize the sword and hew out their own deliverance? My answer to all these questions is, there will be no wrong, no imposition, no outrage, and consequently, no collision. Oh, day of universal brotherhood, begin! It comes skipping upon the mountains, and singing through the vales. I hear its footsteps in the tread of the multitudes of the devout, on their way to church. I hear its voice in the billowing up of that great song of praise that rises from all the churches of God, illuminated for worship. I see its banner lifted upon the fallen ramparts of great iniquities, the folds of light streaming with the stars of promise and good cheer. This wave of Gospel influence dashes higher up toward full tide. This song of joy, now tremulous and faint, will burst into million-voiced acclaim. The towers that have so long been tolling the sorrows of the world shall peal another sound—Scotch kirk and American church and mission chapel and great St. Paul’s, chiming the clear, sweet, silvery song of the Millennium. The Church of God, no more a barrack for fighting Christians, shall become a great temple, on whose walls shall be hung olive-branches of peace. The flags of all nations, once carried in front of hostile armies, shall hang in graceful festoons above those who once were full of hate. The “Marseillaise Hymn” and “Bonny Doon” and “Hail Columbia” and “God save the Queen,” shall mingle in one great song; but, touched into resurrection, it shall mount into a harmony of unimagined sweetness and power, that shall soar and melt and pour into the hallelujah that, like the voice of many waters, and the voice of mighty thunders, comes surging up to the feet of Jesus. Again: I learn from this Chicago disaster what a poor place the earth is to put our treasures in. Two hundred and fifty million dollars of property destroyed in a day and a night! How much toil of brain and hand and foot represented in that property! All the anxiety and sweat of twenty years gone in one day of destruction. We have been accustomed to think that if property were insured, all was well. But even insurance companies have gone down. Set not your affections on anything you can build, for it is perishable. Do not worship your fine reputation or your handsome store or your large house, or your swift ship, but build up in your soul a temple of Christian character. Disasters cannot crush it nor fire consume it nor iconoclast deface its altars nor time chisel down its walls. Yet politicians have worshiped their office, and merchants their business and painters their pictures and musicians their attainments and architects their buildings and historians their books; and how often have they seen their works perish! Audubon, after fifteen years of working in making sketches of birds, leaves the sketches in a trunk, goes off, comes back, and finds that the rats have devoured them. Isaac Newton’s dog, “Spot,” tore to pieces a manuscript that represented the work of a quarter of a lifetime. A worm has sunk the ship that was the pride of its builder. A child’s hand has spoiled a painting intended to be immortal. A horse’s hoof dashed out the brain of a most accomplished philosopher. The marble statue that came out, under the stroke of an ingenious sculptor, drops on the sidewalk and is broken by a careless drayman. Time will break down grandest arch and stanchest pyramid and mightiest city. The day will come when reconstructed Chicago and New York and Brooklyn and Boston and Savannah and Charleston and New Orleans and Cincinnati and St. Louis and San Francisco and London and Paris and Vienna and Rome and Constantinople and St. Petersburg and Madras and Canton and Pekin will be wrapped in flame of awful conflagration. Yea, the earth itself shall perish! What a poor place to put one’s treasure in! A painter, busy in making the fresco of a building, standing high up on the scaffolding, was entranced with his own work, and stepped back to admire it, and in his excitement forgot that he stood upon a high scaffolding, stepped back too far, and fell—his life dashed out, far beneath, on the pavement. So men admire their worldly achievements, and in their enchantment step back to look, and step back too far, and fall—ruined for life and lost for eternity. Again, learn from this calamity the beauty of heroism and self-denial. You have read how those firemen fought the flames until they fell dead in the fire; of how men, while their own dwellings were burning, helped the neighbors out of their dwellings. Scene after scene of self-denying heroism. How grand it is, amid the selfishness of the world, to find such generous deeds! The Moravian missionaries were told that they could not enter the lazaretto where the lepers were dying unless they staid there. “Then,” they said, “we will go and stay there.” They went in to nurse the sick, and perished. You have read the life of pure-hearted Elizabeth Fry, toiling among the degraded. But the full biographies of the world’s martyrs will never be written. The firemen in all our cities who have rescued people from blazing buildings; the sailors who have helped the passengers off the wreck, themselves perishing; the nurses who have waited upon the sick in yellow-fever and cholera hospitals, and sunk down to death from exhaustion; the Christian men who, on the battle-field, have administered to the fallen amid rattling canister and bursting shell; the Christian women who have gone down through haunts of shame on errands of mercy, defended by no human arm, but looked after by that God who, with his lightnings, would have struck down any who dared to do them harm. Christian heroism has ever been ready to face the fire and swim the flood and dare the storm, if good might be done. And in that day when men who sat in places of power shall go down to shame and contempt, these humble ones shall have their names written high on the pillars of heaven. Better than to have been commemorated in poetry or song will it be for them who hear the good cheer from Christ, “I was hungry, and ye fed me; I was sick, and ye visited me. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!” Again, learn from this disaster the importance of being prepared for the great future. Five hundred people were known to have perished; I fear there were many more. They had no time for preparation. The poorest time for the last twenty years, in Chicago, to pray was that Sunday night. How can one pray when his children are burning or his house being consumed? Many of you are daily exposed to perils. You walk on scaffoldings; you drive fractious animals; you fly over the country on swift wheels; you work among dangerous chemicals. The voice that comes on the west wind says, “Prepare to meet thy God.” By the revolutions of the days and nights you are hurried on to your last hour of earth and your first hour of eternity. Sleeping and waking, your heart beats the double quickstep of an immortal spirit. See you not, through the fogs and mists of earth, in the distance, the looming up of the heavenly shore, over which white-robed inhabitants walk, forever free from toil and pain, and sin and tears? Hark to the cry that comes over the waters from castles of the blessed, from the lips of princes, robed and garlanded, from harps that never felt the rough twang of woe, and from trumpets that peal forth the victory of many conquerors. The trees of God bend with immortal fruitage, and under them rest the toil-worn of earth, looking down toward you, ready at your coming up to shout, amid the rustle of palms and the clang of celestial towers, “Hail! hail!” But there is an obligation growing out of this service, and that is the duty of giving prompt relief to the houseless, homeless, exhausted, and dying sufferers of Chicago. They want something besides “God bless yous”—namely, cloaks and sacques and shoes and hats and coats and dresses—yea, all the articles of a winter’s wardrobe. Out of the charred and smoking ruins there are stretched up the hands of more than one hundred and fifty thousand people begging for help, and from blistered and bleeding lips they cry out, “We are hungry; give us bread! We are freezing; give us clothes! We are homeless; give us shelter! We are sick; give us cordials!” Forever blasted will be that ear that refuses to listen! Forever palsied will be that hand that refuses to help! I plead in behalf of cripples by the flames robbed of their crutch; in behalf of toiling women, whose sewing-machines have been burned up; in behalf of the orphans whose fathers were crushed under the falling walls; in behalf of women whose hour of anguish has come, and there is no pillow, and there is no roof; in behalf of brave firemen, whose legs were shattered when the ladders broke—yea, in behalf of him who said, “Inasmuch as ye did it unto these my brethren, ye did it unto me.” You will not turn your back on this suffering. Your bed to-night will be softer if you feel that you have provided some sufferer with a mattress to lie on. Your own food will be sweeter if you make provision for the hunger-struck. Your own children will seem brighter-faced if you provide stockings for the little bare feet. Get ready for a grand contribution of money and clothes. When the box comes around, let it seem like the wasted hand of suffering stretched out for help. Let the church officials move slowly down the aisles they gather the alms, remembering that the amount they gather will decide whether some groaning man or woman shall live or perish. As in the last day we hope to find mercy of the Lord, let us to-night show mercy to others. O thou self-denying one of Gethsemane and the cross, drop upon us thy spirit. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 19: 017. HAGAR IN THE WILDERNESS ======================================================================== Hagar in the Wilderness Genesis 21:19 : “And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink.” Morning breaks upon Beersheba. There is an early stir in the house of old Abraham. There has been trouble among the domestics. Hagar, an assistant in the household, and her son, a brisk lad of sixteen years, have become impudent and insolent, and Sarah, the mistress of the household, puts her foot down very hard and says that they will have to leave the premises. They are packing up now. Abraham, knowing that the journey before his servant and her son will be very long and across desolate places, in the kindness of his heart sets about putting up some bread and a bottle with water in it. It is a very plain lunch that Abraham provides, but I warrant you there would have been enough of it had they not lost their way. “God be with you!” said old Abraham as he gave the lunch to Hagar and a good many charges as to how she should conduct the journey. Ishmael, the boy, I suppose, bounded away in the morning light. Boys always like a change. Poor Ishmael! He has no idea of the disasters that are ahead of him. Hagar gives one long, lingering look on the familiar place where she had spent so many happy days, each scene associated with the pride and joy of her heart, young Ishmael. The scorching noon comes on. The air is stifling and moves across the desert with insufferable suffocation. Ishmael, the boy, begins to complain and lies down, but Hagar rouses him up, saying nothing about her own weariness or the sweltering heat; for mothers can endure anything. Trudge, trudge, trudge. Crossing the dead level of the desert, how wearily and slowly the miles slip! A tamarind that seemed hours ago to stand only just a little ahead, inviting the travelers to come under its shadow, now is as far off as ever, or seemingly so. Night drops upon the desert, and the travelers are pillowless. Ishmael, very weary, I suppose instantly falls asleep. Hagar, as the shadows of the night begin to lap over each other—Hagar hugs her weary boy to her bosom and thinks of the fact that it is her fault that they are in the desert. A star looks out, and every falling tear it kisses with a sparkle. A wing of wind comes over the hot earth and lifts the locks from the fevered brow of the boy. Hagar sleeps fitfully, and in her dreams travels over the weary day, and half awakes her son by crying out in her sleep, “Ishmael! Ishmael!” And so they go on day after day and night after night, for they have lost their way. No path in the shifting sands; no sign in the burning sky. The sack empty of the flour; the water gone from the bottle. What shall she do? As she puts her fainting Ishmael under a stunted shrub of the arid plain, she sees the bloodshot eye, and feels the hot hand, and watches the blood bursting from the cracked tongue and there is a shriek in the desert of Beersheba, “We shall die! We shall die!” Now, no mother was ever made strong enough to hear her son cry in vain for a drink. Heretofore she had cheered her boy by promising a speedy end of the journey, and even smiled upon him when she felt desperate enough. Now there is nothing to do but place him under a shrub and let him die. She had thought that she would sit there and watch until the spirit of her boy would go away forever, and then she would breathe out her own life on his silent heart; but as the boy begins to claw his tongue in agony of thirst and struggle in distortion and begs his mother to slay him, she cannot endure the spectacle. She puts him under a shrub, and goes off a bow-shot, and begins to weep until all the desert seems sobbing, and her cry strikes clear through the heavens; and an angel of God comes out on a cloud, and looks down upon the appalling grief and cries: “Hagar, what aileth thee?” She looks up and she sees the angel pointing to a well of water, where she fills the bottle for the lad. Thank God! Thank God! I learn from this Oriental scene, in the first place, what a sad thing it is when people do not know their place, and get too proud for their business! Hagar was an assistant in that household, but she wanted to rule there. She ridiculed and jeered until her son, Ishmael got the same tricks. She dashed out her own happiness, and threw Sarah into a great fret; and if she had stayed much longer in that household she would have upset calm Abraham’s equilibrium. My friends, one-half of the trouble in the world today comes from the fact that people do not know their place, or, finding their place, will not stay in it. When we come into the world there is always a place ready for us. A place for Abraham. A place for Sarah. A place for Hagar. A place for Ishmael. A place for you and a place for me. Our first duty is to find our sphere; our second is to keep it. We may be born in a sphere far off from the one for which God finally intends us. Sixtus V was born on the low ground, and was a swineherd; God called him up to wave a sceptre. Ferguson spent his early days in looking after sheep; God called him up to look after stars, and be a shepherd watching the flocks of light on the hillsides of heaven. Hogarth began by engraving pewter pots; God raised him to stand in the enchanted realm of a painter. The shoemaker’s bench held Bloomfield for a little while; but God raised him to sit in the chair of a philosopher and Christian scholar. The soap-boiler of London could not keep his son in that business, for God had decided that Hawley was to be one of the greatest astronomers of England. On the other hand, we may be born in a sphere a little higher than that for which God intends us. We may be born in a castle and play in a costly conservatory and feed high-bred pointers and angle for gold-fish in artificial ponds and be familiar with princes; yet God may better have fitted us for a carpenter’s shop or dentist’s forceps or a weaver’s shuttle or a blacksmith’s forge. The great thing is to find just the sphere for which God intended us, and then to occupy that sphere, and occupy it without complaint. Here is a man God-fashioned to make a plow. There is a man God-fashioned to make a constitution. The man who makes the plow is just as honorable as the man who makes the constitution. There is a woman who was made to fashion a robe, and yonder is one intended to be a queen and wear it. It seems to me that in the one case as in the other, God appoints the sphere, and the needle is just as respectable in his sight as the sceptre. I do not know but that the world would long ago have been saved if some of the men out of the ministry were in it, and some of those who are in it were out of it. I really think that one-half the world may be divided into two quarters—those who have not found their sphere and those who, having found it, are not willing to stay there. How many are struggling for a position a little higher than that for which God intended them. The bondswoman wants to be mistress. Hagar keeps crowding Sarah. The small wheel of a watch which beautifully went treading its golden pathway wants to be the balance-wheel, and the sparrow with chagrin drops into the brook because it cannot, like the eagle, cut a circle under the sun. In the Lord’s army we all want to be brigadier-generals! The sloop says: “More mast, more tonnage, more canvas. Oh, that I were a topsail schooner or a full-rigged brig or a Cunard steamer!” And so the world is filled with cries of discontent, because we are not willing to stay in the place where God put us and intended us to be. My friends, be not too proud to do anything God tells you to do. For the lack of a right disposition in this respect the world is strewn with wandering Hagars and Ishmaels. God has given each one of us a work to do. You carry a scuttle of coal up that dark alley. You distribute that Christian tract. You give ten thousand dollars to the missionary cause. You for fifteen years sit with chronic rheumatism, displaying the beauty of Christian submission. Whatever God calls you to, whether it win hissing or huzza; whether to walk under triumphal arch or lift the sot out of the ditch; whether it be to preach on a Pentecost or tell some wanderer of the street of the mercy of the Christ of Mary Magdalene; whether it be to weave a garland for a laughing child on a spring morning and call her a May queen, or to comb out the tangled locks of a waif of the street, and cut up one of your old dresses to fit her out for the sanctuary—do it, and do it right away. Whether it be a crown or yoke, do not fidget. Everlasting honors upon those who do their work, and do their whole work, and are contented in the sphere in which God has put them; while there is wandering and exile and desolation and wilderness for discontented Hagar and Ishmael. Again, I find in this Oriental scene a lesson of sympathy with woman when she goes forth trudging in the desert. What a great change it was for this Hagar! There was the tent, and all the surroundings of Abraham’s house, beautiful and luxurious, no doubt. Now she is going out into the hot sands of the desert. Oh, what a change it was! And in our day we often see the wheel of fortune turn. Here is some one who lived in the very bright home of her father. She had everything possible to administer to her happiness—plenty at the table, music in the drawing-room, welcome at the door. She is led forth into life by some one who cannot appreciate her. A dissipated soul comes and takes her out in the desert. Cruelties blot out all the lights of that home circle. Harsh words wear out her spirits. The high hope that shone out over the marriage altar while the ring was being set and the vows given and the benediction pronounced, have all faded with the orange blossoms, and there she is today brokenhearted, thinking of past joys and present desolation and coming anguish. Hagar in the wilderness! Here is a beautiful home. You cannot think of anything that can be added to it. For years there has not been the suggestion of a single trouble. Bright and happy children fill the house with laughter and song. Books to read. Pictures to look at. Lounges to rest on. Cup of domestic joy full and running over. But the dark night drops. Pillow hot. Pulses flutter. Eyes close. And the foot whose well-known steps on the door-sill brought the whole household out at eventide crying: “Father’s coming!” will never sound on the door-sill again. A long, deep grief plowed through all that brightness of domestic life. Paradise lost. Widowhood. Hagar in the wilderness! How often is it we see the weak arm of woman conscripted for this battle with the rough world. Who is she, going down the street in the early light of the morning, pale with exhausting work, not half slept out with the slumbers of last night, tragedies of suffering written all over her face, her lustreless eyes looking far ahead, as though for the coming of some other trouble? Her parents called her Mary or Bertha or Agnes on the day when they held her up to the font and the Christian minister sprinkled on the infant’s face the washings of a holy baptism. Her name is changed now. I hear it in the shuffle of the worn-out shoes. I see it in the figure of the faded calico. I find it in the lineaments of the woebegone countenance. Not Mary nor Bertha nor Agnes, but Hagar in the wilderness. May God have mercy upon woman in her toils, her struggles, her hardships, her desolation, and may the great heart of Divine sympathy inclose her forever! Again, I find in this Oriental scene the fact that every mother leads forth tremendous destinies. You say: “That is not an unusual scene, a mother leading her child by the hand.” Who is it that she is leading? Ishmael, you say. Who is Ishmael? A great nation is to be founded—a nation so strong that it is to stand for thousands of years against all the armies of the world. Egypt and Assyria thunder against that nation, but in vain. Gaulus brings up his army, and his army is smitten. Alexander decides upon a campaign, brings up his hosts, and dies. For a long while that nation monopolizes the learning of the world. It is the nation of the Arabs. Who founded it? Ishmael, the lad that Hagar led into the wilderness. She had no idea she was leading forth such destinies. Neither does any mother. You pass along the street and see boys and girls who will yet make the earth quake with their influence. Who is that boy at Sutton Pool, Plymouth, England, barefooted, wading down into the slush and slime, until his bare foot comes upon a piece of glass and he lifts it, bleeding and pain-struck? That wound in the foot decides that he be sedentary in his life, decides that he be a student. That wound by the glass in the foot decides that he shall be John Kitto, who shall provide the best religious encyclopaedia the world has ever had provided, and with his other writings as well, throwing a light upon the Word of God such as has come from no other man in this century. O mother, mother, that little hand that wanders over your face may yet be lifted to hurl thunderbolts of war or drop benedictions! That little voice may blaspheme God in the grog-shop or cry “Forward!” to the Lord’s hosts as they go out for their last victory. My mind leaps thirty years ahead, and I see a merchant prince of New York. One stroke of his pen brings a ship out of Canton. Another stroke of his pen brings a ship into Madras. He is mighty in all the money markets of the world. Who is he? He sits beside you in the church. My mind leaps thirty years forward from this time, and I find myself in a relief association. A great multitude of Christian women have met together for a generous purpose. There is one woman in that crowd who seems to have the confidence of all the others, and they all look up to her for her counsel and for her prayers. Who is she? This afternoon you will find her in the Sabbath-school, while the teacher tells her of that Christ who clothed the naked and fed the hungry and healed the sick. My mind leaps forward thirty years from now, and I find myself in an African jungle; and there is a missionary of the cross addressing the natives, and their dusky countenances are irradiated with the glad tidings of great joy and salvation. Who is he? Did you not hear his voice this morning in the first song of the service? My mind leaps forward thirty years from now, and I find myself looking through the wickets of a prison. I see a face scarred with every crime. His chin on his open palm, his elbow on his knee—a picture of despair. As I open the wicket he starts and I hear his chain clank. The jail-keeper tells me that he has been in there now three times—first for theft, then for arson, now for murder. He steps upon the trap door, the rope is fastened to his neck, the plank falls, his body swings into the air, his soul swings off into eternity. Who is he, and where is he? This afternoon flying kite on the city commons. Mother, you are this morning hoisting a throne or forging a chain; are kindling a star or digging a dungeon. A Christian mother a good many years ago sat teaching lessons of religion to her child, and he drank in those lessons. She never knew that Lanphier would come forth and establish the Fulton Street prayer-meeting, and by one meeting revolutionize the devotions of the whole earth, and thrill the eternities with his Christian influence. Lanphier said it was his mother who brought him to Jesus Christ. She never had an idea that she was leading forth such destinies. But oh, when I see a mother reckless of her influence, rattling on toward destruction, garlanded for the sacrifice with unseemly mirth and godlessness, dancing on down to perdition, taking her children in the same direction, preparing them for a life of frivolity, a death of shame, and an eternity of disaster, I cannot help but say: “There they go—there they go; Hagar and Ishmael!” I tell you, there are wilder deserts than Beersheba in many of the fashionable circles of this day. Dissipated parents leading dissipated children. Avaricious parents leading avaricious children. Prayerless parents leading prayerless children. They go through every street, up every dark alley, into every cellar, along every highway. Hagar and Ishmael! and while I pronounce their names, it seems like the moaning of the night wind: “Hagar and Ishmael!” I learn one more lesson from this Oriental scene, and that is, that every wilderness has a well in it. Hagar and Ishmael gave up to die. Hagar’s heart sank within her as she heard her child crying: “Water! Water! Water!” “Ah!” she says, “my darling, there is no water. This is a desert.” And then God’s angel said from the cloud: “What aileth thee, Hagar?” And she looked up and saw him pointing to a well of water, where she filled the bottle for the lad. Blessed be God, that there is in every wilderness a well, if you only know how to find it—fountains for all these thirsty souls this morning. On that last day, on that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried: “If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink.” All these other fountains you find are mere mirages of the desert. Paracelsus, you know, spent his time in trying to find out the elixir of life—a liquid which, if taken, would keep one perpetually young in this world, and would change the aged back again to youth. Of course he was disappointed; he found not the elixir. But here I tell you of the elixir of everlasting life bursting from the “Rock of Ages,” and that drinking that water you shall never get old and you will never be sick and you will never die. “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.” Ah! here is a man who says: “I have been looking for that fountain a great while, but can’t find it.” And here is some one else who says, “I believe all you say, but I have been trudging along in the wilderness and can’t find the fountain.” Do you know the reason? I will tell you. You never looked in the right direction. “Oh,” you say, “I have looked everywhere. I have looked north, south, east, and west, and I haven’t found the fountain.” Why, you are not looking in the right direction at all. Look up, where Hagar looked. She never would have found the fountain at all, but when she heard the voice of the angel she looked up, and she saw the finger pointing to the supply. And, O soul, if with one earnest, intense prayer you would only look up to Christ, he would point you down to the supply in the wilderness. “Look unto me, all ye ends of the earth, and be ye saved; for I am God, and there is none else!” Look! Look as Hagar looked! Yes, there is a well for every desert of bereavement. Looking over any audience, I notice signs of mourning and woe. Have you found consolation? Oh, man bereft, oh, woman bereft, have you found consolation? Hearse after hearse. We step from one grave hillock to another grave hillock. We follow corpses, ourselves soon to be like them. The world is in mourning for its dead. Every heart has become the sepulchre of some buried joy. But sing ye to God; every wilderness has a well in it; and I come to that well and I begin to draw water from a well that never gets dry. If you have lived in the country you have sometimes taken hold of the rope of the old well-sweep, and you know how the bucket came up, dripping with bright, cool water. And I lay hold of the rope of God’s mercy and I begin to draw on that Gospel well-sweep, and I see the buckets coming up. Thirsty soul! Here is one bucket of life! Come and drink of it. “Whosoever will, let him come and take of the water of life freely.” I pull away again at the rope, and another bucket comes up. It is this promise: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” I lay hold of the rope again, and pull away with all my strength, and the bucket comes up, bright and beautiful and cool. Here is the promise: “Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” The old astrologers used to cheat the people with the idea that they could tell from the position of the stars what would occur in the future, and if a cluster of stars stood in one relation, why, that would be a prophecy of evil; if a cluster of stars stood in another relation, that would be a prophecy of good. What superstition! But here is a new astrology in which I put all my faith. By looking up to the star of Jacob, the morning star of the Redeemer, I can make this prophecy in regard to those who put their trust in God: “All things work together for good to those who love God.” Have you seen the Nyctanthes? It is a beautiful flower, but it gives very little fragrance until after sunset. Then it pours its richness on the air. And this grace of the Gospel that I commend to you, while it may be very sweet during the day of prosperity, it pours forth its richest aroma after sundown. And it will be sundown with you and me after a while. When you come to go out of this world, will it be a desert march, or will it be drinking at a fountain? A converted Hindu was dying, and his heathen comrades came around him and tried to comfort him by reading some of the pages of their theology; but he waved his hand as much as to say: “I don’t want to hear it.” Then they called in a heathen priest, and he said: “If you will only recite the Numtra, it will deliver you from hell.” He waved his hand as much as to say: “I don’t want to hear that.” Then they said: “Call on Juggernaut.” He shook his head as much as to say: “I can’t do that.” Then they thought perhaps he was too weary to speak, and they said: “Now, if you can’t say Juggernaut, think of him.” He shook his head again, as much as to say: “No, no, no!” Then they bent down to his pillow, and they said: “In what will you trust?” His face lighted up with the very glories of the celestial sphere, as he cried out, rallying all his dying energies: “Jesus.” Oh, come to the fountain! I will tell you the whole story in two or three sentences. Pardon for all sin. Comfort for all trouble. Light for all darkness. And every wilderness has a well in it. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 20: 018. ISAAC RESCUED ======================================================================== Isaac Rescued Genesis 22:7 : “Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb?” Here are Abraham and Isaac; the one a kind, old, gracious, affectionate father; the other a brave, obedient, religious son. From his bronzed appearance you can tell that this son has been much in the fields, and from his shaggy dress you know that he has been watching the herds. The mountain air has painted his cheek rubicund. He is twenty, or twenty-five, or, as some suppose, thirty-three years of age; nevertheless a boy, considering the length of life to which people lived in those times, and the fact that a son never is anything but a boy to a father. I remember that my father used to come into the house when the children were home on some festal occasion, and say: “Where are the boys?” although “the boys” were twenty-five and thirty and thirty-five years of age. So this Isaac is only a boy to Abraham, and this father’s heart is in him. It is Isaac here and Isaac there. If there is any festivity around the father’s tent, Isaac must enjoy it. It is Isaac’s walk and Isaac’s apparel and Isaac’s manners and Isaac’s prospects and Isaac’s prosperity. The father’s heart-strings are all wrapped around that boy, and wrapped again, until nine-tenths of the old man’s life is in Isaac. I can just imagine how lovingly and proudly he looked at his only son. Well, the dear old man had borne a great deal of trouble, and it had left its mark upon him. In hieroglyphics of wrinkle, the story was written from forehead to chin. But now his trouble seems all gone, and we are glad that he is very soon to rest forever. If the old man shall get decrepit, Isaac is strong enough to wait on him. If the father get dim of eyesight, Isaac will lead him by the hand. If the father become destitute, Isaac will earn him bread. How glad we are that the ship that has been in such a stormy sea is coming at last into the harbor. Are you not rejoiced that glorious old Abraham is through with his troubles? No! no! A thunderbolt! From that clear eastern sky there drops into that father’s tent a voice with an announcement enough to turn black hair white, and to stun the patriarch into instant annihilation. God said: “Abraham!” The old man answered: “Here I am.” God said to him: “Take thy son, thy only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering.” In other words, slay him; cut his body into fragments; put the fragments on the wood; set fire to the wood, and let Isaac’s body be consumed. “Atrocity! Murder!” says some one. “Not so,” said Abraham. I hear him soliloquize: “Here is the boy on whom I have depended! Oh, how I loved him! He was given in answer to prayer, and now must I surrender him? O Isaac, my son! Isaac, how shall I part with you? But then it is always safer to do as God asks me to; I have been in dark places before, and God delivered me. I will implicitly do as God has told me, although it is very dark. I can’t see my way, but I know God makes no mistakes, and to him I commit myself and my darling son.” Early in the morning there is a stir around Abraham’s tent. A beast of burden is fed and saddled. Abraham makes no disclosure of the awful secret. At the break of day he says: “Come, come, Isaac, get up! We are going off on a two or three days’ journey.” I hear the ax hewing and splitting amid the wood until the sticks are made the right length and the right thickness, and then they are fastened on the beast of burden. They pass on—there are four of them—Abraham, the father; Isaac, the son; and two servants. Going along the road, I see Isaac looking up into his father’s face, and saying: “Father, what is the matter? Are you not well? Has anything happened? Are you tired? Lean on my arm.” Then, turning around to the servants, the son says: “Ah! father is getting old, and he has had trouble enough in other days to kill him.” The third morning has come, and it is the day of the tragedy. The two servants are left with the beast of burden, while Abraham and his son Isaac, as was the custom of good people, in those times, went up on the hill to sacrifice to the Lord. The wood is taken off the beast’s back, and put on Isaac’s back. Abraham has in one hand a pan of coals or a lamp, and in the other a sharp, keen knife. Here are all the appliances for sacrifice, you say. No, there is one thing wanting; there is no victim—no pigeon or heifer or lamb. Isaac, not knowing that he is to be the victim, looks up into his father’s face, and asks a question which must have cut the old man to the bone: “My father!” The father said: “My son, Isaac, here I am.” The son said: “Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb?” The father’s lip quivered, and his heart fainted, and his knees knocked together, and his entire body, mind, and soul shivered in sickening anguish as he struggles to gain equipoise; for he does not want to break down. And then he looks into his son’s face, with a thousand rushing tendernesses and say: “My son, God will provide himself a lamb.” The twain are now at the top of the hill, the place which is to be famous for a most transcendent occurrence. They gather some stones out of the field, and build an altar three or four feet high. Then they take this wood off Isaac’s back and sprinkle it over the stones, so as to help and invite the flame. The altar is done—it is all done. Isaac has helped to build it. With his father he has discussed whether the top of the table is even, and whether the wood is properly prepared. Then there is a pause. The son looks around to see if there is not some living animal that can be caught and butchered for the offering. Abraham tries to choke down his fatherly feelings and suppress his grief, in order that he may break to his son the terrific news that he is to be the victim. Ah! Isaac never looked more beautiful than on that day to his father. As the old man ran his emaciated fingers through his son’s hair, he said to himself: “How shall I give him up? What will his mother say when I come back without my boy? I thought he would have been the comfort of my declining days. I thought he would have been the hope of ages to come. Beautiful and loving, and yet to die under my own hand. Oh, God! is there not some other sacrifice that will do? Take my life, and spare his! Pour out my blood, and save Isaac for his mother and the world!” But this was an inward struggle. The father controls his feelings, and looks into his son’s face, and says: “Isaac, must I tell you all?” His son said: “Yes, father. I thought you had something on your mind; tell it.” The father said: “My son, Isaac, thou art the lamb!” “Oh,” you say, “why did not that young man, if he was twenty or thirty years of age, smite into the dust his infirm father? He could have done it.” Ah! Isaac may have had some intimation by this time that the scene was typical of a Messiah who was to come, and so he made no struggle. They fell on each other’s necks, and wailed out the parting. Awful and matchless scene of the wilderness. The rocks echo back the breaking of their hearts. The cry: “My son! my son!” The answer: “My father! my father!” Do not compare this, as some people have to Agamemnon, willing to offer up his daughter, Iphigenia, to please the gods. There is nothing comparable to this wonderful obedience to the true God. You know that victims for sacrifice were always bound, so that they might not struggle away. Rawlings, the martyr, when he was dying for Christ’s sake, said to the blacksmith who held the manacles: “Fasten those chains tight now, for my flesh may struggle mightily.” So Isaac’s arms are fastened, his feet are tied. The old man, rallying all his strength, lifts him on to a pile of wood. Fastening a thong on one side of the altar, he makes it span the body of Isaac, and fastens the thong at the other side of the altar, and another thong, and another thong. There is the lamp flickering in the wind, ready to be put under the brushwood of the altar. There is the knife, sharp and keen. Abraham—struggling with his mortal feelings on the one side, and the commands of God on the other—takes that knife, rubs the flat of it on the palm of his hand, cries to God for help, comes up to the side of the altar, puts a parting kiss on the brow of his boy, takes a message from him for mother and home, and then, lifting the glittering weapon for the plunge of the death-stroke—his muscles knitting for the work—the hand begins to descend. It falls! Not on the heart of Isaac, but on the arm of God, who arrests the stroke, making the wilderness quake with the cry: “Abraham! Abraham! lay not thy hand upon the lad, nor do him any harm!” What is this sound back in the woods! It is a crackling as of tree branches, a bleating and a struggle. Go, Abraham, and see what it is. Oh, it was a ram that, going through the woods, has its crooked horns fastened and entangled in the brushwood, and could not get loose; and Abraham seizes it gladly, and quickly unloosens Isaac from the altar, puts the ram on in his place, sets the lamp under the brushwood of the altar, and as the dense smoke of the sacrifice begins to rise, the blood rolls down the sides of the altar, and drops hissing into the fire, and I hear the words: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Well, what are you going to get out of this? There is an aged minister of the Gospel. He says: “I should get out of it that when God tells you to do a thing, whether it seems reasonable to you or not, go ahead and do it. Here Abraham could not have been mistaken. God did not speak so indistinctly that it was not certain whether he called Sarah, or Abraham, or somebody else; but with divine articulation, divine intonation, divine emphasis, he said: ‘Abraham!’ Abraham rushed blindly ahead to do his duty, knowing that things would come out right. Likewise do so yourselves. There is a mystery of your life. There is some burden you have to carry. You do not know why God has put it on you. There is some persecution, some trial, and you do not know why God allows it. There is a work for you to do, and you have not enough grace, you think, to do it. Do as Abraham did. Advance, and do your whole duty. Be willing to give up Isaac, and perhaps you will not have to give up anything. ‘Jehovah-jireh’— the Lord will provide.” A capital lesson this old minister gives us. Out yonder is an aged woman; the light of heaven in her face; she is half-way through the door; she has her hand on the pearl of the gate. Mother, what would you get out of this subject? “Oh,” she says, “I would learn that it is in the last pinch that God comes to the relief. You see the altar was ready, and Isaac was fastened on it, and the knife was lifted; and just at the last moment God broke in and stopped proceedings. So it has been in my life of seventy-five years. Why, sir, there was a time when the flour was all out of the house; and I set the table at noon and had nothing to put on it; but five minutes of one o’clock a loaf of bread came. The Lord will provide. My son was very sick, and I said: ‘Dear Lord, you do not mean to take him away from me, do you? Please, Lord, do not take him away. Why, there are neighbors who have three and four sons; this is my only son; this is my Isaac. Lord, you will not take him away from me, will you?’ But I saw he was getting worse and worse all the time; and I turned round and prayed, until after a while I felt submissive, and I could say: ‘Thy will, O Lord, be done!’ The doctors gave him up, and we all gave him up. And, as was the custom in those times, we had made the grave-clothes, and we were whispering about the last exercises when I looked, and I saw some perspiration on his brow, showing that the fever had broken, and he spoke to us so naturally that I knew he was going to get well. He did get well, and my son Isaac, who, I thought, was going to be slain and consumed of disease, was loosened from that altar. And, bless your souls, that has been so for seventy-five years; and if my voice were not so weak, and if I could see better, I could preach to you younger people a sermon; for though I cannot see much, I can see this, whenever you get into a tough place, and your heart is breaking, if you will look a little farther into the woods, you will see, caught in the branches, a substitute and a deliverance. ‘My son, God will provide himself a lamb.’“ Thank you, mother, for that short sermon. I could preach back to you for a minute or two and say, never do you fear. I wish I had half as good a hope of heaven as you have. Do not fear, mother; whatever happens, no harm will ever happen to you. I was going up a long flight of stairs; and I saw an aged woman, very decrepit, and with a cane, creeping on up. She made but very little progress, and I felt Very exuberant; and I said to her: “Why, mother, that is no way to go upstairs;” and I threw my arms around her and I carried her up and put her down on the landing at the top of the stairs. She said: “Thank you, thank you; I am very thankful.” O mother, when you get through this life’s work and you want to go upstairs and rest in the good place that God has provided for you, you will not have to climb up—you will not have to crawl up painfully. The two arms that were stretched on the Cross will be flung around you, and you will be hoisted with a glorious lift beyond all weariness and all struggle. May the God of Abraham and Isaac be with you until you see the Lamb on the hilltop. Now, that aged minister has made a suggestion, and this aged woman has made a suggestion; I will make a suggestion: Isaac going up the hill makes me think of the great sacrifice. Isaac, the only son of Abraham. Jesus, the only Son of God. On those two “onlys” I build a tearful emphasis. O Isaac! O Jesus! But this last sacrifice was a more tremendous one. When the knife was lifted over Calvary, there was no voice that cried “Stop!” and no hand arrested it. Sharp, keen, and tremendous, it cut down through nerve and artery until the blood sprayed the faces of the executioners, and the mid-day sun dropped a veil of cloud over its face because it could not endure the spectacle. O Isaac, of Mount Moriah! O Jesus, of Mount Calvary! Better could God have thrown away into annihilation a thousand worlds than to have sacrificed his only Son. It was not one of ten sons—it was his only Son. If he had not given up him, you and I would have perished. “God so loved the world that he gave his only—” I stop there, not because I have forgotten the quotation, but because I want to think. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Great God! break my heart at the thought of that sacrifice. Isaac the only, typical of Jesus the Only. You see Isaac going up the hill and carrying the wood. O Abraham, why not take the load off the boy? If he is going to die so soon, why not make his last hours easy? Abraham, all unconscious of the fact, was furnishing a type that future ages would understand. We see now that in carrying that wood up Mount Moriah, Isaac was to be a symbol of Christ carrying his own cross up Calvary. I do not know how heavy that cross was—whether it was made of oak or acacia or Lebanon cedar. I suppose it may have weighed one or two or three hundred pounds. That was the lightest part of the burden. All the sins and sorrows of the world were wound around that cross. The heft of one, the heft of two, worlds; earth and hell were on his shoulders. O Isaac, carrying the wood of sacrifice up Mount Moriah! O Jesus, carrying the wood of sacrifice up Mount Calvary, the agonies of earth and hell wrapped around that cross! I shall never think of the heavy load on Isaac’s back, that I shall not think of the crushing load on Christ’s back. For whom that load? For you. For you. For me. For me. Would that all the tears that we have ever wept over our sorrows had been saved until now, and that we might now pour them out on the lacerated back and feet and heart of the Son of God. You say: “If this young man was twenty or thirty years of age, why did not he resist? Why was it not Isaac binding Abraham instead of Abraham binding Isaac? The muscle in Isaac’s arm was stronger than the muscle in Abraham’s withered arm. No young man twenty-five years of age would submit to have his father fasten him to a pile of wood with intention of burning.” Isaac was a willing sacrifice, and so a type of Christ who willingly came to save the world. If all the armies of heaven had resolved to force Christ out from the gate, they could not have done it. Christ was equal with God. If all the battalions of glory had armed themselves and resolved to put Christ forth and make him come out and save this world they could not have succeeded in it. With one stroke he would have toppled over angelic and archangelic dominion. But there was one thing that the Omnipotent Christ could not stand. Our sorrows mastered him. He could not bear to see the world die without an offer of pardon and help, and if all heaven had armed itself to keep him back, if the gates of life had been bolted and double-barred, Christ would have flung the everlasting doors from their hinges, and would have sprung forth, scattering the hindering hosts of heaven like chaff before the whirlwind, as he cried: “Lo! I come to suffer. Lo! I come to die.” Christ—a willing sacrifice. Willing to take Bethlehem humiliation, and Sanhedrin outrage, and whipping-post maltreatment, and Golgotha butchery. Willing to be bound. Willing to suffer. Willing to die. Willing to save. How does this affect you? Do not your very best impulses bound out toward this pain-struck Christ? Get down at his feet, O ye people! Put your lips against the wound on his right foot and help kiss away the pang. Wipe the foam from his dying lip. Get under the cross until you feel the baptism of his rushing tears. Take him into your heart with warmest love and undying enthusiasm. By your resistances you have abused him long enough. Christ is willing to save you. Are you willing to be saved? It seems to me as if this moment were throbbing with the invitations of an all-compassionate God. I have been told that the Cathedral of St. Mark’s stands in a quarter in the center of the city of Venice, and that when the clock strikes twelve at noon, all the birds from the city and the regions round about the city fly to the square and settle down. It came in this wise: A large-hearted woman passing one noonday across the square, saw some birds shivering in the cold, and she scattered some crumbs of bread among them. The next day, at the same hour, she scattered more crumbs of bread among them, and so on from year to year until the day of her death. In her will she bequeathed a certain amount of money to keep up the same practice, and now, at the first stroke of the bell at noon, the birds begin to come there, and when the clock has struck twelve, the square is covered with them. How beautifully suggestive! Christ comes out to feed thy soul today. The more hungry you feel yourselves to be, the better it is. It is noon and the Gospel clock strikes twelve. Come in flocks! Come as doves to the window! All the air is filled with the liquid chime: Come! Come! Come! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 21: 019. MACHPELAH: OR. EASTER THOUGHTS ======================================================================== Machpelah: Or. Easter Thoughts Genesis 23:17-18 : “And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and all the trees that were in the field, that were in all the borders round about, were made sure unto Abraham.” Here is the first cemetery ever laid out. Machpelah was its name. It was an arborescent beauty, where the wound of death was bandaged with foliage. Abraham, a rich man, not being able to bribe the King of Terrors, proposes here, as far as possible, to cover up his ravages. He had, no doubt, previously noticed this region, and now that Sarah, his wife, had died—that remarkable woman who at ninety years of age had born to her the son Isaac, and who now, after she had reached one hundred and twenty-seven years, had expired—Abraham is negotiating for a family plot for her last slumber. Ephron owned this real estate, and after, in mock sympathy for Abraham, refusing to take anything for it, now sticks on a big price—four hundred shekels of silver. This cemetery plot is paid for, and the transfer made, in the presence of witnesses in a public place, for there were no deeds and no halls of records in those early times. Then in a cavern of limestone rock Abraham put Sarah, and, a few years after, himself followed, then Isaac and Rebekah, and then Jacob and Leah. Embowered, picturesque, and memorable Machpelah! That “God’s Acre” dedicated by Abraham has been the mother of innumerable mortuary resting-places. The necropolis of every civilized land has vied with its metropolis. The most beautiful hills of Europe outside the great cities are covered with obelisk and funeral vase and arched gateways and columns and parterres in honor of the inhumated. The Appian Way of Rome was bordered by sepulchral commemorations. For this purpose Pisa has its arcades of marble sculptured into exquisite bas-reliefs and the features of dear faces that have vanished. Genoa has its terraces cut into tombs; and Constantinople covers with cypress the silent habitations; and Paris has its Pere-la-Chaise,on whose heights rest Balzac and David and Marshal Ney and Cuvier and La Place and Molière, and a mighty group of warriors and poets and painters and musicians. In all foreign nations utmost genius on all sides is expended in the work of interment, mummification and incineration. Our own country consents to be second to none in respect to the lifeless body. Every city and town and neighborhood of any intelligence or virtue has, not many miles away, its sacred enclosure, where affection has engaged sculptors’ chisel and florists’ spade and artificer in metals. Our own city has shown its religion as well as its art in the manner in which it holds the memory of those who have passed forever away, by its Cypress Hills and its Evergreens and its Calvary and Holy Cross and Friends’ cemeteries. All the world knows of Greenwood, with now about two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants sleeping among hills that overlook the sea, and by lakes embosomed in an Eden of flowers. Our American Westminster Abbey, an acropolis of mortuary architecture, a Pantheon of mighty ones ascended, elegies in stone, Iliads in marble, whole generations in peace waiting for other generations to join them. No dormitory of breathless sleepers in all the world has so many mighty dead. Among preachers of the Gospel, Bethune and Thomas De Witt and Bishop Janes and Tyng and Abeel, the missionary, and Beecher and Buddington and McClintock and Inskip and Bangs and Chapin and Noah Schenck and Samuel Hanson Cox. Among musicians, the renowned Gottschalk and the holy Thomas Hastings. Among philanthropists, Peter Cooper and Isaac T. Hopper and Lucretia Mott and Isabella Graham and Henry Bergh, the apostle of mercy to the brute creation. Among the literati the Careys, Alice and Phoebe, James K. Paulding and John G. Saxe. Among journalists Bennett and Raymond and Greeley. Among scientists, Ormsby Mitchell, warrior as well as astronomer, and lovingly called by his old soldiers “Old Star;” the Drapers, splendid men, as I well know, one of them my teacher, the other my classmate. Among inventors, Elias Howe, who, through the sewing machine, did more to alleviate the toils of womanhood than any man that ever lived, and Professor Morse, who gave us magnetic telegraphy; the former doing his work with the needle, the latter with the thunderbolt. Among physicians and surgeons, Joseph C. Hutchinson and Marion Sims and Dr. Valentine Mott, with the following epitaph which he ordered cut in honor of the Christian religion: “My implicit faith and hope is in a merciful Redeemer, who is the resurrection and the life. Amen and Amen.” This is our American Machpelah, as sacred to us as the Machpelah in Canaan of which Jacob uttered that pastoral poem in one verse: “There they buried Abraham, and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac, and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah.” At this Easter service I ask and answer what may seem a novel question, but it will be found, before I get through, a practical and useful and tremendous question: What will Resurrection Day do for the cemeteries? First, I remark, it will be their supernal beautification. At certain seasons it is customary in all lands to strew flowers over the mounds of the departed. It may have been suggested by the fact that Christ’s tomb was in a garden. And when I say garden, I do not mean a garden of these latitudes. The late frosts of spring and the early frosts of autumn are so near to each other that there are only a few months of flowers in the field. All the flowers we see today had to be petted and coaxed, and put under shelter or they would not have bloomed at all. They are the children of the conservatories. But at this season and through the most of the year, the Holy Land is all ablush with floral opulence. You find all the royal family of flowers there, some that you supposed indigenous to the far North, and others indigenous to the far South—the daisy and hyacinth, crocus and anemone, tulip and water-lily, geranium and ranunculus, mignonette and sweet marjoram. In the college at Beyrout you may see Dr. Post’s collection of about eighteen hundred kinds of Holy Land flowers; while among trees are the oak of frozen climes, and the tamarisk of the tropics, walnut and willow, ivy and hawthorn, ash and elder, pine and sycamore. If such floral and botanical beauties are the wild growths of the fields, think of what a garden must be in Palestine! And in such a garden Jesus Christ slept after, on the soldier’s spear, his last drop of blood had coagulated. And then see how appropriate that all our cemeteries should be floralized and tree-shaded. “Well, then,” you say, “how can you make out that the Resurrection Day will beautify the cemeteries? Will it not leave them a ploughed-up ground? On that day there will be an earthquake, and will not this split the polished Aberdeen granite, as well as the plain slab that can afford but the two words, ‘Our Mary,’ or ‘Our Charley’?” Well, I will tell you how Resurrection Day will beautify all the cemeteries. It will be by bringing up the faces that were to us once, and in our memories are to us now, more beautiful to us than any calla lily, and the forms that are to us more graceful than any willow by the waters. Can you think of anything more beautiful than the reappearance of those from whom we have been parted? I do not care which way the tree falls in the blast of the judgment hurricane, or if the ploughshare that day shall turn under the last rose-leaf and the last china-aster, if out of the broken sod shall come the bodies of our loved ones not damaged, but irradiated. The idea of the resurrection gets easier to understand as I hear the phonograph unroll some voice that talked into it or sung into it a year ago, just before our friend’s decease. You start it off, and then come forth the very tones, the very accentuation, the very cough, the very song, of the person that breathed into it once, but is now departed. If a man can do that, cannot Almighty God, without half trying, revivify the voice of your departed? And if he can restore to us the voice, why not the lips and the tongue and the throat that fashioned the voice? And if the lips and the tongue and the throat, why not then the brain that suggested the words? And if the brain, why not the nerves, of which the brain is the headquarters? And if he can return the nerves, why not the muscles, which are less ingenious? And if the muscles, why not the bones, that are less wonderful? And if the voice and the brain and the muscles and the bones, why not the entire body? If man can do the phonograph, God can do the resurrection. Will it be the same body that in the last day shall be reanimated? Yes, but infinitely improved. Our bodies change every seven years, and yet, in one sense, it is the same body. On my wrist and the second finger of my right hand there are scars. I made them at twelve years of age, when disgusted at the presence of two warts, I took a red-hot iron and burned them off and burned them out. Since then my body has changed at least a half-dozen times, but those scars prove it is the same body. And we never lose our identity. If God can and does sometimes rebuild a man five, six, ten times in this world, is it mysterious that he can rebuild him once more, and that in the resurrection? If he can do it ten times, I think he can do it eleven times. Then look at the seventeen-year locusts. For seventeen years gone, at the end of seventeen years they appear, and by rubbing the hind leg against the wing make that rattle at which all the husbandmen and vine-dressers tremble as the insectile host takes up the march of devastation. Resurrection every seventeen years. Another consideration makes the idea of resurrection easier. God made Adam. He was not fashioned after any model. There had never been a human organism, and so there was nothing to copy. At the first attempt God made a perfect man. He made him out of the dust of the earth. If out of ordinary dust of the earth, and without a model, God could make a perfect man, surely out of the extraordinary dust of the mortal body, and with millions of models, God can make each one of us a perfect being in the Resurrection. Surely the last undertaking would not be greater than the first. See the Gospel algebra: ordinary dust minus a model equals a perfect man; extraordinary dust and plus a model equals a resurrection body. Mysteries about it? Yes; that is one reason why I believe it. It would not be much of a God who could do things only as far as I can understand. Mysteries? Yes; but no more about the resurrection of your body than about its present existence. I will explain to you the last mystery of the resurrection, and make it as plain to you as that two and two make four, if you will tell me how your mind, which is entirely independent of your body, can act upon your body so that at your will your eyes open, or your foot walks, or your hand is extended. So, I find nothing in the Bible statement concerning the resurrection that staggers me for a moment. All doubts clear from my mind, I say that the cemeteries, however beautiful now, will be more beautiful when the bodies of our loved ones come up. They will come in improved condition. They will come up rested. The most of them lay down at the last very tired. How often you have heard them say, “I am so tired!” The fact is, it is a tired world. If I should go around the world, I could not find a person in any condition of life ignorant of the sensation of fatigue. I do not believe there are fifty persons in any assemblage who are not tired. Your head is tired or your back is tired or your foot is tired or your brain is tired or your nerves are tired. Long journeying or business application or bereavement or sickness have put on you heavy weights. So the vast majority of those that went out of this world went out fatigued. About the poorest place to rest in is this world. Its atmosphere, its surroundings, and even its hilarities are exhausting. So God stops our earthly life, and mercifully closes the eyes and quiets the feet and folds the hands and more especially gives quiescence to the lung and heart, that have not had ten minutes’ rest since the first respiration and the first beat. If a drummer-boy in the army were compelled to beat his drum twenty-four hours without stopping, his officer would be court-martialed for cruelty. If the drummer-boy should be commanded to beat his drum for a week without ceasing, day and night, he would die in attempting it. But under your vestment is a poor heart that began its drum-beat for the march of life thirty or forty or sixty or eighty years ago, and it has had no furlough by day or night; and, whether in conscious or comatose state, it went right on, for if it had stopped seven seconds your life would have closed. And your heart will keep going until some time after your spirit has flown, for the auscultator says that after the last respiration of lung and the last throb of pulse, and after the spirit is released, the heart keeps beating on for a time. What a mercy, then, it is that the grave is the place where that wondrous machinery of ventricle and artery can halt! Under the healthful chemistry of the soil, all the wear and tear of nerve and muscles and bone will be subtracted and that bath of good, fresh, clean soil will wash off the last ache, and then some of the same style of dust out of which the body of Adam was constructed may be infused into the resurrection body. How can the bodies of the human race, which have had no replenishment from the dust since the time of Adam in Paradise, get any recuperation from the storehouse from which he was constructed without going back into the dust? That original, life-giving material having been once added to the body as it once was, and all the defects left behind, what a body will be the resurrection body! And will not hundreds of thousands of such appearing above the Gowanus Heights make Greenwood more beautiful than any June morning after a shower? The dust of the earth being the original material for fashioning the first human being, we have got to go back to the same place to get a perfect body. Factories are apt to be rough places, and those who toil in them have their garments grimy and their hands smutched. But who cares for that, when they turn out for us beautiful musical instruments or exquisite upholstery? What though the grave is a rough place, it is a resurrection-body manufactory, and from it shall come the radiant and resplendent forms of our friends on the brightest morning the world saw ever. You put into a factory cotton, and it comes out apparel. You put into a factory lumber and lead, and it comes out pianos and organs. And so into the factory of the grave you put in pneumonias and consumptions and they come out health. You put in groans and they come out hallelujahs. For us, on the final day, the most attractive places will not be the parks or the gardens or the palaces, but the cemeteries. We are not told in what season that day will come. If it should be winter, those who come up will be more lustrous than the snow that covered them. If in the autumn, those who come up will be more gorgeous than the woods after the frosts have penciled them. If in the spring, the bloom on which they tread will be dull compared with the rubicund of their cheeks. Oh, the perfect resurrection body! Almost every one has some defective spot in his physical constitution: a dull ear or a dim eye or a rheumatic foot or a neuralgic brow or a twisted muscle or a weak side or an inflamed tonsil or some point at which the east wind or a season of overwork assaults him. But the resurrection body shall be without one weak spot, and all that the doctors and nurses and apothecaries of earth will thereafter have to do will be to rest without interruption after the broken nights of their earthly existence. Not only will that day be the beautification of well-kept cemeteries, but some of the graveyards that have been neglected and been the pasture-ground for cattle, and the rooting-places for swine, will for the first time have attractiveness given them. It was a shame that in that place ungrateful generations planted no trees, and twisted no garlands, and sculptured no marble for their Christian ancestry; but on the day of which I speak the resurrected shall make the place of their feet glorious. From under the shadow of the church, where they slumbered among nettles and mullein stalks and thistles and slabs aslant, they shall rise with a glory that shall flush the windows of the village church, and by -the bell-tower that used to call them to worship, and above the old spire beside which their prayers formerly ascended. What triumphal procession never did for a street, what an oratorio never did for an academy, what an orator never did for a brilliant auditory, what obelisk never did for a king, Resurrection morn will do for all the cemeteries. This Easter tells us that in Christ’s resurrection our resurrection, if we are his, and the resurrection of all the pious dead, are assured, for he was “the first fruits of them that slept.” Renan says he did not rise, but five hundred and eighty witnesses, sixty of them Christ’s enemies, say he did rise, for they saw him after he had risen. If he did not rise, how did sixty armed soldiers let him get away? Surely, sixty living soldiers ought to be able to keep one dead man! Blessed be God! He did get away. After his resurrection Mary Magdalene saw him. Cleopas saw him. Ten disciples in an upper room at Jerusalem saw him. On a mountain the eleven saw him. Five hundred at once saw him. Professor Ernest Renan, who did not see him, will excuse us for taking the testimony of the five hundred and eighty who did see him. He got away, and that makes me sure that our departed loved ones and we ourselves shall get away. Freed himself from the shackles of clod, he is not going to leave us and ours in the lurch. There will be no door-knob on the inside of our family sepulcher, for we cannot come out, of ourselves; but there is a door-knob on the outside, and that Jesus shall lay hold of, and opening, will say: “Good morning! You have slept long enough! Arise! Arise!” And then what flutter of wings, and what flashing of rekindled eyes, and what gladsome rushing across the family lot, with cries of “Father, is that you?” “Mother, is that you?” “My darling, is that you?” “How you all have changed! The cough gone, the croup gone, the consumption gone, the paralysis gone, the weariness gone. Come, let us ascend together! The older ones first, the younger ones next! Quick, now get into line! The skyward procession has already started! Steer now by that embankment of cloud for the nearest gate!” And as we ascend, on one side the earth gets smaller until it is no larger than a mountain, and smaller until it is no larger than a palace, and smaller until it is no larger than a ship, and smaller until it is no larger than a wheel, and smaller until it is no larger than a speck. Farewell, dissolving earth! But on the other side, as we rise, heaven at first appears no larger than your hand. And nearer it looks like a chariot and nearer it looks like a throne and nearer it looks like a star and nearer it looks like a sun and nearer it looks like a universe. Hail, scepters that shall always wave! Hail, anthems that shall always roll! Hail, companionships never again to be broken, and friendships never again to part! That is what Resurrection Day will do for all the cemeteries and graveyards from the Machpelah that was opened by Father Abraham in Hebron to the Machpelah yesterday consecrated. And that makes Lady Huntington’s immortal rhythm most apposite: When thou, my righteous Judge, shalt come To take thy ransomed people home, Shall I among them stand? Shall such a worthless worm as I, Who sometimes am afraid to die, Be found at thy right hand? Among thy saints let me be found, Whene’er the archangel’s trump shall sound, To see thy smiling face; Then loudest of the throng I’ll sing, While heaven’s resounding arches ring With shouts of sovereign grace. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 22: 020. DUTIES OF HUSBANDS TO WIVES ======================================================================== Duties of Husbands to Wives Genesis 24:63 : “And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at eventide: and he lifted up his eyes and saw, and, behold, the camels were coming.” A bridal pageant on the back of dromedaries! The camel is called the ship of the desert. Its swinging motion in the distance is suggestive of a vessel rising and falling with the billows. Though awkward, how imposing these creatures as they move along, whether in ancient or modern times, sometimes carrying four hundred or four thousand travelers from Bagdad to Aleppo, or from Bassora to Damascus! In my text comes a caravan. We notice the noiseless step of the broad foot, the velocity of motion, the gay caparison of saddle and girth and awning, sheltering the riders from the sun, and the hilarity of the mounted passengers, and we cry out: “Who are they?” Well, Isaac has been praying for a wife, and it is time he had one, for he is forty years of age; and his servant, directed by the Lord, has made a selection of Rebekah; and, with her companions and maidens, she is on her way to her new home, carrying with her the blessing of all her friends. Isaac is in the fields, meditating upon his proposed passage from celibacy to monogamy. And he sees a speck against the sky, then groups of people, and after a while he finds that the grandest earthly blessing that ever comes to a man is approaching with this gay caravan. I take it for granted, O man, that your marriage was divinely arranged, and that the camels have arrived from the right direction and at the right time, bringing the one that was intended for your consort—a Rebekah and not a Jezebel. I proceed to show you how you ought to treat your wife, and my ambition is to tell you more plain truth than you ever heard in any three-quarters of an hour in all your life. First of all, I charge you, realize your responsibility in having taken her from the custody and care and homestead in which she was once sheltered. What courage you must have had, and what confidence in yourself, to say to her practically: “I will be to you more than your father and mother, more than all the friends you ever had or ever can have! Give up everything and take me. I feel competent to see you through life in safety. You are an immortal being, but I am competent to defend you and make you happy. However bright and comfortable a home you have now, and though in one of the rooms is the arm-chair in which you were rocked, and in the garret is the cradle in which you were hushed and the trundle-bed in which you slept, and in the sitting-room are the father and mother who have got wrinkle-faced and stoop-shouldered and dim-eyesighted in taking care of you, yet you will do better to come with me.” I am amazed that any of us ever had the sublimity of impudence to ask such a transfer from a home assured to a home conjectured and unbuilt. You would think me a very daring and hazardous adventurer if I should go down to a pier in one of our great seaports at a time when there was a great lack of ship captains, and I should, with no knowledge of navigation, propose to take a steamer across to Glasgow or Havre, and say: “All aboard! Haul in the planks and swing out,” and, passing out into the sea, plunge through darkness and storm. If I succeeded in getting charge of a ship, it would be one that would never be heard of again. But that is the boldness of every man that proffers marriage. He says: “I will navigate you through the storms, the cyclones, the fogs of a lifetime. I will run clear of rocks and icebergs, I have no experience and I have no seaport, but all aboard for the voyage of a lifetime! I admit that there have been ten thousand shipwrecks on this very route, but don’t hesitate! Tut! Tut! There now! Don’t cry! Brides must not cry at the wedding.” In response to this the woman, by her action, practically says: “I have but one life to live, and I entrust it all to you. My arm is weak, but I will depend on the strength of yours. I don’t know much of the world, but I rely on your wisdom. I put my body, my mind, my soul, my time, my eternity, in your keeping. I make no reserve. Even my name I resign and take yours, though mine is a name that suggests all that was honorable in my father and all that was good in my mother and all that was pleasant in my brothers and sisters. I start with you on a journey which shall not part except at the edge of your grave or mine. Ruth, the Moabitess, made no more thorough self-abnegation than I make, when I take her tremendous words, the pathos of which many centuries have not cooled: ‘Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.’ Side by side in life. Side by side in the burying-ground. Side by side in heaven. Before God and man, and with my immortal soul in the oath, I swear eternal fidelity.” Now, my brother, how ought you to treat her? Unless you are an ingrate infinte you well. You will treat her better than any one in the universe, except your God. Her name will have in it more music than in all that Chopin or Bach or Rheinberger composed. Her eyes, swollen with three weeks of night watching over a child with scarlet fever, will be to you beautiful as a May morning. After the last rose petal has dropped out of her cheek, after the last feather of the raven’s wing has fallen from her hair, after across her forehead and under her eyes and across her face there are as many wrinkles as there are graves over which she has wept, you will be able truthfully to say, in the words of Solomon’s song: “Behold, thou art fair, my love! Behold, thou art fair!” And perhaps she may respond appropriately in the words that no one but the matchless Robert Burns could ever have found pen or ink or heart or brain to write: John Anderson, my jo, John, We clamb the hill thegither; And mony a canty day, John, We’ve had wi’ ane anither. Now we maun totter down, John, ‘But hand in hand we’ll go; And sleep thegither at the foot, John Anderson, my jo. If any one assail her good name, you will have hard work to control your temper, and if you should strike him down the sin will not be unpardonable. By as complete a surrender as the universe ever saw—except that of the Son of God for your salvation and mine—she has a first mortgage on your body, mind and soul, and the mortgage is foreclosed; and you do not more thoroughly own your two eyes or your two hands than she owns you. The longer the journey Rebekah makes and the greater the risks of her expedition on the back of the camels, the more thoroughly is Isaac bound to be kind and indulgent and worthy. Now, be honest and pay your debts. You promised to make her happy. Are you making her happy? You are an honest man in other things, and feel the importance of keeping a contract. If you have induced her to enter into a conjugal partnership under certain pledges of kindness and affectionate attention, and then have failed to fulfill your word, you deserve to have a suit brought against you for getting goods under false pretenses, and then you ought to be mulcted in a large amount of damages. Review now all the fine, beautiful, complimentary, gracious, and glorious things you promised her before marriage, and reflect whether you have kept your faith. Do you say, “Oh, that was all sentimentalism, and romance, and a joke,” and that “they all talk that way!” Well, let that plan be tried on yourself! Suppose I am interested in Western lands, and I fill your mind with roseate speculation, and I tell you that a city is already laid out on the farm that I propose to sell you, and that a new railroad will run close by and have a depot for easy transportation of the crops, and that eight or ten capitalists are going to put up fine residences close by, and that the climate is delicious, and that the ground, high up, gives no room for malaria, and that every dollar planted will grow up into a bush bearing ten or twenty dollars, and my speech glows with enthusiasm until you rush off with me to an attorney to have the deed drawn and the money paid down and the bargain completed. You can hardly sleep nights because of the El Dorado, the Elysium, upon which you are soon to enter. You give up your home at the East, you bid good-by to your old neighbors, and take the train, and after many days’ journey you arrive at a quiet depot,from which you take a wagon thirty miles through the wilderness, and reach your new place. You see a man seated on a wet log, in a swamp, and shaking with the fifteenth attack of chills and fever, and ask him who he is. He says: “I am a real estate agent, having in charge the property around here.” You ask him where the new depot is. He tells you that it has not yet been built, but no doubt will be if the company get their bill for the track through the next Legislature. You ask him where the new city is laid out. He says, with chattering teeth: “If you will wait till this chill is off, I will show it to you on the map I have in my pocket.” You ask him where the capitalists are going to build their fine houses, and he says: “Somewhere along those lowlands out there by those woods, when the water has been drained off.” That night you sleep in the hut of the real estate agent, and though you pray for everybody else, you do not pray for me. Being more fortunate than many men who go out in such circumstances, you have money enough to get back, and you come to me, and out of breath in your indignation, you say: “You have swindled me out of everything. What do you mean in deceiving me about that Western property?” “Oh,” I reply, “that was all right; that was sentimentalism and romance and a joke. That’s the way they all talk!” But more excusable would I be in such deception than you, O man, who by glow of words and personal magnetism induced a womanly soul to make her home among surroundings which you have taken no care to make attractive, so that she exchanged her father’s house for the dismal swamp of married experience—treeless, flowerless, shelterless, comfortless and godless. I would not be half so much to blame in cheating you out of a farm as you in cheating a woman out of the happiness of a lifetime. My brother, do not get angry at what I say, but honestly compare the promises you made, and see whether you have kept them. Some of you spent every evening of the week with your betrothed before marriage, and since then you spent every evening away, except you have influenza or some sickness on account of which the doctor says you must not go out. You used to fill your conversation with interjections of adulation, and now you think it sounds silly to praise the one who ought to be more attractive to you as the years go by, and life grows in severity of struggle and becomes more sacred by the baptism of tears—tears over losses, tears over graves. Compare the way some of you used to come in the house in the evening, when you were attempting the capture of her affections, and the way some of you come into the house in the evening now. Then what politeness, what distillation of smiles, what graciousness, sweet as the peach orchard in blossom week! Now, some of you come in and put your hat on the rack and scowl, and say: “Lost money today!” and you sit down at the table and criticise the way the food is cooked. You shove back before the others are done eating, and snatch up the evening paper and read, oblivious of what has been going on in that home all day. The children are in awe before the domestic autocrat. Bubbling over with fun, yet they must be quiet; with healthful curiosity, yet they must ask no questions. The wife has had enough annoyances in the nursery and parlor and kitchen to fill her nerves with nettles and spikes. As you have provided the money for food and wardrobe, you feel you have done all required of you. Toward the good cheer, and the intelligent improvement, and the moral entertainment of that home, which at the longest can last but a few years, you are doing nothing. You seem to have no realization of the fact that soon these children will be grown up or in their sepulchres, and will be far removed from your influence, and that the wife will soon end her earthly mission, and that the house will be occupied by others, and you yourself will be gone. Gentlemen, fulfill your contracts. Christian marriage is an affectional bargain. In heathen lands a man wins his wife by achievements. In some countries wives are bought by the payment of so many dollars, as so many cattle or sheep. In one country the man gets on a horse and rides down where a group of women are standing, and seizes one of them by the hair, and lifts her, struggling and resisting, on his horse, and if her brothers and friends do not overtake her before she gets to the jungle, she is his lawful wife. In another land the masculine candidate for marriage is beaten by the club of the one whom he would make his bride. If he cries out under the pounding, he is rejected. If he receives the blows uncomplainingly, she is his by right. Endurance and bravery and skill decide the marriage in barbarous lands, but Christian marriage is a voluntary bargain, in which you promise protection, support, companionship and love. Business men have in their fire-proof safes a file of papers containing their contracts, and sometimes they take them out and read them over to see what the party of the first part and the party of the second part really bound themselves to do. Different ministers of religion have their own peculiar forms of marriage ceremony; but if you have forgotten what you promised at the altar of wedlock, you had better buy or borrow an Episcopal Church-Service, which contains the substance of all intelligent marriage ceremonies, when it says: “I take thee to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance, and thereto I pledge thee my troth.” Would it not be a good idea to have that printed in tract form and widely distributed? The fact is, that many men are more kind to everybody else’s wives than to their own wives. They will let the wife carry a heavy coal-scuttle upstairs, and will at one bound clear the width of a parlor to pick up some other lady’s pocket-handkerchief. There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men—namely, husbands in flirtation. The attention they ought to put upon their own wives they bestow upon others. They smile on them coyly and askance, and with a manner that seems to say: “I wish I was free from that old drudge at home. What an improvement you would be on my present surroundings!” And bouquets are sent, and accidental meetings take place, and late at night the man comes to his prosaic home, whistling and hilarious, and wonders that the wife is jealous. There are thousands of men who, while not positively immoral, need radical correction of their habits in this direction. It is meanness immeasurable for a man by his behavior to seem to say to his wife: “You can’t help yourself, and I will go where I please, and admire whom I please, and I defy your criticism.” Why did you not have that put in the bond, O domestic Shylock? Why did you not have it understood before you were pronounced husband and wife that she should have only a part of the dividend of your affections? that when, as time rolled on and the cares of life had erased some of the bright lines from her face, and given unwieldiness to her form, you would have the reserved right to pay obeisance to cheeks more rubicund, and figure lither and more agile, and as you demanded the last pound of patience and endurance on her part, you could, with the emphasis of an Edwin. Forrest or a Macready, have tapped the eccentric marriage document, and have said: “It’s in the bond”? If this modern Rebekah had understood beforehand where she was alighting, she would have ordered the camel drivers to turn the caravan backward toward Padan-aram. Flirtation has its origin either in dishonesty or licentiousness. The married man who indulges in it is either a fraud or a rake. However high up in society such a one may be, and however sought after, I would not give a three-cent piece, though it had been three times clipped, for the virtue of the masculine flirt. The most worthy thing for the thousands of married men to do is to go home and apologize for past neglects, and brighten up their old love. Take up the family Bible and read the record of the marriage day. Open the drawer of relics in the box inside the drawer containing the trinkets of your dead child. Take up the pack of yellow-colored letters that were written before you became one. Rehearse the scenes of joy and sorrow in which you have mingled. Put all these things as fuel on the altar, and by a coal of sacred fire rekindle the extinguished light. It was a blast from hell that blew it out, and a gale from heaven will fan it into a blaze. Ye who have broken marriage vows, speak out! take your wife into all your plans, your successes, your defeats, your ambitions. Tell her everything. Walk arm in arm with her into places of amusement, and on the piazza of summer watering-places, and up the rugged way of life, and down through dark ravine, and when one trembles on the way, let the other be reinforcement. In no case pass yourself off as a single man, practising gallantries. Do not, after you are fifty years of age, in ladies’ society try to look young-mannish. Interfere not, with your wife’s religious nature. Put her not in that awful dilemma in which so many Christian wives are placed by their husbands, who ask them to go to places or do things which compel them to decide between loyalty to God and loyalty to the husband. Rather than ask her to compromise her Christian character, encourage her to be more and more a Christian, for there will be times in your life when you will want the help of all her Christian resources; and certainly, when you remember how much influence your mother had over you, you do not want the mother of your children to set a less gracious example. It pleases me greatly to hear the unconverted and worldly husband say about his wife, with no idea that it will get to her ears: “There is the most godly woman alive. Her goodness is a perpetual rebuke to my waywardness. Nothing on earth could ever induce her to do a wrong thing. I hope the children will take after her instead of after me. If there is any heaven at all, I am sure she will go there.” Ah, my brother, do you not think it would be a wise and a safe thing for you to join her on the road to heaven? You think you have a happy home now, but what a home you would have if you both were religious! What a new sacredness it would give to your marital relation, and what a new light it would throw on the forehead of your children! In sickness what a comfort! In reverses of fortune what a wealth! In death what a triumph! God meant you to be the high-priest of your household. Go home today and take the Bible on your lap, and gather all your family yet living around you, and those not living will hear of it in a flash, and as ministering spirits will hover—father and mother and children gone, and all your celestial kindred. Then kneel down, and if you can’t think of a prayer to offer, I will give you a prayer—namely: “Lord God, I surrender to thee myself and my beloved wife, and these dear children. For Christ’s sake forgive all the past, and help us for all the future. We have lived together here, may we live together forever. Amen and amen!” Dear me, what a stir it would make among your best friends on earth and in heaven! Joseph II, the emperor, was so kind and so philanthropic that he excited the unbounded love of most of his subjects. He abolished serfdom, established toleration, and lived in the happiness of his people. One day while on his way to Ostend to declare it a free port, and while at the head of a great procession, he saw a woman at the door of her cottage in dejection. The emperor dismounted and asked the cause of her grief. She said that her husband had gone to Ostend to see the emperor, and had declined to take her with him; for as he was an alien, he could not understand her loyal enthusiasm, and that it was the one great desire of her life to see the ruler for whose kindness and goodness and greatness she had an unspeakable admiration; and her disappointment in not being able to go and see him was simply unbearable. The Emperor Joseph took from his pocket a box decorated with diamonds surrounding a picture of himself, and presented it to her, and when the picture revealed to whom she was talking, she knelt in reverence and clapped her hands in gladness before him. The emperor took the name of her husband, and the probable place where he might be found at Ostend, and had him imprisoned for the three days of the emperor’s visit, so that the husband returning home found that the wife had seen the emperor while he had not seen him. In many families of this earth the wife, through the converting grace of God, has seen the “King in his beauty,” and he has conferred upon her the pearl of great price, while the husband is an “alien from the covenant of promise, without God and without hope in the world,” and imprisoned in worldliness and sin. Oh, that they might arm in arm go this day and see him, who is not only greater and lovelier than any Joseph of earthly dominion, but “high over all, in earth, and air, and sky!” His touch is life. His voice is music. His smile is heaven. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 23: 021. EXPANSION ======================================================================== Expansion Genesis 28:14 : “Thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east.” Since the Americano-Hispanic War is concluded and a United States ambassador is again stationed at Madrid, and a Spanish ambassador at Washington, the people of our country are divided into expansionists and anti-expansionists. From a different standpoint than that usually taken, I discuss this all-absorbing theme. I leave the political aspect of this subject to statesmen and warriors, and pray Almighty God that they may be enabled rightly to settle the question whether the islands in controversy shall be finally annexed, or held under protectorate, or resigned to themselves, while I call attention to the fact that a campaign of moral and religious expansion ought to be immediately opened on widest and grandest scale. At the close of this war God put into the hands of this country the key to the world’s redemption. Heretofore the religious movement in lands where Christ is unknown had to precede the educational. After in China and India and the islands of the sea the missionaries had labored over fifty or seventy-five years, the printing-press and the secular school came in. Now, to better advantage than ever before, religious and secular enlightenment may go side by side, and so the work be accomplished in short time and more thoroughly. Starting with the fact that in Cuba and Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands at least three-fourths of the people can neither read nor write, what an opportunity for school and printing-press! Within five years every man in those islands may be taught to read not only the Bible but the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States and the biography of George Washington and of Abraham Lincoln. It seems to me that the Government of the United States ought by vote of Congress to afford common schools and printing-presses to those benighted regions. Our national legislature by one vote appropriated fifty million dollars to give bread and medicine to Cuba. Why not by a similar generosity give fifty million dollars for feeding and healing the minds and souls of those ignorant and besotted archipelagoes. In the name of God, I nominate a school for every neighborhood of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. As soon as the gavel falls at twelve o’clock of next December fourth on the table of Senate and House of Representatives, and the roll has been called and the preliminaries are observed let some member of our national Legislature, with mind and soul and voice strong enough to be heard not only through those halls, but through Christendom, propose a measure for the mental and moral disenthralment of the islands whose future status is in controversy. What has made American civilization the highest civilization the world has ever seen? Next to the Bible and the church, schools, common schools, schools reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from British America to Gulf of Mexico. Five years under such educational advantage and this whole subject that keeps our public men agitated, some of them to frothing at the mouth, will settle itself. Give those islands readers, spellers, arithmetics, histories, blackboards, maps, geographies, globes. Let the State Legislatures at their next meeting take parts of those islands under their especial educational patronage. What is needed is State and national action in this matter of schools. Then let the editorial associations of the United States, as many of such organizations as there are States, resolve at the next convocation to establish in every region of those islands a printing-press, to be supported by people of this country until it can become self-supporting. Each of these State editorial associations sending out to those islands at least one editor and two reporters and enough typesetters, down will go the ignorance and superstition of those islands as certainly as the Spanish fleet under Cervera sank under the pounding of our American battleships, and into their every port will go intelligence and love of free institutions as certainly as into the harbor of Manila went Admiral Dewey on that famous night when he was not expected. The printing-press! Nothing can stand before its bombardment. Editors of American newspapers and publishers of American books! Take the ordination for such a magnificent service. Eloquence on Capitol Hill cannot meet the exigency. Epigrams on political platforms or in State Legislatures will not hasten the desired consummation one week or one hour or one moment. When Cubans and Porto Ricans and Filipinos see the morning and evening newspapers thrown into the doorways and hawked along the streets of Havana and Santiago and Manila, those who cannot read, by the force of curiosity will learn to read, so that they may know what information is being scattered; and that which may be missionary effort at the start, and carried on by Americans sent forth to do the work, will soon be done by educated natives. Porto Rican editors! Porto Rican reporters! Porto Rican typesetters! Porto Rican publishers! It was a great mercy to take those islands from under the heels of despotism, but it will be a mightier mercy to emancipate them from ignorance and degradation. The expansion of the knowledge and intellectual qualification of all those insular regions is the desire of all intelligent Americans. Awake, all you schools and colleges and universities and printing-presses, to your opportunity! Still further here is a wide-open door for Christianity. First of all, we have the attention of those people. The heathen nations are for the most part soporific. The American missionaries heretofore had great difficulty in getting heathendom to listen. They excited some comment by their attire, so different was the parting of the hair and the shape of the hat and the cut of the coat and the formation of the shoe of the evangelizers; but the questions constantly arose in regard to the missionary: “Who is he?” “What is he here for?” And then the interrogator would relax into the previous stupid indifference. But that condition of things has passed. The guns of our American navy have awakened those populations. They do not ask who we are. They have found out. They are now listening to what American civilization and our Christian religion have to say on any subject. Now is the time, while their ears and eyes are wide open, to tell them of the rescuing and saving and inspiriting power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world. The steam printing-press which secular education plants there may be used and will be used to print religious newspapers and tracts and sermons and mighty discussions of questions temporal and eternal. The comfortable homes of those populations, when Christianized, standing side by side with the degraded huts of those who remain unchristianized, will be revolutionary for good. The Porto Rican and the Filipino will come out from his uncleansed and low-roofed and uninviting kennel, and say to his neighbor of beautiful household: “Why cannot I have things as you have them?” And when he finds that it is the Bible, with its teachings on family life and personal purity and exalted principle, and the Church of God that proposes the rectification of all evil and the implantation of all good, he will cry out: “Give me the Bible and the Church and the earthly alleviations and the eternal hope which have wrought for you such transfiguration.” Now, Church of God; now, all Christian philanthropists, is your opportunity! Nothing like it has occurred since Christ came. Perhaps there may be nothing like it till his second coming. Here is a definiteness of aim that is most helpful and inspiring. The millions of dollars given for the redemption of the world and the thousands of glorious missionaries who have, as volunteers, gone forth among barbaric nations, were given and enlisted under a great and immeasurable idea; but when they come to add to the great and immeasurable idea the idea of definiteness we will infinitely augment the work. More than three hundred million of heathen in India, more than four hundred million of people in China, and more millions of heathen than can be guessed outside of those countries, sometimes stagger and confound and defeat our faith; but here in these islands of present controversy we can farm out the work among the churches, and in five years, under the blessing of God, not only fit the people for the right of suffrage, but prepare them for usefulness and heaven. The difference between the general idea of the ° world’s evangelization and some particularized field of evangelization is the difference between the improvement of agriculture among all nations and the improvement of seventy-five acres put under one’s especial care and industry. By all means let the general work go on; but here is the specified field for religious concentration and development. This is not chimerical or impractical. The American Missionary Association of the Congregational church has already begun the work at San Juan, Utuado, and Albonito, and all denominations of Christians will soon be in those insular fields, and we all need, with our prayers and contributions, to cheer them on to take for God and righteousness those regions which our navy has captured from Spanish oppression. It has been estimated that this Americo-Spanish war cost us three hundred million dollars. It would not cost half of that to proclaim and carry on and consummate a holy war that will rescue those archipelagoes from satanic domination. Who will volunteer? I beat the drum of a recruiting station. Who will enlist under the one-starred, blood-striped banner of Immanuel? Cuba and Porto Rico and the Philippines are stepping-stones for our American Christianity to cross over and take the round world for God. We need a new evangelical alliance organized for this one purpose. In all denominations there are those with large enough hearts and who have been thoroughly enough converted to join in such an advanced movement; men, who, putting aside all minor differences of opinion, “believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son,” and who would march shoulder to shoulder in such a Gospel campaign. The result would be that those islanders, after such a scene of Gospelization, would assort themselves into denominations to suit themselves, and some would be sprinkled in holy baptism, and others would be immersed in those warm rivers, and some would worship in religious assemblage silent as the Quaker meetinghouse, and others would have as many jubilant ejaculations as a backwoods camp-meeting; and some of those who preached would be gowned and surpliced for the work, and others would stand in citizens’ apparel or in their shirt-sleeves preaching that Gospel which is to save the world. Mark you well that statesmanship, however grand it is, and wise men of the world, however noble, cannot do this work. Mere secular education does not moralize. Some of the most thoroughly educated men in all the world have been the worst men. Quicken a man’s intellect, while at the same time you do not make his morals good, and you only augment his power for evil. Geography and mathematics and metaphysics and philosophy will never qualify a people to govern themselves. A corrupt printing-press is worse than no printing-press at all, but let loose an open Bible upon those islands, and let the apocalyptic angel once fly over them, and you will prepare them to become either colonies of the United States Government, or, as I hope will be the case, independent republics. God did not exhaust himself when he built this nation. Those islands will yet have their Thomas Jeffersons, qualified to write for them Declarations of Independence; and George Washingtons, capable of achieving their liberties; and Abraham Lincolns, strong enough to emancipate their serfdoms; and Longfellows and Bryants, capable of putting their hills and their rivers and their landscapes into poems; and their Bancrofts and Prescotts, to make their histories; and their Irvings, to write their “Sketch Books;” and their Charles O’Conors and Rufus Choates, to plead in the court-rooms; and their Daniel Websters and John J. Crittendens, to move their senates. The day cometh—hear it all ye who have no hope for those islands of bedwarfed and diseased illiterates—the day cometh when those regions will have a Christian civilization equal to that which this country now enjoys, while I hope by that time this country will be as superior to what it now is, as today Washington and New York are better than Manila and Santiago. Do you see by this process of Gospelized intelligence, those archipelagoes will, as a nation, be protected from the two woes prophesied in regard to this country, the one woe prophesied by the expansionists, and the other woe prophesied by the anti-expansionists? It is said by those who would have us take all we can lay our hands on as a nation, that unless we enter the door now open for the enlargement of our national domain, we will decline the mission which God, in his providence, has assigned us. But surely no woe will come upon us, or upon them, if we Christianize them as we now have the opportunity of doing. The political technicalities are nothing as compared with the importance of this movement. I implore all political expansionists to augment us in this work of moral and religious expansion, for unless those islands are moralized and elevated in intelligence and habits, we do not want them, and their annexation would be political damnation. On the other hand, I implore all anti-expansionists to take a hand in the Gospelization of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. The only way to prepare them to take care of themselves is to give them the Ten Commandments that were published on Mount Sinai, and let them hear the groan of sacrifice that was breathed out on the heights of Golgotha. What they most want is the Gospel, the pure Gospel, the omnipotent Gospel, the Gospel that helps heal the wounds of the body, and irradiates the darkness of the mind, and achieves the ransom of the soul. But on this platform the so-called expansionists and so-called anti-expansionists will yet stand side by side. Though I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, within five years, if this religio-educational work is properly attended to, there will be a Cuban republic, a Porto Rican republic and a Philippine republic, none of them on a large scale; but they will all have their schools and printing-presses and evangelical churches, their presidents, their senates and house of representatives, their mayors and their constabularies; and as good order will be observed in their cities as now reigns on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, or Broadway, New York. Christ has started for the conquest of the nations, and nothing on earth or in hell can stop it. The continents are rapidly rolling into his dominion, and why not these islands, which for the most part, are only fragments broken off from continents, the interval lands having been sunk by earthquakes, allowing the ocean to take mastery over them? Each mother continent has around it a whole family of little continents. If the continents are being so rapidly evangelized, why not the islands? If America, why not Cuba and the Bahamas? If Asia, why not the Philippines and the Moluccas? If Europe, why not the Azores and the Orkneys? If Africa, why not Madagascar and St. Helena? The same power that broke them off the mainland, can lift them into evangelization. In the old Book, which has become a new Book by reason of modern discoveries, special attention is called to the islands. “Declare the Lord’s praise in the islands,” commands Isaiah. “Let the multitudes of the islands be glad thereof,” says the Psalmist. “All the islands of the heathen shall worship him,” writes Zephaniah. “He shall turn his face to the islands,” prophesies Daniel. “The inhabitants of the isles shall be astonished at thee,” foretells Ezekiel. “Hear it and declare it to the islands afar off,” exclaims Jeremiah. You see from this the islands are not to be neglected. Perhaps they are the Lord’s favorites, as in households if there be any favoritism at all it is for the weakest. The islands, too small to take care of themselves, have the eternal God to take care of them. Let nations look out how they tread on the islands, however small and weak, for they are omnipotently defended. They may not be able to marshal large armies, or to send out navies to sweep the sea, but better than that, they have the chariots of heaven on their side and the drawn sword of the Almighty. I have as much faith in the salvation of the smallest island of the Philippines, of the Falklands, of the Canaries, of the Ladrones, of the Carolines, of the Fijis, of the Barbadoes, of the Cape Verdes, of the Society Islands, as I have in the salvation of America. The continents themselves are only larger islands, and the world in which we live is only a still larger island, and the solar system is a group of islands, and the universe is an archipelago studded with islands of worlds, surrounded by the great ocean of infinitude and immensity. So you see when God planned the universe he diagrammed it into islands, and he will look after the interest of each of those islands, however small, and England and Holland and France and Germany and America must not treat the smallest and weakest island that comes under their sway any different from the way they treat the strongest nation of all the earth. God may chiefly deal with individuals in the next world, but he deals with nations in this world only, and when persistently a nation practises injustice against other people, it is only a question of time when the offender will find his doom. The path of time is strewn with the carcasses of nations that because of their maltreatment of other nations perished. The higher such offending empires rise, the harder will be their fall. I believe the United States Government will last as long as the world lasts. I believe the fires of the Judgment Day will leap on the domes of our State and National capitals, while yet they are in their full power. I believe the last earthquake will put its explosion under our national foundations while yet they stand firm. I believe that republican and democratic form of government will be the universal form of government for all nations when they have been evangelized, for then the nations will be capable of self-government and will have demanded and secured that form of government as a right. It will be either that or a theocracy, which will be the direct government of Christ in his personal reign on earth, as many Bible students believe. Yet that jubilant expectation is founded not on the skill of human statesmanship or human legislation, but upon the belief that this nation will submit to divine guidance, and obey the divine law, and carry out its divinely-imposed mission. But if we defy the God of nations, our doom is fixed. It required the pen of an Edward Gibbon, through four great volumes of more than five hundred pages each, to tell the story of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, concluding his monumental work with the words: “It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candor of the public.” What! the Roman empire dead. Did she lack warriors? No. Behold her Pompey and her Julius Caesar. Did she lack lawmakers and lawgivers? No. Think of the masters of Roman jurisprudence, our American attorneys today quoting those laws in our court-rooms more than fifteen centuries after they were enacted. In poetry did she not have her Virgil and Ovid? In history did she not have her Sallust and her Livy? In eloquence did she not have her Scipio and Cicero? In satire did she not have a Juvenal and a Horace? What pens were wielded by her Cato and her Terence and her Pliny! All nations heard the cry of her war eagles, the voices of her oratory, and the chime of her cantos. But the day of judgment came for that nation, and Hannibal crossed the Apennines, and the Goths and Vandals swooped, and the Carthaginian fleet assailed, and Numidian horsemen galloped, and nations combined, and Rome sank. The tourist now on the banks of the Tiber sees the ruins of her Forum, the ruins of her Colosseum, the ruins of her art, the ruins of her aqueducts, the ruins of her catacombs, the ruins of her palaces. If our nation forgets its duty to other nations and practices injustice against other people, however insignificant, it will not take another Edward Gibbon twenty years, and through four great volumes, to tell the story of the decline and fall of American institutions. By so much as our opportunities have been greater than any nation that ever lived, and the mission to which she has been ordained is more stupendous than any bestowed by the Almighty upon any people, if we forget our God and commit wickedness our overthrow will be quicker and more tremendous; and yonder Capitoline hill, with its architectural magnificence will become a heap of gigantic ruins, to be visited by the people of other times and other nations, who will read in letters of crushed and crumbled marble that which David wrote many hundred years ago upon parchment: “The way of the wicked he turneth upside down.” Three years ago, at this season, in memorial sermon, I proposed the twisting of two garlands, one to be put upon the grave of the Northern soldier, and the other to be put on the grave of the Southern soldier; but this year we need three garlands, the third to be put upon the graves of those who fell in this Americo-Hispanic conflict. The third garland needs to be quite as fragrant and as radiant as the other two. These last heroes braved more than bayonets and bombshell; they braved the pestiferous breath of the tropics—whole battalions, whole regiments, whole brigades, whole armies of deathful malaria. They confronted those oppositions of the torrid climes which no sword can pierce, no agility climb, no stratagem flank, no torpedo explode, no courage conquer. Under the awful charge of visible and invisible hosts about six thousand men went down, some to instant death, and others through lingering pangs in hospital. If in this third wreath you twist the crimson rose, suggestive of sanguinary sacrifice, and the white calla-lily, suggestive of glorious resurrection, put in also a few forget-me-nots, suggestive of remembrance, and a few passion flowers, suggestive of the love that mourns the slain, and a few heliotropes, suggestive of the fragrance of their memory. Then let the night’s dew put the tears into the blue eyes of the violets, and all the soldiers’ cemeteries be so many censers burning incense before the throne of that God who has been the friend of this nation from the time of Lexington to the time of San Juan Hill, from the guns of the United States warships Constitution and Constellation, at the beginning of this century, to the guns of the United States warships Olympia, Oregon, Brooklyn, and other loaded thunders at the close of this century. Remember, here and now, that those brave boys opened up the way for a kind of expansion we all believe in. They swung open the gates for the speedy Gospelization of islands stupid with the superstition of ages. They cleared the way for missionaries and Bibles. They set those islands free. Leaving to the United States Government to decide what shall be the political destiny of those peoples, let us all join in a campaign of religious expansion—expansion of affection that can take all the world in, expansion of our theologies until none shall reject their broad invitation, expansion of hope that embraces eternity as well as time, expansion of effort that will not cease till the whole earth is saved, and the time arrives when the prophecy shall be fulfilled and “they shall come from the north and the south and the east and the west and sit down in the kingdom of God, and the last shall be first and the first last.” Week before last, in this capital of the nation, we set three nights on fire in celebration of naval and soldierly heroics, and there were rockets of fire and wheels of fire and sheaves of fire and spouting fountains of fire and bombardments of fire and ships of fire sank in billows of fire, and those three nights were three garlands of fire; but now we are in softer and quieter mood, and the three garlands of today are woven of blossoms and corollas of all colors and all pungencies of aroma, and we bethink ourselves that this third garland was needed to chain together the Northern garland of other decorative times to the Southern garland of other decorative times. Floral chain of three links! For the first time in sixty years the North and South stand in complete brotherhood. Heroes of Vermont and Alabama, of Massachusetts and South Carolina, of Maine and Louisiana, shoulder to shoulder! May that alliance remain until the last oppression is extirpated from the earth and all nations stand in the liberty with which Christ would make all people free! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 24: 022. STRUGGLE AND VICTORY ======================================================================== Struggle and Victory (Preached After a Domestic Bereavement.) Genesis 32:26 : “Let me go, for the day breaketh.” The dust is rising from a traveling herd of cattle and sheep and goats and camels. They are the present which Jacob is sending to appease the anger of his offended brother. That night Jacob halts by the brook Jabbok. No rest for the weary man, no shining ladder to let the angels down into his dream; but a fierce combat until the morning with an unknown contestant. The two—Jacob and the stranger—seize each other, each trying to throw to the ground the other. The stranger, to show his superior power touches Jacob, and the thigh-bone springs from the socket, and Jacob goes limping and a cripple all his days. As on the morning sky the clusters of purple cloud begin to ripen, Jacob finds out it is an angel with whom he has been wrestling, and not one of his brother’s coadjutors. As the angel stretches himself up into the rising morn, he cries out, “Let me go, the day breaketh!” First of all, I learn from my subject that God lets His children go into terrific struggle. Jacob loved God; God loved him; but there Jacob is left alone in the midnight by the brook Jabbok to struggle with this mighty influence. So all the way down through the ages. For Joseph, a pit; for Daniel, a wild beast’s den; for David, dethronement and exile; for Peter, a prison; for Paul, a shipwreck; for John, desolate Patmos; for Vashti, insulting cruelty; for Josephine, banishment; for Mr. Burns, the outrage of the Montreal populace; for Catherine, the Scotch martyr, the drowning surges of the sea; for John Brown, of Edinburgh, the pistol-shot of Lord Claverhouse; for McKail, a scaffold; for Hugh Latimer, a stake; for Christ, a cross. Some one said to a Christian reformer, “The world is against you,” and the Christian reformer replied, “Then I am against the world.” So it has been a struggle all the way through the ages. But why need I go to those memorable instances, when I can come into the life of a thousand persons in this house today and find illustration of the truth of what I am now proclaiming? You have found life a wrestling—a midnight wrestling by the brook Jabbok. This man found the struggle in Wall street, this one in Broad street, this in Atlantic street, this one in Fulton street, this one in Chestnut street. What you bought you could not sell. He whom you trusted fled. Help you expected did not come. Some great financial trouble with long arms and grip like death, took hold of you and tried to throw you into the dust. It was midnight wrestling by the brook Jabbok. It has been all the way up to this time a question as to whether you would throw it, or it would throw you. Here is some one else who has had a wrestling with evil appetite. It came stealthily upon him. He did not know the force of that appetite until he began to resist it; but some day he woke up and said, “Now, for God’s sake, and for the sake of my soul, and for the sake of my wife and children, I must stop this.” O what an hour that was! What a solemn hour it is when a bad appetite rises up determined to destroy a man, and a man rises up and swears in the strength of the eternal God that he will destroy it. Then the angels of light look down in sympathy, then the angels of darkness look up in spite. O what an hour it is, and how many a man, biting his lip until the blood came, and with scalding tears, cried out by the brook Jabbok in the midnight, “God help me!” I have seen a man in that contest completely flung, completely wrestled down into the dust. Without any appeal to God for help, and depending on his own force of resolution, he went into the combat, and he fought well for a while. It seemed as if he was going by sheer force of earthly resolution to throw the bad habit, and he struck strongly, and he struck decisively, it seemed for a while; but his arm got weaker and weaker and weaker until it fell palsied by his side. First of all, I saw the auctioneer’s mallet come down on the pictures, then on the musical instruments, then on the fine upholstery of the parlor. Then I saw him drop into the ditch. Then I saw him shrink away from all kindly associations; I saw him fall away from the house of God, where he had been an ornament—I saw him fall away, and fall away forever. He was contending with his own right arm, and the evil habit threw him. Blessed be God, I have seen the other result—a result just opposite to that which I have been depicting. The evil habit came on regaled with cups of dissipation, and the two grappled—the giant of habit and the man who wished to be disenthralled—they clinched, they struggled. The giant of evil habit began to waver. It became weaker and weaker, and it fell, and when the triumphant wrestler put his heel on the neck of the overthrown habit, the shout was heard, “Thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It was a midnight wrestle by the brook Jabbok, and it was a triumph, as it will be for every man who puts his trust in the Lord and does his best. Elsewhere I saw a struggle going on, and the sorrows of widowhood came, the sorrows of struggling for a livelihood. It is a sad thing to see a man contending for a livelihood amid many disadvantages; but to see a delicate woman with a group of helpless little ones at her back, fighting the giant of poverty—that is a scene overwhelming to any sympathetic heart. People passed by. They saw it was only an humble home, but they did not know that between the four walls of that plain house there was a courage greater than Hannibal scaling the Alps, greater than was seen in the pass of Thermopylae, greater than when at Balaklava “into the jaws of death rode the six hundred.” She fought for bread, she fought for shelter, she fought for clothing, she fought with aching head and weak side and exhausted strength. Midnight struggle by the brook Jabbok. Perhaps she said, “Hath the Lord forgotten to be gracious? Must I fight this battle alone?” No, no; in the darkness of that midnight, and in the sough of the wind and in the ripple of the brook Jabbok were heard the words, “Thy fatherless children I will preserve them alive, and let thy widows trust in me.” Victory again by the brook Jabbok. Midnight wrestle again triumphant. A weak woman’s arm infused with the strength of the Lord God Omnipotent. So the struggle has gone on, and O how many have had it! Blessed are all those who put their trust in this God; they shall never be put to confusion. You must have struggle, and you will have victory. I learn again from this subject that often God’s people are trying to throw down their best blessing. Jacob thought it was an enemy he was fighting with that night. Oh, no! it was an angel of mercy that had come to promise a blessing to him and to his children afterward. So it has been with you and with me. How many times we have tried to throw down our greatest blessing. Your great misfortunes in life have turned out to be your greatest advantage. Come, now, be frank, and tell me, is it not true that through the sorrows of life you have come to the highest Christian experience? What were you before you lost that child? What were you before that great financial calamity came? All wrapped up in this world. But I think if you would calmly today sit down and count the things that have turned out to your greatest advantage, you would find out they were those things that you thought were sent for your destruction. It was a midnight wrestle by the brook Jabbok with something you wanted to put down, but God had sent an angel of mercy to your soul. David, pursued into the wilderness by his recreant son, becomes the sweet singer of Israel. Through scourging and shipwreck and imprisonment, Paul comes to be the great apostle. The hurricane that struck the house where Job’s children were banqueting, and slew the children, turned out with other misfortunes to make Job write that magnificent poem which has been the astonishment of the ages. I know of no way of getting the wheat out. of the straw except by threshing it. I know of no way of purifying the gold except by putting it in the crucible. Go among these men and women who have accomplished most for God—go anywhere, and you will find they have had the baptism of tears. There is something beautiful about baptism on sacramental day, when the water is sprinkled on the face of the child; but there is a more solemn baptism than that, and that is the baptism of tears. Just look at the consolation which comes to God’s children. See how often those things which seem to have been full of disaster turned out to be full of blessing. See the difference between the experience of those who trust in this world and those who trust in God. Rossini, after he had played “William Tell,” the five hundredth time, was serenaded by a band of musicians. Then they came up and gave him a golden crown of laurel leaves, and put it upon his brow, and while he was in that great triumph he said to a friend aside, “I would give all this brilliant scene—all this brilliant scene for one hour of love and joy and comfort.” Compare that man, amid all his artistic triumphs, his melancholy, with the feeling of Isaac Watts, sick again and again with dire sicknesses, tired and annoyed and persecuted and perplexed, yet writing this as his experience: The hill of Zion yields A thousand sacred sweets, Before we reach the heavenly fields, Or walk the golden streets. Then let our songs abound, And every tear be dry; We’re marching through Emanuel’s ground, To fairer worlds on high. Oh, it is prosperity that kills, and it is trouble that saves. As long as the Israelites were half starved in the wilderness, and going from hardship to hardship, they behaved quite well; but after a while they wanted meat, and the Lord sent a great flock of quails that darkened the sky, until they fell all around about the encampment; and they took of these quails, and ate and ate and stuffed themselves until they died. Hardship they endured; the prosperity destroyed them. It is not the vulture of trouble that eats out the life of the soul; it is the quails, it is the quails. Ah! do not fret about your misfortunes and about your trials, and do not fight against God, do not be rebellious against painful providences. You are trying to wrestle down an angel of mercy; you are trying to overthrow that which came for your blessing. Behold Jacob in the midnight by the brook Jabbok. My subject also impresses me with the fact that while we may triumph over our troubles, they leave their marks on us. Jacob prevailed against this angel; but the angel touched him, lamed him for life, and he went limping on his way. What so prematurely ploughed those wrinkles on your face? Why has your hair become gray before it was time for frost? What has hushed the hilarity in your dwelling? You have been trouble-touched. Are we stoics that we can see our cradle rifled of the bright eyes and the sweet lips? Must we stand unmoved and see the garden of our earthly delight uprooted? Will Jesus, who wept Himself, be angry with us if we weep over a grave that swallows what we love best? Oh, no! We must weep. You shall not drive back the tears to scald the heart. Thank God for the strange and mysterious relief that comes in tears. Under this gentle rain the flowers of comfort put forth their bloom. God pity the dry, the withered, the parched, the all-consuming grief which wrings its hands and grinds its teeth and bites the nails into the quick, but cannot weep. Jesus wept. Blessed be God that there is comfort for all our sorrows, and that there is comfort in tears; but do not blame those who do not come out of their despondency very quickly; do not chide them because they are not as gay as once they were. Do not think it is because they are weak. They have been trouble-touched. My subject also kindles with a great joy when it prophesies the dawn. No one ever wanted to see the morning more than Jacob did. And what an announcement! “The day breaketh!” What a cry for all philanthropists and for all Christians. The world is brightening. The Church of God has just been planting its batteries. It is going forth “fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners.” It is a mighty Church, and it is to become the Church universal. It is to bring all nations under its sway. “The day breaketh! The day breaketh!” The bigotries of the earth are falling. Some of us remember when we thought that if a man would get to heaven he must believe in the perseverance of the saints, or in their falling away from grace; that he must be an Arminian or a Calvinist; that he must believe in liturgy or no liturgy. Those times have passed, and we have come to believe that if a man loves the Lord Jesus Christ, and trusts Him, he will get to heaven without any doubt at all, whatever else he does believe or does not believe. I, one Sabbath during the summer vacation, went into a Presbyterian church, and it was communion day, and I took the sacrament and my soul was strengthened. The very next Sabbath I was in a Methodist church, and I sat at the love-feast and my soul was strengthened. The very next Sabbath I was at Sharon Springs, New York, in an Episcopal church, and when the invitation was given to those who desired to take the sacrament to kneel at the altar, I knelt, and I cannot tell which communion service was the most helpful to my soul. I could not tell then; I cannot tell now. “I believe in the communion of saints, and the forgiveness of sins, and the life everlasting. Amen.” The bigotries of the earth are giving way before the doctrine of Christian brotherhood. “The day breaketh! The day breaketh!” I look off upon this audience this morning, and I see many who are going down into the waves of trouble that have come clear above the girdle. I want to tell you of the cessation of hostilities. God is going to let you free after a while. The grave will break, the dead will rise. The morning star trembles on the brightening sky. The gates of the east are swinging open. “The day breaketh!” When Philip Melancthon and Martin Luther sat down in discouragement and talked over the gloomy state of the Church, they got more and more gloomy; but after a while Martin Luther got up and said to Philip Melancthon, “Come, Philip, let us sing the forty-sixth psalm: ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea: though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.’“ When we go out of this world our departure may be a struggle. We have a great many good friends here whom we will be sorry to leave—friends with whom we played in childhood or counseled with in manhood. The lattice may be turned to keep out the sun, or a book may be set to dim the light of the midnight taper, or the house may be filled with the cries of widowhood and orphanage, or the Church of God may mourn our departure; but if Jesus calls, all will be well. It will never be told that in the last hour we cried for help and could not get it. The hours of the night of death will go by. It will be one o’clock in the morning, two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the morning, five o’clock in the morning. “The day breaketh!” So I would have it when I die. I am in no haste to be gone. I have no grudge against this world. It is a very bright world to me. The only fault I have to find with it is it treats me too well. But when it is time for me to go, I want to be ready— my worldly affairs all settled. If I have wronged others, in that last hour I want to be sure of their forgiveness. If there are hands stretched out from this world to hold me back, there will be hands stretched out from the other world to draw me on. Then, Lord Jesus, help me on and help me up. Unfearing and undoubting, may I step right out into the light and be able to look back to friends and kindred who would detain me, saying, “Let me go, let me go, the day breaketh!” Since I last stood here the waves have gone over us. Have you lost a child? Then you understand the grief? Have you not lost one? You cannot understand it. I would not dare to trust myself very far in this reference or allusion. I only make reference to it that I may thank you for your deep, wide, magnificent sympathies. First of all, God helped us, and next you. When, last Sabbath afternoon, we were riding to Greenwood, I said, “I cannot understand this composure which I feel, and this strange peace;” and it was suggested then and there: “There is a vast multitude of people praying for us.” That solved it. Again I thank you. God bless you all in your persons and in your homes. I gave that one to God in holy baptism just after his birth, and God has only taken that which was His own. I stand here today to testify of the comforting grace of God. Religion is a tremendous reality. God will wipe away all tears from our eyes. There shall be no more sorrow or sighing: neither shall there be any more pain. “The day breaketh!” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 25: 023. THE AMERICAN SHEAF ======================================================================== The American Sheaf A Thanksgiving Sermon. Genesis 37:7 : “We were binding sheaves in the field, and lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf.” A Josephic dream! At seventeen years of age, and when life is most roseate, Joseph, in vision, saw a great harvest field, himself and his brethren at work in it, and after a while the sheaf that he was binding rose up with an imperial air, and the sheaves of the other harvesters fell flat on their faces as the overawed subjects of an empire might fall down on their faces before a king. The dream was fulfilled when there was famine in Egypt and Joseph had the care of all the corn-cribs, and his brethren came and implored food from him. Sure enough, all their sheaves bowed to his sheaf. A Thanksgiving Day vision! I am away out in the center of a field where the harvests of all nations are reaping. Here is the great American sheaf. Sheaf of wheat, sheaf of rice, sheaf of corn, sheaf floral; agricultural, homological, mineralogical, literary and moral prosperities—all bound together in one great sheaf. It is kingly, and on its brow is the golden coronal of all the year’s sunshine, and in its presence all the sheaves of European and Asiatic harvests bend and fall down, feeling their littleness. Oh, the sheaf, the golden sheaf, the overtopping sheaf of American prosperity! Other nations far surpass ours in antiquities, in cathedrals, in titled pomp, in art galleries; but in most things their sheaves must bow to our sheaf. I have an idea that the most favored constellation of immensity is the one of which the earth is a star, and of the hemispheres the western is the most favored, and that of the zones the temperate is the more desirable, and the United States are the best part of the American continent. The best place on earth to live is here. Had it not been so, there would have been three hundred thousand Americans last year moving into Europe, instead of three hundred thousand Europeans moving into America. Human nature has a strong tendency to fault-finding. The pessimists outnumber the optimists. Where there is one man who sings and whistles and laughs, there are ten men who sigh and groan and complain. We are more apt to compare our condition with those who are better off than with those who are worse off. I propose this Thanksgiving morning, for the purpose of stirring your gratitude, to show you how much preferable is the condition of this nation to all other nations, and how the Italian sheaf and the British sheaf and the Spanish sheaf and the French sheaf and all the other sheaves, must bow down to our American sheaf. Have you realized your superior blessings atmospheric? Have you thought of the fact that most of the millions of the human race are in climates frigid or torrid or horrid? Take up the map, and thank God that you are are so far off from Arctic icebergs on the one side and seven-feet-long cobras on the other. For what multitudes of the human race, life is an Arctic expedition! Underground huts. Immeasurable barrenness. Life a prolonged shiver. Our front doorsteps on a January night are genial compared with their climate. Ask some of the Arctic explorers about the luxuries of life around the North Pole. Instead of killing so many brave men in Polar expeditions, we had better send messengers to persuade those pale inhabitants of polar climates to say good-by to the eternal snows and abandon those realms of earth to the walrus and white bear, and shut up those gates of crystal and come down into a realm where the thermometer seldom drops below zero. Oh, the beauties of Baffin’s Bay, only six weeks in the year open! What a delightful thing when, in those Arctic regions, they milk their cows and milk only ice-cream! Let all those who, like yourselves, live between thirty and fifty degrees of north latitude, thank God and have sympathy for the vast population of both hemispheres who freeze between sixty and eighty degrees of latitude. Then compare our atmosphere with the heated air, infested with reptilian and insectile life, in which most of the human race suffer. Think of India and China and Ethiopia. Travelers tell you of the delicious orange groves, but ask them about the centipedes. They tell of the odor of the forests, but ask them about the black flies. They tell you about the rich plumage of the birds, but ask them about the malarias. They tell you about the fine riders, but ask them about the Bedouins and bandits. They tell you about the broad piazzas, but ask them about the midnights with the thermometer at an insufferable no. Vast cities of the torrid clime without sewerage, without cleansing, packed and piled-up wretchedness, and all discomfort. What beautiful hyenas! What fascinating scorpions! What sociable tarantulas! What captivating lizards! What wealth of bugs! What an opportunity to study comparative anatomy and herpetology! What a chance to look into the open countenance of the pleasing crocodile. Hundreds of millions of people in such surroundings! I would rather live in one of these American cities in a house with two rooms than to live in the torrid lands and own all Brazil, all Hindustan, all Arabia, all China. There is not a land where wages and salaries are so large for the great masses of the people as here. In Ireland, in some parts, eight cents a day for wages; in England, a dollar a day good wages, vast populations not getting as much as that; in other lands, fifty cents a day and twenty-five cents a day, clear on down to starvation and squalor. An editor in England told me that his salary was seven hundred and fifty dollars a year, and he seemed satisfied! Look at the great populations coming out of the factories of other lands, and accompany them to their homes, and see what privation the hardworking classes on the other side the sea suffer. The laboring classes here are ten per cent. better off than in any other country under the sun—twenty per cent., forty per cent., fifty per cent., seventy-five per cent. The toilers with hand and foot have better homes and better furnished. I do not talk an abstraction. I know what I have seen. The stonemasons, and carpenters, and plumbers, and mechanics, and artisans of all styles in America have finer residences than the majority of the professional men in Great Britain. You enter the laborer’s house on this side the sea and you will find upholstery and pictures and instruments of music. His children are educated at the best schools; his life is insured so that in case of his sudden demise the family shall not be homeless. Let all American workmen know that while their wages may not be as high as they would like to have them, America is the paradise of industry. Again, there is no land on the earth where the political condition is so satisfactory as here. Every two years in the State and every four years in the nation we clean house. After a vehement expression of the people at the ballot-box in the autumnal election, they all seem satisfied; and if they are not satisfied, at any rate they smile. An Englishman asked me in an English rail train this question: “How do you people stand it in America with a revolution every four years? Wouldn’t it be better for you, like us, to have a Queen for a lifetime and everything settled?” England changes government just as frequently as we do. At some adverse vote in Parliament out goes the Conservative and in comes the Liberal; and after a while there will be another admonitory vote in Parliament, and out will go the Liberal, and in will come the Conservative. Administrations change there, but not as advantageously as here, for there they may change almost any day, while here a party in power continues in power four years. It is said that in this country we have more political dishonesty than in any other land. The difference is that in this country almost every official has a chance to steal, while in other lands a few people absorb so much that the others have no chance at appropriation! The reason they do not steal is they cannot get their hands on it! The governments of Europe are so expensive that after the salaries of the royal families are paid there is not much left to misappropriate. The Emperor of Russia has a nice little salary of eight million two hundred and ten thousand dollars; the Emperor of Austria has a yearly salary of four million dollars; Victoria, the Queen, has a salary of two million two hundred thousand dollars; the royal plate at St. James’ palace is worth ten million dollars; the Queen’s hairdresser gets ten thousand dollars a year for combing the royal locks, while the most of us have to comb our hair at less than half that expense, if we have any to comb! Over there, there is a host of attendants, all on salaries, some of them five thousand and six thousand dollars a year; Master of Buck Hounds, seven thousand five hundred dollars a year. (I translate pounds into dollars.) Gentlemen of the Wine and Beer Cellars, Controller of the Household, Groom of the Robes, Mistress of the Robes, Captain of Gold Stick, Lieutenant of Gold Stick, Lieutenant of Silver Stick, Clerk of the Powder Closet, Pages of the Back Stairs, Maids of Honor, Master of Horse, Chief Equerry, Equerries in Ordinary, Crown Equerry, Hereditary Grand Falconer, Vice Chamberlain, Clerk of Kitchen, Master of Forks, Grooms in Waiting, Lords in Waiting, Grooms of the Great Chamber, Sergeant-at-Arms, Barge Master and Waterman, Eight Bedchamber Women, Eight Ladies of the Bedchamber, Ten Grooms of the Great Chain, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. All this is only a type of the fabulous expense of foreign governments. All this paid out of the sweat and the blood of the people. Are the people satisfied? However much the Germans like William, and the Spaniards like their young King, and England likes her glorious Queen, these stupendous governmental expenses are built on a groan of dissatisfaction as wide as Europe. If it were left to the people of England, of Germany, of Austria, of Spain, of Russia, whether these expensive establishments should be kept up, do you doubt what the vote would be? Now, is it not better that we be overtaxed and the surplus be distributed all over the land among the lobby men, and that it go into the hands of hundreds and thousands of people—is there not a better chance of its finally getting down into the hands of honest people, than if it were all built up, piled up inside gardens and palaces? Again, the monopolistic oppression is less here than anywhere else. The air here is full of protest because great houses, great companies, great individuals, are building such overtowering fortunes. Stephen Girard and John Jacob Astor stared at in their time for their august fortunes, would not now be pointed at in the streets of Philadelphia or New York as anything remarkable. These vast fortunes for some imply pinchedness of want for others. A great protuberance on a man’s head implies the illness of the whole body. These estates of disproportioned size weaken all the body politic. But the evil is nothing here compared with the monopolistic oppression abroad. Just look at their ecclesiastical establishments. Look at those great cathedrals built at fabulous expense and supported by ecclesiastical machinery at vast expense, and sometimes in an audience room that would hold a thousand people, twenty or thirty people gather for worship. The pope’s income is eight million dollars. Cathedrals of statuary and braided arch and walls covered with masterpieces of Rubens and Raphael and Michael Angelo, against all the walls dashing seas of poverty, and crime, and filth, and abomination. Ireland today one vast monopolistic devastation. About thirty-five millions of people in Great Britain, and yet all the soil owned by about thirty-two thousand. Statistics enough to shake the earth, Duke of Devonshire owning ninety-six thousand acres in Derbyshire, Duke of Richmond owning three hundred thousand acres at Gordon Castle, Marquis of Breadalbane going on a journey of one hundred miles in a straight line, all on his own property; Duke of Sutherland has an estate as wide as Scotland, which dips into the sea on both sides. Bad as we have it here, it is a thousand times worse there. Beside that, if here a few fortunes overshadow all others, we must remember there is a vast throng of other people being enriched, and this fact shows the thriftiness of the country. It is estimated that there are over five thousand millionaires in the United States. In addition to this, you must remember that there are successes on less extended scale. Tens of thousands of people worth five hundred thousand dollars; scores of thousands of people worth one hundred thousand dollars each. Yea, the majority of the people of the United States are on their way to fortunes. They will either be rich themselves or their children will be rich. If I should leave to some men the question: “Will you have a fortune and your children struggle on through their lives in the struggle you have had to make—will you have the fortune, or would you rather that they should have the fortune?” Scores of men would say: “I am willing to fight this battle all the way through and give my children a chance; I don’t care so much about myself; it’s only for ten or twenty years, anyhow; give my children a chance.” If anything stirs my admiration it is to see a man without any education himself sending his sons to college, and without any opportunity for luxury himself, resolved that though he may have it hard all the days of his life, his children shall have a good start. And I tell you, although some of you may have sore commercial struggle, there Is going to be a great opening for your sons and your daughters as they come on to take their places in society. Besides that, the domains of Europe and Asia are already full. Every place occupied unless it be desert or volcano or condemned barrens, while here we have plenty of room, and the resources are only just opening. In other lands, if fortunes fatten they must fatten on others; but here they can fatten out of illimitable prairies and out of inexhaustible mines. We have only just begun to set the Thanksgiving table in this country. We have just put on one silver fork, and one salt cellar, and one loaf of bread, and one smoking platter. Wait until the fruits come in from all the orchards, and the meats from all the markets, and the vegetables from all the gardens, and the silver from all the mines, and the dinner bell rings, saying: “Thanksgiving table spread. Come all the people from between the two oceans. Come from between the Thousand Isles and the Gulf of Mexico. Come and dine!” The prospects are so magnificent that for centuries to come all the other sheaves will have to bow to our sheaf. Again, the nation is more fully at peace than any other. At least fifteen million men belonging to the standing armies of Europe today. Since we had our conflict, on the other side the sea they have had Zulu war, Afghan war, Egyptian war, Russo-Turkish war, German-French war. No certainty about the future. All the governments of Europe watching each other lest one of them get too much advantage. Diplomacy all the time nervously at work. Four nations watching the Suez Canal as carefully as four cats could watch one rat. In order to keep peace, intermarriage of royal families; some bright princess compelled to marry some disagreeable foreign dignitary in order to keep the balance of political power in Europe, the ill-matched pair fighting out on a small scale that which would have been international contests, sometimes the husband holding the balance of power, sometimes the wife holding the balance of power. One unwise stroke of Gladstone’s pen after Garnet Wolseley had captured Tel-el-Kebir and all Europe would have been one battlefield. Crowded cities, crowded governments, crowded learned institutions, crowded great cities, close by each other. You get in the cars here and you ride one hundred or one hundred and fifty miles; then you come to a great city, as from here to Philadelphia, as from here to Albany, as from here to Boston. I got on the cars at Manchester and closed my eyes for a long sleep before I got to Liverpool. In forty minutes I was aroused out of sleep by some one saying: “We are here; this is Liverpool.” The cities crowded; the populations crowded, packed in between the Pyrenees and the Alps, packed in between the English Channel and the Adriatic so closely they cannot move without treading either on each other’s heels or toes. Sceptres clashing, chariot wheels colliding. The nations of Asia and Europe this moment wondering what next. But on this continent we have plenty of room and nobody to fight. Eight million square miles in North America, and all but one-seventh capable of rich cultivation, implying what fertility and what commerce! Four great basins pouring their waters into the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Gulf of Mexico. Shore line of twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and sixty-nine miles. The one State of Texas with more square miles than all France, than all Germany. That our continent might have plenty of elbow room, and not be jostled by the effete governments of Europe, God sank to the depths of the sea a whole continent that once ran from off the coast of Europe to the coast of America—the continent of Atlantis—which allowed the human race to pass from Europe to America on foot, with little or no shipping; that continent dimly described in history, but the existence of which has been proved by archaeological evidences innumerable; that whole continent sunken so that a fleet of German, British, and American vessels had to take deep sea soundings to touch the top of it; that highway from Europe to America entirely removed so that for the most part only the earnest, and the persevering, and the brave, could reach America, and that through long sea voyage. Did I say the whole continent of ours, this North American continent? Governments on the southern end of this continent are gradually coming to the time when they will beg annexation. On the other hand, beautiful and hospitable Canada. The vast majority of the people there are more republican than monarchical in their feelings, and the chief difference between them and us is that they live on one side the St. Lawrence and we on the other. The United States Government will offer hand and heart in marriage to beautiful and hospitable Canada, and Canada will blush and look down, and thinking of her allegiance across the sea, will say: “Ask mother.” Peace all over the continent, and nothing to fight about. What a pity that slavery is gone! While that lasted we had something over which the orators could develop their muscles of vituperation and calumny. We are so hardly put to it for military demonstration that guns and swords and cannon were called out when we celebrated the bicentennial of William Penn, the peaceful Quaker for whom a gun would never have been of any use except to hang his broad brim hat on. Oh, what shall we do for a fight? Will not somebody strike us? We cannot draw swords on the subject of civil service reform, or free trade, or “corners” in wheat. Our ships of war are cruising around the ocean, hoping for something interesting to turn up. Sumter and Moultrie and Pulaski and Fort Lafayette and Fortress Monroe and all the other shaggy lions of war sound asleep on their iron paws. Gunpowder out of fashion, and not even allowed the juvenile population on Fourth of July. Fire-crackers a sin. The land is struck through and through with peace. There is hardly a Northern city where there are not Confederate generals in its law offices, or commercial establishments, or insurance companies. There you sit or stand today, side by side—you who wore the blue and you who wore the gray; you who kindled fires on the opposite side of the Potomac in the winter of 1862; you who followed Stonewall Jackson toward the North; and you who followed General Sherman toward the South. Why are you not breaking each other’s heads? Ah! you have irreparably mixed up your politics. The Northern man married a Southern wife, and the Southern man married a Northern wife, and your children are half Mississippian and half New Englander; and to make another division between the North and the South possible you would have to do with your child as Solomon proposed with the child brought before him in judgment—divide it with the sword, giving half to the North and half to the South. No, sir; there is nothing so hard to split as a cradle. Intermarriage will go on and consanguinal ties will be multiplied, and the question for generations to come will be, how we people in this generation got into such an awful wrangle and went to digging such an awful grave trench. But there is now—look! no blood on the cotton, no mark of cavalry hoof on the wheat. Twenty years ago could the wheat sheaf and the palmetto have stood on the same platform? No. Every grain of this wheat would have been a bullet, and every leaf of the palmetto a sword. “Peace on earth, good will to men.” Apple and orange; how the colors blend. In the great harvest field of the world’s tranquility all sheaves bowing to our sheaf. Again, we are better off than other nations in matters of national debt, our debt less than one-half of that of England, and not more than a third that of France. We have for many years, every day, paid one hundred and forty-two thousand dollars toward the liquidation of the national debt. It is going all to melt away like a snowbank under an April sun. Again, we have a better climate than in any other nation. We do not suffer from anything like the Scotch mist, or the English fogs, or from anything like the Russian ice blast, or from the awful typhus of Southern Europe, or the Asiatic cholera. Epidemics here are exceptional, very exceptional. Plenty of wood and coal to make a roaring fire in winter time; easy access to sea beach or mountain top when the ardors of summer come down; Michigan wheat for the bread; Long Island corn for the meal; New Jersey pumpkins for the pies; Carolina rice for the queen of puddings; prairie fowl from Illinois; fish from the Hudson and the James; hickory, and hazel, and walnuts from all our woods; Louisiana sugar to sweeten our beverages; Georgia cotton to keep us warm; oats for the horses; carrots for the cattle; and oleomargarine butter for the hogs! In our land all products and all climates that you may desire. Are your nerves weak and in need of bracing up? Go North. Is your throat delicate and in need of balmy airs? Go South. Do you feel crowded and want more room? Go West. Are you tempted to become office-seekers? Go to jail! Almost anything you want you can have. Plenty to eat, plenty to wear, plenty to read. “It has been well the past year,” says the loom. “It has been well,” says the type. “It has been well,” say pen and chisel and hammer and plough and fishing-net. “It has been well,” answer the groves and orchards and studios and factories and workshops and harvest fields of America. Our national sheaf is larger this year, and more regal, and riper, and more richly grained, than at any time since the Pilgrim Fathers settled New England, or the Hollanders founded New York, or the Huguenots took possession of the Carolinas. Sheaf of sheaves. While all others bow before it, let it bow in turn before the good Lord of the unparalleled American harvest. Before him come down all the corn shocks; before him come down the sheaf of governmental sceptres, the sheaf of battle-spears, the sheaf of barbaric arrows, the sheaf of commercial yardsticks, the sheaf of joy, the sheaf of family reunion, the sheaf of thanksgiving. All the sheaves of the harvest field bowing down low at the feet of the great Husbandman. You have in hackneyed phrase heard over and over again that America is the asylum of the oppressed. This glorious Thanksgiving morning I declare it to be the wardrobe of the earth, the wheat-bin of the hemispheres, the corn-crib of all nations. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 26: 024. NEXT TO THE THRONE ======================================================================== Next to the Throne Genesis 37:28 : “They drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver.” Genesis 45:26 : “He is governor over all the land of Egypt.” You cannot keep a good man down. God has decreed for him a certain point of elevation. He will bring him to that though it cost him a thousand worlds. You sometimes find men fearful they will not be properly appreciated. Every man comes to be valued at just what he is worth. You cannot write him up, and you cannot write him down. These facts are powerfully illustrated in my subject. It would be an insult to. suppose that you were not all familiar with the life of Joseph. How his jealous brothers threw him into a pit, but seeing a caravan of Arabian merchants trudging along beside their camels, with spices and gums that loaded the air with aroma, sold their brother to these merchants, who carried him down into Egypt; Joseph there sold to Potiphar, a man of influence and office. How by Joseph’s integrity he raised himself to high position in the realm, until, under the false charge of a vile wretch, he was hurled into the penitentiary. How in prison he commanded respect and confidence. How by the interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream he was freed and became the chief man in the realm, the Bismarck of his century. How in the time of famine Joseph had the control of a magnificent storehouse which he had filled during seven years of plenty. How when his brothers, who had thrown him into the pit and sold him into captivity, applied for corn, he sent them home with the beasts of burden borne down under the heft of the corn-sacks. How the sin against their brother which had so long been hidden came out at last and was magnanimously repaid by that brother’s forgiveness and kindness—the only revenge he took. You see, in the first place, that the world is compelled to honor Christian character. Potiphar was only a man of the world, yet Joseph rose in his estimation until all the affairs of that great house were committed to his charge. From his servant no honor or confidence was withheld. When Joseph was in prison he soon won the heart of the keeper, and though placed there on the charge of being a scoundrel, he soon convinced the jailor that he was an innocent and a trustworthy man, and released from close confinement he became general superintendent of prison affairs. Wherever Joseph was placed, whether a servant in the house of Potiphar, or a prisoner in the penitentiary, he became the first man everywhere, and is an illustration of the truth I lay down, that the world is compelled to honor Christian character. There are those who affect to despise a religious life. They speak of it as a system of phlebotomy by which the man is bled of all his courage and nobility. They say he has bemeaned himself. They pretend to have no more confidence in him since his conversion than before his conversion. But all this is hypocrisy. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in the Church and there is a great deal of hypocrisy outside the Church. It is impossible for any man not to admire and confide in a man who shows that he has really become a child of God, and is what he professes to be. You cannot despise a son of the Lord God Almighty. Of course, we have no admiration for the sham of religion. I was at a place a few hours after the ruffians had gone into the rail-train and demanded that the passengers throw up their arms, and then these ruffians took the pocketbooks; and Satan comes and suggests to a man that he throw up his arms in hypocritical prayer and pretension, and then steals his soul. For the mere pretension of religion we have abhorrence. Redwald, the king, after baptism, had an altar of Christian sacrifice and an altar for sacrifice to devils; and there are many men now attempting the same thing—half a heart for God and half a heart for the world—and it is a dead failure, and a caricature of religion, and the only successful assault ever made on Christianity is the inconsistency of its professors. You may have a contempt for pretension to religion, but when you behold the excellency of Jesus Christ come out in the life of one of his disciples, all that there is good and noble in your soul rises up into admiration, and you cannot help it. Though that man be as far beneath you in estate as the Egyptian slave of whom we are discoursing was beneath his rulers, by an irrevocable law of your nature, Potiphar and Pharaoh will always esteem Joseph. When Eudoxia, the Empress, threatened Chrysostom with death, he made the reply: “Tell the Empress I fear nothing but sin.” Such a scene as that compels the admiration of the world. There was something in Agrippa and Felix which compelled their respect for Paul, the rebel against government. I doubt not that they would willingly have yielded their office and dignity for a thousandth part of that true heroism which beamed in the eye and beat in the heart of that unconquerable Apostle. Paul did not cower before Felix; Felix cowered before Paul. The infidel and worldling are compelled to honor in their hearts, although they may not eulogize with their lips, a Christian firm in persecution, cheerful in poverty, trustful in losses, triumphant in death. I find Christian men in all professions and occupations, and I find them respected and honored and successful. John Frederick Oberlin alleviating ignorance and distress; Howard passing from dungeon to lazaretto with healing for the body and soul; Elizabeth Fry going to the profligacy of Newgate Prison to shake its obduracy, as the angel came to the prison at Philippi, driving open the doors and snapping loose the chain—these, as well as the lives of thousands of followers of Jesus who have devoted themselves to the temporal and spiritual welfare of the race, are monuments of the Christian religion that will not crumble while the world lasts. A man said to me in the cars: “What is religion? Judging from the character of many professors of religion I do not admire religion.” I said: “Now suppose we went to an artist in the city of Rome and while in his gallery asked him: ‘What is the art of painting?’ would he take us out in a low alley and show us the mere daub of a pretender at painting? or would he take us down into the corridors and shows us the Rubens and the Raphaels and the Michael Angelos? When we asked him: ‘What is the art of painting?’ he would point to the works of great masters, and say: ‘That is painting.’ Now, you propose to find the mere caricature of religion, to seek after that which is the mere pretension of a holy life, and you call that religion. I point you to the splendid men and women whom this Gospel has blessed and lifted and crowned. Look at the masterpieces of divine grace if you want to know what religion is.” We learn also from this story of Joseph that the result of persecution is elevation. Had it not been for his being sold into Egyptian bondage by his malicious brothers, and his false imprisonment, Joseph never would have become a governor. Everybody accepts the promise: “Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” but they do not realize the fact that this principle applies to worldly as well as spiritual success. It is true in all departments. Men rise to high official positions through misrepresentation. Public abuse is all that some of our public men have had to rely upon for their elevation. It has brought to them what talent and executive force could not have achieved. Many of those who are making great effort for place and power will never succeed, just because they are not of enough importance to be abused. It is the nature of men—that is of all generous and reasonable men—to gather about those who are persecuted and defend them, and they are apt to forget the faults of those who are the subjects of attack, while attempting to drive back the slanderers. Persecution is elevation. Helen Stirk, the Scotch martyr, standing with her husband at the place of execution, said: “Husband, let us rejoice today; we have lived together many happy years; this is the happiest time of all our life; you see we are to be happy together forever. Be brave now, be brave. I will not say ‘Goodnight’ to you for we shall soon be in the kingdom of our Father together.” Persecution shows the heroes and heroines. I go into another department and I find that those great denominations of Christians which have been most abused have spread the most rapidly. No good man was ever more violently maltreated than John Wesley. His followers were hooted at and maligned and called by every detestable name that infernal ingenuity could invent, but the hotter the persecution the more rapidly they spread, until you know what a great host they have become and what an overwhelming force for God and the truth they are wielding all the world over! It was persecution that gave Scotland to Presbyterianism. It was persecution that gave our land first to civil liberty and afterward to religious freedom. Yea, I might go further back and say it was persecution that gave the world the great salvation of the Gospel. The ribald mockery, the hungering and thirsting, the unjust charge, the ignominious death, when all the force of hell’s fury was hurled against the Cross, was the introduction of that religion which is yet to be the earth’s deliverance and our eternal salvation. The State sometimes said to the Church: “Come, take my hand and I will help you.” What was the result? The Church deteriorated and it lost its estate of holiness, and it became ineffective. At other times the State said to the Church: “I will crush you.” What has been the result? After the storms have spent their fury the Church, so far from having lost any of its force, has increased and is worth infinitely more after the assault than before. Read all history and you will find that true. The Church is far more indebted to the opposition of civil government than to its approval. The fires of the stake have only been the torches which Christ held in his hand, by the light of which the Church has marched to her present glorious position. In the sound of racks and implements of torture I hear the rumbling of the Gospel chariot. The scaffolds of martyrdom have been the stairs by which the Church mounted. Learn also from our subject that sin will come to exposure. Long, long ago had those brothers sold Joseph into Egypt. They had made the old father believe that his favorite child was dead. They had suppressed the crime, and it was a profound secret well kept by the brothers. But suddenly the secret is out. The old father hears that his son is in Egypt, having been sold there by the malice of his own brothers. How their cheeks must have burned and their hearts sunk at the flaming out of this long-concealed crime! The smallest iniquity has a thousand tongues, and they will blab out exposure. Saul was sent to destroy the Canaanites, their sheep and their oxen; but when he got down there among the pastures, he saw some fine sheep and oxen too fat to kill, so he thought he would steal them. Nobody would know it. He drove these stolen sheep and oxen toward home, but stopped to report to the prophet how he had executed his mission, when in the distance the sheep began to bleat and the oxen to bellow. The secret was out, and Samuel said to the blushing and confused Saul: “What meaneth the bleating of the sheep that I hear and the bellowing of the cattle?” Ah! you cannot keep an iniquity still. At just the wrong time the sheep will bleat and the oxen will bellow. Achan cannot steal the Babylonish garment without being stoned to death, nor Arnold betray his country without having his neck stretched. Look over the police arrests. These thieves, these burglars, these counterfeiters, these highwaymen, these assassins, they all thought they could bury their iniquity so deep down it would never come to resurrection; but there was some shoe that answered to the print in the soil, some false keys found in their possession, some bloody knife that whispered of the death, and the public indignation and the anathema of outraged law hurled them into the dungeon or hoisted them on the gallows. Francis I, King of France, stood counseling with his officers how he could take his army into Italy, when Ameril, the fool of the court, leaped out from a corner of the room and said: “You had better be consulting how you will get your army back”; and it was found that Francis I, and not Ameril, was the fool. Instead of consulting as to the best way of getting into sin, you had better consult as to whether you will be able to get out of it. If the world does not expose you, you will voluntarily or involuntarily tell it yourself. There is an awful power in an aroused conscience. A highwayman plunged out upon Whitefield as he rode along on horseback, a sack of money on the horse—money that he had raised for orphan asylums—and the highwayman put his hand on the gold and Whitefield turned to him and said: “Touch that if you dare—that belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ.” And the ruffian slunk into the forest. Conscience! Conscience! The ruffian had a pistol, but Whitefield shook at him the finger of doom. Do not think you can hide any great and protracted sin in your heart, my brother. In an unguarded moment it will slip off the lip, or some slight action may for the moment set ajar this door that you wanted to keep closed. But suppose that in this life you hide it, and you get along with this transgression burning in your heart, as a ship, on fire within, for days hinders the flames from bursting out by keeping down the hatches, yet at last in the Judgment that iniquity will blaze out before God and the universe. Learn also from this subject that there is an inseparable connection between all events, however remote. The universe is only one thought of God. Those things which seemed fragmentary and isolated are only different parts of that great thought. How far apart seemed these two events—Joseph sold to the Arabian merchants and his rulership of Egypt; yet you see in what a mysterious way God connected the two into one plan. So the events are linked together. You who are aged men look back and group together a thousand things in your life that once seemed isolated. One undivided chain of events reaches from the Garden of Eden to the Cross of Calvary, and thus up to the Kingdom of Heaven. There is a relation between the smallest insect that hums in the summer air and the archangel on his throne. God can trace a direct ancestral line from the blue-jay that this spring will build its nest in the tree behind the house to some one of the flock of birds which, when Noah hoisted the ark’s window, with a whirr and dash of bright wings went out to sing over Mount Ararat. The tulips that bloom in the garden this spring were nursed by the snow-flakes. The furthest star on one side of the universe could not look toward the furthest star on the other side of the universe and say: “You are no relation to me,” for from that bright orb a voice of light would ring across the heavens, responding, “Yes, yes; we are sisters.” Nothing in God’s universe swings at loose ends. Accidents are only God’s way of turning a leaf in the book of his eternal decrees. From our cradle to our grave there is a path all marked out. Each event in our life is connected with every other event in our life. Our losses may be the most direct road to our gain. Our defeat and our victory are twin brothers. The whole direction of your life was changed by something which at the time seemed to you trifling, while some occurrence which seemed tremendous affected you but little. God’s plans are magnificent beyond all comprehension. He molds us and turns and directs us, and we know it not. Thousands of years are to him as the flight of a shuttle. The most terrific occurrence does not make God tremble. The most triumphant achievement does not lift him into rapture. That one great thought of God goes out through the centuries, and nations rise and fall and eras pass and the world changes, but God still keeps the undivided mastery, linking event to event and century to century. To God they are all one event, one history, one plan, one development, one system. Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty! I was years ago in New Orleans at the Exposition rooms, when a telegram was sent to the President of the United States, at Washington, and we waited some fifteen or twenty minutes and then the President’s answer came back, and then the presiding officer waved his handkerchief and the signal was sent to Washington that we were ready to have the machinery of the Exposition started, and the President put his finger on the electric button and instantly the great Corliss wheel began to move—rumbling, rumbling, rolling, rolling. It was overwhelming, and fifteen thousand people clapped and shouted. Just one finger at Washington started that vast machinery, hundreds and hundreds of miles away, and I thought then as I think now, that men sometimes touch influences that respond in the far distance, forty years from now, fifty years from now, a thousand years from now—a million years from now—one touch sounding through the ages. We also learn from this story the propriety of laying up for the future. During the seven years of plenty, Joseph prepared for the famine, and when it came he had a crowded storehouse. The life of most men in a worldly respect is divided into years of plenty and famine. It is seldom that any man passes through life without at least seven years of plenty. During those seven years, your business bears a rich harvest. You scarcely know where all the money comes from, it comes so fast. Every bargain you make seems to turn into gold. You contract few bad debts. You are astonished with large dividends. You invest more and more capital. You wonder how men can be content with a small business, gathering in only a few hundred dollars while you reap your thousands. Those are the seven years of plenty. Now Joseph has time to prepare for the threatened famine, for to almost every man there do come seven years of famine. You will be sick, you will be unfortunate, you will be defrauded, there will be hard times, you will be disappointed, and if you have no storehouse upon which to fall back, you may be famine-struck. We have no admiration for this denying one’s self all personal comfort and luxury for the mere pleasure of hoarding up, this grasping, grasping for the mere pleasure of seeing how large a pile you can get, this always being poor because as soon as a dollar comes in it is sent out to see if it can find another dollar. We have a contempt for all those things, but there is an intelligent and noble-minded forecast which we love to see in men who have families and kindred depending upon them for the blessings of education and home. God sends us to the insects for a lesson, which while they do not stint themselves in the present, do not forget their duty to forecast the future. “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise; which having no guide, overseer or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer and gathereth her food in the harvest.” Now, there are two ways of laying up money. One of these is to put it in stock and deposit it in bank and invest it on bond and mortgage. The other way to lay up money is giving it away. He is the safest who makes both of these investments. There are men who if they lose every dollar they have in the world would be millionaires for eternity. They made the spiritual investment; but the man who devotes none of his gains to the cause of Christ and looks only for his own comfort and luxury is not safe, I care not how the money is invested. He acts as the rose if it should say: “I will hold my breath, and none shall have a breath of fragrance from me until next week; then I will set all the garden afloat with my aroma.” Of course the rose, refusing to breathe, died. Above all, lay up treasures in heaven. They never depreciate in value. They never are at a discount. They are always available. You may feel safe now with your one thousand dollars or two thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars income, but what will such an income be worth after you are dead? Others will get it. Perhaps some of them will quarrel about it before you are buried. They will be so glad when you are dead. They are only waiting for you to die. What then will all your earthly accumulations be worth? If you gathered it all in your bosom and walked up with it to heaven’s gate, it would not purchase your admission. Or if allowed to enter, it could not buy you a crown or robe, and the poorest saint in heaven would look down at you and say: “Where did that pauper come from?” May we all have treasures in heaven. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 27: 025. A BLOODY MONSTER ======================================================================== A Bloody Monster Genesis 37:33 : “It is my son’s coat; an evil beast hath devoured him.” Joseph’s brethren dipped their brother’s coat in goat’s blood, and then brought the dabbled garment to their father, cheating him with the idea that a ferocious animal had slain him, and thus hiding their infamous behavior. But there is no deception about that which we hold up to your observation today. A monster such as never ranged African thicket or Hindustan jungle hath tracked this land, and with bloody maw hath strewn the continent with the mangled carcasses of whole generations; and there are tens of thousands of fathers and mothers who could hold up the garment of their slain boy, truthfully exclaiming, “It is my son’s coat; an evil beast hath devoured him.” There has, in all ages and climes, been a tendency to the improper use of stimulants. Noah took to strong drink. By this vice, Alexander the Conqueror was conquered. The Romans at their feasts fell off their seats with intoxication. Four hundred millions of our race are opium-eaters. India, Turkey, and China have groaned with the desolation; and by it have been quenched such lights as Halley and De Quincey. One hundred millions are the victims of the betel-nut, which has specially blasted the East Indies. Three hundred millions chew hashish, and Persia, Brazil, and Africa suffer the delirium. The Tartars employ murowa; the Mexicans, the agave; the people at Guarapo, an intoxicating product taken from sugarcane; while a great multitude, that no man can number, are the votaries of alcohol. To it they bow. Under it they are trampled. In its trenches they fall. On its ghastly holocaust they burn. Could the muster-roll of this great army be called, and they could come up from the dead, what eye could endure the reeking, festering putrefaction? What heart could endure the groan of agony? Drunkenness! Does it not jingle the burglar’s key? Does it not whet the assassin’s knife? Does it not cock the highwayman’s pistol? Does it not wave the incendiary’s torch? Has it not sent the physician reeling into the sickroom; and the minister with his tongue thick into the pulpit? Did not an exquisite poet, from the very top of his fame, fall a gibbering sot, into the gutter, on his way to be married to one of the fairest daughters of New England, and at the very hour the bride was decking herself for the altar; and did he not die of delirium tremens, almost unattended, in a hospital? Tamerlane asked for one hundred and sixty thousand skulls with which to build a pyramid to his own honor. He got the skulls, and built the pyramid. But if the bones of all those who have fallen as a prey to dissipation could be piled up, it would make a vaster pyramid. Who will gird himself for the journey, and try with me to scale this mountain of the dead—going up miles high on human carcasses to find still other peaks far above, mountain above mountain white with the bleached bones of drunkards? The Sabbath has been sacrificed to the rum traffic. To many of our people, the best day of the week is the worst. Bakers must keep their shops closed on the Sabbath. It is dangerous to have loaves of bread going out on Sunday. The shoe store is closed: severe penalty will attack the man who sells boots on the Sabbath. But down with the window-shutters of the grogshops! Our laws shall confer particular honor upon the rum-traffickers. All other trades must stand aside for these. Let our citizens who have disgraced themselves by trading in clothing and hosiery and hardware and lumber and coal take off their hats to the rum-seller, elected to particular honor. It is unsafe for any other class of men to be allowed license for Sunday work. But swing out your signs, and open your doors, O ye traffickers in the peace of families and in the souls of immortal men! Let the corks fly and the beer foam and the rum go tearing down the half-consumed throat of the inebriate. God does not see! Does he? Judgment will never come! Will it? It may be that God is determined to let drunkenness triumph, and the husband and sons of thousands of our best families be destroyed by this vice, in order that our people, amazed and indignant, may rise up and demand the extermination of this municipal crime. There is a way of driving down the hoops of a barrel so tight that they break. We have, in this country, at various times tried to regulate this evil by a tax on whisky. You might as well try to regulate the Asiatic cholera or the smallpox by taxation. The men who distil liquors are, for the most part, unscrupulous; and the higher the tax, the more inducement to illicit distillation. Oh! the folly of trying to restrain an evil by government tariff! If every gallon of whisky made—if every flask of wine produced, should be taxed a thousand dollars, it would not be enough to pay for the tears it has wrung from the eyes of widows and orphans, nor for the blood it has dashed on the Christian Church, nor for the catastrophe of the millions it has destroyed for ever. I sketch two houses in one street. The first is bright as home can be. The father comes at nightfall, and the children run out to meet him. Luxuriant evening meal. Gratulation and sympathy and laughter. Music in the parlor. Fine pictures on the wall. Costly books on the table. Well-clad household. Plenty of everything to make home happy. House the second! Piano sold yesterday by the sheriff. Wife’s furs at pawnbroker’s shop. Clock gone. Daughter’s jewelry sold to get flour. Carpets gone off the floor. Daughters in faded and patched dresses. Wife sewing for the stores. Little child with an ugly wound on her face, struck by an angry blow. Deep shadow of wretchedness falling in every room. Doorbell rings. Little children hide. Daughters turn pale. Wife holds her breath. Blundering step in the hall. Door opens. Fiend, brandishing his fist, cries, “Out! out! What are you doing here?” Did I call this house the second? No; it is the same house. Rum transformed it. Rum embruted the man. Rum sold the shawl. Rum tore up the carpets. Rum shook his fist. Rum desolated the hearth. Rum changed that paradise into a hell! I sketch two men that you know very well. The first graduated from one of our literary institutions. His father, mother, brothers and sisters were present to see him graduate. They heard the applauding thunders that greeted his speech. They saw the bouquets tossed to his feet. They saw the degree conferred and the diploma given. He never looked so well. Everybody said, “What a noble brow! What a fine eye! What graceful manners! What brilliant prospects!” Man the second: Lies in the station-house. The doctor has just been sent for to bind up the gashes received in a fight. His hair is matted and makes him look like a wild beast. His lip is bloody and cut. Who is this battered and bruised wretch that was picked up by the police and carried in drunk and foul and bleeding? Did I call him man the second? He is man the first! Rum transformed him. Rum destroyed his prospects. Rum disappointed parental expectation. Rum withered those garlands of commencement day. Rum cut his lip. Rum dashed out his manhood. Rum, accursed rum! This foul thing gives one swing to its scythe, and our best merchants fall; their stores are sold, and they sink into dishonored graves. Again it swings its scythe, and some of our best physicians fall into sufferings that their wisest prescriptions cannot cure. Again it swings its scythe, and ministers of the gospel fall from the heights of Zion, with long resounding crash of ruin and shame. Some of your own households have already been shaken. Perhaps you can hardly admit it; but where was your son last night? Where was he Friday night? Where was he Thursday night? Wednesday night? Tuesday night? Monday night? Nay, have not some of you in your own bodies felt the power of this habit? You think that you could stop? Are you sure you could? Go on a little further, and I am sure you cannot. I think, if some of you should try to break away, you would find a chain on the right wrist, and one on the left; one on the right foot, and another on the left. This serpent does not begin to hurt until it has wound ‘round and ‘round. Then it begins to tighten and strangle and crush until the bones crack and the blood trickles and the eyes start from their sockets, and the mangled wretch cries, “O God! O God! help! help!” But it is too late; and not even the fires of woe can melt the chain when once it is fully fastened. I have shown you the evil beast. The question is, who will hunt him down, and how shall we shoot him? I answer, first, by getting our children right on this subject. Let them grow up with an utter aversion to strong drink. Take care how you administer it even as medicine. If you must give it to them and you find that they have a natural love for it, as some have, put in a glass of it some horrid stuff, and make it utterly nauseous. Teach them, as faithfully as you do the truths of the Bible, that rum is a fiend. Take them to the almshouse, and show them the wreck and ruin it works. Walk with them into the homes that have been scourged by it. If a drunkard hath fallen into a ditch, take them right up where they can see his face, bruised, savage, and swollen, and say, “Look, my son. Rum did that!” Looking out of your window at some one who intoxicated to madness, goes through the street, brandishing his fist, blaspheming God; a howling, defying, shouting, reeling, raving, and foaming maniac, say to your son, “Look; that man was once a child like you.” As you go by the grogshop let them know that that is the place where men are slain and their wives made paupers and their children slaves. Hold out to your children all warnings, all rewards, all counsels, lest in after-days they break your heart and curse your gray hairs. A man laughed at my father for his scrupulous temperance principles, and said: “I am more liberal than you. I always give my children the sugar in the glass after we have been taking a drink.” Three of his sons have died drunkards, and the fourth is imbecile through intemperate habits. Again, we will grapple this evil by voting only for sober men. How many men are there who can rise above the feelings of partisanship, and demand that our officials shall be sober men? I maintain that the question of sobriety is higher than the question of availability; and that, however eminent a man’s services may be, if he have habits of intoxication, he is unfit for any office in the gift of a Christian people. Our laws will be no better than the men who make them. Spend a few days at Harrisburg or Albany or Washington and you will find out why, upon these subjects, it is impossible to get righteous enactments. Again, we will war upon this evil by organized societies. The friends of the rum traffic have banded together; annually issue their circulars; raise fabulous sums of money to advance their interests; and by grips, passwords, signs, and stratagems, set at defiance public morals. Let us confront them with organizations just as secret; and, if need be, with grips and passwords and signs, maintain our position. There is no need that our beneficent societies tell all their plans. I am in favor of all lawful strategy in the carrying on of this conflict. I wish to God we could lay under the wine-casks a train which, once ignited, would shake the earth with the explosion of this monstrous iniquity! Again, we will try the power of the pledge. There are thousands of men who have been saved by putting their names to such a document. I know it is laughed at; but there are some men who, having once promised a thing, do it. “Some have broken the pledge.” Yes; they were liars. But all men are not liars. I do not say that it is the duty of all persons to make such signature; but I do say that it would be the salvation of many of you. The glorious work of Theobald Mathew can never be estimated. At his hand four millions of people took the pledge, and multitudes in Ireland, England, Scotland, and America, have kept it till this day. The pledge signed has been to thousands the proclamation of emancipation. Again, we expect great things from asylums for inebriates. They have already done a glorious work. I think that we are coming at last to treat inebriation as it ought to be treated, namely, as an awful disease, self-inflicted, to be sure, but nevertheless a disease. Once fastened upon a man, sermons will not cure him, temperance lectures will not eradicate it; religious tracts will not remove it; the Gospel of Christ will not arrest it. Once under the power of this awful thirst, the man is bound to go on; and, if the foaming glass were on the other side of perdition, he would wade through the fires of hell to get it. A young man in prison had such a strong thirst for intoxicating liquors that he cut off his hand at the wrist, called for a bowl of brandy in order to stop the bleeding, thrust his wrist into the bowl, and then drank the contents. Stand not, when the thirst is on him, between a man and his cups. Clear the track for him. Away with the children! he would tread their life out. Away with the wife! he would dash her to death. Away with the cross! he would run it down. Away with the Bible! he would tear it up for the winds. Away with heaven! he considers it worthless as a straw. “Give me the drink! Give it to me! Though the hands of blood pass up the bowl, and the soul trembles over the pit—the drink! give it to me! Though it be pale with tears; though the froth of everlasting anguish float on the foam—give it to me! I drink to my wife’s woe, to my children’s rags; to my eternal banishment from God and hope and heaven! Give it to me! the drink!” Again, we will contend against these evils by trying to persuade the respectable classes of society to the banishment of alcoholic beverages. You who move in elegant and refined associations; you who drink the best liquors; you who never drink until you lose your balance, let us look each other in the face on this subject. You have, under God, in your power the redemption of this land from drunkenness. Empty your cellars and wine-closets of the beverage, and then come out and give us your hand, your vote, your prayers, your sympathies. Do that, and I will promise three things: first, that you will find unspeakable happiness in having done your duty; secondly, you will probably save somebody—perhaps your own child; thirdly, you will not, in your last hour, have a regret that you made the sacrifice, if sacrifice it be. As long as you make drinking respectable, drinking customs will prevail, and the plowshare of death, drawn by terrible disasters, will go on turning up this whole continent, from end to end, with the long, deep, awful furrow of drunkards’ graves. This rum fiend would like to go and hang up a skeleton in your beautiful house so that, when you opened the front door to go in, you would see it in the hall; and, when you sat at your table you would see it hanging from the wall; and, when you opened your bedroom you would find it stretched upon your pillow; and, waking at night, you would feel its cold hand passing over your face and pinching at your heart. There is no home so beautiful but it may be devastated by the awful curse. It throws its jargon into the sweetest harmony. What was it that silenced Sheridan, the English orator, and shattered the golden scepter with which he swayed parliaments and courts? What foul sprite turned the sweet rhythm of Robert Burns into a tuneless babble? What was it that swamped the noble spirit of one of the heroes of the last war, until, in a drunken fit, he reeled from the deck of a Western steamer, and was drowned. There was one whose voice we all loved to hear. He was one of the most classic orators of the century. People wondered why a man of so pure a heart and so excellent a life should have such a sad countenance always. They knew not that his wife was a sot. I call upon those who are guilty of these indulgences, to quit the path of death! Oh! what a change it would make in your home! Do you see how everything there is being desolated? Would you not like to bring back joy to your wife’s heart, and have your children come out to meet you with as much confidence as once they showed? Would you not like to rekindle the home-lights that long ago were extinguished? It is not too late to change. It may not entirely obliterate from your soul the memory of wasted years and a ruined reputation, nor smooth out from your anxious brow the wrinkles which trouble has plowed. It may not call back unkind words uttered or rough deeds done; for perhaps in those awful moments you struck her! It may not take from your memory the bitter thoughts connected with some little grave. But it is not too late to save yourself, and secure for God and your family the remainder of your fast-going life. But perhaps you have not utterly gone astray. I may address one who may not have quite made up his mind. Let your better nature speak out. You take one side or the other in the war against drunkenness. Have you the courage to put your foot down right, and say to your companions and friends, “I will never drink intoxicating liquor in all my life; nor will I countenance the habit in others?” Have nothing to do with strong drink. It has turned the earth into a place of skulls, and has stood opening the gate to a lost world to let in its victims; until now the door swings no more upon its hinges, but, day and night, stands wide open to let in the agonized procession of doomed men. Do I address one whose regular work in life is to administer to this appetite? For God’s sake, get out of that business! If a woe be pronounced upon the man who gives his neighbor drink, how many woes must be hanging over the man who does this every day and every hour of the day! Do not think that because human government may license you that therefore God licenses you. I am surprised to hear men say that they respect the “original package” decision, by which the Supreme Court of the United States allows rum to be taken into States like Kansas, which decided against the sale of intoxicants. I have no respect for a wrong decision, I care not who makes it; the three judges of the Supreme Court who gave minority report against that decision were right, and the chief justice was wrong. The right of a State to defend itself against the rum traffic will yet be demonstrated, the Supreme Court notwithstanding. Higher than the judicial bench at Washington is the throne of the Lord God Almighty. No enactment, national, State, or municipal can give you the right to carry on a business whose effect is destruction. God knows better than you do yourself the number of drinks you have poured out. You keep a list; but a more accurate list has been kept than yours. You may call it Burgundy, Bourbon, cognac, Heidsieck, sour mash, or beer. God calls it “strong drink.” Whether you sell it in low oyster-cellar or behind the polished counter of a first-class hotel, the divine curse is upon you. I tell you plainly that you will meet your customers one day when there will be no counter between you. When your work is done on earth, and you enter the reward of your business, all the souls of the men whom you have destroyed will crowd around you, and pour their bitterness into your cup. They will show you their wounds and say, “You made them;” and point to their unquenchable thirst and say, “You kindled it;” and rattle their chain and say, “You forged it.” Then their united groans will smite your ear: and with the hands out of which you once picked the sixpences and the dimes, they will push you off the verge of great precipices; while rolling up from beneath, and breaking away among the crags of death, will thunder, “Woe to him that giveth his neighbor drink!” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 28: 026. LIFE INSURANCE A DUTY ======================================================================== Life Insurance a Duty Genesis 41:34 : “Let him appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven plenteous years.” These were the words of Joseph, the first president of the first life insurance company that the world ever saw. Pharaoh had a dream that distracted him. He thought he stood on the banks of the river Nile, and saw coming up out of the river, seven fat, sleek, glossy cows, and they began to browse in the thick grass. Nothing frightful about that. But after them, coming out of the same river, he saw seven cows that were gaunt and starved, and the worst looking cows that had ever been seen in the land, and, in ferocity of hunger, they devoured their seven fat predecessors. Pharaoh the king, sent for Joseph to decipher these midnight hieroglyphics. Joseph made short work of it, and intimated that the seven fat cows that came out of the river are seven years with plenty to eat; the seven emaciated cows that followed them are seven years with nothing to eat. “Now,” said Joseph, “let us take one-fifth of the corn crop of the seven prosperous years, and keep it as a provision for the seven years in which there shall be no corn crop.” The king took the counsel and appointed Joseph, because of his integrity and public-spiritedness, as the president of the undertaking. The farmers paid one-fifth of their income as premiums. In all the towns and cities of the land there were branch houses. This great Egyptian life insurance company had millions of dollars as assets. After a while the dark days came, and the whole nation would have starved if it had not been for the provision they had made for the future. But now these suffering families had nothing to do but go up and collect the amount of their life policies. The Bible puts it in one short phrase: “In all the land of Egypt there was bread.” I say this was the first life insurance company. It was divinely organized. It had in it all the advantages of “the whole life plan,” of the “tontine plan,” of the “reserved endowment plan,” and all the other good plans. We are told that Rev. Dr. Anhate, of Lincolnshire, England, originated the first life insurance company in 1698. No! it is as old as the corn cribs of Egypt; and God himself was the author and originator. If that were not so, I would not take your time and mine in discussion of this subject. I feel it a theme of vital, religious, and of infinite import, the morals of insurance. A number of years ago, there was a great panic in life insurance, which produced good results. Under the storm, the untrustworthy and bogus institutions were scattered, while the genuine were tested and firmly established, and where does the life insurance institution stand today? What amount of comfort, of education, of moral and spiritual advantage, is represented in the simple statistic that in this country the life insurance companies in one year paid seven million dollars to the families of the bereft; and in five years they paid three hundred millions of dollars to the families of the bereft; and are promising to pay—and hold themselves in readiness to pay—two thousand millions of dollars to the families of the bereft! They have actually paid out more in dividends and death claims than they have ever received in premiums. I know of what I speak. The life insurance companies of this country paid more than seven million dollars of taxes to the government in five years. So, instead of these companies being indebted to the land, the land is indebted to them. To cry out against life insurance, because here and there one company has behaved badly, is as absurd as it would be for a man to burn down a thousand acres of harvest field in order to kill the moles and potato-bugs—as preposterous as a man who should blow up a crowded steamer in mid-Atlantic for the purpose of destroying the barnacles on the bottom of the hulk. What does the Bible say in regard to this subject? If the Bible favors the institution, I will favor it; if the Bible denounces it, I will denounce it. In addition to the forecast of Joseph in the text, I call to your attention Paul’s comparison. Here is one man who, through neglect, fails to support his family while he lives, or after he dies. Here is another man, who abhors the Scriptures and rejects God. Which of those men is the worse? Well, you say the latter. Paul says the former. Paul says that a man who neglects to care for his household is more obnoxious than a man who rejects the Scriptures: “He that provideth not for his own, and especially those of his own household, is worse than an infidel.” Life insurance companies help most of us to provide for our families after we are gone; but if we have the money to pay the premiums, and do not pay them, we have no right to expect mercy at the hand of God in the judgment. We are worse than Tom Paine, and worse than Voltaire. The Bible declares it—we are worse than an infidel. After the certificate of death has been made out, and thirty or sixty days have passed, and the officer of a life insurance company comes into the bereft household and pays down the hard cash on an insurance policy, that officer of the company is performing a positively religious rite, according to the Apostle James, who says: “True religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and the widow in their affliction,” and so on. The religion of Christ proposes to take care of the temporal wants of the people as well as the spiritual. When Hezekiah was dying, the injunction came to him: “Set thy house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.” That injunction in our day would mean: “Make your will; settle up your accounts; make things plain; do not deceive your heirs with rolls of worthless mining stock; do not deceive them with deeds for western lands that will never yield any crop but chills and fever; do not leave for them notes that have been outlawed, and second mortgages on property that will not pay the first.” “Set thy house in order.” That is, fix up things, so your going out of the world may make as little consternation as possible. See the lean cattle devouring the fat cattle, and in the time of plenty prepare for the time of want. The difficulty is that when men think of their death, they usually think of it only in connection with their spiritual welfare, and not of devastation in the household, which will come because of their emigration from it. It is meanly selfish for you to be so absorbed in the heaven to which you are going that you forget what is to become of your wife and children after you are dead. You can go out of this world without leaving a dollar, and yet die happy if you could not provide for them; you can trust them in the hands of the God who owns all the harvests and the herds and the flocks; but if you could pay the premiums on a policy, and neglected them, it is a mean thing for you to go up to heaven, while they go to the poorhouse. You, at death, move into a mansion, river front, and they move into two rooms on the fourth story of a tenement-house in a back street. When they are out at the elbows and knees, the thought of your splendid robe in heaven will not keep them warm. The minister may preach an eloquent sermon over your remains, and the quartette may sing like four angels in the organ loft; but your death will be an outrage. You had the means to provide for the comfort of your household when you left it, and you wickedly neglected it. “Oh,” says some one, “I have more faith than you; I believe when I go out of this world the Lord will provide for them.” Go to Blackwell’s Island, go through all the poorhouses of the country, and I will show you how often God provides for the neglected children of neglectful parents. That is, he provides for them through public charity. As for myself, I would rather have the Lord provide for my family in a private home and through my own industry and paternal and conjugal faithfulness. “But,” says some man, “I mean in the next ten or twenty years to make a great fortune, and so I shall leave my family when I go out of this world very comfortable.” How do you know you are going to live ten or twenty years? If we could look up the highway of the future, we would see it crossed by pneumonias and pleurisies and consumptions and colliding rail-trains and runaway horses and breaking bridges and funeral processions. Are you so certain you are going to live ten or twenty years that you can warrant your household any comfort after you go away from them? Besides that, the vast majority of men die poor! Two—only—out of a hundred succeed in business. Are you very certain you are going to be one of the two? Rich one day, poor the next. A man in New York got two million of dollars, and the money turned his brain and he died in the lunatic asylum. All his property was left with the business firm, and they swamped it; and then the family of the insane man were left without a dollar. In eighteen months the prosperity, the insanity, the insolvency, and the complete domestic ruin! Besides that, there are men who die solvent, who are insolvent before they get under the ground, or before their estate is settled up. How the auctioneer’s mallet can knock the life out of an estate! A man thinks the property is worth fifteen thousand dollars; under a forced sale it brings seven thousand dollars. The business man takes advantage of the crisis, and compels the widow of his deceased partner to sell out to him at a ruinous price, or lose all. The stock was supposed to be very valuable, but it has been so “watered” that when the executor tries to sell it he is laughed out of Wall Street, or the administrator is ordered by the surrogate to wind up the whole affair. The estate was supposed, at the man’s death, to be worth sixty thousand dollars; but after the indebtedness had been met, and the bills of the doctor and the undertaker and the tombstone-cutter have been paid, there is nothing left. That means the children are to come home from school and go to work. That means the complete hardship of the wife, turned out with nothing but a needle to fight the great battle of the world. Tear down the lambrequins, close the piano, rip up the Axminster, sell out the wardrobe, and let the mother take a child in each hand and trudge out into the desert of the world. A life insurance would have hindered all that. “But,” says some one, “I am a man of small means, and I can’t afford to pay the premium.” That is sometimes a lawful and a genuine excuse, and there is no answer to it; but in nine cases out of ten, when a man says that, he smokes up in cigars and drinks down in wine and expends in luxuries enough money to have paid the premium on a life insurance policy which would have kept his family from beggary when he is dead. A man ought to put himself down on the strictest economy until he can meet this Christian necessity. You have no right to the luxuries until you have made such provision. I admire what was said by Rev. Dr. Guthrie, the great Scottish preacher. A few years before his death he stood in a public meeting and declared: “When I came to Edinburgh, the people sometimes laughed at my blue stockings and at my cotton umbrella, and they said I looked like a common plowman, and they derided me, because I lived in a house for which I paid thirty-five pounds rent a year, and oftentimes I walked when I would have been very glad to have a cab; but, gentlemen, I did all that because I wanted to pay the premium on a life insurance that would keep my family comfortable if I should die.” That I take to be the right expression of an honest, intelligent, Christian man. The utter indifference of many people on this important subject accounts for much of the crime and pauperism of this day. Who are these children sweeping the crossings with broken broom and begging of you a penny as you go by? Who are these lost souls gliding under the gaslights, in thin shawls? Ah! they are the victims of want; in many of the cases the forecast of parents and grandparents might have prevented it. God only knows how they struggled to do right. They prayed until the tears froze on their cheeks; they sewed on the sack until the breaking of the day; but they could not get enough money to pay the rent; they could not get enough money to decently clothe themselves; and one day, in that wretched home, the angel of purity and the angel of crime fought a great fight between the empty bread-tray and the fireless hearth, and the black-winged angel shrieked, “Aha! I have won the day!” Says some man, “I believe what you say; it is right and Christian, and I mean some time to attend to this matter.” My friend, you are going to lose the comfort of your household in the same way the sinner loses heaven—by procrastination. I see all around me the destitute and suffering families of parents who meant some day to attend to this Christian duty. During the process of adjournment the man gets his feet wet, then comes a chill and delirium and the doleful shake of the doctor’s head and the obsequies. If there be anything more pitiable than a woman delicately brought up, and on her marriage day, by an indulgent father, given to a man to whom she is the chief joy and pride of life until the moment of his death, and then that same woman going out, with helpless children at her back, to struggle for bread in a world where brawny muscle and rugged soul are necessary—I say, if there be anything more pitiable than that, I do not know what it is. And yet there are good women who are indifferent in regard to their husbands’ duty in this respect; and there are those positively hostile, as though a life insurance subjected a man to some fatality. There is in Brooklyn today a poor woman keeping a small candy shop, who vehemently opposed the insurance of her husband’s life, and when application had been made for a policy of ten thousand dollars, she frustrated it. She would never have a document in the house that implied it was possible for her husband ever to die. One day, in quick revolution of machinery, his life was instantly dashed out. What is the sequel? She is, with weary, exhausting tug, making the half of a miserable living. Her two children have been taken away from her in order that they may be clothed and educated, and her life is to be a prolonged hardship. Oh, man, before forty-eight hours have passed away, appear at the desk of some of our great life insurance companies, have the stethescope of the physician put to your heart and lungs, and by the seal of some honest company decree that your children shall not be subjected to the humiliation of financial struggle after the day of your demise. But I must ask the men engaged in life insurance business whether they feel the importance of their trust, and charge them I must that they need Divine grace to help them in their work. In this day, when there are so many rivalries in your line of business, you will be tempted to overstate the amount of assets and the extent of the surplus, and you will be tempted to abuse the franchise of the company, and make up the deficits of one year by adding some of the receipts of another year. Under the pressure many have gone down, and you will follow them if you have too much confidence in yourself, and do not appeal to the Lord for help. But if any of you belong to that miscreant class of people who, without any financial ability, organize themselves into what they call a life insurance company, with a pretended capital of two hundred thousand dollars or three hundred thousand dollars, then vote yourself into the lucrative position, and then take all the premiums for yourself, and then, at the approach of the State Superintendent, drop all into the hands of those life insurance undertakers whose business it is to gather up the remains of defunct organizations and bury them in their own vault—then, I say, you had better get out of the business, and disgorge the widows’ houses you have swallowed. But my word is, to all those who are legitimately engaged in the business: You ought to be better than other men, not only because of the responsibilities that rest upon you, but because the truth is ever confronting you that your stay on earth is uncertain, and your life a matter of a few days or years. Do not those black-edged letters that come into your office make you think? Does not the doctor’s certificate on the death claim give you a thrill? Your periodicals, your advertisements, and even the lithography of your policies warn you that you are mortal. According to your own showing the chances that you will die this year are at least two per cent. Are you prepared for the tremendous exigency? The most condemned man in the Judgment Day will be the unprepared life insurance man, for the simple reason that his whole business was connected with human exit, and he cannot say, “I did not think.” His whole business was to think on that one thing. Oh, get insured for eternity. In consideration of what Christ has done in your behalf, have the indenture this day made out, signed and sealed with the red seal of the cross. But I have words of encouragement and comfort for those of my hearers who are engaged in the fire insurance business. You are ordained by God to stand between us and the most raging element of nature. We are indebted to you for what the National Board of Underwriters and the Convention of Chiefs of the Fire Departments have effected through your suggestions, and through your encouragement. We are indebted to you for what you have effected in the construction of buildings, and in the change in the habits of our cities; so that by scientific principles orderly companies extinguish the fire, instead of the old-time riots which used to extinguish the citizens! And we are indebted to you for the successful demands you have made for the repeal of unjust laws—for the battle you have waged against incendiarism and arson— for the fatal blow you have given to the theory that corporations have no souls, by the cheerfulness and promptitude with which you have met losses, from which you might have escaped through the technicality of the law. I do not know any class of men in our midst more high-toned and worthy of confidence than these men, and yet I have sometimes feared that while your chief business is to calculate about losses on earthly property, you might without sufficient thought go into that which, in regard to your souls, in your own parlance, might be called “hazards,” “extra hazards,” “special hazards.” An unforgiven sin in the soul is more inflammable and explosive than camphene or nitroglycerine. However the rates may be—yea, though the whole earth were paid down to you in one solid premium—you cannot afford to lose your soul. Do not take that risk, lest it be said hereafter that, while in this world you had keen business faculty, when you went out of the world you went out everlastingly insolvent. The scientific Hitchcocks and Sillimans and Mitchells of the world have united with the sacred writers to make us believe that there is a conflagration coming to sweep across the earth, compared with which that of Chicago, in 1871, and that of Boston, in 1872, and that of New York, in 1835, were mere nothings. Brooklyn on fire! New York on fire! Charleston on fire! San Francisco on fire! Canton on fire! St. Petersburg on fire! Paris on fire! London on fire! The Andes on fire! The Apennines on fire! The Himalayas on fire! What will be peculiar about the day will be that the water with which we put out great fires will itself take flame; and the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the St. Lawrence, and Lake Erie, and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and tumbling Niagara, shall with red tongues lick the heavens. The geological heats of the centre of the world will burn out toward the circumference and the heats of the outside will burn down from the circumference to the centre, and this world will become, not only according to the Bible, but according to science, a living coal—the living coal afterward whitening into ashes, the ashes scattered by the breath of the last hurricane, and all that will be left of this glorious planet will be the flakes of ashes fallen on other worlds. Oh! on that day will you be fire-proof, or will you be a total loss? Will you be rescued, or will you be consumed? When this great cathedral of the world, with its pillars of rocks, and its pinnacles of mountains, and its cellar of golden mine, and its upholstery of morning cloud, and its baptismal font of the sea shall blaze, will you get out on the fire-escape of the Lord’s deliverance? Oh, on that day for which all other days were made, may it be found that these life insurance men had a paid-up policy, and these fire insurance men had given them, instead of the debris of a consumed worldly estate, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 29: 027. CORN-CRIB OF EGYPT ======================================================================== Corn-Crib of Egypt Genesis 43:3 : “Ye shall not see my face, except your brother be with you.” This summer, having crossed eighteen of the States, north, south, east and west, I have to report the mightiest harvests that this country or any other country ever reaped. If the grain gamblers do not somehow wreck these harvests, we are about to enter upon the grandest scene of prosperity that America has ever witnessed. But while this is so in our own country, on the other side of the Atlantic there are nations threatened with famine, and the most dismal cry that is ever heard will I fear be uttered, the cry for bread. I pray God that the contrast between our prosperity and their want may not be as sharp as in the lands referred to by my text. There was nothing to eat. Plenty of corn in Egypt, but ghastly famine in Canaan. The cattle moaning in the stall. Men, women and children awfully white with hunger. Not the failing of one crop for one summer, but the failing of all the crops for seven years. A nation dying for lack of that which is so common on your table, and so little appreciated; the product of harvest field and grist-mill and oven; the price of sweat and anxiety and struggle—bread! Jacob, the father, has the last report from the flour-bin, and he finds that everything is out; and he says to his sons: “Boys, hook up the wagons and start for Egypt, and get us something to eat.” The fact was, there was a great corn-crib in Egypt. The people of Egypt have been largely taxed in all ages, at the present time paying between seventy and eighty per cent. of their products to the government. No wonder in that time they had a large corn-crib, and it was full. To that crib they came from the regions round about—those who were famished—some paying for corn in money; when the money was exhausted paying in sheep and cattle and horses and camels, and when they were exhausted selling their own bodies and their families into slavery. The morning for starting out on the crusade for bread has arrived. Jacob gets his family up very early. But before the elder sons start they say something that makes him tremble with emotion from head to foot, and burst into tears. The fact was, that these elder sons had once before been in Egypt to get corn, and they had been treated somewhat roughly, the lord of the corn-crib supplying them with corn, but saying at the close of the interview: “Now, you need not come back here for any more corn unless you bring something better than money—even your younger brother Benjamin.” Ah! Benjamin—that very name was suggestive of all tenderness. The mother had died at the birth of that son—a spirit coming and another spirit going—and the very thought of parting with Benjamin must have been a heart-break. The keeper of this corn-crib, nevertheless, says to these older sons: “There is no need of your coming here any more for corn unless you bring Benjamin, your father’s darling.” Now Jacob and his family very much needed bread, but what a struggle it would be to give up their son. The Orientals are very demonstrative in their grief, and I hear the bewailing of the father as these older sons keep reiterating in his ears the announcement of the Egyptian lord: “Ye shall not see my face unless your brother be with you.” “Why did you tell them you had a brother?” said the old man, complaining and chiding them. “Why, father,” they said, “he asked us all about our family, and we had no idea he would make any such demand upon us as he has made.” “No use of asking me,” said the father, “I cannot, I will not, give up Benjamin.” The fact was that the old man had lost children; and when there has been bereavement in a household, and a child taken, it makes the other children in the household more precious. So the day for departure was adjourned and adjourned and adjourned. Still the horrors of the famine increased and louder moaned the cattle and wider open cracked the earth, and more pallid became the cheeks, until Jacob, in despair, cried out to his sons, “Take Benjamin and be off.” The older sons tried to cheer up their father. They said: “We have strong arms and a stout heart, and no harm will come to Benjamin. We’ll see that he gets back again.” “Farewell!” said the young men to the father, in a tone of assumed good cheer. “F-a-r-e-w-e-l-l!” said the old man; for that word has more quavers in it when pronounced by the aged than by the young. Well, the bread party—the bread embassy—drives up in front of the corn-crib of Egypt. These corn-cribs are filled with wheat and barley and corn in the husk, for those who have traveled in Canaan and Egypt know that there is corn there corresponding with our Indian maize. Huzza! the journey is ended. The travelers are introduced into the palace. They are worn and bedusted of the way, and servants come in with a basin of water in one hand and a towel in the other, and kneel down before these newly arrived travelers, washing off the dust of the way. The butchers and poulterers ana caterers of the prime minister prepared the repast. The lord of the corn-crib, who is also the prime minister, comes down to these arrived travelers and says: “Dine with me today. How is your father? Is this Benjamin, the younger brother whose presence I demanded?” The guests are seated in small groups, two or three at a table, the food on a tray; all the luxuries from the imperial gardens and orchards and aquariums and aviaries are brought there, and are filling chalice and platter. Now is the time for this prime minister, if he has a grudge against Benjamin, to show it. Will he kill him now that he has him in his hands? Oh no! This lord of the corn-crib is seated at his own table and he looks over to the table of his guests, and he sends a portion to each of them, but sends a larger portion to Benjamin, or as the Bible quaintly puts it, “Benjamin’s mess was five times so much as any of theirs.” Be quick and send word back with the swiftest camel to Canaan to old Jacob, that “Benjamin is well; all is well; he is faring sumptuously; the Egyptian lord did not mean murder and death; but he meant deliverance and life when he announced to us on that day: ‘Ye shall not see my face unless your brother be with you.’“ Well, my friends, this world is famine-struck of sin. It does not yield a single crop of solid satisfaction. It is dying. It is hunger-bitten. The fact that it does not, cannot, feed a man’s heart was well illustrated in the life of the English comedian. All the world honored him—did everything for him that the world could do. He was applauded in England and applauded in the United States. He roused up nations into laughter. He had no equal. And yet, although many people supposed him entirely happy, and that this world was completely satiating his soul, he sits down and writes: “I never in my life put on a new hat, that it did not rain and ruin it. I never went out in a shabby coat because it was raining and thought all who had the choice would keep in-doors, that the sun did not burst forth in its strength and bring out with it all the butterflies of fashion whom I knew and who knew me. I never consented to accept a part I hated, out of kindness to another, that I did not get hissed by the public and cut by the writer. I could not take a drive for a few minutes with Terry without being overturned and having my elbow-bone broken, though my friend got off unharmed. I could not make a covenant with Arnold, which I thought was to make my fortune without making his instead, than in an incredible space of time—I think thirteen months—I earned for him twenty thousand pounds, and for myself one. I am persuaded that if I were to set up as a baker, every one in my neighborhood would leave off eating bread.” That was the lament of the world’s comedian and joker. All unhappy. The world did everything for Lord Byron that it could do, and yet in his last moment he asks a friend to come and sit down by him and read, as most appropriate to his case, the story of “The Bleeding Heart.” Torrigiano, the sculptor, executed, after months of care and carving, “Madonna and the Child.” The royal family came in and admired it. Everybody that looked at it was in ecstasy; but one day, after all that toil, and all that admiration, because he did not get as much compensation for his work as he had expected, he took a mallet and dashed the exquisite sculpture into atoms. The world is poor compensation, poor satisfaction, poor solace. Famine, famine in all the earth; not for seven years, but for six thousand. But, blessed be God, there is a great corn-crib. The Lord built it. It is in another land. It is a large place. An angel once measured it, and as far as I can calculate it in our phrase, that corn-crib is fifteen hundred miles long and fifteen hundred broad, and fifteen hundred high; and it is full. Food for all nations. “Oh!” say the people, “we will start right away and get this supply for our soul.” But stop a moment; for from the keeper of that corn-crib there comes this word, saying: “You shall not see my face except your brother be with you.” In other words, there is no such thing as getting from heaven pardon and comfort and eternal life unless we bring with us our Divine Brother, the Lord Jesus Christ. Coming without him we shall fail before we reach the corn-crib, and our bodies shall be a portion for the jackals of the wilderness; but coming with the Divine Jesus, all the granaries of heaven will swing open before our soul, and abundance shall be given us. We shall be invited to sit in the palace of the King and at the table; and while the Lord of heaven is apportioning from his own table to other tables he will not forget us; and then and there it will be found that our Benjamin’s mess is larger than all the others, for so it ought to be. “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive blessing, and riches, and honor, and glory, and power.” I want to make three points. Every frank and common-sense man will acknowledge himself to be a sinner. What are you going to do with your sins? Have them pardoned, you say. How? Through the mercy of God. What do you mean by the mercy of God? Is it the letting down of a bar for the admission of all, without respect to character? Be not deceived. I see a soul coming up to the gate of mercy and knocking at the corn-crib of heavenly supply; and a voice from within says: “Are you alone?” The sinner replies: “All alone.” The voice from within says, “You shall not see my pardoning face unless your Divine Brother, the Lord Jesus, be with you.” Oh! that is the point at which so many are discomfited. There is no mercy from God except through Jesus Christ. Coming with him we are accepted. Coming without him, we are rejected. Peter put it right in his great sermon before the high priests, when he thundered forth: “Neither is there salvation in any other. There is no other name given under heaven among men whereby we may be saved.” O anxious sinner! O dying sinner! O lost sinner! all you have got to do is to have this Divine Benjamin along with you. Side by side, coming to the gate, all the storehouses of heaven will swing open before your anxious soul. Am I right in calling Jesus Benjamin? Oh, yes! Rachel lived only long enough to give a name to that child, and with a dying kiss she called him Benoni. Afterward Jacob changed his name, and he called him Benjamin. The meaning of the name she gave was “Son of my Pain.” The meaning of the name the father gave was “Son of my Right Hand.” And was not Christ the Son of pain? All the sorrows of Rachel in that hour, when she gave her child over into the hands of strangers were nothing compared with the struggle of God when he gave up his only Son. The Omnipotent God in a birth-throe! And was not Christ appropriately called “Son of the Right Hand?” Did not Stephen look into heaven and see him standing at the right hand of God? And does not Paul speak of him as standing at the right hand of God, making intercession for us? O Benjamin—Jesus! Son of pain! Son of victory! The deepest emotions of our souls ought to be stirred at the sound of that nomenclature. In your prayers plead his tears, his sufferings, his sorrows and his death. If you refuse to do it, all the corn-cribs and the palaces of heaven will be bolted and barred against your soul, and a voice from the throne shall stun you with the announcement: “You shall not see my face except your Brother be with you.” My text also suggests the reason why so many people do not get any real comfort. You meet ten people; nine of them are in need of some kind of condolence. There is something in their health or in their circumstances or in their domestic condition that demands sympathy. And yet the most of the world’s sympathy amounts to absolutely nothing. People go to the wrong crib, or they go in the wrong way. When the plague was in Rome, a great many years ago, there were eighty men who chanted themselves to death with the litanies of Gregory the Great—literally chanted themselves to death, and yet it did not stop the plague. And all the music of this world cannot halt the plague of the human heart. I come to some one whose ailments are chronic, and I say: “In heaven you will never be sick.” That does not give you much comfort. What you want is a soothing power for your present distress. Lost children, have you? I come to you and tell you that in ten years perhaps you will meet those loved ones before the throne of God. Yet there is but little condolence in that. One day is a year without them, and ten years is a small eternity. What you want is a sympathy now—present help. I come to those of you who have lost dear friends, and say: “Try to forget them. Do not keep the departed always in your mind.” How can you forget them when every figure in the carpet and every book and every picture and every room calls out their name. Suppose I come to you and say by way of condolence: “God is wise.” “Oh!” you say, “that gives me no help.” Suppose I come to you and say: “God, from all eternity, has arranged this trouble.” “Ah!” you say, “that does me no good.” Then I say, “With the swift feet of prayer go direct to the corn-crib for a heavenly supply.” You go. You say, “Lord, help me; Lord, comfort me.” But no help yet. No comfort yet. It is all dark. What is the matter? I have found. You ought to go to God and say, “Here, O Lord, are the wounds of my soul, and I bring with me the wounded Jesus. Let his wounds pay for my wounds, his bereavements for my bereavements, his loneliness for my loneliness, his heart-break for my heart-break. O God! for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ—the God, the man, the Benjamin, the brother—deliver my agonized soul. O Jesus of the weary foot! ease my fatigue. O Jesus of the aching head! heal my aching head. O Jesus of the Bethany sisters! roll away the stone from the door of our grave.” That is the kind of prayer that brings help. Yet how many of you are getting no help at all, for the reason that there is in your soul, perhaps, a secret trouble. You may never have mentioned it to a single human ear, or you may have mentioned it to some one who is now gone away, and that great sorrow is still in your soul. After Washington Irving was dead, they found a little box that contained a braid of hair and a miniature, and the name of Matilda Hoffman and a memorandum of her death, and a remark something like this: “The world after that was a blank to me. I went into the country, but found no peace in solitude. I tried to go into society, but I found no peace in society. There has been a horror hanging over me by night and by day, and I am afraid to be alone.” How many unuttered troubles! No human ear has ever heard the sorrow. O troubled soul! I want to tell you that there is one salve that can cure the wounds of the heart, and that is the salve made out of the tears of a sympathetic Jesus. And yet some of you will not take this solace; and you try chloral and you try morphine and you try strong drink and you try change of scene and you try new business associations and anything and everything rather than take the Divine companionship and sympathy suggested by the words of my text when it says, “You shall not see my face again unless your brother be with you.” Oh! that you might understand something of the height and depth and length and breadth and immensity and infinity of God’s eternal consolations. I go further, and find in my subject a hint as to the way heaven opens to the departing spirit. We are told that heaven has twelve gates, and some people infer from that fact that all the people will go in without reference to their past life; but what is the use of having a gate that is not sometimes to be shut? The swinging of a gate implies that our entrance into heaven is conditional. It is not a monetary condition. If we come to the door of an exquisite concert, we are not surprised that we must pay a fee, for we know that fine earthly music is expensive, but all the oratorios of heaven cost nothing. Heaven pays nothing for its music. It is all free. There is nothing to be paid at the door for entrance; but the condition of getting into heaven is our bringing our Divine Benjamin along with us. Do you notice how often dying people call upon Jesus? It is the usual prayer offered—the prayer offered more than all the other prayers put together—” Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” One of our congregation, when asked in the closing moments of his life, “Do you know us?” said: “Oh, yes, I know you. God bless you. Good-by. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit;” and he was gone. Oh yes, in the closing moments of our life we must have a Christ to call upon. If Jacob’s sons had gone toward Egypt, and had gone with the very finest equipage, and had not taken Benjamin along with them, and to the question they should have been obliged to answer: “Sir, we did not bring him, as father could not let him go; we did not want to be bothered with him,” a voice from within would have said: “Go away from us. You shall not have any of this supply. You shall not see my face because your brother is not with you.” And if we come up toward the door of heaven at last, though we come from all luxuriance and brilliancy of surroundings, and knock for admittance, and it is found that Christ is not with us, the police of heaven will beat us back from the bread-house, saying: “Depart, I never knew you.” If Jacob’s sons, coming toward Egypt, had lost everything on the way; if they had expended their last shekel; if they had come up utterly exhausted to the corn-cribs of Egypt, and it had been found that Benjamin was with them, all the storehouses would have swung open before them. And so, though by fatal casualty we may be ushered into the eternal world; though we may be weak and exhausted by protracted sickness—if, in that last moment, we can only just stagger and faint and fall into the gate of heaven—it seems that all the corn-cribs of heaven will open for our need and all the palaces will open for our reception; and the Lord of that place, seated at his table, and all the angels of God seated at their table, and the martyrs seated at their table, and all our glorified kindred seated at our table, the king shall pass a portion from his table to ours, and then, while we think of that fact that it was Jesus who started us on the road, and Jesus who kept us on the way, and Jesus who at last gained admittance for our soul, we shall be glad if he has seen of the travail of his soul and been satisfied, and not be at all jealous if it be found that our Divine Benjamin’s mess is five times larger than all the rest. Hail! anointed of the Lord. Thou art worthy. My friends, you see it is either Christ or famine. If there were two banquets spread, and to one of them only, you might go, you might stand and think for a good while as to which invitation you had better accept; but here it is feasting or starvation. If it were a choice between oratorios, you might say: “I prefer the ‘Creation,’“ or “I prefer the ‘Messiah.’“ But here it is a choice between eternal harmony and everlasting discord. Oh! will you live or die? Will you start for the Egyptian corn-crib, or will you perish amid the empty barns of the Canaanitish famine? “Ye shall not see my face except your brother be with you.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 30: 028. THE LAD'S LIFE ======================================================================== The Lad’s Life Genesis 44:30 : “Seeing that his life is bound up in the lad’s life.” These words were spoken by Judah, as descriptive of the tenderness and affection which Jacob felt toward Benjamin, the youngest son of that patriarchal family; but they are words just as appropriate to many a parent in this house—since “his life is bound up in the lad’s life.” I have known parents that seemed to have but little interest in their children. A father says, “My son must look out for himself. If he comes up well, all right; if he turns out badly, I cannot help it. I am not responsible for his behavior. He must take the same risk in life that I took.” As well might the shepherd throw a lamb into a den of lions and then say, “Little lamb, look out for yourself!” It is generally the case, that even the beast looks after its young. I have gone through the woods on a summer’s day, and I have heard a great outcry in a bird’s nest, and I have climbed up to see what was the matter. I found out that the birds were starving, and that the mother bird had gone off, not to come back again. But that is an exception. It is generally the case that the old bird will pick your eyes out rather than let you come nigh its brood. The lion will rend you in twain if you approach too nearly the whelps; the fowl in the barnyard, clumsy-footed and heavy-winged, flies fiercely at you if you come too near the little group, and God intended every father and mother to be the protection and the help of the child. Jesus comes into every dwelling and says to the father or mother, “You have been looking after this child’s body and mind; the time has come when you ought to be looking after its immortal soul.” I stand before hundreds of people with whom the question, morning, noon, and night, is, “What is to become of the child? What will be its history? Will it choose paths of virtue or vice? Where will it spend eternity?” I read of a vessel that foundered. The boats were launched; many of the passengers were struggling in the water. A mother with one hand beat the waves, and with the other hand lifted up her little child toward the lifeboat, crying, “Save my child! Save my child!” The impassioned outcry of that mother is the prayer of hundreds of Christian people who sit listening this morning while I speak. I propose to show some of the causes of parental anxiety, and then how that anxiety may be alleviated. I find the first cause of parental anxiety in the inefficiency and imperfection of parents themselves. We have a slight hope, all of us, that our children may escape our faults. We hide our imperfections, and think they will steer clear of them. Alas, there is a poor prospect of that! There is more probability that they will choose our vices than choose our virtues. There is something like sacredness in parental imperfections when the child looks upon them. The folly of the parents is not so repulsive when the child looks at it. He says, “Father indulges in it; mother indulges in it; it can’t be so bad.” Your boy, ten years of age, goes up a back street smoking his cigar—an old stump that he found in the street—and a neighbor accosts him and says, “What are you doing this for? What would your father say if he knew it?” The boy says, “Oh, father does that himself!” There is not one of us that would deliberately choose that his children should in all things follow his example, and it is the consciousness of imperfection on our part as parents, that makes us most anxious for our children. We are also distressed on account of the unwisdom of our discipline and instruction. It requires a great deal of ingenuity to build a house or fashion a ship; but more ingenuity to build the temple of a child’s character, and launch it on the great ocean of time and eternity. Where there is one parent that seems qualified for the work, there seem to be twenty parents who miserably fail. Here is a father who says, “My child shall know nothing but religion; he shall hear nothing but religion; he shall see nothing but religion.” The boy is aroused at six o’clock in the morning to recite the Ten Commandments. He is awakened off the sofa on Sunday night to see how much he knows of the Westminster Catechism. It is religion morning, noon, and night. Passages of scripture are plastered on the bedroom wall. He looks for the day of the month in a religious almanac. Every minister that comes to the house is told to take the boy aside, and talk to him, and tell him what a great sinner he is. After a while the boy comes to that period of life when he is too old for chastisement, and too young to know and feel the force of moral principle. Father and mother are sitting up for the boy to come home. It is nine o’clock at night—ten o’clock—it is twelve o’clock—it is half-past twelve, and they hear the night-key jingle in the door. They say he is coming. George goes very softly through the hall, hoping to get upstairs before he is accosted. The father says, “George, where have you been?” “Been out!” Yes, he has been out and he has been down and he is on the broad road to destruction, for this life and the life to come. The father says, “There is no use in the Ten Commandments; the catechism seems to me to be an utter failure.” Ah, my friend, you make a very great mistake. You stuffed that child with religion until he could not digest it; you made that which is a joy in many households an abhorrence in yours. A man in mid-life said to me, “I can’t become a Christian. In my father’s house I got such a prejudice against religion, I don’t want any of it. My father was one of the best men that ever lived, but he had such severe notions about things, and he jammed religion down my throat, until I don’t want any of it, sir.” There have been some who have erred in that direction. In some families it is all scolding and fretfulness with the child; from Monday morning to Saturday night it is that style of culture. The boy is picked at and picked at and picked at. Now you might better give one sound chastisement and have done with it, than to indulge in such perpetual scolding and fretfulness. There is more health in one good thunderstorm, than in three or four days of cold drizzle. Here is a parent who says, “I will not err on the side that parent has erred, in being too strict with his children. I will let mine do as they please. If they want to come in to prayers they can; if they want to play at cards, they can; they can do anything they please—there shall be no hindrance. Go it! Here are tickets for the opera and theater, son. Take your friends with you. Do whatever you desire.” One day a gentleman comes in from the bank to his father’s office and says, “They want to see you over at the bank a minute. Father goes into the bank. The cashier says, “Is that your check?” Father looks at it and says, “No, I never gave that check; I never cross a ‘t’ in that way; I never make the curl to a ‘y’ in that way. It is not my check; that’s a forgery. Send for the police!” “Ah,” says the cashier, “don’t be so quick; your son did that!” The fact was that the boy had been out in dissipating circles, and ten and fifty dollars went in that direction, and he had been treated and he had to treat others, and the boy felt he must have five hundred dollars to keep himself in that circle. That night the father sits up for the son to come home. It is one o’clock before he comes into the hall. He comes in very much flushed, his eye glaring and his breath offensive. Father says, “My son, how can you do so? I have given you everything you wanted and everything to make you comfortable and happy, and now I find, in my old age, that you are a spendthrift, a libertine, and a drunkard.” The son says, “Now, father, what’s the use of your talking in that way? You told me I might have a good time and to go it. I have been acting on your suggestion, that’s all.” And so one parent errs on one side, and another parent errs on the other, and how to strike a happy medium between severity and too great leniency, and train our sons and daughters for usefulness on earth and bliss in heaven, is a question which agitates every Christian household. Where so many good men and women have failed, it is not strange that we should sometimes doubt the propriety of our theory and the accuracy of our kind of government. Again, parental anxiety often arises from an early exhibition of sinfulness in the child. The morning-glories bloom for a little while under the sun and then they shut up as the heat comes on; but there are flowers along the Amazon that blaze their beauty for weeks at a time; yet the short-lived morning-glory fulfils its mission as well as the Victoria Regia. There are some people who take forty, fifty, or sixty years to develop. Then there are little children Who fling their beauty on the vision and vanish. They are morning-glories that cannot stand the glare of the hot noon sun of trial. You have all known such little children. They were pale; they were ethereal; there was something very wonderfully deep in the eye; they had a gentle foot and soft hand, and something almost supernatural in their behavior—ready to be wafted away. You had such a one in your household. Gone now! It was too delicate a plant for this rough world. The heavenly gardener saw it and took it in. We make splendid Sunday-school books out of such children, but they almost always die. I have noticed that for the most part, the children that live sometimes get cross and pick up bad words in the street and quarrel with brother and sister and prove unmistakably that they are wicked—as the Bible says, going astray from the womb, speaking lies. Anxiety on the part of parents also arises from the consciousness that there are so many temptations thrown all around our young people. It may be almost impossible to take a castle by siege—straightforward siege—but suppose in the night there is a traitor within, and he goes down and draws the bolt and swings open the great door, and then the castle falls immediately. That is the trouble with the hearts of the young; they have foes without and foes within. There are a great many who try to make our young people believe that it is a sign of weakness to be pure. The man will toss his head and take dramatic attitudes and tell of his own indiscretions, and ask the young man if he would not like to do the same. And they call him verdant, and they say he is green and unsophisticated, and wonder how he can bear the Puritanical strait-jacket. They tell him he ought to break from his mother’s apron-strings, and they say, “I will show you all about town. Come with me. You ought to see the world. It won’t hurt you. Do as you please, it will be the making of you.” After a while the young man says, “I don’t want to be odd, nor can I afford to sacrifice these friends, and I’ll go and see for myself.” From the gates of hell there goes a shout of victory. Farewell to all innocence—farewell to all early restraints favorable to that innocence which, once gone, never comes back. How many traps there are set for our young people! That is what makes parents so anxious. Here are temptations for every form of dissipation and every stage of it. The young man, when he first goes into dissipation, is very particular where he goes. It must be a fashionable hotel. He could not be tempted into these corner nuisances, with red-stained glass and a mug of beer painted on the sign-board. You ask the young man to go into that place and he would say: “Do you mean to insult me?” No; it must be a marble-floored barroom. There must be no lustful pictures behind the counter; there must be no drunkards hiccoughing while he takes his glass. It must be a place where elegant gentlemen come in and click their cut glass and drink to the announcement of flattering sentiment. But the young man cannot always find that kind of a place; yet he has a thirst and it must be gratified. The down-grade is steeper now, and he is almost at the bottom. Here they sit in an oyster cellar around a card-table, wheezing, bloated, and bloodshot, with cards so greasy you can hardly tell who has the best hand. But never mind; they are only playing for drink. Shuffle away! shuffle away! The landlord stands in his shirt-sleeves with hands on his hips, watching the game and waiting for another call to fill up the glasses. It is the hot breath of eternal woe that flushes that young man’s cheek. In the jets of gaslight I see the shooting out of the fiery tongue of the worm that never dies. The clock strikes twelve; it is the tolling of the bell of eternity at the burial of a soul. Two hours pass on, and they are all sound asleep in their chairs. Landlord says, “Come, now, wake up; it’s time to shut up.” They look up and say, “What?” “It’s time to shut up.” Push them out into the air. They are going home. Let the wife crouch in the corner, and the children hide under the bed. They are going home! What is the history of that young man? He began his dissipation at the Waldorf-Astoria and completed his damnation in the worst grog-shop in Navy Street. But sin even does not stop here. It comes to the door of the drawing-room. There are men of leprous hearts that go into the very best classes of society. They are so fascinating—they have such a bewitching way of offering their arm. Yet the poison of asps is under the tongue, and their heart is hell. At first their sinful devices are hidden, but after a while they begin to put forth their talons of death. Now they begin to show really what they are. Suddenly—although you could not have expected it, they were so charming in their manner, so fascinating in their address—suddenly a cloud, blacker than was ever woven of midnight or hurricane, drops upon some domestic circle. There is agony in the parental bosom that none but the Lord God Almighty can measure—an agony that wishes that the children of the household had been swallowed by the grave, when it would be only a loss of body instead of a loss of soul. What is the matter with that household? They have not had the front windows open in six months or a year. The mother’s hair suddenly turned white; father, hollow-cheeked and bent over prematurely, goes down the street. There has been no death in that family—no loss of property. Has madness seized upon them? No! no! A villain, kid-gloved, patent-leathered, with gold chain and graceful manner, took that cup of domestic bliss, elevated it high in the air until the sunlight struck it, and all the rainbows danced about the brim, and then dashed it down in desolation and woe, until all the harpies of darkness clapped their hands with glee, and all the voices of hell uttered a loud ha! ha! Oh, there are scores and hundreds of homes that have been blasted, and if the awful statistics could be fully set before you, your blood would freeze into a solid cake of ice at the heart. Do you wonder that fathers and mothers are anxious about their children, and that they ask themselves the questions day and night, “What is to become of them? what will be their destiny?” I shall devote the rest of my remarks to alleviation of parental anxiety. Let me say to you, as parents, that a great deal of that anxiety will be lifted if you will begin early with your children. Tom Paine said, “The first five years of my life I became an infidel.” A vessel goes out to sea; it has been five days out. A storm comes on it; it springs a leak; the helm will not work; everything is out of order. What is the matter? The ship is not seaworthy, and never was. It is a poor time to find it out now. Under the fury of the storm the vessel goes down, with two hundred and fifty passengers, to a watery grave. The time to make the ship seaworthy was in the dry dock, before it started. Alas for us, if we wait until our children get out into the world before we try to bring upon them the influence of Christ’s religion! I stood in a house in one of the Long Island villages, and I saw a beautiful tree, and I said to the owner, “That is a very fine tree, but what a curious crook there is in it!” “Yes,” said he, “I planted that tree, and when it was a year old I went to New York and worked as a mechanic for a year or two. and when I came back I found that they had allowed something to stand against the tree; so it has always had that crook.” And so I thought it was with the influence upon children. If you allow anything to stand in the way of moral influence against a child on this side or that side, to the latest day of its life on earth and through all eternity it will show the pressure. No wonder Lord Byron was bad. Do you know his mother said to him, when she saw him limping across the floor with his unsound foot: “Get out of my way, you lame brat!” What chance for a boy like that? Two young men come to the door of sin. They consult whether they will go in. The one young man goes in and the other retreats. Oh, you say, the last had better resolution. No, that was not it. The first young man had no early good influence; the last had been piously trained, and when he stood at the door of sin discussing the matter, he looked around as if to see some one, and he felt an invisible hand on his shoulder, saying, “Don’t go in; don’t go in!” Whose hand was it? A mother’s hand, fifteen years ago gone to dust. A gentleman was telling me of the fact that some years ago there were two young men who stopped at the door of a well-known theater in New York. The question was whether they should go in. That night there was to be a very immoral play enacted in that theater. One man went in; the other stayed out. The young man who went in, went on from sin to sin, and through a crowd of iniquities, and died in the hospital, of delirium tremens. The other young man who retreated, chose Christ, went into the Gospel, and is now one of the most eminent ministers of Christ in this country. And the man who retreated gave as his reason for turning back from that theater that night, that there was an early voice within him, saying, “Don’t go in! don’t go in!” But I want you to remember, O father! O mother! that it is what you do that is going to affect your children, and not what you say. You tell your children to become Christians while you are not, and they will not. Do you think Noah’s family would have gone into the ark if he had not gone in? They would say, “No, there is something about that boat that is not right; father has not gone in.” You cannot push children into the kingdom of God; you have got to pull them in. There has been many a general in a tower or castle looking at his army fighting, but that is not the kind of a man to arouse enthusiasm among his troops. It is a Garibaldi or Napoleon I who leaps into the stirrups and dashes into the conflict and has his troops following him with wild huzza. So you cannot stand off in your impenitent state, and tell your children to go ahead into the Christian life, and have them go. You must yourself dash into the Christian conflict; you must lead them and not tell them to go. Do you know that all the instruction you give to your children in a religious direction goes for nothing unless you illustrate it in your own life? It is what you are, not so much what you teach. Have a family altar. Let it be a cheerful place, the brightest room in your house. Do not wear your children’s knees out with long prayers. Have the whole exercise spirited. If you have a melodeon or an organ or a piano in the house, have it open. Then lead in prayers. If you cannot make a prayer of your own, take Matthew Henry’s prayers or the Episcopal Prayer-book. None better than that. Kneel down with your little ones morning and night, and commend them to God. Do you think they will ever get over it? Never! After you are under the sod a good many years, there will be some powerful temptation around that son, but the memory of father and mother at morning and evening prayers will have its effect upon him; it will bring him back from the path of sin and death. Are your children safe for heaven? You can tell better than any one else. I put to you the question, “Are your children safe for heaven?” I heard of a mother who, when the house was afire, in the excitement of the occasion, got out a great many of the valuable things—many choice articles of furniture—but did not think to ask until too late, “Is my child safe?” It was too late then. The flames had encircled all; the child was gone! Oh, my dear friend, when sea and land shall burn in the final conflagration, will your children be safe? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 31: 029. THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT ======================================================================== The Old Folks’ Visit Genesis 45:28 : “I will go and see him before I die.” Jacob had long since passed the hundred year milestone. In those times people were distinguished for longevity. In the centuries after persons lived to great age. Galen, the most celebrated physician of his time, took so little of his own medicine that he lived to one hundred and forty years. A man of undoubted veracity on the witness-stand in England swore that he remembered an event one hundred and fifty years before. Lord Bacon speaks of a countess who had cut three sets of teeth, and died at one hundred and forty years. Joseph Crele, of Pennsylvania, lived one hundred and forty years. In 1857 a book was printed containing the names of thirty-seven persons who lived one hundred and forty years, and the names of eleven persons who lived one hundred and fifty years. Among the grand old people of whom we have record was Jacob, the shepherd of the text. But he had a bad lot of boys. They were jealous and ambitious and every way unprincipled. Joseph, however, seemed to be an exception; but he had been gone many years, and the probability was that he was dead. As sometimes now in a house you will find kept at the table a vacant chair, a plate, a knife, a fork, for some deceased member of the family, so Jacob kept in his heart a place for his beloved Joseph. There sits the old man, the flock of one hundred and forty years in their flight having alighted long enough to leave the marks of their claw on forehead and cheek and temple. His long beard snows down over his chest. His eyes are somewhat dim, and he can see further when they are closed than when they are open, for he can see clear back into the time when beautiful Rachel, his wife, was living, and his children shook the Oriental abode with their merriment. The centenarian is sitting dreaming over the past when he hears a wagon rumbling to the front door. He gets up and goes to the door to see who has arrived, and his long absent sons from Egypt come in and announce to him that Joseph instead of being dead is living in an Egyptian palace, with all the investiture of prime minister, next to the king in the mightiest empire of all the world! The news was too sudden and too glad for the old man, and his cheeks whiten, and he has a dazed look, and his staff falls out of his hand, and he would have dropped had not the sons caught him and led him to a lounge and put cold water on his face, and fanned him a little. In that half delirium the old man mumbles something about his son, Joseph. He says: “You don’t mean Joseph, do you? my dear son who has been dead so long. You don’t mean Joseph, do you?” But after they had fully resuscitated him, and the news was confirmed, the tears begin the winding way down the cross roads of the wrinkles, and the sunken lips of the old man quiver, and he brings his bent fingers together as he says: “Joseph is yet alive. I will go and see him before I die.” It did not take the old man a great while to get ready, I warrant you. He put on the best clothes that the shepherd’s wardrobe could afford. He got into the wagon, and though the aged are cautious and like to ride slow, the wagon did not get along fast enough for this old man; and when the wagon with the old man met Joseph’s chariot coming down to meet him, and Joseph got out of the chariot and got into the wagon and threw his arms around his father’s neck, it was an antithesis of royalty and rusticity, of simplicity and pomp, of filial affection and paternal love, which leaves us so much in doubt about whether we had better laugh or cry, that we do both. So Jacob kept the resolution of the text: “I will go and see him before I die.” And if our friends, the reporters, would like to have an appropriate title for this sermon, they might call it “The Old Folks’ Visit.” What a strong and unfailing thing is parental attachment! Was it not almost time for Jacob to forget Joseph? The hot suns of many summers had blazed on the heath; the river Nile had overflowed and receded, overflowed and receded again and again; the seed had been sown and the harvests reaped; stars rose and set; years of plenty and years of famine had passed on; but the love of Jacob for Joseph in my text is overwhelmingly dramatic. Oh, that is a cord that is not snapped, though pulled on by many decades! Though when the little child expired the parents may not have been more than twenty-five years of age, and now they are seventy-five, yet the vision of the cradle, and the childish face, and the first utterances of the infantile lips are fresh today, in spite of the passage of a half century. Joseph was as fresh in Jacob’s memory as ever, though at seventeen years of age the boy had disappeared from the old homestead. I found in our family record the story of an infant that had died fifty years before, and I said to my parents: “What is this record, and what does it mean?” Their chief answer was a long, deep sigh. It was yet to them a very tender sorrow. What does that all mean? Why, it means our children departed are ours yet, and that cord of attachment reaching across the years will hold us until it brings us together in the palace, as Jacob and Joseph were brought together. That is one thing that makes old people die happy. They realize it is reunion with those from whom they have long been separated. I am often asked as pastor—and every pastor is asked the question—”Will my children be children in heaven and forever children?” Well, there was no doubt a great change in Joseph from the time Jacob lost him, and the time when Jacob found him—between the boy seventeen years of age and the man in mid-life, his forehead developed with a great business estate; but Jacob was glad to get back Joseph anyhow, and it did not make much difference to the old man whether the boy looked older or looked younger. And it will be enough joy for that parent if he can get back that son, that daughter, at the gate of heaven, whether the departed loved one shall come a cherub or in full-grown angelhood. There must be a change wrought by that celestial climate and by those supernal years, but it will only be from loveliness to more loveliness, and from health to more radiant health. O parent, as you think of the darling panting and white in membranous croup, I want you to know it will be gloriously bettered in that land where there has never been a death and where all the inhabitants will live on in the great future as long as God! Joseph was Joseph notwithstanding the palace, and your child will be your child notwithstanding all the raining splendors of everlasting noon. What a thrilling visit was that of the old shepherd to the prime minister, Joseph! I see the old countryman seated in the palace looking around at the mirrors and the fountains and the carved pillars, and oh! how he wishes that Rachel, his wife, was alive and she could have come there with him to see their son in his great house. “Oh,” says the old man within himself, “I do wish Rachel could be here to see all this!” I visited at the farmhouse of the father of Millard Fill-more when the son was President of the United States, and the octogenarian farmer entertained me until eleven o’clock at night telling me what great things he saw in his son’s house at Washington, and how grandly Millard treated him in the White House. The old man’s face was illumined with the story until almost midnight. He had just been visiting his son at the Capital. And I suppose it was something of the same joy that thrilled the heart of the old shepherd as he stood in the palace of the prime minister. It is a great day with you when your old parents come to visit you. Your little children stand around with great, wide-open eyes, wondering how anybody could be so old. The parents cannot stay many days, for they are a little restless, and especially at nightfall, because they sleep better in their own bed; but while they tarry you somehow feel there is a benediction in every room in the house. They are a little feeble, and you make it as easy as you can for them, and you realize they will probably not visit you very often—perhaps never again. You go to their room after they have retired at night to see if the lights are properly put out, for the old people understand candle and lamp better than the modern apparatus for illumination. In the morning, with real interest in their health, you ask them how they rested last night. Joseph in the historical scene of the text did not think any more of his father than you do of your parents. The probability is, before they leave your house they half spoil your children with kindnesses. Grandfather and grandmother are more lenient and indulgent to your children than they ever were with you. And what wonders of revelation in the bombasine pocket of the one and the sleeve of the other! Blessed is that home where Christian parents come to visit! Whatever may have been the style of the architecture when they came, it is a palace before they leave. If they visit you fifty times, the two most memorable visits will be the first and the last. Those two pictures will hang in the hall of your memory while memory lasts, and you will remember just how they looked, and where they sat, and what they said, and at what figure of the carpet, and at what doorsill they parted from you, giving you the final good-by. Do not be embarrassed if your father come to town and he have the manners of the shepherd, and if your mother come to town and there be in her hat no sign of costly millinery. The wife of Emperor Theodosius said a wise thing when she said: “Husband, remember what you lately were, and remember what you are, and be thankful.” By this time you all notice what kindly provision Joseph made for his father, Jacob. Joseph did not say: “I can’t have the old man around this place. How clumsy he would look climbing up these marble stairs and walking over those mosaics! Then, he would be putting his hands upon some of these frescoes. People would wonder where that old greenhorn came from. He would shock all the Egyptian court with his manners at table. Besides that, he might get sick on my hands, and he might be querulous, and he might talk to me as though I were only a boy, when I am the second man in all the realm. Of course, he must not suffer, and if there is famine in his country—and I hear there is—I will send him some provisions; but I can’t take a man from Padan-aram and introduce him into this polite Egyptian court. What a nuisance it is have poor relations!” Joseph did not say that, but he rushed out to meet his father with perfect abandon of affection and brought him up to the palace, and introduced him to the Emperor, and provided for all the rest of the father’s days, and nothing was too good for the old man while living; and when he was dead, Joseph, with military escort, took his father’s remains to the family cemetery at Machpelah and put them down beside Leah, his wife. Would God all children were as kind to their parents! If the father have large property, and he be wise enough to keep it in his own name, he will be respected by the heirs; but how often it is when the son finds his father in famine, as Joseph found Jacob in famine, the young people make it very hard for the old man. They are so surprised he eats with a knife instead of a fork. They are chagrined at his antediluvian habits. They are provoked because he cannot hear as well as he used to, and when he asks it over again, and the son has to repeat it, he bawls in the old man’s ear: “I hope you hear that!” How long he must wear the old coat or the old hat before they get him a new one! How chagrined they are at his independence of the English grammar! How long he hangs on! Seventy years and not gone yet! Seventy-five years and not gone yet! Eighty years and not gone yet! Will he ever go? They think it of no use to have a doctor in his last sickness, and go up to the drugstore and get a dose of something that makes him worse, and economize on a coffin, and beat the undertaker down to the last point, giving a note for the reduced amount, which they never pay! I have officiated at obsequies of aged people where the family have been so inordinately resigned to Providence that I felt like taking my text from Proverbs: “The eye that mocketh at its father, and refuseth to obey its mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.” In other words, such an ingrate ought to have a flock of crows for pall-bearers! I congratulate you if you have the honor of providing for aged parents. The blessing of the Lord God of Joseph and Jacob will be on you. I rejoice to remember that though my father lived in a plain house the most of his days, he died in a mansion provided by the filial piety of a son who had achieved a fortune. There the octogenarian sat, and the servants waited on him, and there were plenty of horses and plenty of carriages to convey him, and a bower in which to sit on long summer afternoons, dreaming over the past, and there was not a room in the house where he was not welcome, and there were musical instruments of all sorts to regale him; and when life had passed, the neighbors came out and expressed all honor possible, and carried him to the village Machpelah and put him down beside the Rachel with whom he had lived more than half a century. Share your successes with the old people. The probability is, that the principles they inculcated achieved your fortune. Give them a Christian percentage of kindly consideration. Let Joseph divide with Jacob the pasture fields of Goshen, and the glories of the Egyptian court. And here I would like to sing the praises of the sisterhood who remained unmarried that they might administer to aged parents. The brutal world calls these self-sacrificing ones by ungallant names, and says they are peculiar or angular; but if you had had as many annoyances as they have had, Xanthippe would have been an angel compared with you. It is easier to take care of five rollicking, romping children than one childish old man. Among the best women of these cities are those who allowed the bloom of life to pass away while they were caring for their parents. While other maidens were sound asleep, they were bathing the old man’s feet, or tucking up the covers around the invalid mother. While other maidens were in the cotillon, they were dancing attendance upon rheumatism and spreading plasters for the lame back of the septenarian, and heating catnip tea for insomnia. In almost every circle of our kindred there has been some queen of self-sacrifice to whom jeweled hand was offered in marriage, but who stayed on the old place because of the sense of filial obligation, until the health was gone and the attractiveness of personal presence had vanished. Brutal society may call such an one by a nickname; God calls her daughter, and Heaven calls her saint, and I call her domestic martyr. A half-dozen ordinary women have not as much nobility as could be found in the smallest joint of the little finger of her left hand. Although the world has stood six thousand years, this is the first apotheosis of maidenhood, although in the long line of those who have declined marriage that they might be qualified for some special mission are the names of Anna Ross and Margaret Breckinridge and Mary Shelton and Anna Etheridge and Georgiana Willetts the angels of the battle-fields of Fair Oaks and Lookout Mountain and Chancellorsville and Cooper Shop Hospital; and though single life has been honored by the fact that the three grandest men of the Bible—John and Paul and Christ—were celibates. Let the ungrateful world sneer at the maiden aunt, but God has a throne burnished for her arrival, and on one side of that throne in Heaven there is a vase containing two jewels, the one brighter than the Kohinoor of London Tower, and the other larger than any diamond ever found in the districts of Golconda—the one jewel by the lapidary of the palace cut with the words: “Inasmuch as ye did it to father;” the other jewel by the lapidary of the palace cut with the words: “Inasmuch as ye did it to mother.” “Over the hills to the poorhouse” is the exquisite ballad of Will Carleton, who found an old woman who had been turned off by her prosperous sons; but I thank God I may find in my text “Over the hills to the palace.” As if to disgust us with unfilial conduct, the Bible presents us the story of Micah, who stole the eleven hundred shekels from his mother, and the story of Absalom, who tried to dethrone his father. But all history is beautiful with stories of filial fidelity. Epaminondas, the warrior, found his chief delight in reciting to his parents his victories. There goes Æneas from burning Troy, on his shoulders Anchises, his father. The Athenians punished with death any unfilial conduct. There goes beautiful Ruth escorting venerable Naomi across the desert amid the howling of the wolves and the barking of the jackals. John Lawrence, burned at the stake in Colchester, was cheered in the flames by his children, who said: “O God, strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise!” And Christ in the hour of excruciation provided for his old mother. Jacob kept his resolution, “I will go and see him before I die,” and a little while after we find them walking the tessellated floor of the palace, Jacob and Joseph, the prime minister proud of the shepherd. I may say in regard to the most of you that your parents have probably visited you for the last time, or will soon pay you such a visit, and I have wondered if they will ever visit you in the King’s palace. “Oh,” you say, “I am in the pit of sin!” Joseph was in the pit. “Oh,” you say, “I am in the prison of mine iniquity!” Joseph was once in prison. “Oh,” you say, “I didn’t have a fair chance; I was denied maternal kindness!” Joseph was denied maternal attendance. “Oh,” you say, “I am far away from the land of my nativity!” Joseph was far from home. “Oh,” you say, “I have been betrayed and exasperated!” Did not Joseph’s brethren sell him to a passing Ishmaelitish caravan? Yet God brought him to that emblazoned residence; and if you will trust his grace in Jesus Christ you, too, will be empalaced. Oh, what a day that will be when the old folks come from an adjoining mansion in heaven, and find you amid the alabaster pillars of the throne-room and living with the King! They are coming up the steps now, and the epauletted guard of the palace rushes in and says: “Your father’s coming, your mother’s coming!” And when under the arches of precious stones and on the pavement of porphyry you greet each other, the scene will eclipse the meeting on the Goshen highway, when Joseph and Jacob fell on each other’s neck and wept a good while. But oh, how changed the old folks will be! Their cheek smoothed into the flesh of a little child. Their stooped posture lifted into immortal symmetry. Their foot now so feeble, then with the sprightliness of a bounding roe as they shall say to you: “A spirit passed this way from earth and told us that you were wayward and dissipated after we left the world; but you have repented, our prayer has been answered, and you are here; and as we used to visit you on earth before we died, now we visit you in your new home after our ascension.” And father will say, “Mother, don’t you see Joseph is yet alive?” and mother will say, “Yes, father, Joseph is yet alive.” And then they will talk over their earthly anxieties in regard to you, and the midnight supplications in your behalf, and they will recite to each other the old Scripture passage with which they used to cheer their staggering faith: “I will be a God to thee and thy seed after thee.” Oh, the palace, the palace, the palace! That is what Richard Baxter called “The Saint’s Everlasting Rest.” That is what John Bunyan called the “Celestial City.” That is Young’s “Night Thoughts” turned into morning exultations. That is Gray’s “Elegy in a Churchyard” turned to resurrection spectacle. That is the “Cotter’s Saturday Night” exchanged for the cotter’s Sabbath morning. That is the shepherd of Salisbury Plains amid the flocks on the hills of heaven. That is the famine-struck Padanaram turned into the rich pasture fields of Goshen. That is Jacob visiting Joseph at the emerald castle. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 32: 030. A DELICATE QUESTION ======================================================================== A Delicate Question Genesis 47:8 : “How old art thou?” The Egyptian capital was the focus of the world’s wealth. In ships and barges there had been brought to it from India frankincense and cinnamon and ivory and diamonds; from the North, marble and iron; from Syria, purple and silk; from Arabia, some of the finest horses of the world, and from Greece some of the most brilliant chariots; and from all the earth, that which could best please the eye and charm the ear and gratify the taste. There were temples aflame with red sandstone entered by gateways that were guarded by pillars bewildering with hieroglyphics and garlanded with brazen serpents and adorned with winged creatures—their eyes and beaks and pinions glittering with precious stones. There were marble columns blooming into white flower beds; there were stone pillars at the top bursting into the shape of the lotus when in full bloom. Along the avenues lined with sphinx and fane and obelisk, there were princes who came in gorgeously upholstered palanquins, carried by servants in scarlet, or elsewhere drawn by vehicles, the snow-white horses, golden-bitted and six abreast, dashing at full run. On floors of mosaic the glories of Pharaoh were spelled out in letters of porphyry and beryl and flame. There were ornaments twisted from the wood of tamarisk, embossed with silver breaking into foam. There were footstools made out of a single precious stone. There were beds fashioned out of crouched lion in bronze. There were chairs spotted with the sleek hides of leopards. There were sofas footed with the claws of wild beasts, and armed with the beaks of birds. As you stand on the level beach of the sea on a summer day, and look either way, there are miles of breakers, white with the ocean foam, dashing shoreward, so it seemed as if the sea of the world’s pomp and wealth in the Egyptian capital for miles and miles flung itself up into white breakers of marble temple, mausoleum and obelisk. It was to this capital and the palace of Pharaoh that Jacob, the plain shepherd, came to the royal apartment to meet his son Joseph, who had become Prime Minister. Pharaoh and Jacob met, dignity and rusticity, the gracefulness of the court and the plain manners of the field. The king, wanting to make the old countryman at ease, and seeing how white his beard is and how feeble his step, looks familiarly into his face and says to the aged man: “How old art thou?” On this first day of the new year I feel that it is not an inappropriate question that I ask you, as Pharaoh did Jacob, the patriarch: “How old art thou?” People who are truthful on every other subject lie about their ages, so that I do not solicit from you any literal response to the question I have asked. I would put no one under temptation; but I simply want to see by what rod it is we are measuring our earthly existence. There is a right way and a wrong way of measuring a door, or a wall, or an arch, or a tower, and so there is a right way and a wrong way of measuring our earthly existence. It is with reference to this higher meaning that I confront you this morning with the stupendous question of the text, and ask: “How old art thou?” There are many who estimate their by mere worldly gratification. When Lord Dundas was wished a happy New Year, he said: “It will have to be a happier year than the past, for I hadn’t one happy moment in all the twelve months that have gone.” But that has not been the experience of most of us. We have found that though the world is blasted with sin, it is a very bright and beautiful place to reside in. We have had joys innumerable. There is no hostility between the Gospel and the merriments and festivities of life. I do not think that we sufficiently appreciate the worldly pleasures God gives us. When you recount your enjoyments you do not go far enough back. Why do you not go back to the time when you were an infant in your mother’s arms, looking up into the heaven of her smile; to those days when you filled the house with the uproar of boisterous merriment; when you shouted as you pitched the ball on the playground; when, on the cold, sharp winter night, muffled up, on skates you shot out over the resounding ice of the pond? Have you forgotten all those good days that the Lord gave you? Were you never a boy? Were you never a girl? Between those times and this, how many mercies the Lord has bestowed upon you! How many joys have breathed up to you from the flowers, and shone down to you from the stars, and chanted to you with the voice of soaring bird, and tumbling cascade, and booming sea, and thunders that with bayonets of fire, charged down the mountain side! Joy! Joy! If there is any one who has a right to the enjoyments of the world, it is the Christian, for God has given him a lease of everything in the promise: “All are yours.” But I have to tell you that a man who estimates his life on earth by mere worldly gratification is a most unwise man. Our life is not to be a game of chess. It is not a dance in the lighted hall, to quick music. It is not the froth of an ale pitcher. It is not the settlings of a wine cup. It is not a banquet with intoxication and roistering. It is the first step on a ladder that mounts into the skies, or the first step on a road that plunges into a horrible abyss. “How old art thou?” Toward what destiny are you tending, and how fast are you getting on toward it? Again, I remark that there are many who estimate their life on earth by their sorrows and misfortunes. Through a great many of your lives the ploughshare hath gone very deep, turning up a terrible furrow. You have been betrayed, and misrepresented, and set upon, and slapped of impertinence, and pounded of misfortune. The brightest life must have its shadows, and the smoothest path its thorns. On the happiest brood the hawk pounces. No escape from trouble of some kind. While glorious John Milton was losing his eyesight he heard that Salmasius was glad of it. While Sheridan’s comedy was being enacted in Drury Lane Theatre, London, his enemy sat growling at it in the stage box. While Bishop Cooper was surrounded by the favor of learned men, his wife took the manuscript of his lexicon, the product of a long life of anxiety and toil, and threw it into the fire. Misfortune, trial, vexation for almost every one. Pope, applauded of all the world, has a stoop in the shoulder that annoys him so much that he has a tunnel dug so that he may go unobserved from garden to grotto, and from grotto to garden. Cano, the famous Spanish artist, is disgusted with the crucifix that the priest holds before him, because it is such a poor specimen of sculpture. And so, sometimes through taste, and sometimes through learned menace, and sometimes through physical distresses—aye, in ten thousand ways—troubles come to harass and annoy. And yet, it is unfair to measure a man’s life by his misfortunes, because where there is one stalk of nightshade there are fifty marigolds and harebells; where there is one cloud, thunder charged, there are hundreds that stray across the heavens, the glory of land and sky, asleep in their bosom. Because death came and took your child away, did you immediately forget all the five years or the ten years, or the fifteen years, in which she came every night for a kiss, all the tones or the soft touch of her hand? Because in some financial Euroclydon your fortune went into the breakers, did you forget all those years in which the luxuries and extravagances of life showered on your pathway? Alas, that is an unwise man, an ungrateful man, an unfair man, an unphilosophic man, and, most of all, an unchristian man, who measures his life on earth by groans, and tears, and dyspeptic fit, and abuse, and scorn, and terror, and neuralgic thrust. Again, I remark that there are many people who estimate their life on earth by the amount of money they have accumulated. They say, “The year 1866, or 1870, or 1898, was wasted.” Why? “Made no money.” Now, it is all cant and insincerity to talk against money, as though it had no value. It may represent refinement, and education, and many blessed surroundings. It is the spreading of the table that feeds the children’s hunger. It is the lighting of the furnace that keeps you warm. It is the making of the bed on which you rest from care and anxiety. It is the carrying of you at last to decent sepulchre, and the putting up of the slab on which is chiseled the story of your Christian hope. It is simply hypocrisy, this tirade in pulpit and lecture-hall against money. But while all this is so, he who uses money or thinks of money as anything but a means to an end, will find out his mistake when the glittering treasures slip out of his nerveless grasp, and he goes out of this world without a shilling of money or a certificate of stock. He might better have been the Christian porter that opened his gate, or the Christian workman who last night heaved the coal into his cellar. Bonds and mortgages and leases have their use, but they make a poor yardstick with which to measure life. “They that boast themselves in their wealth and trust in the multitude of their riches, none of them can, by any means, redeem his brother, or give to God a ransom for him, that he should not see corruption.” But I remark, there are many—I wish there were more—who estimate their life by their moral and spiritual development. It is not sinful egotism for a Christian man to say, “I am purer than I used to be. I am more consecrated to Christ than I used to be. I have got over a great many of the bad habits in which I used to indulge. I am a great deal better man than I used to be.” There is no sinful egotism in that. It is not base egotism for a soldier to say, “I know more about military tactics than I used to, before I took a musket in my hand and learned to ‘present arms,’ and when I was a pest to the drill-officer.” It is not base egotism for a sailor to say, “I know better how to clew down the mizzen topsail than I used to, before I had ever seen a ship.” And there is no sinful egotism when a Christian man, fighting the battles of the Lord, or, if you will have it, voyaging toward a haven of eternal rest, says, “I know more about spiritual tactics and about voyaging toward heaven than I used to.” Why, there are those among us who have measured lances with many a foe and unhorsed it. We know Christian men who have become swarthy by hammering at the forge of calamity. They stand on an entirely different plane of character from that which they once occupied. They are measuring their life on earth by golden-gated Sabbaths, by pentecostal prayer-meeting, by communion-tables, by baptismal fonts, by hallelujahs in the temple. They have stood on Sinai, and heard it thunder. They have stood on Pisgah, and looked over into the Promised Land. They have stood on Calvary, and seen the cross bleed. They can, like Paul the Apostle, write on their heaviest troubles “light” and “but for a moment.” Even on the darkest night their soul is irradiated, as was the night over Bethlehem, by the faces of those who have come to proclaim glory and good cheer. They are only waiting for the gate to open and the chains to fall off and the glory to begin. 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. If a man begin right, I cannot tell how many tears he may wipe away, how many burdens he may lift, how many orphans he may comfort, how many outcasts he may reclaim. 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 climbed the mountain and delved into the mine and crossed the sea and trudged the desert and dropped, at last, into martyr’s graves, waiting for the resurrection of the just. They measured their lives by the chains they broke off, by the garments they put upon nakedness, by the miles they traveled to alleviate every kind of suffering. 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-lashed, 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 cannot calculate the length of their lives by any human arithmetic. Add to their lives ten thousand times ten thousand years, and you have not expressed it—what they have lived or will live. Oh, what a standard that is to measure a man’s life by! There are those among us 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 or age. They have not even entered upon their infancy, for one must become a babe in Christ to begin at all. Now, I do not know what your advantages or disadvantages are; I do not know what your tact or talent is; I do not know what may be the fascination of your manners or the repulsiveness of them; but I know this: There is for you, my hearer, a field to cultivate, a harvest to reap, a tear to wipe away, a soul to save. If you have worldly means, consecrate them to Christ. If you have eloquence, use it on the side that Paul and Wilberforce used theirs. If you have learning, put it all into the poor-box of the world’s suffering. But if you have none of these—neither wealth, nor eloquence, nor learning—you, at any rate, have a smile with which you can encourage the disheartened; a frown with which you may blast injustice; a voice with which you call the wanderer back to God. “Oh,” you say, “that is a very sanctimonious view of life!” It is not. It is the only bright view of life, and it is the only bright view of death. Contrast the death-scene of a man who has measured life by the worldly standard with the death-scene of a man who has measured life by the Christian standard. Quinn, the actor, in his last moments, said, “I hope this tragic scene will soon be over, and I hope to keep my dignity to the last.” Malherbe said in his last moments to the confessor, “Hold your tongue! your miserable style puts me out of conceit with heaven.” Lord Chesterfield in his last moments, when he ought to have been praying for his soul, bothered himself about the proprieties of the sick-room, and said, “Give Dayboles a chair.” Godfrey Kneller spent his last hours on earth in drawing a diagram of his own monument. Compare the silly and horrible accompaniments of the departure of such men with the seraphic glow on the face of Edward Payson, as he said in his last moment: “The breezes of heaven fan me. I float in a sea of glory.” Or, with Paul the Apostle, who said in his last hour, “I am now ready to be offered up, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me.” Or compare it with the Christian deathbed that you witnessed in your own household. Ah, this world is a false god! It will consume you with the blaze in which it accepts your sacrifice, while the righteous shall be held in everlasting remembrance; and when the thrones have fallen, and the monuments have crumbled and the world has perished, they shall banquet with the conquerors of earth and the hierarchs of heaven. 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 wiser and better way. The wheel of time has turned very swiftly, and it has hurled us on. The old year has gone. The new year has come. For what you and I have been launched upon it, God only knows. Now let me ask you all. Have you made any preparation for the future? You have made preparation for time, my dear brother; have you made any preparation for eternity? Do you wonder that when that man on the Hudson river, in indignation, tore up the tract which was handed to him, and just one word landed on his coatsleeve—the rest of the tract being pitched into the river—that one word aroused his soul? It was that one word, so long, so broad, so high, so deep—”eternity!” Some of you, during the past year, made preparation for eternity, and it makes no difference to you really, as to the matter of safety, whether you go now, or go some other year—whether this year or the next year. Both your feet on the rock, the waves may dash around you. You can say, “God is our refuge and strength—a very present help.” You are on the rock, and you may defy all earth and hell to overthrow you. I congratulate you, I give you great joy. It is a happy New Year to you. I can see no sorrow at all in the fact that our years are going. You hear some people say, “I wish I could go back again to boyhood.” I would not want to go back again to boyhood. I am afraid I might make a worse life out of it than I have made. You could not afford to go back to boyhood if it were possible. You might do a great deal worse than you have done. The past is gone! Look out for the future! To all Christians it is a time of gladness. I am glad the years are going. You are coming on nearer home. Let your countenance light up with the thought—Nearer home! In 1835 the French resolved that at Ghent they would have a kind of musical demonstration that had never been heard of. It would be made up of the chimes of bells and the discharge of cannon. The experiment was a perfect success. What with the ringing of the bells and the report of the ordnance, the city trembled, and the hills shook with the triumphal march that was as strange as it was overwhelming. With a most glorious accompaniment will God’s dear children go into their high residence, when the trumpets shall sound and the Last Day has come. At the signal given, the bells of the towers, and of the lighthouses, and of the cities, will strike their sweetness into a last chime that shall ring into the heavens and float off upon the sea, joined by the boom of bursting mine and magazine, augmented by all the cathedral towers of heaven—the harmonies of earth and the symphonies of the celestial realm making up one great triumphal march, fit to celebrate the ascent of the redeemed to where they shall shine as the stars forever and ever. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 33: 031. RETURN FROM THE CHASE ======================================================================== Return From the Chase Genesis 49:27 : “In the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil.” There is in this chapter such an affluence of simile and allegory, such a mingling of metaphors, that there are a thousand thoughts in it not on the surface. Old Jacob, dying, is telling the fortunes of his children. He prophesies the devouring propensities of Benjamin and his descendants. With his dim old eyes he looks off and sees the hunters going out to the fields, ranging them all day, and at nightfall coming home, the game slung over the shoulder; and reaching the door of the tent, the hunters begin to distribute the game, and one takes a coney and another a rabbit and another a roe. “In the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil.” Or it may be a reference to the habits of wild beasts that slay their prey, and then drag it back to the cave or lair and divide it among the young. There is nothing more fascinating than the life of a hunter. On a certain day in all England you can hear the crack of the sportsman’s gun, because grouse-hunting has begun; and every man who takes pleasure in destroying life and can afford the time and ammunition and can draw a bead, starts for the fields. On the twentieth of October our woods and forests will resound with the shock of firearms, and will be tracked by pointers and setters, because the quail will then be a lawful prize for the sportsman. Xenophon grew eloquent in regard to the art of hunting. In the Far East, people elephant-mounted, chase the tiger. The American Indian darts his arrow at the buffalo until the frightened herd tumble over the rocks. European nobles are often found in the fox-chase and at the stag-hunt. Francis I was called the father of hunting. Moses declared of Nimrod: “He was a mighty hunter before the Lord.” Therefore in all ages of the world the imagery of my text ought to be suggestive whether it means a wolf after a fox or a man after a lion. “In the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil.” I take my text, in the first place, as descriptive of those people who in the morning of their life give themselves up to hunting the world, but afterward, by the grace of God, in the evening of their life divide among themselves the spoils of Christian character. There are aged Christian men and women who, if they gave testimony, would tell you that in the morning of their life they were after the world as intensely as a hound after a hare, or as a falcon swoops upon a gazelle. They wanted the world’s plaudits and the world’s gains. They felt that if they could get this world they would have everything. Some of them started out for the pleasures of the world. They thought that the man who laughed loudest was happiest. They tried repartee and conundrum and burlesque and madrigal. They thought they would like to be Tom Hoods or Charles Lambs or Edgar A. Poes. They mingled wine and music and the spectacular. They were worshipers of the harlequin and the Merry Andrew and the buffoon and the jester. Life was to them foam and bubble and cachinnation and roystering and grimace. They were so full of glee they could hardly repress their mirth even on solemn occasions, and they came near bursting out hilariously even at the burial, because there was something so dolorous in the tone or countenance of the undertaker. After a while misfortune struck them hard on the back. They found there was something they could not laugh at. Under their late hours their health gave way, Or there was a death in the house. Of every green thing their soul was exfoliated. They found out that life was more than a joke. From the heart of God there blazed into their soul an earnestness they had never felt before. They awoke to their sinfulness and their immortality, and here they sit today at sixty or seventy years of age, as appreciative of all innocent mirth as they ever were, but they are bent on a kind of satisfaction which in early life they never hunted; the evening of their days brighter than the morning. In the morning they devoured the prey, but at night they are dividing the spoil. Then there are others who started out for financial success. They see how limber a man’s back is when he bows down before some one transpicuous. They felt they would like to see how the world looked from the window of a three-thousand-dollar turnout. They thought they would like to have the morning sunlight tangled in the headgear of a dashing span. They wanted the bridges in the park to resound under the rataplan of their swift hoofs. They wanted a gilded baldrick, and so they started on the dollar hunt. They chased it up one street and chased it down another. They followed it when it burrowed in the cellar. They treed it in the roof. Wherever a dollar was expected to be they were. They chased it across the ocean. They chased it across the land. They stopped not for the night. Hearing that dollar even in the darkness thrilled them as an Adirondack sportsman is thrilled by a loon’s laugh. They chased that dollar to the money vault. They chased it to the Government treasury. They routed it from under the counter. All the hounds were out—all the pointers and setters. They leaped the hedges for that dollar, and they cried: “Hark, away! a dollar! a dollar!” and when at last they came upon it, and had actually captured it, their excitement was like that of a falconer who has successfully flung his first hawk. In the morning of their life, oh, how they devoured the prey! But there came a better time to their soul. They found out that an immortal nature cannot live on Government bonds. They took up a Northern Pacific bond, and there was a hole in it through which they could look into the uncertainty of all earthly treasures. They saw some Ralston, living at the rate of twenty-five thousand dollars a month, leaping from San Francisco wharf because he could not continue to live at the same rate. They saw the wizen and paralytic bankers who had changed their souls into molten gold stamped with the image of the earth, earthy. They saw some great souls by avarice turned into homunculi, and they said to themselves: “I will seek after higher treasure.” From that time they did not care whether they walked or rode if Christ walked with them; nor whether they lived in a mansion or a hut if they dwelt under the shadow of the Almighty; nor whether they were robed in French broadcloth or in homespun if they had the robe of the Saviour’s righteousness; nor whether they were sandaled with morocco or calfskin if they were shod with the preparation of the Gospel. Now, you see peace on their countenance. Now, that man says: “What a fool I was to be enchanted with this world! Why, I have more satisfaction in five minutes in the service of God than I had in all the first years of my life while I was gain-getting. I like the evening of my day a great deal better than I did the morning. In the morning I greedily devoured the prey; but now it is evening, and I am gloriously dividing the spoil.” This world is a poor thing to hunt. It is healthful to go out in the woods and hunt. It rekindles the luster of the eye. It strikes the brown of the autumnal leaf into the cheek. It gives to the rheumatic limbs a strength to leap like the roe. Christopher North’s pet gun, the muckle-mounted Meg, going off in the summer in the forests, had its echo in the winter-time in the eloquence that rang through the University halls of Edinburgh. It is healthy to go hunting in the fields; but I tell you that it is belittling and bedwarfing and belaming for a man to hunt this world. The hammer comes down on the gun-cap and the barrel explodes and kills you instead of that which you are pursuing. When you turn out to hunt the world, the world turns out to hunt you; and as many a sportsman aiming his gun at a panther’s heart has gone down under the striped claws, so while you have been attempting to devour this world, the world has been devouring you. So it was with Catherine of Russia. Henry II went out hunting for this world, and its lances struck through his heart. Francis I aimed at the world, but the assassin’s dagger put an end to his ambition and his life with one stroke. Mary Queen of Scots wrote on the window of her castle: From the top of all my trust Mishap hath laid me in the dust. The Queen Dowager of Navarre was offered for her wedding-day a costly and beautiful pair of gloves, and she put them on; but they were poisoned gloves and they took her life. Better a bare hand of cold privation than a warm and poisoned glove of ruinous success. “Oh,” says some young man, “I believe what you are preaching. I am going to do that very thing. In the morning of my life I am going to devour the prey, and in the evening I shall divide the spoil of Christian character. I only want a little while to sow my wild oats, and then I will be good.” Young man, did you ever take the census of all the old people? How many old people are there in your house? One, two, or none? How many in any vast assemblage? Only here and there a gray head, like the patches of snow here and there in the fields on a late April day. The fact is that the tides of the years are so strong that men go down under them before they get to be sixty, before they get to be fifty, before they get to be forty, before they get to be thirty; and if you, my young brother, resolve now that you will spend the morning of your days in devouring the prey, the probability is that you will never divide the spoil in the evening hour. He who postpones until old age the religion of Jesus Christ postpones it forever. Where are the men who, thirty years ago, resolved to become Christians in old age, putting it off a certain number of years? They never got to be old. The railroad collision or the steamboat explosion or the slip on the ice or the falling ladder or the sudden cold put an end to their opportunities. They have never had an opportunity since, and never will have an opportunity again. They locked the door of heaven against their soul, and they threw away the key. They chased the world, and they died in the chase. The wounded tiger turned on them. They failed to take the game that they pursued. Mounted on a swift courser, they leaped the hedge, but the courser fell on them and crushed them. Proposing to barter their soul for the world, they lost both and got neither. While this is an encouragement to old people who are yet unpardoned, it is no encouragement to the young who are putting off the day of grace. This doctrine that the old may be repentant is to be taken cautiously. It is medicine that kills or cures. The same medicine given to different patients in one case saves life and in the other destroys it. This possibility of repentance at the close of life may cure the old man while it kills the young. Be cautious in taking it. Again, my subject is descriptive of those who come to a sudden and radical change. You have noticed how short a time it is from morning to night in winter—eight or ten hours. You know that a winter day has a very brief life. The heart of the longest day beats twenty-four times and then it is dead. How quick the transition in the character of these Benjaminites! “In the morning they shall devour the prey, and at night they shall divide the spoil.” Is it possible that there shall be such a transformation in any of our characters? Yes; a man may be at seven o’clock in the morning an all-devouring worldling, and at seven o’clock at night he may be a peaceful, distributive Christian. Conversion is instantaneous. A man passes into the Kingdom of God quicker than down the sky runs the zigzag lightning. A man may be anxious about his soul for a great many years; that does not make him a Christian. A man may pray a great while; that does not make him a Christian. A man may resolve on the reformation of his character and have that resolution going on a great while; that does not make him a Christian. But the very instant when he flings his soul on the mercy of Jesus Christ, that instant is lustration, emancipation, resurrection. Up to that point he is going in the wrong direction; after that point he is going in the right direction. Before that moment he is a child of sin; after that moment he is a child of God. Before that moment, hellward; after that moment, heavenward. Before that moment, devouring the prey; after that moment, dividing the spoil. Five minutes is as good as five years. You know very well that the best things you have done you have done in a flash. You made up your mind in an instant to buy or to sell or to invest or to stop or to start. If you had missed that one chance you would have missed it forever. Now, just as precipitate and quick and spontaneous will be the ransom of your soul. This morning you are making a calculation. You are on the track of some financial or social game. With your pen or pencil you are pursuing it. This very morning you are devouring the prey; but to-night you will be in a different mood. You find that all heaven is offered you. You wonder what resources it will give you now and hereafter. You are dividing peace and comfort and satisfaction and Christian reward in your soul. You are dividing the spoil. On a Sabbath night at the close of the service I said to some persons: “When did you first become serious about your soul?” and they told me: “Tonight.” And I said to others: “When did you give your heart to God?” and they said: “Tonight.” And I said to still others: “When did you resolve to serve the Lord all the days of your life?” and they said: “Tonight.” I saw by their apparel that when the grace of God struck them they were devouring the prey; but I saw also in the flood of joyful tears and in the kindling raptures on their brow and in their exhilarant and transporting utterances that they were dividing the spoil. At night with one touch of electricity all these lights blaze. Oh, I would to God that the darkness of your souls might be broken up and that by one quick, overwhelming, instantaneous flash of illumination you might be brought into the light and the liberty of the sons of God! You see that religion is a different thing from what some of you supposed. You thought it was decadence; you thought religion was emaciation; you thought it was highway robbery; that it struck one down and left him half dead; that it plucked out the eyes and the plumes of the soul; that it broke the wing and crushed the beak as it came clawing with its black talons through the air. No; that is not religion. What is religion? It is dividing the spoil. It is taking a defenseless soul and panoplying it for eternal conquest. It is the distribution of prizes by the King’s hand, every medal stamped with a coronation. It is an exhilaration, an expansion. It is imparadisation. It is enthronement. Religion makes a man master of earth and death and hell. It goes forth to gather the medals of victory won by Prince Emmanuel, and the diadems of heaven and the glories of realms terrestrial and celestial, and then, after ranging all worlds for everything that is resplendent, it divides the spoil. What was it that James Turner, the famous English evangelist, was doing when in his dying moment he said: “Christ is all! Christ is all!” Why, he was entering into light; he was rounding the Cape of Good Hope; he was dividing the spoil. What was the aged Christian Quakeress doing when, at eighty years of age, she arose in the meeting one day and said: “The time of my departure is come. My graveclothes are falling off?” She was dividing the spoil. She longed with wing to fly away, And mix with that eternal day. What is Daniel, the lion-tamer, now doing? and Elijah, who was drawn by the flaming coursers? and Paul, the rattling of whose chains made kings quake? and all the other victims of flood and fire and wreck and guillotine? Where are they? Dividing the spoil. Ten thousand times ten thousand, In sparking raiment bright, The armies of the ransomed saints Throng up the steeps of light. ‘Tis finished, all is finished, Their fight with death and sin; Fling open wide the golden gates And let the victors in. Oh, what a grand thing it is to be a Christian! We begin on earth to divide the spoil, but the distribution will not be completed to all eternity. There is a poverty-stricken soul, there is a business-despoiled soul, there is a sin-blasted soul, there is a bereaved soul—why do you not come and get the spoils of Christian character, the comfort, the joy, the peace, the salvation that I am sent to offer you in my Master’s name? Though your knees knock together in weakness, though your hand tremble in fear, though your eyes rain tears of uncontrollable weeping—come and get the spoils. Rest for all the weary. Pardon for all the guilty. Harbor for all the bestormed. Life for all the dead. I verily believe that there are some who have come in here downcast because the world is against them, and because they feel God is against them, who will go away today saying: I came to Jesus as I was, Weary and worn and sad; I found in him a resting-place, And he has made me glad. Though you came in children of the world, you may go away heirs of heaven. Though you were devouring the prey, now, all worlds witnessing, you may divide the spoil. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 34: 032. EXODUS ======================================================================== Exodus ======================================================================== CHAPTER 35: 033. SISTERS AND BROTHERS ======================================================================== Sisters and Brothers Exodus 2:4 : “And his sister stood afar off to wit what would be done to him.” Princess Thermutis, daughter of Pharaoh, looking out through the lattice of her bathing-house, on the banks of the Nile, saw a curious boat on the river. It had neither oar nor helm, and they would have been useless anyhow. There was only one passenger, and that a baby boy. But the Mayflower that brought the Pilgrim Fathers to America carried not so precious a load. The boat was made of the broad leaves of papyrus tightened together by bitumen. Boats were sometimes made of that material, as we learn from Pliny and Herodotus and Theophrastus. “Kill every Hebrew boy when he is born,” had been Pharaoh’s order. To save her son, Jochebed, the mother of little Moses, had put him in that queer boat and launched him. His sister Miriam stood on the bank watching that craft with its precious burden. She was far enough off not to draw attention to the boat, but near enough to offer protection. There she stands on the bank, Miriam the poetess, Miriam the quick-witted, Miriam the faithful, though very human, for in after time she became so angry with that very brother for marrying a woman she did not like, that she made a great family row and was struck with leprosy. Miriam was a splendid sister, but had her faults like all the rest of us. How carefully she watched the boat containing her brother! A strong wind might upset it. The buffaloes often found there might in a sudden plunge of thirst sink it. Some ravenous water-fowl might swoop and pick his eyes out with iron beak. Some crocodile or hippopotamus crawling through the rushes might craunch the babe. Miriam watched and watched until Princess Thermutis, a maiden on each side of her, holding palm leaves over her head to shelter her from the sun, came down and entered her bathing-house. When from the lattice she saw the boat she ordered it brought, and when the leaves were pulled back from the face of the child and the boy looked up he cried aloud, for he was hungry and frightened, and would not even let the princess take him. The infant would rather stay hungry than acknowledge any one of the court as mother. Now, Miriam, the sister, incognito,no one suspecting her relation to the child, leaps from the bank and rushes down and offers to get a nurse to pacify the child. Consent is given; she brings Jochebed, the baby’s mother, incognito,not sure of the court knowing that she was the mother, and when Jochebed arrived the child stopped crying, for its fright was calmed and its hunger appeased. You may admire Jochebed, the mother, and all the ages may admire Moses, but I clap my hands in applause at the behavior of Miriam, the faithful, brilliant and strategic sister! “Go home,” some one might have said to Miriam. “Why risk yourself out there alone on the banks of the Nile, breathing the miasma and in danger of being attacked by wild beast or ruffian; go home!” No; Miriam, the sister, most lovingly watched and bravely defended Moses, the brother. Is he worthy her care and courage? Oh, yes; the sixty centuries of the world’s history have never had so much involved in the arrival of any ship at any port as in the landing of that papyrus boat calked with bitumen. Its one passenger was to be a none-such in history. Lawyer, statesman, politician, legislator, organizer, conqueror, deliverer. He had such remarkable beauty in childhood that, Josephus says, when he was carried along the road, people stopped to gaze at him, and workmen would leave their work to admire him. When the king playfully put his crown upon this boy, he threw it off indignantly, and put his foot on it. The king, fearing that this might be a sign that the child might yet take down his crown, applied another test. According to the Jewish legend, the king ordered two bowls to be put before the child, one containing rubies and the other burning coals. And if he took the coals he was to live, and if he took the rubies he was to die. For some reason the child took one of the coals and put it in his mouth, so that his life was spared, although it burned the tongue so that he was indistinct of utterance ever after. Having come to manhood, he spread open the palms of his hands in prayer and the Red Sea parted to let two million five hundred thousand people escape. And he put the palms of his hands together in prayer and the Red Sea closed on a strangulated host. His life unutterably grand, his burial must be on the same scale. God would let neither man nor saint nor archangel have anything to do with weaving for him a shroud or digging for him a grave. The omnipotent God left his throne in heaven one day, and if the question was asked: “Whither is the King of the Universe going?” the answer was: “I am going to bury Moses.” And the Lord took this mightiest of men to the top of a hill, and the day being clear, Moses ran his eye over the magnificent range of country. Here, the valley of Esdraelon, where the final battle of all nations is to be fought; and yonder, the mountains Hermon and Lebanon and Gerizim, and hills of Judea; and the village of Bethlehem there, and the city of Jericho yonder, and the vast stretch of landscape that almost took the old lawgiver’s breath away as he looked at it. Then, without a pang, as I learn from the statement that the eye of Moses was undimmed and his natural force unabated, God touched the great lawgiver’s eyes and they closed; and his lungs, and they ceased; and his heart, and it stopped; and commanded, saying: “To the skies, thou immortal spirit!” One Divine hand was put against the back of Moses, and the other hand against the pulseless breast, and God laid him softly down on Mount Nebo, and then the lawgiver, lifted in the Almighty’s arms, was carried to the opening of a cave and placed in a crypt, and one stroke of the Divine hand smoothed the features into an everlasting calm, and a rock was rolled to the door, and the only obsequies at which God did all the offices of priest and undertaker and grave-digger and mourner were ended. Was not Miriam, the sister of Moses, doing a good thing, an important thing, a glorious thing, when she watched the boat woven of river plants and made water-tight with asphaltum, carrying its one passenger? Did she not put all the ages of time and of a coming eternity under obligation when she defended her helpless brother from the perils aquatic, reptilian and ravenous? She it was that brought that wonderful babe and his mother together so that he was reared to be the deliverer of his nation, when otherwise, if saved at all from the rushes of the Nile, he would have been only one more of the God-defying Pharaohs; for Princess Thermutis, of the bathing-house, would have inherited the crown of Egypt, and as she had no child of her own, this adopted child would have come to coronation. Had there been no Miriam there would have been no Moses. What a garland for faithful sisterhood! For how many a lawgiver, for how many a hero, for how many a deliverer, and for how many a saint are the world and the Church indebted to a watchful, loving, faithful, godly sister? Come up out of the farmhouses, come up out of the inconspicuous homes! Come up from the banks of the Hudson and the Penobscot and the Savannah and the Mobile and the Mississippi and all the other Niles of America, and let us see you, the Miriams who watched and protected the leaders in law and medicine and merchandise and art and agriculture and mechanics and religion! If I should ask all these physicians and attorneys and merchants and ministers of religion and successful men of all professions and trades who are indebted to an elder sister for good influences, and perhaps for an education or a prosperous start, to rise, they would rise by the hundreds. God knows how many of our Greek lexicons and how much of our schooling was paid for by money that would otherwise have gone for the replenishing of a sister’s wardrobe. While the brother sailed off for a resounding sphere, the sister watched him from the banks of self-denial. Miriam was the oldest of the family; Moses and Aaron, her brothers, are younger. Oh, the power of the elder sister to help decide the brother’s character for usefulness and for heaven! She can keep off from her brother more evils than Miriam could have driven back water-fowl or crocodile from the ark of bulrushes. The elder sister decides the direction in which the cradle-boat shall sail. By gentleness, by good sense, by Christian principle, she can turn it toward the palace, not of a wicked Pharaoh, but of a holy God; and a brighter princess than Thermutis shall lift him out of peril, even religion, whose ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. The elder sister, how much the world owes her! Born while yet the family was in limited circumstances, she had to hold and take care of her younger brothers. And if there is anything that excites my sympathy it is a little girl lugging around a great fat child, and getting her ears boxed because she cannot keep him quiet. By the time she gets to young womanhood she is pale and worn out, and her attractiveness has been sacrificed on the altar of sisterly fidelity, and she is consigned to celibacy, and society calls her by an ungallant name, but in heaven they call her Miriam. In most families the two most undesirable places in the record of births are the first and the last, the first because she is worn out with the cares of a home that cannot afford to hire help, and the last because she is spoiled as a pet. Among the grandest equipages that sweep through the streets of heaven will be those occupied by sisters who sacrificed themselves for brothers. They will have the finest of the Apocalyptic white horses, and many who on earth looked down upon them will have to turn out to let them pass. Let sisters not begrudge the time and care bestowed on a brother. It is hard to believe that any boy that you know so well as your brother can ever turn out anything very useful. Well, he may not be a Moses. There is only one of that kind needed for six thousand years. But I tell you what your brother will be—either a blessing or a curse to society, a candidate for happiness or wretchedness. He will, like Moses, have the choice between rubies and living coals, and your influence will have much to do with his decision. He may not, like Moses, be the deliverer of a nation, but he may, after your father and mother are gone, be the deliverer of a household. What thousands of homes today are piloted by brothers! There are properties now-well invested and yielding income for the support of sisters and younger brothers, because the elder brother rose to the leadership from the day the father lay down to die. Whatever you do for your brother will come back to you again. If you set him an ill-natured, censorious, unaccommodating example, it will recoil upon you from his own irritated and despoiled nature. If you, by patience with all his infirmities and by nobility of character, dwell with him in the few years of your companionship, you will have your counsels reflected back upon you some day by his splendor of behavior in some crisis where he would have failed but for you. Do not snub him. Do not depreciate his ability. Do not talk discouragingly about his future. Do not let Miriam get down off the bank of the Nile, and wade out and upset the ark of bulrushes. Do not tease him. Brothers and sisters do not consider it any harm to tease. That spirit abroad in the family is one of the meanest and most devilish. There is a teasing that is pleasurable, and is only another form of innocent raillery, but that which provokes and irritates and makes the eye flash with anger is to be reprehended. It would be less blameworthy to take a bunch of thorns and draw them across your sister’s cheek, or to take a knife and draw its sharp edge across your brother’s hand till the blood spurts, for that would damage only the body, but teasing is the thorn and the knife, scratching and lacerating the disposition and the soul. It is the curse of innumerable households that the brothers tease the sisters, and the sisters the brothers. Sometimes it is the color of the hair or the shape of the features or an affair of the heart. Sometimes it is by revealing a secret, or by a suggestive look or a guffaw or an “Ahem!” Tease! Tease! Tease! For God’s sake, quit it. Christ says: “He that hateth his brother is a murderer.” Now, when you, by teasing, make your brother or sister hate, you turn him or her into a murderer or murderess. Do not let jealousy ever touch a sister’s soul, as it so often does, because her brother gets more honor or more means. Even Miriam, the heroine of the text, was struck by that evil passion of jealousy. She had possessed unlimited influence over Moses, and now he marries, and not only so, but marries a black woman from Ethiopia, and Miriam is so disgusted and outraged at Moses, first because he had married at all, and next, because he had practiced miscegenation, that she is drawn into a frenzy, and then begins to turn white, and gets white as a corpse, and then whiter than a corpse. Her complexion is like chalk; the fact is, she has the Egyptian leprosy. And now the brother whom she had defended on the Nile comes to her rescue in a prayer that brings her restoration. Let there be no room in all your house for jealousy, either to sit or stand. It is a leprous abomination. Your brother’s success, sister! is your success. His victories will be your victories; for, while Moses, the brother, led the vocal music after the crossing of the Red Sea, Miriam, the sister, with two glittering sheets of brass uplifted and flashing in the sun, led the instrumental music, clapping the cymbals till the last frighted neigh of pursuing cavalry horse was smothered in the wave, and the last Egyptian helmet went under. How strong it makes a family when all the sisters and brothers stand together, and what an awful wreck when they disintegrate, quarreling about a father’s will and making the surrogate’s office horrible with their wrangle. Better when you were little children in the nursery that with your playhouse mallets you had accidentally killed each other fighting across your cradle, than that, having come to the age of maturity, and having in your veins and arteries the blood of the same father and mother, you fight each other across the parental grave in the cemetery. If you only knew it your interests are identical. Of all the families of the earth that ever stood together, perhaps the most conspicuous is the family of the Rothschilds. As Mayer Anselm Rothschild was about to die in 1812, he gathered his children about him, Anselm, Solomon, Nathan, Charles and James, and made them promise that they would always be united on ‘Change. Obeying that injunction they have been the mightiest commercial power on earth, and at the raising or lowering of their sceptre, nations have risen or fallen. That illustrates how much on a large scale, and for selfish purposes, a united family may achieve. But suppose that, instead of a magnitude of dollars as the object, it be doing good and making salutary impression and raising this sunken world, how much more ennobling! Sister, you do your part, and brother will do his part. If Miriam will lovingly watch the boat on the Nile, Moses will help her when leprous disasters strike. When father and mother are gone, and they soon will be, if they have not already made exit, the sisterly and fraternal bond will be the only ligament that will hold the family together. How many reasons for your deep and unfaltering affection for each other! Rocked in the same cradle; bent over by the same motherly tenderness; toiled for by the same father’s weary arm and aching brow; with common inheritance of all the family secrets; and with names given you by parents who started you with the highest hopes for your happiness and prosperity—I charge you, be loving and kind and forgiving. If the sister see that the brother never wants a sympathizer, the brother will see that the sister never wants an escort. Oh, if the sisters of a household knew through what terrific temptations their brother goes in this city life, they would hardly sleep nights in the anxiety for his salvation! And if you would make a holy conspiracy of kind words and gentle attentions and earnest prayers, it would save his soul from death and hide a multitude of sins. But let the sister dash off in one direction of discipleship of the world, and the brother flee off in another direction in dissipation, and it will not be long before they will meet again at the iron gate of Despair, their blistered feet in the hot ashes of a consumed lifetime. Alas, that brothers and sisters, though living together for years, very often do not know each other, and that they see only the imperfections and none of the virtues! General Bauer, of the Russian cavalry, had in early life wandered off in the army, and the family supposed he was dead. After he gained a fortune he encamped one day in Husam, his native place, and made a banquet, and among the great military men who were to dine, he invited a plain miller and his wife, who lived near by, and who, affrighted, came, fearing some harm would be done them. The miller and his wife were placed one on each side of the general at the table. The general asked the miller all about his family, and the miller said that he had two brothers and a sister. “No other brothers?” “My younger brother went off with the army many years ago, and no doubt was long ago killed.” Then the general said: “Soldiers, I am this man’s younger brother who, he thought, was dead.” And how loud was the cheer, and how warm was the embrace! Brother and sister, you need as much of an introduction to each other as they did. You do not know each other. You think your brother is grouty and cross and queer, and he thinks you are selfish and proud and unlovely. Both wrong! That brother will be a prince in some woman’s eyes, and that sister a queen in the estimation of some man. That brother is a magnificent fellow, and that sister is a morning in June. Come, let me introduce you: “Moses, this is Miriam.” “Miriam, this is Moses.” Add seventy-five per cent. to your present appreciation of each other, and when you kiss good-morning do not stick up your cold cheek, wet from the recent washing, as though you hated to touch each other’s lips in affectionate caress. Let it have all the fondness and cordiality of a loving sister’s kiss. Make yourselves as agreeable and helpful to each other as possible, remembering that soon you part. The few years of boyhood and girlhood will soon slip by, and you will go out to homes of your own, and into the battle with the world and amid ever-changing vicissitudes, and on paths crossed with graves, and up steps hard to climb, and through shadowy ravines. But oh, my God and Saviour, may the terminus of the journey be the same as the start, namely, at father’s and mother’s knee, if they have inherited the kingdom! Then, as in boyhood and girlhood days we rushed in after the day’s absence with much to tell of exciting adventure, and father and mother enjoyed the recital as much as we who made it, so we shall on the hillside of heaven rehearse to them all the scenes of our earthly expedition, and they shall welcome us home, as we say: “Father and mother, we have come, and brought our children with us.” The old revival hymn described it with glorious repetition: Brothers and sisters there will meet, Brothers and sisters there will meet, Brothers and sisters there will meet, Will meet to part no more. I read of a child in the country who was detained at a neighbor’s house on a stormy night by some fascinating stories that were being told him, and then looked out and saw it was so dark he did not dare go home. The incident impressed me the more because in my childhood I had much the same experience. The boy asked his comrades to go with him, but they dared not. It got later and later—seven o’clock, eight o’clock, nine o’clock. “Oh,” he said, “I wish I were home!” As he opened the door the last time a blinding flash of the storm and a deafening roar overcame him. But after a while he saw in the distance a lantern, and lo! his brother was coming to fetch him home, and the lad stepped out and with swift feet hastened on to his brother, who took him home, where they were so glad to greet him, and where, for a long time, supper had been waiting. So may it be when the night of death comes and our earthly friends cannot go with us, and we dare not go alone; may our brother, our Elder Brother, our Friend closer than a brother, come out to meet us with the light of the promises, which shall be a lantern to our feet, and then we will go in to join our loved ones waiting for us, supper all ready, the marriage supper of the Lamb! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 36: 034. THE SHEIK'S DAUGHTER ======================================================================== The Sheik’s Daughter Exodus 3:1 : “Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian.” In the southeastern part of Arabia a man is sitting by a well. It is an and country, and water is scarce, so that a well is of great value, and flocks and herds are driven vast distances to have their thirst slaked. Jethro, a Midianite sheik and priest, was so fortunate as to have seven daughters; and they are practical girls, and yonder they come driving the sheep and cattle and camels of their father to the watering. They lower the buckets and then pull them up, the water plashing on the stones and chilling their feet, and the troughs are filled. Who is that man out there sitting unconcerned and looking on? Why does he not come and help the women in this hard work of drawing water? But no sooner have the dry lips and panting nostrils of the flocks begun to cool a little in the brimming trough of the well, than some rough Bedouin shepherds break in upon the scene, and with clubs and shouts drive back the animals that were drinking, and affright these girls until they fly in retreat, and the flocks of these ill-mannered shepherds are driven to the troughs, taking the places of the other flocks. Now that man sitting by the well begins to color up, and his eye flashes with indignation, and all the gallantry of his nature is aroused. It is Moses, who naturally had a quick temper anyhow, as he demonstrated on one occasion when he saw an Egyptian oppressing an Israelite and gave the Egyptian a sudden clip and buried him in the sand, and as he showed afterward when he broke all the Ten Commandments at once by shattering the two granite slabs on which the law was written. But the injustice of this treatment of the seven girls sets him on fire with wrath, and he takes this shepherd by the throat, and pushes back another shepherd till he falls over the trough, and aims a stunning blow between the eyes of another, as he cries, “Begone, you villains!” and he hoots and roars at the sheep and cattle and camels of these invaders and drives them back; and having cleared the place of the desperadoes, he told the seven girls of this Midianite sheik to gather their flocks together and bring them again to the watering. You ought to see a fight between the shepherds at a well in the Orient as I saw it in December, 1889. There were here a group of rough men who had driven the cattle many miles, and here another group who had driven their cattle as many miles. Who should have precedence? Such clashing of buckets! Such hooking of horns! Such kicking of hoofs! Such vehemence in a language I fortunately could not understand! Now the sheep with a peculiar mark across their woolly backs were at the trough, and now the sheep of another mark. It was one of the most exciting scenes I ever witnessed. An old book describes one of these contentions at an Eastern well when it says: “One day the poor men, the widows and the orphans met together and were driving their camels and their flocks to drink, and were all standing by the water-side. Daji came up and stopped them all, and took possession of the water for his master’s cattle. Just then an old woman belonging to the tribe of Abs came up and accosted him in a suppliant manner, saying, ‘Be so good, Master Daji, as to let my cattle drink. They are all the property I possess and I live by their milk. Pity my flock, have compassion on me. Grant my request and let them drink.’ Then came another old woman and addressed him: ‘O, Master Daji, I am a poor, weak old woman, as you see. Time has dealt hardly with me. It has aimed its arrows at me, and its daily and nightly calamities have destroyed all my men. I have lost my children and my husband, and since then I have been in great distress. These goats or cattle are all that I possess. Let them drink, for I live on the milk that they produce. Pity my forlorn state. I have no one to tend them. Therefore, grant my supplication and of thy kindness let them drink.’ But in this case the brutal slave, so far from granting this humble request, smote the woman to the ground.” A like scrimmage has taken place at the well in the triangle of Arabia between the Bedouin shepherds and Moses championing the cause of the seven daughters who had driven their father’s flocks to the watering. One of these girls, Zipporah, her name meaning “little bird,” was fascinated by this heroic behavior of Moses; for, however timid woman herself may be, she always admires courage in a man. Zipporah became the bride of Moses, one of the mightiest men of all the centuries. Zipporah little thought that that morning as she helped drive her father’s flocks to the well, she was splendidly deciding her own destiny. Had she stayed in the tent or house while the other six daughters of the sheik tended to their herds, her life would probably have been a tame and uneventful life in the solitudes. But her industry, her fidelity to her father’s interest, her spirit of helpfulness brought her into league with one of the grandest characters of all history. They met at that famous well, and while she admired the courage of Moses, he admired the filial behavior of Zipporah. The fact that it took the seven daughters to drive the flocks to the well implies that they were immense flocks, and that her father was a man of wealth. What was the use of Zipporah’s bemeaning herself with work when she might have reclined on the hillside near her father’s tent, and plucked buttercups, and dreamed out romances, and sighed idly to the winds, and wept over imaginary songs to the brooks. No; she knew that work was honorable, and that every girl ought to have something to do, and so she starts with the bleating and lowing and bellowing and neighing droves to the well for the watering. Around every home there are flocks and droves of cares and anxieties, and every daughter of the family, though there be seven, ought to be doing her part to take care of the flocks. In many households, not only is Zipporah, but all her sisters, without practical and useful employments. Many of them are waiting for fortunate and prosperous matrimonial alliance, but some lounger like themselves will come along, and after counting the large number of father Jethro’s sheep and camels will make proposal that will be accepted; and neither of them having done anything more practical than to chew chocolate caramels, the two nothings will start on the road of life together, every step more and more a failure. That daughter of the Midianitish sheik will never find her Moses. Girls of America! imitate Zipporah. Do something practical. Do something helpful. Do something well. Many have fathers with great flocks of absorbing duties, and such a father needs help in home or office or field. Go out and help him with the flocks. The reason that so many men now condemn themselves to unaffianced and solitary life is because they cannot support the modern young woman, who rises at half-past ten in the morning and retires at midnight, one of the trashiest of novels in her hands most of the time between the late rising and the late retiring—a thousand of them not worth one Zipporah. There is a question that every father and mother ought to ask the daughter at breakfast or tea table, and that all the daughters of the wealthy sheik ought to ask each other: “What would you do if the family fortune should fail, if sickness should prostrate the breadwinner, if the flocks of Jethro should be destroyed by a sudden incursion of wolves and bears and hyenas from the mountain? What would you do for a living? Could you support yourself? Can you take care of an invalid mother or brother or sister as well as yourself?” Yea, bring it down to what any day might come to a prosperous family. “Can you cook a dinner if the servants should make a strike for higher wages and leave that morning?” Every minute of every hour of every day of every year there are families flung from prosperity into hardship, and alas! if in such exigency the seven daughters of Jethro can do nothing but sit around and cry and wait for some one to come and hunt them up a situation for which they have no qualification. Get at something useful; get at it right away! My friend and Washingtonian townsman, W. W. Corcoran, did a magnificent thing when he built and endowed the “Louise Home” for the support of the unfortunate aristocracy of the South—the people who once had everything but have come to nothing. We want another W. W. Corcoran to build a “Louise Home” for the unfortunate aristocracy of the North. But institutions like that in every city of the land could not take care of one-half of the unfortunate aristocracy of the North and South, whose large fortunes have failed, and who, through lack of acquaintance with any style of work, cannot now earn their own bread. There needs to be peaceful, yet radical revolution among most of the prosperous homes of America, by which the elegant do-nothings may be transformed into practical do-somethings. Let useless women go to work and gather the flocks. Come, Zipporah, let me introduce you to Moses! But you do not mean that this man affianced to this country girl was the great Moses of history, do you? You do not mean that he was the man who afterward wrought such wonders? Surely, you do not mean the man whose staff dropped, wriggled into a serpent, and then, clutched, stiffened again into a staff? You do not mean the challenger of Egyptian thrones and palaces? You do not mean him who struck the rock so hard it wept in a stream for thirsty hosts? Surely, you do not mean the man who stood alone with God on the quaking Sinaitic ranges; not him to whom the Red Sea was surrendered? Yes, the same Moses who afterward rescued a nation, defending the seven daughters of the Midianitish sheik. Why, do you not know that this is the way men and women get prepared for special work. The wilderness of Arabia was the law school, the theological seminary, the university of rock and sand, from which he graduated for a mission that will balk seas, and drown armies, and lift the lantern of illumined cloud by night, and start the workmen with bleeding backs among Egyptian brick-kilns toward the pasture lands that flow with milk and the trees of Canaan dripping with honey. Gracious God, teach all the people this lesson. You must go into humiliation and retirement and hidden closets of prayer if you are to be fitted for special usefulness. How did John the Baptist get prepared to become a forerunner of Christ? Show me his wardrobe. It will be hung with silken socks and embroidered robes and attire of Tyrian purple? Show me his dining table. On it the tankards ablush with the richest wines of the vineyards of Engedi, and rarest birds that were ever caught in net, and sweetest venison that ever dropped antlers before the hunter? No; we are distinctly told “the same John had his raiment of camels’ hair”—not the fine hair of the camel which we call camlet, but the long, coarse hair such as beggars in the East wear—and his only meat was of insects, the green locust, about two inches long, roasted, a disgusting food. These insects were caught and the wings and legs torn off, and they were stuck on wooden spits and turned before the fire. The Bedouins pack them in salt and carry them in sacks. What a menu for John the Baptist! Through what deprivation he came to what exaltation! And you will have to go down before you go up. From the pit into which his brothers threw him, and the prison in which his enemies incarcerated him, Joseph rose to be Egyptian prime minister. Elijah, who was to be the greatest of all the ancient prophets, Elijah, who made King Ahab’s knees knock together with the prophecy that the dogs would be his only undertakers; Elijah, whose one prayer brought more than three years of drought, and whose other prayer brought drenching showers; the man who wrapped up his cape of sheepskin into a roll and with it cut a path through raging Jordan for just two to pass over; the man who with wheel of fire rode over death and escaped into the skies without mortuary disintegration; the man who, hundreds of years after, was called out of the eternities to stand beside Jesus Christ on Mount Tabor when it was ablaze with the splendors of transfiguration—this man could look back to the time when voracious and filthy ravens were his only caterers. You see John Knox preaching the coronation sermon of James VI, and arraigning Queen Mary and Lord Darnley in a public discourse at Edinburgh, and telling the French ambassador to go home and call his king a murderer; John Knox making all Christendom feel his moral power, and at his burial the Earl of Morton saying, “Here lieth a man who in his life never feared the face of man.” Where did John Knox get much of his schooling for such resounding and everlasting achievement? He got it while in chains pulling at the boat’s oar in French captivity. Michael Faraday, one of the greatest masters in the scientific world, did not begin by lecturing in the university. He began by washing bottles in the laboratory of Humphrey Davy. So the privations and hardships of your life may on a smaller scale be the preface and introduction to usefulness and victory. See also in this call of Moses that God has a great memory. Four hundred years before he had promised the deliverance of the oppressed Israelites of Egypt, The clock of time has struck the hour, and now Moses is called to the work of rescue. Four hundred years is a very long time, but you see God can remember a promise four hundred years as well as you can remember four hundred minutes. Four hundred years includes all your ancestry that you know anything about and all the promises made to them, and we may expect fulfillment in our heart and life of all the blessings predicted to our Christian ancestry centuries ago. You have a dim remembrance, if any remembrance at all, of your great-grandfather, but God sees those who were on their knees in 1598 as well as those on their knees in 1898, and the blessings he promised the former and their descendants have arrived, or will arrive. While piety is not hereditary, it is a grand thing to have had a pious ancestry. So God in this chapter calls up the pedigree of the people whom Moses was to deliver, and Moses is ordered to say to them, “The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob hath sent me unto you.” If that thought be divinely accurate, let me ask, What are we doing by prayer and by a holy life for the redemption of the next four hundred years? Our work is not only with the people of the latter part of the nineteenth century, but with those in the closing of the twentieth century and the closing of the twenty-first century and the closing of the twenty-second century and the closing of the twenty-third century. For four hundred years, if the world continues to swing until that time, or if it drops, then notwithstanding the influence will go on in other latitudes and longitudes of God’s universe. No one realizes how great he is for good or for evil. There are branchings out and rebounds and reverberations and elaborations of influence that cannot be estimated. The fifty or one hundred years of our earthly stay are only a small part of our sphere. The flap of the wing of the destroying angel that smote the Egyptian oppressors, the wash of the Red Sea over the heads of the drowned Egyptians, were all fulfillments of promises four centuries old. And things occur in your life and in mine that we cannot account for. They may be the echoes of what was promised in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Oh, the prolongation of the divine memory! Notice, also, that Moses was eighty years of age when he got this call to become the Israelitish deliverer. Forty years he had lived in palaces as a prince; another forty years he had lived in the wilderness of Arabia. I should not wonder if he had said: “Take a younger man for this work. Eighty winters have exposed my health; eighty summers have poured their heats upon my head. There are the forty years that I spent among the enervating luxuries of a palace, and then followed the forty years of wilderness hardship. I am too old. Let me off. Better call a man in the forties or fifties, and not one who has entered upon the eighties.” Nevertheless, he undertook the work, and if we want to know whether he succeeded, ask the abandoned brick-kilns of Egyptian taskmasters, and the splintered chariot wheels strewn on the beach of the Red Sea, and the timbrels which Miriam clapped for the Israelites passed over and the Egyptians gone under. Do not retire too early. Like Moses, you may have your chief work to do after eighty. It may not be in the high places of the field; it may not be where a strong arm and an athletic foot and a clear vision are required, but there is something for you yet to do. Perhaps it may be to round off the work you have already done; to demonstrate the patience you have been recommending all your lifetime; perhaps to stand a lighthouse at the mouth of the bay to light others into harbor; perhaps to show how glorious a sunset may come after a stormy day. If aged men do not feel strong enough for anything else, let them sit around in our churches and pray, and perhaps in that way they may accomplish more good than they ever did in the meridian of their life. It makes us feel strong to see aged men and women all up and down the pews, their faces showing they have been on mountains of transfiguration. We want in all our churches more men like Moses, men who have been through the deeps and climbed up the shelled beach on the other side. We want aged Jacobs, who have seen ladders which let down heaven into their dreams. We want aged Peters, who have been at Pentecosts, and aged Pauls, who have made Felix tremble. There are here and there those who feel like the woman of ninety years who said to Fontenelle, who was eighty-five years of age, “Death appears to have forgotten us.” “Hush,” said Fontenelle, the wit, putting his finger to his lip. No, my friend you have not been forgotten. You will be called at the right time. Meantime, be holily occupied. Let the aged remember that by increased longevity of the race men are not as old at sixty as they used to be at fifty, not as old at seventy as they used to be at sixty, not as old at eighty as they used to be at seventy. Sanitary precaution better understood; medical science further advanced; laws of health more thoroughly adopted; dentistry continuing for longer time successful mastication; homes and churches and court-rooms and places of business better ventilated—all these have prolonged life, and men and women in the close of this century ought not to retire until at least fifteen years later than in the opening of the century. Do not put the harness off until you have fought a few more battles. Think of Moses starting out for his chief work an octogenarian; forty years of wilderness life after forty years of palace life, yet just beginning. There died, at Hawarden, England, one of the most wonderful men that ever lived since the ages of time began their roll. He was the chief citizen of the whole world. Three times had he practically been king of Great Britain. Again and again coming from the House of Commons, which he had thrilled and overawed in his eloquence, on Saturday, on Sunday morning reading prayers for the people with illumined countenance and brimming eyes and resounding voice, saying, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.” The world has no other such man to lose as Gladstone; the Church had no other such champion to mourn over. I shall never cease to thank God that on Mr. Gladstone’s invitation I visited him at Hawarden, and heard from his own lips his belief in the authenticity of the Holy Scriptures, the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the grandeurs of the world to come. At his table and in the walk through his grounds I was impressed as I was never before, and probably will never be again, with the majesty of a nature all consecrated to God and the world’s betterment. In the presence of such a man, what have those to say who profess to think that our religion is a pusillanimous and weak and cowardly and unreasonable affair? Matchless William E. Gladstone! Still further, watch this spectacle of genuine courage. No wonder when Moses scattered the rude shepherds, he won Zipporah’s heart. What mattered it to Moses whether the cattle of the seven daughters of Jethro were driven from the troughs by the rude herdsmen? Sense of justice fired his courage; and the world wants more of the spirit that will dare almost anything to see others righted. All the time at wells of comfort, at wells of joy, at wells of religion, and at wells of literature there are outrages practised, the wrong herds getting the first water. Those who have the previous right come in last, if they come in at all. Thank God, we have here and there a strong man to set things right! I am so glad that when God has an especial work to do, he has some one ready to accomplish it. Is there a Bible to translate, there is a Wickliffe to translate it; if there is a literature to be energized, there is a Shakespeare to energize it; if there is an error to smite, there is a Luther to smite it; if there is to be a nation freed, there is a Moses to free it. But courage is needed in religion, in literature, in statesmanship, in all spheres; heroics to defend Jethro’s seven daughters and their flocks and put to flight the insolent invaders. And those who do the brave work will win somewhere high reward. The loudest cheer of heaven is to be given “to him that overcometh.” Still further, see in this call of Moses that if God has any especial work for you to do he will find you. There were Egypt and Arabia and Palestine with their crowded population, but the man the Lord wanted was at the southern point of the triangle of Arabia, and he picks him right out, the shepherd who kept the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest and sheik. So God will not find it hard to take you out from the sixteen hundred million of the human race if he wants you for anything especial. There was only just one man qualified. Other men had courage like Moses; other men had some of the talents of Moses; other men had romance in their history, as had Moses; other men were impetuous, like Moses; but no other man had these different qualities in the exact proportion as had Moses; and God, who makes no mistake, found the right man for the right place. Do not fear you will be overlooked, or that when you are wanted God cannot find you. He knows your name, your features, your temperament, and your characteristics, and in what land or city or ward or neighborhood or house you live. He will not have to send out scouts or explorers to find your residence or place of stopping, and when he wants you he will make it as plain that he means you as he made it plain that he needed Moses. He called his name twice, as afterward when he called the great apostle of the Gentiles he called twice, saying “Saul, Saul,” and when he called the troubled housekeeper he called her twice, saying “Martha, Martha,” and when he called the prophet to his mission he called him twice, saying, “Samuel, Samuel,” and now he wants a deliverer he calls twice, saying “Moses, Moses.” Yes, if God has anything for us to do he will call us twice by name. At the first announcement of our name we may think it possible that we misunderstood the sound, but after he calls us twice by name we know he means us as certainly as when he twice spoke the names of Saul or Martha or Samuel or Moses. You see, religion is a tremendous personality. We all have the general call to salvation. We hear it in songs, in sermons, in prayers; we hear it year after year. But after a while, through our own sudden and alarming illness, or the death of a playmate or a schoolmate or a college-mate, or the decease of a business partner, or the demise of a next-door neighbor, we get the especial call to repentance and a new life and eternal happiness, and we know that God means us. Oh, have you noticed this way in which God calls us twice? Two failures of investments; two sicknesses; two persecutions; two bereavements; two disappointments; two disasters. Moses! Moses! Still further notice that the call of Moses was written in letters of fire. On the Sinaitic peninsula there is a thorn bush called the acacia, dry and brittle, and it easily goes down at the touch of the flame. It crackles and turns to ashes very quickly. Moses seeing one of these bushes on fire, goes to look at it. At first, no doubt, it seemed to be a botanical curiosity, burning, yet crumpling no leaf, parting no stem, scattering no ashes. It was a supernatural fire that did no damage to the vegetation. That burning bush was the call. Your call will probably come in letters of fire. Ministers get their call to preach in letters on paper or parchment or typewritten, but it does not amount to much, unless they have already had a call in letters of fire. You will not amount to much in usefulness until somewhere near you find a burning bush. It may be found burning in the hectic flush of your child’s cheek; it may be found burning in business misfortune; it may be found burning in the fire of the world’s scorn or hate or misrepresentation. But hearken to the crackle of the burning bush! What a fascinating and inspiring character, this Moses! How tame all other stories compared with the biography of Moses! From the lattice of her bathing-house on the Nile, Thermutis, daughter of Pharaoh, sees him in the floating cradle of papyrus leaves made water-tight by bitumen; his infantile cry is heard among the marble palaces and princesses hush him with their lullabies; workmen by the roadside drop their work to look on him when as a boy he passed, so beautiful was he; two bowls put before his infant eyes for choice to demonstrate his wisdom, the one bowl containing rubies and the other coals of fire. Sufficiently wise was he to take the gems, but, divinely directed, he took the coals and put them to his mouth, and his tongue was burnt, and he was left a stammerer all his days, so that he declared, in Exodus 4:10, “I am slow of speech and of slow tongue;” on and on until he set firm foot among the crumbling basalt, and his ear was not deafened by the thunderous “Thou shalt not” of Mount Sinai, the man who went to the relief of the Israelites who were scourged because with chopped straw they were required to make firm bricks, the story of their oppression found chiseled on the tomb of Roschere at Thebes; and when the armies were impeded by venomous serpents, sent crates of ibises, the snake-destroying birds, to clear the way so that his host could march straight ahead, thus surprising the enemy, who thought they must take another route to avoid the reptiles; the whole sky an aviary, to drop quails for him and the hosts following: the only man in all ages whom Christ likens to himself; the man of whom it is written, “Jehovah spoke unto Moses face to face as a man speaketh to his friend;” the man who had the most wondrous funeral of all time, the Lord coming down out of heaven to bury him. No human lips to read the service. No choir to chant a psalm. No organ to roll a requiem. No angel alighting upon the scene; but God laying him out for the last sleep; God upturning the earth to receive the saint; God smoothing or banking the dust above the sacred form; God, with farewell and benediction, closing the sublime obsequies of lawgiver, poet and warrior. “And no man knoweth of his sepulcher unto this day.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 37: 035. THE PLAGUE OF CORRUPT LITERATURE ======================================================================== The Plague of Corrupt Literature Exodus 8:6-7 : “And the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt. And the magicians did so with their enchantments, and brought up frogs upon the land of Egypt.” There is almost a universal aversion to frogs, and yet with the Egyptians they were honored, they were sacred, and they were objects of worship while alive, and after death they were embalmed, and today their remains may be found among the sepulchres of Thebes. These creatures, so attractive once to the Egyptians, at divine behest became obnoxious and loathsome, and they went croaking and hopping and leaping into the palace of the king, and into the bread-trays and the couches of the people, and even the ovens, which were not like modern ovens uplifted above the earth and on the side of chimneys, but in ancient Egypt were small holes in the earth with sunken pottery. These were filled with frogs when the housekeepers came to look at them. If a man sat down to eat, a frog alighted on his plate. If he attempted to put on a shoe, it was preoccupied by a frog. If he attempted to put his head upon a pillow, it had been taken possession of by a frog. Frogs high and low and everywhere; loathsome frogs, slimy frogs, besieging frogs, innumerable frogs, great plague of frogs. What made the matter worse, the magicians said there was no miracle in this, and they could by sleight-of-hand produce the same thing, and they seemed to succeed, for by sleight-of-hand, wonders may be wrought. After Moses had thrown down his staff and by miracle it became a serpent, and then he took hold of it and by miracle it again became a staff, the serpent-charmers imitated the same thing, and knowing that there were serpents in Egypt which by a peculiar pressure on the neck would become as rigid as a stick of wood, they seemed to change the serpent into the staff, and then, throwing it down, the staff became a serpent. So likewise these magicians tried to imitate the plague of the frogs and perhaps by smell of food attracting a great number of them to a certain point, or by shaking them out from a hidden place, the magicians sometimes seemed to accomplish the same miracle. While these magicians made the plague worse, none of them tried to make it better. “Frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt, and the magicians did so with their enchantments, and brought up frogs upon the land of Egypt.” Now that plague of frogs has come back upon the earth. It is abroad today. It is smiting this nation. It comes in the shape of corrupt literature. These frogs hop into the store, the shop, the office, the banking-house, the factory—into the home, into the cellar, into the garret, on the drawing-room table, on the shelf of the library. While the teacher’s face is turned the other way, the lad is reading the bad book. One of these frogs hops upon the page. While the young woman is reading the forbidden novelette, after retiring at night, reading by gas-light, one of these frogs leaps upon the page. Indeed, they have hopped upon the news-stands of the country, and the mails at the post-office shake out in the letter trough hundreds of them. The plague has taken, at different times, possession of this country. It is one of the most loathsome, one of the most frightful, one of the most ghastly of the ten plagues of our modern cities. There is a vast number of books and newspapers printed and published which ought never to see the light. They are filled with a pestilence that makes the land swelter with a moral epidemic. The literature of a nation decides the fate of a nation. Good books, good morals. Bad books, bad morals. I begin with the lowest of all the literature, that which does not pretend to be respectable—from cover to cover a blotch of leprosy. There are many whose entire business it is to dispose of that kind of literature. They display it before the schoolboy on his way home. They get the catalogues of colleges and young ladies’ seminaries, take the names and the post-office addresses, and send their advertisements and their circulars and their pamphlets and their books to every one of them. The president of one of the finest young ladies’ seminaries on the Atlantic coast being absent one day, one of these miscreants came in and secured a catalogue. The president returning and hearing of it, had his fears excited, and he reported the case to official authority. For two weeks that man was hunted, and he was hunted down, and in his possession were found not only the catalogue of the institution, but the catalogues of fourteen colleges, and in eight of them he had already done the damning work. In the possession of these dealers in impure literature were found nine hundred thousand names and post-office addresses, to whom it was thought it might be profitable to send these corrupt things. In the year 1873 there were one hundred and sixty-five establishments engaged in publishing salacious literature. From one publishing house there went out twenty different styles of corrupt books. Although twenty-four tons of salacious literature have been destroyed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, still there is enough of it left in this country to bring down upon us the thunderbolts of an incensed God. What has been very remarkable is the fact that more of those publishers of impure literature lived in the city of Brooklyn than any other city—lived here, did business in New York, had their factories, some on this side the river, some on the other side the river, but they dared to have their residences in this City of Churches. All of them now driven out, or for the most part driven out, these vultures will alight in other fields, and they must be pursued and exterminated from Christendom. In the year 1868 the field had become so extensive in this country that the Congress of the United States passed a law forbidding the transmission of impure literature through the mails, but there were large loops in that law through which criminals might crawl out, and the law was a dead failure—that law of 1868. But in 1873 another law was passed by the Congress of the United States against the transmission of corrupt literature through the mails—a grand law, a potent law, a Christian law—and under that law multitudes of these scoundrels have been arrested, their property confiscated, and they themselves thrown into the penitentiaries where they belonged. Against that good and wholesome and Christian law no good man could make any objection; but it stirred up the animosity and the indignation of a great many people, and they sent up a petition to Congress to compel that body to repeal that good, Christian law. The petition rolled up to the door of the House of Representatives asking for the repeal of the law, and the head name on the petition was that of the most conspicuous infidel in America. He appealed to the House of Representatives with others. That body refused to grant the petition. Then that infidel made application to the Senate of the United States, and that body also refused, so that both Houses of Congress rejected the petition. That application for the repeal of that good law against the transmission of corrupt and obscene literature through the mails of the United States, only demonstrates what you and I already know, that the same infidelity which wipes its feet on the Bible and spits in the face of God is the worst foe of American society. I do not wonder that when an atheist applied to the Mayor of Toronto for permission to lecture in that city, the Mayor of Toronto replied: “No, sir; you may have no God in the United States, but we have one up here in Canada, and you shall not stand here and blaspheme him.” One of the filthiest creatures who had been sending corrupt literature through the mails of the United States was arrested, tried, condemned, and put in the penitentiary. A petition went to President Hayes asking him to pardon the culprit. President Hayes looked over the whole case, saw there was no excuse for the infamy, that there were no mitigating circumstances, and he declined to pardon the miscreant. Then a company of what are called “Liberalists” got together in a meeting and passed a resolution of “deepest sympathy”—these were the two words—”deepest sympathy” for that culprit, and the resolution was offered by an infidel, and the resolution was passed amid great acclamation of the people present. Ah! my friends, the day will come when it will be demonstrated—and if no one else will undertake the work, I will—that while Christianity is the mother of all the virtues, Infidelity is the foster-mother of all the vices of this century, not one excepted. Any man who could ask for the repeal of that good law against the sending of corrupt literature through the mails of the United States, any man who could do that is the enemy of every decent home in America, and has offered an insult to every clean-minded man and every pure-hearted woman in Christendom. Now, my friends, how are we to war against this corrupt literature? and how are the frogs of this Egyptian plague to be slain? First of all, by the prompt and inexorable execution of the law. Let all good postmasters and United States district attorneys and detectives and reformers concert in their action to stop this plague. When Sir Rowland Hill spent his life in trying to secure a low rate of postage not only for England, but for all the world and to open the blessings of the post-office to all honest business and to all messages of charity and kindness and affection, for all healthful intercommunication, he did not mean to make vice easy or to fill the mail-bags of the United States with the scabs of such a leprosy. It ought not to be in the power of every bad man who can raise a one-cent stamp for a circular, or a two-cent stamp for a letter, to blast a man or destroy a home. I was glad when I saw how one wealthy victim pounced upon the culprit who was desecrating our magnificent post-office system. Because the culprit lived on Fifth avenue instead of Elm street only made the matter more outrageous. The New York post-office never did better work than when they detailed fifty policemen to watch the letter-boxes, and the police department of New York city never did better work than when they detailed fifty detectives to make summary arrests. The postal service of this country must be clean, must be kept clean, and we must all understand that the swift retributions of the United States government hover over every violation of the letter-box. There are thousands of men and women in this country, some for personal gain, some through innate depravity, some through a spirit of revenge, who wish to use this great avenue of convenience and intelligence for purposes revengeful, salacious, and diabolic. Wake up the law. Wake up all its penalties. Let every court-room on this subject be a Sinai thunderous and aflame. Let the convicted offenders be sent for the full term to Sing Sing or Harrisburg, and let the people by their votes hurl that Governor from his chair who shall dare to pardon before the expiration of the sentence. I am not talking about what cannot be done. I am talking now about what is being done. A great many of the printing-presses that gave themselves entirely to the publication of salacious literature have been stopped, or have gone into business less obnoxious. What has thrown off, what has kept off the rail-trains of this country for some time back nearly all the leprous periodicals? Those of us who have been on the rail-trains have noticed a great change in the last few months and the last year or two. Why have nearly all those indecent periodicals been kept off the rail-trains for some time back? Who effected it? These societies for the purification of railroad literature gave warning to the publishers and warning to railroad companies, and warning to conductors, and warning to newsboys, to keep the infernal stuff off the trains. Cleveland and Rock Island and Ann Arbor and other cities have successfully prohibited the most of that literature even from going on the news-stands. Terror has seized upon the publishers and the dealers in impure literature from the fact that over six hundred arrests have been made, and the aggregate time for which the convicted have been sentenced to the prison is over one hundred and fifty years, and from the fact that over one million three hundred thousand of their circulars have been destroyed, and the business is not as profitable as it used to be. How have so many of the news-stands of our great cities been purified? How has so much of this iniquity been balked? By moral suasion? Oh, no! You might as well go into a jungle of the East Indies and pat a cobra on the neck, and with profound argument try to persuade it that it is morally wrong to bite and to sting and to poison anything. The only answer to your argument would be an uplifted head and a hiss, and a sharp, reeking tooth struck into your arteries. The only argument for a cobra is a club or a shot-gun, and the only argument for these dealers in impure literature is the clutch of the police and bean soup in a penitentiary. The law! The law! I invoke to consummate the work that is so grandly begun! Another way in which we are to drive back this plague of Egyptian frogs is by filling the minds of our boys and girls with a healthful literature. I do not mean to say that all the books and newspapers in our families ought to be religious books and newspapers, or that every song ought to be sung to the tune of “Old Hundred.” I have no sympathy with the attempt to make the young old. I would rather join in a crusade to keep the young young. Boyhood and girlhood must not be abbreviated. But there are good books, good histories, good biographies, good works of fiction, good books of all styles with which we are to fill the minds of the young, so that there will be no more room for the useless and the vicious than there is room for chaff in a bushel measure which is already filled with Michigan wheat. Why are fifty per cent. of the criminals in the jails and penitentiaries of the United States today under twenty-one years of age? Many of them under seventeen, under sixteen, under fifteen, under fourteen, under thirteen. Walk along one of the corridors of the Tombs prison in New York and look for yourselves. Bad books, bad newspapers, bewitched them as soon as they got out of the cradle. Beware of all those stories which end wrong. Beware of all those books which make the road that ends in perdition seem to end in Paradise. Do not glorify the dirk and the pistol. Do not call the desperado brave or the libertine gallant. Teach our young people that if they go down into the swamps and marshes to watch the jack-o’-lanterns dance on the decay and rottenness, they will catch malaria and death. “Oh!” says some one, “I am a business man, and I have no time to examine what my children read. I have no time to inspect the books that come into my household.” If your children were threatened with typhoid fever, would you have time to go for the doctor? Would you have time to watch the progress of the disease? Would you have time for the funeral? In the presence of my God I warn you of the fact that your children are threatened with moral and spiritual typhoid, and that unless the thing be stopped, it will be to them funeral of body, funeral of mind, funeral of soul. Three funerals in one day. My word is to this vast multitude of young people: Do not touch, do not borrow, do not buy a corrupt book or a corrupt picture. A book will decide a man’s destiny for good or for evil. The book you read yesterday may have decided you for time and for eternity, or it may be a book that may come into your possession to-morrow. A good book—who can exaggerate its power? Benjamin Franklin said that his reading of Cotton Mather’s “Essays to Do Good,” in childhood gave him holy aspirations for all the rest of his life. George Law, the millionaire, declared that a biography he read in childhood gave him all his subsequent prosperities. A clergyman, many years ago, passing to the far West, stopped at a hotel. He saw a woman copying something from Doddridge’s “Rise and Progress.” It seemed that she had borrowed the book, and there were some things she wanted especially to remember. The clergyman had in his satchel a copy of Doddridge’s “Rise and Progress,” and so he made her a present of it. Thirty years passed on. The clergyman came that way and he asked where the woman was, whom he had seen long ago. They said: “She lives yonder in that beautiful house.” He went there and said to her: “Do you remember me?” She said: “No, I do not.” He said: “Do you remember a man gave you Doddridge’s ‘Rise and Progress’ thirty years ago?” “Oh yes; I remember. That book saved my soul. I loaned the book to all my neighbors, and they read it and they were converted to God, and we had a revival of religion which swept through the whole community. We built a church and called a pastor. You see that spire yonder, don’t you? That church was built as the result of that book you gave me thirty years ago.” Oh, the power of a good book! But, alas! for the influence of a bad book. John Angel James, than whom England never had a holier minister, stood in his pulpit at Birmingham and said “Twenty-five years ago a lad loaned to me an infamous book. He would loan it only fifteen minutes and then I had to give it back; but that book has haunted me like a specter ever since. I have in agony of soul, on my knees before God, prayed that he would obliterate from my soul the memory of it; but I shall carry the damage of it until the day of my death.” The assassin of Sir William Russell declared that he got the inspiration for his crime by reading what was then a new and popular novel, “Jack Sheppard.” Homer’s “Iliad” made Alexander the warrior. Alexander said so. The story of Alexander made Julius Caesar and Charles XII both men of blood. Have you in your pocket or in your trunk, or in your desk at business a bad book, a bad picture, a bad pamphlet? In God’s name I warn you to destroy it. I had one book in my library of which I have never thought with any comfort. It was an infidel book, which I bought for the purpose of finding out the arguments against Christianity. A gentleman in my library one day said, “Can I borrow that book?” I said, “Certainly.” That book came back with some passages marked as having especially impressed him, and when I heard that he had gone down in a shipwreck off Cape Hatteras I asked myself the question, “I wonder if anything he saw in that book which he borrowed from me could have affected his eternal destiny?” Have the courage of the young man who carrying a large package of infidel books and tracts out toward his village felt the burden getting heavy and his knees knocked together. He sat down to rest. He could not understand why the burden should bear him down. He shouldered it again and started on, but was sickened with it. His knees knocked together again. He could not go on. He sat down to rest. The third time he shouldered the burden and it seemed heavier, and heavier, until at last he threw it down, ripped open the bundle, tore up the infidel tracts and infidel books and scattered the fragments to the winds! Another way in which we shall fight back this corrupt literature and kill the frogs of Egypt is by rolling over them the Christian printing-press, which shall give plenty of healthful reading to all adults. All these men and women are reading men and women. We see so many books we do not understand what a book is. Stand it on end. Measure it, the height of it, the depth of it, the length of it, the breadth of it. You cannot do it. Examine the paper and estimate the progress made from the time of the impressions on clay, and then on to the bark of trees, and from the bark of trees to papyrus, and from papyrus to the hide of wild beasts, and from the hide of wild beasts on down until the miracles of our modern paper manufacturies, and then see the paper, white and pure as an infant’s soul, waiting for God’s inscription. A book! Examine the type of it. Examine the printing of it and see the progress from the time when Solon’s laws were written on oak planks and Hesiod’s poems were written on tables of lead, and the Sinaitic commands were written on tables of stone, on down to Hoe’s perfecting printing-press. It took all the universities of the past, all the martyr fires, all the civilizations, all the battles, all the victories, all the defeats, all the glooms, all the brightnesses, all the centuries to make it possible. A book! It is the chorus of the ages—it is the drawing-room in which kings and queens and orators and poets and historians and philosophers come out to greet you. If I worshiped anything on earth I would worship that. If I burned incense to any idol, I would build an altar to that. Thank God for good books, healthful books, inspiring books, Christian books, books of men, books of women, Book of God. It is with these good books that we are to overcome corrupt literature. Upon the frogs swoop with these eagles. I depend much for the overthrow of iniquitous literature upon the mortality of books. Even good books have a hard struggle to live. Polybius wrote forty books; only five of them left. Thirty books of Tacitus have perished. Twenty books of Pliny have perished. Livy wrote one hundred and forty books; only thirty-five of them remain. Æschylus wrote one hundred dramas; only seven remain. Euripides wrote over a hundred; only nineteen remain. Varro wrote the biographies of over seven hundred great Romans. All that wealth of biography has perished. If good and valuable books have such a struggle to live, what must be the fate of those that are diseased and corrupt and blasted at the very start? They will die as the frogs when the Lord turned back the plague. The work of Christianization will go on until there will be nothing left but good books, and they will take the supremacy of the world. May you and I live to see the illustrious day! Against every bad pamphlet send a good pamphlet; against every unclean picture send an innocent picture; against every scurrilous song send a Christian song; against every bad book send a good book; and then it will be as it was in ancient Toledo, where the Toletum missals were kept by the saints in six churches, and the sacrilegious Romans demanded that those missals be destroyed, and that the Roman missals be substituted; and the war came on, and I am glad to say that the whole matter having been referred to champions, the champion of the Toletum missals with one blow brought down the champion of the Roman missals. So it will be in our day. The good literature, the Christian literature, in its championship for God and the truth, will bring down the evil literature in its championship for the devil, I feel tingling to the tips of my fingers, and through all the nerves of my body, and all the depths of my soul, the certainty of our triumph. Cheer up, O men and women who are toiling for the purification of society! Toil with your faces in the sunlight. “If God be for us, who, who can be against us?” Lady Hester Stanhope was the daughter of the third Earl Stanhope, and when her relatives were all dead she went to the far East and took possession of a deserted convent. Then she threw up fortresses amid the mountains of Lebanon, and invited to her castle all the poor and the wretched and the forsaken and the forgotten. Her house, her castle was a rest for all the weary. She was a devoted Christian woman and expected that the Lord Jesus Christ would come in person and reign in this world, and she was so entranced with the thought that Christ would come again that it was too much for her brain. She had in her magnificent stables two horses, which she kept all the time groomed and bridled and saddled and caparisoned, so that when the Lord should come he might take one horse and she the other, and they could speed away to Jerusalem, the city of the great King. Of course, it was a fanaticism and a delusion, but there was great beauty in the dream even. O my friends, we need no earthly palfreys groomed and bridled and saddled and caparisoned for our Lord when he comes to put down iniquity. The horse is already in the Heavenly equerry, and the imperial rider is about to mount. “And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow, and a crown was given unto him; and he went forth conquering and to conquer.” Horsemen of Heaven, mount! Cavalrymen of God, ride on! Charge! charge until they shall be hurled back, the black horse of famine, the red horse of carnage, the pale horse of death. Jesus forever! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 38: 036. THE FINGER OF GOD ======================================================================== The Finger of God Exodus 8:19 : “The finger of God.” Pharaoh was sulking in his marble throne room at Memphis. Plague after plague had come, and sometimes the Egyptian monarch was disposed to do better, but at the lifting of each plague, he was as bad as before. The necromancers of the palace, however, were compelled to recognize the divine movement, and after one of the most exasperating plagues of all the series, they cried out in the words of my text: “This is the finger of God,” not the first nor the last time when bad people said a good thing. An old Philadelphia friend visiting me the other day, asked me if I had ever noticed the passage of Scripture from which I today speak. I told him no, and I said right away, “That is a good text for a sermon.” In strange way sometimes God suggests to his servants useful discourse It would be a great book that would give the history of sermons. We all recognize the hand of God, and know it is a mighty hand. You have seen a man keep two or three rubber balls flying in the air, catching and pitching them so that none of them fell to the floor, and do this for several minutes, and you have admired his dexterity; but have you thought how the hand of God keeps thousands and thousands of round worlds vastly larger than our world flying for centuries without letting one fall? Wondrous power and skill of God’s hand! But about that I am not to discourse. My text leads me to speak of less than a fifth of the divine hand. “This is the finger of God.” Only in two other places does the Bible refer to this division of the Omnipotent hand. The rocks on Mount Sinai are basalt and very hard stone. Do you imagine it was a chisel that cut the ten commandments in that basalt? No, in Exodus we read that the tables of stone were “written with the finger of God.” Christ says that he cast out devils with “the finger of God.” The only instance that Christ wrote a word, he wrote not with a pen on parchment, but with his finger on the ground. Yet, though so seldom reference is made in the Bible to a part of God’s hand, if you and I keep our eyes open and our heart right, we will be compelled often to cry out, “This is the finger of God.” To most of us gesticulation is natural. If a stranger accost you on the street and ask you the way to some place, it is as natural as to breathe for you to level your forefinger this way or that. Not one out of a thousand of you would stand with your hands by your side and make no motion with your finger. Whatever you may say with your lips is emphasized and reinforced and translated by your finger. Now, God, in the dear old Book, says to us innumerable things by the way of direction. He plainly tells us the way to go. But in every exigency of our life, if we will only look, we will find a providential gesture and a providential pointing, so that we may confidently say, “This is the finger of God.” Two or three times in my life when perplexed on questions of duty after earnest prayer I have cast lots as to what I should do. In olden times the Lord’s people cast lots. The land of Canaan was divided by lot; the cities were divided among the priests and Levites by lot; Matthias was chosen to the apostleship by lot. Now, casting lots is about the most solemn thing you can do. It should never be done except with solemnity, like that of the last judgment. It is a direct appeal to the Almighty. If, after earnest prayer, you do not seem to get the divine direction, I think you might, without sin, write upon one slip of paper “Yes” and upon another “No,” or some other words appropriate to the case, and then obliterating from your mind the identity of the slips of paper, draw the decision and act upon it. In that case I think you have a right to take that indication as the finger of God. But do not do that except as the last resort, and with a devoutness that leaves absolutely all with God. For much that concerns us we have no responsibility, and we need not make appeal to the Lord for direction. We are not responsible for most of our surroundings; we are not responsible for the country of our birth, nor for whether we are Americans or Norwegians or Scotchmen or Irishmen or Englishmen; we are not responsible for our temperament, be it nervous or phlegmatic, bilious or sanguine; we are not responsible for our features, be they homely or beautiful; we are not responsible for the height or smallness of our stature; we are not responsible for the fact that we are mentally dull or brilliant. For the most of our environments, we have no more responsibility than we have for the mollusks at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. I am very glad that there are many things that we are not responsible for. Do not blame one for being in his manner as cold as an iceberg or nervous as a cat amid a pack of Fourth of July crackers. If you are determined to blame somebody, blame our great-grandfathers, or our great-grandmothers, who died before the Revolutionary War, and who may have had habits depressing and ruinous. There are wrong things about all of us, which make me think that one hundred and fifty years ago there was some terrible crank in our ancestral line. Realize that and it will be a relief, semi-infinite. Let us take ourselves as we are this moment, and then ask, “Which way?” Get all the direction you can from careful and constant study of the Bible, and then look up and look out and look around, and see if you can find the finger of God. It is a remarkable thing that sometimes no one can see that finger but yourself. A year before Abraham Lincoln signed the Proclamation of Emancipation, the White House was thronged with committees and associations, ministers and laymen, advising the President to make that Proclamation. But he waited and waited, amid scoff and anathema, because he did not himself see the finger of God. After awhile, and at just the right time, he saw the divine pointing and signed the Proclamation. The distinguished Confederates, Mason and Slidell, were taken off an English vessel by the United States Government. “Don’t give them up,” shouted all the Northern States. “Let us have war with England rather than surrender them,” was the almost unanimous cry of the North. But William H. Seward saw the finger of God leading in just the opposite direction, and the Confederates were given up, and we avoided a war with England, which at that time would have been the demolition of the United States Government. In other words, the finger of God, as it directs you, may be invisible to everybody else. Follow the divine pointing, as you see it, although the world may call you a fool. There has never been a man or woman who amounted to anything that has not sometimes been called a fool. Nearly all the mistakes that you and I have made have come from our following the pointing of some other finger, instead of the finger of God. But, now, suppose all forms of disaster close in upon a man. Suppose his business collapses. Suppose he buys goods and cannot sell them. There are men of vast wealth who are as rich for heaven as they are for this world, but they are exceptions. If a man grows in grace, it is generally before he gets $100,000, or after he loses them. If a man has plenty of railroad securities and has applied to his banker for more; if the lots he bought have gone up fifty per cent. in value; if he had hard work to get the door of his fireproof safe shut because of the new roll of securities he put in there just before locking up at night; if he be speculating in a falling market, or a rising market, and things take for him a right turn, he does not grow in grace very much that week. Suppose a cold spring or a late autumn or the coming of an epidemic corners a man, and his notes come due and he cannot meet them, and his rent must be paid and there is nothing with which to pay it, and the wages of the employees are due and there is nothing with which to meet that obligation, and the bank will not discount, and the business friends to whom he goes for accommodation are in the same predicament, and he bears up and struggles on, until, after a while, crash goes the whole concern. He stands wondering and saying: “I do not see the meaning of all this; I have done the best I could. God knows I would pay my debts if I could, but here I am hedged in and stopped.” What should that man do in that case? Go to the Scriptures and read the promise about all things working together for good, and kindred passages? That is well. But he needs to do something beside reading the Scriptures. He needs to look for the finger of God that is pointing toward better treasures; that is pointing toward eternal release; that is urging him to higher realms. No human finger ever pointed to the East or West or North or South so certainly as the finger of God is pointing that troubled man to higher and better spiritual resources than he ever enjoyed. I am speaking of whole-souled men. Such men are so broken by calamity that they are humbled and fly to God for relief. Men who have no spirit and never expect anything are not much affected by financial changes. They are as apt to go into the kingdom under one set of circumstances as another. They are dead beats wherever they are. The only way to get rid of them is to lend them a dollar, and you will never see them again. I have tried that plan and it works well. But I am speaking of the effects of misfortune on high-spirited men. Nothing but trial will turn such men from earth to heaven. Do you know what made the great revival of 1857, when more people were converted to God, probably, than in any year since Christ was born? It was the defalcations and bankruptcies which swept American prosperity so flat that it could fall no flatter. It is only through clouds and darkness and whirlwind of disaster such men can see the finger of God. A most interesting, as well as a most useful, study is to watch the pointing of the finger of God. In the Seventeenth Century, South Carolina was yielding resin and turpentine and tar as her chief productions. But Thomas Smith noticed that the ground near his house in Charleston was very much like the places in Madagascar where he had raised rice, and some of the Madagascar rice was sown there and grew so rapidly that South Carolina was led to make rice her chief production. Can you not see the finger of God in that incident? Rev. John Fletcher, of England, many will know, was one of the most useful ministers of the Gospel who ever preached. Before conversion he joined the army and had bought his ticket on the ship for South America. The morning he was to sail someone spilled on him a kettle of hot water, and he was so scalded he could not go. He was very much disappointed, but the ship he was going to sail on went out and was never heard of again. Who can doubt that God was arranging the life of John Fletcher? Was it merely accident that Richard Rodda, a Cornish miner, who was on his knees praying, remained unhurt, though heavy stones fell before him and behind him and on each side of him, and another fell on top of these so as to make a roof over him? F. W. Robertson, the great preacher of Brighton, England, had his life-work decided by the barking of his dog. A neighbor, whose daughter was ill, was disturbed by the barking of that dog one night. This brought the neighbor into communication with Robertson. That acquaintanceship kept him from joining the dragoons, and going to India and spending his life in military service, and reserved him for a pulpit, the influence of which, for Gospelization, will resound for all time and all eternity. Why did not Columbus sink when, in early manhood, he was afloat six miles from the beach with nothing to sustain him till he could swim to land but a boat’s oar? I wonder if his preservation had anything to do with America? Had the storm that diverted the Mayflower from the mouth of the Hudson, for which it was sailing, and sent it ashore at Cape Cod, no Divine supervisal? Does anarchy rule this world, or God? St. Felix escaped martyrdom by crawling through a hole in the wall across which the spiders immediately afterward wove a web. His persecutors saw the hole in the wall, but the spiders’ web put them off the track. A boy was lost by his drunken father, and could not for years find his way home. Nearly grown, he went into a Fulton street prayer-meeting and asked for prayers that he might find his parents. His mother was in the room, and rose, and recognized her long-lost son. Do you say that these things “only happened so?” Tell that to those who do not believe in a God and have no faith in the Bible. Do not tell it to me. I said to an aged minister of much experience, “All the events of my life seem to have been divinely connected. Do you suppose it is so in all lives?” He answered, “Yes, but most people do not notice the divine leadings.” I stand here to say from my own experience that the safest thing in all the world to do is to trust the Lord. I never had a misfortune, or a persecution, or a trial, or a disappointment, however excruciating at the time, that God did not make turn out for my good. My one wish is to follow the divine leading. I want to watch the finger of God. Nations also would do well to watch for the finger of God. What does the cholera scare in America mean? Some say it means that the plague will sweep our land next summer. I do not believe a word of it. There will be no cholera here next summer. Four or five summers ago there were those who said it would surely be here the following summer because it was on the way. But it did not come. The sanitary precautions established here will make next summer unusually healthful. Cholera never starts from the place it stopped the season before, but always starts in the filth of Asia, and if it starts next summer, it will start there again; it will not start from New York quarantine. But it is evident to me that the finger of God is in this cholera scare, and that he is pointing this nation to something higher and better. It has been demonstrated, as never before, that we are in the hands of God. He allowed the plague to come to our very gates and then halted it. The quarantine was right and necessary, but very easily the plague could have leaped the barriers lifted against it. Thanks to the President of the United States, and thanks to the health officers, and thanks to the Thirteenth Regiment, and thanks to all who stood between this evil and our national health, but more than all, and higher than all, thanks to God! Out of that solemnity we ought to pass up to something better than anything that has ever yet characterized us as a nation. We ought to quit our national sins, our Sabbath breaking, and our drunkenness, and our impurities, and our corruptions of all sorts as a people. The tendency is in self-gratulation at our prosperity to forget the mercy of God that has kept us from being blotted out for our crimes, and that still multiplies our temporal prosperities. Forward, and upward! See you not the finger of God in this protecting mercy? I rejoice that there are many encouraging signs for our nation, and one is that this presidential campaign has less malignity and abuse than any presidential campaign since we have been a nation. Turn over to the pictorials and the columns of the political sheets of the presidential excitements all the way back and see what contumely Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe and Jackson went through. Now see the almost entire absence of all that. The political orators, I notice this year, are apt to begin by eulogizing the honesty and good intentions of the opposing candidate, and say that he is better than his party. Instead of vitriol, camomile flowers. That we seem to have escaped the degradation of the usual quadrennial billingsgate is an encouraging fact. Perhaps this betterment may have somewhat resulted from the sadness hovering over the home of one of the candidates, a sadness in which the whole nation sympathizes. Perhaps we have been so absorbed in paying honors to Christopher Columbus that we have forgotten to anathematize the prominent men of the present. No man in this country is fully honored until he is dead. Whatever be the reasons, this nation has escaped many of the horrors that ordinarily accompany the presidential contest. But let us not pause too long in hilarity about the present and forget the fact that there are not only temporal possibilities far greater than those attained, but higher moral and religious possibilities. The God of our fathers is the God of their children, and his finger points us to a higher national career than many have yet suspected. For our churches, our schools, our colleges, our institutions of mercy, the best days are yet to come. But notice that this finger of God, almost always and in almost everything, points forward and not backward. All the way through the Bible, the lamb and pigeon on the altar, the pillar of fire poised above the wilderness, peace offering, sin offering, trespass offering, fingers of Joseph and Isaac and Joshua and David and Isaiah and Micah and Ezekiel, all together made the one finger of God pointing to the human, the divine, the gracious, the glorious, the omnipotent, the gentle, the pardoning and suffering and atoning Christ. And now the same finger of God is pointing the world upward to the same Redeemer and forward to the time of his universal domination. My hearers, get out of the habit of looking back and looking down and look up and look forward. It is useful once in awhile to look back, but you had better, for the most part of the time, stop reminiscence and begin anticipation. We have, most of us, hardly begun yet. If we love the Lord and trust him—and you may all love him and trust him from this moment on—we no more understand the good things ahead of us than a child at school studying his A B C can understand what that has to do with his reading John Ruskin’s “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” or Dante’s “Divina Commedia.” The satisfactions and joys we have as yet had are like the music a boy makes with his first lesson on the violin compared with what was evoked from his great orchestra by my dear and illustrious and transcendent, but now departed friend, Patrick Gilmore, when he lifted his baton and all the strings vibrated, and all the trumpets pealed forth, and all the flutes caroled, and all the drums rolled, and all the hoofs of the cavalry charge, which he imitated, were in full beat. Look ahead! The finger of God points forward. “Oh, but,” says some one, “I am getting old and I have a touch of rheumatism in that foot, and I believe something is the matter with my heart, and I cannot stand as much as I used to.” Well, I congratulate you, for that shows you are getting nearer to the time when you are going to enter immortal youth and be strong enough to hurl off the battlements of heaven any bandit, who, by unheard-of burglary, might break into the Golden City. “But,” says some one else, “I feel so lonely; the most of my friends are gone, and the bereavements of life have multiplied until this world, that was once so bright to me, has lost its charm.” I congratulate you, for, when you go, there will be fewer here to hold you back and more there to pull you in. Look ahead! The finger of God is pointing forward. We sit here in church, and by hymn and prayer and sermon and Christian association we try to get into a frame of mind that will be acceptable to God and pleasant to ourselves. But what a stupid thing it all is compared with what it will be when we have gone beyond psalm book and sermon and Bible, and we stand, our last imperfection gone, in the presence of that charm of the universe—the blessed Christ— and have him look in our face and say: “I have been watching you and sympathizing with you and helping you all these years, and now you are here. Go where you please and never know a sorrow and never shed a tear. There is your mother now—she is coming to greet you—and there is your father, and there are your children. Sit down under this tree of life, and on the banks of this river talk it all over.” I tell you there will be more joy in one minute of that than in fifty years of earthly exultation. Look ahead! Look at the finest house on earth and know that you will have a finer one in heaven. Look up the healthiest person you can find, and know you will yet be healthier. Look up the one who has the best eyesight of any one you have ever heard of, and know you will have better vision. Listen to the sweetest prima donna that ever trod the platform, and know that in heaven you will lift a more enrapturing song than ever enchanted earthly auditorium. My friends, I do not know how we are going to stand it—I mean the full inrush of that splendor. Last summer I saw Moscow, in some respects the most splendid city under the sun. The Emperor afterward asked me if I had seen it, for Moscow is the pride of Russia. I told him yes, and that I had seen Moscow burn. I will tell you what I meant. After examining nine hundred brass cannons which were picked out of the snow after Napoleon retreated from Moscow, each cannon deep cut with the letter “N,” I ascended a tower of some two hundred and fifty feet, just before sunset, and on each platform there were bells, large and small, and I climbed up among the bells, and then as I reached the top, all the bells underneath me began to ring, and they were joined by the bells of fourteen hundred towers and domes and turrets. Some of the bells sent out a faint tinkle of sound, a sweet tintinnabulation that seemed a bubbling of the air, and others thundered forth boom after boom, boom after boom, until it seemed to shake the earth and fill the heavens—sounds so weird, so sweet, so awful, so grand, so charming, so tremendous, so soft, so rippling, so reverberating—and they seemed to wreathe and whirl and rise and sink and burst and roll and mount and die. When Napoleon saw Moscow burn, it could not have been more brilliant than when I saw the fourteen hundred turrets aflame with the sunset; and there were roofs of gold, and walls of malachite, and pillars of porphyry, and balustrades of mosaic, and architecture of all colors mingling the brown of autumnal forests and the blue of summer heavens, and the conflagration of morning skies, and the emerald of rich grass, and the foam of tossing seas. The mingling of so many sounds was an entrancement almost too much for human nerves and human eyes and human ears. I expect to see nothing to equal it until you and I see heaven. But that will surpass it and make the memory of what I saw that July evening in Moscow almost tame and insipid. All heaven aglow and all heaven a-ring, not in the sunset, but in the sunrise. Voices of our own kindred mingling with the doxologies of empires. Organs of eternal worship responding to the trumpets that have wakened the dead. Nations in white. Centuries in coronation. Anthems like the voice of many waters. Circle of martyrs. Circle of apostles. Circle of prophets. Thrones of cherubim. Thrones of seraphim. Throne of archangel. Throne of Christ. Throne of God. Thrones! Thrones! Thrones! The ringer of God points that way. Stop not until you reach that place. Through the atoning Christ, all I speak of and more may be yours and mine. Do you not now hear the chime of the bells of that metropolis of the universe? Do you not see the shimmering of the towers? Good morning. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 39: 037. THE PLAGUE OF NARCOTICS ======================================================================== The Plague of Narcotics Exodus 9:14 : “I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people.” Upon the cleanest, the most fertile, the richest, and the wisest nation of the ancient world, the ten plagues dropped. Plague the first: The river Nile, which was the source of Egyptian fertility and an object of worship, was incarnadined, and rolled its crimson currents amid a horror-stricken population; the reservoir and the costly water-works putrid with destroyed animal life. Plague the second: The frogs innumerable, croaking in the marshes of the Nile, move up and take possession of the homes of a nation which dressed in white and was fastidious for cleanliness; and the storks, the vultures, and the cranes swooping upon their prey. Plague the third: The gnats and mosquitoes buzzed and bit, and stung the people into wild delirium. Plague the fourth: The gadflies became intolerable, or the beetle—an imitation of which you often see on a gentleman’s finger, cut in the shape of scarabæus, or Egyptian beetle. Plague the fifth: Distemper seized upon the cattle until they went bellowing with pain, and epizooty upon the horses, and trichina upon the swine. Plague the sixth: Carbuncles and elephantiasis inflamed the skin of multitudes. Plague the seventh: Hailstorms, with their icy hammers, smote the earth, and at a season of the year when the cattle were all grazing in the fields and hence were unsheltered from the pelting. Plague the eighth: Locusts, which, according to naturalists, march in companies and regiments and battalions, commanded by captains and colonels and generals, marched across the land until every green thing in orchard and vineyard and garden was destroyed. Plague the ninth: Darkness dropped on all the land and it was as black at twelve o’clock at noon as at twelve o’clock at night. Plague the tenth: In every Egyptian home, the oldest, whether on the mother’s lap or seated at the table, took on the last pallor and expired. Draw a curtain over every home in Egypt. These ten Egyptian plagues have all passed off the earth, but our modern cities have their ten plagues, blasting, destructive and deathful; and it is my object in a series of Sabbath morning discourses to describe them. The first plague that I shall mention is the plague narcotic. In all ages the world has sought out some flower or herb or weed to stimulate its lethargy or to compose its grief. A drug called nepenthe was widely used among the ancient Greeks and the ancient Egyptians for narcotic purposes. The Theban women knew how to compound it. You had but to chew the leaves and your sadness was whelmed with hilarity. But nepenthe passed out from the consideration of the world. Next came hasheesh, which is made from Indian hemp. It is manufactured from the flowers at the top, or workmen in leathern clothing walk through the fields of hemp and the exudation from the hemp adheres to the leathern garments, and then this exudation is scraped off and prepared with aromatics and becomes an intoxicant for the people. Whole nations have been stimulated, narcotized, and made imbecile with this accursed hasheesh. The visions kindled by that drug are said to be gorgeous and magnificent beyond all description; but it finally takes down body, mind, and soul in horrible death. I knew one of the most brilliant men of his day. Whether he appeared in magazine or in book, or in newspaper column, he was an enchantment. He could, in the course of an hour’s conversation, produce more wit and strange information than any man I ever talked with; but he chewed hasheesh. He did so first as a matter of curiosity, to see whether the powers ascribed to it really belonged to it. He put his hand into the cockatrice’s den to see whether it would bite, and he found out to his complete undoing. His father, who was a minister of the Gospel, prayed for him and counseled him, and obtained for him the best medical prescription of the best physicians in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Berlin. He said he could not stop. A large circle of friends put their wits together to try to rescue him, but he went on down. First, his body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering; then his mind gave way, and he became a raving maniac; then his immortal soul went, blaspheming God, into a starless eternity. He was only about thirty years of age. Behold the ravages of the Persian and Egyptian weed called hasheesh. Opium demands emphatic recognition. It is made, as you know, from the white poppy. It is not a new discovery. We read of it three hundred years before Christ; but it was not until the seventeenth century that it began its death march; passing out from the medicinal and the curative, and by smoking and mastication becoming the scourge of nations. In the year 1861 there were imported into this country one hundred and seven thousand pounds of opium, but last year five hundred and thirty-three thousand pounds of opium. It is estimated that in the year 1876 there were in this country two hundred and twenty-five thousand opium consumers; but I saw a statistic yesterday that said there are probably now in the United States at least five hundred thousand opium consumers. The fact is appalling. Do not think that they are merely barbaric fanatics who go down under that stroke. Read the great De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater.” He says for the first ten years it gave him the keys of paradise; but it takes his own powerful pen to describe the horrors consequent. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, after conquering the world with his pen, was conquered by opium. The most magnetic and brilliant lawyer of this century fell a victim to its stroke, and there are thousands of men and women—but more women than men—who are being bound, body, mind, and soul, to this terrific habit. There is a great mystery about some families. You do not know why they do not get on. The opium habit is so stealthy, so deceitful, and so deathful. You can cure a hundred drunkards easier than you can cure one opium-eater. I have heard of cases of reformation, but I never saw any. I hope there are cases of genuine reformation. I have seen men who for forty years had been the victims of strong drink thoroughly reformed; but the opium-eaters that I have seen go on and go down. Their cry in the last hour of life is not for God, nor for prayer, nor for the Bible, but for opium. Perhaps there are only two persons outside the household who know what is the matter—the physician and the pastor; the physician called in for physical relief, the pastor called in for spiritual relief; but they both fail. The physician acknowledges his defeat. The minister of religion acknowledges his defeat, for it seems as if the Lord does not answer prayer for opium-eaters. O man! O woman! are you tampering with this habit? have you just begun? are you, for the assuagement of physical distresses or mental trouble, making this a regular resource? I beg you stop. The ecstasies at the start will not pay for the horrors at the last. The paradise is followed too soon by the pandemonium. Morphia is a blessing from God for the relief of sudden pang or acute dementia, but was never intended for prolonged use. And what the peculiar sadness of it is, it comes to people in their weak moments. De Quincey says, “I took it for rheumatism.” Coleridge says, “I took it for insomnia or sleeplessness.” What do you take it for? For God’s sake, do not take it too long. What is remarkable, they are going down from the highest and the wealthiest classes, and from the most fashionable circles of New York and Brooklyn—going down by hundreds and by thousands. Over twenty thousand opium-eaters in Chicago. Over twenty thousand opium-eaters in St. Louis. In the same proportion, that would make over seventy thousand in New York and Brooklyn. The clerk of the drug store says, “I can tell them when they come in. There is something peculiar about their complexion, something peculiar about their nervousness, something peculiar about the look of their eyes that immediately reveals them.” In some families chloral is taking the place of opium. Physicians first prescribe it for sleeplessness. Then the patient keeps on because he likes the effect. Whole tons of chloral manufactured in Germany. Baron Liebig says that he knows one chemist in Germany who manufactures a half-ton of chloral every week. There are multitudes being taken down by this habit. Look out for hydrate of chloral! But I am under this head speaking chiefly of opium. You never heard a sermon against opium, but it seems to me there ought to be ten thousand pulpits turned into quaking, flaming, thundering Sinais of warning against this plague narcotic. The devil of morphia in this country will be mightier than the devil of alcohol. But nepenthe and hasheesh and opium and chloral shall not have all the field to themselves. There sprang up in Yucatan, on this continent, a weed which has bewitched the world. It crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth century, and captured Spain. Then it captured Portugal, and then the French ambassadors took it to Paris, and it captured the French empire. Then Walter Raleigh introduced it into England. The botanists ascribe it to the genus nicotiana; but you all know it as the inspiring, the elevating, the emparadising, the radiating, the nerve-shattering, the dyspepsia-breeding, the health-destroying tobacco. I shall not be offensively personal while I speak on this subject, because you all use it, or nearly all! Indeed I know from personal experience how it soothes and roseates the world, and kindles sociality, and I know what are its baleful results. I know what it is to be its slave, and thank God! I know what it is to be its conqueror. I have no expectation that I will persuade the great masses of you to change your habits upon this subject, but I thought I might help you in some advice to your children. You say, “Did not God make tobacco?” Oh, yes. You say, “Is not God good?” Oh, yes. You say, “Then God, when he created tobacco, must have created it for some good purpose.” Oh, yes; it is good for a great many things—tobacco is. It is good to kill moths in the wardrobe, and tick in sheep, and to strangulate all kinds of vermin, and to fumigate pestiferous places, and like all other poisons, God created it for some particular use. So he did henbane, so nux vomica, so copperas, so belladonna, so all those poisons which he directly created or had man to extract. But the same God who made the poisons also created us with common sense to know how to use them, and how not to use them. “But,” say some of my friends, “do not people use it without seeming harm to themselves, and are there not cases of plethora which absolutely need this depletion?” Oh, yes! Skilful and prudent physicians have sometimes prescribed it just as they sometimes prescribe arsenic, and they prescribe it well. There can be no doubt about its being poisonous. There was a case reported in which a little child lay upon its mother’s lap, and a drop from her pipe fell on the child’s lip, and it went into convulsions and into death. “But,” you say, “do not people live on to old age who indulge in this habit?” Yes; so I have seen an inebriate seventy years old. There are some persons who, in spite of all the outrages to their physical system, live on to old age. In the case of the man of the jug, he lasted so long because he was pickled! In the case of the man of the pipe, he lasted so long because he was turned into smoked liver! But, my friends, what advice had we better give to our young people? I say, in the first place, let us advise them to abstain from this habit because all the medical fraternity of the United States and Great Britain pronounce it the cause of widespread and terrific unhealth. Dr. Agnew, Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Olcott, Dr. Barnes, Dr. Woodward, Dr. Rush, Dr. Hosack, Dr. Harvey, Dr. Mott—all the medical fraternity, allopathic, homœopathic, hydropathic, eclectic—denounce the habit, and warn the community against it. One distinguished physician says: “This habit is the cause of seventy different styles of disease. This habit is the cause of nearly all the cases of cancer of the mouth.” What is the testimony of the late Dr. John C. Warren, of Boston, than whom there is no higher authority? He says: For more than thirty years I have been in the habit of inquiring of patients who came to me with cancer of the tongue and lips whether they used tobacco, and if so, whether they chewed or smoked, and if they have sometimes answered in the negative as to the first question, I can truly say that to the best of my knowledge and belief such cases are exceptions to the general rule. When, as is usually the case, one side of the tongue is affected with ulcerated cancer it arises from the habitual retention of the tobacco in contact with this part. Their united testimony is that it depresses the vitality of the system and brings on nervousness and dyspepsia and takes off twenty-five per cent. of the physical vigor of the people of this country, and damaging this generation damages the next, the accumulated curse going on to capture other centuries. Another eminent physician, for a long while superintendent of the Insane Asylum at Northampton, Mass., says: “Fully half of the patients who have come to our asylum for treatment are the victims of tobacco.” It is a sad thing, my brother, to damage the body; it is a worse thing to damage the mind, and any man of common sense knows that the nervous system immediately acts upon the brain. More than that: nearly all reformers will tell you that it tends to drunkenness, it creates unnatural thirst. There are those who use this narcotic who do not drink, but nearly all who drink use the narcotic, so that shows there is an immediate affinity between the two drugs. It was long ago demonstrated that a man cannot permanently reform from strong drink unless he gives up tobacco. In nearly all the cases where men having been reformed have fallen back, it has been shown they have first touched tobacco and then surrendered to intoxicants. The broad avenue leading down to the drunkard’s grave and the drunkard’s hell is strewn thick with tobacco leaves. What did Benjamin Franklin say? “I never saw a well man in the exercise of common sense who would say that tobacco did him any good.” What did Thomas Jefferson say, when arguing against the culture of tobacco? He said: “It is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.” Horace Greeley said of it: “It is a profane stench.” Daniel Webster said: “If those men must smoke, let them take the horse-shed.” One reason why there are so many the victims of this habit is because there are so many ministers of religion who smoke and chew. They smoke until they get the bronchitis, and the dear people have to pay their expenses to Europe! They smoke until the nervous system breaks down. They smoke themselves to death. I could name three eminent clergymen who died of cancer in the mouth, and in every case the physician said it was tobacco. There has been many a clergyman whose tombstone was all covered up with eulogy, which ought to have had the honest epitaph, “Killed by too much cavendish!” Some of them smoke until the room is blue, and their spirits are blue, and the world is blue, and everything is blue. Time was when God passed by such sins, but it becomes now the duty of the American clergy who indulge in this narcotic to repent. How can a man preach temperance to the people when he is himself indulging in an appetite like that? I have seen a cuspidor in a pulpit where the minister should drop his cud before he gets up to read, “Blessed are the pure in heart,” and to read about “rolling sin as a sweet morsel under the tongue!” and in Leviticus to read about the unclean animals that chew the cud. I have known Presbyteries and General Assemblies and General Synods where there was a room set apart for the ministers to smoke in. Oh, it is a sorry spectacle, a consecrated man, a holy man of God, looking around for something, which you take to be looking for a larger field of usefulness. He is not looking for that at all. He is only looking for some place where he can discharge a mouthful of tobacco juice! I am glad the Methodist Church of the United States, in nearly all their conferences, have passed resolutions against this habit; and it is time we had an anti-tobacco reform in the Presbyterian Church and the Episcopal Church and the Baptist Church and the Congregational Church. About sixty years ago a young man graduated from Andover Theological Seminary into the ministry. He went straight to the front. He had an eloquence and personal magnetism before which nothing could stand; but he was soon thrown into the insane asylum for twenty years, and the doctor said it was tobacco that sent him there. According to the custom then in vogue, he was allowed a small portion of tobacco every day. After he had been there nearly twenty years, walking the floor one day he had a sudden return of reason, and he realized what was the matter. He threw the plug of tobacco through the iron grates and said: “What brought me here? what keeps me here? why am I here? Tobacco! Tobacco! O God! help, help, and I’ll never use it again.” He was restored. He was brought forth. For ten years he successfully preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and then went into a blissful immortality. There are ministers of religion today indulging in narcotics, dying by inches, and they do not know what is the matter with them. I might in a word give my own experience. It took ten cigars to make a sermon. I got very nervous. One day I awakened to the outrage I was inflicting upon myself. I was about to change settlements, and a generous wholesale tobacconist in Philadelphia said if I would only come to Philadelphia he would, all the rest of my life, provide me with cigars free of charge. I said to myself, If in these war-times, when cigars are so costly and my salary is small, I smoke more than I ought to, what would I do if I had gratuitous and illimitable supply? And then and there, twenty years ago, I quit once and forever. It made a new man of me, and though I have since then done as much hard work as any one, I think I have had the best health God ever blessed a man with. A minister of religion cannot afford to smoke. Put into my hand the moneys wasted in tobacco in Brooklyn, and I will support three orphan asylums as grand and as beautiful as that to which you have this last week been contributing. Put into my hand the moneys wasted in tobacco in the United States of America, and I will clothe, feed, and shelter all the suffering poor on this continent. The American Church gives a million dollars a year for the evangelization of the heathen, and American Christians spend five millions in tobacco. Now, I stand this morning not only in the presence of my God, to whom I must give an account for what I say today, but I stand in the presence of a great multitude of young men who are forming their habits. Between seventeen and twenty-three there are tens of thousands of young men damaging themselves irretrievably by tobacco. You either use very good tobacco or cheap tobacco. If you use cheap tobacco, I want to tell you why it is cheap. It is a mixture of burdock, lampblack, sawdust, colts-foot, plantain-leaves, fullers’ earth, lime, salt, alum, and a little tobacco. You cannot afford, my young friend to take such a mess as that between your lips. If, on the other hand, you use costly tobacco, let me say, I do not think you can afford it. Take that which you expend and will expend, if you keep the habit all your life, and put it aside, and it will buy you a farm to make you comfortable in the afternoon of life. A merchant of New York gave this testimony: In early life I smoked six cigars a day at six and a half cents each—they averaged that. I thought to myself one day, ‘I’ll just put aside all the money I am consuming in cigars, and all I would consume if I kept on in the habit, and I will see what it will come to by compound interest.” [And he gives this tremendous statistic:] Last July completed thirty-nine years since, by the grace of God, I was emancipated from the filthy habit, and the saving amounted to the enormous sum of twenty-nine thousand one hundred and two dollars and three cents by compound interest. We lived in the city, but the children, who had learned something of the enjoyment of country life from their annual visits to their grandparents, longed for a home among the green fields. I found a very pleasant place in the country for sale. The cigar money now came into requisition, and I found it amounted to a sufficient sum to purchase the place, and it is mine. Now, boys, you take your choice, smoking without a home, or a home without smoking. Listen to that, young man, and take another thing into consideration, and that is, vast amounts of property are destroyed every year indirectly by this habit. An agent of an insurance company says: “One half our losses come from the spark of the pipe and the cigar.” One young man threw away his cigar in one of the cities, and with it he threw away three millions of dollars’ worth of the property of others that blazed up from that spark. Harpers’ splendid printing establishment years ago was destroyed by a plumber who having lighted his pipe threw the match away, and it fell into a pot of camphene. The whole building was in flames. Five blocks went down. Two thousand employees thrown out of work, and more than a million dollars of property destroyed. But I am speaking of higher values today. Better destroy a whole city of stores than destroy one man. My young friends, if you will excuse the idiom, I will say, stop before you begin. Here is a serfdom which has a shackle that it is almost impossible to break. Gigantic intellects that could overcome every other bad habit have been flung of this and kept down. Some one was seeking to persuade a man from the habit. The reply was, “Ask me to do anything under the canopy of heaven but this. This I cannot give up, and won’t give up, though it take seven years off my life.” I must have a word also with all those of my friends whom it does not hurt, who can stop any time they want to, and who can smoke most expensive cigars. My Christian brother, what is your influence in the matter? How much can you afford to deny yourself for the good of others? It was a great mystery to many people why Governor Briggs, of Massachusetts, wore a cravat, but no collar. Some people thought it was an absurd eccentricity. Ah no! This was the secret. Many years before, he was talking with an inebriate and telling him that his habit was unnecessary, and the inebriate retorted, and said: “We do a great many things that are not necessary. It is not necessary for you to wear that collar.” “Well,” said Governor Briggs, “I never will wear a collar again if you won’t drink.” “Agreed,” said the inebriate. Governor Briggs never wore a collar. They both kept their bargain for twenty years. They kept it to the death. That is the reason Governor Briggs did not wear a collar. That is the Gospel of the Son of God; self-denial for the good and the rescue of others. So we might by little effort now and then save a man. By how little or by how much self-denial are we willing to be influenced? I stop at this point, because I have no more time to pursue the subject, although I have much more to say upon it. I stop at this point, by throwing all the passions of my soul into one prayer: God help us! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 40: 038. ONWARD ======================================================================== Onward Exodus 14:15 : “Go forward.” “Masterly retreat” is a term often used in military circles, but in religion there is no such thing. It is either glorious advance or disgraceful and ignominious falling back. I address the more than three hundred members added today, and indeed all Christians, in the order given to the Israelites by the Lord through Moses: “Go forward.” It would be a strange thing if all our anxiety about men ceased the moment they were converted. You would almost doubt the sanity of the farmer who, having planted the corn and seen it just sprout above ground, should say: “My work is all done. I have no more anxiety for the field.” No. There is work for the plough and the hoe, and there must be a careful keeping up of the fences, and there must be a frightening away of the birds that would pillage the field. And I say the entrance upon Christian life is only the implantation of grace in the heart. There is earnest, hard work yet to be done, and perhaps many years of anxiety before there shall be heard the glorious shout of “Harvest home.” The beginning to be a Christian is only putting down the foundation; but after that there are years of hammering, polishing, carving, lifting, before the structure is completed. It takes five years to make a Christian character; it takes twenty years; it takes forty years; it takes seventy years, if a man shall live so long. In other words, a man dying after half a century of Christian experience feels that he has only learned the “A B C” of a glorious alphabet. It is May now in the natural world. The May blossoms will soon scatter, but the pumps are busy in the trees, the apple-tree and the pear-tree and the plum-tree, sending forth fountains of life that will after awhile hang out in luscious fruit. And so it is in the hearts of many of you. The May blossoms of your first experience will scatter and we are anxiously watching whether those spring blossoms will show themselves in the grand, ripe, glorious fruit of Christian character. The next year will decide a great deal in your history, young Christian man. It will decide whether you are to be a burning and shining light of the church, or a spark of grace covered up in a barrel of ashes. It will decide whether you are to be a strong man in Christ Jesus, with gigantic blows striking the iron mail of darkness, or a bedwarfed, whining, grumbling soldier, that ought to be drummed out of the Lord’s camp with the “Rogues’ March.” You have only just been launched; the voyage is to be made. Earth and heaven and hell are watching to see how fast you will sail, how well you will weather the tempest, and whether at last, amid the shouting of the angels, you shall come into the right harbor. May God help me this morning to give you three or four words of Christian counsel, as I address myself more especially to those who have just now entered the Christian life. My first word of counsel is, hold before your soul a very high model. Do not say, “I wish I could pray like that man, or speak like this man, or have the consecration of this one.” Say: “Here is the Lord Jesus Christ, a perfect pattern. By that I mean, with God’s grace, to shape all my life.” In other words, you will never be any more a Christian than you strive to be. If you build a foundation twenty by thirty feet you will only have a small house. If you build a foundation one hundred by one hundred feet, you will have a large house. If you resolve to be only a middling Christian, you will only be a middling Christian. If you have no high aspiration in a worldly direction you will never succeed in business. If you have no high aspiration in religious things you will never succeed in religion. You have a right to aspire to the very highest style of Christian character. From your feet there reaches out a path of Christian attainment which you may take, and I deliberately say that you may be a better man than was Paul, or David, or Summerfield, or Doddridge—a better woman than Hannah More or Charlotte Elizabeth. Why not? Did they have a monopoly of Christian grace? Did they have a private key of the storehouse of God’s mercy? Does God shut you out from the gladness and goodness to which they were introduced? Oh, no. You have just the same promises, just the same Christ, just the same Holy Ghost, just the same offers of present and everlasting love, and if you fall short of what they were—aye, if you do not come up to the point which they reached and go beyond it—it is not because Christ has shut you out from any point of moral and spiritual elevation, but because you deliberately refused to take it. I admit that man cannot become a Christian like that without a struggle; but what do you get without fighting for it? The fortresses of darkness are to be taken by storm. You may by acute strategy flank the hosts of temptation; but there are temptations, there are evils, in the way that you will have to meet face to face, and it will be shot for shot, gun for gun, grip for grip, slaughter for slaughter. The Apostle Paul, over and over again, represents the Christian life as a combat. When the war vessel of Christ’s Church comes into glory, bringing its crew and its passengers, it will not come in like a North river yacht, beautifully painted and adorned, swinging into the boathouse after a pleasure excursion. Oh, no. It will be like a vessel coming with a heavy cargo from China or India, the marks of the wave and the hurricane upon it—sails rent, rigging spliced, pumps all working to keep her afloat, bulwarks knocked away. I see such a vessel coming and I get out my small boat and push toward her, and I shout, “Ahoy, captain! What are you going to do with those shivered timbers? That was a beautiful ship when you went out, but you have ruined it.” “Oh,” says the captain, “I have a fine cargo on board, and by this round trip I have made ten fortunes.” So I believe it will be when the Christian soul at last comes into the harbor of heaven. It will come bearing upon it the marks of a great stress of weather. You can see by the very looks of that soul as it comes into glory that it was driven by the storm and dashed in the hurricane; but by so much as the voyage was rough, will the harbor be blessed. “If ye suffered with Him on earth, ye shall be glorified with Him in heaven.” Aim high. Do not be satisfied to be like the Christians all around about you. Be more than they have ever been for Christ. An old Arabian king was showing a beautiful sword that had been given him, when one of his courtiers said: “This sword is too short. You cannot do anything with it.” Said the king’s son: “To a brave man, no sword is too short. If it be too short, take one step in advance, and then it is long enough.” So I say to any Christian who may feel that he has poor weapons with which to fight against sin and darkness and death: “Advance upon the enemy. In the strength of Christ, go forward. Put forth more strength. God is for you, and if God be for you, who can be against you? Remember that God never puts you in battle but He gives you weapons with which to fight.” My second word of counsel to those who have recently entered upon Christian life is: abstain from all pernicious associations; and take only those that are useful and beneficent. Stay out of all associations that would damage your Christian character. Take only those associations that will help you. A learned man said: “If I stay with that man Fenelon any longer, I shall get to be a Christian in spite of myself.” In other words, there is a mighty power in Christian associations. Now, what kind of associations shall we, as young Christians, seek after? I think we ought to try to get in company better than ourselves, never going into company worse than ourselves. If we get into company a little better than ourselves and there are ten people in that company, ten chances to one we will be bettered. If we get into company a little worse than ourselves and there be ten people in that company, ten chances to one we will be made worse than we were before. Now, when a young Christian enters the Church, God does not ask him to be a monk. God does not ask her to be a nun. There is no virtue in monasticism. The anchorite that lives on acorns is no nearer heaven than the man who lives on partridge and wild duck. Isolation is not demanded by the Bible. A man may use the world with the restriction of not abusing it. But just as soon as you find any surroundings pernicious to your spiritual interest, quit those associations. This remark is more especially appropriate to the young. Now it is impossible that the young and untroubled should seek their associations with those who are aged and worn out. As God intended the aged to associate with the aged, talking over the past and walking staff in hand along the same paths they trod, thirty, forty, and fifty years ago, so I suppose He intended the young chiefly to associate with the young. The grace of God does not demand that we be unnatural. I do not want you to take this caution I have given you as that of a growing misanthrope, hating hilarity. For you must have a spring bow if you want to make the arrow fly. But while this is so, I want you to be especially on guard in this matter and let the religion of Jesus Christ control you in all your associations. I know young people who have meant well enough, but they have floated off into evil influences, and they have associated day by day with those who hated God and despised His commandments, and their characters are all depleted. I can see they are changed for the worse, but they are not aware of it. O young man, come out of that bad association. I do not know what it is. I do not know to what place you may have a private key. I do not know to what place you go without the sanction of those who love you very much. I do not pretend to point out any evil influences, but are there not some surrounding influences that are pernicious to your growth in grace? Stand back from that furnace in which so many young Christians have been destroyed. In this church there is a large company of young men and young women consecrated to Christ. I know of no better people than they are. Young convert, I invite you into their friendship. Contact with them will elevate you. All hail, young followers of Jesus Christ, my joy and my pride! My heart thrills at every step of your advancement. I talked with you in that hour when you first tried to break from sin, and I now rejoice as I see you putting on the armor for a conflict in which God will give you present and everlasting victory. Stand off from all evil associations. A man is no better than the company he keeps. Go among those who are better than you are and you will be made better. Go among those who are worse than you are and you will be made worse. My next word of counsel is that you be actively employed. I see a great many Christians with doubts and perplexities, and they seem to be proud of them. Their entire Christian life is made up of gloom, and they seem to cultivate that spiritual despondency, when I will undertake to say that in nine cases out of ten spiritual despondency is a judgment of God upon idleness. Who are the happy people in the Church today? The busy people. Show me a man who professes the religion of Jesus Christ and is idle, and I will show you an unhappy man. The very first prescription that I give to a man when I find him full of doubts and fears about his eternal interest is to go to work for God. Ten thousand voices are lifted up asking for your help. Go and help. Here is a wood full of summer insects. An axeman goes into the wood to cut firewood. The insects do not bother him very much, and every stroke of the axe makes them fly off. But let a man go and lie down there and he is bitten and mauled, and thinks it is a horrible thing to stay in the wood. Why does he not take an axe and go to work? So there are thousands of Christians now in the Church who go out amid great annoyances in life—they are not perplexed, they are all the time busy; while there are others who do nothing and they are stung and stung and stung and covered from head to foot with the blotches of indolence and inactivity, and spiritual death. The first thing then you have to do, O Christian young man, Christian young woman, is to go to work in the service of the Lord if you want to be a happy Christian. When an army goes out there are always stragglers falling off here and there, some because they are faint and sick, but a great many because they are afraid to fight and too lazy to march. After awhile the lazy men on the road hear the booming of the guns for hours, and they hear the shout of victory, and a man on horseback comes up and says: “We have won the day.” Then they hasten up. How brave they are after the battle is over. Poor at fighting, but grand at “huzza!” So there are stragglers following the Lord’s host. There come days of darkness and battle. Where are they? We call the roll of the host. They make no answer, but after a while there comes a day of triumph in the Church, and they are all about. “Huzza! huzza! Didn’t we give it to them!” I have another word of counsel to give those who have just entered Christian life, and that is, be faithful in prayer. You might as well, business man, start out in the morning without food and expect to be strong all that day—you might as well abstain from food all the week and expect to be strong physically, as to be strong without prayer. The only way to get any strength into the soul is by prayer, and the only difference between that Christian who is worth everything and that who is worth nothing is the fact that the last does not pray and the other does. And the only difference between this Christian who is getting along very fast in the holy life and this one who is only getting along tolerably, is that the first prays more than the last. You can graduate a man’s progress in religion by the amount of prayer, not by the number of hours, perhaps, but by the earnest supplication that he puts up to God. There is no exception to the rule. Show me a Christian man who neglects this kind of duty and I will show you one who is inconsistent. Show me a man who prays, and his strength and his power cannot be exaggerated. Why, just give to a man this power of prayer and you give him almost omnipotence. This afternoon you will see two Sabbath-school teachers. That one does not gain the attention of her class. This one does. What is the difference between them, their intellects being about equal? The first thought only of her own apparel. The other came from great prostration before God in earnest supplication, asking that God’s mercy might come upon the school, and that in the afternoon she might gain the attention of those five or six immortals that would be around her. The one teacher has no control over her class. The other sits as with the strength of the Lord God Almighty. A minister comes into the pulpit. He has a magnificent sermon, all the sentences rounded according to the laws of rhetoric and fine sermonizing, and the truth makes no impression on the hearts of men. People go away and say: “Very beautiful, wasn’t it?” A plain man comes into the pulpit. He has been on his knees before God, asking for an especial message that day, and the hearts of men open to the plain truth, the broken sentences strike into their consciences, and, though the people may disperse at the close of the services seemingly without having received any impression, that night voices will be lifted in some household: “Men and brethren, what shall we do to be saved?” Oh, this power of prayer! Pray! Pray! Another word of counsel I have to give. Be faithful in Bible research. A great many good books are now coming out. We cannot read half of them. At every revolution of the printing-press they are coming. They cover our parlor tables, and are in our sitting-rooms and libraries. Glorious books they are. We thank God every day for the work of the Christian printing-press. But I have thought that perhaps the followers of Christ sometimes allow this religious literature to take their attention from God’s word, and that there may not be as much Bible reading as there ought to be. How is that in your own experience? Just calculate in your minds how much religious literature you have read during the year, and then how large a portion of the Word of God you have read, and then contrast the two and answer within your own soul whether you are giving more attention to the books that were written by the hand of man or that written by the hand of God. Now, you go to the drug store and you get the mineral waters; but you have noticed that the waters are not so fresh or sparkling or healthful as when you get these very waters at Saratoga and Sharon—getting them right where they bubble from the rock. And I have noticed the same thing in regard to the truth of the Gospel; while there is a good deal of refreshment and health in the Gospel of God as it comes through good books, I find it is better when I come to the eternal rock of God’s Word and drink from that fountain that bubbles up fresh and pure to the life and refreshment and health of the soul. Read the Bible and it brings you into the association of the best people that ever lived. You stand beside Moses and learn his meekness, beside Job and learn his patience, beside Paul and catch something of his enthusiasm, beside Christ and you feel His love. And yet how strange it is that a great many men have given their whole lives to the assaulting of that book. I cannot understand it. Thomas Paine worked hard against that book as though he received large wages, and he confessed that all the time he was writing he did not have a Bible anywhere near him. How many powerful intellects have endeavored to destroy it. Hume, Bolingbroke, Voltaire have been after it. Ten thousand men now are warring against the truth of God’s Word. What do you think of them? I think it is mean, and will prove it. I will prove it is the meanest thing that has ever been done in all the centuries. There is a ship at sea and in trouble. The captain and the crew are at their wits’ end. You are on board. You are an old seaman. You come up and give some good counsel, which is kindly taken. That is all right. But suppose, instead of doing that, in the midst of all the trouble, you pick up the only compass that is on board and pitch it over the taffrail? Oh, you say, that is mean—dastardly. Is it as mean as this? Here is the vessel of the world going on with fourteen hundred millions of passengers, tossed and driven in the tempest, and at the time we want help the infidel comes and he takes hold of the only compass and he tries to pitch it overboard. It is contemptible beyond everything that is contemptible. Have you any better light? Bring it on if you have. Have you any better comfort to give us? Bring it on if you have. Have you any better hope? Bring it on if you have, and then you may have this Bible and I shall never want it again. But I can think of a meaner thing than that, and that is an old man going along on the mountains with a staff in one hand and a lantern in the other. Darkness has come on suddenly. He is very old, just able to pick his way out amid the rocks and precipices, leaning on his staff with the one hand and guiding himself with the light in the other. You come up and say, “Father, you seem to be lost. You are a long way from home.” “Yes,” he replies. And then you take him by the hand and lead him home. That is very kind of you. But suppose instead of that you should snatch the staff from his hand and hurl it over the rocks, and snatch the lantern and blow it out? That would be dastardly, contemptible until there is no depth of contempt beneath it. If you have a better staff, give it to him. If you have a better light, give it to him. When God has put the staff of the Gospel in our hands and the lamp of God’s World to light our feet, are you going to take from us our only support and our only illumination? I love the sting of the wasp and the rattlesnake better than I do the man who wants to clutch the Word of God from my grasp. There are people here who have been reading it a good while. It is a precious book to their souls. It has been so in times of darkness and trouble. There was a soldier who fell in battle, and after he had fallen he said in a feeble voice to his comrade, “Give me a drop.” His comrade replied, “There is not a particle of water in my canteen.” “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t mean that. Look in my knapsack and you will find a Bible there. Get out that old Bible and just give me a drop out of that.” And his comrade found the Bible and read a few passages. The dying soldier said, “Oh, George, there is nothing like that, is there, for a dying soldier?” Cling to your Bible! If this Bible should be destroyed, if all the Bibles that have ever been printed should be destroyed, we could make up a Bible right out of this audience. From that Christian man’s experience I take one cluster of promises, and from that old Christian man’s experience another, I put them all together, and I think I would have a Bible. You see, my friends, I have not tried to hide the fact that I have large expectation of you who have entered the Christian life. Do not be discouraged. Press on toward the prize; God beside you and heaven before you. Keep your courage up. I look in thirty years from now upon this Church. Another man in the pulpit. Other faces in the pews. Another man leading the singing. Others carrying around the alms-boxes of the Church. All changed. Thirty years have gone and I look into the faces of the people, and I say, “Why, it seems to me I have seen these people somewhere, but I cannot exactly say where. Oh, yes, now I begin to think. These were the converts in 1881 and 1880. Why, how you have changed!” “Oh, yes,” they say, “of course we have changed. Thirty years make a great change.” I say, “How many wrinkles there are in your faces!” “Oh, yes,” they say, “thirty years make a great many wrinkles.” “Have you kept the faith?” “Yes, we have kept the faith.” “Where are those people who used to sit in the pew with you.” “All gone.” Then I say, “Well, I feel lonely; come, let us sing one of the old hymns we used to sing thirty years ago in 1881 on communion day. Any of you know the old tune? Some one hum it. Yes, that’s it, that’s it. Now, altogether, let us sing, just as we did in 1881.” There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Immanuel’s veins; And sinners plunged beneath that flood Lose all their guilty stains. The dying thief rejoiced to see, That fountain in his day; And there may I, though vile as he, Wash all my sins away. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 41: 039. MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES ======================================================================== Moral Character of Candidates Exodus 20:1-17 : “The Ten Commandments.” The lightnings and earthquakes united their forces to wreck a mountain of Arabia Petræa in olden time, and travelers today find heaps of porphyry and greenstone rocks, boulder against boulder, the remains of the first law library, written, not on parchment or papyrus, but on shattered slab of granite. The corner-stones of all morality, of all wise law, of all righteous jurisprudence, of all good government, are the two tablets of stone on which were written the Ten Commandments. All Roman law, all French law, all English law, all American law that is worth anything, all common law, civil law, criminal law, martial law, law of nations, were rocked in the cradle of the twentieth chapter of Exodus. And it would be well in these times of great political agitation if the newspapers would print the Decalogue some day in place of the able editorial. But let the Ten Commandments loose upon the great political parties of our day and there would be wild panic. The fact is that some people suppose that the law has passed out of existence, and some are not aware of some of the passages of that law, and others say this or that is of the more importance, when no one has any right to make such an assertion. These laws are the pillars of society, and if you remove one pillar you damage the whole structure. I have noticed that men are particularly vehement against sins to which they are not particularly tempted, and find no especial wrath against sins in which they themselves indulge. They take out one gun from this battery of ten guns, and load that and unlimber that and fire that. They say: “This is an Armstrong gun, and this is a Krupp gun, and this is a Nordenfelt five-barreled gun, and this is a Gatling ten-barreled gun, and this is a Martini thirty-seven barreled gun.” But I have to tell them that they are all of the same calibre, and that they shoot from eternity to eternity. Many questions are before the people in the coming elections all over the land, but I shall try to show you that the most important thing to be settled about all these candidates is their personal moral character. To-day, in this brief course of sermons I am preaching on national affairs, and within a few days of the Presidential election, I propose to test the character of persons nominated for office in city, State and nation, and to test them by the Decalogue. Many of the clergymen have gone on the political platform in these times—and I have no criticism to offer in regard to them—some going on one political platform and some on the opposite political platform. I hope they are all better than I am, yet I have not felt called of God to copy their example, but rather in a few Sabbath morning sermons, omitting all personalities, to lay down certain principles which will stand the test of the Judgment Day. The Decalogue forbids idolatry, image making, profanity, maltreatment of parents, Sabbath desecration, murder, theft, incontinence, lying, and covetousness. That is the Decalogue by which you and I will have to be tried, and by that same Decalogue you and I must try candidates for office. Of course we shall not find anything like perfection. If we do not vote until we find an immaculate nominee we will never vote at all. We have so many faults of our own we ought not to be censorious or maledictory or hypercritical in regard to the faults of others. The Christly rule is as appropriate for November as any other month in the year, and for the fourth year as for the three preceding years: “Judge not that ye be not judged, for with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again. Most certainly are we not to take the statement of red-hot partisanship as the real character of any man. From nearly all the great cities of this land I receive daily or weekly newspapers, sent to me regularly and in compliment, so I see both sides—I see all sides—and it is most entertaining, and my regular amusement, to read the opposite statements. The one statement says the man is an angel, and the other says he is a devil; and I split the difference, and I find him half-way between. There has never been an honest or respectable man running for the United States Presidency since the foundations of the American Government, if we may believe the old files of newspapers in the museums. What a mercy it is that they were not all hung before inauguration day! If a man believe one-half of what he sees in the newspapers in these times, his career will be very short outside of Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. I was absent during this last week, and I was dependent entirely upon what I read in regard to what had occurred in these cities, and I read there was a procession in New York of five thousand patriots, and a minute after I read in another sheet that there were seventeen thousand; and then I read in regard to another procession that there were ten thousand, and then I read in another paper that there were sixty thousand. A campaign orator in the Rink or the Academy of Music received a very cold reception—a very chilling reception—said one statement. The other statement said the audience rose at him; so great was the enthusiam that for a long while the orator could not be heard, and it was only after lifting his hand that the vociferation began to subside! One statement will twist a letter one way, and another statement will twist it another way. You must admit it is a very difficult thing in times like these to get a very accurate estimate of a man’s character, and I charge you, as your religious teacher, I charge you to caution, and to mercifulness, and to prayer. I warn you also against the mistake which many are making, and always do make, of applying a different standard of character for those in high place and of large means from the standard they apply for ordinary persons. However much a man may have, and however high the position he gets, he has no especial liberty given him in the interpretation of the Ten Commandments. A great sinner is no more to be excused than a small sinner. Do not charge illustrious defection to eccentricity, or chop off the Ten Commandments to suit especial cases. The right is everlastingly right and the wrong is everlastingly wrong. If any man nominated for any office in this city, State, or nation differs from the Decalogue, do not fix up the Decalogue, but fix him up. This law must stand whatever else may fall. I call your attention also to the fact that you are all aware of, that the breaking of one commandment makes it the more easy to break all of them, and the philosophy is plain. Any kind of sin weakens the conscience, and if the conscience is weakened, that opens the door for all kinds of transgression. If, for instance, a man go into this political campaign wielding scurrility as his chief weapon, and he believes everything bad about a man, and believes nothing good, how long before that man himself will get over the moral depression? Neither in time nor eternity. If I utter a falsehood in regard to a man I may damage him, but I get for myself tenfold more damage. That is a gun that kicks. If, for instance, a man be profane, under provocation he will commit any crime. I say under provocation. For if a man will maltreat the Lord Almighty, would he not maltreat his fellow-man? If a man be guilty of malfeasance in office he will, under provocation, commit any sin. He who will steal will lie, and he who will lie will steal. If, for instance, a man be unchaste, it opens the door for all other iniquity, for in that one iniquity he commits theft of the worst kind, and covetousness of the worst kind, and falsehood—pretending to be decent when he is not—and maltreats his parents by disgracing their name, if they were good. Be careful, therefore, how you charge that sin against any man either in high place or low place, either in office or out of office, because when you make that charge against a man you charge him with all villainies, with all disgusting propensities, with all rottenness. A libertine is a beast lower than the vermin that crawl over a summer carcass—lower than the swine, for the swine has no intelligence to sin against. Be careful, then, how you charge that against any man. You must be so certain that a mathematical demonstration is doubtful as compared with it. And, then, when you investigate a man on such subjects, you must go the whole length of investigation, and find out whether or not he has repented. He may have been down on his knees before God and implored the divine forgiveness, and he may have implored the forgiveness of society and the forgiveness of the world; although if a man commit that sin at thirty or thirty-five years of age there is not one case out of a thousand where he ever repents. You must in your investigation see if it is possible that the one case investigated may not have been the glorious exception. But do not chop off the seventh commandment to suit the case. Do not change Fairbanks’s scale to suit what you are weighing with it. Do not cut off a yardstick to suit the dry goods you are measuring. Let the law stand, and never tamper with it. Above all, I charge you do not join in the cry that I have heard—for fifteen, twenty years I have heard it—that there is no such thing as purity. If you make that charge you are a foul-mouthed scandaler of the human race. You are a leper. Make room for that leper! When a man, by pen or type or tongue, utters such a slander on the human race that there is no such thing as purity, I know right away that that man himself is a walking lazaretto, a reeking ulcer, and is fit for no society better than that of devils damned. We may enlarge our charities in such a case, but in no such case let us shave off the Ten Commandments. Let them stand as the everlasting defense of society and of the Church of God. The committing of one sin opens the door for the commission of other sins. You see it every day. Those Wall Street embezzlers, those bank cashiers absconding as soon as they are brought to justice, develop the fact that they were in all kinds of sin. No exception to the rule. They all kept bad company, they nearly all gambled, they all went to places where they ought not. Why? The commisson of the one sin opened the gate for all the other sins. Sins go in flocks, in droves, and in herds. You open the door for one sin, that invites in all the miserable segregation. The campaign orators this autumn, some of them, bombarding the suffering candidates all the week, will think no wrong in Sabbath-breaking. All the week hurling the eighth commandment at one candidate, the seventh commandment at another candidate, and the ninth commandment at still another. They think no wrong in riding all Sunday, and they are at this moment, many of them, in the political headquarters calculating the chances. All the week hurling one commandment at Mr. Elaine, another commandment at Mr. Cleveland, and another commandment at Mr. St. John—what are they doing with the fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy”? Breaking it. Is not the fourth commandment as important as the eighth, as the seventh, as the ninth? Some of these political campaign orators, as I have seen them reported, and as I have heard in regard to them, bombarding the suffering candidates all the week, yet tossing the name of God from their lips recklessly, guilty of profanity. What are they doing with the third commandment? Is not the third commandment, which says, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain”—is not the third commandment as important as the other nine? Oh, yes, we find in all departments men are hurling their indigation against sins perhaps to which they are not especially tempted—hurling it against iniquity toward which they are not particularly drawn. I have this book for my authority when I say that the man who swears or the man who breaks the Sabbath is as culpable before God as either of those candidates is culpable if the things charged on him are true. What right have you and I to select which commandment we will keep and which we will break? Better not try to measure the thunderbolts of the Almighty, saying this has less blaze, this has less momentum. Better not play with the guns, better not experiment much with the divine ammunition. Cicero said he saw the Iliad written on a nut-shell, and you and I have seen the Lord’s prayer written on a five-cent piece; but the whole tendency of these times is to write the Ten Commandments so small nobody can see them. I protest this day against the attempt to revise the Decalogue which was given on Mount Sinai amid the blast of trumpets and the cracking of the rocks and the paroxysm of the mountain of Arabia Petræa. I bring up the candidates for city, State and national power, I bring them up, and I try them by this Decalogue. Of course, they are imperfect. We are all imperfect. We say things we ought not to say, we do things we ought not to do. We have all been wrong, we have all done wrong. But I shall find out one of the candidates who comes, in my estimation, nearest to obedience of the Ten Commandments, and I will vote for him, and you will vote for him unless you love God less than your party; then you will not. Herodotus said that Nitocris, the daughter of Nebuchadnezzar, was so fascinated with her beautiful village of Ardericca, that she had the river above Babylon changed so it wound this way and wound that, and curved this way and curved that, and though you sailed on it for three days every day you would be in sight of that exquisite village. Now, I do not care which way you sail in morals, or which way you sail in life, if you only sail within sight of this beautiful group of divine commandments. Although they may sometimes seem to be a little angular, I do not care which way you sail, if you sail in sight of them you will never run aground and you will never be shipwrecked. I never felt more impressed from God than I do this moment of the importance of what I am saying to this audience. Society needs toning up on all these subjects. I tell you there is nothing worse to fight than the ten regiments, with bayonets and sabres of fire, marching down the side of Mount Sinai. They always gain the victory, and those who fight against them go under. There are thousands and tens of thousands of men being slain by the Decalogue. What is the matter with that young man of whom I read, dying in his dissipations? In his dying delirium he said: “Now, fetch on the dice. It is mine! No, no! It is gone, all is gone! Bring on more wine! Bring on more wine! Oh, how they rattle their chains! Fiends, fiends, fiends! I say you cheat! The cards are marked! Oh, death! oh, death! oh, death! Fiends, fiends, fiends!” And he gasped and was gone. The Ten Commandments slew him. Let not ladies and gentlemen in this nineteenth century revise the Ten Commandments, but let them in society and at the polls put to the front those who come the nearest to this God-lifted standard. On Tuesday morning next read the twentieth chapter of Exodus at family prayers. The moral or the immoral character of the next President of the United States will add seventy-five per cent. unto or subtract seventy-five per cent. from the national morals. You and I cannot afford to have a bad President; the young men of this country cannot afford to have a bad President; the commercial, the moral, the artistic, the agricultural, the manufacturing, the religious interests of this country, cannot afford to have a bad President; and if you, on looking over the whole field, cannot find a man who, in your estimation, comes within reasonable distance of obedience of the Decalogue, stay at home, do not vote at all. I suppose when in the city of Sodom there were four candidates put up for office, and Lot did not believe in any of them, he did not register. I suppose if there came a crisis in the politics of Babylon, where Daniel did not believe in any of the candidates, he stayed at home on election day, praying with his face toward Jerusalem. But we have no such crisis, we have no such exigency, thank God. Yet I have to say to you today that the moral character of a ruler always affects the ruled; and I appeal to history. Wicked King Manasseh depressed the moral tone of all the nation of Judah, and threw them into idolatry. Good King Josiah lifted up the whole nation by his excellent example. Why is it that today England is higher up in morals than at any point in her national history? It is because she has the best ruler in all Europe, all the attempts to scandalize her name a failure. The political power of Talleyrand brooded all the political tricksters of the last ninety years. The dishonest Vice-Presidency of Aaron Burr blasted this nation until important letters were written in cipher, because the people could not trust the United States mail. And let the court circles of Louis XV and Henry VIII march out, followed by the debauched nations. The higher up you put a bad man the worse is his power for evil. The great fabulist says that the pigeons were in fright at a kite flying in the air, and so these pigeons hovered near the dovecote; but one day the kite said, “Why are you so afraid? why do you pass your life in terror? make me king, and I’ll destroy all your enemies.” So the pigeons made the kite king, and as soon as he got the throne his regular diet was a pigeon a day. And while one of the victims was waiting for its turn to come, it said: “Served us right!” The malaria of swamps rises from the plain to the height, but moral malaria descends from the mountain to the plain. Be careful, therefore, how you elevate into authority men who are in any wise antagonistic to the Ten Commandments. As near as I can tell, the most important thing now to be done is to have about forty million copies of the Sinaitic Decalogue printed and scattered throughout the land. It was a terrible waste when the Alexandrian library was destroyed, and the books were taken to heat four thousand baths for the citizens of Alexandria. It was very expensive heat. But without any harm to the Decalogue, you could with it heat a hundred thousand baths of moral purification for the American people. I say we want a tonic—a mighty tonic—a corrective—an all-powerful corrective—and Moses in the text, with steady hand, notwithstanding the jarring mountains and the full orchestra of the tempest and the blazing of the air, pours out the ten drops—no more, no less—which this nation needs to take for its moral convalescence. But I shall not leave you under the discouragement of the Ten Commandments, because we have all offended. There is another mountain in sight, and while one mountain thunders the other answers in thunder; and while Mount Sinai, with lightning, writes doom, the other mountain, with lightning, writes mercy. The only way you will ever spike the guns of the Decalogue is by the spikes of the cross. The only rock that will ever stop the Sinaitic upheaval is the Rock of Ages. Mount Calvary is higher than Mount Sinai. The English Survey Expedition, I know, say that one Sinaitic peak is seven thousand feet high and another eight thousand and another nine thousand feet high, and travelers tell us that Mount Calvary is only a slightly raised knoll outside of the wall of Jerusalem; but Calvary in moral significance overtops and over-shadows all the mountains of the hemispheres, and Mount Washington and Mount Blanc and the Himalayas are hillocks compared with it. You know that sometimes one fortress will silence another fortress. Moultrie silenced Sumter; and against the mountain of the law I put the mountain of the cross. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die,” booms one, until the earth jars under the cannonade. “Save them from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom,” pleads the other, until earth and heaven and hell quake under the reverberation. And Moses, who commands the one, surrenders to Christ, who commands the other. Once by the law our hopes were slain, But now in Christ we live again. Aristotle says that Mount Etna erupted one day and poured torrents of scoria upon the villages at the base, but that the mountain divided its flame and made a lane of safety for all those who came to rescue their aged parents. And this volcanic Sinai divides its fury for all those whom Christ has come to rescue from the red ruin on both sides. Standing as I do today, half-way between the two mountains—the mountain of the 20th of Exodus and the mountain of the 19th of John—all my terror comes into supernatural calm, for the uproar of the one mountain subsides into quiet, and comes down into so deep a silence that I can hear the other mountain speak—ay, I can hear it whisper: “The blood, the blood, the blood that cleanseth from all sin.” The Survey Expedition says that the Sinaitic mountains have wadys, or water courses—Alleyat and Ajelah—emptying into Feiran. But those streams are not navigable. No boat put into those rocky streams could sail. But I have to tell you this day that the boat of Gospel rescue comes right up amid the water courses of Sinaitic gloom and threat, ready to take us off from under the shadows into the calm sunlight of God’s pardon and into the land of peace. Oh, if you could see that boat of Gospel rescue coming this day, you would feel as John Gilmore, in his book, “The Storm Warriors,” says that a ship’s crew felt on the Kentish Knock Sands, off the coast of England, when they were being beaten to pieces and they all felt they must die! They had given up all hope, and every moment washed another plank from the wreck, and they said, “We must die, we must die!” But after a while they saw a Ramsgate lifeboat coming through the breakers for them, and the man standing highest up on the wreck said: “Can it be? Can it be? It is, it is, it is, it is! Thank God! It is the Ramsgate lifeboat! It is, it is, it is, it is!” And the old Jack tar, describing that lifeboat to his comrades after he got ashore, said: “Oh, my lads, what a beauty it did seem, what a beauty it did seem coming through the breakers that awful day!” May God, through the mercy in Jesus Christ, take us all off the miserable wreck of our sin into the beautiful lifeboat of the Gospel! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 42: 040. PLAGIARISM ======================================================================== Plagiarism Exodus 20:15 : “Thou shalt not steal.” Steal what? Overcoats? Furniture? Dry-goods? Horses? United States bonds? Merchandise? Silver? Gold? Do not so limit the command. This Sinaitic thunder rolls out not only against the purloining of the goods of others, but against the theft of intellectual possessions. It is high time that somewhere a sermon be preached on the subject of plagiarism, a sin which comes down through the centuries, and is now abroad among the people. Dean Swift stopped at a church in Shropshire, England, and heard one of his own sermons preached by the rector of the place. Pope’s Essay on Man was first anonymously published, and was claimed by another author. It is a most practical subject, for there are in our great assemblies every Sunday hundreds of persons who, perhaps in greater or less extent, are earning their livelihood by their pen, and there are young lawyers, and there are young clergymen, and young editors who are fashioning their intellectual habits; and then there are those who are giving their entire life to imparting instruction, and, more than all, there are hundreds of parents, who need to give the right bias on this subject to their children—for in our day all the boys and girls come to the art of literary composition. It is not a subject that you can adjourn to the realm of taste or whimsicality. It is a question of ethics, of right and wrong, of practical morals, and is charged with tremendous issues. Much of the world’s knowledge is common property and can no more be fenced in or kept under lock and key or chained fast to an author’s desk than you can sell or buy the atmosphere. Such are all the facts of history. Such are all the statistics of the world. Such is the realm of anecdote and of logic. Such are all the theories of science and religion. Each age borrows and appropriates the accumulated knowledge of the past ages. Each year is the lawful heir of the preceding year, and every century the legatee of former centuries. But the classification of facts and the peculiar presentation of knowledge may be private property. Plagiarism begins when you appropriate without credit some one else’s way of putting things. All the facts of history are the property of the world, common property; but who would deny the copyright of Bancroft to the History of the United States, or the copyright of Prescott to the Conquest of Mexico, or the copyright of Motley to the Dutch Republic. Telegraphy is a common property, but would it not have been right for Professor Morse to have a patent right in his invention? The one hundred and fourteen thousand words of the English vocabulary are common property, but was not Noah Webster right in keeping a royalty on his unabridged dictionary? The cotton-gin added millions of dollars to the value of property in the South, but who is in sympathy with an attempt to swindle Eli Whitney out of his invention. There are scores of the best men and women in England and the United States who are kept in semi-pauperism and are coughing their life away at writing desks from which they would long ago have been emancipated if they had had rightful control of the financial interests of their literary children. The insufficient international copyright law between England and the United States, which lasted so many years, has sanctioned a depredation that amounts to wholesale and infamous brigandage. On both sides the sea the punishment for purloining a bale of cotton or a tierce of rice or a can of oil or a barrel of apples or a ton of coal or a load of wood, is imprisonment—Tombs Court, disgrace, ejection from all respectable society; but for the larceny of intellectual toil on both sides the sea—toil that may have racked the brain and shattered the nerves, and destroyed the health through years and years of fatigue—the punishment was a derisive smile. When a great book was published either in Great Britain or the United States, the first question was, which publishing house on the opposite side the water should steal it? The time will come when the boundary line between meum and tuum of a literary plain will be as distinctly marked as the boundary line between two homesteads. This countenancing of international larceny has had its effect upon individuals, and editors have to be on their guard lest the poem or the essay that comes into their office shall be the possession of somebody else than its pretended originator. The vice has gone on until it has crept on some of the platforms and into some of the pulpits. It is a most bedwarfing vice. It is most ruinous to mind and most damaging to soul. No man can keep such a sin and keep his religion. It is mental suicide. The man’s capacity for origination shrivels up. No one ever yet successfully plagiarized without being found out. The newspaper press of the day is a detective on the track of all such desperadoes. There was a time when such a vice could be carried on year after year, and it was covered up with the cloak of deceit, and ever and anon ecclesiastical courts tried some-one for purloining John Wesley’s sermons or Jeremy Taylor’s sermons, and they were found out by mere accident. But now, all the literary and scientific and religious knowledge of the world turns over at least once a week, and most of it turns over every day. Each one of the great dailies sends forth in each publication enough material for one volume. They go forth through the mails by the ton. A man might as well hoist a ladder in a village at noonday and try to steal the town clock without being observed as to expect to carry off literary work in our time and not be found out. The newspaper editor, scissors in hand and mucilage on the table, sits up to his chin in exchanges from the four winds of heaven. Besides that, all the world is traveling now. Fares are so cheap and transit is so rapid that before every preacher and before every lecturer, and before every religious exhorter there may sit persons from the most unexpected quarter, and if they heard three years ago something delivered in New Orleans which you deliver in Brooklyn, the discovery will be reported. Quote from all books that you can lay your hands on, quote from all directions—it is a merit to have breadth of reading to be able to quote—but be sure to announce the fact that it is a quotation. Ah! how many are making a mistake in this thing. It is a mistake that a man cannot afford to make. Four commas upside down, two at the beginning of the paragraph and two at the close of the paragraph, would have saved many a man’s integrity and usefulness. One would think that if the fact that it is a wrong to misappropriate the brain work of others is not a sufficient barrier to the evil, the perils of the undertaking would be savingly appalling. Plagiarists have no idea of the damage they do. I have submitted to an amount of imposition to which I shall submit no longer. Contrary to the advice of my friends I have never published one word about it. The time has come for me in a kindly spirit, without any acerbity, to make a protest. In justice to myself, and at the same time as a practical lesson to all Christian workers, I am going to present three or four facts. I lectured in Detroit, Michigan, one Friday evening, On the following night, Saturday night, I received a telegram as I was about to go on a platform at a distant city, a telegram from Detroit, saying in substance: “What does all this mean? The lecture you delivered here in Detroit is identical with one delivered a few nights ago in the City of Chicago by another lecturer.” Editorials, many editorials written on the subject, telegrams flying through the country on the subject. A Chicago journalist told me he had received four telegrams from the newspaper press of New York in regard to the matter. The history of my lecture was that it was the first lecture I ever delivered, I ever prepared, and it was twenty-one years old; it was just of age! and I had delivered it in at least a hundred cities on this and the other side the sea, and it had been largely reported. I do not take the responsibility of saying that the lecturer in Chicago plagiarized my lecture, I do not take the responsibility because I do not know, but I will say that if I had not been able by ten thousand witnesses to prove the priority of my lecture, it would have been very damaging to me. Another fact: Just after I came to Brooklyn, I preached a sermon on “Hagar in the Wilderness.” The sermon was taken down by a stenographer and was printed. Ten years after, a member of my church asked me to reproduce that sermon, saying it had done him some good. I took up the stenographic report of that sermon, read it carefully, and as nearly as I could reproduced it. Before that week was out I received four letters, one from Pittsburg, one from Chicago, one from Boston, and one from Louisville, Kentucky, saying in substance: “How is this? Our Monday morning papers say you preached a sermon on ‘Hager in the Wilderness,’ that you preached it the day before in the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Why, that very sermon was preached in our city one or two months ago by a minister or an evangelist. Did you take it from him, or did he take it from you?” I sat down and wrote four indignant letters, and carried them in my pocket, as I am accustomed to do with such letters, and finally burned them up. I knew what a plight those plagiarists would be in if I referred my correspondents to the newspapers which had published that sermon ten years before. I was wrong in condoning their faults. I shall never let such thieves again escape. I say now, as I have said before, that if Christian workers in any part of the world want to employ my sermons in places where there is no pastor, and to read them in churches and in halls and in houses, as they are read on both sides of the sea, they have full liberty to do so. I believe what I preach is the truth of the Gospel and the wider it goes the better I am pleased. The officers of my church understood that whoever else was crowded in church, gentlemen of the press should never be crowded. Years ago I prayed God for this result which has come in the opening in a marvelous way through the secular as well as the religious press for the full publication of my sermons week by week in all the cities of Christendom. I am grateful to God for this opportunity and I am grateful to all journalists and all reporters who give me the privilege. But is it right that an opportunity like this should be abused by plagiarists to put me in a wrong light? I tell you the nuisance has become intolerable. Another illustration: Years ago, I received a letter from the President of the Wesleyan Conference in Australia, saying in substance: “Yesterday we suspended from the ministry a preacher, not for preaching your sermons exactly, but for saying that one of your sermons was his. The subject was the ‘Mutilation of the Scriptures,’ the text was Jeremiah thirty-six and twenty-three: ‘And it came to pass that when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, Jehoiakim cut it with the penknife.’“ The President of the Wesleyan Conference went on to inform me that this preacher had in the cities of New Zealand and Australia preached this sermon, and finally he was announced to preach in Melbourne, and a gentleman who had received a book from London containing fifty of my sermons, among others the very sermon, carried the book with him to church, thinking perhaps the sermon might be repeated in Melbourne, and when the preacher arose and announced his text the inquisitive auditor in the pew opened the book, and without any notes, and from memory the preacher went through the whole discourse, not changing a word. He was arraigned before the ecclesiastical court, and, of course, denied the plagiarism, for a man who will steal will lie, but the book of sermons was produced, and he was immediately suspended from the ministry. Am I not right, I ask you as common-sense men and women, in uttering a protest? I have a more remarkable case, and it is comparatively recent. A Pittsburg journal, one of our most prominent papers, printed a reportorial statement. It was not printed in any unkindness to me because I am personally acquainted with the editor; but the reporter says that he interviewed “an eminent divine” of Pittsburg, and that “eminent divine” gave him the following statement: “The sermons of Talmage are frequently stolen by rural ministers, yet I once heard of a case where he was caught in the act himself. On the occasion referred to, he preached an unusually eloquent sermon which was afterward published as his own. On the following Sabbath a Methodist minister of Brooklyn preached the same sermon. A friend asked him why he had preached Talmage’s sermon so soon after he had delivered it himself. He denied the insinuation indignantly, and being pressed on the point produced an English newspaper containing the sermon, thus admitting his own guilt, but pulling Talmage from his pedestal at the same time. Talmage once preached a sermon on the owl, the vulture, the bat, the chameleon, and the snail. A certain minister who was then, and is still, located within a hundred miles of Pittsburg used the sermon on the following Sabbath. The exposure of this action, in connection with other causes, caused a dissolution of his relations with that congregation. Before leaving, however, he delivered a farewell sermon, which was especially sarcastic, and which his hearers afterward learned was also the property of Talmage.” Now, if that “eminent minister” of Pittsburg will prove that some minister in Brooklyn preached a sermon identical with anything I preached, and I cannot prove that I previously preached and printed it either in this country or in Europe, I will put for distribution among the poor of Pittsburg a thousand dollars in the hand of the editor of the paper spoken of. A thousand dollars for the poor of that city, the pastors of that city to be the jury in the matter. A thousand dollars will buy a great many shoes for bare feet in the cold weather. Now, if that “eminent divine” of Pittsburg is accurately reported, he is a calumniator. Is it not time that in justice to myself and my church I file this caveat? I sat in my own pulpit in Brooklyn and heard a clergyman standing before me preach one of my own sermons verbatim. I suppose the sermon, without any name attached, had been printed somewhere. The trouble is when plagiarists are caught they go to pleading, generally, unconscious assimilation, or unwitting appropriation. They happened to read it and it stuck fast to them! And they did not realize it. False! No man makes a mistake like that without knowing it. A man no more makes that mistake than does by mistake a sneak-thief put his hand in your cash box. Unconscious assimilation, indeed! In my first country settlement I had a great deal of interest in raising a splendid flock of fowls. I used to go out two or three times a day and admire them. One morning I went to the hennery and they were all gone. I thought at the time that the man who took them was a criminal; but I find out in these days perhaps it was only a case of unconscious assimilation! I suppose he just walked away and they stuck fast to him! I tell you that with the vast resources, legitimate resources open before literary men in this day, plagiarism is inexcusable. I say these things not only in justice to myself, but as a lesson to all Christian workers here and elsewhere. Be yourself and no one else. All the work you do for Christ that is effective you will do with your own weapons. God has given you just enough faculty to do all the work he ever expects of you. Use all books and all the intellectual toil of others only as a whetstone to sharpen your own battle-ax. Your own way will be more effective for good than anybody else’s way employed by you, though there were fifty per cent. more genuine in that way. David broke down under Saul’s armor, but he had been a shepherd’s boy, and he knew how to use a sling, and he took five smooth pebbles from the brook and he had five times more ammunition than was necessary, for it only took one pebble skilfully hurled to crack like an eggshell Goliath’s cranium. Above all, my dear friends, saturate yourselves with Scriptural knowledge and with Scriptural style. No copyright of that book of books. Daniel Webster said if he had ever come to any perspicuity of style it was by long time perusal of the Scriptures. Rufus Choate having with forensic magnetism aroused judge and jury and court-room to highest pitch of enthusiasm, whelmed them with Scriptural peroration. It is the most magnificent book ever written, and it is all at your disposal. Do you want history? Quote Moses. Do you want blank verse? Quote Habakkuk. Do you want the spectral? Quote Ezekiel. Do you want the pastoral? Quote Ruth. Do you want a battle march? Quote Joshua. Do you want argument? Quote Paul. Do you want pathos? Quote John. Do you want all tenderness and all omnipotence? Quote Christ. Equip yourself from all sources. Read all good books. Listen to all oratorios. Examine all pictures. Bring botany and geology and astronomy and history and poetry and archæology. Gather all these up and then mass your troops for one great Gospel campaign, and remember it closes at sundown. Alas! how many lose the battle of life because either they do not start early enough, or they make fatal mistakes after they have started. For those two reasons Napoleon lost Waterloo. History tells us, and Victor Hugo in his most popular work powerfully dramatizes the fact, that the night before the memorable eighteenth of June, 1815, there was a great deluge of rain, and the ground was so soaked that Napoleon could not move his artillery, and he had to wait until the ground was somewhat settled; so that instead of opening the battle as he had expected at six o’clock in the morning, he opened it at nearly twelve at noon. Of course, that gave time for Blucher to come up with his reenforcements, and to join Wellington and to overthrow the great Frenchman. Had there been no rain that night, and had the battle opened at six o’clock in the morning instead of at twelve o’clock at noon, or near twelve, the battle might have been ended by noon in the overthrow of the English army, for Napoleon had nearly a hundred more guns than Wellington. The difference between six and twelve o’clock for Napoleon was the difference between defeat and victory. And that is the way I see a great many people losing the battle of life. They start too late. They wait until their foes are re-enforced and re-enforced and other battalions of temptation fall into line. Instead of opening the battle in the morning of life they open it in the noon of life; at twelve instead of six. Oh, you cannot do in an afternoon what was intended for a whole day. What a lesson for all of the young. Oh, the stupendous difference between six o’clock and twelve o’clock. And then avoid making a fatal mistake. Many have been destroyed by one mistake. Only one false entry. Only one fraud. Only one plagiarism. Only one experiment in sin. Only one evil companionship. Only one day of dissipation. Only one night of wassail. Only one fall. Only those are safe who are bounded on the north and the south and the east and the west and above and beneath by the grace of God. Your beautiful intentions will avail nothing unless they are divinely upheld. They will be a beautiful suspension bridge with buttresses not strong enough to hold the strain. Make Christ your ally, and you make heaven an annex of time. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 43: 041. THE CONCHOLOGY OF THE BIBLE; OR, GOD AMONG THE SHELLS ======================================================================== The Conchology of the Bible; or, God Among the Shells Exodus 30:34 : “And the Lord said unto Moses, Take unto thee sweet spices, stacte, and onycha.” You may not have noticed the shells of the Bible, although in this early part of the sacred Book God calls you to consider and employ them, as he called Moses to consider and employ them. Behold and wonder and worship. The onycha of my text is a shell found on the banks of the Red Sea, and Moses and his army must have crushed many of them under foot as they crossed the bisected waters, onycha on the beach and onycha in the unfolded bed of the deep. I shall speak of this shell as a beautiful and practical revelation of God, and as true as the first chapter of Genesis and the last chapter of the Revelation or everything between. Not only is this shell, the onycha, found in the Red Sea, but in the waters of India. It not only delectates the eye with its convolutions of beauty, white and lustrous and seriate, but blesses the nostril with a pungent aroma. This shell-fish, accustomed to feed on spikenard, is redolent with that odorous plant, redolent when alive and redolent when dead. Its shells, when burnt, bewitch the air with fragrance. In my text, God commands Moses to mix this onycha with the perfumes of the altar in the ancient Tabernacle, and I propose to mix some of its perfumes at the altar of our own tabernacle, as I now come to speak of the Conchology of the Bible, or God among the Shells. It is a secret that you may keep for me, for I have never before told it to any one, that in all the realms of the natural world there is nothing to me so fascinating, so completely absorbing, so full of suggestiveness, as a shell. What? More entertaining than a bird, which can sing, when a shell cannot sing? Well, there you have made a great mistake. Pick up the onycha from the banks of the Red Sea, or pick up a bivalve from the beach of the Atlantic Ocean, and listen, and you hear a whole choir of marine voices—bass, alto, soprano—in an unknown tongue, but seeming to chant, as I put them to my ear, “The sea is his and he made it;” others singing, “Thy way, O God, is in the sea;” others hymning, “He ruleth the raging of the sea.” “What,” says some one else, “does the shell impress you more than the star?” In some respects, yes, because I can handle the shell and closely study the shell, while I cannot handle the star, and if I study it I must study it at a distance of millions and millions of miles. “What,” says some one else, “are you more impressed by the shell than by the flower?” Yes, for it has far greater varieties and far greater richness of color, as I could show you in thousands of specimens, and because the shell does not fade, as does the rose leaf, but maintains its beauty century after century; so that the onycha which the hoof of Pharaoh’s horse knocked aside in the chase of the Israelites across the Red Sea may have kept its lustre to this hour. Yes, they are so parti-colored and multicolored that you might pile them up until you would have a wall with all the colors of the wall of heaven, from the jasper at the bottom to the amethyst at the top. Oh, the shells! The petrified foam of the sea! The hardened bubbles of the deep! The diadems thrown by the ocean to the feet of the continent! How the shells are ribbed, grooved, cylindered, mottled, iridescent! They were used as coin by some nations, fastened in belts by others, made into handles of wooden implements by still others. Cowries are still used as coin in some parts of the world. Mollusks not only of the sea but mollusks of the land. Do you know how much they have had to do with the world’s history? They saved the Church of God from extinguishment. The Israelites marched out of Egypt two million strong, besides flocks and herds. The Bible says “the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading troughs being bound up in the clothes on their shoulders.... They are thrust forth out of Egypt and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves any victuals.” Just think of it! Forty years in the wilderness! Infidelity triumphantly asks: “How could they live forty years in the wilderness without food? You say manna fell. Oh, that was after a long while. They would have starved long before the manna fell.” The fact is they were chiefly kept alive by the mollusks of the land or shelled creatures. Mr. Fronton and Mr. Sicard took the same route from Egypt toward Canaan that the Israelites took, and they give this as their testimony: “Although the children of Israel must have consisted of about two million of souls, with baggage and innumerable flocks and herds, they were not likely to experience any inconvenience in their march. Several thousand persons might walk abreast with the greatest ease in the very narrowest part of the valley in which they first began to file off. It soon afterwards expands to above three leagues in width. With respect to forage, they would be at no loss. The ground is covered with tamarisk, broom, clover and sainfoin, of which latter, especially, camels are passionately fond, besides almost every variety of odoriferous plant and herb proper for pasturage. The whole sides of the valley through which the children of Israel marched are still tufted with brushwood, which doubtless afforded food for their beasts, together with many drier sorts for lighting fire, on which the Israelites could with the greatest ease bake the dough they brought with them on small iron plates, which form a constant appendage to the baggage of an oriental traveller. Lastly, the herbage underneath these trees and shrubs is completely covered with snails of a prodigious size and of the best sort, and however uninviting such a repast might appear to us, they are here esteemed a great delicacy. They are so plentiful in this valley that it may be literally said that it is difficult to take one step without treading on them.” So the shelled creatures saved the host of Israelites on the march to the Promised Land, and the attack of infidelity at this point is defeated by the facts, as infidelity is always defeated by facts, since it is founded on ignorance. In writing and printing, our interrogation point has at the bottom a mark like a period and over it a flourish like the swing of a teamster’s whip, and we put this interrogation point at the end of a question; but in the Spanish language, the interrogation point is twice used for each question. At the beginning of the question the interrogation point is presented upside down, and at the close of the question right side up. When infidelity puts a question about the Scriptures, as it always indicates ignorance, the question ought to be printed with two interrogation points, one at the beginning and one at the close, but both upside down. Thank God for the wealth of mollusks all up and down the earth, whether feeding the Israelites on their way to the land flowing with milk and honey, or, as we are better acquainted with the mollusks, when flung to the beach of lake or sea. If I should ask you to name three of the great royal families of the earth, perhaps you would respond, the House of Stuart, the House of Hapsburg, the House of Bourbon, but the three royal families of mollusks are the Univalve, or shell in one part; the Bivalve, or shell in two parts, and the Multivalve, or shell in many parts; and I see God in their every hinge, in their every tooth, in their every cartilage, in their every ligament, in their every spiral ridge, and in their adaptation of thin shell for still ponds and thick coatings for boisterous seas. They all dash upon me the thought of the providential care of God. What is the use of all this architecture of the shell, and why is it pictured from the outside lip clear down into its labyrinths of construction? Why the infinity of skill and radiance in a shell? What is the use of the color and exquisite curve of a thing so insignificant as a shell-fish? Why, when the conchologist, by dredge or rake, fetches the crustaceous specimens to the shore, does he find at his feet whole Alhambras and Coliseums and Parthenons and Crystal Palaces of beauty in miniature, and these bring to light only an infinitesimal part of the opulence in the great subaqueous world. Linnaeus counted twenty-five hundred species of shells, but conchology had then only begun its achievements. While exploring the bed of the Atlantic Ocean in preparation for laying the cable, shelled creatures were brought up from the depths of nineteen hundred fathoms. When lifting the telegraph wire from the Mediterranean and Red seas, shelled creatures were brought up from depths of two thousand fathoms. The English Admiralty, exploring in behalf of science, found mollusks at a depth of twenty-four hundred and thirty-five fathoms. What a realm awful for vastness! As the shell is only the house and the wardrobe of insignificant animals of the deep, why all that wonder and beauty of construction? God’s care for them is the only reason. And if God provide so munificently for them, will he not see that you have wardrobe and shelter? Wardrobe and shelter for a periwinkle; shall there not be wardrobe and shelter for a man? Would God give a coat of mail for the defence of a Nautilus and leave you no defence against the storm? Does he build a stone house for a creature that lasts a season, and leave without home a soul that takes hold on centuries and aeons? Hugh Miller found “The Footprints of the Creator” in the Old Red Sandstone, and I hear the harmonies of God in the tinkle of the sea-shells when the tide comes in. The same Christ who drew a lesson of providential care from the fact that God clothes the grass of the field instructs me to draw the same lesson from the shells. In almost every man’s life, however well born and prosperous for years, and in almost every woman’s life there comes a very dark time, at least once. A conjunction of circumstances will threaten bankruptcy and homelessness and starvation. It may be that these words will meet the ear or the eye of those who are in such a state of foreboding. Come, then, and see how God gives an ivory palace to a water creature that you could cover with a ten-cent piece, and clothes in armor against all attack a coral no bigger than a snowflake. I do not think that God will take better care of a bivalve than of one of his own children. I rake to your feet with the Gospel rake the most thorough evidences of God’s care for his creatures. I pile around you great mounds of shells, that they may teach you a most comforting theology. Oh, ye of little faith, walk along these arbors of coralline, and look at these bouquets of shell fit to be handed a queen on her coronation day, and see these fallen rainbows of color, and examine these lilies in stone, these primroses in stone, these heliotropes in stone, these cowslips in stone, these geraniums in stone, these japonicas in stone. Oh, ye who have your telescopes ready, looking out on clear nights, trying to see what is occurring in Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury, know that within a few hours’ walk or ride of where you now are there are whole worlds that you might explore, but of which you are unconscious; and among the most beautiful and suggestive of these worlds is the conchological world. Take this lesson of a providential care. How does that old hymn go?— We may, like ships, by tempest be tossed On perilous deeps, but cannot be lost; Though Satan enrages the wind and the tide, The promise assures us the Lord will provide. But while you get this pointed lesson of providential care from the shelled creatures of the deep, notice in their construction that God helps them to help themselves. This house of stone in which they live is not dropped on them and is not built around them. The material for it exudes from their own bodies and is adorned with a colored fluid from the pores of their own neck. It is a most interesting thing to see these crustaceans fashion their own homes out of carbonate of lime and membrane. And all of this is a mighty lesson to those who are waiting for others to build their fortunes, when they ought to go to work and, like the mollusks, build their own fortunes out of their own brain, out of their own sweat, out of their own industries. Not a mollusk on all the beaches of all the seas would have a house of shell if it had not itself built one. Do not wait for others to shelter you or prosper you. All the crustaceous creatures of the earth, from every flake of their covering and from every ridge of their tiny castles on Atlantic and Pacific and Mediterranean coasts, say: “Help yourself, while God helps you to help yourself.” Those people who are waiting for their father or rich old uncle to die and leave them a fortune are as silly as a mollusk would be to wait for some other mollusk to drop on it a shell-equipment. It would kill the mollusk, as, in most cases, it destroys a man. Not one person out of a hundred ever was strong enough to stand the possession of a large estate by inheritance dropped on him in a mass. Have great expectations from only two persons—God and yourself. Let the onycha of my text become your preceptor. But the more I examine the shells, the more I am impressed that God is a God of emotion. Many scoff at emotion, and seem to think that God is a God of cold geometry and iron laws and eternal apathy and enthroned stoicism. No! no! The shells with overpowering emphasis deny it. While law and order reign in the universe you have but to see the lavishness of color on the Crustacea, all shades of crimson from the faintest blush to blood of battlefield, all shades of blue, all shades of green, all shades of all colors from deepest black to whitest light, just poured out on the shells with no more order than a mother premeditates or calculates how many kisses and hugs she shall give her babe waking up in the morning sunlight. Yes! My God is an emotional God, and he says: “We must have colors, and let the sun paint all of them on the scroll of that shell; and we must have music, and here is a carol for the robin, and a psalm for the man, and a doxology for the seraphim, and a resurrection call for the archangel.” Ay, he showed himself a God of sublime emotion when he flung himself on this world in the personality of a Christ to save it, without regard to the tears it would take or the blood it would exhaust or the agonies it would involve. When I see the Louvres and the Luxembourgs and the Vaticans of Divine painting strewn along the eight thousand miles of coast; and I hear, in a forest, on a summer morning, musical academies and Handel societies of full orchestras, I say God is a God of emotion; and if he observes mathematics, it is mathematics set to music, and his figures are written, not in white chalk on blackboards, but by a finger of sunlight on walls of jasmine and trumpet-creeper. In my study of the conchology of the Bible, this onycha of the text also impresses me with the fact that religion is perfume. What else could God have meant when he said to Moses: “Take unto thee sweet spices, stacte and onycha”? Moses took that shell of the onycha, put it over the fire, and as it crumbled into ashes it exhaled an odor that hung in every curtain and filled the ancient Tabernacle, and its sweet smoke escaped from the sacred precincts and saturated the outside air. Perfume! That is what religion is. But, instead of that, some make it a malodor. They serve God in a rough and acerb way. They box their child’s ears because he does not properly keep Sunday, instead of making Sunday so attractive the child could not help but keep it. They make him learn by heart a difficult chapter in the book of Exodus, with all the hard names, because he has been naughty. How many disagreeable good people there are! No one doubts their piety, and they will reach heaven, but they will have to get fixed up before they go there, or they will make trouble by calling out to us: “Keep off that grass!” “What do you mean by plucking that flower?” “Show your tickets!” Oh! how many Christian people need to obey my text, and take into their worship and their behavior and their consociations and presbyteries and general assemblies and conferences more onycha. I have sometimes gone in a very gale of spirit into the presence of some disagreeable Christians and in five minutes felt wretched, and at some other time I have gone depressed into the company of suave and genial souls, and in a few moments I felt exhilarant. What was the difference? It was the difference in what they burnt in their censers. The one burnt onycha; the other burnt asafœtida. In this conchological study of the Bible I also notice that the mollusks or shelled animals furnish the purple that you see richly darkening so many Scripture chapters. The purple stuff in the ancient Tabernacle, the purple girdle of the priests, the purple mantle of Roman emperors, the apparel of Dives in purple and fine linen, ay, the purple robe which, in mockery, was thrown upon Christ, were colored by the purple of the shells on the shores of the Mediterranean. It was discovered by a shepherd’s dog having stained his mouth by breaking one of the shells, and the purple aroused admiration. Costly purple! Six pounds of the purple liquor extracted from the shell-fishes was used to prepare one pound of wool. Purple was also used on the pages of books. Bibles and prayer-books appeared in purple vellum, and may still be found in some of the national libraries of Europe. Plutarch speaks of some purple which kept its beauty for one hundred and ninety years. But, after a while, the purple became easier to get, and that which had been a sign of imperial authority when worn in robes, was adopted by many people, and so an Emperor, jealous of this appropriation of the purple, made a law that any one except royalty wearing purple should be put to death. Then, as if to punish the world for that outrage of exclusiveness, God obliterated the color from the earth, as much as to say: “If all cannot have it, none shall have it.” But, though God has deprived the race of that shell-fish which afforded the purple, there are shells enough to make us glad and worshipful. Oh, the entrancement of hue and shape still left all up and down the beaches of all the continents! These creatures of the sea have what roofs of enameled porcelain! They dwell under what pavilions, blue as the sky and fiery as a sunset and mysterious as an aurora! And am I not right in leading you, for a few moments, through this mighty realm of God so neglected by human eye and human footstep? It is said that the invention of the harp and lute was suggested by the fact that in Egypt the Nile overflowed its banks, and when the waters retreated, tortoises were left by the million on all the lands, and these tortoises died, and soon nothing was left but the cartilages and gristle of these creatures, which tightened under the heat into musical strings that, when swept by the wind or touched by the foot of man, vibrated, making sweet sounds, and so the world took the hint and fashioned the harp. And am I not right in trying to make music out of the shells, and lifting them as a harp, from which to thrum the jubilant praises of the Lord and the pathetic strains of human condolence? But I find the climax of this conchology of the Bible in the pearl, which has this distinction above all other gems, that it requires no human hand to bring out its beauties. Job speaks of it; and its sheen is in Christ’s sermon; and the Bible, which, opening with the onycha of my text, closes with the pearl. Of such value is this crustaceous product, I do not wonder that for the exclusive right of fishing for it on the shores of Ceylon a man paid to the English government six hundred thousand dollars for one season. So exquisite is the pearl, I do not wonder that Pliny thought it was made out of a drop of dew, the creature rising to the surface to take it, and the chemistry of nature turning the liquid into a solid. You will comprehend why the Bible makes so much of the pearl in its similitudes if you know how much it costs to get it. Boats with divers sail out from the island of Ceylon, ten divers to each boat. Thirteen men guide and manage the boat. Down into the dangerous depths, amid sharks that swirl around them, plunge the divers, while sixty thousand people anxiously gaze on. After three or four minutes’ absence from the air, the diver ascends, nine-tenths strangulated and blood rushing from ears and nostrils, and, flinging his pearly treasure on the deck, falls into unconsciousness. Oh, it is an awful exposure and strain and peril to fish for pearls, and yet they do so, and is it not a wonder that to get that which the Bible calls the Pearl of Great Price, worth more than all other pearls put together, there should be so little anxiety, so little struggle, so little enthusiasm. Would to God that we were all as wise as the merchantman Christ commended, “who, when he had found one Pearl of Great Price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.” But what thrills me with suggestiveness is the material out of which all pearls are made. They are fashioned from the wound of the shell-fish. The exudation from that wound is fixed and hardened and enlarged into a pearl. The ruptured vessels of the water-animal fashioned the gem that now adorns the finger or earring or sword hilt or king’s crown. So, out of the wounds of earth will come the pearls of heaven. Out of the wound of conviction, the pearl of pardon. Out of the wound of bereavement, the pearl of solace. Out of the wound of loss, the pearl of gain. Out of the deep wound of the grave, the pearl of resurrection joy. Out of the wounds of a Saviour’s life and a Saviour’s death, the rich, radiant, the everlasting pearl of heavenly gladness. “And the twelve gates were twelve pearls.” Take the consolation, all ye who have been hurt, whether hurt in body or hurt in mind or hurt in soul. Get your trouble sanctified. If you suffer with Christ on earth, you will reign with him in glory. The tears of earth are the crystals of heaven “Every several gate was of one pearl.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 44: 042. ABOLITION OF SUNDAY ======================================================================== Abolition of Sunday Exodus 31:13 : “Verily my Sabbaths ye shall keep.” While the evangelical denominations put especial emphasis upon the sanctity of the Sabbath, I am glad to know that the wisdom of resting one day in the seven is almost universally acknowledged. Men have found out that they can do more work in six days than they can in seven. The world has found out that the fifty-two days of rest in a year are not a subtraction, but an addition. It has been demonstrated in all departments. Lord Castlereagh thought he could work his brain three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, and he broke down and committed suicide; and Wilberforce said in regard to him: “Poor Castlereagh! this comes from non-observance of the Sabbath.” A prominent merchant of New York said: “I should long ago have been a maniac but for the observance of the Sabbath.” The nerves, the brain, the muscles, the bones, the entire physical, mental, and moral constitution cry out for Sabbatic rest. What is true of man is true of beast. Travelers have found that they come sooner to their destination if they stop one day in the seven. What is the matter with some of these horses attached to the street cars as the poor creatures go stumbling and staggering on? They are robbed of the Sabbatic rest. In the days of old, when the sheep and the cattle were driven from the far West to the seacoast, it was found out by positive test that those drovers got sooner to the seaboard who stopped one day in seven on the way. They came sooner to the seaboard than those who drove right on. The fishermen off the banks of Newfoundland have experimented in this matter, and they find that they catch more fish in the year when they observe the Sabbath than in the year when they do not observe the Sabbath. When I asked a Rocky Mountain locomotive engineer, as I was riding with him, “Why do you switch off your locomotive on a side track and take another?”—as I saw he was about to do—”it seems to be a straight route.” He replied: “We have to let the locomotive stop and cool off, or the machinery would very soon break down!” The manufacturers of salt were told if they allowed their kettles to cool one day in seven they would have immense repairs to make; but the experiment was made, and the contrast came, and it was found that those manufacturers of salt who allowed the kettles to cool once a week had less repairs to make than those who kept the furnaces in full blast and the kettles always hot. What does all this mean? It means that intellectual man and dumb beast and dead machinery cry out for the Lord’s day. The Sabbath comes, and it soothes the nerves, and it puts out the fires of anxiety which have burned all the week. The fact is, we are seven-day clocks, and we have to be wound up once a week or we will run down into the grave. The Sabbath is a savings bank into which we gather up our resources of physical and mental strength to draw on all the week. That man gives a mortgage to disease and death who works on the Sabbath, and at the most unexpected moment the mortgage will be foreclosed and the soul ejected from the premises. Every gland, every cell, every globule, every finger-nail, cries out: “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy!” While the flail and the axe and the yardstick have not been able to destroy the Sabbath, and the vast majority of people, from sanitary reasons, have about concluded it is best to rest on the Sabbath, there is an attempt to destroy the Lord’s day, on one side by the grog-shops, and on the other side by secular amusements. We have a law in this State most positively forbidding the sale of intoxicating drinks on the Sabbath day. That law is every Sabbath broken. Some say: “Let it be repealed—a law on the statute book not executed, better drive out the law.” Instead of that we say we want the law to continue on the statute book, and we mean to have it enforced. There are three thousand liquor dealers in Brooklyn banded together to put down this law, and they are moving upon the State Legislature, and they propose to have that law broken down and cast out from the statute book. When one of our reformers comes up before a justice of the peace and reports some of these Sabbath-breakers, the justice of the peace looks over, and in almost every case excuses the criminal. Why? Because he knows there are three thousand liquor dealers in Brooklyn who have their eyes on him, and they will remember it at the next election. Now, what we want is, on the other hand, to have ten thousand good, honest, upright citizens banded together in some excise league, demanding the enforcement of the law, so when a justice of the peace with the criminal before him remembers there are three thousand liquor sellers who want him to discharge the criminal, he will have a vivid remembrance at the same time of the ten thousand honest citizens who demand the enforcement of the law; and these reformers who have been roughly jostled and caricatured and kicked out will be differently treated in times that are to come from the way they have been treated in the times that are past. It is time for all good citizens, whether they are temperance men or not, and all men who have a pride in their homes, to rise up and put down this infamous business, at any rate one day of the week. Certainly, if they have full swing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, they ought to give us at least one day of rest from this awful evil which is abroad amid the nations. To many of our citizens the best day is the worst day! They get their salaries, and they get their wages on Saturday night, and then they are inveigled into these places, and that which ought to have gone for the livelihood of the family goes for their own destruction. Who are you, the men who deal in cloth and hosiery and hardware and groceries, who are you who sell bread and shoes, that you should bow down to the liquor traffic? Your places of business closed up today, theirs open. Will you take off your hat to them? Is their business better than yours? Why should the law give especial privilege to these men who are trafficking in the bodies and souls of men? If a baker should sell bread he would be very apt to be arrested. It is not safe to have loaves of bread going through the streets on Sundays. If a man should sell shoes and boots it would be a very dangerous thing; he might be arrested. But all the liquor saloons are open on the Sabbath. If the front door is not open, the back door is open. Now, I tell you, fellow-citizens, there is something awfully wrong in this town when such things are allowed. Then, there is an effort being made by secular amusements to destroy our Sabbaths. In many of the cities, nearly all the places of theatric and operatic entertainment are open. There are thousands of pens busy trying to write down the Christian Sabbath, and it is a question whether we are going to have pluck and grit and consecration enough to hand down to our children the Sabbath we got from our ancestors. I am opposed to all these invasions of the Sabbath because they run against the divine enactment. God says: “If thou turn away thy foot from doing thy pleasure on my holy day, thou shalt walk upon the high places.” What does he mean by “doing thy pleasure?” He means secular amusements. A man was telling me how he was affrighted when during the time of an earthquake he heard the bellowing of the cattle in the field, and even the barnyard fowl screamed in horror. It was in time of earthquake, and when the mountains were full of fire, that God sent forth the enactment: “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” the agitators of nature emphasizing the divine injunction. Some say, “We ought to have, as they have in other cities, sacred concerts!” I saw a man who had attended one of these grand sacred concerts. He said interspersed amid the music they had a dance and a tight-rope walk and a trapeze performance. I suppose it was a holy dance and a consecrated tight rope. I do not know about that, but I am certain it was a “grand sacred concert.” Will a man rob God? Yes, he will; and every place of secular amusement that is open on Sabbath in any city is grand larceny against the Lord God Almighty. The sailor was right. The captain discharged all his crew because they would not work on Sabbath when they were in port. The captain went out to get another crew. He said to one man: “I should like to have you on my ship.” The man said: “I should like to be employed.” “Will you work on Sunday?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because a man that will rob God Almighty will cheat me out of my wages.” Have you ever looked at the meanness of the desecration of the Sabbath. Suppose you were a poor man, and went to a dry goods merchant, and you begged for some articles of clothing, and he should say to you, “I will give you now six yards of cloth,” and while he goes off at one end of the counter to bind up the six yards of cloth, you slip in behind the counter and steal another yard. That is what every man does when he breaks the Sabbath. God gives us six days, and we want to steal the other. Some one says, “Have you not any regard for the people’s rights?” Yes. I believe in the people having their rights, but has not the Lord any rights? You govern your family, and the Governor rules the State, and the President rules the United States. Do you really think the Lord Almighty, who made the heavens and the earth, has a right to rule the universe? Had he a right to make the enactment, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy?” There is no higher court than that. I declare it now, in the presence of all the people, whether it be a popular or an unpopular thing to say, the people have no rights except those which the Lord Almighty gives them. I am opposed to all these infractions of the Sabbath because they are attempting to introduce in this country the Parisian Sunday. Suppose now while I am speaking you should hear the gun of a foreign ship coming up the harbor. Suppose a bombshell should be thrown from a foreign frigate into this city. How soon the churches would be cleared, and we would be all ready for the contest, and where there was a gun it would be brought into requisition, and all the ships in the Navy Yard would be swung from their anchorage, and we would all be ready to confront such a foreign enemy. Now they are trying to introduce into this country the Parisian Sabbath. How do you like it? Ye who were born under the shadow of the Adirondacks or the Catskills—ye who were born on the banks of the Tennessee or the Savannah, how would you like to have the Parisian Sunday introduced into this country? We say to all who come from other lands, Come, come. I would have all the gates of the continent swung open. I would have the gates of San Francisco swung open toward Asia, and the gates of the Atlantic swung open toward Europe. If next year there should come eight hundred thousand from foreign lands, I would say, Let them come. If you have any idea of the vast reaches of this country yet unoccupied, you are willing they shall come, and the more that come the better. But among those people who will come there is a division, the same as among people in this country—the law-abiding and the law-breakers. The law-abiding people, we want them to come. The law-breakers, we do not want them. We do not want the monarchies of Europe. We do not want the Parisian Sunday. We do not want the Brussellian Sunday or the Dresdenian Sunday. We want to keep the quiet of our Christian Sabbath. I was awakened in Paris by a great racket in the street, and I rushed to the window to see what was the matter. I said to some one: “What is the matter?” I said to another, “What is the matter?” “Oh,” they replied, “it is Sunday!” Sunday! All the vehicles rushing hither and thither. People talking at the height of their voices and in the most boisterous manner. The Champs Elysées one great mob of pleasure-seekers. Balloons flying; parrots chattering; footballs rolling; Punch and Judy shows in scores of places, each with a shouting audience; hand-organs and cymbals and all styles of racket, musical and unmusical. Sunday! And then as the day passed on toward night I stood and saw the excursionists come home, fagged-out men, women, and children, a great Gulf Stream of fatigue and irritability and wretchedness. A drunken Fourth of July instead of a Christian Sunday. How would you like to have such a Sunday as that in this country? Compare it with the Christian Sabbath in one of our best cities. At day-dawn a holy silence comes down. The business man tarries longer on the pillow because there are no store doors to open, no hard work to be engaged in. The family tarry longer around the table. There is no rushing off to business. After a while there is a song sung. After a while there is a prayer offered, and after a while, about ten o’clock, there is a long procession churchward, and there they praise God for his goodness, and they contribute to the poor, the suffering, and the wandering. Which Sunday do you like the better? I will tell you in which boat the Sabbath came to this country, and in which boat it will go out. The Sabbath came to this country in the Mayflower, and if the Sabbath ever leaves this country, it will go in the ark that floats above the deluge of a destroyed nation. If you have ever been in Brussels or in Paris on the Sabbath day it requires no great persuasion for me on my part to get you to pray morning, noon, and night, that such a Sabbath may never come to this country. Then Sunday desecration is such an outrage on employes. Where do these bartenders get their Sunday? Do they get any more wages? No. The breaking down of Sunday, what does it mean? It means that a few men who toil shall toil seven days and get no more pay than they get for six. Then there are all the employes of the opera-houses and the theatres—the scene-shifters, the ballet-dancers, the call-boys, the supernumeraries, making up thousands and thousands in this country. Where are they going to get their Sunday? You see them on the stage, with the tinsel and the tassel and the halberds, or you see them in gauze whirling in the toe tortures, and they seem queens or fairies; but after twelve o’clock at night see them going along the street in faded dress, shivering and cold and hungry, to their garrets or their cellars. It means that these people shall have no rest for the body and no rest for the soul. When you talk about opening places of secular amusement on the Sabbath, while there may be people outside of such establishments who are wanting them, there are many of these employes who are practically praying, “O God, let the crushing Juggernaut stop one day in seven!” It is a swindling process upon employes. It is a proposition to give no Sabbath to thousands and thousands and thousands of people in this country. Then all these movements are a war upon our political institutions. When the Sabbath goes down, the republic goes down. Dissoluteness is inconsistent with self-government. Sabbath-breaking is dissoluteness. What is the matter with republicanism in Italy and in Spain? No Sabbath. What is the matter with republicanism in France? France got a republic, but one day the modern Napoleon rode through the Champs Elysées, and the republic went down under the clattering hoofs. France has a republic again, but how often it quakes from end to end, and one of the commune has only just to plaster an insurgent advertisement against a stone wall, and all France is a-quake and in fear of revolution that is to come. France will never have any quiet, happy, and permanent republic until she quits her roistering Sabbaths and recognizes God and sacred things. Abolish the Sabbath, and then you have the commune in America. Abolish the Sabbath, and then you have revolution, and then you have the sun of prosperity going down in darkness and in blood. May the Lord God of Lexington and Bunker Hill and Gettysburg avert the catastrophe! O men and women who believe in Christian things, O men and women in favor of popular liberty, stand in solid phalanx in this Thermopylae of our national history, for as certainly as I stand here and you sit there, the triumph or overthrow of republican institutions in this country will be decided in this Sabbatic contest. Rally your voices, your pens, your printing presses and all your influence in the Lord’s artillery corps in behalf of the Christian Sabbath. Decree before high heaven that the Sabbath which you received from your ancestors shall go down undamaged to your children. For those who die battling in this contest we will chisel the epitaph: “These are they who came out of great tribulation, and had their robes washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb.” But for that man who proves recreant to the cause of God and his country in a crisis like this, there shall be no honorable epitaph, and he shall not be worthy of any burial-place in all this land, but perhaps some steam tug at midnight may take him out and drop him in the sea where the lawless minds which observe no Sunday may gallop over the grave of him who in life and death proved himself a traitor to the cause of God and American institutions. Long live the Christian Sabbath! Perish forever all attempt to overthrow it! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 45: 043. THE GOLDEN CALF ======================================================================== The Golden Calf Exodus 32:20 : “And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.” People will have a god of some kind, and they prefer one of their own making. Here come the Israelites, breaking off their golden earrings, the men as well as the women, for in those times there was masculine as well as feminine decoration. Where did they get these beautiful gold earrings, coming up as they did from the desert? Oh, they borrowed them of the Egyptians, when they left Egypt. These earrings are piled up into a pyramid of glittering beauty. “Any more earrings to bring?” says Aaron. None. Fire is kindled; the earrings are melted and poured into a mold, not of an eagle or a war charger, but of a silly calf; the gold cools down; the mold is taken away, and the idol is set up on its four legs. An altar is built in front of the shining calf. Then the people throw up their arms and gyrate and shriek and dance vigorously and worship. Moses has been six weeks on Mount Sinai, and he comes back, and hears the howling and sees the dancing of these golden-calf fanatics, and he loses his patience, and he takes the two plates of stone, on which were written the Ten Commandments, and flings them so hard against a rock that they split all to pieces. When a man gets angry he is apt to break all the Ten Commandments! Moses rushes in, and he takes this calf-god and throws it into a hot fire, until it is melted all out of shape, and then pulverizes it—not by the modern appliance of nitro-muriatic acid, but by the ancient appliance of nitre or by the old-fashioned file. He stirs for the people a most nauseating draught. He takes this pulverized golden calf and throws it in the only brook which is accessible, and the people are compelled to drink of that brook or not drink at all. But they did not drink all the glittering stuff thrown on the surface. Some of it flows on down the surface of the brook to the river, and then flows on down the river to the sea, and the sea takes it up and bears it to the mouth of all the rivers, and, when the tides set back, the remains of this golden calf are carried up into the Hudson and the East river and the Thames and the Clyde and the Tiber and men go out and they skim the glittering surface, and they bring it ashore, and they make another golden calf, and California and Australia break off their golden earrings to augment the pile, and in the fires of financial excitement and struggle, all these things are melted together, and while we stand looking and wondering what will come of it, lo! we find that the golden calf of Israelitish worship has become the golden calf of European and American worship. Pull aside this curtain and you see the golden calf of modern idolatry. It is not, like other idols, made out of stocks or stone, but it has an ear so sensitive that it can hear the whispers on Wall Street and Third Street and State Street, and the footfalls in the Bank of England, and the flutter of a Frenchman’s heart on the Bourse. It has an eye so keen that it can see the rust on the farm of Michigan wheat, and the insect in the Maryland peach-orchard, and the trampled grain under the hoof of the Russian war-charger. It is so mighty that it swings any way it will the world’s shipping. It has its foot on all the merchantmen and the steamers. It started the American Civil War, and under God stopped it; and it decided the Turco-Russian contest. One broker in September, 1869, in New York, shouted, “One hundred and sixty for a million!” and the whole continent shivered. The golden calf of the text has its right front foot in New York, its left front foot in Chicago, its right back foot in Charleston, its left back foot in New Orleans, and when it shakes itself it shakes the world. Oh, this is a mighty God—the golden calf of the world’s worship. But every god must have its temple, and this golden calf of the text is no exception. Its temple is vaster than St. Paul’s Cathedral in England, and St. Peter’s in Italy, and the Alhambra of the Spaniards, and the Parthenon of the Greeks, and the Taj Mahal of the Hindus, and all the cathedrals put together. Its pillars are grooved and fluted with gold and its ribbed arches are hovering gold and its chandeliers are descending gold and its floors are tessellated gold and its vaults are crowded heaps of gold and its spires and domes are soaring gold and its organ-pipes are resounding gold and its pedals are tramping gold and its stops pulled out are flashing gold, while standing at the head of the temple, as the presiding deity, are the hoofs and shoulders and eyes and ears and nostrils of the calf of gold. Further, every god must have not only its temple, but its altar of sacrifice, and this golden calf of the text is no exception. Its altar is not made out of stone as other altars, but out of counting-room desks and fireproof safes, and it is a broad, a long, a high altar. The victims sacrificed on it are the Swartouts and the Ketchams and the Fisks and the Tweeds and the Mortons and ten thousand other people who are slain before this golden calf. What does this god care about the groans and struggles of the victims before it? With cold, metallic eye it looks on and yet lets them suffer. What an altar! What a sacrifice of mind, body, and soul! The physical health of a great multitude is flung on to this sacrificial altar. They cannot sleep, and they take chloral and morphine and intoxicants Some of them struggle in a nightmare of stocks, and at one o’clock in the morning suddenly rise up shouting: “A thousand shares of New York Central—one hundred and eight and a-half! take it!”—until the whole family is affrighted, and the speculators fall back on their pillow and sleep until they are awakened again by a “corner” in Pacific Mail or a sudden “rise” of Rock Island. Their nerves gone, their digestion gone, their brain gone, they die. The gowned ecclesiastic comes in and reads trie funeral service: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.” Mistake. They did not “die in the Lord”; the golden calf killed them! The trouble is, when men sacrifice themselves on this altar suggested in the text, they not only sacrifice themselves, but they sacrifice their families. If a man by a wrong course is determined to go to perdition, I suppose you will have to let him go. But he puts his wife and children in an equipage that is the amazement of the avenues, and the driver lashes the horses into two whirlwinds, and the spokes flash in the sun, and the golden headgear of the harness gleams, until black calamity takes the bits of the horses and stops them, and shouts to the luxuriant occupants of the equipage, “Get out!” They get out. They get down. That husband and father flung his family so hard they never got up. There was the mark on them for life—the mark of a split hoof—the death-dealing hoof of the golden calf. Solomon offered in one sacrifice, on one occasion, twenty-two thousand oxen and one hundred and twenty thousand sheep; but that was a tame sacrifice compared with the multitude of men who are sacrificing themselves on this altar of the golden calf, and sacrificing their families with them. The soldiers of General Havelock in India walked literally ankle deep in the blood of “the house of massacre,” where two hundred white women and children had been slain by the Sepoys; but the blood about this altar of the golden calf flows up to the knee, flows up to the girdle, flows to the shoulder, flows to the lip. Great God of heaven and earth, have mercy on those who immolate themselves on this altar! The golden calf has none. Still the degrading worship goes on, and the devotees kneel and kiss the dust and count their golden beads and cross themselves with the blood of their own sacrifice. The music rolls on under the arches; it is made of clinking silver and clinking gold, and the rattling specie of the banks and brokers’ shops, and the voices of all the exchanges. The soprano of the worship is carried by the timid voices of men who have just begun to speculate, while the deep bass rolls out from those who for ten years have been steeped in the seething cauldron. Chorus of voices rejoicing over what they have made; chorus of voices wailing over what they have lost. This temple of which I speak stands open day and night, and there is the glittering god with his four feet on broken hearts, and there is the smoking altar of sacrifice, new victims every moment on it, and there are the kneeling devotees, and the doxology of the worship rolls on, while death stands with moldy and skeleton arm beating time for the chorus—” More! more! more!” Some people are very much surprised at the actions of people in the Stock Exchange, New York. Indeed, it is a scene sometimes that paralyzes description, and is beyond the imagination of any one who has never looked in. What snapping of finger and thumb and wild gesticulation and raving like hyenas, and stamping like buffaloes and swaying to and fro. and jostling and running one upon another and deafening uproar, until the president of the Exchange strikes with his mallet four or five times, crying, “Order! order!” and the astonished spectator goes out into the fresh air feeling that he has escaped from pandemonium. What does it all mean? I will tell you what it means. The devotees of every heathen temple cut themselves to pieces and yell and gyrate. This vociferation and gyration of the Stock Exchange is all-appropriate. This is the worship of the golden calf. But my text suggests that this worship has to be broken up, as the behavior of Moses on this occasion indicated. There are those who say that this golden calf, spoken of in the text, was hollow, and merely plated with gold; otherwise, Moses could not have carried it. I do not know that; but somehow, perhaps by the assistance of his friends, he takes up this golden calf, which is an infernal insult to God and man, and throws it into the fire, and it is melted; and then it comes out and is cooled off, and by some chemical appliance, or by an old-fashioned file, it is pulverized, and it is thrown into the brook, and, as a punishment, the people are compelled to drink the nauseating stuff. So you may depend upon it that God will burn and he will grind to pieces the golden calf of modern idolatry, and he will compel the people in their agony to drink it. If not before, it will be so on the last day. I know not where the fire will begin, whether at the “Battery” or Central Park, whether at Fulton or at Bushwick, whether at Shoreditch or West End; but it will be a very hot blaze. All the government securities of the United States and Great Britain will curl up in the first blast. All the money-safes and deposit-vaults will melt under the first touch. The sea will burn like tinder, and the shipping will be abandoned forever. The melting gold in the broker’s window will burst through the melted window-glass into the street; but the flying population will not stop to scoop it up. The cry of “Fire!” from the mountain will be answered by the cry of “Fire!” in the plain. The conflagration will burn out from the continent toward the sea, and then burn in from the sea toward the land. New York and London, with one cut of the red scythe of destruction, will go down. Twenty-five thousand miles of conflagration! The earth will wrap itself round and round in shroud of flame, and lie down to perish. What then will become of your golden calf? Who then so poor as to worship it? Melted, or between the upper and the nether millstone of falling mountains ground to powder. Dagon down; Moloch down; Juggernaut down; golden calf down! But, every day is a day of judgment, and God is all the time grinding to pieces the golden calf. Merchants of New York and Brooklyn, what is the characteristic of this time in which we live? “Bad,” you say. Professional men, what is the characteristic of the time in which we live? “Bad,” you say. Though I should be in a minority of one, I venture the opinion that these are the best times we have had in many years, for the reason that God is teaching this nation, as never before, that old-fashioned honesty is the only thing that will stand. Some years ago, in a time of panic, we learned, as never before, that forgeries will not pay; that the watering of stock will not pay; that the spending of fifty thousand dollars on country-seats and a palatial city residence, when there are only thirty thousand dollars income, will not pay; that the appropriation of trust funds to our own private speculation will not pay. We had a great national tumor, in the shape of fictitious prosperity. We called it national enlargement; instead of calling it enlargement, we might better have called it a swelling. It was a tumor, and God cut it out; and the nation was sent back to the principles of our fathers and grandfathers, when twice three made six instead of sixty, and when the apples at the bottom of the barrel were just as good as the apples on the top of the barrel, and a silk handkerchief was not half cotton, and a man who wore a five-dollar coat paid for was more honored than a man who wore a fifty-dollar coat not paid for. The modern golden calf, like the one of the text, is very apt to be made out of borrowed gold. These Israelites of the text borrowed the earrings of the Egyptians, and then melted them into a god. That is the way the golden calf is made nowadays. A great many housekeepers, not paying for the articles they get, borrow of the grocer and the baker and the butcher and the dry-goods seller. Then the retailer borrows of the wholesale dealer. Then the wholesale dealer borrows of the capitalist; and we borrow and borrow and borrow, until the community is divided into two classes—those who borrow and those who are borrowed of; and after a while the capitalist wants his money and he rushes upon the wholesale dealer, and the wholesale dealer wants his money and he rushes upon the retailer, and the retailer wants his money and he rushes on the customer, and we all go down together. There is many a man in this day who rides in a carriage and owes the blacksmith for the tire, and the wheelwright for the wheel, and the trimmer for the curtain, and the driver for unpaid wages, and the harnessmaker for the bridle, and the furrier for the robe, while from the tip of the carriage-tongue clear back to the tip of the camel’s-hair shawl fluttering out of the back of the vehicle, everything is paid for by notes that have been three times renewed. I tell you, that in this country we shall never get things right until we stop borrowing and pay as we go. It is this temptation to borrow and borrow and borrow that keeps the people everlastingly praying to the golden calf for help, and just at the minute they expect the help the golden calf treads on them. The judgments of God, like Moses in the text, will rush in and break up this worship; and I say, let the work go on until every man shall learn to speak truth with his neighbor, and those who make engagements shall feel themselves bound to keep them, and when a man who will not repent of his business iniquity, but goes on wishing to satiate his cannibal appetite by devouring widows’ houses, shall, by the law of the land, be compelled to exchange the brownstone front on Madison Avenue or Beacon Hill for the Penitentiary. Let the golden calf perish! But, if we have made this world our God, when we come to die, we shall see our idol demolished. How much of this world are you going to take with you into the next? Will you have two pockets—one in each side of your shroud? Will you cushion your casket with bonds and mortgages and certificates of stock? Ah! no. The ferryboat that crosses this Jordan takes no baggage—nothing heavier than an immaterial spirit. You may, perhaps, take five hundred dollars with you two or three miles, in the shape of funeral trappings, to the cemetery, but you will have to leave them there. It would not be safe for you to lie down there with a gold watch or a diamond ring; it would be a temptation to the pillagers. If we have made this world our god, we shall see our idol, when we die, ground to pieces by our pillow, and we shall have to drink it in bitter regrets for the wasted opportunities of a lifetime. Soon we will be gone. Where are the veterans who on the Fourth of July, 1794, marched from New York Park to the “Battery” and fired a salute, and then marched back again? and the Society of the Cincinnati, who dined that afternoon at Tontine Coffee House on Wall Street? and Grant Thorburn, who that afternoon waited fifteen minutes at the foot of Maiden Lane for the Brooklyn ferryboat, then got in, and was rowed across by two men, with oars, the tide so strong that it was an hour and ten minutes before they landed? Where are the veterans that fired the salute, and the men of the Cincinnati Society who that afternoon drank to the patriotic toast? and the oarsmen that rowed the boat? and the people who were transported? Gone! Oh! this is a fleeting world; it is a dying world. A man who had worshiped it all his days, in his dying moment described himself when he said, “Fool! fool! fool!” I want you to change temples, and to give up the worship of this unsatisfying and cruel god for the service of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here is the gold that will never crumble. Here are the securities that will never fail. Here are banks that will never break. Here is an altar on which there has been one sacrifice that does for all, for “by one sacrifice hath Christ perfected forever them that are sanctified.” Here is a God, who will comfort you when you are in trouble, and soothe you when you are sick, and save you when you die. For he has said: “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.” When your parents have breathed their last, and the old, wrinkled and trembling hands can no more be put upon your head for a blessing, he will be to you a father and mother both, giving you the defense of the one and the comfort of the other. For have we not Paul’s blessed hope that as Jesus died and rose again, “Even so them also which sleep in Jesus shall God bring with him.” And when your children go away from you, the sweet darlings, you will not kiss them and say good-by forever. He only wants to hold them for you a little while. He will give them back to you again, and he will have them all waiting for you at the gates of eternal welcome. And he shall say, “Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I have clothed thee with change of raiment; even the spotless righteousness of my only begotten Son.” Oh, what a God he is! He will allow you to come so close that you can put your arms around his neck, while he in response will put his arms around your neck, and all the windows of heaven will be hoisted to let the redeemed look out and see the spectacle of a rejoicing Father and a returned prodigal locked in that glorious embrace. Quit worshiping the golden calf, and bow this day before him in whose presence we must all appear when the world has turned to ashes, When shriveling like a parched scroll, The flaming heavens together roll, When louder yet, and yet more dread, Swells the high trump that wakes the dead. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 46: 044. THE BALLOT-BOX ======================================================================== The Ballot-Box Exodus 37:1 : “Two cubits and a-half was the length of it, and a cubit and a-half was the breadth of it, and a cubit and a-half was the height of it.” Look at it!—the sacred chest of the ancients, about five feet long, three feet wide, and three feet high. Within and without of gold, on the top of it representations of two angels facing each other with outspread wings. The book of the law and many precious things were in that box. The fate of the nation was in it. Carried at the head of the host, in the presence of that box, the waters of the Jordan parted. Costly, precious, divinely charged, momentous box! Unholy hands must be kept off it. It was generally called the ark of the covenant, but you will understand it was a box, the most precious box of the ages. Where is it? Gone forever. No crypt of ancient church, no museum of the world has a fragment of it. But is not this nation God’s chosen people? Have we not been brought through the Red Sea? Have we not been led with the pillar of fire by night? Have we no ark of the covenant? Yes. The ballot-box is the sacred chest, the ark of the American covenant. The law is in it. The will of God and the will of man are in it. The fate of the nation is in it. Carried before our host, the waters of national trouble part. Its fate is the fate of the American Government. On the first Tuesday of November ten million men may uncover their heads in its presence. Mighty ark of the American covenant, thou ballot-box of a free people! It is a very old box. In Athens, and long before the art of printing, the people dropped pebbles into it, expressive of their will. After that beans were dropped into it—white beans for the affirmative, black beans for the negative; but as through that process it was easy to see which way a man voted, the election sometimes took place by night. If a man was to be voted out of citizenship, or as you would say, ostracized, his name was put upon a shell and the shell was dropped into the box. In the British Parliament, Gladstone fought for the full introduction of the ballot-box, and in 1872 it became one of the fastnesses of the English nation. It is now one of the cornerstones of our American institutions. It is older than the Constitution. Tell me what will become of the ballot-box and I will tell you what will become of the American government. What a change of feeling in regard to it since Sydney Smith shot his keenest shafts of ridicule at it, and William Cobbett felt called upon to answer thirty-eight objections to its existence! Without the ballot-box there can be no free institutions, and there can be no permanent peace. Give the people every year, or every four years, an opportunity of expressing their political preferences, and for the most part you avoid insurrection and revolution. If they cannot have the vote they will have the sword. When John Milton was visiting in Italy, he noticed that the gardeners and farmers were cultivating the side of Mount Vesuvius while the volcano was in eruption, and he asked them if they found it safe so to do. “Oh, yes,” they said, “the danger and the alarm are before the eruption takes place; then there is earthquake and terror all through the country, but after the lava begins to pour forth all the people feel relieved.” It is the suppression of the popular will that makes moral earthquake, political earthquake. Give the people full expression through the ballot-box and there is national relief, national satisfaction. And yet there are mighty foes to the ballot-box, and I have thought it would be appropriate if, as a Christian patriot, I enumerated some of those terrible enemies. In the first place, ignorance. Other things being equal, in proportion as a man is intelligent, he is qualified for the right of suffrage. You have ten, twenty, thirty years been studying American institutions through all the channels of information. You have become acquainted with the needs of our country. You know all that has been said on both sides the tariff question, the Chinese question, the educational question, the sectional question, and you have made up your mind, and day after tomorrow I see you coming down off your front steps. I say, “Good morning, neighbor; hope you are all well today. Which way are you bound?” You say, “I am going to vote.” You take your position in the line of electors, you wait your turn, you come up, the judge of election announces your name, your ballot is deposited, you pass out. Well done. But right behind you comes a man who cannot spell “president,” or “controller,” or “attorney.” He cannot write his own name, or if he can write at all, he makes a small “i” for the pronoun of the first person, which, while very descriptive of his limited capacity, is very hard on good orthography. He cannot tell you on which side the Alleghany Mountains Ohio is. There are educated canary birds and educated horses who have more intelligence than he. He puts in his vote for the opposite candidate, and he cancels your vote. His ignorance weighs as much as your intelligence. That is not right; everybody says that is not right. How to correct the evil? By laws of compulsory education well executed. Until a man can read the Declaration of American Independence and the Constitution of the United States and the first chapter of Genesis, and write a petition for citizenship with his own hand, and calculate how much is the interest of the United States debt, and tell the difference between a republic, a limited monarchy, and a despotism, he is not fit to vote at any polls between Key West and Alaska. Time was when there may have been an excuse for ignorance; but not now and in this day, when the common school makes knowledge as free as the fresh air of heaven. In 1872, in England, there were two million seven hundred thousand children who ought to have been in school, but there were in school only one million three hundred and thirty-three thousand six hundred. About fifty per cent. And of all those who were in school, not more than five per cent. got anything worthy of the name of education. Much of this foreign ignorance is added to our American ignorance, and at our next election there will be tens of thousands who will vote though they may have no more qualification to do so than they would have qualification to lecture on astronomy. Now, I advocate a law which, after it has given a sufficient number of years of warning, shall make ignorance a crime. I advocate a law which would place a board of examination side by side with the officers of registration, to decide whether a man has enough intelligence to become one of the monarchs who shall decide the destiny of this republic. Educate the people; give them an opportunity to know and understand what they do. If they will not take the education, deny them the vote. From that quarter there comes the greatest danger to the sacred chest, the ballot-box, the ark of the American covenant. Another powerful enemy of the ballot-box is spurious voting. If in one of our largest cities one thousand scoundrels have already been discovered as having registered for a vote next Tuesday, when they have no residence there, what may you judge in regard to other parts of the country. What a grand thing is this law of registration. Without it, election day is a farce; but how sad is the condition of things when in a sovereign State both parties charge upon the other party, each party upon the other, the outrage of the ballot-box. The law needs a keener twist for the neck of the repeaters. They need something more than slight fine and short imprisonment. They are attempting the assassination of this republic. In olden times when men with unholy hands touched the ark of the covenant, they dropped dead. Witness Uzza. And when men through spurious voting lay unholy hands on the sacred chest, the ark of the American covenant, they deserve extermination. Another powerful foe of the ballot-box is intimidation. There are corporations which compel their employees to vote as they, the head, wish them. In a delicate and skilful way they simply intimate to their employees that if they do not vote as the employers vote, they will be frozen out of the establishment. There are thousands of such places. You can go to villages where there are factories, and finding out the political sentiment of the men who own the factories you can tell how the election will go. Now, that is criminal. When an employee does his work well, and gives you full equivalent in toil for what you pay him in wages, you have no right to expect any more of him. He sells you his work. He does not sell you his political or his religious principles. Yet you are too wise to say, “You did not vote as I wanted you to vote; now I discharge you.” You call him in some day and find fault with his work, and you tell him that you have an uncle or an aunt, a cousin or a niece or a nephew who will have to have his situation! But he knows why you discharge him, and God knows. You are not fit for American citizenship. There must be on the ark of the covenant, the sacred chest, no shadow of corporate or capitalistic intimidation. I am not surprised at the vehemence of Lord Chief Justice Holt, of England, when he says; “Let the people vote fairly. Interference with a man’s vote is in behalf of this or the other party. If such cases come before me to be tried, I shall charge the jury to make the offender pay well for it.” Let there be no monocratic or military or mobocratic intimidation. Just as soon as in any precinct of the United States a man cannot vote as he pleases, there is something wrong. Another powerful foe of the ballot-box is bribery. No one will ever know how many thousands or millions of dollars have been raised to carry certain elections. I do not know which party raises the most money. I know that the chief affront with one party is that one of their candidates will give only so many thousand dollars, and I know that the other party has taxed official salaries as heavily as they could bear. I simply know it is a sad state of things. I simply know that there will be neighborhoods and cities where the announcement will be made in private, “So many thousands of dollars for so many votes.” I tell you that bribery is the disgrace of American institutions. It is often the case that men are nominated for office with reference to the amount of money of their own they can put into the contest, or the amount of money they can command from their friends. Senators and Representatives and Governors buying their way into office. I tell you no news in this respect, for your own patriotic hearts have been pained with it. It is often the case that the bribe comes in the form of official position. “Wheel your eloquence into my side, and when I get to be President I will make you Secretary of State, or you shall be Postmaster-General or Minister to England. Wheel your eloquence into my side, and when I get to be Governor you will be Surveyor-General. Wheel your eloquence into my side, and when I get to be Mayor you will be on the Water Board.” The simple fact is, that by the time many of those who are running for office get to the chair they are from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot mortgaged with pledges, and the people who will go to the State capital or to Washington to get offices are applying for positions that were gone three months before the election. There are two long lines of worm fence, one line of worm fence reaching to our State capitals, the other line of our worm fence reaching to Washington; and at the time of the nominations there are great multitudes of citizens astride these fences, equally poised, ready to get down on that side where they can get the most emolument. Bribery for those who receive it and bribery on the part of those who give it kicks both ways; and it is a disgrace to the ballot-box; and it is a scourge to the sacred chest, the ballot-box, the ark of the American covenant. In the name of God I denounce it. Another great enemy of that sacred chest is defamation of character. Can you find out from the newspapers, when two men are running for office, which is the better? How often in the autumnal elections the good man is denounced and the bad man applauded, so that you can come sometimes to no just opinion as to who is the best man, and there are hundreds and thousands of electors who go up to vote so utterly befogged they know not what they do. Is not that a fearful influence to be brought upon the ballot-box of this country? It has been so ever since the foundation of this government. Another powerful foe of the ballot-box is the rowdy and drunken caucus. The ballot-box is robbed of its power of choice when in a back room of some groggery the nominees are made, and men come up to the ballot-box on election day, and they only have a choice between two evils. Now, you respectable men of both parties, I charge you that, having saturated your handkerchief with cologne or some other disinfectant, you go down and take possession of the caucus. You begin your work on election day, and you begin it two weeks or two months too late. In some of the cities of the United States, when the elector comes to the polls on election day he finds that the nominees are such a scaly, greasy, stenchful crew there is no choice. What if he vote for some outsider? He merely throws his vote away. Honorable men of all cities, go and take possession of the caucus, though when you return home you have to hang your hat and your coat on the line in the back yard. It is high time these things were changed. American politics have got very low, and in some States they are controlled by men who are not more in need of good morals than of a bathtub! Snatch the ballot-box from such desperadoes. Where is the David with the courage to bring back the ark of the covenant from Kirjath-jearim? The ballot-box needs to be washed and set on a higher pedestal. Some propose, by way of improvement, that we have in this country a property qualification. They say that if men have a certain amount of real estate they are more likely to have a financial interest in good government; and they say that as soon as a man gets property he becomes cautious and conservative. I have to reply that a property qualification would shut out from the ballot-box much of the best brain of this country. Literary men are almost always poor. The pen is a good kind of implement for mending the world, but a poor implement for gaining a livelihood. I could call the roll of hundreds of literary men who never owned a foot of ground, and never will own a foot of ground until they get under it—professors of colleges, editors of newspapers, ministers of religion, bookmakers depending on a scant and uncertain royalty paid by the publishers. A property qualification will shut out these men, and a great multitude who, though they never owned a house on earth, will have a mansion in heaven. On the other hand, you will notice that there are those who by accident of fortune got vast estate, while they are in profound stupidity; as an English millionaire told me on the steamer going over to Europe, that he was going to see the dikes of Scotland, and as a lady of much pretension, who had just returned from Europe, upon being asked last summer on the cars by a member of my family if she had seen Mont Blanc, said, “Well, really, I don’t know; is that in Europe?” There is no more complete ignorance than you will sometimes find dismounting from a four-thousand-dollar equipage at the door of a Madison Avenue mansion. The property qualification would be a gigantic injustice. There are only two ways in which you will ever mend these matters: one by more thorough legal protection of the ballot-box, and the other by more thorough education and moralization of the people. I have sometimes thought that perhaps we may be obliged to call upon woman to help us in the reformation of the ballot-box. Wherever she goes there is adornment and purification. I suppose you have noticed the difference between the cleanliness of the gentlemen’s cabin on the ferry-boat and the ladies’ cabin. I suppose you have noticed the difference between the cleanliness of the gentlemen’s smoking-car on the rail-train, and the other cars in which women are passengers. Give woman the right of suffrage, and our polls on election day, instead of being cheerless and repulsive, will be saloons of beauty. In October in eleven thousand of the school districts of the State of New York women voted, or had a right to vote. Order everywhere. By what justice have the majority of the grown people in this country been disfranchised? Simply because they are women. Give women the ballot, and that will decide the Mormon and the temperance questions. A woman owning property must pay taxes. Ought she not then to have a right to say something in regard to the expenditure of those moneys? Many of us have been opposed to female suffrage, on the ground that we do not want woman’s delicate nature to confront the insults and the blasphemies and the disorder of election day; but when she has the ballot, there will be no insults, no disorder, no blasphemies on election day. It is not so much what the ballot would do for woman, as what woman would do for the ballot. I cannot understand how there should be such an aversion to woman’s political preferment among Americans and among Englishmen in this day, when we have a great-souled Mrs. Hayes reigning in the White House and a Queen Victoria in Windsor Castle. The ancient ark of the covenant was carried into captivity, away off to Kirjath-jearim; but one day that sacred chest was put upon a cart, and oxen were fastened to the cart, and the chest was brought back to Jerusalem with shouting and thanksgiving. So the ballot-box has been carried into captivity of demagogism and mobocracy; but I should not wonder if by prayer to God with thanksgiving that sacred ark of the covenant would be brought back and put into the temple of Christian patriotism. Take the first step in this direction next election day. It may be the last vote you will ever deposit for the highest office in this country. I know that we sometimes find centenarians pleasantly boasting that they have voted for nearly all the Presidents; but the majority of men never vote for more than three or four. Do you think your vote of no importance? A poor soldier went into the store of a hairdresser in London, and asked for money to get back to the army. He had already stayed beyond his furlough, and he must have quick transit. The hairdresser felt sorry for him and gave him the money. “Now,” said the poor soldier, “I have got nothing to give you in return for your kindness except this little slip of paper, which has on it a recipe for making blacking.” The soldier gave it, not supposing it to be of great value. The man received it, not supposing it to be of any great value. But it has yielded the man who took it two million five hundred thousand dollars, and was the foundation of one of the greatest manufacturing establishments of England. Now, I have to tell you that that little slip of printed paper that you will drop into the ballot-box next election day will seem to be more insignificant, and yet it may have a moral and a national value beyond all estimation. So I solemnly charge you to duty next Tuesday. About seven o’clock in the morning will begin the great snowstorm of the nation’s suffrages. The white flakes will fall in all the villages between the Highlands of Navesink and the Golden Gate of the Pacific—so silently falling that the keenest ear will not detect one out of the millions. Snowing on until noon, snowing on until night. The octogenarian will come up to the polls with trembling hand, and scanning the ballot with spectacled eyes, will give the ballot to the judge of election. The young man who has been patiently waiting the time when he would have a right to vote will come up, and proudly and blushingly hand in his suffrage and pass on. The capitalist with diamonded finger and the workman with hard fist will come up, and the vote of the one will be as good as the vote of the other. Snowing, snowing, snowing, until at sundown all these flakes will be united and compacted into an avalanche ready to slide down in expression of the nation’s will. Stand out of the way! In the awful sweep of the white avalanche, may there go down sectionalism and political fraud ten thousand feet under, forever under! Remember that you not only have a vote, but a prayer which may be more powerful than a vote. God only can control the suffrages of a city or a nation. I told you at the opening, that on the top of the sacred chest of olden times there were two angels facing each other with outspread wings. Why not on the top of the great chest, the ark of the American covenant, let there be two angels—the angel of the North and the angel of the South, long looking different ways, now face to face with outspread wing of blessing. We cannot live under any other form of government than that under which we are living. The stars of our flags are not the stars of thickening night, but stars sparkling amid the red bars of morning cloud. Let the despotisms of Asia keep their feet off the Pacific coast. Let the tyrannies of Europe keep their feet off the Atlantic coast. We shall have in this country only one government. At the south, Mexico will follow Texas into the Union, and Christianity and civilization will stand in the halls of the Montezumas, and if not in our day, then in the day of our children, Yucatan and Central America will wheel into line of dominion. On the north, Canada will be ours, not by conquest, for English and American swords may never clash blades, but we will simply woo the fair neighbor of the north, and she will be ours, and England will say to Canada, “You are old enough now for the marriage day. Giant of the West, go take your bride.” Then from Baffin’s Bay to the Caribbean there shall be one republic, under one banner and with one destiny—a free, undisputed, Christianized American continent. God grant it. Amen! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 47: 045. THE GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS ======================================================================== The Gospel Looking-Glass Exodus 38:8 : “And he made the laver of brass, and the foot of it of brass, of the looking-glasses of the women assembling.” We often hear about the Gospel in John and the Gospel in Luke and the Gospel in Matthew; but there is just as surely a Gospel of Moses and a Gospel of Jeremiah and a Gospel of David. In other words, Christ is as certainly to be found in the Old Testament as in the New. When the Israelites were marching through the wilderness, they carried their church with them. They called it the tabernacle. It was a pitched tent, very costly, very beautiful. The frame-work was made of forty-eight boards of acacia-wood set in sockets of silver. The curtains between these boards were purple and scarlet and blue and fine linen and were hung with most artistic loops. The candlestick of that tabernacle had shaft and branch and bowl of solid gold and the figures of cherubim that stood there had wings of gold; and there were lamps of gold and snuffers of gold and tongs of gold and rings of gold, so that skepticism has sometimes asked, Where did all that precious material come from? It is not my place to furnish the precious stones; it is only to tell that they were there. I wish now more especially to speak of the laver that was built in the midst of that ancient tabernacle. It was a great basin in which the priests washed their hands and feet. The water came down from the basin in spouts and passed away after the cleansing. This laver or basin was made out of the looking-glasses of the women who had frequented the tabernacle and who had made these their contribution to the furniture. These looking-glasses were not made of glass, but they were brazen. The brass was of a very superior quality and polished until it reflected easily the features of those who looked into it. So that this laver of looking-glasses spoken of in my text did double work; it not only furnished the water in which the priests washed themselves, but it also, on its shining, polished surface, pointed out the spots of pollution on the face which needed ablution. Now, my friends, as every thing in that ancient tabernacle was suggestive of religious truth, and for the most part positively symbolical of truth, I shall take that laver of looking-glasses spoken of in the text as all-suggestive of the Gospel, which first shows us our sins as in a mirror, and then washes them away by divine ablution. Oh happy day, happy day, When Jesus washed my sins away! I have to say that this is the only looking-glass in which a man can see himself as he is. There are some mirrors that flatter the features and make you look better than you are. Then there are other mirrors that distort your features and make you look worse than you are; but I want to tell you that this looking-glass of the Gospel shows a man just as he is. When the priests entered the ancient tabernacle, one glance at the burnished side of this laver showed them their need of cleansing; so this Gospel shows the soul its need of divine washing. “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” That is one showing. “All we, like sheep, have gone astray.” That is another showing. “From the crown of the head to the sole of the foot there is no health in us.” That is another showing. The world calls these, defects, imperfections or eccentricities or erratic behavior or “wild oats” or “high living”; but the Gospel calls them sin, transgression, filth—the abominable thing that God hates. It was just one glance at that mirror that made Paul cry out: “O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” and that made David cry out: “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;” and that made Martin Luther cry out: “Oh, my sins, my sins!” I am not talking about bad habits. You and I do not need any Bible to tell us that bad habits are wrong, that blasphemy and evil-speaking are wrong. But I am talking of a sinful nature, the source of all bad thoughts, as well as of all bad actions. The Apostle Paul calls their roll in the first chapter of Romans. They are a regiment of death encamping around every heart, holding it in a tyranny from which nothing but the grace of God can deliver it. Here for instance, is ingratitude. Who has not been guilty of that sin? It a man hand us a glass of water, we say: “Thank you;” but for the ten thousand mercies that we are every day receiving from the hand of God, how little expression of gratitude—for thirst slaked, for hunger fed, for shelter and sunshine and sound sleep and clothes to wear—how little thanks! I suppose there are men fifty years of age who have never yet been down on their knees in thanksgiving to God for his goodness. Besides that ingratitude of our hearts, there is pride (who has not felt it?)—pride that will not submit to God, that wants its own way—a nature that prefers wrong sometimes instead of right—that prefers to wallow instead of to rise up. I do not care what you call that; I am not going to quarrel with any theologian, or any man who makes any pretensions to theology. I do not care whether you call it “total depravity,” or something else; I simply make the announcement of God’s word, affirmed and confirmed by the experience of hundreds of people in this house; the imagination of the heart of man is evil from youth. “There is none that doeth good; no, not one.” We have a bad nature. We were born with it. We got it from our parents; they got it from their parents. Our thoughts are wrong; our action is wrong; our whole life is obnoxious to God before conversion; and after conversion, not one good thing in us but that which the grace of God has planted and fostered. “Well,” you say, “I can’t believe that to be so.” Ah! my dear brother, that is because you have never looked into this laver of looking-glasses. If you could catch a glimpse of your natural heart before God, you would cry out in amazement and alarm. The very first thing this Gospel does is to cut down our pride and self-sufficiency. If a man does not feel his lost and ruined condition before God, he does not want any Gospel. I think the reason that there are so few conversions in this day is because the tendency of the preaching is to make men believe that they are pretty good anyhow—quite clever, only wanting a little fixing up—a few touches of divine grace, and then you will be all right; instead of proclaiming the broad, deep truth that Payson and Baxter and Whitefield thundered to a race trembling on the verge of infinite and eternal disaster. “Now,” says some one, “can this really be true? Have we all gone astray? Is there no good in us?” In Hampton Court I saw a room where the four walls were covered with looking-glasses; and it made no difference which way you looked, you saw yourself. And so it is in this Gospel of Christ. If you once step within its full precincts, you will find your whole character reflected; every feature of moral deformity, every spot of moral taint. If I understand the Word of God, its first announcement is that we are lost. I care not, my brother, how magnificently you may have been born, or what may have been your heritage or ancestry, you are lost by reason of sin. “But,” you say, “what is the use of all this—of showing a man’s faults when he can’t get rid of them?” None! “What was the use of that burnished surface to this laver of looking-glasses spoken of in the text, if it only showed the spots on the countenance and the need of washing, and there was nothing to wash with?” Glory be to God, I find that this laver of looking-glasses was filled with fresh water every morning, and the priest no sooner looked on its burnished side and saw his need of cleansing than he washed and was clean—glorious type of the Gospel of my Lord Jesus, that first shows a man his sin, and then washes it all away!” 1 want you to notice that this laver in which the priest washed—the laver of looking-glasses—was filled with fresh water every morning. The servants of the tabernacle brought the water in buckets and poured it into this laver. So it is with the Gospel of Jesus Christ; it has a fresh salvation every day. It is not a stagnant pool filled with accumulated corruptions. It is living water, which is brought from the eternal rock to wash away the sins of yesterday—of one moment ago. “Oh,” says some one, “I was a Christian twenty years ago!” That does not mean anything to me. What are you now? We are not talking, my brother, about pardon ten years ago, but about pardon now—a fresh salvation. Suppose a time of war should come and I could show the Government that I had been loyal to it twelve years ago, would that excuse me from taking an oath of allegiance now? Suppose you ask me about my physical health and I should say I was well fifteen years ago—that does not say how I am now. The Gospel of Jesus Christ comes and demands present allegiance, present fealty, present moral health; and yet how many Christians there are seeking to live entirely in past experience, who seem to have no experience of present mercy and pardon! When I was on the sea and there came up a great storm and officers and crew and passengers all thought we must go down, I began to think of my life insurance, and whether, if I were taken away, my family would be cared for; and then I thought, Is the premium paid up? and I said, Yes. Then I felt comfortable. Yet there are men who in religious matters are looking back to past insurance. They have let it run out, and they have nothing for the present, no hope nor pardon—falling back on the old insurance policy of ten, twenty, thirty years ago. If I want to find out how a friend feels toward me, do I go to the drawer and find some old yellow letters written to me ten or twelve years ago? No; I go to the letter that was stamped the day before yesterday in the post office, and I find how he feels toward me. It is not in regard to old communications we had with Jesus Christ, it is communications we have now. Are we not in sympathy with him this morning and is he not in sympathy with us? Do not spend so much of your time in hunting in the wardrobe for the old, worn-out shoes of Christian profession. Come this morning and take the glittering robe of Christ’s righteousness from the Saviour’s hand. You say you were plunged in the fountain of the Saviour’s mercy a quarter of a century ago. That is nothing to me; I tell you to wash now in this laver of looking-glasses and have your soul made clean. I notice, also, in regard to this laver of looking-glasses spoken of in the text, that the priests always washed both hands and feet. The water came down in spouts, so that, without leaving any filth in the basin, the priests washed both hands and feet. So the Gospel of Jesus Christ must touch the very extremities of our moral nature. A man cannot fence off a small part of his soul, and say, “Now this is to be a garden in which I will have all the fruits and flowers of Christian character, while outside it shall be the devil’s commons.” No, no; it will be all garden or none. I sometimes hear people say, “He is a very good man except in politics.” Then he is not a good man. A religion that will not take a man through an autumn election will not be worth anything to him in June, July, and August. They say he is a useful sort of a man, but he overreaches in a bargain. I deny the statement. If he is a Christian anywhere, he will be in his business. It is very easy to be good in the prayer-meeting, with surroundings kindly and blessed, but not so easy to be a Christian behind the counter, when by one skilful twitch of the goods you can hide a flaw in the silk so that the customer cannot see it. It is very easy to be a Christian with a psalm-book in your hand and a Bible in your lap, but not so easy when you can go into a shop, and falsely tell the merchant you can get those goods at a cheaper rate in another store, so that he will sell them to you cheaper than he can afford to sell them. The fact is, the religion of Christ is all-pervasive. If you rent a house, you expect full possession of it. You say: “Where are the keys of those rooms? If I pay for this whole house, I want possession of those rooms.” And the grace of God when it comes to a soul takes full possession of a man, or goes away and takes no possession. It will ransack every room in the heart, every room in the life, from cellar to attic, touching the very extremities of his nature. The priests washed hands and feet. I remark, further, that this laver of looking-glasses spoken of in the text was a very large laver. I always thought, from the fact that so many washed there that it needed to be large, and also from the fact that Solomon afterward, when he copied that laver in the Temple, built it on a very large scale; and so suggestive of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and salvation by him—vast in its provisions. The whole world may come and wash in this laver and be clean. When the last war had ended, the Government of the United States made proclamation of pardon to the common soldiery in the Confederate army, but not to the chief soldiers. The Gospel of Christ does not act in that way. It says pardon for all, but especially for the chief of sinners. I do not now think of a single passage that says a small sinner may be saved, but I do think of passages that say a great sinner may be saved. If there be sins only faintly hued, just a little tinged, so faintly colored that you can hardly see them, there is no special pardon promised in the Bible for those sins; but if they be glaring, red like crimson, then they shall be as snow. Now, my brother, I do not state this to put a premium upon great iniquity. I merely say this to encourage that man in this house who feels he is so far gone from God that there is no mercy for him. I want to tell him there is a good chance. Why, Paul was a murderer; he assisted at the execution of Stephen; and yet Paul was saved. The dying thief did everything bad. The dying thief was saved. Richard Baxter swore dreadfully; but the grace of God met him, and Richard Baxter was saved. It is a vast laver. Go and tell everybody to come and wash in it. Let them come up from the penitentiaries and wash away their crimes. Let them come up from the almshouses and wash away their poverty. Let them come up from their graves and wash away their death. If there be anyone so worn out in sin that he cannot get up to the laver, you will take hold of his head and put your arms around him and I will take hold of his feet and we will plunge him in this glorious Bethesda, the vast laver of God’s mercy and salvation. In Solomon’s Temple there were ten lavers and one molten sea—this great reservoir in the midst of the temple filled with water—these lavers and this molten sea adorned with figures of palm branch and oxen and lions and cherubim. This fountain of God’s mercy is a vaster molten sea than that. It is adorned, not with palm branches, but with the wood of the cross; not with cherubim, but with the wings of the Holy Ghost; and around its great rim all the race may come and wash in the molten sea. I was reading the other day of Alexander the Great, who, when he was very thirsty and standing at the head of his army, had brought to him a cup of water. He looked off upon his host and said, “I cannot drink this, my men are all thirsty”; and he dashed it to the ground. Blessed be God! there is enough water for all the host—enough for captains and host. “Whosoever will may come and take of the water of life freely”—a laver broad as the earth, high as the heavens, and deep as hell. But I notice, also, in regard to this laver of looking-glasses spoken of in the text, that the washing in it was imperative and not optional. When the priests come into the tabernacle (you will find this in the thirtieth chapter of Exodus), God tells them that they must wash in that laver or die. The priest might have said, “Can’t I wash elsewhere? I washed in the laver at home, and now you want me to wash here.” God says, “No matter whether or not you have washed before. Wash in this laver or die.” “But,” says the priest, “there is water just as clean as this—why won’t that do?” “Wash here,” says God, “or die.” So it is with the Gospel of Christ—it is imperative. There is only this alternative: keep our sins and perish, or wash them away and live. But says some one, “Why could not God have made more ways to heaven than one?” I do not know but he could have made half a dozen. I know he made but one. You say, “Why not have a long line of boats running from here to heaven?” I cannot say, but I simply know that there is only one boat. You say, “Are there not trees as luxuriant as that on Calvary?—more luxuriant, for that had neither buds nor blossoms; it was stripped and barked!” Yes, yes; there have been taller trees than that and more luxuriant; but the only path to heaven is under that one tree. Instead of quarreling because there are not more ways, let us be thankful to God there is one—one name given unto men whereby we can be saved—one laver in which all the world may wash. So you see what a radiant Gospel this is I preach. I do not know how a man can stand stolidly and present it, for it is such an exhilarant Gospel. It is not a mere whim or caprice; it is life or death; it is heaven or hell. You come before your child, and you have a present in your hand. You put your hands behind your back and say, “Which hand will you take? In one hand there is a treasure, in the other there is not.” The child blindly chooses. But God our Father does not do that way with us. He spreads out both hands, and says, “Now this shall be very plain. In that hand are pardon and peace and life and the treasures of heaven; in that hand are punishment and sorrow and woe. Choose, choose for yourselves!” “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.” Oh, my dear friends, I wish I could this morning coax you to accept this Gospel. If you could just take one look in this laver of looking-glasses spoken of in the text, you would begin now spiritual ablution. You will not feel insulted, will you, when I tell you that you are a lost soul without pardon? Christ offers all the generosity of his nature to you this morning. The love of Christ I dare not, toward the close of my sermon, begin to tell about it. The love of Christ! Do not talk to me about a mountain; it is higher than that Do not talk to me about a sea; it is deeper than that. An artist in his dreams had such a splendid vision of the transfiguration of Christ that he awoke and seized his pencil, and said, “Let me paint this and die.” Oh, I have seen the glories of Christ! I have beheld something of the beauty of that great sacrifice on Calvary, and I have sometimes felt I would be willing to give anything if I might just sketch before you the wonders of that sacrifice. I would like to do it while I live, and I would like to do it when I die. “Let me paint this and die!” He comes along, weary and worn, his face wet with tears, his brow crimson with blood, and he lies down on Calvary for you. No; I mistake. Nothing was as comfortable as that. A stone on Calvary would have made a soft pillow for the dying head of Christ. Nothing so comfortable as that. He does not lie down to die; he stands up to die; his spiked hands outspread as if to embrace a world. Oh, what a hard end for these feet that had traveled all over Judea on ministries of mercy! What a hard end for those hands that had wiped away tears and bound up broken hearts! Very hard, O dying Lamb of God! and yet there are those here this morning who do not love thee. They say, “What is all that to me? What if he does weep and groan and die, I don’t want him.” Lord Jesus Christ, they will not help thee down from the cross! The soldiers will come and they will tear thee down from the cross and put their arms around thee and lower thee into the tomb; but they will not help. They see nothing to move them. O dying Christ! turn on them thine eyes of affection now, and see if they will not change their minds! I saw One hanging on a tree, In agony and blood, Who fixed his languid eyes on me, As near his cross I stood. Oh, never till my latest breath Will I forget that look! He seemed to change me with his death, Though not a word he spoke. And that is all for you! Oh, can you not love him? Come around this laver, old and young. It is so burnished, you can see your sins; and so deep, you can wash them all away. O mourner, here bathe your bruised soul; and, sick one, here cool your hot temples in this laver. Peace! Do not cry any more, dear soul! Pardon for all thy sins, comfort for all thy afflictions. The black cloud that hung thundering over Sinai has floated above Calvary, and burst into the shower of a Saviour’s tears. I saw in Kensington Garden, London, a picture of Waterloo a good while after the battle had passed, and the grass had grown all over the field. There was a dismounted cannon, and a lamb had come up from the pasture and lay sleeping in the mouth of that cannon. So the artist had represented it—a most suggestive thing. Then I thought how the war between God and the soul had ended; and instead of the announcement, “The wages of sin is death,” there came the words, “My peace I give unto thee”; and amidst the batteries of the law that had once quaked with the fiery hail of death, I beheld the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. I went to Jesus as I was, Weary, and worn, and sad: I found in him a resting-place, And he has made me glad. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 48: 046. LEVITICUS ======================================================================== Leviticus ======================================================================== CHAPTER 49: 047. AN OBNOXIOUS DIET ======================================================================== An Obnoxious Diet Leviticus 11:13-30 : “And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls... the owl, the vulture, and the bat... These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth... the chameleon... and the snail.” The Bible offers every possible variety of theme, of argument, and of illustration. We care not much in what kind of a pitcher the water of life is brought, if it is only the clear, pure water. God gave the ancients a list of the animals that they might eat, and a list of animals that they might not eat. These people lived in a hot climate, and certain forms of animal food corrupted their blood, and disposed them to scrofulous disorders, depraved their appetites, and bemeaned their souls. A man’s food, when he has the means and opportunity of selecting it, suggests his moral nature. The reason the savage is as cruel as the lion is because he has food that gives him the blood of the lion. A missionary among the barbarians says that, by changing his style of food to correspond with theirs, his temperament was entirely changed. There are certain forms of food that have a tendency to affect the moral nature. Many a Christian is trying to do by prayer that which cannot be done except through corrected diet. For instance, he who uses swine’s flesh for constant diet will be diseased in body and polluted of soul—all his liturgies and catechisms notwithstanding. The Gadarene swine were possessed of the devil, and ran down a steep place into the sea, and all the swine ever since seem to have been similarly possessed. In Leviticus, God struck the meat off the table of his people, and placed before them a bill of fare at once healthful, nutritious, and generous. But, higher than his physical reason, there was a spiritual reason why God chose certain forms of food for the ancients. God gave a peculiar diet to his people, not only because he wanted them to be distinguished from the surrounding nations, but because certain birds and animals, by reason of their habits, have been suggestive of moral qualities. By the list of things from which they were to abstain, God wished to prejudice their minds against certain evils; and, in the list of lawful things given, he wished to suggest certain forms of good. When God solemnly forbade his people to eat the owl, the vulture, the bat, the chameleon, and the snail, he meant to drive out of his people all the sins that were thus emblemized. I take the suggestion of the text, and say that one of the first unclean things the Christian needs to drive out of his soul is the owl. The owl is the melancholy bird of the night. It hatches out whole broods of superstitions. It is doleful and hideous. When it sings, it sings through its nose. It loves the gloom of night better than the brightness of the day. Who has not slept in the cabin near the woods, and been awakened in the night by the dismal “too-hoo” of the owl? Melancholy is the owl that is perched in many a Christian soul. It is an unclean bird, and needs to be driven away. A man whose sins are pardoned, and who is on the road to heaven, has no right to be gloomy. He says: “I have so many doubts.” That is because you are lazy. Go actively to work in Christ’s cause, and your doubts will vanish. You say: “I have lost my property”; but I reply: “You have infinite treasures laid up in heaven.” You say: “I am weak and sickly and going to die.” Then be congratulated that you are so near eternal health and perpetual gladness. Catch a few morning larks for your soul, and stone this owl off your premises. As a little girl was eating the sun dashed upon her spoon, and she cried: “Oh, mamma, I have swallowed a spoonful of sunshine!” Would God that we might all indulge in the same beverage! Cheerfulness—it makes the homeliest face handsome; it makes the hardest mattress soft; it runs the loom that weaves buttercups and rainbows and auroras. God made the grass black? No; that would be too somber. God made the grass red? No; that would be too gaudy. God made the grass green, that by this parable all the world might be led to a subdued cheerfulness. Read your Bible in the sunshine. Remember that your physical health is closely allied to your spiritual. The heart and the liver are only a few inches apart, and what affects one affects the other. A historian records that by the sound of great laughter in Rome, Hannibal’s assaulting army was frightened away in retreat. And there is in the great outbursting joy of a Christian soul that which can drive back any infernal besiegement. Rats love dark closets, and Satan loves to burrow in a gloomy soul. “Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous! and again I say, rejoice!” Hoist the window of your soul in this the twelve o’clock of your spiritual night. Put the gun to your shoulder and aim at the black jungle from which the hooting comes, pull the trigger, and drop that croaking, loathsome, hideous owl of religious melancholy into the bushes. Again, taking the suggestion of the text, drive out the vulture from your soul. God would not allow the Jews to eat it. It lives on carcasses; it fattens among the dead; with leaden wing it circles about battle-fields. Wilson, the American ornithologist, counted two hundred and thirty-seven vultures around one carcass. If crossing the desert when there is no sign of wing in the air a camel perish out of the caravan, immediately the air begins to darken with vultures. There are many professed Christians who have a vulture in their souls. They prey upon the character and feelings of others. A doubtful reputation is a banquet for them. Some rival in trade or profession falls, and the vulture puts out its head. These people revel in the details of a man’s ruin. They say: “I told you so!” They rush into some store and say: “Have you heard the news? Just as I expected! Our neighbor has gone all to pieces! Good for him!” That professedly Christian woman, having heard of the wrongdoing of some sister in the church, instead of hiding the sin with a mantle of charity, peddles it all along the streets. The most loathsome, miserable, God-forsaken wretch on earth is a gossip. I can tell her on the street, though I have never seen her before. She walks fast, and has her bonnet-strings loose, for she has not had time to tie them since she heard the last scandal. I think that when Satan has a job so infinitely mean that in all the pit he cannot find a devil mean enough to do it, and all bribes and threats have failed to get one willing for the infernal crusade, he says to one of his sergeants: “Go up to that town, and in such a street, on such a corner, get that gossiping woman, and she will be glad to do it.” And sure enough, like a hungry fish, she takes the hook in her mouth, and Satan slackens the line, and lets her run out farther and farther, until after a while he says: “It is time to haul in that line,” and with a few strong pulls he brings her to the beach of fire. What do you say? That she was a member of the church? I cannot help that. When Satan goes a-fishing, he does not care what school the fish belongs to, whether it is a Presbyterian mackerel or an Episcopalian salmon. Amidst the thunder-crash of Sinai God said: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” And in Leviticus he says: “Thou shalt not go up and down as a tale-bearer.” Take not into your ear that scum of hell that people call tittle-tattle. Whosoever willingly listens to a slander is equally guilty with the one who tells it, and an old writer says they ought both to be hanged; the one by the tongue and the other by the ear. Do not smile upon such a spaniel, lest, like a pleased dog, he puts his dirty paw upon you. Throw back the shutter of your soul, O Christian men and women! and see if there be within you a vulture with filthy talons and cruel beak. Let not this unclean thing roost in your soul, for my text says: “Ye shall hold in abomination the vulture.” Again, taking the suggestion of the text, drive out the bat from your soul. No wonder God set this bird among the unclean. It is an offense to every one. Let it fly into the window of a summer night, and all the hands, young and old, are against it. It is half bird, half mouse. It seems made partly to walk and partly to fly, and does neither well, and becomes an emblem of those Christians who try to cling to earth and heaven at the same time. They want to walk on earth in worldliness, and yet fly toward heaven in spirituality; and their soul between feet and wings, is constantly perplexed. Be one thing or the other! Choose the world, if you prefer it, and see how many dollars you can win and how much applause you can gain and how large a business you can establish and how grand a house you can build and how fast a span of horses you can drive. You may be prospered until you can fail for five hundred thousand dollars, instead of having the disgrace of failing for only ten thousand, as some unenterprising people do. It is quite a reward to be able for ten or twenty years to be called one of the solid men of your own city; and then, to make your fortune last as long as possible, we will give you a splendid funeral, and you shall have twenty-five carriages following you, with somebody in the most of them, and your coffin shall have silver handles on the sides and we will mourn for you in splendid pocket-handkerchiefs bound with crape and with bombazine twenty full yards long trailing half across the parlor, so that all the company may stand upon it; and we will write our letters for the next six months on paper edged with black. But, my friends, your worldly fortunes will not last. I will buy out now all that you will be worth in worldly estate seventy-five years from now. I have the money in my pocket with which to do it. Here it is! Two cents! It is a large sum to offer for all you will possess at the close of seventy-five years. Choose the world, if you want to; but if not, then choose heaven. That estate lies partly on this side of the river, but mostly on the other. It is ever accumulating. The prospect of it makes one independent of earthly misfortunes; so that Rogers, the martyr, slept so soundly the night before his burning, that they violently shook him in order to get him awake in time for the execution; and Paul exults at the thought of the “joy unspeakable and full of glory.” Choose earth or heaven! Make up your mind whether you will walk in earthly joys, or fly with heavenly expectations. Be not a bat, fit neither to walk nor fly, having just enough of heaven to spoil the world, and so much of the world as to spoil heaven. Christ says that your present condition nauseates him to positive sickness: “Because thou art neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth!” In the ruins of Pompeii there was found a petrified woman, who, instead of trying to flee from the destroyed city, had spent her time in gathering up her jewels. She saved neither her life nor her jewels. There are multitudes making the same mistake. In trying to get earth and heaven they lose both. “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” Be one thing or the other. Tread the earth like a lion, or mount the air like the eagle; for my text says: “Ye shall have in abomination among the fowls the bat.” Again, taking the suggestion of the text, drive out the chameleon from your soul. There is some difference among good men as to the name of this creeping thing which God pronounced unclean, but I shall take the opinion which seems best suited to my purpose. The chameleon is a reptile, chiefly known by its changeableness of color, taking the color of the thing next to it, sometimes brown, sometimes red, and sometimes gray, but always the color of its surroundings, a type of that class of Christians who are now one thing in religious faith, and now another, just to suit circumstances, always taking their color of religious belief from the man they are talking to. They go to one place, and are first-rate Unitarians. “Jesus was a good man, but nothing more.” They go to Princeton, and they are Trinitarians, almost willing to die for the divinity of Jesus. Among the Universalists they refuse the idea of future punishment; and, going among those of opposite belief, announce that there is a hell with a gusto that makes you think they are glad of it. Drive out that unclean chameleon from your soul. Do not be ever changing the color of your faith. Liberal Christianity, falsely so-called, believes in nothing. God is anything you want to make him. The Bible to be believed, in so far as you like it. Heaven a grand mixing up of Neros and Pauls. The man who dies by suicide in his right mind in 1888, beating into glory by ten years the Christian man who dies a Christian death in 1898—the suicide proving himself wiser than the Christian. O my friends, let us try to believe in something! An infidel was called to the bedside of his daughter. The daughter said: “Father, which shall I believe, you or mother? Mother took the religion of Christ, and died in its embrace. You say that religion is a humbug. Now I am going to die, and I am very much perplexed; shall I believe you, or take the belief of my mother?” The father said: “Choose for yourself.” She said: “No; I am too weak to choose for myself; I want you to choose for me.” “Well,” said the father, after much hesitation and embarrassment: “Mary, I think you had better take the religion of your mother.” The time will come when we shall have to believe something. We cannot afford to be on the fence in religion. Truth and error are set opposite to each other. The one is infinitely right, and the other infinitely wrong. In the Judgment Day we must give an account of what we believed as well as how we acted. The difference between believing truth and believing error is the difference between paradise and perdition. I beg you, in the light of the Bible, and on your knees before God, to form your religious opinion and then stick to it, though business companions scoff and wits caricature and the air crackles with the fires of martyrdom. Surely truths in behalf of which Christ died, and angels of God trooped forth, and the whole universe is marshaled, are worth living for and worth dying for. Amidst the most unclean things is this ever-changing chameleon of religious theory. Away with the reptile! God abhors it with an all-consuming abhorrence. Once more, taking the suggestion of the text, drive out the snail from your soul. God has declared it unclean. It is an animal to be found everywhere between the coldest north and the hottest south. There are fifteen hundred species of the snail. They have no backbone, and they are so slow that their movement is almost imperceptible. You see a snail in one place today; go to-morrow and you will find it has advanced only a few inches. It becomes an emblem of that large class of Christian people who go to work with a slowness and sluggishness that is wonderful. They are stopped by every little obstacle, because, like the snail, they have no backbone. Others mount up on eagle’s wings, but they go at a snail’s pace. O child of God, arouse! We have apotheosized Prudence and Caution long enough. Prudence is a beautiful grace, but of all the family of Christian graces I like her the least, for she has so often been married to Laziness, Sloth, and Stupidity. We have a million idlers in the Lord’s vineyard, who pride themselves on their prudence. “Be prudent,” said the disciples of Christ, “and stay away from Jerusalem”; but he went. “Be prudent,” said Paul’s friends, “and look out for what you say to Felix”; but he thundered away until the ruler’s knees knocked together. In the eyes of the world, the most imprudent men that ever lived were Martin Luther and John Oldcastle and Wesley and Knox. My opinion is, that the most imprudent and reckless thing is to stand still. It is well to hear our Commander’s voice when he says “Halt!” but quite as important to hear it when he says “Forward!” This Gospel ship, made to plow the sea at thirty knots an hour, is not making three. Sometimes it is most prudent to ride your horse slowly and pick out the way for his feet and not strike him with the spurs; but when a band of Shoshone Indians are after you in full tilt, the most prudent thing for you to do is to plunge in the rowels and put your horse to a full run, shouting “Go ‘long!” until the Rocky Mountains echo it. The foes of God are pursuing us. The world, the flesh, and the devil are after us; and our wisest course is to go ahead at swiftest speed. When the Church of God gets to advancing too fast, it will be time enough to use caution. No need of putting on the brakes while going up-hill. Do not let us sit down waiting for something “to turn up,” but go ahead in the name of God, and turn it up. The great danger to the Church now is not sensation, but stagnation. Oh, that the Lord God would send a host of aroused and consecrated men to set the Church on fire, and to turn the world upside down. Let us find the last snail in our souls. With divine vehemence let us stamp its life out; for my text declares: “These also shall be unclean to you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the chameleon and the snail.” I have thus tried to persuade these Christian men and women against gloominess and slander and half-and-half experiences and changeableness and sloth. Our opportunities for getting better are being rapidly swallowed up in the remorseless past. This moment may we drive out all the unclean things from our souls—the vulture and the bat and the owl and the chameleon and the snail; and in place thereof bring in the Lamb of God and the Dove of the Spirit! The case is urgent. Arouse! before it be eternally too late! “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it!” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 50: 048. SPRINKLED AND CLEANSED ======================================================================== Sprinkled and Cleansed Leviticus 14:5-7 : “And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel, over running water. As for the Jiving bird, he shall take it, and the cedar-wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water; and he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field.” The Old Testament, to very many people, is a great slaughter-house strewn with the blood and bones and horns and hoofs of butchered animals. It offends their sight; it disgusts their taste; it actually nauseates the stomach. But to the intelligent Christian the Old Testament is a magnificent corridor through which Jesus advances. As he appears at the other end of the corridor, we can only see the outlines of his character; coming nearer, we can descry the features. But when, at last, he steps upon the platform of the New Testament, amid the torches of evangelists and apostles, the orchestras of heaven announce him with a blast of minstrelsy that wakes up Bethlehem at midnight. There were a great many cages of birds brought down to Jerusalem for sacrifice—sparrows and pigeons and turtle-doves. I can hear them now, whistling, caroling, and singing all around about the Temple. When a leper was to be cured of his leprosy, in order to his cleansing two of these birds were taken; one of them was slain over an earthen vessel of running water—that is, clear, fresh water, and then the bird was killed. Another bird was then taken, tied to a hyssop branch, and plunged by the priest into the blood of the first bird; and then, with this hyssop branch, bird-tipped, the priest would sprinkle the leper seven times, then untie the bird from the hyssop branch and it would go soaring into the heavens. Now open your eyes, my brethren, and see that that first bird meant Jesus and that that second bird means your own soul. There is nothing more suggestive than a caged bird. In the down of its breast you can see the glow of southern climes; in the sparkle of its eye you can see the flash of distant seas; in its voice you can hear the song it learned in the wildwood. It is a child of the sky in captivity. Now the dead bird of my text, captured from the air, suggests the Lord Jesus, who came down from the realms of light and glory. He once stood in the sunlight of heaven. He was the favorite of the land. He was the King’s son. Whenever a victory was gained or a throne set up, he was the first to hear it. He could not walk incognito along the streets, for all heaven knew him. For eternal ages he had dwelt amid the mighty populations of heaven. No holiday had ever dawned on the city when he was absent. He was not like an earthly prince, occasionally issuing from a palace heralded by a troop of clanking horse-guards. No; he was greeted everywhere as a brother, and all heaven was perfectly at home with him. But one day there came word to the palace that an insignificant island was in rebellion and was cutting itself to pieces with anarchy. I hear an angel say: “Let it perish. The King’s realm is vast enough without the island. The tributes to the King are large enough without that. We can spare it.” “Not so,” said the prince, the King’s son; and I see him push out one day, under the protest of a great company. He starts straight for the rebellious island. He lands amid the execrations of the inhabitants, that grow in violence until the malice of earth has smitten him and the spirits of the lost world put their black wings over his dying head and shut the sun out. The hawks and vultures swooped upon this dove of the text, until head and breast and feet ran blood—until, under the flocks and beaks of darkness, the poor thing perished. No wonder it was a bird that was taken and slain over an earthen vessel of running water. It was a child of the skies. It typified him who came down from heaven in agony and blood to save our souls. Blessed be his glorious name forever! I notice, also, in my text, that the bird that was slain was a clean bird. The text demanded that it should be. The raven was never sacrificed nor the cormorant nor the vulture. It must be a clean bird, says the text; and it suggests the pure Jesus—the holy Jesus. Although he spent his boyhood in a corrupt village, although blasphemies were poured into his ear enough to have poisoned anyone else, he stands before the world a perfect Christ. Herod was cruel; Henry VIII was unclean; but point out a fault of our King. Answer me, ye boys who knew him on the streets of Nazareth. Answer me, ye miscreants who saw him die. The sceptical tailors have tried for eighteen hundred years to find out one hole in this seamless garment, but they have not found it. The most ingenious and eloquent infidel of this day, in the last line of his book, all of which denounces Christ, says: “All ages must proclaim that among the sons of men there is none greater than Jesus.” So let this bird of the text be clean—its feet fragrant with the dew that it pressed, its beak carrying sprigs of thyme and frankincense, its feathers washed in summer showers. O thou spotless Son of God, impress us with thy innocence! Thou lovely source of true delight, Whom I, unseen, adore, Unveil thy beauties to my sight, That I may love thee more. I remark, also, in regard to this first bird, mentioned in the text, that it was a defenseless bird. When the eagle is assaulted, with its iron beak it strikes like a bolt against its adversary. This was a dove or a sparrow; we do not know just which. Take a dove or pigeon in your hand and the pecking of its beak on your hand makes you laugh at the feebleness of its assault. The reindeer, after it is down, may fell you with its antlers. The ox, after you think it is dead, may break your leg in its death struggle. The harpooned whale, in its last agony, may crush you in the coil of the unwinding rope. But this was a dove or a sparrow—perfectly harmless, perfectly defenseless—type of him who said: “I have trod the wine-press alone, and there was none to help.” None to help! The murderers have it all their own way. Where was the soldier in the Roman regiment who swung his sword in the defense of the Divine Martyr? Did they put one drop of oil on his gashed feet? Was there one, in all that crowd, manly and generous enough to stand up for him? Were the miscreants at the cross any more interfered with in their work of spiking him fast than the carpenter in his shop driving a nail through a pine board? The women cried, but there was no balm in their tears. None to help! none to help! O my Lord Jesus, none to help! The wave of anguish came up to the arch of his feet—came up to his knee— floated to his waist—rose to his chin—swept to his temples, yet none to help! Ten thousand times ten thousand angels in the sky, ready at command to plunge into the bloody affray and strike back the hosts of darkness, yet none to help! none to help! Oh, this dove of the text, in its last moment, clutched not with angry talons. It plunged not a savage beak. It was a dove—helpless, defenseless. None to help! none to help! As, after a severe storm in the morning, you go out and find birds dead on the snow, so this dead bird of the text makes me think of that awful storm that swept the earth on Crucifixion day, when the wrath of God and the malice of man and the fury of devils wrestled beneath the three crosses. As we sang just now: Well might the sun in darkness hide, And shut his glories in, When Christ, the mighty Maker, died For man, the creature’s sin. But I come now to speak of this second bird of the text. We must not let that fly away until we have examined it. The priest took the second bird, tied it to the hyssop branch, and then plunged it in the blood of the first bird. Ah! that is my soul, plunged for cleansing in the Saviour’s blood. There is not enough water in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to wash away our smallest sin. Sin is such an outrage on God’s universe that nothing but blood can atone for it. You know the life is in the blood, and as the life had been forfeited, nothing could buy it back but blood. What was it that was sprinkled on the door-posts when the destroying angel went through the land? Blood. What was it that went streaming from the altar of ancient sacrifice? Blood. What was it that the priest carried into the Holy of Holies, making intercession for the people? Blood. What was it that Jesus sweated in the garden of Gethsemane? Great drops of blood. What does the wine in the sacramental cup symbolize? Blood. What makes the robes of the righteous in heaven so fair? They are washed in the blood of the Lamb. What is it that cleanses all our pollution? The blood of Jesus Christ, that cleanseth from all sin. I hear somebody saying: “I do not like such a sanguinary religion as that.” Do you think it is very wise for the patient to tell the doctor: “I don’t like the medicine you have given me”? If he wants to be cured, he had better take the medicine. My Lord God has offered us a balm, and it is very foolish for us to say: “I don’t like that balm.” We had better take it, and be saved. But you do not oppose the shedding of blood in other directions and for other ends. If a hundred thousand men go out to battle for their country, and have to lay down their lives for free institutions, is there anything ignoble about that? No, you say; “glorious sacrifice rather.” And is there anything ignoble in the idea that the Lord Jesus Christ, by the shedding of his blood, delivered not only one land, but all lands and all ages, from bondage, introducing men by millions and millions into the liberty of the sons of God! Is there anything ignoble about that? As this second bird of the text was plunged in the blood of the first bird, so we must be washed in the blood of Christ, or go polluted forever. Let the water and the blood, From thy side a healing flood, Be of sin the double cure, Save from sin, and make me pure. I notice now that as soon as this second bird was dipped in the blood of the first bird, the priest unloosened it and it was free—free of wing and free of foot. It could whet its beak on any tree-branch it chose. It could peck the grapes of any vineyard it chose. It was free: a type of our souls after we have washed in the blood of the Lamb. We can go where we will. We can do what we will. You say: “Had you not better qualify that?” No; for I remember that in conversion the will is changed, and the man will not will that which is wrong. There is no strait-jacket in our religion. A state of sin is a state of slavery. A state of pardon is a state of emancipation. The hammer of God’s grace knocks the hopples from the feet, knocks the handcuffs from the wrist, opens the door into a landscape all ashimmer with fountains and abloom with gardens. It is freedom. If a man has become a Christian, he is no more afraid of Sinai. The thunders of Sinai do not frighten him. You have, on some August day, seen two thunder showers meet. One cloud from this mountain and another cloud from that mountain, coming nearer and nearer together, and responding to each other, crash to crash, thunder to thunder, boom! boom! And then the clouds break and the torrents pour, and they are emptied perhaps into the very same stream that comes down so red at your feet, that it seems as if all the carnage of the storm-battle has been emptied into it. So in this Bible I see two storms gather, one above Sinai, the other above Calvary, and they respond one to the other—flash to flash, thunder to thunder, boom! boom! Sinai thunders: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die;” Calvary responds: “Save them from going down to the pit, for I have found a ransom.” Sinai says: “Woe! woe!” Calvary answers: “Mercy! mercy!” and then the clouds burst and empty their treasures into one torrent and it comes flowing to our feet, red with the carnage of our Lord—in which, if thy soul be plunged, like the bird in the text, it shall go forth free—free! Oh, I wish all people to understand this: that when a man becomes a Christian he does not become a slave, but that he becomes a free man; that he has larger liberty after he becomes a child of God than before he became a child of God. General Fisk said that he once stood at a slave-block where an old Christian minister was being sold. The auctioneer said of him: “What bid do I hear for this man? He is a very good kind of a man; he is a minister.” Somebody said, “Twenty dollars” (he was very old and not worth much); somebody else “twenty-five”—”thirty”—”thirty-five”—”forty.” The aged Christian minister began to tremble; he had expected to be able to buy his own freedom, and he had just seventy dollars and expected with the seventy dollars to get free. As the bids ran up the old man trembled more and more. “Forty”—”forty-five”—”fifty”—”fifty-five”—”sixty”—”sixty-five.” The old man cried out, “Seventy.” He was afraid they would outbid him. The men around were transfixed. Nobody dared bid; and the auctioneer struck him down to himself—done—done! But by reason of sin we are poorer than that African. We cannot buy our own deliverance. The voices of death are bidding for us and they bid us in and they bid us down. But the Lord Jesus Christ comes and says: “I will buy that man; I bid for him my Bethlehem manger; I bid for him my hunger on the mountain; I bid for him my aching head; I bid for him my fainting heart; I bid for him all my wounds.” A voice from the throne of God says: “It is enough! Jesus has bought him.” Bought with a price. The purchase complete. It is done. The great transaction’s done; I am my Lord’s, and he is mine. He drew me, and I followed on, Charmed to confess the voice divine. Why, is not a man free when he gets rid of his sins? The sins of the tongue gone; the sins of action gone; the sins of the mind gone. All the transgressions of thirty, forty, fifty, seventy years gone—no more in the soul than the malaria that floated in the atmosphere a thousand years ago; for when my Lord Jesus pardons a man he pardons him, and there is no half-way work about it. Here I see a beggar going along the turnpike road. He is worn out with disease. He is stiff in the joints. He is ulcered all over. He has rheum in his eyes. He is sick and wasted. He is in rags. Every time he puts down his swollen feet, he cries, “Oh, the pain!” He sees a fountain by the roadside under a tree, and he crawls up to that fountain and says, “I must wash.” Here I may cool my ulcers. Here I may get rested.” He stoops down and scoops up in the palm of his hands enough water to slake his thirst; and that is all gone. Then he stoops down and begins to wash his eyes, and the rheum is all gone. Then he puts in his swollen feet, and the swelling is gone. Then, willing no longer to be only half cured, he plunges in, and his whole body is laved in the stream, and he gets out upon the bank well. Meantime the owner of the mansion up yonder comes down, walking through the ravine with his only son and he sees the bundle of rags and asks, “Whose rags are these?” A voice from the fountain says, “Those are my rags.” Then says the master to his son, “Go up to the house and get the best new suit you can find and bring it down.” And he brings down the clothes and the beggar is clothed in them and he looks around and says, “I was filthy, but now I am clean. I was ragged, but now I am robed. I was blind, but now I see. Glory be to the owner of that mansion; and glory be to that son who brought me that new suit of clothes; and glory be to this fountain, where I have washed and where all who will may wash and be clean!” Where sin abounded, grace doth much more abound. The bird has been dipped, now let it fly away. The next thing I notice about this bird, when it was loosened (and this is the main idea), is, that it flew away. Which way did it go? When you let a bird loose from your grasp, which way does it fly? Up. What are wings for? To fly with. Is there anything in the suggestion of the direction taken by that bird to indicate which way we ought to go? Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings, Thy better portion trace; Rise from transitory things To heaven, thy native place. We should be going heavenward. That is the suggestion. But I know that we have a great many drawbacks. You had them this morning, perhaps. You had them yesterday or the day before; and although you want to be going heavenward, you are constantly discouraged. But I suppose when that bird went out of the priest’s hands it went by inflections—something stooping, as is the motion of a bird. So the soul soars toward God, rising up in love and sometimes depressed by trial. It does not always go in the direction it would like to go. But the main course is right. There is one passage in the Bible which I quote oftener to myself than any other: “He knoweth our frame and he remembereth that we are dust.” There is a legend which says that when Jesus was a boy, playing with his comrades one Sabbath day, he made birds of clay; and as these birds of clay were standing upon the ground, an old Sadducee came along and he was disgusted at the sport and dashed the birds to pieces; but the legend says that Jesus waved his hand above the broken birds and they took wing and went singing heavenward. Of course, that is a fable; but it is not a fable that we are dust, and that, the hand of divine grace waved over us once, we go singing toward the skies. I wish, my friends, that we could live in a higher atmosphere. If a man’s whole life object is to make dollars, he will be running against those who are making dollars. If his whole object is to get applause, he will run against those who are seeking applause. But if he rises higher than that, he will not be interrupted in his flight heavenward. Why does that flock of birds, floating up against the blue sky so high that you can hardly see them, not change its course for spire or tower? They are above all obstructions. So we would not have so often to change our Christian course if we lived in a higher atmosphere, nearer Christ, nearer the throne of God. Oh, ye who have been washed in the blood of Christ—ye who have been loosed from the hyssop branch—start heavenward. It may be to some of you a long flight. Temptations may dispute your way; storms of bereavement and trouble may strike your soul; but God will see you through. Build not on the earth. Set your affections on things in heaven, not on things on earth. This is a perishing world. Its flowers fade. Its fountains dry up. Its promises cheat. Set your affections upon Christ and heaven. I rejoice that the flight will, after a while, be ended. Not always beaten of the storm. Not always going on weary wings. There is a warm dovecote of eternal rest where we shall find a place of comfort, to the everlasting joy of our souls. Oh, they are going up all the time—going up from this church—going up from all the families and from all the churches of the land—the weary doves seeking rest in a dovecot. Oh, that in that good land we may all meet when our trials are over. We cannot get into the glorious presence of our departed ones unless we have been cleansed in the same blood that washed their sins away. I know this is true of all who have gone in, that they were plunged in the blood, that they were unloosed from the hyssop branch. Then they went singing into glory. See that ye refuse not him that speaketh, for if they escaped not who refuse him that spake on earth, how much more shall not we escape if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 51: 049. NUMBERS ======================================================================== Numbers ======================================================================== CHAPTER 52: 050. AMONG THE BEDOUINS ======================================================================== Among the Bedouins Numbers 10:31 : “Forasmuch as thou knowest how we are to encamp in the wilderness.” Night after night we have slept in tent in Palestine. There are large villages of Bedouins without a house, and for three thousand years the people of those places have lived in black tents, made out of dyed skins; and when the winds and storms wore out and tore loose those coverings, others of the same kind took their places. Noah lived in a tent; Abraham in a tent. Jacob pitched his tent on the mountain. Isaac pitched his tent in the valley. Lot pitched his tent toward Sodom. In a tent the woman Jael nailed Sisera, the general, to the ground, first having given him sour milk to make him soundly sleep—that being the effect of such nutrition, as modern travelers can testify. The Syrian army in a tent. The ancient battle-shout was, “To your tents, O Israel!” Paul was a tent-maker. Indeed, Isaiah, magnificently poetic, indicates that all the human race live under a blue tent when he says that God “stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in;” and Hezekiah compared death to the striking of a tent, saying, “My age is removed from me as a shepherd’s tent.” In our tent in Palestine tonight I hear something I never heard before and hope never to hear again. It is the voice of a hyena amid the rocks nearby. When you may have seen this monster putting his mouth between the iron bars of a menagerie, he is a captive and he gives a humiliated and suppressed cry. But yonder in the midnight on a throne of rocks he has nothing to fear, and he utters himself in a loud, resounding, terrific, almost supernatural sound, splitting up the darkness into a deeper midnight. It begins with a howl and ends with a sound something like a horse’s whinnying. In the hyena’s voice are defiance and strength and blood-thirstiness and crunch of broken bones and death. For the most part Palestine is clear of beasts of prey. The leopards, which Jeremiah says cannot change their spots, have all disappeared, and the lions that once were common all through this land and used by all the prophets for illustrations of cruelty and wrath, have retreated before the discharges of gunpowder, of which they have an indescribable fear. But for the most part Palestine is what it originally was. With the one exception of a wire thread reaching from Joppa to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem to Nazareth, and from Nazareth to Tiberias, and from Tiberias to Damascus, that one nerve of civilization, the telegraphic wire (for we found ourselves only a few minutes off from Brooklyn and New York while standing by Lake Galilee)—with that one exception, Palestine is just as it always was. Nothing surprises me so much as the permanence of everything. A sheep or horse falls dead and, though the sky may one minute before be clear of all wings, in five minutes after, it becomes black with eagles contending for largest morsels of the defunct quadruped. Ah, now I understand the force of Christ’s illustration when he said: “Wheresoever the carcase is there will the eagles be gathered together.” The longevity of those eagles is wonderful. They live fifty or sixty and sometimes a hundred years. That explains what David meant when he says, “Thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” I saw a shepherd with the folds of his coat bent far outward and I wondered what was contained in that amplitude of apparel, and I said to the dragoman: “What has that shepherd got under his coat?” And the dragoman said: “It is a very young lamb he is carrying; it is too young and too weak and too cold to keep up with the flock.” At that moment I saw the lamb put its head out from the shepherd’s bosom and I said: “There it is now, Isaiah’s description of the tenderness of God—’He shall gather the lambs with his arm and carry them in his bosom.’“ Passing by a village home, in the Holy Land, about noon, I saw a great crowd in and around a private house, and I said to the dragoman: “David, what is going on there?” He said: “Somebody has recently died there, and their neighbors go in for several days after to sit down and weep with the bereaved.” “There it is,” I said, “the old Scriptural custom: ‘And many of the Jews came to Martha and Mary, to comfort them concerning their brother.’“ Early in the morning, passing by a cemetery in the Holy Land, I saw among the graves about fifty women dressed in black, and they were crying: “O my child!” “O my husband!” “O my father!” “O my mother!” Our dragoman told us that every morning, very early for three mornings after a burial, the women go to the sepulchre, and after that every week very early for a year. As I saw this group just after daybreak, I said: “There it is again, the same old custom referred to in Luke, the evangelist, where he says, ‘certain women which were early at the sepulchre.’“ But here we found ourselves at Jacob’s well, the most famous well in history, most distinguished for two things: because it belonged to the old patriarch after whom it was named, and for the wonderful things which Christ said, seated on this well-curb, to the Samaritan woman. We dismount from our horses in a drizzling rain, and our dragoman, climbing up to the well over the slippery stones, stumbles and frightens us all by nearly falling into it. I measured the well at the top and found it six feet from edge to edge. Some grass and weeds and thorny growths overhang it. In one place the roof is broken through. Large stones embank the wall on all sides. Our dragoman took pebbles and dropped them in, and from the time it took ere they clicked on the bottom you could tell it was deep; though not as deep as formerly, for every day travelers are applying the same test; and though in the time of Maundrell, the traveler, the well was a hundred and sixty-five feet deep, now it is only seventy-five. So great is the curiosity of the world to know about this well, that during the dry season a Captain Anderson descended into it—at one place the sides so close he had to put his hands over his head in order to get through, and then he fainted away, and lay at the bottom of the well as though dead, until hours after when he was brought to the surface. It is not like other wells digged down to a fountain that fills it, but a reservoir to catch the falling rains; and to that Christ refers when speaking to the Samaritan woman about a spiritual supply, he said that he would, if asked, have given her “living water;” that is, water from a flowing spring in distinction from the water of that well, which was rain water. But why did Jacob make a reservoir there when there is plenty of water all around and abundance of springs and fountains, and seemingly no need of that reservoir? Why did Jacob go to the vast expense of boring and digging a well, perhaps two hundred feet deep as first completed, when, by going a little way off, he could have water from other fountains at little or no expense? Ah, Jacob was wise. He wanted his own well. Quarrels and wars might arise with other tribes, and the supply of water might be cut off; so the shovels, and pickaxes, and boring instruments were ordered, and the well of nearly four thousand years ago was sunk through the solid rock. When Jacob thus wisely insisted on having his own well he taught us not to be unnecessarily dependent on others. Independence of business character; independence of moral character; independence of religious character. Have your own well of grace, your own well of courage, your own well of divine supply. If you are an invalid you have a right to be dependent on others. But if God has given you good health, common sense, and two eyes and two ears and two hands and two feet, he equipped you for independence of all the universe except himself. If he had meant you to be dependent on others you would have been built with a cord around your waist to tie fast to somebody else. No; you are built with common sense to fashion your own opinions, with eyes to find your own way, with ears to select your own music, with hands to fight your own battles. There is only one being in the universe whose advice you need, and that is God. Have your own well, and the Lord will fill it. Dig it, if need be, through two hundred feet of solid rock. Dig it with your pen, or dig it with your yard-stick, or dig it with your shovel, or dig it with your Bible. In my small way I never accomplished anything for God or the Church or the world or my family or myself, except in contradiction to human advice and in obedience to divine counsel. God knows everything, and what is the use of going for advice to human beings who know so little that no one but the all-seeing God can realize how little it is. I suppose that when Jacob began to dig this well on which we were sitting that noontide, people gathered around and said: “What a useless expense you are going to, when rolling down from yonder Mount Gerizim, and down from yonder Mount Ebal, and out yonder in the valley is plenty of water!” “Oh,” replied Jacob, “that is all true, but suppose my neighbors should get angered against me and cut off my supply of mountain beverage, what would I do, and what would my family do, and what would my flocks and herds do? Forward! ye brigade of pickaxes and crowbars and go down into the depths of these rocks and make me independent of all except him who fills the bottles of the clouds! I must have my own well!” Young man, drop cigars and cigarettes and wine cups and the Sunday excursions, and build your own house and have your own wardrobe and be your own capitalist! “Why, I have only five hundred dollars income a year!” says some one. Then spend four hundred dollars of it in living and ten per cent of it, or fifty dollars, in benevolence and the other fifty in beginning to dig your own well. Or if you have a thousand dollars a year, spend eight hundred of it in living, ten per cent, or one hundred dollars, in benevolence and the remaining one hundred in beginning to dig your own well. The largest bird that ever flew through the air was hatched out of one egg and the greatest estate was brooded out of one dollar. I suppose when Jacob began to dig this well it was a dry season, and some one comes up and says: “Now, Jacob, suppose you get the well fifty feet deep, or two hundred feet deep, and there should be no water to fill it, would you not feel silly? People passing along the road and looking down from Mount Gerizim or Mount Ebal, near-by, would laugh and say: ‘That is Jacob’s well, a great hole in the rock, illustrating the man’s folly.’“ Jacob replied: “There never has been a well in Palestine or any other country that, once thoroughly dug, was not sooner or later filled from the clouds, and this will be no exception.” For months after Jacob had completed the well people went by and out of respect for the deluded old man put their hand over their mouth to hide a snicker, and the well remained as dry as the bottom of a kettle that has been hanging over the fire for three hours. But one day the sun was drawing water, and the wind got around to the east, and it began to drizzle, and then great drops splashed all over the well-curb, and the heavens opened their reservoir, and the rainy season poured its floods for six weeks, and there came maidens to the well with empty pails and carried them away full, and the camels thrust their mouths into the troughs and were satisfied, and the water was in the well three feet deep, and fifty feet deep, and two hundred feet deep, and all the Bedouins of the neighborhood and all the passers-by realized that Jacob was wise in having his own well. It is your part to dig your own well and it is God’s part to fill it. You do your part and he will do his part. Much is said about “good luck,” but people who are industrious and self-denying almost always have good luck. You can afford to be laughed at because of your application and economy, for when you get your well dug and filled it will be your turn to laugh. But look up from this famous well, and see two mountains and the plain between them on which was gathered the largest religious audience that ever assembled on earth, about five hundred thousand people. Mount Gerizim, about eight hundred feet high, on one side, and on the other Mount Ebal; the former called the Mount of Blessing and the latter called the Mount of Cursing. At Joshua’s command six tribes stood on Mount Gerizim and read the blessings for keeping the law, and six tribes stood on Mount Ebal reading the curses for breaking the law, while the five hundred thousand people on the plain cried “Amen” with an emphasis that must have made the earth tremble. “I do not believe that,” says some one, “for those mountain tops are two miles apart, and how could a voice be heard from top to top?” My answer is that, while the tops are two miles apart, the bases of the mountains are only half a mile apart, and the tribes stood on the sides of the mountains, and the air is so clear and the acoustic qualities of this great natural amphitheatre so perfect that voices can be distinctly heard from mountain to mountain, as has been demonstrated by travelers fifty times in the last fifty years. Can you imagine anything more thrilling and sublime and overwhelming than what transpired on those two mountain sides, and in the plain between, when the responsive service went on, and thousands of voices on Mount Gerizim cried, “Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the fields, blessed shall be thy basket and thy store!” and then from Mount Ebal thousands of voices responded, crying: “Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s landmark! Cursed be he that maketh the blind to wander out of the way,” and then there rolled up from all the spaces between the mountains that one word, with which the devout of earth close their prayers and the glorified of heaven finish their doxologies: “Amen! Amen!”—that scene only to be surpassed by the times which are coming, when the churches and the academies of music and the auditoriums of earth no longer large enough to hold the worshipers of God; the parks, the mountain sides, the great natural amphitheatres of the valleys shall be filled with the outpouring populations of the earth, and mountain shall reply to mountain, as Mount Gerizim to Mount Ebal, and all the people between shall ascribe riches and honor and glory and dominion and victory to God and the Lamb, and there shall rise an “Amen” like the booming of the heavens mingling with the thunder of the seas. On and on we ride until now we have come to Shiloh, a dead city on a hill surrounded by rocks, sheep, goats, olive gardens and vineyards. Here good Eli fell backward and broke his neck and lay dead at the news from his bad boys, Phineas and Hophni. Life is not worth living after one’s children have turned out badly, and more fortunate was Eli, instantly expiring under such tidings, than those parents who, their children recreant and profligate, live on with broken hearts to see them going down into deeper and deeper plunge. There are fathers and mothers here today to whom death would be happy release because of their recreant sons. And if there be recreant sons here present, and your parents be far away, why not bow your head in repentance, and at the close of this service go to the telegraph office and put it on the wing of the lightning that you have turned from your evil ways? Before another twenty-four hours have passed, take your feet off the sad hearts at the old homestead. Home to thy God, O prodigal! Many, many letters do I get saying in purport: “My son is in your cities; we have not heard from him for some time; we fear something is wrong; hunt him up and say a good word to him; his mother is almost crazy about him; he is a child of many prayers.” But how can I hunt him up unless he be in this audience? Where are you, my boy? On the main floor, or on this platform, or in these boxes, or in these great galleries? Where are you? Lift your right hand. I have a message from home. Your father is anxious about you; your mother is praying for you; your God is calling for you. Or will you wait until Eli falls back lifeless and the heart against which you lay in infancy ceases to beat? What a story to tell in eternity that you killed her! My God! avert that catastrophe! But I turn from this Shiloh of Eli’s sudden decease under bad news from his boys, and find close by what is called the “Meadow of the Feast.” While this ancient city was in the height of its prosperity, on this “Meadow of the Feast” there was an annual ball, where the maidens of the city, amid clapping cymbals and a blare of trumpets, danced in a glee, upon which thousands of spectators gazed. But no dance since the world stood ever broke up in such a strange way as the one the Bible describes. One night while by the light of the lamps and torches these gaieties went on, two hundred Benjamites, who had been hidden behind the rocks and among the trees, dashed upon the scene. They came not to injure or destroy, but wishing to set up households of their own, the women of their own land having been slain in battle, and by preconcerted arrangement each one of the two hundred Benjamites seized the one whom he chose for the queen of his home and carried her away to large estate and beautiful residence, for these two hundred Benjamites had inherited the wealth of a nation. As today near Shiloh we look at the “Meadow of the Feast,” where the maidens danced that night, and at the mountain gorge up which the Benjamites carried their brides, we bethink ourselves of the better land and the better times in which we live, when such scenes are an impossibility, and amid orderly groups and with prayer and benediction, and breath of orange blossoms, and the roll of the wedding march, marriage is so solemnized, and with oath recorded in heaven, two immortals start arm in arm on a journey, to last until death do them part. Upon every such marriage altar may there come the blessing of him “who setteth the solitary in families.” Side by side on the path of life, side by side in their graves, side by side in heaven! But we must this afternoon—our last day before reaching Nazareth—pitch our tent on the most famous battlefield of all time—the Plain of Esdraelon. What must have been the feelings of the Prince of Peace as he crossed it on the way from Jerusalem to Nazareth? Not a flower blooms there but has in its veins the inherited blood of flowers that drank the blood of fallen armies. Hardly a foot of the ground that has not at some time been gullied with war chariots, or trampled with the hoofs of cavalry. It is a plain reaching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. Upon it look down the mountains of Tabor and Gilboa and Carmel. Through it rages at certain seasons the river Kishon, which swept down the armies of Sisera, the battle occurring in November when there is almost always a shower of meteors, so that “the stars in their courses” were said to have fought against Sisera. Through this plain drove Jehu, and the iron chariots of the Canaanites, scythed at the hubs of the wheels, hewing down their awful swath of death, thousands in a minute. The Syrian armies, the Turkish armies, the Egyptian armies again and again trampled it. There they career across it—David and Joshua and Godfrey and Richard, Coeur de Lion,and Baldwin and Saladin—a plain not only famous for the past, but famous because the Bible says the great decisive battle of the world will be fought there—the battle of Armageddon. To me the plain was more absorbing because of the desperate battles here and in regions around, in which the Holy Cross—the very two pieces of wood on which Jesus was supposed to have been crucified—was carried as a standard at the head of the Christian host. That night, closing my eyes in my tent on the Plain of Esdraelon (for there are some things we can see better with eyes shut than open), the scenes of the ancient war come before me. The twelfth century was closing, and Saladin, at the head of eighty thousand mounted troops, was crying, “Ho, for Jerusalem! Ho, for all Palestine!” and before them everything went down, but not without unparalleled resistance. In one place, one hundred and thirty Christians were surrounded by many thousands of furious Mohammedans. For one whole day the one hundred and thirty held out against these thousands. Tennyson’s “Six Hundred,” when “some one had blundered,” were eclipsed by these one hundred and thirty fighting for the Holy Cross. They took hold of the lances which had pierced them with death-wounds and, pulling them out of their own breasts and sides, hurled them back again at the enemy. On went the fight until all but one Christian had fallen, and he, mounted on the last horse, wielded his battle-ax right and left till his horse fell under the plunge of the javelins, and the rider, making the sign of the cross toward the sky, gave up his life on the points of a score of spears. But soon after the last battle came. History portrays it, poetry chants it, painting colors it, and all ages admire that last struggle to keep in possession the wooden cross on which Jesus was said to have expired. It was a battle in which mingled the fury of devils and the grandeur of angels. Thousands of dead Christians on this side. Thousands of dead Mohammedans on the other side. The battle was hottest close around the wooden cross upheld by the Bishop of Ptolemais, himself wounded and dying. And when the Bishop of Ptolemais dropped dead, the Bishop of Lydda seized the cross and again lifted it, carrying it onward into a wilder and fiercer fight, and sword against javelin, and battle-ax upon helmet, and piercing spear against splintering shield, horses and men tumbled into heterogeneous death. Now the wooden cross on which the armies of Christians had kept their eye begins to waver, begins to descend. It falls! and the wailing of the Christian host at its disappearance drowns the huzzah of the victorious Moslems. But that standard of the cross only seemed to fall. It rides the sky today in triumph. Five hundred million souls, the mightiest army of the ages, are following it, and where that goes they will go, across the earth and up the mighty steeps of the heavens. In the twelfth century it seemed to go down; but in the nineteenth century it is the mightiest symbol of glory and triumph, and means more than any other standard, whether inscribed with eagle or lion or bear or star or crescent. That which Saladin trampled on the Plain of Esdraelon I lift today for your marshaling. The Cross! the Cross! The foot of it planted in the earth it saves, the top of it pointing to the heavens to which it will take you, and the outstretched beam of it like outstretched arms of invitation to all nations. Kneel at its foot. Lift your eye to its victim. Swear eternal allegiance to its power. And as that mighty symbol of pain and triumph is kept before us, we will realize how insignificant are the little crosses we are called to bear, and will more cheerfully carry them. Must Jesus bear the cross alone, And all the world go free? No, there’s a cross for every one, And there’s a cross for me. As I fall asleep tonight on my pillow in the tent on the Plain of Esdraelon, reaching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, the waters of the River Kishon soothing me as a lullaby, I hear the gathering of the hosts for the last battle of all the earth. And by their representatives, America is here and Europe is here and Asia is here and Africa is here and all heaven is here and all hell is here, and Apollyon on the black horse leads the armies of darkness and Jesus on the white horse leads the armies of light. And I hear the roll of the drums and the clear call of the clarions, and the thunder of the cannonades. And then I hear the wild rush as of millions of troops in retreat, and then the shout of victory from fourteen hundred million throats; and then a song, as though all the armies of earth and heaven were joining it, clapping cymbals, beating the time: “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 53: 051. DEUTERONOMY ======================================================================== Deuteronomy ======================================================================== CHAPTER 54: 052. THE GIANT'S BEDSTEAD ======================================================================== The Giant’s Bedstead Deuteronomy 3:11 : “Only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof and four cubits the breadth of it.” The story of giants is mixed with myth. William the Conqueror was said to have been of overtowering altitude, but, when, in after time, his tomb was opened, his bones indicated that he had been physically of only ordinary size. Roland the hero was said to have been of astonishing stature, but when his sepulcher was examined, his armor was found only large enough to fit an ordinary man. Alexander the Great had helmets and shields of enormous size made and left among the people whom he had conquered, so as to give the impression that he was a giant, although he was rather under than over the usual height of a man. But that in other days and lands there were real giants is authentic. One of the guards of the Duke of Brunswick was eight and a half feet high. In a museum in London is the skeleton of Charles Birne, eight feet four inches in stature. The Emperor Maximin was over eight feet. Pliny tells of a giant nine feet high, and two other giants nine and a half feet. So I am not incredulous when I come to my text and find King Og a giant, and the size of his bedstead, turning the cubits of the text into feet—the bedstead of Og, the king, must have been about thirteen and a half feet long. Judging from that, the giant who occupied it was probably about eleven feet in stature, or nearly twice the average human size. There was no need of Rabbinical writers trying to account for the presence of this giant, King Og, as they did, by saying that he came down from the other side of the Flood, being tall enough to wade the waters beside Noah’s Ark, or that he rode on the top of the Ark, the passengers inside the Ark daily providing him with food. There was nothing supernatural about him. He was simply a monster in size. Cyrus and Solomon slept on beds of gold, and Sardanapalus had one hundred and fifty bedsteads of gold burned up with him, but this bedstead of my text was of iron—everything sacrificed for strength to hold this excessive avoirdupois, this Alp of bone and flesh. No wonder this couch was kept as a curiosity at Rabbath, and people went from far and near to see it, just as now people go to museums to behold the armor of the ancients. You say what a fighter this giant, King Og, must have been. No doubt of it. I suppose the size of his sword and breastplate corresponded to the size of his bedstead, and his stride across the battle-field and the full stroke of his arm must have been appalling. With an armed host he comes down to drive back the Israelites, who are marching on from Egypt to Canaan. We have no particulars of the battle, but I think the Israelites trembled when they saw this monster of a man moving down to crush them. Alas for the Israelites! Will their troubles never cease? What can men five and a half feet high do against this warrior of eleven feet, and what can short swords do against a sword whose gleam must have been like a flash of lightning? The battle of Edrei opened. Moses and his army met the giant and his army. The Lord of Hosts descended into the fight and the gigantic strides that Og had made when advancing into the battle were more than equaled by the gigantic strides with which he retreated. Huzza for triumphant Israel! Sixty fortified cities surrendered to them. A land of indescribable opulence comes into their possession, and all that is left of the giant king is the iron bedstead. “Nine cubits was the length thereof and four cubits the breadth of it.” Why did not the Bible give us the size of the giant instead of the size of the bedstead? Why did it not indicate that the man was eleven feet high instead of telling us that his couch was thirteen and a half feet long? No doubt among other things it was to teach us that you can judge of a man by his surroundings. Show me a man’s associates, show me a man’s books, show me a man’s home, and I will tell you what he is without your telling me one word about him. You cannot only tell a man according to the old adage, “By the company he keeps,” but by the books he reads, by the pictures he admires, by the church he attends, by the places he visits. Moral giants and moral pigmies, intellectual giants and intellectual pigmies, like physical giants or physical pigmies may be judged by their surroundings. There is a man who has been thirty years faithful in attendance upon churches and prayer-meetings and Sunday-schools, and putting himself among intense religious associations. He may have his imperfections but he is a very good man. Great is his religious stature. The other man has been for thirty years among influences intensely worldly, and he has shut himself out from all other influences, and his religious stature is that of a dwarf. No man ever has been or can be independent of his surroundings, social, intellectual, moral, religious. The Bible indicates the length of the giant by the length of his bedstead. Let no man say, “I will be good,” and yet keep evil surroundings. Let no man say, “I will be faithful as a Christian,” and yet consort chiefly with worldlings. You are proposing an everlasting impossibility. When a man departs this life, you can tell what has been his influence in a community for good by those who mourn for him and by how sincere and long-continued are the regrets of his taking off. There may be no pomp of obsequies and no pretense at epitaphiology, but you can tell how high he was in consecration, and how high in usefulness, by how long is his shadow when he comes to lie down. What is true of individuals is true of cities and nations. Show me the free libraries and schools of a city, and I will tell you the intelligence of its people. Show me its gallery of painting and sculpture, and I will tell you the artistic advancement of its citizens. Show me its churches, and I will tell you the moral and religious status of the place. From the fact that Og’s bedstead was thirteen and a half feet long, I conclude the giant himself was about eleven feet high. But let no one by this though be induced to surrender to unfavorable environments. A man can make his own bedstead. Chantrey and Hugh Miller were born stonemasons, but the one became an immortal sculptor and the other a Christian scientist whose name will never die. Turner, the painter, in whose praise John Ruskin expended the greatest genius of his life, was the son of a barber who advertised, “a penny a shave.” Dr. Prideaux, one of the greatest scholars of all time, earned his way through college by scouring pots and pans. The late Judge Bradley worked his own way up from a charcoal burner to the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. Yes, a man can decide the size of his own bedstead. Notice, furthermore, that even giants must rest. Such enormous physical endowment on the part of King Og might suggest the capacity to stride across all fatigue and omit slumber. No. He required an iron bedstead. Giants must rest. Not appreciating that fact, how many of the giants yearly break down. Giants in business, giants in art, giants in eloquence, giants in usefulness. They live not out more than half their days. They try to escape the consequences of overwork by a voyage across the sea or a sail in a summer yacht or call on physicians for relief from insomnia or restoration of unstrung nerves or the arrest of apoplexies, when all they need is what this giant of my text resorted to—an iron bedstead. Let no one think because he has great strength of body or mind that he can afford to trifle with his unusual gifts. The commercial world, the literary world, the artistic world, the political world, the religious world, are all the time aquake with the crash of falling giants. King Og, no doubt, had a throne but the Bible never mentions his throne. King Og, no doubt, had a crown, but the Bible never mentions his crown. King Og, no doubt, had a scepter, but the Bible does not mention his scepter. Yet, one of the largest verses of the Bible is taken up in describing his bedstead. So God all up and down the Bible honors sleep. Adam, with his head on a pillow of Edenic roses, has his slumber blest by a divine gift of beautiful companionship. Jacob, with his head on a pillow of rock, has his sleep glorified with a ladder filled with descending and ascending angels. Christ, with a pillow made out of the folded-up coat of a fisherman, honors slumber in the back part of the storm-tossed boat. The only case of accident to sleep mentioned in the Bible was when Eutychus fell from a window during a sermon of Paul, who had preached until midnight, but that was not so much of a condemnation of sleep as a censure of long sermons. More sleep is what the world wants. Economize in everything but sleep. William H. Seward, the renowned Secretary of State, in the midst of his overmastering toils longed for the capacity to rest, writing in his memorandum-book: “I have never found but one invaluable recipe for having a good night’s rest, and that is to have been restless and sleepless the night before.” When President John Quincy Adams and the distinguished Josiah Quincy went to hear Judge Story lecture on law to his students, and, when invited to sit beside the judge and both fell asleep, the judge appropriately pointed to them, and said to his students: “Behold the evil effects of early rising.” In Bible times, when people arose at the voice of the bird, they retired at the time the bird puts his head under his wing. One of our national sins is robbery of sleep. Walter Scott was so urgent about this duty of slumber that, when arriving at a hotel where there was no room to sleep in, except that in which there was a corpse, inquired if the deceased had died of a contagious disease, and, when assured he had not, took the other bed in the room and fell into profoundest slumber. Those of small endurance must certainly require rest if even the giant needs an iron bedstead. Notice, furthermore, that God’s people on the way to Canaan need not be surprised if they confront some sort of a giant. Had not the Israelitish host had trouble enough already? No! Red Sea not enough. Water famine not enough. Long marches not enough. Opposition by enemies of ordinary stature not enough. They must meet Og, the giant of the iron bedstead. “Nine cubits was the length thereof and four cubits the breadth of it.” Why not let these Israelites go smoothly into Canaan without this gigantic opposition? Oh, they needed to have their courage and faith further tested and developed! And blessed is the man, who, in our time, in his march toward the Promised Land does not meet more than one giant. Do not conclude that you are not on the way to Canaan because of this obstacle. As well might the Israelites conclude they were not on the way to the Promised Land because they met Og, the giant. Standing in your way is some evil propensity, some social persecution, some business misfortune, some physical distress. Not one of you but meets a giant who would like to hew you in twain. Higher than eleven feet this Og darkens the sky and the rattle of his buckler stuns the ear. But, you are going to get the victory, as did the Israelites. In the name of the God of Moses and David and Joshua and Paul, charge on him, and you will leave his carcass in the wilderness. You want a battle shout! Take that with which David, the five-footer, assailed Goliath, the nine-footer, when that giant cried, with stinging contempt both in manner and intonation: “Come to me, and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field,” and David looked up at the monster of braggadocio and defiantly replied: “Thou comest to me with a sword and with a spear and with a shield; but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. This day will the Lord deliver thee unto mine hand; and I will smite thee and take thine head from thee, and I will give the carcasses of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.” Then David, with probably three swirls of the sling about his head got into sufficient momentum and let fly till the cranium of the giant broke in, and he fell, and David leaped on his carcass, one foot on his chest and the other on his head, and that was the last of the Philistine. But, be sure you get the right battle shout, and that you utter it with the right spirit, or Og will roll over you as easily as at night he rolled into his iron bedstead. Brethren, I have made up my mind that we will have to fight all the way up to the Promised Land. I used to think that after a while I would get into a time where it would be smooth and easy, but the time does not come, and it will never come in this world. By the time King Og is used up so that he cannot get into his iron bedstead, some other giant of opposition looms up to dispute our way. Let us stop looking for an easy time and make it a thirty years’ war or a sixty years’ war or a hundred years’ war, if we live so long. Must I be carried to the skies On flowery beds of ease, While others fought to win the prize, And sailed through bloody seas? Do you know the name of the biggest giant that you can possibly meet—and you meet him? He is not eleven feet high but one hundred feet high. His bedstead is as long as the continent. His name is Doubt. His common food is infidel books and skeptical lectures and ministers who do not know whether the Bible is inspired at all or inspired in spots, and Christians who are more infidel than Christian. You will never reach the Promised Land unless you slay that giant. Kill Doubt or Doubt will kill you. How to overcome this giant? Pray for faith, go with people who have faith, read everything that encourages faith, avoid as you would ship fever and smallpox the people who lack faith. In this battle against King Og use not for weapons the crutch of a limping Christian or the sharp pen of a controversialist, but the sword of truth, which is the Word of God. The word “if” is made up of the same number of letters as the word “Og,” and it is just as big a giant. If the Bible be true. If the soul be immortal. If Christ be God. If our belief and behavior here decide our future destiny. If. If. If. I hate that word “If.” Noah Webster says it is a conjunction; I say it is an armed giant. Satan breathed upon it a curse when he said to Christ: “If thou be the Son of God.” What a dastardly and infamous “If.” Against that giant “If” hurl Job’s “I know” and Paul’s “I know.” “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” “I know in whom I have believed.” Down with the “If” and up with the “I know.” Oh, that giant Doubt is such a cruel giant! It attacks many in the last hour. It could not let my mother alone even in her dying moments. After a life of holiness and consecration such as I never heard of in any one else, she said to my father: “Father, what if, after all, our prayers and struggles should go for nothing?” Why could she not, after all the trials and sicknesses and bereavements of a long life and the infirmities of old age, be allowed to go without such a cruel stroke from Doubt, the giant? Do you wonder I have a grudge against the old monster? If I could I would give him a bigger bounce than Satan got when, hurled out of heaven, the first thing he struck was the bottom of perdition. Another impression from my subject: the march of the Church cannot be impeded by gigantic opposition. That Israelitish host led on by Moses was the Church, and when Og, the giant, him of the iron bedstead, came out against him with another host—a fresh host against one that seemed worn out—things must have looked bad for Israel. No account is given of the bedstead of Moses, except that one in which he first slept—the cradle of aquatic vegetation on the Nile, where the wife of Chenephres, the king, found the floating babe, and, having no child of her own, adopted him. Moses of ordinary size against Og of extraordinary dimensions. Besides that, Og was backed up by sixty fortified cities. Moses was backed up seemingly by nothing but the desert that had worn him and his army into a group of undisciplined and exhausted stragglers. But the Israelites triumphed. If you spell the name of Og backward, you turn it into the word “Go,” and Og was turned backward and made to go. With Og’s downfall all the sixty cities surrendered. Nothing was left of the giant except his iron bedstead, which was kept in a museum at Rabbath to show how tall and stout he once was. So shall the last giant of opposition in the Church’s march succumb. Not sixty cities captured but all the cities. Not only on one side of Jordan, but on both sides of all the rivers. The day is coming. Hear it all ye who are doing something for the conquest of the world for God and the truth, the time will come when, as there was nothing left of Og, the giant, but the iron bedstead kept at Rabbath as a curiosity, there will be nothing left of the giants of iniquity except something for the relic hunters to examine. Which of the giants will be the last slain I know not, but there will be a museum somewhere to hold the relics of what they once were. A rusted sword will be hung up—the only relic of the giant of War. A demijohn—the only relic of the giant of Inebriation. A roulette ball—the only relic of the giant of Hazard. A pictured certificate of watered stock—the only relic of the giant of Stock Gambling. A broken knife—the only relic of the giant of Assassination. A yellow copy of Tom Paine—the only relic of the giant of Unbelief. And that museum will do for the later ages of the world what the iron bedstead at Rabbath did for the earlier ages. Do you not see it makes all the difference in the world whether we are fighting on toward a miserable defeat or toward a final victory? All the Bible promises prophesy the latter, and so I cheer you who are the troops of God, and though many things are dark now, like Alexander, I review the army by torchlight and I give you the watchword which Martin Luther proclaimed: “The Lord of Hosts!” “The Lord of Hosts!” and I cry out exultingly, with Oliver Cromwell at the battle of Dunbar: “Let God arise; let his enemies be scattered.” Make all the preparations for the world’s evangelization. Have the faith of Robert and Mary Moffat, the missionaries, who, after preaching in Bechuanaland for ten years without one convert, were asked what they would like to have sent them by way of gift from England, said: “Send a communion service for it will be surely needed,” and sure enough the expected in-gathering of many souls was realized and the communion service arrived in time to celebrate it. Appropriately did that missionary write in an album when his autograph was requested: My album is the savage breast, Where darkness reigns and tempests wrest, Without one ray of light, To write the name of Jesus there, And point to worlds both bright and fair, And see the savage bowed in prayer, Is my supreme delight Whatever your work and wherever you work for God—forward. You in your way and I in my way. With holy pluck fight on with something of the strength of Thomas Troubridge, who at Inkermann had one leg shot off, and the foot of the other leg, and when they proposed to carry him off the field replied: “No. I do not move until the battle is won.” Whatever be the rocking of the Church or State, have the calmness of the aged woman in an earthquake that frightened everybody else, and who, when asked if she was not afraid, said: “No, I am glad that I have a God who can shake the world.” Whether your work be to teach a Sabbath class or nurse an invalid or reform a wanderer or print a tract or train a household or bear the querulousness of senility or cheer the disheartened or lead a soul to Christ, know that by fidelity you may help hasten the time when the world shall be snowed under with white lily and incarnadined with red rose. And, now, I bargain with you that we will come back some day from our superstellar abode to see how the world looks when it shall be fully emparadised—its last tear wept, its last wound healed, its last shackle broken, its last desert gardenized, its last giant of iniquity decapitated. And when we land, may it be somewhere near this spot of earth where we have together toiled and struggled for the kingdom of God, and may it be about this hour in the high noon of some glorious Sabbath, looking into the upturned faces of some great audience radiant with holiness and triumph. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 55: 053. HALF A PLANET ======================================================================== Half a Planet Deuteronomy 3:27 : “Lift up thine eyes westward.” So God said to Moses in Bible times, and so he said to Christoforo Colombo, the son of a wool-comber of Genoa, more than four hundred years ago. As if to condemn the slur that different ages put upon mothers-in-law, the mother-in-law of Columbus gave him the sea-charts and maps and other navigators’ materials out of which he ciphered America. The nations had been looking chiefly toward the East. The sculpture of the world, the architecture of the world, the laws of the world, the philosophy of the world, the civilization of the world, the religion of the world came from the East. But, while Columbus, as his name was called after it was Latinized, stood studying maps and examining globes and reading cosmography, God said to him: “Lift up thine eyes toward the West.” The fact was it must have seemed to Columbus a very lopsided world. Like a cart with one wheel, like a scissors with one blade, like a sack on one side of a camel, needing a sack on the other side to balance it. Here was a bride of a world with no bridegroom. When God makes a half of anything he does not stop there. He makes the other half. We are all obliged sometimes to leave things only half done. But God never stops half-way, because he has the time and the power to go all the way. I do not wonder that Columbus was not satisfied with half a world, and so went to work to find the other half. The pieces of carved wood that were floated to the shores of Europe by a westerly gale, and two dead human faces, unlike anything he had seen before, likewise floated from the West, were to him the voice of God, saying: “Lift up thine eyes toward the West.” But the world then as now had plenty of Can’t-be-Done’s. That is what keeps individuals back and enterprises back and the church back, and nations back—ignominious and disgusting and disheartening Can’t-be-Done’s. Old navigators said to young Columbus, “It can’t be done.” The republic of Genoa said, “It can’t be done.” Alphonso V. said, “It can’t be done.” A committee on maritime affairs, to whom the subject was submitted, declared, “It can’t be done.” Venetians said, “It can’t be done.” After a while the story of this poor but ambitious Columbus reaches the ear of Queen Isabella, and she pays eighty dollars to buy him a decent suit of clothes, so that he may be fit to appear before royalty. The interview in the palace was successful. Money enough was borrowed to fit out the expedition. There they are, the three ships, in the Gulf of Cadiz, Spain. If you ask me which have been the most famous boats of the world I would say, first, Noah’s ship, that wharfed on Mount Ararat; second, the boat of bulrushes, in which Moses floated the Nile; third, the Mayflower, that put out from Plymouth with the Pilgrim Fathers; and now these three vessels that on this, the Friday morning, August 3, 1492, are rocking on the ripples. I am so glad it is Friday, so that the prows of those three ships shall first run down the superstition that things begun or voyages started on Friday must necessarily be disastrous. Show me any Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Saturday that ever accomplished as much as this expedition that started on Friday. With the idea that there will be perils connected with the expedition, the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is administered. Do not forget that this voyage was begun under religious auspices. There is the Santa Maria, only ninety feet long, with four masts and eight anchors. The captain walking the deck is fifty-seven years old, his hair white, for at thirty-five he was gray, and his face is round, his nose aquiline and his stature a little taller than the average. I know from his decided step and the set of his jaw that he is a determined man. That is Captain Christopher Columbus. Near-by, but far enough off not to run into each other, are the smaller ships, the Pinta and the Nina, about large enough and safe enough to cross the Hudson River or the Thames in good weather. There are two doctors in this fleet of ships, and a few landsmen, adventurers who are ready to risk their necks in a wild expedition. There are enough provisions for a year. “Captain Columbus, where are you sailing for?” “I do not know.” “How long before you will get there?” “I cannot say.” “All ashore that are not going,” is heard, and those who wish to remain behind go to the land. Now the anchors of the three ships are being weighed and the ratlines begin to rattle and the sails to unfurl. The wind is dead east, and it does not take long to get out to sea. In a few hours the adventurers wish they had not started. The ships begin to roll and pitch. Oh, what a delightful sensation to landsmen! They begin to bother Christopher Columbus with questions. They want to know what he thinks of the weather. They want to know when he thinks they will probably get there. Every time when he stands taking observations of the sun with an astrolabe they wonder what he sees and ask more questions. The crew are rather grouty. Some of them came on under four months’ advance pay and others were impressed into the service. For sixteen days the wind is dead east, and that pleases the captain, because it blows them further and further away from the European coast, and further on toward the shore of another country, if there is any. After a while there comes a calm day and the attempt is made to fathom the ocean, and they cannot touch bottom though the line and lead run down 200 fathoms. More delightful sensations for those who are not good sailors! A fathom is six feet and two hundred fathoms are one thousand and two hundred feet, and below that it may be many hundred fathoms deeper. To add interest to the voyage, on the twentieth day out, a violent storm sweeps the sea, and the Atlantic Ocean tries what it can do with the ships Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina. Some of you know something of what a sea can do with the Umbria, the Majestic, the Teutonic and the Paris, and you must imagine what the ocean could do with those three small ships of olden times. You may judge what the ocean was then by what it is now; it has never changed its habits. It can smile like the morning, but often it is the archangel of wrath, and its most rollicking fun is a shipwreck. The mutinous crew would have killed Columbus had it not been for the general opinion on shipboard that he was the only one that could take them back home in safety. The promise of a silk waistcoat and forty dollars in money to the man who should first discover land, appeased them somewhat, but the indignation and blasphemy and threats of assassination must have been awful. Yet God sustained the great sailor commanding the Santa Maria. Every evening on shipboard they had prayers and sung a vesper hymn. But, after all the patience of those on board the ships had been exhausted, and the great captain or admiral had been cursed by every anathema that human lips could frame, one night a sailor saw a light moving along the shore, and then moving up and down, and then disappearing. On Friday morning, October 12, 1492, a gun from the Pinta signaled “Land ahead.” At two o’clock, just long enough after Thursday to make it sure it was Friday, and to give another blow at the world’s ideas of unlucky days. Then the ships lay to, and the boats were lowered, and Captain Christopher Columbus first stepped upon the shore, amid the song of birds and the air a surge of redolence, and took possession in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. So the voyage that began with the sacrament ended with Gloria in Excelsis Deo. From that day onward, you say there can be nothing for Columbus but honors, rewards, rhapsodies, palaces and world-wide applause. No, no! On his way back to Spain the ship was so wrenched by the tempest and so threatened with destruction that he wrote a brief account of his discovery and put it in a cask and threw it overboard, that the world might not lose the advantage of his adventures. Honors awaited him on the beach; but he undertook a second voyage and with it came all maligning and persecution and denunciation and poverty. He was called a land-grabber, a liar, a cheat, a fraud, a deceiver of nations. Speculators robbed him of his good name, courtiers depreciated his discoveries, and there came to him ruined health and imprisonment and chains, of which he said while he rattled them on his wrists: “I will wear them as a memento of the gratitude of princes.” Amid keen appreciation of the world’s abuse and cruelty, and with body writhing in the tortures of gout, he groaned out his last words: “In manus tuas Domine commendo spiritum meum:” “Into thy hands, Oh, Lord, I commend my spirit.” Of course he had regal obsequies. That is the way the world tries to atone for its mean treatment of great benefactors. Many a man has had a fine ride to his grave who during this life had to walk all the way. A big funeral, and instead of bread they give him a stone—that is, a tombstone. But death that brings quiet to the body of others did not bring quiet to his. First buried in the church of Santa Maria. Seven years afterward removed to Seville. Twenty-three years afterward removed to San Domingo. Finally removed to Cuba. Four post-mortem journeys from sepulchre to sepulchre. I wish his bones had been transported to our own shores, where they belong, and that in the fifth century after his decease the American continent might have built a mausoleum worthy of him who picked this jewel of a hemisphere out of the sea and set it in the crown of the world’s geography. But the bright noonday sun of that old sailor’s prosperity went down in thickest night, and though here and there a monument has been lifted in his memory, and here and there a city called after him, the continent that he was the means of founding was named after another name and no fitting commemoration of his work has been proposed until nearly four hundred years after his body turned to dust. May the imposing demonstration now being made in his honor on the Atlantic coast, and to be made next year in his honor mid-continent, be brilliant enough and far-resounding enough and Christian enough and magnificent enough to atone for the neglect of centuries. May the good Lord allow that most illustrious sailor of all time to look over the amethystine battlements long enough to see some of the garlands wreathed around his name and hear something of the hemispheric shout that shall greet his memory. What most impresses me in all that wondrous life, which, for the next twelve months, we will be commemorating by sermon and song and military parade and World’s Fair and Congress of Nations, is something I have never heard stated, and that is, that the discovery of America was a religious discovery and in the name of God. Columbus, by the study of prophecies and by what Zechariah and Micah and David and Isaiah had said about the “ends of the earth,” was persuaded to go out and find the “ends of the earth,” and he felt himself called by God to carry Christianity to the “ends of the earth.” Then, the administration of the Last Supper before they left the Gulf of Cadiz, and the evening prayers during the voyage, and the devout ascription as soon as they saw the new world, and the doxologies with which they landed, confirm me in saying that the discovery of America was a religious discovery. Atheism has no right here; infidelity has no right here; vagabondism has no right here. And as God is not apt to fail in any of his undertakings (at any rate, I have never heard of his having anything to do with a failure), America is going to be gospelized, and from the Golden Gate of California to the Narrows of New York Harbor, and from the top of North America to the foot of South America, from Behring Straits to Cape Horn, this is going to be Immanuel’s Land. All the forms of irreligion and abomination that have cursed other parts of the world will land here—yea, they have already landed—and they will wrangle for the possession of this hemisphere, and they will make great headway and feel themselves almost established. But at what time they feel themselves secure of domination they will be made to bite the dust. God will not forget the prophecies which encouraged Columbus about the “ends of the earth seeing the salvation of God,” nor the Christian anthem which Columbus led on the morning of the 12th of October, 1492, on the coast of San Salvador. Like that flock of land birds which met the Santa Maria, and the Pinta, and the Nina far out at sea, indicating to the commanders of that fleet that they were approaching some country, so a whole flock of promises and hopes, golden-winged and songful, this morning alight around us, assuring us that we are approaching the glorious period of American evangelization. A Divine influence will yet sweep the continent that will make iniquity drop like slacked lime, and will make the most blatant infidelity declare it was only joking when it said the Bible was not true, and the worst atheism announce that it always did believe in the God of Nations. Let others call for Requiem and Dead March; I call for George Frederick Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. There has been much talk of late about communication with other worlds. Mars has come so near we can see its canals, and it has been hoped that by signals after a while we may communicate with other stars. Ah, that will not be possible until our world has been reformed and evangelized. It would not do for our world in its lost and ruined state to have communication with other worlds. It would spoil their morals. But wait until this world is fully redeemed, as it will be, and then perhaps interstellar correspondence may be opened. Till then, this smitten and sickened world of ours must be quarantined from coming too near the unfallen worlds. But, thank God! the prophecies which cheered Columbus in his undertaking cheer us. America for God! Yea, the round world for God! There can be no doubt about it. That great Italian navigator also impresses me with the idea that when one does a good thing, he cannot appreciate its ramifications. To the moment of his death, Columbus never knew that he had discovered America, but thought that Cuba was a part of Asia. He thought the Island of Hispaniola was the Ophir of Solomon. He thought he had only opened a new way to old Asia. Had he known what North and South America were and are, and that he had found a country three thousand miles wide, ten thousand miles long, of near sixteen million square miles, and four times as large as Europe, the happiness would have been too much for mortal man to endure. He had no idea that the time would come when a nation of sixty million people on this side of the sea would be joined by all the intelligent nations on the other side the sea, for the most part of the year reciting his wonderful deeds. It took centuries to reveal the result of that one transatlantic voyage. So it has always been. Could Paul, on that June day, when he was decapitated, have had any idea of what effect his letters and the account of his life would have on Christendom? Could Martin Luther have had any idea of the echoes that would ring through the ages from the bang of his hammer nailing the Latin theses against a church door at Wittenberg? Could Eli Whitney have realized the continents of wealth that would be added to the South by the invention of his cotton gin? Could John Guttenberg, toiling year after year, making type, and laboriously setting them side by side, and with presses changed now this way and that, and sued by John Faust for money loaned, and many of the people trying to cheat Guttenberg out of his invention, he toiling on until he produced the Mazarin Bible, have any idea that, as a result of his invention, there would be librairies that, placed side by side, would again and again engirdle the earth, or the showers of newspapers that snow the world under? When Manhattan Island was sold to the Dutch for twenty-four dollars, neither they who sold, nor they who bought, could have forseen New York, the commercial metropolis of America, that now stands on it. Can a man who preaches a sermon, or a woman who distributes tracts; or a teacher who instructs a class, or a passer-by who utters encouraging words, realize the infinitudes of useful result? The teacher at Harrow School, who toiled with William Jones, the most stupid boy in school, and at the foot of his class, did not know that he was fitting for his work the greatest Oriental scholar of modern times; his statue now in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Every move you make for God, however insignificant in your own eyes, or in the eyes of others, touches worlds larger than the one Columbus discovered. Why talk about unimportant things? There are no unimportant things. Infinity is made up of infinitesimals. On a clear night the smallest dew-drop holds a star. Each one of you is at the centre of a universe, and all you say and do somehow vibrates to the extreme of that universe in all directions. I promise everlasting renown to those who will go forth with Christian and sympathetic words. After the battle of Copenhagen, Nelson, the admiral, went into a hospital and halted at the bed of a wounded sailor who had lost his arm, and said: “Well, Jack, what is the matter with you?” and the sailor replied: “Lost my right arm, your honor;” and Nelson looked down at his own empty sleeve and said: “Well, Jack, then you and I are both spoiled for fishermen. Cheer up, my brave fellow!” and that sympathetic word cheered the entire hospital. Before you die, you can, out of your own misfortunes, cheer a hundred souls, and start unending echoes. You can no more appreciate the far-reaching results of your life than Columbus could see this continent from Arctic to Antarctic. I say this not to make you proud and arrogant, but to make you tremble with your responsibilities, and put you on your guard as to what you do and what you say. While studying the life of this Italian navigator, I am also reminded of the fact that while we are diligently looking for one thing, we find another. Columbus started to find India, but found America. Go on and do your duty diligently and prayerfully, and if you do not find what you looked for, you will find something better. Saul was hunting for the strayed animals of his father’s barnyard, but met Samuel, the prophet, who gave him a crown of dominion. Nearly all the great inventions and discoveries were made by men who, at the time, were looking for something else. Professor Morse gone to Europe to perfect himself in chemistry, on returning happens to take the packet-ship Sully from Havre, and while in conversation with a passenger learns of some experiments in France, which suggests to him the magnetic telegraphy. He went to Europe to learn the wisdom of others and discovered the telegraph. Hargreaves by the upsetting of a machine, and the motion of its wheels while upset, discovered the spinning-jenny. So, my friend, go on faithfully and promptly with your work, and if you do not get the success you seek, and your plans upset, you will get something just as good and perhaps better. Sail ahead on the voyage of life, keep a correct log-book, brave the tempest, make the best use of the east wind, keep a sharp lookout, and I warrant you in the name of the God of Columbus that if you do not find just what you want of an earthly nature, you will find heaven, and that will be better. What was wornout India, crouching under a tropical sun, compared with salubrious and radiant and almost illimitable America; and what is all that this little world in which we live can afford you compared with that supernal realm, whose foliage, and whose fruits, and whose riches, and whose population, and whose grandeurs, and whose worship, and whose Christ, make up an affluence that the most rapturous vocabulary fails to utter? Another look at the career of that Admiral of the Santa Maria persuades me that it is not to be expected that this world will do its hard workers full justice. If any man ought to have been treated well from first to last, it was Columbus. He had his faults. Let others depict them. But a greater soul the centuries have not produced. This continent ought to have been called Columbia, after the hero who discovered it, or Isabelliana, after the queen who furnished the means for the expedition. No. The world did not do him justice, while he was alive, and why should it be expected to do him justice after he was dead. Columbus in a dungeon! What a thought. Columbus in irons! What a spectacle. The wife of Robert Murray, after whom Murray Hill, New York, was named, never has received proper credit for detaining at a very rich luncheon the officers of the opposing army until Washington and his army could escape. Mrs. Murray saved American independence. How the wrong men and the wrong women get credit that does not belong to them, while God’s heroes and God’s heroines go ungarlanded. You have heard of the brave words of dying chieftains, but you probably never heard of what a private soldier said, fallen at Resaca, and bleeding under a shell wound in his mouth, and who though suffering dreadfully from thirst, when a cup of water was offered him declined to drink, saying, “My mouth is all bloody, sir, and it might make the tin-cup bad for others!” The world knows little or nothing of the bravest words and the bravest deeds. In one of the last letters which Columbus sent to his son, he wrote this lamentation: “I receive nothing of the revenue due me. I live by borrowing. Little have I profited by twenty years of service with such toils and perils, since at present I do not own a roof in Spain. If I desire to eat or sleep, I have no recourse but the inn, and, for the most times, have not wherewithal to pay my bill.” Be not surprised, my hearer, if you suffer injustice. You are in the best of company; the men and women who wrought mightily for God and the world’s improvement, and got for it chiefly misrepresentation and abuse while they lived, although afterward they have had a long row of carriages at the obsequies, and a gilt-edged set of resolutions unanimously adopted for the consolation of the bereft household. Do your full duty, expecting no appreciation in this world, but full reward in the world to come. And, now, while I am thinking of this illustrious ship captain of Genoa, let me bespeak higher appreciation for the ship captains now in service, many of them this moment on the sea, the lives of tens of thousands of passengers in their keeping. What an awful responsibility is theirs! They go out through the Narrows, or start from Queenstown or Southampton or Glasgow, not knowing what cyclones, or collisions, or midnight perils are waiting for them. It requires bravery to face an army of men, but far more bravery to face an army of Atlantic surges led on by hurricanes. A more stupendous scene is not to be witnessed than that of a ship captain walking the bridge of a steamer in the midst of a cyclone. Remember those heroes in your prayers; and when worn out in the service, and they have to command inferior craft, or return to the land and go out of service, do them full honor for what they once were. Let the ship companies award them pensions worthy of what they endured until they start on their last voyage from this world to the next. Ay, that voyage we must all take, landsmen as well as seafarers. Let us be sure that we have the right pilot, and the right chart, and the right captain, and that we start in the right direction. It will be to each of us who love the Lord a voyage more wonderful for discovery than that which Columbus took, for, after all we have heard about that other world, we know not where it is, or how it looks; and it will be as new as San Salvador was to the glorious captain of the Santa Maria. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man.” May the light from that Golden Beach flash on the darkness, and we be able to step ashore amid groves and orchards and aromas, such as the world’s atmosphere never ripened or breathed. Ay, fellow-mariners, over the rough sea of life, through the fogs and mists of earth, see you not already the outline of the better country? Land ahead! Land ahead! Nearer and nearer we come to heavenly wharfage. Throw out the planks and step ashore into the arms of your kindred, who have been waiting and watching for the hour of your disembarkation. Through the rich grace of Christ, our Lord, may we all have such blissful arrival! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 56: 054. THE HORNET'S MISSION ======================================================================== The Hornet’s Mission Deuteronomy 7:20 : “The Lord thy God will send the hornet.” It seems as if the insectile world were determined to extirpate the human race. It bombards the grain fields and the orchards and the vineyards. The Colorado beetle, the Nebraska grasshopper, the New Jersey locust, the universal potato-beetle, seem to carry on the work which was begun ages ago when the insects buzzed out of Noah’s ark as the door was opened. In my text, the hornet flies out on its mission. It is a species of wasp, swift in its motion and violent in its sting. Its touch is torture to man or beast. We have all seen the cattle run bellowing under the cut of its lancet. In boyhood we used to stand cautiously looking at the globular nest hung from the tree-branch, and while we were looking at the wonderful covering we were struck with something that sent us shrieking away. The hornet goes in swarms. It has captains over hundreds, and twenty of them alighting on one man will produce certain death. The Persians attempted to conquer a Persian city, but the elephants and the beasts on which the Persians rode were assaulted by the hornet, so that the whole army was broken up, and the besieged city was rescued. This burning and noxious insect stung out the Hittites and the Canaanites from their country. What gleaming sword and chariot of war could not accomplish was done by the puncture of an insect. The Lord sent the hornet. My friends, when we are assaulted by great Be-hemoths of trouble, we become chivalric, and we assault them; we get on the high-mettled steed of our courage, and we make a cavalry charge at them, and, if God be with us, we come out stronger and better than when we went in. But, alas, for these insectile annoyances of life—these foes too small to shoot—these things without any avoirdupois weight—the gnats and the midges and the flies and the wasps and the hornets! In other words, it is the small stinging annoyances of our life which drive us out and use us up. In the best-conditioned life, for some grand and glorious purpose God has sent the hornet. I remark, in the first place, that these small stinging annoyances may come in the shape of a nervous organization. People who are prostrated under typhoid fevers or with broken bones get plenty of sympathy; but who pities anybody that is nervous? The doctors say, and the family say, and everybody says, “Oh, she’s only a little nervous; that’s all!” The sound of a heavy foot, the harsh clearing of a throat, a discord in music, a want of harmony between the shawl and the glove on the same person, a curt answer, a passing slight, the wind from the east, any one of ten thousand annoyances, opens the door for the hornet. The fact is that the vast majority of the people in this country are overworked, and their nerves are the first to give out. A great multitude are under the strain of Leyden, who, when he was told by his physician that if he did not stop working while he was in such poor physical health he would die, responded, “Doctor, whether I live or die, the wheel must keep going round.” These sensitive persons of whom I speak have a bleeding sensitiveness. The flies love to light on anything raw, and these people are like the Canaanites spoken of in the text or in the context—they have a very thin covering, and are vulnerable at all points. “And the Lord sent the hornet.” Again, the small insect annoyances may come to us in the shape of friends and acquaintances who are always saying disagreeable things. There are some people you cannot be with for half an hour but you feel cheered and comforted. Then there are other people you cannot be with for five minutes before you feel miserable. They do not mean to disturb you, but they sting you to the bone. They gather up all the yarn which the gossips spin, and retail it. They gather up all the adverse criticisms about your person, about your business, about your home, about your church, and they make your ear the funnel into which they pour it. They laugh heartily when they tell you, as though it were a good joke, and you laugh, too—outside. These people are brought to our attention in the Bible in the Book of Ruth. Naomi went forth beautiful and with the finest of worldly prospects, into another land; but, after a while, she came back widowed and sick and poor. What did her friends do when she came to the city? They all went out, and, instead of giving her common-sense consolation, what did they do? Read the Book of Ruth and find out. They threw up their hands and said, “Is this Naomi?” as much as to stay, “How awful bad you do look!” When I entered the ministry I looked very pale for years, and every year, for four or five years, many times a year I was asked if I had not consumption; and, passing through the room, I would sometimes hear people sigh and say, “A-ah! not long for this world!” I resolved in those times that I never, in any conversation, would say anything depressing, and by the help of God I have kept the resolution. These people of whom I speak reap and bind in the great harvest-field of discouragement. Some day you greet them with a hilarious “Good morning,” and they come buzzing at you with some depressing information. “The Lord sent the hornet.” It is astonishing how some people prefer to write and to say disagreeable things. That was the case when Henry M. Stanley returned after his magnificent exploit of finding David Livingstone. When Mr. Stanley stood before the savants of Europe, and many of the small critics of the day, under pretense of getting geographical information, put to him most insolent question, he folded his arms and refused to answer. At the very time when you would suppose all decent men would have applauded the heroism of the man, there were those to hiss. “The Lord sent the hornet.” And when afterward that man sat down on the western coast of Africa, sick and worn out, with, perhaps, the grandest achievement of the age in the way of geographical discovery, there were small critics all over the world to buzz and buzz, and caricature and deride him, and when, after a while, he got the London papers, as he opened them out flew the hornet. When I see that there are so many people in the world who like to say disagreeable things, and write disagreeable things, I come almost in my weaker moments to believe what a man said to me in Philadelphia one Monday morning. I went to get the horse at the livery stable, and the hostler, a plain man, said to me: “Mr. Talmage, I saw that you preached to the young men yesterday.” I said, “Yes.” He said: “No use, no use; man’s a failure.” The small insect annoyances of life sometimes come in the shape of local physical trouble, which does not amount to a positive prostration, but which bothers you when you want to feel the best. Perhaps it is a sick headache which has been the plague of your life, and you appoint some occasion of mirth, or sociality, or usefulness, and when the clock strikes, the hour you cannot make your appearance. Perhaps the trouble is between the ear and the forehead, in the shape of a neuralgic twinge. Nobody can see it or sympathize with it; but just at the time when you want your intellect clearest, and your disposition brightest, you feel a sharp, keen, disconcerting thrust. “The Lord sent the hornet.” Perhaps these small insect annoyances will come in the shape of a domestic irritation. The parlor and the kitchen do not always harmonize. To get good service, and to keep it, is one of the great questions of the country. Sometimes it may be the arrogance and inconsiderateness of employers, but, whatever be the fact, we all admit there are these insect annoyances winging their way out from the culinary department. If the grace of God be. not in the heart of the housekeeper, she cannot maintain her equilibrium. The men come home at night and hear the story of these annoyances, and say: “Oh, these home troubles are very little things!” They are small, small as wasps, but they sting. Martha’s nerves were all unstrung, when she rushed in, asking Christ to scold Mary, and there are tens of thousands of women who are dying, stung to death by these pestiferous domestic annoyances. “The Lord sent the hornet.” These small insect disturbances may also come in the shape of business irritations. There are men here who went through the 24th of September, 1869, the panics of 1873 and of 1893, without losing their balance, who are every day unhorsed by little annoyances—a clerk’s ill manners, or a blot of ink on a bill of lading, or the extravagance of a partner who overdraws his account, or the underselling by a business rival, or the whispering of store-confidences in the street, or the making of some little bad debt which was against your judgment, but you wanted to please somebody else. It is not the panics that kill the merchants. Panics come only once in ten or twenty years. It is the constant din of these every-day annoyances which is sending so many of our best merchants into nervous dyspepsia and paralysis and the grave. When our national commerce fell flat on its face, these men stood up and felt almost defiant; but their life is going away now under the swarm of these pestiferous annoyances. “The Lord sent the hornet.” I have noticed in the history of some of my congregation that their annoyances are multiplying, and that they have a hundred where they used to have ten. The naturalist tells us that a wasp sometimes has a family of twenty thousand wasps, and it does seem as if every annoyance of your life brooded a million. By the help of God to-day, I want to show you the other side. The hornet is of no use? Oh, yes! The naturalists tell us they are very important in the world’s economy; they kill spiders, and they clear the atmosphere; and I really believe God sends the annoyances of our life upon us to kill the spiders of the soul, and to clear the atmosphere of our skies. These annoyances are sent on us, I think, to wake us up from our lethargy. There is nothing that makes a man so lively as a nest of “yellow jackets,” and I think that these annoyances are intended to persuade us of the fact that this is not a world for us to stop in. If we had a bed of everything that was attractive and soft and easy, what would we want of heaven? We think that the hollow tree sends the hornet, or we may think that the devil sends the hornet. I want to correct your opinion. “The Lord sent the hornet.” Then I think these annoyances come on us to cultivate our patience. In the gymnasium, you find upright parallel bars with holes over each other for pegs to be put in. Then the gymnast takes a peg in each hand and he begins to climb, one inch at a time, or two inches, and getting his strength cultivated, reaches after a while the ceiling. And it seems to me that these annoyances in life are a moral gymnasium, each worriment a peg with which we are to climb higher and higher in Christian attainment. We all love to see patience, but it cannot be cultivated in fair weather. Patience is a child of the storm. If you had everything desirable, and there was nothing more to get, what would you want with patience? The only time to cultivate it is when you are lied about, and sick and half dead. “Oh,” you say, “if I only had the circumstances of some well-to-do man I would be patient, too.” You might as well say, “If it were not for this water I would swim;” or, “I could shoot this gun if it were not for the cartridge.” When you stand chin-deep in annoyances is the time for you to swim out toward the great headlands of Christian attainment, so as to “know Christ and the power of his resurrection, and to have fellowship with his sufferings.” Nothing but the furnace will ever burn out of us the clinker and the slag. I have formed this theory in regard to small annoyances and vexations. It takes so much trouble to fit us for usefulness and for heaven. The only question is, whether we shall take it in the bulk or pulverized and granulated. Here is one man who takes it in the bulk. His back is broken, or his eyesight put out, or some other awful calamity befalls him; while the vast majority of people take the thing piecemeal. Which way would you rather have it? Of course in piecemeal. Better have five aching teeth than one broken jaw; better ten fly-blisters than an amputation; better twenty squalls than one cyclone. There may be a difference of opinion as to allopathy and homoeopathy; but in this matter of trouble I like homoeopathic doses—small pellets of annoyance rather than some knock-down dose of calamity. Instead of the thunderbolt give us the hornet. If you have a bank, you would a great deal rather that fifty men would come in with cheques less than a hundred dollars than to have two depositors come in the same day, each wanting his ten thousand dollars. In this latter case you cough and look down to the floor, and you look up at the ceiling, before you look into the safe. Now, my friends, would you not rather have these small drafts of annoyance on your bank of faith than some all-staggering demand upon your endurance? But remember that little as well as great annoyances equally require you to trust in Christ for succor, and for deliverance from impatience and irritability. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee.” In the village of Hamelin, tradition says, there was an invasion of rats, and these small creatures almost devoured the town, and threatened the lives of the population; and the story is that a piper came out one day and played a very sweet tune, and all the vermin followed him—followed him to the banks of the Weser, and then he blew a blast and they dropped in and disappeared forever. Of course, this is a fable; but I wish I could, on the sweet flute of the Gospel, draw forth all the nibbling and burrow-ing annoyances of your life, and play them “down into the depths forever. How many touches did Mr. Church give to his picture of “Cotopaxi,” or his “Heart of the Andes?” I suppose about fifty thousand touches. I hear the canvas saying, “Why do you keep me trembling with that pencil so long? Why don’t you put it on in one dash?” “No,” says Mr. Church, “I know how to make a painting; it will take fifty thousand of these touches.” And I want you, my friends, to understand that it is these ten thousand annoyances which, under God, are making up the picture of your life, to be hung at last in the galleries of heaven, fit for angels to look at. God knows how to make a picture. I go into a sculptor’s studio, and see him shaping a statue. He has a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other, and he gives a very gentle stroke—click, click, click! I say, “Why don’t you strike harder?” “Oh,” he replies, “that would shatter the statue. I can’t do it that way; I must do it this way.” So he works on, and after a while the features come out, and everybody that enters the studio is charmed and fascinated. Well, God has your soul under process of development, and it is the little annoyances and vexations of life that are chiselling out your immortal nature. It is click, click, click! I wonder why some great providence does not come, and with one stroke prepare you for heaven. Ah, no; God says that is not the way. And so he keeps on by strokes of little vexations, until at last you shall be a glad spectacle for angels and for men. You know that a large fortune may be spent in small change, and a vast amount of moral character may go away in small depletions. It is the little troubles of life that are having more effect upon you than great ones. A swarm of locusts will kill a grain-field sooner than the incursions of three or four cattle. You say, “Since I lost my child, since I lost my property, I have been a different man.” But you do not recognize the architecture of little annoyances, that are hewing, digging, cutting, shaping, splitting, and interjoining your moral qualities. Rats may sink a ship. One lucifer match may send destruction through a block of store-houses. Catherine de Medici got her death from smelling a. poisonous rose. Columbus, by stopping and asking for a piece of bread and a drink of water at a Franciscan convent, was led to the discovery of a new world. And there is an intimate connection between trifles and immensities, between nothings and every-things. Now, be careful to let none of those annoyances go through your, soul unarraigned. Compel them to administer to your spiritual wealth. The scratch of a sixpenny-nail sometimes produces lockjaw, and the clip of a most infinitesimal annoyance may damage you forever. Do not let any annoyance or perplexity come across your soul without its making you better. Our national government, when it wanted money, did not think it belittling to put a tax on pins, and a tax on buckles, and a tax on shoes. The individual taxes do not amount to much, but in the aggregate to millions and millions of dollars. And I would have you, oh Christian man, put a high tariff on every annoyance and vexation that comes through your soul. This might not amount to much, in single cases, but in the aggregate it would be a great revenue of spiritual strength and satisfaction. A bee can suck honey even out of a nettle; and if you have the grace of God in your heart, you can get sweetness out of that which would otherwise irritate and annoy. A returned missionary told me that a company of adventurers rowing up the Ganges were stung to death by flies that infest that region at certain seasons. The earth has been strewed with the carcasses of men slain by insect annoyances. The only way to get prepared for the great troubles of life is to conquer these small troubles. What would you say of a soldier who refused to load his gun, or to go into the conflict because it was only a skirmish, saying: “I am not going to expend my ammunition on a skirmish; wait until there comes a general engagement, and then you will see how courageous I am, and what battling I will do?” The general would say to such a man, “If you are not faithful in a skirmish, you would be nothing in a general engagement.” And I have to tell you, O Christian men, if you cannot apply the principles of Christ’s religion on a small scale, you will never be able to apply them on a large scale. If I had my way with you I would have you possess all possible worldly prosperity. I would have you each one a garden—a river flowing through it, geraniums and shrubs on the sides, and the grass and flowers as beautiful as though the rainbow had fallen. I would have you a house, a splendid mansion, and the bed should be covered with upholstery dipped in the setting sun. I would have every hall in your house set with statues and statuettes, and then I would have the four quarters of the globe pour in all their luxuries on your table, and you should have forks of silver and knives of gold, inlaid with diamonds and amethysts. Then you should each one of you have the finest horses, and your pick of the equipages of the world. Then I would have you live a hundred and fifty years, and you should not have a pain or ache until the last breath. “Not each one of us?” you say. Yes; each one of you. “Not to your enemies?” Yes; the only difference I would make with them would be that I would put a little extra gilt on their walls, and a little extra embroidery on their slippers. But, you say, “Why does not God give us all these things?” Ah! I bethink myself. He is wiser. It would make fools and sluggards of us if we had our way. No man puts his best picture in the portico or vestibule of his house. God meant this world to be only the vestibule of heaven, that great gallery of the universe toward which we are aspiring. We must not have it too good in this world, or we would want no heaven. Polycarp was condemned to be burned to death. The stake was planted. He was fastened to it. The faggots were placed around him, the fires kindled, but history tells us that the flames bent outward like the canvas of a ship in a stout breeze, so that the flames, instead of destroying Polycarp, were only a wall between him and his enemies. They had actually to destroy him with the poniard; the flames would not touch him. Well, my hearer, I want you to understand that by God’s grace the flames of trial, instead of consuming your soul, are only going to be a wall of defense, and a canopy of blessing. God is going to fulfill to you the blessing and the promises, as he did to Polycarp. “When thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned.” Now you do not understand; but you shall know hereafter. In heaven you will bless God even for the hornet. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 57: 055. THE CHRIST-LAND ======================================================================== The Christ-Land Deuteronomy 8:7 : “The Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land.” Out of the sixty-four millions of our present American population and the millions of our past, only about five thousand have ever visited the Holy Land. Of all those who cross to Europe, less than five per cent. ever get as far as Rome, and less than two per cent. ever get to Athens, and less than a quarter of one per cent. ever get to Palestine. Of the less than a quarter of one per cent. who do go to the Holy Land, some see nothing but the venomous insects and the filth of the Oriental cities and come back wishing they had never gone. Of those who see much of interest and come home, only a small portion can tell what they have seen, the tongue unable to report the eye. The rarity of a successful, intelligent and happy journey through the Holy Land is very marked. But the time approaches when a journey to Palestine will be much more common. Thousands will go where now there are scores. Two locomotives were recently sent up from Joppa to Jerusalem, and railroads are about to be laid in Palestine, and the day will come when the cry will be: “All out for Jerusalem!” “Twenty minutes for breakfast at Tiberias!” “Change cars for Tyre!” “Grand Trunk Junction for Nineveh!” “All out for Damascus!” Meanwhile the wet locks of the Atlantic Ocean and Adriatic and Mediterranean seas are being shorn, and not only is the voyage shortened, but, after a while, without crossing the ocean, you or your children will visit the Holy Land. A company of capitalists have gone up to Behring Straits, where the American and Asiatic continents come within thirty-six miles of meeting. These capitalists or others will build a bridge across those straits, for midway are three islands called “The Diomedes,” and the water is not deep and is never disturbed with icebergs. Trains of cars will run from America across that bridge and on down through Siberia, bringing under more immediate observation that country hitherto traduced and misrepresented, and there are persons here today who, without one qualm of sea-sickness, will visit that wonderful land where the Christic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, Solomonic and Herodic histories overlap each other with such power that by the time I took my feet out of the stirrups at the close of the journey I felt so thrilled with emotion that it seemed nothing else could ever stir my feelings again. The chief hindrance to going to Palestine with many is the dreadful sea; and, though I have crossed it ten times, it is more dreadful every time, and I fully sympathize with what was said one night when Mr. Beecher and I went over to speak in New York at the anniversary of the Seamen’s Friend Society, and the clergyman making the opening prayer quoted from St. John: “There shall be no more sea,” and Mr. Beecher, seated beside me, in memory of a recent ocean voyage, said: “Amen! I am glad of that.” By the partial abolition of the Atlantic Ocean and the putting down of rail-tracks across every country in all the world, the most sacred land on earth will come under the observation of so many people, who will be ready to tell what they saw, that infidelity will be pronounced only another form of insanity; for no honest man can visit the Holy Land and remain an infidel. This Bible from which I preach has almost fallen apart, for I read from it the most of the events in it recorded on the very places where they occurred. Some of the leaves got wet as the waves dashed over our boat on Lake Galilee, and the book was jostled in the saddlebags for many weeks; but it is a new book to me, newer than any book that yesterday came out of any of our great printing-houses. All my life I had heard of Palestine, and I had read about it and talked about it and preached about it and sung about it and prayed about it and dreamed about it, until my anticipations were piled up into something like Himalayan proportions, and yet I have to cry out, as did the Queen of Sheba when she first visited the Holy Land, “The half was not told me.” In order to make more accurate and vivid a book I have been writing—a life of Christ, entitled, “From Manger to Throne”—I left home last October, and on the last night of November we were walking the decks of the Senegal,a Mediterranean steamer. It was a ship of immense proportions. There were but few passengers, for it is generally rough at that time of year, and pleasure-seekers are not apt to be voyaging there and then. The stars were all shining that night. Those armies of light seemed to have had their shields newly burnished. We walked the polished deck. Not much was said, for in all our hearts was the dominant word, “to-morrow.” Somehow the Acropolis, which a few days before had thrilled us at Athens, now in our minds lessened in the height of its columns and the glory of its temples. And the Egyptian pyramids in our memory lessened their wonders of obsolete masonry, and the Coliseum of Rome was not so vast a ruin as it a few weeks before had seemed to be. And all that we had seen and heard dwindled in importance, for to-morrow, to-morrow we shall see the Holy Land. “Captain, what time will we come in sight of Palestine?” “Well,” he said, courteously, “if the wind and sea remain as they are, about daybreak.” Never was I so impatient for a night to pass. I could not see much use for that night, anyhow. I pulled aside the curtain from the port-hole of my stateroom, so that the first hint of dawn would waken me. But it was a useless precaution. Sleep was among the impossibilities. Who could be so stupid as to slumber when any moment there might start out within sight of the ship the land where the most stupendous scenes of all time and all eternity were enacted, land of ruin and redemption, land where was fought the battle that made our heaven possible, land of Godfrey and Saladin, of Joshua and Jesus? Will the night ever be gone? Yes, it is growing lighter, and along the horizon there is something like a bank of clouds, and as a watchman paces the deck I say to him, “What is that out yonder?” “That is land, sir,” said the sailor. “The land!” I cried. Soon all our friends were aroused from sleep and the shore began more clearly to reveal itself. With roar and rattle and bang the anchor dropped in the roadstead a half-mile from land, for though Joppa is the only harbor of Palestine, it is the worst harbor on all the coasts. Sometimes for weeks no ship stops there. Between rocks about seventy-five feet apart a small boat must take the passengers ashore. The depths are strewn with the skeletons of those who have attempted to land or attempted to embark. Twenty-seven pilgrims perished with one crash of a boat against the rocks. Whole fleets of crusaders, of Romans, of Syrians, of Egyptians, have gone to splinters there. A writer eight hundred years ago said he stood on the beach in a storm at Joppa, and out of thirty ships, all but seven went to pieces on the rocks and a thousand of the dead were washed ashore. Strange that with a few blasts of powder like that which shattered our American Hell Gate, those rocks have not been uprooted and the way cleared, so that great ships, instead of anchoring far out from land, might sweep up to the wharf for passengers and freight. But you must remember that that land is under the Turk, and what the Turk touches he never improves. Mohammedanism is against easy wharves, against steamers, against rail-trains, against printing-presses, against civilization. Darkness is always opposed to light. The owl hates the morn. “Leave those rocks where they are,” practically cries the Turkish Government; “we want no people of other religions and other habits to land there; if the salt seas wash over them, let it be a warning to other intruders; away with your nineteenth century, with its free thought and its modern inventions.” That Turkish Government ought to be blotted from the face of the earth, and it will be. Of many of the inhabitants of Palestine I asked the question, “Has the Sultan of Turkey ever been here?” “No.” “Why don’t he come, when it belongs to his dominion?” And, after the man interrogated looked this way and that, so as to know he would not be reported, the answer would invariably be, “He dare not come.” I believed it. If the Sultan of Turkey attempted to visit Jerusalem, he would never get back again. All Palestine hates him. I saw him go to the mosque for prayers in his own city of Constantinople, and saw seven thousand armed men riding out to protect him. Expensive prayers! Of course that government wants no better harbor at Joppa. May God remove that curse of nations, that old hag of the centuries, the Turkish Government! For its everlasting insult to God and woman, let it perish! And so, until it does perish those rocks at the harbor will remain the jaws of repeated destruction. As we descended the narrow steps at the side of the ship, we heard the clamor and quarrel and swearing of fifteen or sixteen different races of men of all features and all colors and all vernaculars; all different in appearance, but all alike in desire to get our baggage and ourselves at exorbitant prices. Twenty-boats and only ten passengers to go ashore! The man having charge of us pushes aside some, and strikes with a heavy stick others, and by violences that would not be tolerated in our country, but which seem to be the only manner of making any impression there, clears our way into one of the boats, which heads for the shore. We are within fifteen minutes of the Christ-land. Now we hear shouting from the beach and in five minutes we will be landed. The prow of the boat is caught by men who wade out to help us in. We are tremulous with suppressed excitement, our breath is quick, and from the side of the boat we spring to the shore, and Sunday morning, December 1, 1889, about eight o’clock, our feet touch Palestine. Forever to me and all our party will that day and hour be commemorated for that pre-eminent mercy. Let it be mentioned in prayer by my children and children’s children after we are gone that that morning we were permitted to enter that land, and gaze upon those holy hills, and feel the emotions that rise and fall, and weep and laugh and sing and triumph at such a disembarkation. On the back of hills one hundred and fifty feet high Joppa is lifted toward the skies. It is. as picturesque as it is quaint, and as much unlike any city we have ever seen, as though it were built in that star Mars, where a few nights ago this very September astronomers, through unparalleled telescopes, saw a snow-storm raging. How glad we were to be in Joppa! Why, this is the city where Dorcas, that queen of the needle, lived and died and was resurrected. You remember that the poor people came around the dead body of this benefactress and brought specimens of her kind of needlework, and said: “Dorcas made this,” “Dorcas sewed that,” “Dorcas cut and fitted this,” “Dorcas hemmed that.” According to Lightfoot, the commentator, they laid her out in state in a public room, and the poor wrung their hands and cried, and sent for Peter, who performed a miracle by which the good woman came back to life and resumed her benefactions. An especial resurrection day for one woman! She was the model by which many women of our day have fashioned their lives, and at the first blast of the horn of the wintry tempest there appear ten thousand Dorcases—Dorcases of Brooklyn, Dorcases of New York, Dorcases of London, Dorcases of all the neighborhoods and towns and cities of Christendom, just as good as the Dorcas of the Joppa which I visited. Thank God for the ever-increasing skill and sharpness and speed and generosity of Dorcas’s needle! “What is this man doing?” I said to the dragoman in the streets of Joppa. “Oh, he is carrying his bed.” Multitudes of the Eastern people sleep out-of-doors, and that is the way so many in those lands become blind. It is from the dew of the night falling on the eyelids. As a result of this, in Egypt every twentieth person is totally blind. In Oriental lands the bed is made of a thin small mattress, a blanket and a pillow, and when the man rises in the morning he just ties up the three into a bundle and shoulders it and takes it away. It was to that the Saviour referred when he said to the sick man, “Take up thy bed and walk.” An American couch or an English couch would require at least four men to carry it, but one Oriental can easily manage his slumber equipment. But I inhale some of the odors of the large tanneries around Joppa. It is there, to this day, a prosperous business, this tanning of hides. And that reminds me of Simon, the tanner, who lived at Joppa, and was the host of Peter the Apostle. I suppose the olfactories of Peter were as easily insulted by the odors of a tannery as others. But the Bible says, “He lodged with one Simon, the tanner.” People who go out to do reformatory and missionary and Christian work must not be too sensitive. Simon, no doubt, brought to his homestead every night the malodors of the calf-skins and ox-hides in his tannery, but Peter lodged in that home, not only because he may not have been invited to the houses of merchant princes, surrounded by redolent gardens, but to teach all men and women engaged in trying to make the world better they must not be squeamish and fastidious and finical and over-particular in doing the work of the world. The Church of God is dying of fastidiousness. We cry over the sufferings of the world in hundred-dollar pocket handkerchiefs, and then put a cent in the poor-box. There are many willing to do Christian work among the cleanly and the refined and the elegant and the educated; but excuse them from taking a loaf of bread down a dirty alley, excuse them from teaching a mission-school among the uncombed and the unwashed, excuse them from touching the hand of one whose finger-nails are in mourning for departed soap. Such religious precisionists can toil in atmospheres laden with honeysuckle and rosemary, but not in air floating up from the malodorous vats. No, no! excuse them from lodging with Simon, the tanner. During the last war, there were in Virginia some sixty or seventy wounded soldiers in a barn on the second floor, so near the roof that the heat of the August sun was almost insupportable. The men were dying from sheer exhaustion and suffocation. A distinguished member of the Christian Commission said to the nurse who stood there, “Wash the faces and feet of these men, and it will revive them.” “No,” said the nurse, “I didn’t come into the army to wash anybody’s feet.” “Well,” said the distinguished member of the Commission, “bring me water and a towel; I will be very glad to wash their feet.” One had the spirit of the devil, the other the spirit of Christ. But reference to Peter reminds me that we must go to the housetop in Joppa where he was taught the democracy of religion. That was the queerest thing that ever happened. On our way up to that housetop we passed an old well where the great stones were worn deep with the ropes of the buckets, and it must be a well many centuries old, and, I think, Peter drank out of it. Four or five goat or calf skins filled with water lay about the yard. We soon got up the steps and on the housetop. It was in such a place in Joppa that Peter, one noon while he was waiting for dinner, had a hungry fit and fainted away and had a vision or dream or trance. I said to my family and friends on that housetop, “Listen while I read about what happened here.” And, opening the Bible, we had the whole story. It seems that Peter on the housetop dreamed that a great blanket was let down out of heaven, and in it were sheep and goats and cattle and mules and pigeons and buzzards and snakes and all manner of creatures that fly the air or walk the fields or crawl the earth; and in the dream a voice told him, as he was hungry, to eat, and he said, “I cannot eat things unclean.” Three times he dreamed it. There was then heard a knocking at the gate of the house on the top of which Peter lay in a trance, and three men asked, “Is Peter here?” Peter, while yet wondering what his dream meant, descends the stairs and meets these strangers at the gate. They fell him that a good man by the name of Cornelius, in the city of Cæsarea, has also had a dream and has sent them for Peter and to ask him to come and preach. At that call Peter left Joppa for Cæsarea. The dream he had just had prepared him to preach, for Peter learned by it to reject no people as unclean; and whereas he previously thought he must preach only to the Jews, now he goes to preach to the Gentiles, who were considered unclean. Notice how the two dreams meet—Peter’s dream on the housetop, Cornelius’ dream at Cæsarea. So I have noticed providences meet, distant events meet, dreams meet. Every dream is hunting up some other dream, and every event in searching for some other event. In the fifteenth century (1492) the great event was the discovery of America. The art of printing, born in the same century, goes out to meet that discovery and make the new world an intelligent world. The Declaration of Independence announcing equal rights meets Robert Burns’s A Man’s a Man for A’ That. The United States was getting too large to be managed by one government, and telegraphy was invented to compress within an hour the whole continent. Armies in the Civil War were to be fitted out with clothing, and the sewing-machine invention came out to make it possible. Immense farming acreage is presented in this country, enough to support millions of our native-born and millions of foreigners; but the old style of plow and scythe and reaper and thresher cannot do the work, and there came steam plows, steam harrows, steam reapers, steam rakes, steam threshers, and the work is accomplished. The forests of the earth fail to afford sufficient fuel, and so the coal mines surrender a sufficiency. The cotton crops were luxuriant, but of comparatively little value; for they could not be managed, and so at just the right time Hargreaves came along with his invention of the spinning-jenny, and Arkwright with his roller, and Whitney with his cotton-gin. The world, after pottering along with tallow candles and whale oil, was crying for better light and more of it; and the hills of Pennsylvania poured out rivers of oil, and kerosene illumined the nations. But the oil-wells began to fail, and then the electric light comes forth to turn night into day. So all events are woven together, and the world is magnificently governed, because it is divinely governed. We criticise things and think the divine machinery is going wrong, and put our fingers amid the wheels only to get them crushed. But, I say, hands off! Things are coming out gloriously. Cornelius may be in Cæsarea, and Peter in Joppa, but their dreams meet. It is one hand that is managing the world, and that is God’s hand; and one mind that is planning all things for good, and that is God’s mind; and one heart that is filled with love and pardon, and sympathy, and that is God’s heart. Have faith in him. Fret about nothing. Things are not at loose ends. There are no accidents. All will come out right in your history and in the world. As you are waking from one dream upstairs, an explanatory dream will be knocking at the gate downstairs. Standing here in Joppa, I remember that where we this morning disembarked the prophet Jonah embarked. For the first time in my life I fully understand that story. God told Jonah to go to Nineveh, but the prophet declined that call and came here to Joppa. I was for weeks, while in the Holy Land, consulting with tourist companies as to how I could take Nineveh in my journey. They did not encourage the undertaking. It is a most tedious ride to Nineveh across a desert. Now I see an additional reason why Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. He not only revolted because of the disagreeable message he was called to deliver at Nineveh, but because it was a long way and rough and bandit-infested, so he came here to Joppa and took ship to go in another direction. But, alas, for the disastrous voyage! He paid his full fare for the whole voyage, but the ship company did not fill their part of the contract. To this day they have not paid back that passage money. Why people should doubt the story of Jonah and the whale is more of a mystery than the Bible event itself. I do not need the fact that Pliny, the historian, records that the skeleton of a whale forty feet long, and with hide a foot and a half thick, was brought from Joppa to Rome. The event recorded in the book of Jonah has occurred a thousand times. The Lord always has a whale outside the harbor for a man who starts in the wrong direction. Recreant Jonah! I do not wonder that even the whale was sick of him. This prophet was put in the Bible not as an example, but as a warning, because the world not only needs lighthouses, but buoys, to show where the rocks are. The Bible story of him ends by showing the prophet in a fit of the sulks. He was chagrined because Nineveh was not destroyed, and then he went out to pout, and sat under a big leaf, using it for a shade from the tropical sun; and when a worm disturbed that leaf and withered it, and the sun smote Jonah, he flew into a great rage and said: “It is better for me to die than to live.” A prophet in a rage because he had lost his umbrella! Beware of petulance! But standing here on the housetop at Joppa, I look off upon the sands near the beach, and I almost expected to find them crimsoned and incarnadined. But no; the rains long ago washed away the last sign of the Napoleonic massacre. Napoleon was marching his army through the coasts. He had here at Joppa four thousand Arabians, who had been surrendered as prisoners of war and under a promise of protection. What shall he do with them? It will be impossible for him to take them along, and he cannot afford to leave soldiers enough to guard them from escape. It will not be difficult for the man who broke the heart of lovely Josephine and who, when asked if the great losses of life in his battles were not too dear a price to pay for his victories, shrugged his shoulders mirthfully and said: “You must break the eggs if you want to make an omelet”—I say, it will not be difficult for him to decide. The prisoners of war are, by his order, taken out on the sands and put to death—one thousand of them, two thousand of them, three thousand of them, four thousand of them, massacred. And the blood pours down into the sea, the red of one mingling with the blue of the other, and making an awful maroon, which neither God nor nations can ever forget. Ye who are fond of vivid contrasts put the two scenes of Joppa side by side—Dorcas with her needle, and the imperial butcher with his knife. But standing on this Joppa housetop, I look off on the Mediterranean, and what is that strange sight I see? The waters are black, seemingly for miles. There seems to be a great multitude of logs fastened together. Oh, yes, it is a great raft of timbers. They are cedars of Lebanon which King Hiram is furnishing King Solomon in exchange for twenty thousand measures of wheat, twenty thousand baths of oil, and twenty thousand baths of wine. These cedars have been cut down and trimmed in the mountains of Lebanon by the seventy thousand axmen engaged there, and with great withes and iron bolts are fastened together, and they are floating down to Joppa to be taken across the land for Solomon’s temple now building at Jerusalem; for we have lost our hold of the nineteenth century and are clear back in the ages. The rafts of cedar are guided into what is called the Moon Pool; an old harbor south of Joppa, now filled with sand, and useless. With long pikes the timber is pushed this way and that in the water; then with levers and many a loud, long “Yo, heave,” as the carters get their shoulders under the great weight, the timber is fastened to the wagons, and the lowing oxen are yoked to the load, and the procession of teams moves on with crack of whip and drawled-out words, which, translated, I suppose, would correspond with the “whoa, haw, gee” of modern teamsters, toward Jerusalem, which is forty-one miles away, over mountainous distances, which for hundreds of years defied all engineering. And these rough cedars shall become carved pillars and beautiful altars and rounded banisters and traceried panels and sublime ceilings and exquisite harps and kingly chariots. As the wagon train moves out from Joppa over the plain of Sharon toward Jerusalem, I say to myself, what vast numbers of people helped build that temple of Solomon, and what vast numbers of people are now engaged in building the wider, higher, grander temple of righteousness rising in the earth. Our Christian ancestry toiled at it, amid sweat and tears, and hundreds of the generations of the good, and the long train of Christian workers, still moves on; and, as in the construction of Solomon’s temple, some hewed with the ax in the far-away Lebanon, and some drove a wedge and some twisted a withe and some trod the wet and slippery rafts on the sea and some yoked the ox and some pulled at the load and some shoved the plane and some fitted the joints and some heaved up the rafters, but all helped build the temple, though some of these never saw it; so now let us all put our hands and our shoulders and our hearts to the work of building the temple of righteousness, which is to fill the earth; and one will bind a wound and another will wipe away a tear and another will teach a class and another will speak the encouraging word, and all of us will be ready to pull and lift, and in some way help on the work until the millennial morn shall gild the pinnacles of that finished temple, and at its shining gates the world shall put down its last burden, and in its lavers wash off its last stain, and at its altars the last wanderer shall kneel. At the dedication of that temple all the armies of earth and heaven will “shoulder arms,” and “present arms,” and “ground arms;” for “behold! a greater than Solomon is here.” But my first day in the Holy Land is ended. The sun is already closing his eye for the night. I stand on the balcony of a hotel which was brought to Joppa in pieces from America by some fanatics who came here expecting to see Christ reappear in Palestine. My room here was once occupied by that Christian hero of the centuries—English, Chinese, Egyptian, world-wide General Gordon, a mighty man of God, as well as for the world’s pacification. Although the first of December and winter, the air is full of fragrance from gardens all a-bloom, and under my window are acacia and tamarisk and mulberry and century plants and orange groves and oleander. From the drowsiness of the air and the fatigues of the day I feel sleepy. Good-night. To-morrow we start for Jerusalem. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 58: 056. SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE ======================================================================== Spiritualism an Imposture Deuteronomy 18:10; Deuteronomy 18:12 : “There shall not be found among you any consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer, for all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.” We are surrounded by mystery. Before us, behind us, to the right of us, to the left of us, mystery. There is a vast realm unexplored that science, I have no doubt, will yet map out. He who explores that realm will do the world more service than did ever a Columbus or an Amerigo Vespucci. There are so many things that cannot be accounted for, so many sounds and appearances which defy acoustics and investigation, so many things approximating to the spectral, so many effects which do not seem to have a sufficient cause. The wall between the spiritual and the material is a very thin wall. That there are communications between this world and the next world there can be no doubt, the spirits of our departed going from this world to that, and, according to the Bible, ministering spirits coming from that to this. I do not know but that some time there may be complete and constant and unmistakable lines of communication opened between this world and the next. To unlatch the door between the present state and the future state all the fingers of superstition have been busy. We have books entitled “Footfalls on the Boundaries of Other Worlds;” “The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next;” “Researches into the Phenomena of Spiritualism,” and whole libraries of hocus-pocus, enough to deceive the very elect. I shall not take time to rehearse the history of divination, Delphic oracle, sybil, or palmistry, or the whole centuries of imposture, but will deal only with modern Spiritualism, which proposes to open the door between this world and the next, and put us into communication with the dead. It has never yet offered one reasonable credential. There is nothing in the intelligence or the character of the founders of Spiritualism to commend it. All the wonderful things performed by Spiritualism have been performed by sleight-of-hand and rank deception. Dr. Carpenter, Robert Houdin, Mr. Waite and others have exposed the fraud by dramatizing in the presence of audiences the very things that Spiritualism proposes to do or says it has done. In the New York Independent there was an account of a challenge given by a non-Spiritualist to a Spiritualist to meet him on the platform of Tremont Temple, Boston. The non-Spiritualist declared that he would by sleight-of-hand perform all the feats executed by the Spiritualist. They met in the presence of an audience. The Spiritualist went through his wonderful performances, and the other man by sleight-of-hand did the same things. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” is the test that Christ gave, and by that test I conclude that the tree of Spiritualism, which yields bad fruit, and bad fruit continually, is one of the worst trees in all the orchard of necromancy. The post-office which it has established between the next world and this is another Star Route post-office, kept up at vast expense without ever having delivered one letter from the other world to this. In our times, Spiritualism proposes a materialization. I hold in my hand a specimen of spiritualistic photography; spiritualists bringing up the dead, and then clothing them in bodies somewhat similar to the bodies they once had, but somewhat shadowy. Here are photographs, This, of an editor who calls back a dead editress. She comes clothed in materialization, her cheek against his forehead. The picture of the living and the picture of the dead. And all these pictures. One I cannot show you, for it is of Christ. Men have rushed in, as one man from my own church went behind the scenes, and he found the masks and the false hair and all the apparatus for building up a body. In all cases a swindle. The first leading remark I have to make in regard to Spiritualism is that it is a very old doctrine. Do you want to know the origin and the history of that which has captured so many in all our towns and cities, a doctrine with which some of you are tinged? Spiritualism in America was born in 1847, in Hydesville, Wayne county, New York, where one night there was a rapping at the door of Michael Weekman, and a second rapping at the door, and a third rapping at the door, and every time the door was opened there was no one there. Proof positive that they were invisible knuckles that rapped at the door. In that same house there was a man who felt a cold hand pass over his forehead, and there was no arm attached to the hand. Proof positive it was a Spiritualistic influence. After a while, Mr. Fox with his family moved into that house, and then they had bangings at the door every night. One night Mr. Fox cried out, “Are you a spirit?” Two raps—answer in the affirmative. “Are you an injured spirit?” Two raps—answer in the affirmative. Then they knew right away that it was the spirit of a pedler who had been murdered in that house years before, and who had been robbed of his five hundred dollars. Whether the spirit of the pedler came back to collect his five hundred dollars or his bones I do not know. But from that time on there was a constant excitement around the premises, and the excitement spread all over the land. All these are matters of history. People said; “Well, now, we have a new religion.” No! it is not a new religion. In all ages there have been necromancers, those who consulted with the spirits of the departed—charmers who threw people into a mesmeric state; sorcerers who by eating poisonous herbs can see everything, hear everything, and tell everything; astrologers who found out a new dispensation of the stars, experts in palmistry who can by the lines in the palm of your hand tell your origin, your history and your destiny. From the cavern on Mount Parnassus it is said there came up an atmosphere that intoxicated the sheep and the goats that came near-by, and under its influence the shepherds were lifted into exaltation so they could foretell future events and consult with familiar spirits. Long before the time of Christ, the Brahmins had all the table rocking and the table quaking. You want to know what God thinks of all these things. He says in one place, “I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers.” He says in another place: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” And lest you should make too wide a margin between Spiritualism and witchcraft, he groups them together in the text and says: “There shall not be found among you any consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer, for all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.” And then the still more remarkable passage which says: “The soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people;” and a score of passages showing that God never speaks of these evils in any other way than with lightnings of indignation. After all that, be a Spiritualist if you dare! Another remark I have to make in regard to Spiritualism is, that, it takes advantage of people when they are weak and morbid with trouble. We lose a friend. The house is dark, the world is dark, the future seems dark. If we had in our rebellion and in our weakness the power to marshal a host and recapture our loved one from the next world, we would marshal the host. Oh, how we long to speak with the dead! Spiritualism comes in at that moment, when we are all worn out, perhaps by six weeks’ or two months’ watching—all worn out, body, mind and soul—and says, “Now, I will open the door; you shall hear the voices; take your place around the table; all be quiet now.” Five minutes pass along; no response from the next world. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes. Nervous system all the time more and more agitated. Thirty minutes; no response from the next world. Forty minutes pass, and the table begins to shiver. Then the medium sits down, his hand twitching, and the pen and the ink and the paper having been provided he writes out the message from the next world. What is remarkable is that these spirits after being in the illumination of heaven, some of them for years, forget how to spell right. People who were excellent grammarians come back and with their first sentence smash all the laws of English grammar! I received such a letter. I happened to know the man who purported to have signed it. It was a miserably spelled letter. I sent it back with the remark, “You just send word to those spirits they had better go to school and study orthography.” Now, just think of spirits enthroned in heaven coming down to crawl under a table, and break crockery, and ring the bell before supper is ready, and rattle the shutters on a gusty night. What consolation in such miserable stuff as compared with the consolation that our departed friends, free from toil and sin and pain, are forever happy, and that we will join them, not in mysterious and half utterance which makes the hair stand on end and makes cold chills creep the back, but in a reunion most blessed and happy and glorious. And None Shall Murmur or Misdoubt When God’s Great Sunrise Finds Us Out. I denounce Spiritualism because it takes advantage of people when they are weak and worn-out and morbid under the bereavements and sorrows of this life. Another remark I have to make in regard to Spiritualism is, that it is an affair of the night. The Davenports, the Foxes, the Fowlers, and all the mediums prefer the night, or, if it is in the daytime, a darkened room. Why? Because deception is more successful in the night. Some of the things done in Spiritualism are not frauds, but are to be ascribed to some occult law of nature which will after a while be discovered; but nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of their feats are arrant and unmitigated humbug. I suppose almost every one sometimes has been touched by some hallucination. Indigestion from a late supper generally accounts for it. If you will only take in generous proportions at eleven o’clock at night, lobster-salad and mince-pie and icecream and lemonade and a little cocoanut, you will be able to see fifty materialized spirits! All the mediums of the past did their work in the night. Witch of Endor held her seance in the night. Deeds of darkness. Away with this religion of spooks. Another remark I have to make in regard to Spiritualism is that it ruins the physical health. Look in upon an audience of Spiritualists. Cadaverous, pale, worn-out, exhausted. Hands cold and clammy. Nothing prospers but long hair—soft marshes yielding rank grass. Something startling going through that room, clothed in white. Table fidgety as though to get its feet loose and dance. Voices sepulchral. Rappings mysterious. I never knew a confirmed Spiritualist who had a healthy nervous organization. It is the first stage of epilepsy or catalepsy. I have noticed that people who hear a great many rappings from the next world have not much strength to endure the hard raps of this. What a sin it is to be trifling with your nervous system. Get your nervous system out of tune and the whole universe is out of tune as far as you are concerned. Better tamper with the chemist’s retort that may smite you dead, or with the engineer’s steamboiler that may blow you to atoms, than trifle with your nerves. You can live without eyes and with one lung and with no hands and no feet. Be happy as men have been happy in such misfortune; but alas! if your nervous system is gone. Another remark I have to make in regard to Spiritualism is that it is a marital and social curse. Deeds of darkness and orgies of obscenity have taken place under its wing. I cannot tell you the story. I will not pollute my tongue or your ears with the recital. Enough to know that the criminal courts have often been called to stop the criminality. How many families have been broken up here in Brooklyn and throughout the United States! Women by the hundreds have by Spiritualism been pushed off into a life of profligacy. It employs all that phraseology about “spiritual affinities,” and “affinital relation,” and “spiritual matches,” and the whole vocabulary of free love. It is at war with the marriage relation. I read in one of their prominent papers that “Marriage is the monster curse of civilization.” The Spiritualist paper goes on to say: “Marriage controls education, is the fountain of selfishness, the cause of intemperance and debauchery, the source and aggravation of poverty, the prolific mother of disease and crime. The society we want is men and women living in freedom, sustaining themselves by their own industry, dealing with each other in equity, respecting each other’s sovereignty and governed by their attractions.” If Spiritualism had full swing it would turn this world into a pandemonium of carnality. It is an unclean and an adulterous religion, and the sooner it goes down to the pit from which it came up, the better for earth and heaven. For the sake of man’s honor and woman’s purity, let it perish. I wish I could gather up all the raps it has ever heard, from spirits blest or damned, on its own head in one thundering rap of annihilation. Another remark I have to make in regard to Spiritualism is that it produces insanity. There is not an asylum from Bangor to San Francisco where there are not the torn and bleeding victims of Spiritualism. You go into an asylum and say: “What is the matter with this man?” The doctors will tell you again and again, “Spiritualism demented him.” “What is the matter with this woman?” The doctors will tell you: “Spiritualism demented her.” They have been carried off into mental midnight—senators, judges of courts—and at one time they came near capturing a President of the United States. At Flushing, Long Island, there was a happy home. The father became infatuated with Spiritualism, forsook his home, took the fifteen thousand dollars, the only fifteen thousand dollars he had, surrendered them to a New York medium, three times attempted to take his own life, and then was sent to the State lunatic asylum. You put your hand in the hand of this influence and it will lead you down to darkness, eternal darkness where Spiritualism holds an everlasting seance. You remember the steamer Atlantic started from Europe for America. After it had been out long enough to get to the middle of the ocean, the machinery broke, and for days and weeks the steamer Atlantic tossed about in the waves. Well, there were many friends of passengers in these cities and they said, “That vessel has gone down; it is a month since she was due; that vessel must have sunk.” There were wives who went to spiritual mediums to learn the fate of that vessel. The spirits were gathered around the table and they said that vessel had gone to the bottom with all on board. Some of those women went to the insane asylum and passed the rest of their lives. But one day, off Quarantine, a gun was heard. Flags went up on all the shipping, bells of New York and Brooklyn were rung, newsboys ran through the streets shouting: “Extra! The Atlantic safe!” The vessel came to wharf, and there was embracing of long-absent ones; but some of those men who were passengers went up to the insane asylums to find their wives incarcerated by this foul cheat of hell, Spiritualism. What did Judge Edmonds say in Broadway Tabernacle, New York, while making argument in behalf of Spiritualism, himself having been fully captured. What did Judge Edmonds say? He admitted this: “There is a fascination about consultation with the spirits of the dead that has a tendency to lead people off from their right judgment and to instil into them a fanaticism that is revolting to the natural mind.” Spiritualism not only ruins its disciples but it ruins its mediums. No sooner had the Gadarean swine on the banks of Galilee become spiritual mediums than they went down in an avalanche of pork to the consternation of all the herdsmen. Spiritualism bad for a man, bad for a woman, bad for a beast. Another remark I have to make in regard to Spiritualism is, that it ruins the soul. It first makes a man quarter of an infidel, then it makes him half an infidel, then it makes him a full infidel. The whole system is built on the insufficiency of the Bible as a revelation. If God is ever struck square in the face it is when men sit at a table, put their hands on the table and practically say: “Come, you spirits of the departed, and make a revelation in regard to the future world which the Bible has not made. Come, father; come, mother, companion in life; my children, come, tell me something about that future world which the Bible is not able to tell me.” Although the Bible says he that adds a word to it shall be found a liar, men are all the time getting these revelations, or trying to get them from the next world. You will either have to give up the Bible or give up Spiritualism. No one ever for a very great length of time kept both of them. I received a letter from a gentleman saying he was a Christian and a Spiritualist, and that he had been brought up under the excellent teaching of Theodore Parker, of Boston. Theodore Parker, a worse infidel than Tom Paine, because Tom Paine never pretended to be anything but an infidel. I can understand how a man brought up under Theodore Parker could believe Spiritualism or anything else. You will either have to give up Spiritualism or you will have to give up the Bible. How do I know that Spiritualism is antagonistic to the Christian religion? I know it by the fact that Spiritualists call up the spirits of those who believed in the Christian religion here, but coming now from the next world, denounce it. They call up for instance, as I have evidence to show, Lorenzo Dow, the evangelist. What does he do? Coming at their call he denounces all Christians as idolaters. They call up Tom Paine. He says he is stopping at the same house with John Bunyan! They call up John Wesley, who denounces Christianity, coming from the spiritual world, although all his life he so gloriously preached it. Andrew Jackson Davis, the chief of their apostles, says that the New Testament is a dismal echo of a barbaric age. In another place he says the Bible is a pen-and-ink relic of Christianity. I have in my house a book used in Spiritualistic service in this city years ago. It contains a catechism and a hymn book. The catechism has these questions and answers: Q. What Is Our Chief Baptism? A. Frequent Ablution in Water. Q. What Is Our Inspiration? A. Fresh Air and Sunshine. Q. What Is Our Love Feast? A. Clear Conscience and Sound Sleep. Q. What Is Our Prayer? A. Physical Exercise. And then it goes on to show that a great proportion of their religious service is a system of calisthenics. Then when they want to arouse the devotion of the people to the highest pitch, they give out the hymn on the sixty-fifth page: The Night Hath Gathered Up Her Silken Fringes, Or, on the fifteenth page: Come to the Woods, Heigh-Ho! But you say you are not such a fool as that. You will be if you keep on with your Spiritualism. “Oh!” says some one, “Don’t you really think it might authenticate Christianity? don’t you know there are some people who deny there is any future world? and don’t you realize that if spirits come back from another world it will persuade them that there is another world?” To that question I answer in the ringing words of the Son of God: “If they believe not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe though one rose from the dead.” I believe this sermon, under God, will save some from disease and death and darkness and doom. I think we have come to the time spoken of by the apostle when he says: “In the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits.” And I think never so much as now the words of my text need to be rung in all churches: “There shall not be found among you any consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer, for all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.” I invite you to a Christian seance—not a midnight but a noonday seance. The whole church is a family. Here is the table. Put the Bible on the table. Then let us put our hands on the Bible and listen if we can catch a voice from the next world. The answer comes: “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever.” That is a voice from the next world. Before you quit this Christian seance I want you to promise that you will trust in the Word of God as it is until the light of the eternal world flashes upon us. Do not sit at a worldly seance either in fun or in earnest. Have your tables so well made that they will not tip. If the table must move, have it move under the offices of industrious housewifery. Let your children know there are no ghosts except those that walk on two or four feet—human or bestial. Do not go to get somebody to tell your fortune. Tell your own fortune by putting your trust in God and doing your best. I will tell your fortune. “All things work together for good to those that love God.” Do not insult your departed friends by asking them to come into a dark closet to cut up capers, or crawl under the extension table. I give you the advice that Isaiah gave to the people of this day: “When they shall say unto you, seek not them that have familiar spirits and unto wizards that peep and that mutter. Should not a people seek unto their God?” Remember there is only one spirit you have a right to invoke, and that is the grand, the glorious, the august, the holy, the Omnipotent Spirit of God who now hovers around your soul and that has been around you all your life long. That Spirit now moving upon your soul. Grieve him not away. The voice dropping through the roof, coming in at the window, filling all this room from door to door and from floor to ceiling, with tender and overmastering intonation saying: “My spirit shall not always strive.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 59: 057. MARTYRDOM AT LUCKNOW ======================================================================== Martyrdom at Lucknow Deuteronomy 20:19 : “When thou shalt besiege a city a long time in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an ax against them.” The awfulest thing in war is besiegement, for to the work of deadly weapons it adds hunger and starvation and plague. Besiegement is sometimes necessary; but my text commands mercy even in that. The fruit trees must be spared, because they afford food for man. “Thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an ax against them.” But in my recent journey around the world I found at Lucknow, India, the remains of the most merciless besiegement of the ages; and I proceed to tell you that story for four great reasons: to show you what a horrid thing war is and to make you all advocates for peace; to show you what genuine Christian character is under bombardment; to put a coronation on Christian courage; and to show you how splendidly good people die. As our train glided into the dimly lighted station, I asked the guard, “Is this Lucknow?” and he answered, “Lucknow;” at the pronunciation of which proper name strong emotions rushed through body, mind and soul. The word is a synonym of suffering, of cruelty, of heroism, of horror such as is suggested by hardly any other word. We have for thirty-five years been reading of the agonies there endured and the daring deeds there witnessed. It was my great desire to have some one who had witnessed the scenes transacted in Lucknow in 1857 conduct us over the place. We found just the man. He was a young soldier at the time the greatest mutiny of the ages broke out, and he took refuge with others inside the Residency, which was a cluster of buildings making a fortress in which the representatives of the English Government lived, and which was to be the scene of an endurance and a bombardment the story of which, poetry and painting and history and secular and sacred eloquence have been trying to depict. Our escort not only had a good memory of what had happened, but had talent enough to rehearse the tragedy. In the early part of 1857 all over India the natives were ready to break out in rebellion against all foreigners, and especially against the civil and military representatives of the English Government. A half dozen causes are mentioned for the feeling of discontent and insurrection that was evinced throughout India. The most of the causes were mere pretexts. Greased cartridges were no doubt an exasperation. The grease ordered by the English Government to be used on these cartridges was taken from cows or pigs, and grease to the Hindus is unclean, and to bite these cartridges at the loading of the guns would be an offense to the Hindus’ religion. The leaders of the Hindus said that these greased cartridges were only part of an attempt by the English Government to make the natives give up their religion; hence unbounded indignation was aroused. Another cause of the mutiny was that a large province of India had been annexed to the British Empire, and thousands of officials in the employ of the king of that province were thrown out of position, and they were all ready for trouble-making. Another cause was said to be the bad government exercised by some English officials in India. The simple fact was that the natives of India were a conquered race, and the English were the conquerors. For one hundred years the British sceptre had been waved over India, and the Indians wanted to break that sceptre. There never had been any love or sympathy between the natives of India and the Europeans; there is none now. Before the time of the great mutiny the English Government risked much power in the hands of the natives. Too many of them manned the forts; too many of them were in governmental employ. And now the time had come for a wide outbreak. The natives had persuaded themselves that they could send the English Government flying, and to accomplish it, dagger and sword and firearms and mutilation and slaughter must do their worst. It was evident in Lucknow that the natives were about to rise and put to death all the Europeans they could lay their hands on, and into the Residency the Christian population of Lucknow hastened for defense from the tigers in human form which were growling for their victims. The occupants of the Residency, or fort, were, military and non-combatants, men, women and children, in number about one thousand six hundred and ninety-two. I suggest in one sentence some of the chief woes to which they were subjected, when I say that these people were in the Residency five months without a single change of clothing; some of the time the heat at one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty degrees; the place black with flies, and all a-squirm with vermin; firing of the enemy upon them, ceasing neither day nor night; the hospital crowded with the dying; smallpox, scurvy, cholera, adding their work to that of shot and shell; women brought up in all comfort and never having known want, crowded and entombed in a cellar where nine children were born; less and less food; no water except that which was brought from a well under the enemy’s fire, so that the water obtained was at the price of blood; the stench of the dead horses added to the effluvia of corpses—and all waiting for the moment when the army of sixty thousand shrieking Hindu devils should break in upon the garrison of the Residency; now reduced by wounds and sickness and death to nine hundred and sixty-seven men, women, and children. “Call me early to-morrow morning,” I said, “and let us be at the Residency before the sun becomes too hot.” At seven o’clock in the morning we left our hotel in Lucknow, and I said to our obliging, gentlemanly escort, “Please take us along the road by which Havelock and Outram came to the relief of the Residency.” That was the way we went. There was a solemn stillness as we approached the gate of the Residency. Battered and torn is the masonry of the entrance. Signature of shot, and punctuation of cannon ball, all up and down and everywhere. “Here to the left,” said our escort, “are the remains of a building, the first floor of which in other days had been used as a banqueting hall, but then was used as a hospital. At this part the amputations took place, and as the surgeons had no antiseptic appliances, all such patients died. The heat was so great and the food so insufficient that the poor fellows could not recover from the loss of blood; they all died. Amputations were performed without chloroform. All the anaesthetics were exhausted.” Sir Henry Lawrence had been in poor health for a long time before the mutiny. He had been in the Indian service for years, and he had started for England to recover his health; but getting as far as Bombay, the English Government requested him to remain at least a while, for he could not be spared in such dangerous times. He came here to Lucknow; and, foreseeing the siege of this Residency, had filled many of the rooms with grain, without which the Residency would have been obliged to surrender. He had the foresight to take also into this Residency rice and sugar and charcoal and fodder for the oxen and hay for the horses. But now, at the time when all the people were looking to him for wisdom and courage, Sir Henry is dying. Our escort describes the scene, unique, tender, beautiful and overpowering; and while I stood on the very spot where the sighs and groans of the besieged and lacerated and broken-hearted met the whizz of bullets, and the demoniac hiss of bursting shell, and the roar of batteries, my escort gave me the particulars. As soon as Sir Henry was told that he had not many hours to live he asked the chaplain to administer to him the Holy Communion. He felt particularly anxious for the safety of the women in the Residency who, at any moment, might be subjected to the savages who howled around the Residency, their breaking in only a matter of time, unless re-enforcements should come He would frequently say to those who surrounded his death couch, “Save the ladies. God help the poor women and children!” He gave directions for the desperate defense of the place. He asked forgiveness of all those whom he might unintentionally have neglected or offended. He left a message for all his friends. He forgot not to give direction for the care of his favorite horse. He charged the officers, saying, “By no means surrender. Make no treaty or compromise with the desperadoes. Die fighting.” He took charge of the asylum he had established for the children of soldiers. He gave directions for his burial, saying, “No nonsense, no fuss. Let me be buried with the men.” He dictated his own epitaph, which I read above his tomb: “Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty. May the Lord have mercy on his soul.” He said, “I would like to have a passage of Scripture added to the words on my grave such as: ‘To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against him’—isn’t it from Daniel?” So, as brave a man as England or India ever saw, expired. The soldiers lifted the cover from his face and kissed him before they carried him out. The chaplain offered a prayer. Then they removed the great hero amid the rattling hail of the guns and put him down among other soldiers buried at the same time. All of which I state for the benefit of those who would have us believe that the Christian religion is fit only for women in the eighties and children under seven. There was glory enough in that departure to halo Christendom. “There,” said our escort, “‘Bob the Nailer’ did the work. “Who was ‘Bob the Nailer?’“ “Oh, he was the African who sat at that point, and when any one of our men ventured across the road he would drop him by a rifle ball. Bob was a sure marksman. The only way to get across the road for water from the well was to wait until his gun flashed and then instantly cross before he had time to load. The only way we could get rid of him was by digging a mine under the house where he was hidden. When the house was blown up ‘Bob the Nailer’ went with it.” I said to him, “Had you made up your minds what you and the other sufferers would do in case the fiends actually broke in?” “Oh, yes,” said my escort, “we had it all planned, for the probability was every hour for nearly five months that they would break in. You must remember it was one thousand six hundred against sixty thousand, and for the latter part of the time it was nine hundred against sixty thousand, and the Residency and the earthworks around it were not put up for such an attack. It was only from the mercy of God that we were not massacred soon after the besiegement. We were resolved not to allow ourselves to get into the hands of those desperadoes. You must remember that we and all the women had heard of the butchery at Cawnpore, and we knew what defeat meant. If unable to hold out any longer we would have blown ourselves up, and all gone out of life together.” “Show me,” I said, “the rooms where the women and children staid during those awful months.” Then we crossed over and went down into the cellar of the Residency. With a shudder of horror indescribable I entered the cellars where six hundred and twenty-two women and children had been crowded until the whole place was full. I know the exact number, for I counted their names on the roll. As one of the ladies wrote in her diary—speaking of these women, she said: “They lay upon the floor fitting into each other like bits in a puzzle.” Wives had obtained from their husbands the promise that the husbands would shoot them rather than let them fall into the hands of the desperadoes. The women within the Residency were kept on the smallest allowance that would maintain life. No opportunity of privacy. The death-angel and the birth-angel touched wings as they passed. Flies, mosquitoes, vermin in full possession of the place, and these women in momentary expectation that the enraged savages would rush upon them, in a violence of which club and sword and torch and throat-cutting would be the milder forms. Our escort told us again and again of the bravery of these women. They did not despair. They encouraged the soldiery; they waited on the wounded and dying in the hospital; they gave up their stockings for holders of the grape-shot; they solaced each other when their children died. When a husband or father fell such prayers of sympathy were offered as only women can offer. They endured without complaint. They prepared their own children for burial. They were inspiration for the men who stood at their posts fighting till they dropped. Our escort told us that again and again news had come that Havelock and Outram were on the way to deliver these besieged ones out of their wretchedness. They had received a letter from Havelock, rolled up in a quill and carried in the mouth of a disguised messenger; a letter telling them he was on the way, but the next news was that Havelock had been compelled to retreat. It was constant vacillation between hope and despair. But one day they heard the guns of relief sounding nearer and nearer. Yet all the houses of Lucknow were fortresses filled with armed miscreants, and every step of Havelock and his army was contested—firing from house-tops; firing from windows; firing from doorways. I asked our friend if he thought that the world-famous story of a Scotch lass in her delirium thinking she heard the Scotch bagpipes advancing with the Scotch regiment, was a true story. He said he did not know but that it was true. Without this man’s telling me, I knew from my own observation that delirium sometimes quickens some of the faculties, and I rather think the Scotch lass in her delirium was the first to hear the bagpipes. I decline to believe that class of people who would like to kill all the poetry of the world and banish all the fine sentiment. They tell us that Whittier’s poem about Barbara Frietchie was founded on a delusion, and that Longfellow’s poems immortalized things that never occurred. The Scotch lass did hear the slogan. I almost heard it myself as I stood inside the Residency while my escort told of the coming on of the Seventy-eighth Highland Regiment. “Were you present when Havelock came in?” I asked, for I could suppress the question no longer. His answer came: “I was not at the moment present, but with some other young fellows I saw soldiers dancing while two Highland pipers played, and I said, ‘What is all this excitement about?’ Then we came up and saw that Havelock was in, and Outram was in, and the regiments were pouring in.” “Show us where they came in!” I exclaimed, for I knew that they did not enter through the gate of the Residency, that being banked up inside to keep the murderers out. “Here it is,” answered my escort, “here it is—the embrasure through which the men came.” We walked up to the spot. It is now a broken-down pile of bricks a dozen yards from the gate. Long grass now, but then a blood-spattered, bullet-scarred opening in the wall. As we stood there, although the event was thirty-seven years ago, I saw them come in; Havelock, pale and sick, but triumphant; and Outram, whom all the equestrian statues in Calcutta and Europe cannot too grandly present. “What then happened?” I said to my escort. “Oh,” he said, “that is impossible to tell. The earth was removed from the gate and soon all the army of relief entered, and some of us laughed and some cried and some prayed and some danced. Highlanders so dust-covered and enough blood and wounds on their faces to make them unrecognizable, snatched the babes out of their mothers’ arms and kissed them, and passed the babies along for other soldiers to kiss, and the wounded men crawled out of the hospital to join in the cheering, and it was wild jubilee, until the first excitement passed; the story of how many of the advancing army had been slain on the way began to have tearful effect, and the story of suffering that had been endured inside the fort, and the announcement to children that they were fatherless, and to wives that they were widows, submerged the shouts of joy with wailing of agony.” “But were you not embarrassed by the arrival of Havelock and fourteen hundred men who brought no food with them?” He answered, “Of course, we were put on smaller rations immediately, in order that they might share with us; but we knew that the coming of this re-enforcement would help us to hold the place until further relief should come. Had not this first relief arrived as it did, in a day or two at most, and perhaps in an hour, the besiegers would have broken in and our end would have come. The Sepoys had dug six mines under the Residency and would soon have exploded all.” After we had obtained a few bullets that had been picked out of the wall, and a piece of a bombshell, we walked around the eloquent ruins, and put our hands into the scars of the shattered masonry, and explored the cemetery inside the fort, where hundreds of the dead soldiers await the coming of the Lord of hosts at the Last Day, and we could endure no more. My nerves were all a-tremble, and my emotions were wrung out, and I said, “Let us go.” On the following day I visited the grave of Havelock, about four miles from the Residency. The scenes of hardship and self-sacrifice through which he had passed were too much for mortal endurance, and a few days after Havelock left the Residency which he had relieved, he lay in a tent a-dying, while his son, whom I saw in London on my way here, was reading to the hero the consolatory Scriptures. He had received the message of congratulation from Queen Victoria over his triumphs and had been knighted, and such a reception as England never gave to any man since Wellington came back from Waterloo awaited his return. But he will never again see his native land. He has led his last army, and planned the last battle. Yet he is to gain another victory. He declared it when, in his last hours, he said to General Outram, “I die happy and contented. I have for forty years so ruled my life that when death came I might face it without fear. To die is gain.” Indeed this was no new sentimentality with him. He once stated that in boyhood, with four companions, he was accustomed to seek the “seclusion of one of the dormitories for purposes of devotion, though certain in those days of being branded as Methodists and canting hypocrites.” He had in early life been immersed in a Baptist church. He acknowledged God in every victory, and says in one of his despatches that he owes it “to the power of the Enfield rifle in British hands, to British pluck, and to the blessing of Almighty God on a most righteous cause.” He was accustomed to spend two hours every morning in prayer and Bible-reading, and if the army was to march at eight o’clock he arose for purposes of religious devotion at six o’clock. What a speech that was Havelock made to his soldiers as he started for Cawnpore, India: “Over two hundred of our race are still alive in Cawnpore. With God’s help we will save them from death. I am trying you severely, my men; but I know what you are made of.” His epitaph is as beautiful and comprehensive as anything I have ever seen, and I copied it then and there, and it is as follows: “Here rest the mortal remains of Henry Havelock, Major-General in the British Army and Knight Commander of the Bath, who died at Delkhoosha, Lucknow, of dysentery, produced by the hardships of a campaign in which he achieved immortal fame, on the 24th of November, 1857. He was born on the 5th of April, 1795, at Bishop Wearmouth, County of Durham, England. Entered the army 1815. Came to India 1823, and served there with little interruption till his death. He bore an honorable part in the wars of Burmah, Afghanistan, the Wahvetta campaign of 1843, and the Sutlej of 1845. Retarded by adverse circumstances in a subordinate position, it was the aim of his life to show that the profession of a Christian is consistent with the fullest discharge of the duties of a soldier. He commanded a division in the Persian expedition of 1857. In the terrible convulsions of that year his genius and character were at length fully developed and known to the world. Saved from shipwreck on the Ceylon coast by that Providence which designed him for greater things, he was nominated to the command of the column destined to relieve the brave garrison of Lucknow. This object, after almost superhuman exertion he, by the blessing of God, accomplished. But he was not spared to receive on earth the reward so truly earned. The Divine Master whom he served saw fit to remove him from the sphere of his labor in the moment of his greatest triumphs. He departed to his rest in humble but confident expectation of far greater rewards and honors than those which his country was anxious to bestow. In him the skill of a commander, the courage and devotion of a soldier, the learning of a scholar, the grace of a highly-bred gentleman, and all the social and domestic virtues of a husband, father, and friend were blended together and strengthened, harmonized and adorned by the spirit of a true Christian, the result of the influence of the Holy Spirit on his heart and of a humble reliance on the merits of a crucified Saviour. II. Timothy, 4:7-8: ‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.’ This monument is erected by his sorrowing widow and family.” Is not that magnificent? A plain monument marks Havelock’s grave. But I said while standing at the sacred place, why does not England take his dust to herself, and in Westminster Abbey make him a pillow? In all her history of wars there is no name so magnetic, yet she has expressed nothing on this man’s tomb. His widow reared the tombstone. Do you say, “Let him sleep in the region where he did his grandest deeds?” The same reason would have buried Wellington in Belgium, and Von Moltke at Versailles, and Grant at Vicksburg, and Stonewall Jackson far away from his beloved Lexington, Virginia. Take him home, O England! The rescuer of the men, women and children at Lucknow! Though his ear, now dulled, could not hear the roll of the organ when it sounds through the venerable Abbey the National Anthem, it would hear the same trumpet that brings up from among those sacred walls the form of Outram, his fellow-hero in the overthrow of the Indian mutiny. Let Parliament make appropriation from the National treasury, and some great warship under some illustrious admiral sail across Mediterranean and Arabian seas and wait at Bombay harbor for the coming of the dust of this conqueror of conquerors; and then, saluted by the shipping of all free nations, let him come under the arches and along the aisles where have been carried the mightiest heroes of many centuries. Some audiences and some readers are so slow of thought and so stupid that they need an application made of every subject. But the people who get this sermon have made the application for themselves already. I challenge you to say whether or not I have kept my promise when in the opening of this discourse I said I would show you four things: what an awful affair war is; what genuine Christian character is under bombardment; what is the coronation of Christian courage; and how splendidly good people die. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 60: 058. DOMINION OF FASHION ======================================================================== Dominion of Fashion Deuteronomy 22:5 : “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.” God thought womanly attire of enough importance to have it discussed in the Bible. Paul, the apostle, by no means a sentimentalist, and accustomed to dwell on the great themes of God and the resurrection, writes about the arrangement of woman’s hair and the style of her jewelry; and in my text, Moses, his ear yet filled with the thunder at Mount Sinai, declares that womanly attire must be in marked contrast with masculine attire, and infraction of that law excites the indignation of high heaven. Just in proportion as the morals of a country or an age are depressed is that law defied. Show me the fashion plates of any century from the time of the Deluge to this, and I will tell you the exact state of public morals. Bloomerism in this country years ago seemed about to break down this divine law, but there was enough of good in American society to beat back the indecency. Yet ever and anon we have imported from France, or perhaps invented on this side the sea a style that proposes as far as possible to make women dress like men; and thousands of young women catch the mode, until some one goes a little too far in imitation of masculinity, and the whole custom, by the good sense of American womanhood, is obliterated. The costumes of the countries are different, and in the same country may change, but there is a divinely ordered dissimilarity which must be forever observed. Any divergence from this is administrative of vice and runs against the keen thrust of the text, which says: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.” Many years ago, a French authoress, signing herself George Sand, by her corrupt but brilliant writings depraved homes and libraries innumerable, and was a literary grandmother of all the present French and American authors, who have written things so much worse that they have made her putrefaction quite presentable. That French authoress put on masculine attire. She was consistent. Her writings and her behavior were perfectly accordant. My text abhors mannish women and womanish men. What a sickening thing it is to see a man copying the speech, the walk, the manner of a woman. The trouble is that they do not imitate a sensible woman, but some female imbecile. And they simper, and they go with mincing step, and lisp, and scream at nothing, and take on a languishing look, and bang their hair, and are the nauseation of honest folks of both sexes. O man, be a man! You belong to quite a respectable sex. Do not try to cross over, and to become a hybrid; neither one nor the other, but a failure, half-way between. Alike repugnant are masculine women. They copy a man’s stalking gait and go down the street with the stride of a walking-beam. They wish they could smoke cigarettes, and some of them do. They talk boisterously and try to sing bass. They do not laugh, they roar. They cannot quite manage the broad profanity of the sex they rival, but their conversation is often a half-swear; and if they said, “O Lord!” in earnest prayer as often as they say it in lightness they would be high up in saint-hood. Withal there is an assumed rugosity of apparel, and they wear a man’s hat, only changed by being in two or three places smashed in and a dead canary clinging to the general wreck, and a man’s coat tucked in here and there according to unaccountable aesthetics. O woman, stay a woman! You also belong to a very respectable sex. Do not try to cross over. If you do you will be a failure as a woman and only a nondescript of a man. We already have enough intellectual and moral bankrupts in our sex without your coming over to make worse the deficit. My text also sanctions fashion. Indeed, it sets a fashion! There is a great deal of senseless cant about fashion. A woman or man who does not regard it is unfit for good neighborhood. The only question is what is right fashion and what is wrong fashion. Before I stop I want to show you that fashion has been one of the most potent of reformers and one of the vilest of usurpers. Sometimes it has been an angel from heaven, and at others the mother of abominations. As the world grows better, there will be as much fashion as now, but it will be a righteous fashion. In the heavenly life white robes always have been and always will be in the fashion. There is a great outcry against this submission to social custom, as though any consultation of the tastes and feelings of others were deplorable; but without it the world would have neither law, order, civilization nor common decency. There has been a canonization of bluntness. There are men and women who boast that they can tell you all they know and hear about you, especially if it be unpleasant. Some have mistaken rough behavior for frankness, when the two qualities do not belong to the same family. You have no right, with your eccentricities, to crash in upon the sensitiveness of others. There is no virtue in walking with hoofs over fine carpets. The most jagged rock is covered with blossoming moss. The storm that comes jarring down in thunder strews rainbow colors upon the sky and silvery drops on the orchard. Then there are men who pride themselves on their capacity to “stick” others. They say: “I have brought him down; didn’t I make him squirm!” Others pride themselves on their outlandish apparel. They boast of being out of the fashion. They wear a queer hat. They ride in an odd carriage. By dint of perpetual application they would persuade the world that they are perfectly indifferent to public opinion. They are more proud of being “out of fashion” than others are of being in. They are utterly and universally disagreeable. Their rough corners have never been worn off. They prefer a hedgehog to a lamb. The accomplishments of life are in nowise productive of effeminacy or enervation. Good manners and a respect for the tastes of others are indispensable. The Good Book speaks favorably of those who are a “peculiar” people; but that does not sanction the behavior of queer people. There is no excuse, under any circumstances, for not being the lady or gentleman. Rudeness is sin. We have no words too ardent to express our admiration for the refinement of society. There is no law, moral or divine, to forbid elegance of demeanor, or artistic display in the dwelling, gracefulness of gait and bearing, polite salutation or honest compliments; and he who is shocked or offended by these had better, like the ancient Scythians, wear tiger-skins and take one wild leap back into midnight barbarism. As Christianity advances there will be better apparel, higher styles of architecture, more exquisite adornments, sweeter music, more correct behavior and more thorough ladies and gentlemen. But there is another story to be told. Wrong fashion is to be charged with producing many of the worst evils of society, and its path has often been strewn with the bodies of the slain. It has set up a false standard by which people are to be judged. Our common sense, as well as all the divine intimations on the subject, teach us that people ought to be esteemed according to their individual and moral attainments. The man who has the most nobility of soul should be first, and he who has the least of such qualities should stand last. No crest or shield or escutcheon can indicate one’s moral peerage. Titles of duke, earl, viscount, lord, esquire or partrician ought not to raise one into the first rank. Some of the meanest men I have ever known had at the end of their name D. D. or LL. D. or A. M. Truth, honor, charity, heroism, self-sacrifice, should win highest favor; but inordinate fashion says: “Count not a woman’s virtues; count her adornments.” “Look not at the contour of the head, but see the way she arranges her hair.” “Ask not what noble deeds have been accomplished by that man’s hand; but is it white and soft?” Ask not what good sense is in her conversation, but “In what was she dressed?” Ask not whether there were hospitality and cheerfulness in the house, but “In what style do they live?” As a consequence, some of the most ignorant and vicious men are at the top, and some of the most virtuous and intelligent at the bottom. During our Civil War we suddenly saw men elevated into the highest social positions. Had they suddenly reformed from evil habits or graduated in science or achieved some good work for society? No; they simply had obtained a government contract! This accounts for the utter chagrin which people feel at the treatment they receive when they lose their property. Hold up your head amid financial disaster like a Christian! Fifty thousand subtracted from a good man leaves how much? Honor; truth; faith in God; triumphant hope; and a kingdom of ineffable glory, over which he is to reign forever and ever. If the owner of millions should lose a penny out of his pocket, would he sit down on a curbstone and cry? And shall a man possessed of everlasting fortunes wear himself out with grief because he has lost worldly treasure? You have only lost that in which hundreds of wretched misers could have surpassed you; and you have saved that which the Cæsars and the Pharaohs and the Alexanders could never attain. And yet society thinks differently, and we see the most intimate friendships broken up as the consequence of financial embarrassments. Proclamation has gone forth: “Velvets must go up and plain apparel must come down,” and the question is: “How does the coat fit?” not “Who wears it?” The power that bears the tides of excited population up and down our streets, and rocks the world of commerce, and thrills all nations, trans-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic, is clothes. It decides the last offices of respect; and how long the dress shall be totally black; and when it may subside into spots of grief on silk, calico or gingham. Men die in good circumstances, but by reason of extravagant funeral expenses are well-nigh insolvent before they get buried. Wrong fashion is productive of a most ruinous rivalry. The expenditure of many households is adjusted by what their neighbors have, not by what they themselves can afford to have; and the great anxiety is as to who shall have the finest house and the most costly equipage. The weapons used in the warfare of social life are not minie rifles and Dahlgren guns and Hotchkiss shells, but chairs and mirrors and vases and Gobelins and Axminsters. Many household establishments are like racing steamboats, propelled at the utmost strain and risk, and just coming to a terrific explosion. “Who cares,” say they, “if we only come out ahead?” There is no one cause today of more financial embarrassment and of more dishonesties than this determination at all hazards to live as well as or better than other people. There are persons who will risk their eternity upon one pier mirror, or who will dash out the splendors of heaven to get another trinket. There are scores of men in the dungeons of the penitentiary who risked honor, business, everything, in the effort to shine like others. Though the heavens fall they must be “in the fashion.” The most famous frauds of the day have resulted from this feeling. It keeps hundreds of men struggling for their commercial existence. The trouble is that some are caught and incarcerated if their larceny be small. If it be great they escape and build their castle on the Rhine or the Hudson. Again, wrong fashion makes people unnatural and untrue. It is a factory from which has come forth more hollow and unmeaning flatteries and hypocrisies than the Lowell mills ever turned out shawls and garments. Few people are really natural and unaffected. When I say this I do not mean to deprecate cultured manners. It is right that we should have more admiration for the sculptured marble than for the unhewn block of the quarry. From many circles in life fashion has driven out vivacity. A frozen dignity instead floats about the room, and iceberg grinds against iceberg. You must not laugh outright; it is vulgar. You must smile. You must not dash rapidly across the room; you must glide. There is a round of bows and grins and flatteries, and oh’s and ah’s and simperings, and namby-pambyism—a world of which is not worth one good, round, honest peal of laughter. From such a hollow round the tortured guest retires at the close of the evening, and assures his host that he has enjoyed himself. Thus social life has been contorted and deformed, until, in some mountain cabin, where rustics gather to the quilting or the apple-paring, there is more good cheer than in all the frescoed icehouses of the metropolis. We want in all the higher circles of society more warmth of heart and naturalness of behavior, and not so many refrigerators. Again, wrong fashion is incompatible with happiness. Those who depend for their comfort upon the admiration of others are subject to frequent disappointment. Somebody will criticise their appearance, or surpass them in charm, or will receive more attention. Oh, the jealousy and detraction and heartburnings of those who move in this bewildered maze! Poor butterflies! Bright wings do not always bring happiness. “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” The revelations of high life that come to the challenge and the fight are only the occasional croppings out of disquietudes that are, underneath, like the stars of heaven for multitude, but like the demons of the pit for hate. The misery that will to-night in the cellar cuddle up in the straw is not so utter as the princely disquietude which stalks through splendid drawing-rooms, brooding over the slights and offenses of luxurious life. The bitterness of life seems not so unfitting when drunk out of a pewter mug as when it pours from the chased lips of a golden chalice. In the sharp crack of the voluptuary’s pistol, putting an end to his earthly misery, I hear the confirmation that in a hollow, fastidious life there is no peace. Again, devotion to wrong fashion is productive of physical disease, mental imbecility and spiritual withering. Apparel insufficient to keep out the cold and the rain, or so fitted upon the person that the functions of life are restrained; late hours filled with excitement and feasting; free drafts of wine that make one not beastly intoxicated, but only fashionably drunk; and luxurious indolence—are the instruments by which this unreal life pushes its disciples into valetudinarianism and the grave. Along the walks of prosperous life death goes a-mowing—and such harvests as are reaped! Materia medica has been exhausted to find curatives for these physiological devastations. Dropsies, cancers, consumptions, gout and almost every infirmity in all the realm of pathology have been the penalties paid. To counteract the damage, pharmacy has found forthwith medicament, panacea, elixir, embrocation, salve and cataplasm. With swollen feet upon cushioned ottoman, and groaning with aches innumerable, the votary of luxurious living is not half so happy as his groom or coal-heaver. Wrong fashion is the world’s undertaker, and drives thousands of hearses to Greenwood and Laurel Hill and Mount Auburn. But, worse than that, this folly is an intellectual depletion. This endless study of proprieties and etiquette, patterns and styles, is bedwarfing to the intellect. I never knew a woman or a man of extreme fashion who knew much. How belittling the study of the cut of a coat or the tie of a cravat or the wrinkle in a sleeve or the color of a ribbon! How they are worried if something gets untied or hangs awry or is not nicely adjusted! With a mind capable of measuring the height and depth of great subjects; able to unravel mysteries, to walk through the universe, to soar up into the infinity of God’s attributes—hovering perpetually over a new style of cloak! I have known men, reckless as to their character and regardless of interests momentous and eternal, exasperated by the shape of a vest-button. Worse than all—this folly is not satisfied until it extirpates every moral sentiment and blasts the soul. A wardrobe is the rock upon which many a soul has been riven. The excitement of a luxurious life has been the vortex that has swallowed up more souls than the maelstrom off Norway ever destroyed ships. What room for elevating themes in a heart filled with the trivial and unreal? Who can wonder that in this haste for sun-gilded baubles and winged thistle-down men and women should tumble into ruin? The travelers to destruction are not all clothed in rags. In the wild tumult of the Last Day—the mountains falling, the heavens flying, the thrones uprising, the universe assembling; amid the boom of the last great thunder-peal, and under the crackling of a burning world—what will become of the disciple of fashion? Watch the career of one thoroughly artificial. Through inheritance, or, perhaps, his own skill, having obtained enough for purposes of display, he feels himself thoroughly established. He sits aloof from the common herd, and looks out of his window upon the poor man, and says: “Put that dirty wretch off my steps immediately!” On Sabbath days he finds the church, but mourns the fact that he must worship with so many of the inelegant, and says: “They are perfectly awful! That man whom you put in my pew had a coat on his back that did not cost five dollars.” He struts through life unsympathetic with trouble, and says: “I cannot be bothered.” Is delighted with some doubtful story of Parisian life, but thinks there are some very indecent things in the Bible. Walks arm and arm with the successful man of the world, but does not know his own brother. Loves to be praised for his splendid house, and, when told that he looks younger, says: “Well, really, do you think so?” But the brief strut of his life is about over. Upstairs he dies. No angel wings hovering about him. No Gospel promises kindling up the darkness; but exquisite embroidery, elegant pictures, and a bust of Shakespeare on the mantel. The pulses stop. The minister comes in to read of the resurrection, that day when the dead shall come up—both he that died on the floor and he that expired under princely upholstery. He is carried out to burial. Only a few mourners, but a great array of carriages. Not one common man at the funeral. No befriended orphan to weep a tear on his grave. No child of want, pressing through the ranks of the weeping, saying: “He was the best friend I had.” What now? He was a great man. Shall not chariots of salvation come down to the other side of the Jordan and escort him up to the palace? Shall not the angels exclaim: “Turn out! A prince is coming.” Will the bells chime? Will there be harpers with their harps, and trumpeters with their trumpets? No! No! No! There will be a shudder, as though a calamity had happened. Standing on heaven’s battlement, a watchman will see something shoot past, with fiery downfall, and shriek: “Wandering star—for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness!” But sadder yet is the closing of a woman’s life who has been worshipful of worldliness, all the wealth of a lifetime’s opportunity wasted. What a tragedy! A woman on her dying pillow, thinking of what she might have done for God and humanity, and yet having done nothing! Compare her demise with that of a Harriet Newell, going down to peacefully die in the Isle of France, reviewing her lifetime sacrifices for the redemption of India; or the last hours of Elizabeth Hervey, having exchanged her bright New England home for a life at Bombay amid stolid heathenism, that she might illumine it, saying in her last moments: “If this is the dark valley, it has not a dark spot in it; all is light, light!” or the exit of Mrs. Lenox, falling under sudden disease at Smyrna, breathing out her soul with the last words, “Oh, how happy!” or the departure of Mrs. Sarah D. Comstock, spending her life for the salvation of Burmah, giving up her children that they might come home to America to be educated, and saying as she kissed them good-by, never to see them again: “O Jesus! I do this for thee!” or the going of ten thousand good women, who in less resounding spheres have lived not for themselves, but for God and the alleviation of human suffering. That was a brilliant scene when, in 1485, in the campaign for the capture of Ronda, Queen Elizabeth of Castile, on horseback, side by side with King Ferdinand, rode out to review the troops. As she, in bright armor, rode along the lines of the Spanish host, and waved her jeweled hand to the warriors, and ever and anon uttered words of cheer to the worn veterans who, far away from their homes, were risking their lives for the kingdom, it was a spectacle which illumines history. But more glorious will be the scene when some consecrated Christian woman, crowned in heaven, shall review the souls that on earth she clothed and fed and medicined and evangelized, and then introduced into the ranks celestial. As on the white horse of victory, side by side with the King, this queen unto God shall ride past the lines of those in whose salvation she bore a part, the scene will surpass anything ever witnessed on earth in the life of Joan of Arc or Penelope or Semi-ramis or Aspasia or Marianne or Margaret of Anjou. Ride on, victor! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 61: 059. THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE BIBLE; OR, GOD AMONG THE CENTURIES ======================================================================== The Chronology of the Bible; or, God Among the Centuries A New Year’s sermon. Deuteronomy 32:7 : “Consider the years of many generations.” At twelve o’clock last night, while so many good people were watching, an old friend passed out of our homes and a stranger entered. The old friend making valedictory was the departing year; the stranger arriving is the new. The old friend was garrulous with the occurrences of many days, but the stranger put his finger over his lip and said nothing and seemed charged with many secrets and mysteries. I did not see either the departure or the arrival, but was sound asleep, thinking that was for me the best way to be wide awake now. And I was confident that the transference from year to year would go on just as well as if L were watching. Good-bye, Old Year! Welcome, New Year! As an army is divided into brigades and regiments and companies, and they observe this order in their march, and their tread is majestic, so the time of the world’s existence is divided into an army, divinely commanded: the eras are the brigades, the centuries are the regiments, and the years are the companies. Forward! into the eternity past, out of the eternity to come. Forward! is the command, and nothing can halt them even though the world should die. While obeying my text, “Consider the years of many generations,” I propose to speak of the “Chronology of the Bible, or God among the Centuries.” We make a distinction between time and eternity, but time is only a piece of eternity, and chronology has been engaged in the sublime work of dividing up this portion of eternity that we call time into compartments, and putting events in their right compartment. It is as much an injustice against the past to wrongly arrange its events, as it would be an injustice if, through neglect of chronological accuracy, it should, in the far distant future, be said that America was discovered in 1776, and the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1492, and Washington born on the 22d. of March, and the Civil War of the United States was fought in 1840. As God puts all the events of time in the right place, let us be careful that we do not put them in the wrong place. The chronology of the Bible takes six steps, but they are steps so long, it makes us hold our breath as we watch the movement. From Adam to Abraham. From Abraham to the exodus from Egypt. From the exodus to the foundation of Solomon’s Temple. From the foundation of Solomon’s Temple to the destruction of that Temple. From the destruction of the Temple to the return from Babylonish captivity. From Babylonish captivity to the birth of Christ. Chronology takes pen and pencil, and calling astronomy and history to help, says: “Let us fix one event, from which to calculate everything. Let it be a star, the Bethlehem star, the Christmas star.” And from that we go back to see the world was created four thousand and four years before Christ, the deluge came two thousand three hundred and forty-eight years before Christ, the exodus from Egypt occurred one thousand four hundred and ninety-one years before Christ, and Solomon’s temple was destroyed five hundred and eighty-six years before Christ. Chronology enters the first chapter of Genesis and says the day mentioned there is not a day of twenty-four hours, but of ages; the word there translated as “day,” in other places meaning ages, and so the Bible account of the creation and the geologists’ account of the creation are completely harmonious. Chronology enters the book of Daniel, and says that words “time and a-half” mean a year and a-half. Chronology enters at another point and shows us that the seasons of the year were then only two—summer and winter. We find that the Bible year was three hundred and sixty days, instead of three hundred and sixty-five; that the day was calculated from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night; that the night was divided into four watches, namely, the late watch, the midnight, the cock-crowing, the early watch. The clock and watch were invented so long after the world began that the day could not be very sharply divided in Bible times. Ahaz had a sun-dial, or a flight of stairs with a column at the top, and the shadow which that column threw on the steps beneath indicated the hour, the shadow lengthening or withdrawing from step to step. But the events of life and the events of the world moved so slowly, for the most part in Bible times, that they had no need of such timepieces as we stand on our mantels or carry in our pockets in an age when a man may have a half dozen or a dozen engagements for one day and needs to know the exact minute for each one of them. The earth itself in Bible times was the chief timepiece, and it turned once on its axis and that was a day, and once around the sun and that was a year. It was not until the fourteenth century that the almanac was born, the almanac that we toss carelessly about, not realizing that it took the accumulated ingenuity of more than five thousand years to make one. Chronology had to bring into its service the monuments of Egypt, and the cylinders of Assyria, and the bricks of Babylon, and the pottery of Nineveh, and the medals struck at Antioch for the battle of Actium, and all the hieroglyphics that could be deciphered, and had to go into the extremely delicate business of asking the ages of Adam and Seth and Enoch and Methuselah who, after their three-hundredth year, wanted to be thought young. I think it must have been in recognition of the stupendous work of making an almanac that all the days of the week are named after the gods. Sunday, after the Sun, which was of old worshiped as a god; Monday, after the Moon, which was also worshiped as a god; Tuesday, after Tuesco, the god of War; Wednesday, after Woden, the chief god of the Scandinavians; Thursday, after Thor, the god of thunder; Friday, after Frea, the goddess of marriage, and Saturday, after Saturn. The old Bible year began with the 25th of March. Not until 1752 did the first of the month of January get the honor in legal documents in England of being called the first day of the year. Improvements all along have been made in chronology until the calendar and the almanac and the clock and the watch seem to have reached perfection, and all the nations of Christendom have similarity of time calculations and have adopted what is called the “New Style,” except Russia, which keeps what is called the “Old Style,” and is twelve days different, so that, writing from there, if you wish to be accurate, you date your letter January 1st and January 12th, or December 10th and December 22d. It is something to thank God for that the modes are so complete for calculating the cycles, the centuries, the decades, the years, the months, the days, the hours, the seconds. Think of making appointments, as in the Bible days, for the time of the new moon. Think of making one of the watches of the night, in the Bible times, a rooster’s crowing. The Bible says, “Before the cock crow thou shalt deny me thrice;” “If the Master cometh at cock-crowing;” and that was the way the midnight watch was indicated. The crowing of that barnyard bird has always been most uncertain. The crowing is at the lowest temperature of the night, and the amount of dew and the direction of the wind may bring the lowest temperature at eleven o’clock at night, or two o’clock in the morning, and at any one of six hours. Just before a rain, the crowing of chanticleer in the night is almost perpetual. Compare these modes of marking time with our own modes, when twelve o’clock is twelve o’clock, and six o’clock is six o’clock, and ten o’clock is ten o’clock, independent of all weathers, and then thank God that you live now. But, notwithstanding all the imperfect modes of marking hours or years or centuries, Bible chronology never trips up, never falters, never contradicts itself, and here is one of the best arguments for the authenticity of the Scriptures. If you can prove an alibi in the courts, and you can prove beyond doubt that you were in some particular place at the time you were charged with doing or saying something in quite another place, you gain the victory, and Infidelity has tried to prove an alibi by contending that events and circumstances in the Bible ascribed to certain times must have taken place at some other time, if they took place at all. But this Book’s chronology has never been caught at fault. It has been proved that when the Hebrews went into Egypt there were only seventy of them, and that when they came out there were two millions of them. “Now,” says Infidelity, with a guffaw that it cannot suppress, “what an absurdity! They went down into Egypt seventy and came out two millions. That is a falsehood on the face of it. Nations do not increase in that ratio.” But, my sceptical friend, hold a moment. The Bible says the Jews were 430 years in Egypt, and that explains the increase from seventy persons to two millions, for it is no more but rather less than the ordinary increase of nations. The Pilgrim Fathers came to America in the Mayflower, one small shipload of passengers, less than three hundred years ago, and now we have a nation of sixty millions. Where then is the so-called impossibility that the seventy Jews who went into Egypt in four hundred and thirty years became two millions? Infidelity wrong and Bible chronology right. Now, stop and reflect, why is it that this sublime subject of Bible chronology has been so neglected, and that the most of you have never given ten minutes to the consideration of it and that this is the first sermon ever preached on this stupendous and overwhelming theme? We have stood by the half day or the whole day at grand reviews and seen armies pass. Again and again and again on the Champs Elysees, Frenchmen, by the hundreds of thousands, have stood and watched the bannered armies go by, and the huzza has been three miles long and until the populace were so hoarse they could huzza no longer. Again and again and again, the Germans, by hundreds of thousands, have stood on the palaced and statued Unter den Linden, Berlin, and strewn garlands under the feet of uniformed hosts led on by Von Moltke or Blucher or Frederick the Great. When Wellington and Ponsonby and the Scots Greys came back from Waterloo, or Wolseley from Egypt or Marlborough from Blenheim, what military processions through Regent street and along by the palaces of London and over the bridges of the Thames! What almost interminable lines of military on the streets of all our American capitals, while Mayors and Governors and Presidents, with uncovered heads, looked on. But put all those grand reviews together and they are tame compared with the reviews which on this New Year’s Day you from the pew and I from the pulpit witness. Hear them pass in chronological order; all the years before the flood; all the years since the flood; decades abreast; centuries abreast; epochs abreast; millenniums abreast; Egyptian civilization, Babylonian populations, Assyrian dominions. Armies of Persian, Grecian, Peloponnesian and Roman wars: Byzantine empire, Saracenic hosts, Crusaders of the First, the Second, the Third and the last—avalanche of men: Dark Ages in sombre epaulettes and Brighter Ages with shields of silver and helmets of gold: Italy, Spain, France, Russia, Germany, England and America, past and present: dynasties, feudal domains, despotisms, monarchies, republics, ages on ages, ages on ages, passing today in a chronological review, until one has no more power to look upon the advancing columns, now brilliant, now squalid; now garlanded with peace, now crimson with slaughter; now horrid with ghastliness, now radiant with love and joy. This chronological study affords, among many practical thoughts, especially two—the one encouraging to the last degree and the other startling. The encouraging thought is that the main drift of the centuries has been toward betterment, with only here and there a serious reversal. Grecian civilization was a vast improvement on Egyptian civilization, and Roman civilization a vast improvement on Grecian civilization, and Christian civilization is a vast improvement on Roman civilization. What was the boasted age of Pericles compared with the age of Longfellow and Tennyson? What was Queen Elizabeth as a specimen of moral womanhood compared with Queen Victoria? What were the cruel warriors of olden times compared with the most distinguished warriors of the last half century, all of them as much distinguished for kindness and good morals as for prowess; the two military leaders of our Civil War on Northern and Southern side communicant members of Christian churches, and their home life as pure as their public life? Nothing impresses me in this chronological review more than the fact that the regiments of years are better and better regiments as the troops move on. I thank God that you and I were not born any sooner than we were born. How could we have endured the disaster of being born in the eighteenth or seventeenth or sixteenth century? Glad am I that we are in the regiment now passing the reviewing stand and that our children will pass the stand in a still better regiment. God did not build this world for a slaughter-house or a den of infamy. A good deal of cleaning house will be necessary before this world becomes as clean and sweet as it ought to be; but the brooms and the scrubbing brushes and the upholsterers and plumbers are already busy, and when the world gets fixed up as it will be, if Adam and Eve ever visit it—as I expect they will—they will say to each other: “Well, this beats Paradise when we lived there, and the pears and plums are better than we plucked from the first trees, and the wardrobes are more complete, and the climate is better.” Since I settled in my own mind the fact that God was stronger than the devil, I have never lost faith in the emparadisation of this planet. With the exception of a retrogression in the Dark Ages, the movement of the world has been on and on, and up and up, and I have two jubilant hosannas—one for the closing year and the other for the new year. But the other thought coming out of this subject is that biblical chronology, and indeed all chronology, is urging the world to more punctuality and promptitude. What an unsatisfactory and indefinite thing it must have been for two business men in the time of Ahaz to make an appointment, saying: “We will settle that business matter tomorrow when the shadow on the dial of Ahaz reaches the tenth step from the top,” or, “I will meet you in the street called Straight in Damascus in the time of the new moon,” or, when asked in a court-room, what time an occurrence took place, should answer: “It was during the time of the latter rain,” or, “It was at the time of the third crowing of the barnyard.” You and I remember when ministers of the Gospel in the country, giving out a notice of an evening service, instead of saying at six or seven or eight o’clock would say, “The service will begin at early candle-light.” Thank God for chronological achievements which have ushered in calendars and almanacs and clocks and watches, and at so cheap a rate all may possess them. Chronology, beginning by appreciating the value of years and the value of days, has kept on until it cries out: “Man, immortal; woman, immortal; look out for that second!” The greatest fraud a man can commit is to rob another of his time. Hear it, ye laggards, and repent! All the fingers of chronology point to punctuality as one of the graces. The minister or the lecturer or business man who comes to his place ten minutes after the appointed time commits a crime, the enormity of which can only be estimated by multiplying the number of persons present by ten. If the engagement be made with five persons, he has stolen fifty minutes, for he is ten minutes late and he has robbed each of the five persons of ten minutes apiece, and ten times five are fifty. If there are five hundred persons present, and he be ten minutes late, he has committed a robbery of five thousand minutes, for ten times five hundred are five thousand, and five thousand minutes are eighty-three hours, which make more than three days. The thief of dry goods, the thief of bank bills is not half so bad as the thief of time. Doctor Rush, the greatest and busiest physician of his day appreciated the value of time, and when asked how he had been able to gather so much information for his books and lectures, he replied: “I have been able to do it by economizing my time. I have not spent one hour in amusement in thirty years.” And taking a blank book from his pocket, said, “I fill a book like this every week with thoughts that occur to me and facts collected in the rooms of my patients.” Napoleon appreciated the value of time when the sun was sinking upon Waterloo, and he thought that a little more time would retrieve his fortunes, and he pointed to the sinking sun, and said: “What would I not give to be this day possessed of the power of Joshua and enabled to retard thy march for two hours?” Voltaire, the blatant French infidel, appreciated the value of time, when, in his dying moments, he said to his doctor: “I will give you half of what I am worth if you will give me six months of life,” and when told that he could not live six weeks, he burst into tears and said: “Then, I shall go to hell.” John Wesley appreciated the value of time when he stood on his steps waiting for a delayed carriage to take him to an appointment, saying: “I have lost ten minutes forever.” Lord Nelson appreciated the value of time when he said: “I owe everything in the world to being always a quarter of an hour beforehand.” A clockmaker in one of the old English towns appreciated the value of time when he put on the front of the town clock the words: “Now or when?” Mitchell, the astronomer, appreciated the value of time when he said: “I have been in the habit of calculating the value of a thousandth part of a second.” They best appreciate the value of time whose Sabbaths have been wasted and whose opportunities of repentance and usefulness are all gone, and who have nothing left but memories, baleful and elegiac. They stand in the bleak September, with bare feet, on the sharp stubble of a reaped wheat field, crying: “The harvest is past,” and the sough of an autumnal equinox moans forth in echo: “The harvest is past!” But do not let us get an impression from chronology that because the years of time have been so long in procession they are to go on forever. Matter is not eternal! Oh, no! If you watch half a day, or a whole day, or two days, as I once did, to see a military procession, you remember the last brigade and the last regiment and the last company finally passed on, and as we rose to go we said to each other: “It is all over.” So this mighty procession of earthly years will terminate. Just when, I have no power to prognosticate, but science confirms the Bible prophecy that the earth cannot always last. Indeed, there has been a fatality of worlds. The moon is merely the corpse of what it once was, and scientists have again and again gone up in their observatories to attend the deathbed of dying worlds, and have seen them cremated. So I am certain, both from the Word of God and science, that the world’s chronology will sooner or later come to its last chapter. The final century will arrive and pass on, and then will come the final decade, and then the final year and the final month and the final day. The last spring will swing its censer of apple blossoms, and the last winter bank its snows. The last sunset will burn like Moscow, and the last morning radiate the hills. The clocks will strike their last hour, and the watches will tick their last second. No incendiaries will be needed to run hither and yon with torches to set the world on fire. Chemistry teaches us that there is a very inflammable element in water. While oxygen makes up a part of the water, the other part of the water is hydrogen, and that is very combustible. The oxygen drawn out from the water may put instantly into conflagration the Hudsons and Savannahs and Mississippis and Rhines and Urals and Danubes, and the Atlantic and Pacific and Indian and Mediterranean Seas. And then the Angel of God, descending from the Throne, might put one foot in the surf of the sea and the other on the beach, and cry to the four winds of heaven: “Time was! But time shall be no longer!” Yet, found in Christ, pardoned and sanctified, we shall welcome the day with more gladness than we ever welcomed a Christmas or New Year’s morn. When wrapt in fire, the realms of ether glow, And heaven’s last thunder shakes the earth below; Thou, undismayed, shalt o’er the ruin smile, And light thy torch at nature’s funeral pile. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 62: 060. THE DROWNED LADS ======================================================================== The Drowned Lads Deuteronomy 33:13 : “The deep that coucheth beneath.” Switzerland has the glaciers of Mont Blanc as a crown for her brow and Lake Geneva for an emerald on her right hand. In the Swiss rail-train, we are told that we must look out for the bridge where, as he emerges, there suddenly dashes upon the eye of the traveler one of the most extraordinary scenes of beauty and grandeur in all Europe. In the twinkling of an eye appears Lausanne, seated on her throne of three hills, with thirty-five thousand population; her cathedral, nine hundred years old, with apsed chapels and Byzantine capitals; her museums, distinguished the world over for the finest specimens in minerals and animals and shell-fish; her terraces and gardens, bewitching with aroma and luxuriance; her schools, which, by the rarest opportunity for culture, invite the youth of America and of all the world; Lake Geneva, deep, yet the clearest of waters, traversed by steamers crowded with passengers from all lands, and fishing-smacks here and there hauling out trout and pike and perch and salmon; and sail-boats going out from the castles on the beach, occupied by gentlemen of fortune. This sheet of water, skirted by mountains, Jura and the Alps, some green with verdure, some white with snow, some cleft with streams, crystalline and arrowy, the chalices of the floods emptying into this great bowl of the mountain. On the banks of this lake Gibbon, Rousseau, and Voltaire studied, and Byron dramatized, and John Kemble, the tragedian, lies buried and Rothschild built his mansion and ten thousand men and women, far better than any I have mentioned have gone up and down, adoring the God who lifted the hills and sunk this great inland sea. May you all live to behold the Alps, cloud-turbaned, looking down into the mirror of beautiful Geneva! One summer day, two lads of our own city, and much of the time of our own congregation, pushed out from Lausanne on those exquisite waters, on a pleasure excursion. It was in the leisure of school-hours. A sudden storm swept over the lake, capsizing that boat; or there was a defect in the vessel, and those precious lives were emptied into a watery grave. You say that they ought not to have gone where there was danger. I reply, where will you go and find no danger? You go down the street, a scaffold may fall on you. You go to the park, the horses may become unmanageable. You take the rail-train, a switchman may turn the track the wrong way. You stay at home, the lightning may strike through the roof or miasma may come in through the open window. Dangers stand round us everywhere to press us to the tomb. There is great health for a student in rowing with the oar, and great exhilaration in the spreading of the sail; but the lake that you stroke and fondle, thinking it harmless and asleep, sometimes proves treacherous to the yacht, and springs upon it like a panther, clutching it down with wrathful, overmastering strength. So that Moses, in the text, graphically and truthfully describes the fatal slyness of river and lake and sea when he says, “The deep that coucheth beneath.” The particulars of that sad event have not yet come to us; but never, through the coral caves of the Atlantic and amidst the gardens of sea-weed and along by the hulks of the wrecked shipping, could a more fearful message travel the submarine cable than that which came briefly announcing that two American students at Lausanne, Switzerland, had ended their mortal life in Lake Geneva. Such a transition is the easiest and most painless of all modes of getting out of this life. After one minute of submergence, generally, consciousness is gone. The Navarino sponge-divers cannot bear to stay under the water more than two minutes, notwithstanding all their experience; and yet persons who have been resuscitated tell us that the mind at such a time acts with wonderful velocity. And so I suppose these dear lads had time to think of home, and the sadness of the parental hearts whom they expected to join again in October. God decreed otherwise, and may his omnipotent grace soothe the bereaved and the desolate. There is in this event a new illustration of a very old lesson. You tell me nothing but a stereotyped thing when you tell me of life’s uncertainty. I have heard that a thousand times from ministers and prayer-meeting talkers and Sabbath-school teachers; and when you make that observation, I open my eyes no wider, nor does my heart beat quicker; but when you tell me that a boat flung two beloved lads into a watery grave, then I am stunned by the telegram, and compelled to read the truth written by pen of lightning stretched up from under the sea. How quickly our life comes, and how soon it goes! We pass along a perilous cliff, and we almost hold our breath and balance ourselves lest we fall off and, getting beyond the pass, we thank God for our deliverance, but perhaps lie down and die in the smooth plain beneath. Many a man has gone through three or four battles unclipped of bullet or sabre, who has had his life at last dashed out on the icy pavement in front of his doorstep or by the snapping of a whiffletree. You go two thousand miles in an express train unharmed, to lose your life at the hands of a reckless hackman in your own village. These two lads of whom I am speaking went through three thousand miles of stormy Atlantic unharmed, to find their death on a lake that they might have sailed across in thirty minutes. When we picture our exit from this world, we are very apt to think of a soft couch and a shaded room and careful attendants; but many of us will never have anything like that. It will be a rush and a plunge and a leap and a fall and the world flashes out and eternity flashes in! You tell me that this lesson of life’s uncertainty is appropriate only for the old, for the emaciated, for the sick. Ah, no! these lads did not come crawling down to the boat, they did not come on crutches, they were not fagged out. They came bounding into the boat, elastic, ruddy, robust. They expected to live seventy years. Their lungs sound, their hearts beating with healthful pulsation, their limbs lithe, their clear eye taking in the sheen of wave and the frown of crag and the azure of sky, they sprang to their places in the prow or stern with shout and laughter. They had no premonition that they were to go. So it will be with many of us. You pay a certain amount of money, premium for life insurance, that, when you are gone, your family may get relief from it; but what life insurance company would dare to say to a man, “You will live a year” or “You will live six months” or “You will live a week” or “You will live a day” or “You will live an hour” or “You will live a second”—and warrant it? I come to this platform strong and well, but that is no assurance that I shall go off alive. To-morrow morning you cross the ferry in good health; that is no assurance that you will come back without being helped. Our physical organism is such a delicate, intricate, elaborate piece of Divine mechanism that if but the little finger of disaster touch it too roughly it crushes into ruin. God, as if to show that you cannot depend upon physiological appearances, lets some invalid crawl on to eighty-five years of age, kept up by tonics and plasters, and helped by spectacles and ear-trumpets and canes, while there are thousands, muscular, roundly developed, and athletic, who drop dead under apoplectic stroke. Feel in your pockets and bring me out, if you can, a document rightly signed and sealed warranting you to get through this night alive. I saw plunging into Lake Geneva the River Rhone. It came on with swift uproar, and you could tell some distance back that it was coming on to that plunge. But who can tell at what moment, at what day, the river of our life shall empty into the deep, wide, infinite future? All the heavy shipping that goes out of New York goes through the “Narrows”; but by what different tack! to what different harbors! One of the most fascinating excursions in Switzerland is to the Castle of Chalons, in the midst of those very Genevan waters. History and poetry tell us that Bonivard, the hero, was chained in that castle six years; and you can see the bolt and ring by which he was fastened and the circular depression in the ground where he tramped about. After a while a flotilla came down and he was freed; but he heard them coming before his shout of deliverance mingled with their shout of victory. Yet here, my friends, we go tramping around in this earthly prison-house, chained to a body from which we cannot get free, not knowing at what moment the forces of the great future may break in upon us to shatter these manacles of flesh, and disendungeon our immortal spirit, until the prisoner of Chalons shall become the victor of the skies. Do you not feel that we walk amidst a vast uncertainty, not knowing what peril may swoop from above or what deep may be crouching beneath? Suppose you had been with those boys in that boat, would you have been ready? It was well for them that they were children of the Covenant—”I will be a God to thee and to thy seed after thee”—and that they were praying boys, in their Brooklyn home kneeling down with their mother and praying aloud, not ashamed to let the world hear any more than to let God hear. When the boat became unmanageable, and they were trying to haul in sail, they would not have had so good an opportunity for spiritual preparation as they had in their calm Brooklyn home, where they were not ashamed to acknowledge Jesus! Many of you may go out of life just as suddenly. Whether by flood or fire or earthquake or lightning flash or colliding rail-trains or a fatal slip on an orange peeling in the street, I know not; but you will have then no time to repent, and you will have no time to pray. If all the churches and cathedrals of the world should then go crying unto God in your behalf, it would not do you any good. All the preparation a man makes for the great future, he has to make this side the sharp line that divides the two residences. I see in this event that hilarity and gladness cannot keep back the fatal attack. When three or four students are together, and in such a tonic and exhilarating air as that of Switzerland, there is mirth and exuberance unbounded. They did not see the soft paws of the wave reaching up around the gilded boat, nor did they imagine that the deep lay couched beneath, ready to spring upon them. I believe in mirth and in boating and in pleasure excursions; but I want you to understand that gladness and hilarity of surrounding cannot keep back our last moment. It may come treading over rose leaves; it may come keeping step to the thrum of the harp, while hands are clapping, while feet are bounding, while all sails are set over a glassy sea. So it came when the Arctic and the Vesta, mid-Atlantic, struck. So it came when the Austria burned on the high seas. So it came when Richmond Court-house fell. So it came when the Ville du Havre sank. “In such a day, and in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of man cometh.” Oh, this bell of warning that rings tonight has not attached to it a short rope that any sexton may seize, but a twisted strand of wire three thousand miles long, and the red fingers of the lightning pull it until it rings from continent to continent, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work nor device nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.” What a voice for the youth of my congregation—the voice that comes from Lake Geneva tonight! Young people do not like anything dull or stupid. Neither do I, and I do not blame them for that; but there is nothing tame in this event. It comes with a great thrill, and it seems that your body and mind and soul must feel the shock. They had every prospect of living. Just look at their pictures. See what broad shoulders they had, what stout chests, what ruddy cheeks, what grand foreheads. “Oh!” you say, “if they had only known how to swim, it would have been all right.” They could swim; they could outswim you. They were as familiar with the water as many with the land. They were splendid swimmers. Their father had taught them how to take this exercise. But they were too far from shore, or the boom struck them, and they are gone. They had no power to stand up against a lake one thousand feet deep. Their father, who had often been with them on the water, was not there. He could give them no relief. But I think that he who walked Lake Gennesaret walked Lake Geneva, and that they are safe. O man! O woman! when your last moment comes, you want something more than a human arm to help you. No one but Jesus then; no one but Jesus now. They had brilliant prospects. In Germany, in Paris, and in Switzerland they had studied, at the fountain-head, those languages through which comes so much of the culture and refinement of the world. The gates of knowledge and of success were open before them, but they died at the gates, and all the plans for earthly welfare ended then and there. Do not build too much upon this world. It is a glassy surface, with a thousand feet of graves beneath. Do you think you can sail that craft and clew down the topsail-yards and haul out the reef tackles? A sudden squall may come, and you will go down, unless there be a Christ sleeping in the hinder part of the ship, ready in the nick of time to rise up and hush the wind and silence the sea. I believe the Son of God was in that tossing boat, and that when these lads cried out, in their extremity, “Master, save us, we perish!” I think then and there he came to their spiritual and immortal rescue. Let us pray God he will comfort those who are waiting for more minute tidings of this event. The tongue of the cable seems to have been palsied with the tidings, and it does not talk plainly. I wish their bodies might be found. It would be a satisfaction, though a sad satisfaction, to have them here in one of our own cemeteries. As the mother said to me a few hours later, it would seem like tucking them away in bed safely for the night. But if God shall deny these parents this, it will make no difference to the lads and the archangel’s trumpet that wakes up the sea will wake up also the lake. And, after all, they can find no grander place to sleep than where they are sleeping now; the shadows of Jura and the Alps blanketing them in their slumbers, while vast, majestic Mont Blanc bends over them snow-white, the only fit type of the great white throne before which they and we shall be assembled. Before they went away, on the finger of one of the lads was placed a gold ring with the inscription, “God bless you”; and on the finger of the other lad was placed a gold ring with the inscription, “Remember father and mother”; but God your Father would this night put upon your soul immortal the signet-ring of his everlasting affection. Will you wear it? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 63: 061. JOSHUA ======================================================================== Joshua ======================================================================== CHAPTER 64: 062. TRIUMPH ALL THE WAY ======================================================================== Triumph All the Way Joshua 1:5 : “There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life.” Moses was dead. A beautiful tradition says the Lord kissed him, and in that act drew forth the soul of the dying lawgiver. He had been buried, only one Person at the funeral, the same One who kissed him. But God never takes a man away from any place of usefulness until he has some one ready to replace him. The Lord does not go looking around amid a great variety of candidates to find some one especially fitted for the vacated position. He makes a man for that place. Moses has passed off the stage, and Joshua, the hero, puts his foot on the platform of history so solidly that all the ages echo with the tread. He was a magnificent fighter, but he always fought on the right side, and he never fought unless God told him to fight. He got his military equipment from God, who gave him the promise at the start: “There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life.” God fulfilled this promise, although Joshua’s first battle was with the spring freshet; the next with a stone wall; the next, leading on a regiment of whipped cowards, and the next battle against darkness, wheeling the sun and the moon into his battalion, and the last, against the King of Terrors, Death—five great victories. As a rule, when the general of an army starts out in a war he would like to have a small battle in order that he may get his own courage up and rally his troops and get them drilled for greater conflicts; but the first undertaking of Joshua was greater than the leveling of Fort Pulaski, or the assault of Gibraltar, or the overthrow of the Bastile. It was the crossing of the Jordan at the time of the spring freshet. The snows of Mount Lebanon had just been melting and they poured down into the valley, and the whole valley was a raging torrent. So the Canaanites stand on one bank and they look across and see Joshua and the Israelites, and they laugh and say: “Aha! they cannot disturb us until the freshets fall; it is impossible for them to reach us.” But after a while they look across the water and they see a movement in the army of Joshua. They say, “What is the matter now? Why there must be a panic among those troops, and they are going to fly, or perhaps they are going to try to march across the river Jordan. Joshua is a lunatic.” But Joshua, the chieftain, looks at his army and cries: “Forward, march!” and they start for the bank of the Jordan. One mile ahead go two priests carrying a glittering box four feet long and two feet wide. It is the Ark of the Covenant. And they come down, and no sooner do they just touch the rim of the water with their feet, than by an Almighty fiat, Jordan parts. The army of Joshua marches right on without getting their feet wet, over the bottom of the river, a path of chalk and broken shells and pebbles, until they get to the other bank. Then they lay hold of the oleanders, and tamarisks, and willows, and pull themselves up a bank thirty or forty feet high, and having gained the other bank, they clap their shields and their cymbals, and sing the praises of the God of Joshua. But no sooner have they reached the bank than the waters begin to dash and roar, and with a terrific rush they break loose from their strange anchorage. As the hand of the Lord God is taken away from the thus uplifted waters—waters perhaps uplifted half a mile— they rush down, and some of the unbelieving Israelites say, “Alas, alas, what a misfortune! Why could not those waters have stayed parted? Because perhaps we may want to go back. O Lord, we are engaged in a risky business. Those Canaanites may eat us up. How if we want to go back? Would it not have been a more complete miracle if the Lord had parted the waters to let us come through, and kept them parted to let us go back if we are defeated?” My friends, God makes no provision for a Christian’s retreat. He clears the path all the way to Canaan. To go back is to die. The same gatekeepers that swung back the amethystine and crystalline gate of the Jordan to let Israel pass through, now swing shut the amethystine and crystalline gate of the Jordan to keep the Israelites from going back. Victory ahead, but water thirty feet deep behind, surging to death and darkness and woe. But you say: “Why did not those Canaanites, when they had such a splendid chance, standing on the top of the bank thirty or forty feet high, completely demolish those poor Israelites down in the river?” I will tell you why. God had made a promise, and he was going to keep it. “There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life.” But this is no place for the host to stop. Joshua gives the command: “Forward, march!” In the distance there is a long grove of trees and at the end of the grove is a city. It is a city with arbors, a city with walls seeming to reach to the heavens, to buttress the very sky. It is the great metropolis that commands the mountain pass. It is Jericho. That city was afterward captured by Pompey, and once by Herod the Great, and once again by the Mohammedans; but this campaign the Lord plans. There shall be no swords, no shields, no battering-ram. There shall be only one weapon of war, and that a ram’s horn. The horn of the slain ram was sometimes taken and holes were punctured in it, and then the musician would put the instrument to his lips, and he would run his fingers over this rude musical instrument and make a great deal of sweet harmony for the people. That was the only kind of weapon. Seven priests were to take these rude rustic musical instruments, and they were to go around the city every day for six days—once a day for six days—and then on the seventh day they were to go around blowing these rude musical instruments seven times, and then at the close of the seventh blowing of the ram’s horns on the seventh day, the peroration of the whole scene was to be a shout at which those great walls should tumble from capstone to base. The seven priests with the rude musical instruments pass all around the city walls on the first day, and score a failure. Not so much as a piece of plaster broke loose from the wall—not so much as a loosened rock, not so much as a piece of mortar lost from its place. “There,” say the unbelieving Israelites, “did I not tell you so? Why, those ministers are fools. The idea of going around the city with those musical instruments and expecting in that way to destroy it. Joshua has been spoiled; he thinks because he has overthrown and conquered the spring freshet, he can overthrow the stone wall. Why, it is not philosophic. Do you not see there is no relation between the blowing of these musical instruments and the knocking down of the wall? It is not philosophic.” And I suppose there were many wiseacres who stood with their brows knitted, and with the forefinger of the right hand to the forefinger of the left hand, arguing it all out, and showing that it was not possible that such a cause could produce such an effect. And I suppose that night in the encampment there was plenty of caricature, and if Joshua had been nominated for any high military position, he would not have received many votes. Joshua’s stock was down. The second day the priests blowing the musical instruments go around the city, and again a failure. The third day, and a failure; fourth day, and a failure; fifth day, and a failure; sixth day, and a failure. The seventh day comes, the climacteric day. Joshua is up early in the morning and examines the troops, walks all about, looks at the city wall. The priests start to make the circuit of the city. They go all around once, all around twice, three times, four times, five times, six times, seven times, and a failure. There is only one more thing to do, and that is to utter a great shout. I see the Israelitish army straightening themselves up, filling their lungs for a vociferation such as never was heard before and never heard after. Joshua feels that the hour has come, and he cries out to his host: “Shout, for the Lord hath given you the city.” All together the troops shout: “Down, Jericho, down Jericho!” and the long line of solid masonry begins to quiver and to move and to rock. Stand from under! She falls! Crash! go the walls and temples, the towers, the palaces; the air blackened with the dust. The huzza of the victorious Israelites and the groan of the conquered Canaanites commingle, and Joshua, standing there in the debris of the wall, hears a voice saying: “There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life.” Only one house spared. Who lives there? Some great king? No. Some woman distinguished for great kindly deeds? No. She had been conspicuous for her crimes. It is the house of Rahab. Why was her house soared? Because she had been a great sinner? No, but because she repented, demonstrating to all the ages that there is mercy for the chief of sinners. The red cord of divine injunction reaching from her window to the ground, so that when the people saw the red cord they knew it was the divine indication that they should not disturb the premises; making us think of the divine cord of a Saviour’s deliverance, the red cord of a Saviour’s kindness, the red cord of a Saviour’s mercy, the red cord of our rescue. Mercy for the chief of sinners. Put your trust in that God, and no damage shall befall you. When our world shall be more terribly surrounded than was Jericho, even by the trumpets of the judgment day, and the hills and the mountains, the metal bones and ribs of nature, shall break, they who have had Rahab’s faith shall have Rahab’s deliverance. When wrapped in fire the realms of ether glow, And Heaven’s last thunder shakes the earth below; Thou undismayed shalt o’er the ruins smile, And light thy torch at Nature’s funeral pile. But Joshua’s troops may not halt here. The command is, “Forward, march!” There is the city of Ai; it must be taken. How shall it be taken? A scouting party comes back and says; “Joshua, we can do that without you; it is going to be a very easy job; you just stay here while we go and capture it.” They march with a small regiment in front of that city. The men of Ai look at them and give one yell, and the Israelites run like reindeer. The Northern troops at Bull Run did not make such rapid time as these Israelites with the Canaanites after them. They never cut such a sorry figure as when they were on the retreat. You who go out in the battles of God with only half a force, instead of your taking the men of Ai, the men of Ai will take you. Look at the Church of God on the retreat. The Bornesian cannibals ate up Munson, the missionary. “Fall back!” said a great many Christian people; “Fall back! O Church of God! Borneo will never be taken. Do you not see the Bornesian cannibals have eaten up Munson, the missionary?” Tyndall delivers his lecture at the University of Glasgow, and a great many good people say: “Fall back! O Church of God! Do you not see that Christian philosophy is going to be overcome by worldly philosophy? Fall back!” Geology plunges its crowbar into the mountains and there are a great many people who say: “Scientific investigation is going to overthrow the Mosaic account of the creation. Fall back!” But friends of God never have had any right to fall back. Joshua falls on his face in chagrin. It is the only time you ever see the back of his head. He falls on his face and begins to whine, and he says, “O Lord God, wherefore hast thou at all brought this people over Jordan to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites, to destroy us? Would to God we had been content and dwelt on the other side of Jordan. For the Canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land shall hear of it, and shall environ us round, and cut off our name from the earth.” I am very glad Joshua said that. Before, it seemed as if he were a supernatural being, and therefore, could not be an example to us, but I find he is a man, he is only a man. Just as sometimes you find a man under severe opposition, or in a bad state of physical health, or worn out with overwork, lying down and sighing about being defeated. I am encouraged when I hear this cry of Joshua as he lies in the dust. God comes and rouses him. How does he rouse him? By complimentary apostrophe? No. He says, “Get thee up. Wherefore liest thou upon thy face?” Joshua rises, and, I warrant you, with a mortified look. But his old courage comes back. The fact was, that was not his battle. If he had been in it he would have gone on to victory. He gathers his troops around him and says: “Now, let us go up and capture the city of Ai; let us go up right away.” They march on. He puts the majority of the troops behind a ledge of rocks in the night, and then he sends comparatively small regiments up in front of the city. The men of Ai come out with a shout. The small regiments of Israelites in stratagem fall back and fall back, and when all the men of Ai have left the city and are in pursuit of these scattered, or seemingly scattered regiments, Joshua stands on a rock—I see his locks flying in the wind as he points his spear toward the doomed city, and that is the signal. The men rush out from behind the rocks and take the city, and it is put to the torch, and then these Israelites in the city march down and the flying regiments of Israelites return, and between these two waves of Israelitish prowess the men of Ai are destroyed, and the Israelites gain the victory; and while I see the curling smoke of that destroyed city on the sky, and while I hear the huzza of the Israelites and the groan of the Canaanites, Joshua hears something louder than it all, ringing and echoing through his soul, “There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life.” But this is no place for the host of Joshua to stop. “Forward, march!” cries Joshua to the troops. There is the city of Gibeon. It has put itself under the protection of Joshua. They send word, “There are five kings after us; they are going to destroy us; send troops quick; send us help right away.” Joshua has a three-days’ march, more than double-quick. On the morning of the third day he is before the enemy. There are two long lines of battle. The battle opens with great slaughter, but the Canaanites soon discover something. They say, “That is Joshua; that is the man who conquered the spring freshet and knocked down the stone wall of Jericho, and detroyed the city of Ai. There is no use fighting.” They sound a retreat, and as they begin to retreat, Joshua and his host spring upon them like a panther, pursuing them over the rocks, while the catapults of the sky pour a volley of hailstones into the valley, and all the artillery of the heavens, with bullets of iron, pound the Canaanites against the ledges of Beth-horon. “Oh!” says Joshua, “this is surely a victory.” “But do you not see the sun is going down?” Those Amorites are going to get away after all, and then they will come up some other time and bother us, and perhaps destroy us. See, the sun is going down. Oh, for a longer day than has ever been seen in this climate!” What is the matter with Joshua? Has he fallen in an apoplectic fit? No. He is in prayer. Look out when a good man makes the Lord his ally. Joshua raises his face, radiant with prayer, and looks at the descending sun over Gibeon and at the faint crescent of the moon, for you know the queen of the night sometimes will linger around the palaces of the day. Pointing one hand at the descending sun and the other hand at the faint crescent of the moon, in the name of that God who shaped the worlds and moves the worlds, he cries: “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou moon, in the valley of Ajalon.” They halted. Whether it was by refraction of the sun’s rays, or by the stopping of the whole planetary system, I do not know, and do not care. I leave it to the Christian scientists and the infidel scientists to settle that question, while I tell you I have seen the same thing. “What!” say you, “not the sun standing still?” Yes. The same miracle is performed nowadays. The wicked do not live out half their day, and their sun sets at noon. But let a man start out in battle for God and the truth, and against sin, and the day of his usefulness is prolonged and prolonged and prolonged. John Summerfield was a consumptive Methodist. He looked fearfully white, I am told, as he stood in the old Sands Street Church, in Brooklyn, preaching Christ, and again on the anniversary platform in New York, pleading for the Bible until unusual and unknown glories rolled forth from that book. When he was dying his pillow was brushed with the wings of an angel from the skies, the messenger that God sent down. Did John Summerfield’s sun set? Did John Summerfield’s day end? Oh, no! He lives on in his burning utterances in behalf of the Christian Church. He said, “I cannot die now. I am only twenty-seven years of age. Sun of my Christian influence, stand thou still above America.” And it stood still. Robert McCheyne was a consumptive Presbyterian. It was said when he preached he coughed so it seemed as if he would never preach again. His name is fragrant in all Christendom—that name is mightier today than was ever his living presence. He lived to preach the Gospel in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Dundee, but he went away very early. He preached himself into the grave. Has Robert McCheyne’s sun set? Is Robert McCheyne’s day ended? Oh, no! His dying delirium was filled with prayer, and when he lifted his hand to pronounce the benediction upon his family, and the benediction upon his country, he seemed to say: “I cannot die now; I want to live on and on. I want to start an influence for the Church that will never cease. I am only thirty years of age. Sun of my Christian ministry, stand still over Scotland.” And it stood still. A long time ago there was a Christian woman very consecrated, and she had a drunken husband, and so on came the night of domestic trouble. She lost her children, and there came the night of bereavement. She was very ill, and there came the night of sickness. Her soul departed, and there came the night of death. But all these nights of trouble, and darkness, and sorrow, and sickness were illumined by the grace of the Gospel; and people came many miles to see how cheerful a Christian could be when ill, and how cheerfully a Christian could die. The moon that illumined that night of trouble was a reflection from the Sun of Righteousness. In the last hour of that night—that night of darkness and sickness and misfortune—as she lifted her hand toward heaven, those who stood nearest her pillow could hear the whisper, for she wanted to live on in the generations that were to follow, consecrated to God; she wanted to have an influence long after she had entered upon her eternal reward, and while her hand was lifted and her lips were moving, those who stood nearest her pillow could hear her say, “I want to live on for many years of good. Thou Moon, stand still in the valley of Ajalon.” But Joshua was not quite through. There was time for five funerals before the sun of that prolonged day set. Who will preach their funeral sermon? Massillon preached the funeral sermon over Louis XVI. Who will preach the funeral sermon of those five dead kings—King of Jerusalem, King of Hebron, King of Jarmuth, King of Lachish, King of Eglon? Let it be by Joshua. What is his text? What shall be the epitaph put on the door of the tomb? “There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life.” Before you fasten up the door, I want five more kings beheaded and thrust in: King Alcohol, King Fraud, King Lust, King Superstition, King Infidelity. Let them be beheaded and hurl them in. Then fasten up the door forever. What shall the inscription and what shall the epitaph be?—for all Christian philanthropists of all ages are going to come and look at it. What shall the inscription be? “There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life.” But it is time for Joshua to go home. He is a hundred and ten years old. Washington went down the Potomac and at Mount Vernon closed his days. Wellington died peacefully at Apsley House: Now, where shall Joshua rest? Why, he is to have his greatest battle now. After a hundred and ten years he has to meet a king who has more subjects than all the present population of the earth, his throne a pyramid of skulls, his parterre the graveyards and the cemeteries of the world, his chariot the world’s hearse—the King of Terrors. But if this is Joshua’s greatest battle, it is going to be Joshua’s greatest victory. He gathers his friends around him and gives his valedictory and it is full of reminiscence. Young men tell what they are going to do; old men tell what they have done. And as you have heard a grandfather, or great-grandfather, seated by the evening fire, tell of Monmouth or Yorktown, and then lift the crutch or staff as though it were a musket, to fight, and show how the old battles were won—so Joshua gathers his friends around his dying couch, and he tells them the story of what he has been through, and as he lies there, his white locks snowing down on his wrinkled forehead, I ask if God has kept his promise all the way through. As he lies there he tells the story one, two, or three times—you have heard old people tell a story two or three times over—and he answers: “I go the way of all the earth, and not one word of the promise has failed, not one word thereof has failed; all has come to pass, not one word thereof has failed.” And then he turns to his family, as a dying parent will, and says: “Choose now whom you will serve, the God of Israel, or the God of the Amorites. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” A dying parent cannot be reckless or thoughtless of his children. Consent to part with them forever at the door of the tomb we cannot. By the cradle in which their infancy was rocked, by the bosom on which they first lay, by the blood of the covenant, by the God of Joshua, it shall not be. We will not part, we cannot part. Jehovah-Jireh, we take Thee at Thy promise. “I will be a God to thee and thy seed after thee.” Dead, the old chieftain must be laid out. Handle him very gently; that sacred body is over a hundred and ten years of age. Lay him out, stretch out those feet that walked dry shod the parted Jordan. Close those lips which helped blow the blast at which the walls of Jericho fell. Fold the arm that lifted the spear toward the doomed city of Ai. Fold it right over the heart that exulted when the five kings fell. But where shall we get the burnished granite for the headstone and the footstone? I bethink myself now. I imagine that for the head it shall be the sun that stood still upon Gibeon, and for the foot, the moon that stood still in the valley of Ajalon. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 65: 063. THE SCARLET ROPE ======================================================================== The Scarlet Rope Joshua 2:21 : “And she bound the scarlet line in the window.” If you have any idea that I have chosen this text because it is odd, you do not know me nor the errand on which I come. Eternity is too near and life too short for men to take texts merely because they are peculiar. I take this because it is full of the old Gospel. There is a very sick and sad house in the city of Jericho. What is the matter? Is it poverty? No. Worse than that. Is it leprosy? No. Worse than that. Is it death? No. Worse than that. A daughter has forsaken her home. By what infernal plot she was induced to leave, I know not; but they look in vain for her return. Sometimes they hear a footstep very much like hers, and they start up and say, “She comes!” but only to sink back again into disappointment. Alas! alas! The father sits by the hour, with his face in his hands, saying not one word. The mother’s hair is becoming gray too fast, and she begins to stoop, so that those who saw her only a little while ago in the street know her not now as she passes. The brothers clench their fists, swearing vengeance against the despoiler of their home. Alas! will the poor soul never come back? There is a long, deep shadow over all the household. Added to this, there is an invading army six miles away, just over the river, coming on to destroy the city; and what with the loss of their child, and the coming-on of that destructive army, I think the old people wished that they could die. That is the first scene in this drama of the Bible. In a house on the wall of the city is that daughter. That is her home now. Two spies have come from the invading army to look around through Jericho, and see how best it may be taken. Yonder is the lost child, in that dwelling on the wall of the city. The police hear of it, and soon there is the shuffling of feet all around about the door, and the city government demands the surrender of those two spies. First, Rahab—for that was the name of the lost child—first, Rahab secretes the two spies, and gets their pursuers off the track; but after a while she says to them: “I will make a bargain with you. I will save your life if you will save my life, and the life of my father and my mother and my brothers and my sisters when the victorious army comes upon the city.” Oh, she had not forgotten her home yet, you see! The wanderer never forgets home. Her heart breaks now as she thinks of how she has maltreated her parents, and she wishes she were back with them again, and she wishes she could get away from her sinful enthralment; and sometimes she looks up in the face of the midnight, bursting into agonizing tears. No sooner have these two spies promised to save her life, and the life of her father and mother and brothers and sisters than Rahab takes a scarlet cord and ties it around the body of one of the spies, brings him to the window, and, as he clambers out—nervous lest she have not strength to hold him—with muscular arms such as women seldom have, she lets him down, hand over hand, in safety to the ground. Not being exhausted, she ties the cord around the other spy, brings him to the window, and just as successfully lets him down to the ground. No sooner have these men untied the scarlet cord from their bodies than they look up, and they say: “You had better get all your friends in this house—your father, your mother, your brothers, and your sisters; you had better get them in this house. And then, after you have them here, take this red cord which you have put around our bodies, and tie it across the window; and when our victorious army comes up, and sees that scarlet thread in the window, it will spare this house and all who are in it. Shall it be so?” cried the spies. “Ay, ay,” said Rahab, from the window, “it shall be so!” That is the second scene in this Bible drama. There is a knock at the door of the old man. He looks up, and says, “Come in”; and, lo! there is Rahab, the lost child; but she has no time to talk. They gather in excitement around her, and she says to them: “Get ready quickly, and go with me to my house. The army is coming! The trumpet! Make haste! Fly! The enemy!” That is the third scene in this Bible drama. The hosts of Israel are all around about the doomed city of Jericho. Crash! goes the great metropolis, heaps on heaps. The air suffocating with the dust, and horrible with the screams of a dying city. All the houses flat down. All the people dead. Ah, no, no! On a crag of the wall—the only piece of the wall left standing—there is a house which we must enter. There is a family there that has been spared. Who are they? Let us go in and see. Rahab, her father, her mother, her brothers, her sisters, all safe, and the only house left standing in all the city. What saved them? Was the house more firmly built? Oh, no! it was built in the most perilous place, on the wall, and the wall was the first thing that fell. Was it because her character was any better than any of the other population of the city? Oh, no! Why, then, was she spared, and all her household? Can you tell me why? Oh, it was the scarlet line in the window. That is the fourth scene in this Bible drama. When the destroying angel went through Egypt it was the blood of the lamb on the door-posts that saved the Israelites; and now that vengeance has come upon Jericho, it is the same color that assures the safety of Rahab and all her household. My friends, there are foes coming upon us, more deadly and more tremendous, to overthrow our immortal interests. They will trample us down, and crush us out forever, unless there be some skilful mode of rescue open. The police of death already begin to clamor for our surrender; but blessed be God, there is a way out. It is through the window, and by a rope so saturated with the blood of the cross that it is as red as that with which the spies were lowered; and if once our souls shall be delivered, then, the scarlet cord stretched across the window of our escape, we may defy all bombardment, earthly and satanic. In the first place, carrying out the idea of my text, we must stretch this scarlet cord across the window of our rescue. There comes a time when a man is surrounded. What is that in the front door of his soul? It is the threatenings of the future. What is that in the back door of the soul? It is the sins of the past. He cannot get out of either of those doorways. If he attempts it he will be cut to pieces. What shall he do? Escape through the window of God’s mercy. That sunshine has been pouring in for many a day. God’s inviting mercy. God’s pardoning mercy. God’s all-conquering mercy. God’s everlasting mercy. But, you say, the window is so high. Ah, there is a rope, the very one with which the cross and its Victim were lifted. That was strong enough to hold Christ, and it is strong enough to hold you. Bear all your weight upon it, all your hopes for this life, all your hopes for the life that is to come. Escape now through the window. “But,” you say, “that cord is too small to save me; that salvation will never do at all for such a sinner as I have been.” I suppose that the rope with which Rahab let the two spies to the ground was not thick enough; but they took that or nothing. And, my dear brother, that is your alternative. There is only one scarlet line that can save you. There have been hundreds and thousands who have been borne away in safety by that scarlet line, and it will bear you away in safety. Do you notice what a very narrow escape those spies had? I suppose they came with flustered cheek and with excited heart. They had a very narrow escape. They went in the broad door of sin; but how did they come out? They came out of the window. They went up by the stairs of stone; they came down on a slender thread. And so, my friends, we go easily and unabashedly into sin, and all the doors are open; but if we get out at all it will be by being let down over precipices, wriggling and helpless, the strong grip above keeping us from being dashed on the rocks beneath. It is easy to get into sin, young man. It is not easy to get out of it. A young man, to-night, goes to the marble counter of the barroom of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He asks for a brandy-smash—called so, I suppose, because it smashes the man that takes it. As the young man receives it, he does not seem to be at all excited. It does not give any glassiness to the eye. He walks home in beautiful apparel, and all his prospects are brilliant. That drink is not going to destroy him, but it is the first step on a bad road. Years have passed on, and I see that young man after he has gone the whole length of dissipation. It is midnight, and he is in a hotel—perhaps the very one where he took the first drink. He is in the fourth story, and the delirium is on him. He rises from the bed and comes to the window, and it is easily lifted; so he lifts it. Then he pushes back the blinds, and puts his foot on the window-sill. Then he gives one spring, and the watchman finds his disfigured body, unrecognizable, on the pavement. Oh, if he had only waited a little—if he had come down on the scarlet ladder that Jesus holds from the wall for him and for you and for me! But no, he made one jump of it, and was gone. A minister of Christ was not long ago dismissed from his diocese for intoxication, and in a public meeting at the West he gave this account of his sorrow. He said: “I had a beautiful home once; but strong drink shattered it. I had beautiful children; but this fiend of rum took their dimpled hands in his and led them to the grave. I had a wife—to know her was to love her; but she sits in wretchedness to-night while I wander over the earth. I had a mother, and the pride of her life was I; but the thunderbolt struck her. I now have scarcely a friend in all the world. Taste of the bitter cup I have tasted, and then answer me as to whether I have any hatred for the agency of my ruin. Hate it! I hate the whole damning traffic. I would to God to-night that every distillery were in flames, for then in the glowing sky I would write in the smoke of the ruin: ‘Woe to him that putteth the bottle to his neighbor’s lips!’“ That minister of the Gospel went in through the broad door of temptation; he came out of the window. And when I see the temptations that are all about us, and when I know the proclivity to sin in every man’s heart, I see that, if any of us escape, it will be a very narrow escape. Oh, if we have, my friends, got off from our sin, let us tie the scarlet thread by which we have been saved across the window. Let us do it in praise of him whose blood dyed it that color. Let it be in announcement of the fact that we shall no more be fatally assaulted. “There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” Then let all the forces of this world come up in cavalry charge, and let the spirits of darkness come on, an infernal storming party attempting to take our soul; this rope twisted from these words, “The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin,” will hurl them back defeated forever. Still further, we must take this red cord of the text and stretch it across the window of our households. When the Israelitish army came up against Jericho, they said, “What is that in the window?” Some one said, “That is a scarlet line.” “Oh,” said some one else, “that must be the house that was to be spared. Don’t touch it.” That line was thick enough and long enough and conspicuous enough to save Rahab, her father, her mother, her brothers, and her sisters—the entire family. Have our households as good protection? You have bolts on the front door and on the back and fastenings to the window and perhaps burglar alarms and perhaps an especial watchman blowing his whistle at midnight before your dwelling; but all that cannot protect your household. Is there on our houses the sign of a Saviour’s sacrifice and mercy? Is there a scarlet line in the window? Have your children been consecrated to Christ? Have you been washed in the blood of the atonement? In what room do you have family prayers? Show me where it is you are accustomed to kneel. The sky is black with the coming deluge. Is your family inside or outside the ark? It is a sad thing for a man to reject Christ; but to lie down in the night of sin, across the path to heaven, so that his family come up and trip over him into an infinity of horrors—that is the longest, the deepest, the mightiest! It is a sad thing for a mother to reject Christ; but to gather her family around her, and then take them by the hand and lead them out into paths of worldliness, away from God and heaven—oh, it will take all the dirges of earth and hell to weep out that agony. I suppose there are here homes represented where there has not been an audible prayer offered for ten years. There may be geranium and cactus in the window and upholstery hovering over it and childish faces looking out of it; but there is no scarlet thread stretched across it. Although that house may seem to be on the finest street in all the city, it is really on the edge of a marsh across which sweep most poisonous malarias, and it has a sandy foundation and its splendor will come down and great will be the fall of it. A home without God! A prayerless father! An undevout mother! Awful! awful! Is that you? Will you keep on, my brother, on the wrong road, and take your loved ones with you? May God arrest you before you complete the ruin of those whom you ought to save. You see I talk plainly to you, just as I would have you talk plainly to me. Time is so short that we cannot waste any of it on apologies or indirections or circumlocutions. You owe to your children, O father! O mother! more than food, more than clothing, more than shelter—you owe them the example of a prayerful, consecrated, pronounced, out-and-out Christian life. You cannot afford to keep it away from them. Now, as I stand here, you do not see any hands outstretched toward me, and yet there are hands on my brow and hands on both my shoulders. They are hands of parental benediction. It is quite a good many years ago now since we folded those hands as they began the last sleep on the banks of the Raritan, in the village cemetery; but those hands are stretched out toward me to-night, and they are just as warm and they are just as gentle as when I sat at their knee at five years of age. And I shall never shake off those hands. I do not want to. They have helped me so much a thousand times already, and I do not expect to have a trouble or a trial between this and my grave where those hands will not help me. Theirs was not a very splendid home, as the world calls it; but we had a family Bible there, well worn by tender perusal; and there was a family altar there, where we knelt morning and night; and there was a holy Sabbath there; and stretched in a straight line, or hung in loops or festoons, there was a scarlet line in the window. Oh, the tender, precious, blessed memory of a Christian home! Is that the impression you are making upon your children? When you are dead—and it will not be long before you are—when you are dead, will your child say, “If there ever was a good Christian father, mine was one. If there ever was a good Christian mother, mine was one?” Will they say that after you are dead? Standing some Sabbath night in church preaching the glorious Gospel, as I am trying to do, will they tell the people in that day how there are hands of benediction on their brow and hands of parental benediction on both their shoulders? Still further, we want this scarlet line of the text drawn across the window of our prospects. I see Rahab and her father and her mother and her brothers and sisters looking out over Jericho, the city of palm-trees, and across the river and over at the army invading and then up to the mountains and the sky. Mind you, this house was on the wall, and I suppose the prospect from the window must have been very wide. Besides that, I do not think that the scarlet line at all interfered with the view of the landscape. The assurance it gave of safety must have added to the beauty of the country. To-night, my friends, we stand or sit in the window of earthly prospect, and we look off toward the hills of heaven and the landscape of eternal beauty. God has opened the window for us, and we look out; but how if we do not get there? If we never get there, better never to have had even this faint glimpse of it. We now only get a dim outline of the inhabitants. We now only here and there catch a note of the exquisite harmony. But blessed be God for this scarlet line in the window! That tells me that the blood of Christ bought that home for my soul, and I shall go there when my work is done here. And as I put my hand on that scarlet line everything in the future brightens. My eyesight gets better, and the robes of the victors are more lustrous, and our loved ones who went away some time ago—they do not stand any more with their backs to us, but their faces are this way, and their voice drops through this Sabbath air, saying, with all tenderness and sweetness, “Come! Come! Come!” And the child that you think of only as buried—why, there she is, and it is May-day in heaven; and they gather the amaranth and they pluck the lilies and they twist them into a garland for her brow, and she is one of the May-queens of heaven. Oh, do you think they could see our waving now? I wonder if they can see us from that good land? I think they can. If from this window of earthly prospect we can almost see them, then from their towers of light I think they can fully see us. And so I wave them the glory and I wave them the joy and I say, “Have you got through with all your troubles?” and their voices answer, “God hath wiped away all tears from our eyes.” I say, “Is it as grand up there as you thought it would be?” and the voices answer, “Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” I say, “Do you have any more struggle for bread?” and they answer, “We hunger no more, we thirst no more.” And I say, “Have you been out to the cemetery of the golden city?” and they answer, “There is no death here.” And I look out through the night heavens, and I say, “Where do you get your light from, and what do you burn in the temple?” and they answer, “There is no night here, and we have no need of candle or of star.” And I say, “What book do you sing out of?” and they answer, “The Hallelujah Chorus.” And I say, “In the splendor and magnificence of the city, don’t you ever get lost?” and they answer, “The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne leadeth us to living fountains of water.” Oh, how near it seems to-night! Their wings—do you not feel them? Their harps—do you not hear them? And all that through the window of our earthly prospect, across which stretcheth the scarlet line. Be that my choice color forever. Is it too glaring for you? Do you like the blue because it reminds you of the sky or the green because it makes you think of the foliage or the black because it has in it the shadows of the night? I take the scarlet because it shall make me think of the price that was paid for my soul. Oh, the blood! the blood! the blood of the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world! Through it we escape sin. Through it we reach heaven. Will you let it atone for you? Believe in it, and you live. Refuse it, and you die. Will you accept it, or will you pull over on you the eternal calamity of rejecting it? I see where you are. You are at the cross-roads today. The next step decides everything. Pause before you take it; but do not pause too long, lest the wind of God’s justice shut the door that has been standing open so long. I hear the thunder of God’s artillery. I hear the blast of the trumpet that wakes the dead. Look out! look out! For in that day, and in our closing moment on earth, better than any other defense or barricade, however high or broad or stupendous, will be one little, thin, scarlet thread in the window. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 66: 064. THE JORDANIC PASSAGE ======================================================================== The Jordanic Passage Joshua 3:17. “And the priests that bare the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan, and all the Israelites passed over on dry ground, until all the people were passed clean over Jordan.” Washington crossed the Delaware when crossing was pronounced impossible; but he did it by boat. Xerxes crossed the Hellespont with two million men, but he did it by an extemporized bridge. The Israelites crossed the Red Sea, but the same orchestra that celebrated the deliverance of one army sounded the strangulation of the other. This crossing in my text is different from all those. It was without the loss of a human life. It was without the loss of so much as a linchpin. It seemed as if the waters were driven away. As the priests, who were the vanguard of the army, came down and touched the brim of the river the waters fled away, and then it was as if all the dampness had been sponged off, as though the road by a towel had been wiped dry. The streets of Jerusalem were not more dry than the depths of that river. Yonder go the army of the Israelites, the armed men in front, followed by the wives, the children, the flocks, and the herds. As they come down into the midst of the river, and the waters pile up in crystal wall, the passing multitudes look up and think of the peril if that wall should fall before the march is completed, and the people get to the other side, the bank amid the tamarisks and the oleanders. And so I think the mothers hugged their children closer to their hearts and hastened their pace. Quick now, get up on the other bank, all the host, the armed men, the wives, the children, the flocks, the herds lest this which seems to be a triumphal march, end in awful catastrophe. Seated this morning on the shelving of limestone we look off upon the river, this wonderful river that Joshua crossed under rainbow arch woven out of the spray—the river which afterward became the baptistery where Christ was sprinkled or plunged—the river in which the borrowed axe-head miraculously swam at the prophet’s order—the river illustrious in the world’s history for heroic faith and omnipotent deliverance, and typical of scenes to transpire in your life and mine, scenes enough to make us from sole of foot to crown of head thrill with gladness. Standing this morning by the affrighted and fugitive river of Jordan, we learn in the first place that obstacles touched vanish. The priests came down at the head of the Israelitish host, and they did not wade in chin deep, or chest deep, or knee deep, or ankle deep; they with the foot just touched the rim of the water, and Jordan fled. So it was with a great many of the obstacles in your life and mine. They are tremendous in the distance, but when we advance upon them, when we touch them with our courage they are gone. Paul and John in the Scriptures seemed to have especial antipathy to cross dogs. Paul says in Philippians, “Beware of dogs;” and John seems to shut the gate of heaven against all the canine species, when he says, “Without are dogs.” But I have been told that when those ferocious animals come upon you, if you can keep your eye upon them they retreat. Whether that is so or not I cannot say, but this I know, that many of the troubles and annoyances of life which hound you, if you will only turn upon them, and as they advance upon you, you advance upon them and you keep your eye of courage upon them and cry, “Begone!” they will slink and cower. There is a beautiful tradition among the American Indians that Manitou was traveling in the invisible world, and that he came upon a hedge of thorns, and after a while he saw wild beasts glare upon him from the thicket, and after a while he saw an impassable river; but as he determined to proceed, did go on, the thorns turned to be phantoms, the wild beasts a powerless ghost, the river only the phantom of a river. And it is the simple fact of our lives that the vast majority of the obstacles in our way disappear when we march upon them. Jordan touched vanishes. You see some duty in the future you do not want to perform. “Oh,” you say, “I haven’t the physical courage for it, I haven’t faith in God for it, I can’t do it, I am not competent for the circumstance!” Go right on and do your whole duty, and the obstacles will be gone. The waters touched vanish. What is true when we are well and in great prosperity, we imagine may be true in the last hour of life. How many there are who are afraid of the Jordan of death! If I should ask all those Christians in this audience, who have no fear or agitation about the crossing from this world into the next, to rise, there would not be twenty persons in the house rising. Why, it is not your time to die. God never gives dying grace until you are going to die. We might as well expect martyr’s grace when we are not called to be martyrs. It is the Jordan in the distance that is so terrible. When you come up to it it will depart. That is going to be true in all the histories—not one exception—of those who are the children of God. Good old John Livingston used to have a great horror of leaving this world. He was in a sloop going from Elizabethport to New York, and there came a sudden gust of wind, and the probability was that the sloop would be destroyed, and the most affrighted man on board was John Livingston, and many were surprised that so good and gracious and glorious a man as John Livingston should be affrighted under such circumstances; but when at last that man was called to die, he was as calm as a child asleep on a bank of flowers. It is death in the distance, not death close by, that affrights the Christian. Jordan touched vanishes. So it will be when your last hour comes. I say it in perfect confidence. I know it will be so. Christ, your priest, with bruised feet, will go ahead of you. He will put his foot to the brim of the water, and you will follow. The waters will fly and you will go through dryshod on beds of coral and flowers of heaven and paths of pearl. O! Could We Make These Doubts Remove, These Gloomy Doubts That Rise, And See the Canaan That We Love, With Unbeclouded Eyes, Could We but Stand Where Moses Stood And View the Landscape O’er, Not Jordan’s Stream or Death’s Cold Flood Could Fright Us From the Shore. Looking off upon this strange crossing of the river, I also learn the completeness of everything that God does. When the Jordan was bidden to halt, you would have supposed it would have overflowed and devastated the country. That would be the natural law. Halt a river in its march to the sea, and you destroy the country. But when God built an invisible dam across the Jordan so it halted, he built at the same time an invisible dam on either side the Jordan, so that the context says the waters stood up—stood up—they reared in their march. It was a complete miracle, complete in every respect, just like God’s work, always complete. But you would have said, “If the waters of the Jordan are drawn off it does not make any difference though there be two or three feet of water, the Israelites can easily wade through, and they will come up with saturated garments on the beach as people came up from a shipwreck.” No, it was better than that. You would have said, “If the waters of Jordan are drawn off, then there will be a bed of mud and slime through which the Israelites must pass. Draw off the waters of the Connecticut or the Hudson, or the Potomac, and there would be a bed of mud and slime impassable. It would take days and weeks for it to dry up.” But lo! the completeness of the divine miracle. The waters fly. The bed of the river is perfectly dry. They go through dryshod. Oh! the completeness of everything that God does. Does he build a universe, it is a perfect clock running ever since it was wound up. Fixed stars the pivots, constellations the intermoving wheels, and ponderous laws the weights and mighty swinging pendulum. The stars in the dome striking midnight, and the sun with brazen tongue tolling the hour of noon. The wildest comet has on it the chain of a law it cannot break. The thistle-down that flies before the school-boy’s breath is controlled by the same law that controls a whole universe. The rose-bush in your window is controlled by the same law that controls the tree of the universe, on which stars are ripening fruit, and on which God will some time put his hand and shake down the fruit. It is a complete universe. No astronomer has ever suggested an amendment. Does God make a Bible, it is a complete Bible. Standing amid its dreadful and delightful truths, you seem to be in the midst of an orchestra, where the wailing over sin, and the shoutings over pardon, and the martial strains of victory, sound like the anthem of eternity. It seems like an ocean of truth on which God walks, sometimes in the darkness of prophecy, and sometimes in the splendor with which he walked on Galilee—apostle answering to prophet, Paul to Isaiah, Revelation to Genesis. A complete book. It is the kiss of God on the soul of lost man. Does God provide a Saviour, he is a complete Saviour. God, man—divinity, humanity. He set up the starry pillars of the universe. He planted the cedars of Lebanon. He quarried the sardonyx and the chrysolite and the topaz for the wall of Heaven, putting down jasper for the foundation, and heaving up amethyst for the capstone, and made the twelve gates which are twelve pearls. A mighty Saviour, and yet a sympathetic Saviour. In one instant he thought out a universe, and yet, held by his mother’s hand. All heaven adoring him, yet on earth called “this fellow.” Angels folding their wings over their faces and bowing before him, holy, holy, holy, yet called a sot and a blasphemer. Rocked in a boat on Gennesaret, and yet he it is that undirks the lightning; from the storm-cloud and dismasts Lebanon of its cedars. Rubbing his hand over the place where you have an ache or pain, and yet the stars of heaven the adoring gems of his right hand. Holding us in his arms when we take the last look at our dead; sitting beside us at the tombstone, and while we plant roses there, he plants consolations in our soul. Every chapter a stalk. Every paragraph a stem. Every word a rose. A complete universe. A complete Bible. A complete Saviour. A complete Jordanic passage. Everything he does is complete. Again: I look off upon the wonderful scene of my text and I learn that between us and everything blight and beautiful and useful and prosperous, there is a river of difficulty that we must cross. “Oh!” said the Israelites to Joshua, “I wish I could get some of those grapes.” “Well,” said Joshua, “why don’t you cross over and get them.” The grapes are always on the other side. You have to cross over to get them. That which costs nothing is worth nothing. God puts everything valuable a little out of our reach, that we may struggle for it. For the same reason he puts gold deep down in the mine, and pearls deep down in the sea, to make us dig and dive. We all understand that in worldly things. Would God we understood it in religious things. Nobody is surprised to read that Cornelius Vanderbilt blistered his hands rowing a ferryboat. Nobody is surprised to read that A. T. Stewart used to sweep out his own store. You can think of those who had it very hard who now have it very easy. Their walls blossom and bloom with pictures. Carpets that made foreign looms laugh now embrace their feet. The horses neigh and champ their bits at the doorway, the glided harness tinkling with silver, and the carriage rolling away like a beautiful wave of New York life. Who is it? It is the boy who had all his estate slung over his shoulder in a cotton handkerchief. The silver on the harness of the dancing span is petrified sweat drops. That beautiful dress is the faded calico that God ran his hand over, and it became Turkish satin or Italian silk. Those diamonds are the tears which suffering froze as they fell. There is always a river of difficulty between us and anything that is worth having. There was a river of difficulty between Shakespeare, the boy holding the horses at the London Theatre for a sixpence, and Shakespeare, the world’s dramatist winning the applause of all nations by his incomparable tragedies. There was a river of difficulty between Benjamin Franklin, with a loaf of bread under his arm trudging along the street of Philadelphia, and Benjamin Franklin, the philosopher, outside of Boston, playing kite with the thunder storm. An indolent man was cured of his indolence by looking out of the window at night into another window, and seeing a man turning off one sheet of writing paper after another sheet of writing paper until almost the daybreak. Who was it that wrote until the morning? It was Walter Scott. Who was it that looked at him from the opposite window? Lockhart, after wards his illustrious biographer. It is push and struggle and drive. There are mountains to scale, there are rivers to ford. Lord Mansfield, pursued of the press and pursued of the populace, said, “If a man die in behalf of the law and liberty of his country, he cannot die too soon.” And there has been struggle for everybody that gained anything for themselves, or gained anything for the Church, or gained anything for the world. We all understand it in wordly things? Why can we not understand it in religious things. You think it is a mere accident that that old Christian knows so much about the Bible. Why, he was studying his Bible when you were reading your newspaper. He got strong by running the Christian race. In fifty Solferinos he learned how to fight. In a shipwreck he learned how to swim. It was by pounding the anvil of trouble that he became swarthy. Then when this Christian goes on and gets across all these other rivers of difficulty there is the River of Death still. Lieutenant Molineaux explored the Jordan, and he said he had several boats all split to pieces in the rapids of the Jordan. Some parts of the river are very dangerous, and he had his boats completely destroyed in trying to explore the river Jordan. And the River of Death has destroyed many. There is a gurgling in the water, there is a moaning in the air, there is a thunder in the sky, and God seems to write, “I will tread them in my wrath and trample them in my fury.” To some it seems a dreadful river to cross, but now here is the Christian coming. It is time for departure. He has crossed all the other rivers and here is the River of Death. His priest, the Lord Jesus Christ, with bruised feet, goes right on ahead of him and he comes to the water, and his breath gets shorter and shorter, and his last breath is gone as he touches the wave. But then all the billows toss their plumes and begin to sing: “O! death, where is thy sting? O! grave, where is thy victory?” “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more sea, and there shall be no more death.” What a matter of congratulation it must be to those Israelites that they not only got through themselves, but their families with them. Here are the fathers and mothers climbing up the other bank, and here are their families coming right on with them. O! my brother, my sister will it not be grand, will it not be glorious, if we pass through ourselves in safety, and all our loved ones besides! I was some time ago seated at my table at home, and my family were all there, and I said, “What a beautiful thing it would be if we could all get into one boat, and I could be the oarsman, and we could just pull away across the River of Death; all start together, all go together, and all land in heaven together.” That is not the way. It would not do to substitute our ignorance for God’s wisdom. It is one by one, one by one. My mother, in her dying moments, said to my father—they had been married sixty years—”father, wouldn’t it be pleasant if we could both go together?” But no; it was three years apart. It is one by one. Some of us who were brought up in the country remember when the summer was coming, warm summer weather, in our boyhood we used to ask mother to let us go barefoot, and we remember just the sensation when we put our uncovered foot upon the soft dust and the cool grass. And the time will come when we will cast off these sandals, which we must wear because there are so many sharp places on the road of life. We will cast off these sandals, and with unsandaled foot we will step on the soft bed of the river. Then with one foot in the bed of the river, with the other we will spring up on the other bank, and that will be heaven. It will not be a breaking down; it will be a lifting up; it will be an irradiation as was beautifully illustrated when the Christian husband was dying and he said to his wife, “How that candle flickers, Nellie; put it out. I shall sleep well to-night and waken in the morning.” Oh, how much comfort there is in this subject for all the bereft! You see our departed are not swamped in the waters, are not submerged. They have crossed over. That is all. The Israelites were just as certainly alive on the eastern bank of the Jordan as they were on the western bank of the Jordan, and our departed Christian friends are just as certainly alive now as they were before they crossed the River of Death. The respiration easier. The sight keener. All their aches and ailments left this side. An impassable barrier put between them and all human and Satanic pursuit. Crossed over. Not sick, not dead, not obliterated, not blotted out, but crossed over. Ought I not congratulate you, the bereft, at the thought that your friends are safe in heaven? I remember that the Australia has been out now a good while, and I believe is nine days overdue, and there is a great deal of apprehension about the Australia. And I remember a few years ago when there was a great deal of apprehension about the City of Brussels. She was overdue. She left New York harbor for Liverpool. I think there were eight or ten days that she was overdue, and there was a great deal of apprehension on the part of the friends here about their friends on board that ship. The general impression was all through New York and in England, that the City of Brussels had gone down. But one day the news flashed from Liverpool, “The City of Brussels is coming up the harbor.” What a time of rejoicing it was in New York! Did we not do well to congratulate the people who had friends on board that they had got across safely, that they landed in Liverpool safely? How heartily we shook their hands in gladness, and am I not right in congratulating you, O Christian bereft, that your friends have got safely over! They have not gone down. They are harbored, crossed over. You would not call them back, would you? If you had the capacity, would you call them back? Would you call your aged parents back? Did they not have a struggle long enough? Was not the journey tedious enough? Did they not have ailments and sickness enough? Would you call your Christian father, your Christian mother back, if you could? Would you call your children back? Perhaps it would not be safe for the Lord to trust us with the power. But I do not think we could afford to call our children back to temptation and struggle, for life under the very best circumstances is a struggle. We could not afford to call them back. What! Would we have our departed friends cross the Jordan three times? Is not once enough? In addition to the crossing they have already made, would we have them cross back again? And then after many years had gone they would have to cross over again to the other side, for surely you would not want to keep them forever out of heaven. You would not want them to cross three times. The poet says: Pause and Weep, Not for the Freed From Sin, But That the Sigh of Love Would Bring Them Back Again. I ask a question and the answer comes back in heavenly echo, “Will you never be sick again?” “Never—sick—again.” “Will you never be tired again?” “Never—tired—again.” “Will you never sin again?” “Never—sin—again.” “Will you never weep again?” “Never—weep—again.” “Will you never die again?” “Never—die—again.” O! ye army of departed kindred, I hail you from bank to bank. Wait for us. When our work is done meet us half way between the willowed banks of earth and the palm groves of heaven. There is one old hymn that rings through your soul today while I am preaching, words consecrated by many a dying lip, words we tried to sing at my father’s departure, but all the voices broke down at the close of the first verse, broke in emotion: On Jordan’s Stormy Bank I Stand And Cast a Wistful Eye To Canaan’s Fair and Happy Land, Where My Possessions Lie, O! The Transporting, Rapturous Scene That Rushes On My Sight, Sweet Fields Arrayed in Living Green And Rivers of Delight. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 67: 065. CORN IN PLACE OF MANNA ======================================================================== Corn in Place of Manna Joshua 5:12 : “And the manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land.” Only those who have had something to do with the commissariat of an army know what a job it is to feed and clothe five or six hundred thousand men. Well, there is such a host as that marching across the desert. They are cut off from all army supplies. There are no rail-trains bringing down food or blankets. Shall they all perish? No. The Lord comes from heaven to the rescue, and he touches the shoes and the coats which in a year or two would have been worn to rags and tatters, and they become storm-proof and time-proof, so that, after forty years of wearing, the coats and the shoes are as good as new. Besides that, every morning there is a shower of bread, not sour and soggy, for the rising of that bread is made in heaven, and celestial fingers have mixed it, and rolled it into balls, light, flaky, and sweet, as though they were the crumbs thrown out from a heavenly banquet. Two batches of bread made every day in the upper mansion—one for those who sit at the table with the King, and the other for the marching Israelites in the wilderness. I do not very much pity the Israelites for the fact that they had only manna to eat. It was, I suppose, the best food ever provided. I know that the ravens brought food to Elijah; but I should not so well have liked those black waiters. Rather would I have the fare that came down every morning in buckets of dew—clean, sweet, God-provided edibles. But now the Israelites have taken their last bit of it in their fingers, and put the last delicate morsel of it to their lips. They look out, and there is no manna. Why this cessation of heavenly supply? It was because the Israelites had arrived in Canaan, and they smelled the breath of the harvest-fields, and the crowded barns of the country were thrown open to them. All the inhabitants had fled, and in the name of the Lord of Hosts the Israelites took possession of everything. Well, the threshing-floor is cleared, the corn is scattered over it, the oxen are brought around in lazy and perpetual circuit until the corn is trampled loose; then it is winnowed with a fan, and it is ground and it is baked, and, lo! there is enough bread for all the wornout host. “And the manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land.” From among the mummies of Egypt and Canaan have been brought grains of corn, exactly like our Indian corn, and recently planted, they have produced the same kind of corn, with which we are familiar. So I am not sure which kind of grain my text refers to, but all the same is the meaning. Relief in emergency. The bisection of this subject leads me, first, to speak of especial relief for especial emergency; and, secondly, of the old corn of the Gospel for ordinary circumstances. If these Israelites crossing the wilderness had not received bread from the heavenly bakeries, there would, first, have been a long line of dead children half buried in the sand; then, there would have been a long line of dead women waiting for the jackals; then, there would have been a long line of dead men unburied, because there would have been no one to bury them. It would have been told in the history of the world that a great company of good people started out from Egypt for Canaan, and were never heard of, as thoroughly lost in the wilderness of sand as the City of Boston and the President were lost in the wilderness of waters. What use was it to them that there was plenty of corn in Canaan, or plenty of corn in Egypt? What they wanted was something to eat right there, where there was not so much as a grass-blade. In other words, an especial supply for an especial emergency. That is what some of you want. The ordinary comfort, the ordinary direction, the ordinary counsel, do not seem to meet your case. There are those who feel that they must have an omnipotent and immediate supply, and you shall have it. Is it pain and physical distress through which you must go? Does not Jesus know all about pain? Did he not suffer it in the most sensitive part of head and hand and foot? He has a mixture of comfort, one drop of which shall cure the worst paroxysm. It is the same grace that soothed Robert Hall when, after writhing on the carpet in physical tortures, he cried out: “Oh! I suffered terribly, but I didn’t cry out while I was suffering, did I? Did I cry out?” There is no such nurse as Jesus—his hand the gentlest, his foot the lightest, his arm the strongest. For especial pang especial help. Is it approaching sorrow? Is it long, shadowing bereavement that you know is coming, because the breath is short, and the voice is faint, and the cheek is pale? Have you been calculating your capacity or incapacity to endure widowhood or childlessness or a disbanded home, and cried: “I cannot endure it!” Oh, worried soul, you will wake up amidst all your troubles, and find around about you the sweet consolation of the Gospel as thickly strewed as was the manna around about the Israelitish encampment! Especial solace for especial distress. Or is it a trouble past, yet present? A silent nursery? A vacant chair opposite you at the table? A musing upon a broken family circle never again to be re-united? A choking sense of loneliness? A blot of grief so large that it extinguishes the light of the sun, and puts out the bloom of flower, and makes you reckless as to whether you live or die? Especial comfort for that especial trial. Your appetite has failed for everything else. Oh, try a little of this wilderness manna: “I will never leave thee, I will never forsake thee.” “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.” “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” Or is it the grief of a dissipated companion? There are those here who have it, so I am not speaking in the abstract, but to the point. You have not whispered it, perhaps, to your most intimate friend; but you see your home going away gradually from you, and unless things change soon it will be entirely destroyed. Your grief was well depicted by a woman, presiding at a woman’s meeting in Ohio, when her intoxicated husband staggered up to the platform, to her overwhelming mortification and the disturbance of the audience, and she pulled a protruding bottle from her husband’s pocket, and held it up before the audience, and cried out: “There is the cause of my woe! There are the tears and the life-blood of a drunkard’s wife!” And then, looking up to heaven, she said: “How long, O Lord! how long?” and then, looking down to the audience, cried: “Do you wonder I feel strongly on this subject? Sisters, will you help me?” And hundreds of voices responded: “Yes, yes, we will help you.” You stand, some of you, in such tragedy today. You cannot even ask him to stop drinking. It makes him cross, and he tells you to mind your own business. Is there any relief in such a case? Not such as is found in the rigmarole of comfort ordinarily given in such cases. But there is a relief that drops in manna from the throne of God. Oh, lift up your lacerated soul in prayer, and you will get omnipotent comfort! I do not know in what words the soothing influence may come, but I know that for especial grief there is especial deliverance. I give you two or three passages; try them on; take that which best fits your soul: “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” “All things work together for good to those who love God.” “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” I know there are those who, when they try to comfort people, always bring the same stale sentiment about the usefulness of trial. Instead of bringing up a new plaster for a new wound, and fresh manna for fresh hunger, they rummage their haversack to find some crumb of old consolation, when from horizon to horizon the ground is white with the new-fallen manna of God’s help not five minutes old! But after fourteen thousand six hundred consecutive days of falling manna—Sundays excepted—the manna ceased. Some of them were glad of it. You know they had complained to their leader, and wondered that they had to eat manna instead of onions. Now the fare is changed. Those people in that wandering army under forty years of age had never seen a cornfield, and now, when they hear the leaves rustling and see the tassels waving and the billows of green flowing over the plain as the wind touched them, it must have been a new and lively sensation. “Corn!” cried the old man, as he opened an ear. “Corn!” cried the children, as they counted the shining grains. “Corn!” shouted the vanguard of the host, as they burst open the granaries of the affrighted population, the granaries that had been left in the possession of the victorious Israelites. Then the fire was kindled, and the ears of corn were thrust into it, and, fresh and crisp and tender, were devoured of the hungry victors; and bread was prepared, and many things that can be made out of flour regaled the appetites that had been sharpened by the long march. “And the manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land.” Blessed be God, we stand in just such a field today, the luxuriant grain coming above the girdle, the air full of the odors of the ripe old corn of the Gospel Canaan. “Oh!” you say, “the fare is too plain.” Then I remember you will soon get tired of a fanciful diet. While I was in Paris, I liked for a while the rare and exquisite cookery; but I soon wished I was home again, and had the plain fare of my native land. So it is a fact that we soon weary of the sirups and the custards and the whipped foam of fanciful religionists, and we cry: “Give us plain bread made out of the old corn of the Gospel Canaan.” This is the only food that can quell the soul’s hunger. There are men here who hardly know what is the matter with them. They have tried to get together a fortune and larger account at the bank, and to make investments yielding larger percentages. They are trying to satisfy their soul with a diet of mortgages and stocks. There are others here who try to get famous, and have succeeded to a greater or less extent; and they have been trying to satisfy their soul with the chopped food of magazines and newspapers. All these men are no more happy now than before they made the first thousand dollars; no more happy now than when for the first time they saw their names favorably mentioned. They cannot analyze or define their feelings; but I will tell them what is the matter—they are hungry for the old corn of the Gospel. That you must have, or be pinched, and wan, and wasted, and hollow-eyed, and shriveled up with an eternity of famine. The infidel scientists of this day are offering us a different kind of soul food; but they are, of all men, the most miserable. I have known some of them; but I never knew one of them who came within a thousand miles of being happy. The great John Stuart Mill provided for himself a new kind of porridge; but yet, when he comes to die, he acknowledges that his philosophy never gave him any comfort in days of bereavement, and in a roundabout way he admits that his life was a failure. So it is with all infidel scientists. They are trying to live on telescopes and crucibles and protoplasms, and they charge us with cant, not realizing that there is no such intolerable cant in all the world as this perpetual talk we are hearing about “positive philosophy,” and “the absolute,” and “the great to be,” and “the everlasting no,” and “the higher unity,” and “the latent potentialities,” and “the cathedral of the immensities.” I have been translating what these men have been writing, and I have been translating what they have been doing, and I will tell you what it all means—it means that they want to kill God! And my only wonder is that God has not killed them. I have, in other days, tasted of their confections, and I come back and tell you today that there is no nutriment or life or health in anything but the bread made out of the old corn of the Gospel. What do I mean by that? I mean that Christ is the bread of life, and taking him, you live and live forever. But, you say, corn is of but little practical use unless it is threshed and ground and baked. I answer, this Gospel corn has gone through that process. When on Calvary all the hoofs of human scorn came down on the heart of Christ, and all the flails of Satanic fury beat him long and fast, was not the corn threshed? When the mills of God’s indignation against sin caught Christ between the upper and nether rollers, was not the corn ground? When Jesus descended into hell, and the flames of the lost world wrapped him all about, was not the corn baked? Oh, yes! Christ is ready; his pardon all ready; his peace all ready; everything ready in Christ. Are you ready for him? You say, “That is such a simple Gospel!” I know it is. You say you thought religion was a strange mixture of elaborate compounds. No; it is so plain that any abecedarian may understand it. In its simplicity is its power. If you could, this morning, realize that Christ died to save from sin and death and hell not only your minister and your neighbor and your father and your child, but you, it would make this hour like the judgment-day for agitations, and, no longer able to keep your seat, you would leap up, crying, “For me! for me!” God grant that you, my brother, may see this Gospel with your own eyes, and hear it with your own ears, and feel with your own heart that you are a lost soul, but that Christ comes for your extrication. Can you not take that truth and digest it, and make it a part of your immortal life? It is only bread. You have noticed that invalids cannot take all kinds of food. The food that will do for one will not do for another. There are kinds of food which will produce, in cases of invalidism, very speedy death. But you have noticed that all persons, however weak they may be, can take bread. Oh, soul sick with sin, invalid in your transgressions, I think this Gospel will agree with you! I think if you cannot take anything else, you can take this. Lost—found! Sunken—raised! Condemned—pardoned! Cast out—invited in! That is the old corn of the Gospel. You have often seen a wheel with spokes of different colors, and when the wheel was rapidly turned all the colors blended into a rainbow of exquisite beauty. I wish I could, today, take the peace and the life and the joy and the glory of Christ, and turn them before your soul with such speed and such strength that you would be enchanted with the revolving splendors of that name which is above every name—the name written once with tears of exile and in blood of martyrdom, but written now in burnished crown and lifted sceptre and archangelic throne. There is another characteristic about bread, and that is, you never get tired of it. There are people here seventy years of age who find it just as appropriate for their appetite as they did when, in boyhood, their mother cut a slice of it clear around the loaf. You have not got tired of bread, and that is a characteristic of the Gospel. Old Christian man, are you tired of Jesus? If so, let us take his name out of our Bible and let us with pen and ink erase that name wherever we see it. Let us cast it out of our hymnology, and let “There is a Fountain” and “Rock of Ages” go into forgetfulness. Let us tear down the communion-table where we celebrate his love. Let us dash down the baptismal bowl where we were consecrated to him. Let us hurl Jesus from our heart, and ask some other hero to come in. Could you do it? The years of your past life, aged man, would utter a protest against it, and the graves of your Christian dead would charge you with being an ingrate, and your little grandchildren would say, “Grandfather, don’t do that. Jesus is the one to whom we say our prayers at night, and who is to open heaven when we die. Grandfather, don’t do that.” Tired of Jesus? The Burgundy rose you pluck from the garden is not so fresh and fair and beautiful. Tired of Jesus? As well get weary of the spring morning, and the voices of the mountain runnel, and the quiet of your own home, and the gladness of your own children. Jesus is bread, and the appetite for that is never obliterated. I notice, in regard to this article of food, you take it three times a day. It is on your table morning, noon and night; and if it is forgotten, you say, “Where is the bread?” Just so certainly you need Jesus three times a day. Oh, do not start out without him; do not dare to go out of the front door; do not dare to go off the front steps, without having first communed with him! Before noon there may be perils that will destroy body, mind and soul forever. You cannot afford to do without him. You will, during the day, be amidst sharp hoofs and swift wheels and dangerous scaffoldings, threatening the body, and traps for the soul that have taken some who are more wily than you. When they launch a ship they break against the side of it a bottle of wine. That is a sort of superstition among sailors. But oh, on the launching of every day, that we might strike against it at least one earnest prayer for divine protection! That would not be superstition; that would be Christian. Then at the apex of the day, at the tiptop of the hours, equidistant from morning and night, look three ways. Look backward to the forenoon; look ahead to the afternoon; look up to that Saviour who presides over all. You want bread at noon. You may find no place in which to kneel amidst the cotton bales and the tierces of rice; but if Jonah could find room to pray in the whale’s belly, most certainly you will never be in such a crowded place that you cannot pray. Bread at noon! When the evening hour comes, and your head is buzzing with the day’s engagements, and your whole nature is sore from the abrasion of rough life, and you see a great many duties you have neglected, then commune with Christ, asking his pardon, thanking him for his love. That would be a queer evening repast at which there was no bread. This is the nutriment and life of the plain Gospel that I recommend you. I do not know how some of our ministers make it so intricate and elaborate and mystifying a thing. It seems as if they had a sort of mongrelism in religion—part humanitarianism, part spiritualism, part nothingarianism; and sometimes you think they are building their temple out of the “Rock of Ages,” but you find there is no rock in it at all. It is stucco. The Gospel is plain. It is bread. There are no fogs hovering over this river of life. All the fogs hover over the marsh of human speculation. If you cannot tell, when you hear a man preach whether or not he believes in the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, it is because he does not believe in it. If, when you hear a man preach, you cannot tell whether or not he believes that sin is inborn, it is because he does not think it is congenital. If, when you hear a man talk in pulpit or prayer-meeting, you cannot make up your mind whether or not he believes in regeneration, it is because he does not believe in it. If, when you hear a man speak on religious themes, you cannot make up your mind whether or not he thinks the righteous and the wicked will come out at the same place, then it is because he really believes that their destinies are conterminous. Do not talk to me about a man being doubtful about the doctrines of grace. He is not doubtful to me at all. Bread is bread, and I know it the moment I see it. I had a cornfield which I cultivated with my own hand. I did not ask once in all the summer, “Is this corn?” I did not hunt up The Agriculturist to get a picture of corn. I was born in sight of a cornfield, and I know all about it. When these Israelites came to Canaan and looked off upon the fields, the cry was, “Corn! corn!” And if a man has once tasted of this heavenly bread, he knows it right away. He can tell this corn of the Gospel Canaan from “the chaff which the wind driveth away.” I bless God so many have found this Gospel corn. It is the bread of which if a man eat he shall never hunger. I set the gladness of your soul to the tunes of “Ariel” and “Antioch.” I ring the wedding-bells, for Christ and your soul are married, and there is no power on earth or in hell to get out letters of divorcement. But alas for the famine-struck! Enough corn, yet it seems you have no sickle to cut it, no mill to grind it, no fire to bake it, no appetite to eat it. Starving to death, when the plain is golden with a magnificent harvest! I rode some thirteen miles to see the Alexander, a large steamship that was beached near Southampton, Long Island. It was a splendid vessel. As I walked up and down the decks and in the cabins, I said, “What a pity that this vessel should go to pieces, or be lying here idle!” The coast-wreckers had spent thirty thousand dollars trying to get her off, and they succeeded once; but she came back again to the old place. While I was walking on deck, every part of the vessel trembled with the beating of the surf on one side. Since then I heard that that vessel, which was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, was sold for three thousand five hundred, and knocked to pieces. They had given up the idea of getting her to sail again. How suggestive all that is to me! There are those here who are aground in religious things. Once you started for heaven, but you are now aground. Several times it was thought you had started again heavenward, but you soon got back to the old place, and there is not much prospect you will ever reach the harbors of the blessed. God’s wreckers, I fear, will pronounce you a hopeless case. Beached for eternity! And then it will be written in heaven concerning some one that he was invited to be saved, but refused the offer, and starved to death within sight of the fields and granaries full of the Old Corn of Canaan. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 68: 066. THE USES OF STRATAGEM ======================================================================== The Uses of Stratagem Joshua 8:7 : “Then ye shall rise up from the ambush, and seize upon the city.” Men of the Thirteenth Regiment, and their friends here gathered, of all occupations and professions, men of the city and men of the fields, here is a theme fit for all of us. One Sabbath evening, with my family around me, we were talking over the scene of the text. In the wide-open eyes and the quick interrogations and the blanched cheeks I realized what a thrilling drama it was. There is the old city, shorter by name than any other city in the ages, spelled with two letters—A, I—Ai. Joshua and his men want to take it. How to do it is the question. On a former occasion, in a straightforward, face-to-face fight, they had been defeated; but now they are going to take it by ambuscade. General Joshua has two divisions in his army—the one division the battle-worn commander will lead himself, the other division he sends off to encamp in an ambush on the west side of the city of Ai. No torches, no lanterns, no sound of heavy battalions, but thirty thousand swarthy warriors moving in silence, speaking only in a whisper; no clicking of swords against shields, lest the watchmen of Ai discover it and the stratagem be a failure. If a roistering soldier in the Israelitish army forgets himself, all along the line the word is “Hush!” Joshua takes the other division, the one with which he is to march, and puts it on the north side of the city of Ai, and then spends the night in reconnoitering in the valley. There he is, thinking over the fortunes of the coming day, with something of the feelings of Wellington the night before Waterloo, or of Meade and Lee the night before Gettysburg. There he stands in the night, and says to himself: “Yonder is the division in ambush on the west side of Ai. Here is the division I have under my especial command on the north side of Ai. There is the old city slumbering in its sin. To-morrow will be the battle. Look! the morning already begins to tip the hills. The military officers of Ai look out in the morning very early, and while they do not see the division in ambush, they behold the other division of Joshua, and the cry, “To arms! To arms!” rings through all the streets of the old town, and every sword, whether hacked and bent or newly welded, is brought out, and all the inhabitants of the city of Ai pour through the gates, an infuriated torrent, and their cry is: “Come, we’ll make quick work with Joshua and his troops.” No sooner had these people of Ai come out against the troops of Joshua, than Joshua gave such a command as he seldom gave: “Fall back!” Why, they could not believe their own ears! Is Joshua’s courage failing him? The retreat is beaten, and the Israelites are flying, throwing blankets and accoutrements on every side under this worse than Bull Run defeat. And you ought to hear the soldiers of Ai cheer and cheer and cheer. But they huzza too soon. The men lying in ambush are straining their vision to get some signal from Joshua that they may know what time to drop upon the city. Joshua takes his burnished spear, glittering in the sun like a shaft of doom, and points it toward the city; and when the men up yonder in the ambush see it, with hawk-like swoop they drop upon Ai, and without stroke of sword or stab of spear take the city and put it to the torch. So much for the division that was in ambush. How about the division under Joshua’s command? No sooner does Joshua stop in the flight than all his men stop with him, and as he wheels they wheel, for, in a voice of thunder, he cried “Halt!” One strong arm driving back a torrent of flying troops. And then, as he points his spear through the golden light toward that fated city, his troops know that they are to start for it. What a scene it was when the division in ambush which had taken the city marched down against the men of Ai on the one side, and the troops under Joshua doubled up their enemies from the other side, and the men of Ai were caught between these two hurricanes of Israelitish courage, thrust before and behind, stabbed in breast and back, ground between the upper and the nether millstones of God’s indignation. Woe to the city of Ai! Cheer for the triumph of Israel! Lesson the first: there is such a thing as victorious retreat. Joshua’s falling back was the first chapter in his successful besiegement. And there are times in your life when the best thing you can do is to run. You were once the victim of strong drink. The demijohn and the decanter were your fierce foes. They came down upon you with greater fury than the men of Ai upon the men of Joshua. Your only safety is to get away from them. Your dissipating companions will come around you for your overthrow. Run for your life! Fall back! Fall back from the drinking-saloon! Fall back from the wine-party! Your flight is your advance. Your retreat is your victory. There is a saloon down on the next street that has almost been the ruin of your soul. Then why do you go along that street? Why do you not pass through some other street rather than by the place of your calamity? A spoonful of brandy taken for medicinal purposes by a man who twenty years before had been reformed from drunkenness, hurled into inebriety and the grave one of the best friends I ever had. Retreat is victory! Here is a converted infidel. He is so strong now in his faith in the Gospel, he says he can read anything. What are you reading? Bolingbroke? Andrew Jackson Davis’s tracts? Tyndall’s Glasgow University address? Drop them and run. You will be an infidel before you die, unless you quit that. These men of Ai will be too much for you. Turn your back on the rank and file of unbelief. Fly before they cut you with their swords, and transfix you with their javelins. There are people who have been wellnigh ruined because they risked a foolhardy expedition in the presence of mighty and overwhelming temptations, and the men of Ai made a morning meal of them. So, also, there is victorious retreat in the religious world. Thousands of times the kingdom of Christ has seemed to fall back. When the blood of the Scotch Covenanters gave a deeper dye to the heather of the Highlands; when the Vaudois of France chose extermination rather than make an unchristian surrender; when, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, mounted assassins rode through the streets of Paris, crying: “Kill! Blood-letting is good in August! Kill! Death to the Huguenots! Kill!” when Lady Jane Grey’s head rolled from the executioner’s block; when Calvin was imprisoned in the castle; when John Bunyan lay rotting in Bedford jail, saying, “If God will help me, and my physical life continues, I will stay here until the moss grows on my eyebrows rather give up my faith”—the days of retreat for the church were days of victory. The Pilgrim Fathers fell back from the other side of the sea to Plymouth Rock, but now are marshaling a continent for the Christianization of the world. The Church of Christ falling back from Piedmont, falling back from Rue St. Jacques, falling back from St. Denis, falling back from Wurtemburg castles, falling back from the Brussels market-place, yet all the time triumphing. Notwithstanding all the shocking reverses which the Church of Christ suffers, what do we see today? Twelve thousand missionaries of the cross on heathen grounds; a hundred thousand ministers of Jesus Christ in this land; at least two hundred millions of Christians on the earth. All nations today kindling in a blaze of revival. Falling back, yet advancing until the old Wesleyan hymn will prove true: The lion of Judah shall break every chain, And give us the victory again and again! But there is a more marked illustration of victorious retreat in the life of our Joshua, the Jesus of the ages. First falling back from an appalling height to an appalling depth, falling from celestial hills to terrestrial valleys, from throne to manger; yet that did not seem to suffice him as a retreat. Falling back still further from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from Nazareth to Jerusalem, back from Jerusalem to Golgotha, back from Golgotha to the mausoleum in the rock, back down over the precipices of perdition, until he walked amid the caverns of the eternal captives and drank of the wine of the wrath of Almighty God, amid the Ahabs and the Jezebels and the Belshazzars. O men of the pulpit, and men of the pew, Christ’s descent from heaven to earth does not measure half the distance! It was from glory to perdition. He descended into hell. All the records of earthly retreat are as nothing compared with this falling back. Santa Anna, with the fragments of his army flying over the plateaux of Mexico, and Napoleon and his army retreating from Moscow into the awful snows of Russia, are not worthy to be mentioned with this retreat, when all the powers of darkness seem to be pursuing Christ as he fell back, until the body of him who came to do such wonderful things lay pulseless and stripped. Methinks that the city of Ai was not so emptied of its inhabitants when they went to pursue Joshua, as perdition was emptied of devils when they started for the pursuit of Christ, and he fell back and back, down lower, down lower, chasm below chasm, pit below pit, until he seemed to strike the bottom of objurgation and scorn and torture. Oh, the long, loud, jubilant shout of hell at the defeat of the Lord God Almighty! But let not the powers of darkness rejoice quite so soon. Do you hear that disturbance in the tomb of Arimathea? I hear the sheet rending! What means that stone hurled down the side of the hill? Who is this coming out? Push him back! the dead must not stalk in this open sunlight. Oh, it is our Joshua. Let him come out. He comes forth and starts for the city. He takes the spear of the Roman guard and points that way. Church militant marches up on one side, and the church triumphant marches down on the other side. And the powers of darkness being caught between these ranks of celestial and terrestrial valor, nothing is left of them save just enough to illustrate the direful overthrow of hell and our Joshua’s eternal victory. On his head be all the crowns. In his hands be all the scepters. At his feet be all the human hearts; and here, Lord, is one of them. Lesson the second: the triumph of the wicked is short. Did you ever see an army in a panic? There is nothing so uncontrollable. If you had stood at Long Bridge, Washington, during the opening of our sad Civil War, you would know what it is to see an army run. And when those men of Ai looked out and saw those men of Joshua in a stampede, they expected easy work. They would scatter them as the equinox the leaves. Oh, the gleeful and jubilant descent of the men of Ai upon the men of Joshua! But their exhilaration was brief, for the tide of battle turned and these quondam conquerors left their miserable carcasses in the wilderness of Beth-aven. So it always is. The triumph of the wicked is short. You make twenty thousand dollars at the gaming-table. Do you expect to keep it? You will die in the poorhouse. You made a fortune by iniquitous traffic. Do you expect to keep it? Your money will scatter, or it will stay long enough to curse your children after you are dead. Call over the roll of bad men who prospered and see how short was their prosperity. For a while, like the men of Ai, they went from conquest to conquest, but after a while disaster rolled back upon them and they were divided into three parts: misfortune took their property, the grave took their body, and the lost world took their soul. I am always interested in the building of theaters and the building of dissipating saloons. I like to have them built of the best granite and have the rooms made large, and to have the pillars made very firm. God is going to conquer them, and they will be turned into asylums and art galleries and churches. The stores in which fraudulent men do business, the splendid banking institutions where the president and cashier put all their property in their wives’ hands and then fail for two hundred thousand—all these institutions are to become the places where honest Christian men do business. How long will it take your boys to get through your ill-gotten gains? The wicked do not live out half their days. For a while they swagger and strut and make a great splash in the newspapers, but after a while it all dwindles down into a brief paragraph: “Died suddenly, at thirty-five years of age. Relatives and friends of the family are invited to attend the funeral on Wednesday, at two o’clock, from his late residence. Interment at Greenwood.” Some of them jumped off the docks. Some of them took prussic acid. Some of them fell under the snap of a Derringer pistol. Some of them spent their last days in a lunatic asylum. Where are William Tweed and his associates? Where are Ketcham and Swartwout, absconding swindlers? Where is James Fisk, the libertine, and all the other misdemeanants? The wicked do not live out half their days. Disembogue, oh, world of darkness! Come up, Hilderbrand and Henry II and Robespierre, and with blistering and blaspheming and ashen lips hiss out: “The triumph of the wicked is short.” Alas for the men of Ai when Joshua stretches out his spear toward the city. Lesson the third: how much may be accomplished by lying in ambush for opportunities. Are you hypercritical of Joshua’s maneuver? Do you say that it was cheating for him to take that city by ambuscade? Was it wrong for Washington to kindle camp-fires on New Jersey Heights, giving the impression to the opposing force that a great army was encamped there when there was none at all? I answer, if the war was right, then Joshua was right in his stratagem. He violated no flag of truce. He broke no treaty, but by a lawful ambuscade captured the city of Ai. Oh that we all knew how to lie in ambush for opportunities to serve God! The best of our opportunities do not lie on the surface, but are secreted; by tact, by stratagem, by Christian ambuscade, you may take almost any, castle of sin for Christ. Come up toward men with a regular besiegement of argument and you will be defeated: but just wait until the door of their hearts is set ajar or they are off their guard or their severe caution is away from home, and then drop in on them from a Christian ambuscade. There has been many a man up to his chin in scientific portfolios which proved there was no Christ and no divine revelation, his pen a simitar flung into the heart of theological opponents, who, nevertheless, has been discomfited and captured for God by some little three-year-old child who has got up and put her snowy arms around his sinewy neck, and asked some simple question about God and heaven. Oh, make a flank movement; steal a march on the devil; cheat that man into heaven! A five-dollar treatise that will stand all the laws of homiletics may fail to do that which a penny tract of Christian entreaty may accomplish. Oh, for more Christians in ambuscade, not lying in idleness, but waiting for a quick spring, waiting until just the right time comes! Do not talk to a man about the vanity of this world on the day when he has bought something at “twelve,” and is going to sell it at “fifteen.” But talk to him about the vanity of the world on the day when he has bought something at “fifteen,” and is compelled to sell it at “twelve.” Do not rub a man’s disposition the wrong way. Do not take the imperative mood when the subjunctive mood will do just as well. Do not talk in perfervid style to a phlegmatic, nor try to tickle a torrid temperament with an icicle. You can take any man for Christ if you know how to get at him. Do not send word to him that to-morrow at ten o’clock you propose to open your batteries upon him, but come on him by a skilful, persevering, God-directed ambuscade. Lesson the fourth: the importance of taking good aim. There is Joshua, but how are those people in ambush up yonder to know when they are to drop on the city, and how are these men around Joshua to know when they are to stop their flight and advance? There must be some signal—a signal to stop the one division and to start the other. Joshua with a spear on which were ordinarily hung the colors of battle, points toward the city. He stands in such a conspicuous position, and there is so much of the morning light dripping from that spear-tip, that all around the horizon they see it. It was as much as to say: “There is the city. Take it. God knows and we know that a great deal of Christian attack amounts to nothing simply because we do not take good aim. Nobody knows and we do not know ourselves which point we want to take, when we ought to make up our minds what God will have us to do, and point our spear in that direction and then hurl our body, mind, soul, time, eternity at that one target. In our pulpits and pews and Sunday schools and prayer meetings we want to get a reputation for saying pretty things, and so we point our spear toward the flowers; or we want a reputation for saying sublime things, and we point our spear toward the stars; or we want to get a reputation for historical knowledge, and we point our spear toward the past; or we want to get a reputation for great liberality, so we swing our spear all around; while there is the old world, proud, rebellious and armed against all righteousness; and instead of running any further away from its pursuit, we ought to turn around, plant our foot in the strength of the eternal God, lift the old cross and point it in the direction of the world’s conquest till the redeemed of earth, marching up from one side and the glorified of heaven marching down from the other side, the last battlement of sin is compelled to swing out the streamers of Emmanuel. Oh, Church of God, take aim and conquer! I have heard it said: “Look out for a man who has only one idea; he is irresistible.” I say: Look out for the man who has one idea, and that a determination for soul-saving. Oh, for some of the courage and enthusiasm of Joshua! He flung two armies from the tip of that spear. It is sinful for us to rest, unless it is to get stronger muscle and fresher brain and purer heart for God’s work. I feel on my head the hands of Christ in a new ordination! Do you not feel the same omnipotent pressure? There is a work for all of us. Oh, that we might stand up, side by side, and point the spear toward the city! It ought to be taken. It will be taken. Our cities are drifting off toward loose religion, or what is called “Liberal Christianity,” which is so liberal that it gives up all the cardinal doctrines of the Bible; so liberal that it surrenders the rectitude of the throne of the Almighty. That is liberality with a vengeance. Let us decide upon the work which we, as Christian men, have to do, and, in the strength of God, go to work and do it. It is comparatively easy to keep on a parade amid a shower of bouquets and hand-clapping, and the whole street full of enthusiastic huzzas; but it is not so easy to stand up in the day of battle, the face blackened with smoke, the uniform covered with the earth plowed up by whizzing bullets and bursting shells, half the regiment cut to pieces, and yet the commander crying “Forward, march!” Then it requires old-fashioned valor. My friends, the great trouble of the kingdom of God in this day is the cowards. They do splendidly on a parade day, and at the communion, when they have on their best clothes of Christian profession; but in the great battle of life, at the first sharp-shooting of skepticism, they dodge, they fall back, they break ranks. We confront the enemy, we open the battle against fraud, and lo! we find on our side a great many people that do not try to pay their debts. And we open the battle against intemperance, and we find on our own side a great many people who drink too much. And we open the battle against profanity, and we find on our own side a great many men who make hard speeches. And we open the battle against infidelity, and lo! we find on our own side a great many men who are not quite sure about the Book of Jonah, And while we ought to be massing our troops, and bringing forth more than the united courage of Austerlitz and Waterloo and Gettysburg, we have to be spending our time in hunting up ambuscades. There are a great many in the Lord’s army who would like to go out on a campaign with satin slippers and holding umbrellas over their heads to keep off the heavy dew, and having rations of canvas-back ducks and lemon custards. If they cannot have them they want to go home. They think it is unhealthy among so many bullets! I believe that the next twelve months will be the most stupendous year that heaven ever saw. The nations are quaking now with the coming of God. It will be a year of successes for the men of Joshua, but of doom for the men of Ai. You put your ear to the rail-track and you can hear the train coming miles away. So I put my ear to the ground and I hear the rolling on of the lightning train of God’s mercies and judgments. The mercy of God is first to be tried upon this nation. It will be preached in the pulpits, in theaters, on the streets, everywhere. People will be invited to accept the mercy of the gospel and the story and the song and the prayer will be “mercy.” But suppose they do not accept the offer of mercy—what then? Then God will come with his judgments, and the grasshoppers will eat the crops, and the freshets will devastate the valleys, and the defalcations will swallow the money-markets, and the fires will burn the cities; and the earth will quake from pole to pole. Year of mercies and of judgments. Year of invitation and of warning. Year of jubilee and of woe. Which side are you going to be on? With the men of Ai or the men of Joshua? Pass over this Sabbath into the ranks of Israel. I would clap my hands at the joy of your coming. You will have a poor chance for this world and the world to come without Jesus. You cannot stand what is to come upon you and upon the world unless you have the pardon and the comfort and the help of Christ. Come over. On this side are your happiness and safety, on the other side are disquietude and despair. Eternal defeat to the men of Ai! Eternal victory to the men of Joshua! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 69: 067. A WEDDING PRESENT ======================================================================== A Wedding Present Joshua 15:19 : “Thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And he gave her the upper springs and the nether springs.” The city of Debir was the Boston of antiquity—a great place for brain and books. Caleb wanted it, and he offered his daughter Achsah as a prize to any one who would capture that city. It was a strange thing for Caleb to do; and yet the man that could take the city would have, at any rate, two elements of manhood—bravery and patriotism. Besides, I do not think that Caleb was as foolish in offering his daughter to the conqueror of Debir, as thousands in this day who seek alliances for their children with those who have large means, without any reference to moral or mental acquirements. Of two evils, I would rather measure manly worth by the length of the sword than by the length of the pocket-book. In one case there is sure to be one good element of character; in the other there may be none at all. With Caleb’s daughter as a prize to fight for, General Othniel rode into the battle. The gates of Debir were thundered into the dust, and the city of books lay at the feet of the conquerors. The work done, Othniel comes back to claim his bride. Having conquered the city, it is no great job for him to conquer the girl’s heart; for, however faint-hearted a woman herself may be, she always loves courage in a man. I never saw an exception to that. The wedding festivity having gone by, Othniel and Achsah are about to go to their new home. However loudly the cymbals may clash and the laughter ring, parents are always sad when a fondly-cherished daughter goes off to stay; and Achsah, the daughter of Caleb, knows that now is the time to get almost anything she wants of her father. It seems that Caleb, the good old man, had given as a wedding present to his daughter a piece of land that was mountainous, and sloping southward toward the deserts of Arabia, swept with some very hot winds. It was called “a south land.” But Achsah wants an addition of property; she wants a piece of land that is well watered and fertile. Now it is no wonder that Caleb, standing amidst the bridal party, his eyes so full of tears because she was going away that he could hardly see her at all, gives her more than she asks. She said to him, “Thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And he gave her the upper springs, and the nether springs.” The fact is, that as Caleb, the father, gave Achsah, the daughter, a south land, so God gives to us his world. I am very thankful he has given it to us. But I am like Achsah in the fact that I am not satisfied with the portion. Trees and flowers and grass and blue skies are very well in their places; but he who has nothing but this world for a portion has no portion at all. It is a mountainous land, sloping off toward the desert of sorrow, swept by fiery siroccos; it is “a south land,” a poor portion for any man that tries to put his trust in it. What has been your experience? What has been the experience of every man, of every woman that has tried this world for a portion? Queen Elizabeth, amidst the surroundings of pomp, is unhappy because the painter sketches too minutely the wrinkles on her face, and she indignantly cries out, “You must strike off my likeness without any shadows!” Hogarth, at the very height of his artistic triumph, is stung almost to death with chagrin because the painting he had dedicated to the king does not seem to be acceptable; for George II cries out, “Who is this Hogarth? Take his trumpery out of my presence.” Brinsley Sheridan thrilled the earth with his eloquence, but had for his last words, “I am absolutely undone.” Walter Scott, fumbling around the inkstand, trying to write, says to his daughter, “Oh, take me back to my room; there is no rest for Sir Walter but in the grave!” Stephen Girard, the wealthiest man in his day, or, at any rate, only second in wealth, says, “I live the life of a galley-slave; when I arise in the morning my one effort is to work so hard that I can sleep when it gets to be night.” Charles Lamb, applauded of all the world, in the very midst of his literary triumph, says, “Do you remember, Bridget, when we used to laugh from the shilling gallery at the play? There are now no good plays to laugh at from the boxes.” But why go so far as that? I need to go no farther than your street to find an illustration of what I am saying. Pick me out ten successful worldlings—and you know what I mean by thoroughly successful worldlings—pick me out ten successful worldlings, and you cannot find more than one that looks happy. Care drags him to business; care drags him back. Take your stand at two o’clock at the corner of the streets and see the anxious physiognomies. Your high officials, your bankers, your insurance men, your importers, your wholesalers, and your retailers, as a class—as a class, are they happy? No. Care dogs their steps; and, making no appeal to God for help or comfort, many of them are tossed everywhither. How has it been with you, my hearer? Are you more contented in the house of fourteen rooms than you were in the two rooms you had in a house when you started? Have you not had more care and worriment since you won that fifty thousand dollars than you did before? Some of the poorest men I have ever known have been those of great fortune. A man of small means may be put in great business straits, but the ghastliest of all embarrassments is that of the man who has large estates. The men who commit suicide because of monetary losses are those who cannot bear the burden any more, because they have only fifty thousand dollars left. On Bowling Green, New York, there is a house where Talleyrand used to go. He was a favored man. All the world knew him, and he had wealth almost unlimited; yet at the close of his life he says, “Behold, eighty-three years have passed without any practical result, save fatigue of body and fatigue of mind, great discouragement for the future, and great disgust for the past.” Oh, my friends, this is a “south land,” and it slopes off toward deserts of sorrows; and the prayer which Achsah made to her father Caleb we make this day to our Father God: “Thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And he gave her the upper springs, and the nether springs.” Blessed be God! we have more advantages given us than we can really appreciate. We have spiritual blessings offered us in this world which I shall call the nether springs, and glories in the world to come which I shall call the upper springs. Where shall I find words enough threaded with light to set forth the pleasure of religion? David, unable to describe it in words, played it on a harp. Mrs. Hemans, not finding enough power in prose, sings that praise in a canto. Christopher Wren, unable to describe it in language, sprung it into the arches of St. Paul’s. John Bunyan, unable to present it in ordinary phraseology, takes all the fascination of allegory. Handel, with ordinary music unable to reach the height of the theme, rouses it up in an oratorio. Oh, there is no life on earth so happy as a really Christian life! I do not mean a sham Christian life, but a real Christian life. Where there is a thorn, there is a whole garland of roses. Where there is one groan, there are three doxologies. Where there is one day of cloud, there is a whole season of sunshine. Take the humblest Christian man that you know—angels of God canopy him with their white wings; the lightnings of heaven are his armed allies; the Lord is his Shepherd, picking out for him green pastures by still waters; if he walks forth, heaven is his body-guard; if he lie down to sleep, ladders of light, angel-blossoming, are let into his dreams; if he be thirsty, the potentates of heaven are his cupbearers; if he sit down to food, his plain table blooms into the King’s banquet. Men say, “Look at that odd fellow with the worn-out coat;” the angels of God cry, “Lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates, and let him come in!” Fastidious people cry, “Get off my front steps!” the door-keepers of heaven cry, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom!” When he comes to die, though he may be carried out in a pine box to the potter’s field, to that potter’s field the chariots of Christ will come down, and the cavalcade will crowd all the boulevards of heaven. I bless Christ for the present satisfaction of religion. It makes a man all right with reference to the past; it makes a man all right with reference to the future. Oh, these nether springs of comfort! They are perennial. The foundation of God standeth sure having this seal, “The Lord knoweth them that are his.” “The mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord, who hath mercy upon thee.” Oh, cluster of diamonds set in burnished gold! Oh, nether springs of comfort bursting through all the valleys of trial and tribulation! When you see, you of the world, what satisfaction there is on earth in religion, do you not thirst after it as the daughter of Caleb thirsted after the water-springs? It is no stagnant pond, scummed over with malaria, but springs of water leaping from the Rock of Ages! Take up one cup of that spring-water, and across the top of the chalice will float the delicate shadows of the heavenly wall, the yellow of jasper, the green of emerald, the blue of sardonyx, the fire of jacinth. I wish I could make you understand the joy religion is to some of us. It makes a man happy while he lives, and glad when he dies. With two feet upon a chair and bursting with dropsies, I heard an old man in the poorhouse cry out, “Bless the Lord, oh, my soul!” I looked around and said, “What has this man got to thank God for?” It makes the lame man leap as a hart, and the dumb sing. They say that the old Puritan religion is a juiceless and joyless religion; but I remember reading of Dr. Goodwin, the celebrated Puritan, who in his last moment said, “Is this dying? Why, my bow abides in strength! I am swallowed up in God!” “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” Oh, you who have been trying to satisfy yourselves with the “south land” of this world, do you not feel that you would, this morning, like to have access to the nether springs of spiritual comfort? Would you not like to have Jesus Christ bend over your cradle and bless your table and heal your wounds and strew flowers of consolation all up and down the graves of your dead? ‘Tis religion that can give Sweetest pleasure while we live; ‘Tis religion can supply Sweetest comfort when we die. But I have something better to tell you, suggested by this text. It seems that old Father Caleb, on the wedding day of his daughter, wanted to make her just as happy as possible. Though Othniel was taking her away, and his heart was almost broken because she was going, yet he gives her a “south land;” not only that, but the nether springs; not only that, but the upper springs. O, God! my Father, I thank thee that thou hast given me a “south land” in this world; and the nether springs of spiritual comfort in this world; but, more than all, I thank thee for the upper springs in heaven. It is very fortunate that we cannot see heaven until we get into it. O Christian man, if you could see what a place it is, we would never get you back again to the office or store or shop, and the duties you ought to perform would go neglected. I am glad I shall not see that world until I enter it. Suppose we were allowed to go on an excursion into that good land with the idea of returning. When we got there and heard the song and looked at their raptured faces and mingled in the supernal society, we would cry out, “Let us stay! We are coming here anyhow. Why take the trouble of going back again to that old world? We are here now; let us stay.” And it would take angelic violence to put us out of that world, if once we got there. But as people who cannot afford to pay for an entertainment sometimes come around it and look through the door ajar, or through the openings in the fence, so we come and look through the crevices into that good land which God has provided for us. We can just catch a glimpse of it. We come near enough to hear the rumbling of the eternal orchestra, though not near enough to know who blows the cornet or who fingers the harp. My soul spreads out both wings and claps them in triumph at the thought of those upper springs. One of them pours from beneath the throne; another breaks forth from beneath the altar of the temple; another at the door of “the house of many mansions.” Upper springs of gladness! upper springs of light! upper springs of love! It is no fancy of mine. “The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall lead them to living fountains of water.” O, Saviour divine, roll in upon our souls one of those anticipated raptures! Pour around the roots of the parched tongue one drop of that liquid life! Toss before our vision those fountains of God, rainbowed with eternal victory. Hear it! They are never sick there, not so much as a headache or twinge rheumatic or thrust neuralgic. The inhabitants never says, “I am sick.” They are never tired there. Flight to farthest world is only the play of a holiday. They never sin there. It is as easy for them to be, holy as it is for us to sin. They never die there. You might go through all the outskirts of the great city and find not one place where the ground was broken for a grave. There is health in every cheek. There is spring in every foot. There is majesty on every brow. There is joy in every heart. There is hosanna on every lip. How they must pity us as they look over and look down and see us, and say, “Poor things, away down in that world!” And when some Christian is hurled into a fatal accident, they cry, “Good, he is coming!” And when we stand around the couch of some loved one whose strength is going away, and we shake our heads forebodingly, they cry, “I am glad he is worse; he has been down there long enough. There, he is dead! Come home! come home!” Oh, if we could only get our ideas about that future world untwisted, our thought of transfer from here to there would be as pleasant to us as it was to a little child that was dying. She said, “Papa, when will I go home?” And he said, “To-day, Florence.” “To-day? so soon? I am so glad!” I wish I could stimulate you with these thoughts, O Christian man, to the highest possible exhilaration. The day of your deliverance is coming, is coming rolling on with the shining wheels of the day, and the jet wheels of the night. Every thump of the heart is only a hammer-stroke striking off another chain of clay. Better scour the deck and coil the rope, for the harbor is only six miles away. Jesus will come down in the “Narrows” to meet you. “Now is your salvation nearer than when you believed.” Man of the world! will you not today make a choice between these two portions, between the “south land” of this world, which slopes to the desert, and this glorious land which thy Father offers thee, running with eternal water-courses? Why let your tongue be consumed of thirst when there are the nether springs and the upper springs: comfort here and glory hereafter? You and I need something better than this world can give us. The fact is that it cannot give us anything after a while. It is a changing world. Do you know that even the mountains on the back of a thousand streams are leaping into the valley. The Alleghanies are dying. The dews with crystalline mallet are hammering away the rocks. Frosts and showers and lightnings are sculpturing Mount Washington and the Catskills. Niagara every year is digging for itself a quicker plunge. The sea all around the earth on its shifting shores is making mighty changes in bar and bay and frith and promontory. Some of the old seacoasts are under water now. Off Nantucket, eight feet below low-water mark, are found now the stumps of trees, showing that the waves are conquering the land. Parts of Nova Scotia are sinking. Ships today sail over what, only a little while ago, was solid ground. Near the mouth of the St. Croix river is an island which, in the movements of the earth, is slowly but certainly rotating. All the face of the earth changing—changing. In 1831, an island springs up in the Mediterranean sea. In 1866, another island comes up under the observation of the American consul as he looks off from the beach. The earth all the time changing, the columns of a temple near Bizoli show that the water has risen nine feet above the place it was when these columns were put down. Changing! Our Colorado river, once vaster than the Mississippi, flowing through the great American desert, which was then an Eden of luxuriance, has now dwindled to a small stream creeping down through a gorge. The earth itself, that was once vapor, afterward water—nothing but water—afterward molten rock, cooling off through the ages until plants might live, and animals might live, and men might live, changing all the while, now crumbling, now breaking off. The sun, burning down gradually in its socket. Changing! Changing! an intimation of the last great change to come over the world even infused into the mind of the heathen who has never seen the Bible. The Hindoos believe that Bramah, the creator, once made all things. He created the water, then moved over the water, out of it lifted the land, grew the plants and animals and men on it. Out of his eye went the sun. Out of his lips went the fire. Out of his ear went the air. Then Bramah laid down to sleep four thousand three hundred and twenty million years. After that, they say, he will wake up, and then the world will be destroyed, and he will make it over again, bringing up land, bringing up creatures upon it; then lying down again to sleep four thousand three hundred and twenty million years, then waking up and destroying the world again—creation and demolition following each other, until after three hundred and twenty sleeps, each one of these slumbers four thousand three hundred and twenty million years long, Bramah will wake up and die, and the universe will die with him—an intimation, though very faint, of the great change to come upon this physical earth spoken of in the Bible. But while Bramah may sleep, our God never slumbers nor sleeps; and the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, and the earth and all things that are therein shall be burned up. “Well,” says some one, “if that is so; if the world is going from one change to another, then what is the use of my toiling for its betterment?” That is the point on which I want to guard you. I do not want you to become misanthropic. It is a great and glorious world. If Christ could afford to spend thirty-three years on it for its redemption, then you can afford to toil and pray for the betterment of the nations, and for the bringing on of that glorious time when all people shall see the salvation of God. While, therefore, I want to guard you against misanthropic notions in respect to this subject I have presented, I want you to take this thought home with you: This world is a poor foundation to build on. It is a changing world, and it is a dying world. The shifting scenes and the changing sands are only emblems of all earthly expectation. Life is very much like this day through which we have passed. To many of us it is storm and darkness, then sunshine, storm and darkness, then afterward a little sunshine, now again darkness and storm. Oh, build not your hopes upon this un-certain world! Build on God. Confide in Jesus. Plan for an eternal residence at Christ’s right hand. Then, come sickness or health, come joy or sorrow, come life or death, all is well, all is well. In the name of the God of Caleb, and his daughter, Achsah, I this day offer you the “upper springs” of unfading and everlasting rapture. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 70: 068. THE OLD HOMESTEAD ======================================================================== The Old Homestead Joshua 24:15 : “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Absurd Joshua! You have no time for family religion. You are a military man and your entire time will be taken with affairs connected with the army. You are a statesman and your time will be taken up with public affairs. You are the Washington, the Wellington, the MacMahon of the Israelitish army, and you will have no time for religion. But Joshua in the same voice with which he commanded the sun and the moon to halt and stack arms of light on the parade ground of the Heavens, cried out: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Before we make the same resolution it is best for us to see whether it is a wise and sensible resolution. If religion is going to put my piano out of tune, and clog the feet of my children racing through the hall, and sour the bread, and put crape on the door bell, I do not want it to come into my house. I paid six dollars to hear Jenny Lind warble. I never paid a cent to hear anybody groan. I want to know what religion is going to do if it gets into my house; what it is going to do in the dining hall, in the nursery, in the parlor, in the sleeping apartment, in every room from cellar to attic. It is a great deal easier to invite a disagreeable guest than to get rid of him. If you do not want religion, you had better not ask it to come, for after coming, it may stay a great while. Isaac Watts went to visit Sir Thomas and Lady Abney at their place in Theobald, and was to stay a week, and stayed thirty-five years, and if religion once gets into your household, the probability is it will stay there forever. Now, the question I want to discuss is, what will religion do for the household? Question the first, What did it do for your father’s house if you were brought up in a Christian home? This morning the scene all flashes back upon you. It is time for morning prayers in the old homestead. You are called in. You sit down. You are somewhat fidgety while you listen to the reading. Your father makes no pretense to rhetorical reading of the Scripture, but just goes right on and reads in a plain way. Then you kneel. You remember it now just as well as though it were yesterday. If you were an artist you could photograph the scene. You were not as devotional perhaps as your older brother or sisters, and while they had their heads bowed solemnly down, you were thoughtless and looking around, and you know just the posture of your father and mother, and brothers and sisters. The prayer was longer than you would like to have had it. It was about the same prayer morning by morning and night by night, for your father had the same sins to deplore and the same blessings to thank God for. You were somewhat impatient to have the prayers over. Perhaps the game of ball was waiting, or the skates were lying under the shed, or you wanted to look two or three times over your lesson before you started for school, and you were somewhat impatient. After a while, the prayers were over. Your parents did not rise from the floor as easily as you, for their limbs were rheumatic and stiffened with age. You recall it all this morning. A tear trickles down your cheek and it seems to melt all that scene, but it comes back again. There is father, there is mother, there are your brothers and your sisters. Was that morning exercise in your father’s house degrading or elevating? As you look back now thirty, forty, fifty years, you hear the same prayers—the prayers of 1830, 1840, 1850, just as familiar to your mind now as though you had heard them from lips long ago turned to dust. But all that scene comes back. Was it elevating or degrading? Do you not realize that there has been many a battle in life when that scene upheld you? Do you not remember, O man, when once you proposed to go to some place where you ought not to go, and that prayer jerked you back? Do you know, my brother, my sister, reviewing that scene, bringing it to your mind—do you really think it was good economy or a waste of time that your father and mother spent those moments in prayer for themselves and prayer for their families? Ah! my friends, we begin to think of it this morning, and we come almost to the conclusion that if those scenes were improving to our father’s household, they would be improving to our own household. They did no damage there; they do no damage now. “Is God dead?” said a little child to her father. “Is God dead?” “O, no,” he said, “my child; what do you ask that question for?” “Oh,” she said, “when mother was living we used to have prayers, but since mother has been dead we have not had prayers. I thought perhaps God was dead too.” A family well launched in the morning with prayers goes with a blessing all day. The breakfast hour over, the family scatter—some to household cares, some to school, some to business life in the city. Before night comes there will be many temptations, many perils, perils of misstep, perils of street car, perils of the ferryboat, perils of quick temper; many temptations threatening to do you harm. Somewhere between seven o’clock a. m. and ten o’clock p. m. there may be a moment when you will want God. Oh, you had better launch the day right! It will not hinder you, my brother, in business life. It will be a secular advantage. A man went off to the war and fought for his country, and the children stayed and cultivated the farm, and the mother prayed. One young man was telling the story afterward and some one hearing the story said: “Well, well, your father fighting, children digging on the farm, and mother praying at home; it seems to me all these agencies ought to bring us out of our national troubles.” My friends, what is your memory of those early scenes? Do you think we had better have God in our own household? “But,” says some one, “I can’t formulate a prayer; I never prayed in my life.” Well then, my brother, there are Philip Henry’s prayers, and McDuff’s prayers, and Doddridge’s prayers, and Episcopal Church prayers and a score of good books with supplications appropriate to your family. If you do not feel yourself competent to formulate a prayer, just take one of those prayer books, put it down on the bottom of the chair, kneel by it and then commend to a merciful God your own soul and the souls of your family. “But!” says a father, “I couldn’t do that at all; I am naturally so retiring and reticent it is impossible.” Well, I think sometimes it is the mother’s duty to lead in the prayer. I say, sometimes. She knows more of God, she knows more about the family wants, she can read the Scriptures with more tender enunciation. To put it in plain words, she prays better. I remember my father’s praying morning by morning and night by night, but when he was absent from home and my mother prayed it was very different. Though sometimes when father prayed we were listless or indifferent, we were none of us listless or indifferent when mother prayed, for we remember just how she looked as she said: “I ask not for my children riches or honor, or fame, but I ask that they all may become subjects of thy converting grace.” “Why,” you say, “I never could forget that;” neither could you. These mothers seem to decide everything. Nero’s mother was a murderess. Lord Byron’s mother was haughty and impious. So you might have judged from their children. Walter Scott’s mother was fond of poetry. Washington’s mother was patriotic. St. Bernard’s mother was a noble-minded woman. So you might have judged from their children. Good men have good mothers. There are exceptions to the rule, but they are only exceptions. The father and the mother loving God, their children are almost certain to love God. The son may make a wide curve from the straight path, but he will almost be sure to curve back again after a while. God remembers the prayers and brings the son back on the right road, sometimes after the parents are gone. How often we hear it said: “Oh, he was a wild young man until his father’s death; since that he has been very different; he has been very steady since his father’s death; he has become a Christian.” The fact is that the lid of the father’s casket is often the altar of repentance for a wandering boy. The marble pillar of the tomb is the point at which many a young man has been revolutioned. O young man! how long is it since you were out to your father’s grave? Perhaps you had better go this week. Perhaps the storms of last winter may have bent the headstone toward the earth, and it may need straightening. Perhaps the letters may be somewhat defaced by the elements. Perhaps the gate of the lot may be open. Perhaps you might find a sermon in the faded grass. Better go out and look. O prodigal! do you remember your father’s house? Do you think that religion which did well for the old people would do well for you? It seems to me we are all resolved to have religion in our homes, but let it come in at the front door and not at the back door. In other words do not let us try to smuggle religion into the household. Do not let us be like those families that feel very much mortified when they are caught at family prayers. They do not dare to sing at family prayers lest the neighbors should hear them, and they never have prayers when they have company. If we are going to have religion in our house let it come in at the front door. Some of our beautiful homes have not the courage of the western trapper. A traveller passing along far away from home was overtaken by night and by a storm, and he put in at a cabin. He saw firearms there. It was a rough-looking place, but he did not dare to go into the darkness and storm. He had a large amount of money with him and he felt very much excited and disturbed. After a while the trapper came home. He had a gun on his shoulder. He put the gun roughly down in the cabin, and then the traveller was more disturbed. He was sure he was not safe in that place. After a while he heard the family talking together, and he said, “Now, they are plotting for my ruin; I wish I was out in the night and storm instead of being here; I would be safer there.” After a while the old trapper came up to the traveller and said: “Stranger, we are a rough people; we get our living by hunting, and when we come in at night we are quite tired and we go to bed early, but before we go to bed, we are in the habit of reading a few verses from the Scriptures and say a short prayer; if you don’t believe in such things, if you would just please to step outside the door for a little while, I’ll be obliged to you.” There was the courage to do one’s whole duty under all circumstances, and a house that has prayers in it is a safe house, it is a holy house, it is a divinely guarded house. So the traveller found out as he tarried in the cabin of that western trapper. But there are families that want religion a good way off, yet within calling distance for a funeral; but to have religion dominant in the household from the first day of January, seven o’clock a. m., to the thirty-first day of December, ten o’clock p. m., they do not want it. I had in my ancestral line an incident I must tell about for the encouragement of all Christian parents. My grandfather and grandmother went from Somerville to Baskenridge to attend revival meetings under the ministry of Dr. Finney. They were so impressed with the meetings that when they came back to Somerville, they were seized upon by a great desire for the salvation of their children. That evening the children were going off to a gay party, and my grandmother said to the children, “When you get all ready for the entertainment come into my room; I have something very important to tell you.” After they were all ready for the gay entertainment, they came into my grandmother’s room and she said to them, “Go and have a good time; but while you are gone I want you to know I am praying for you and will do nothing but pray for you until you get back.” They went off to the gay entertainment. They did not enjoy it much because they thought all the time of the fact that mother was praying for them. The evening passed. The children returned. The next day my grandparents heard sobbing and crying in the daughter’s room, and they went in and found her praying for the salvation of God, and her daughter Phebe said: “I wish you would go to the barn and to the wagon house, for Jehiel and David (the brothers) are under powerful conviction of sin.” My grandparent went to the barn, and Jehiel, who afterward became a useful minister of the Gospel, was imploring the mercy of Christ, and then having first knelt with him and commended his soul to Christ, they went to the wagon house, and there was David crying for the salvation of his soul—David, who afterward became my father. The whole family was swept into the kingdom of Jesus Christ. David could not keep the story to himself, and he crossed the fields to a farmhouse and told one to whom he had been affianced the story of his own salvation, and she yielded her heart to God. It was David and Catherine, and they stood up in the village church together a few weeks after—for the story of the converted household went all through the neighborhood—in a few weeks two hundred souls stood up in the plain meeting house at Somerville to profess faith in Christ, among them David and Catherine, afterward my parents. My mother, impressed with that, in after life, when she had a large family of children gathered around her, made a covenant with three neighbors, three mothers. They would meet once a week to pray for the salvation of their children until all their children were converted—this incident not known until after my mother’s death, the covenant then revealed by one of the survivors. We used to say: “Mother, where are you going?” and she would say, “I am just going out a little while; going over to the neighbors.” They kept on in that covenant until all their families were brought into the kingdom of God, myself the last, and I trace that line of results back to that evening when my grandmother commended our family to Christ, the tide of influence going on until this hour, and it will never cease. I tell this for the encouragement of fathers and mothers who are praying for their children. Take courage. God will answer prayer. He will keep his bargain. He will remember his covenant. O! my friends, take your family Bible and read out of it this afternoon. Some of you have such a Bible in the household. I have one in my home. It is a perfect fascination to me. If you looked at it, you would not find a page that was not discolored either with time or tears. My parents read out of it as long as I can remember; morning and evening they read out of it. When my brother Van Nest died in a foreign land, and the news came to our country home, that night they read the eternal consolations out of the old book. When my brother David died in this city, then that book comforted the old people in their trouble. My father in mid-life, fifteen years an invalid, out of that book read of the ravens that fed Elijah all through the hard struggle for bread. When my mother died that book illumined the dark valley. In the years that followed of loneliness, it comforted my father with the thought of reunion which took place afterward in Heaven. Doré never illustrated a Bible as that Bible is illustrated to me, or your family Bible is illustrated to you. Only three or four pictures in it, but we look right through and we see the marriages and the burials, the joys and the sorrows, the Thanksgiving days and the Christmas festivals, the cradles and the deathbeds. Old, old book. The hand that leafed you has gone to ashes; the eyes that perused you are closed. Old, old book! What a pillow thou wouldst make for a dying head! I believe this morning that, under the power of the Holy Ghost, there are hundreds of people here who are going to invite religion into their household. Let religion come into the dining-room to break the bread, into the parlor to purify the socialities, into the library to select their reading, into the bedroom to hallow the slumber, into the hallway to watch us when we go out and when we come in. There are hundreds of people here this morning, I believe, who are ready to say from their heart with the old soldier of the text, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” My subject has two arms. One arm of this subject puts its hand on the head of parents and says: “Do not interfere with your children’s happiness, do not intercept their eternal welfare, do not put out your foot and trip any of them into a ruin. Start them under the shelter and benediction of the Christian religion. Catechisms will not save them, though catechisms are good; the rod will not save them, though the rod may be necessary; lessons of virtue will not save them, though such lessons are very important. Your becoming a Christian through and through, up and down, out and out, will make your children Christians.” The other arm of this subject puts its hand on all those who had good bringing up, but as yet have not yielded to the anticipations in regard to them. I said that the path of the son or the daughter might widely diverge, and yet it is almost certain that the wandering one would come around again on the straight path. There are exceptions, and you, my brother, might be the exception. You have curved out long enough; it is time to curve in. Would it not be awful after all the prayers offered for your salvation, if you missed Heaven? If your parents prayed for you twenty years and they offered two prayers a day for twenty years, that would make twenty-nine thousand two hundred prayers for you. Those twenty-nine thousand two hundred prayers are either the mountain over which you will climb into Heaven, or they will be an avalanche coming down upon your soul. By the cradle that rocked your childhood with the foot that long ceased to move; by the crib in which your children sleep night by night under God’s protecting care; by the two graves in which the two old hearts are resting, the two hearts that beat with love toward you since before you were born; by the two graves in which you, the now living father and mother, will soon repose, I urge you to faithfulness. O! thou glorified Christian ancestry. Bend from the skies today and give new emphasis to what you told us once with tears and many anxieties. Keep a place for us by your blissful side, for today in the presence of earth and Heaven and hell, and by the help of the cross, and amid these overwhelming and gracious memories we all resolve, each one for himself and for his loved ones: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” May the Lord God of Joshua have mercy on us! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 71: 069. JUDGES ======================================================================== Judges ======================================================================== CHAPTER 72: 070. A SUMMER-HOUSE TRAGEDY ======================================================================== A Summer-House Tragedy Judges 3:15 : “But when the children of Israel cried unto the Lord, the Lord raised them up a deliverer, Ehud the son of Gera, a Benjamite, a man left-handed: and by him the children of Israel sent a present unto Eglon, the king of Moab.” Ehud was a ruler in Israel. He was left-handed, and, what was peculiar about the tribe of Benjamin, to which he belonged, there were in it seven hundred left-handed men; and yet, so expert had they all become in the use of the left hand, that the Bible says they could sling stones at a hair’s-breadth, and not miss. Well, there was a king by the name of Eglon, who was an oppressor of Israel. He imposed upon them a most outrageous tax. Ehud, had a divine commission to destroy that oppressor. He came, pretending that he was going to pay the tax, and asked to see King Eglon. He was told he was in the summer-house, the place to which the king retired when it was too hot to sit in the palace. This summer-house was a place surrounded by flowers and trees and springing fountains and warbling birds. Ehud entered the summer-house and said to King Eglon that he had a secret errand with him. Immediately all the attendants were waved out of the royal presence. King Eglon rises to receive the messenger. Ehud, the left-handed man, puts his left hand to his right side, pulls out a dagger, and thrusts Eglon through until the haft went in after the blade. Eglon falls. Ehud comes forth to blow the trumpet of liberty amidst the mountains of Ephraim; and a great host is marshaled and proud Moab submits to the conqueror, and Israel is free. So, O Lord, let thine enemies perish! So, O Lord, let thy friends triumph! I learn first, from this subject, the power of left-handed men. There are some men who, by physical organization, have as much strength in their left hand as in their right hand; but there is something in the writing of this text which implies that Ehud had some defect in his right hand which compelled him to use his left. Oh, the power of left-handed men! Genius is often self-observant, careful of itself, not given to much toil, burning incense to its own aggrandizement; while many a man, with no natural endowments, actually defective in physical and mental organization, has an earnestness for the right, a patient industry, an all-consuming perseverance, which achieve marvels for the kingdom of Christ. Though left-handed, as Ehud, they can strike down a sin as great and imperial as Eglon. I have seen men of wealth gathering about them all their treasures, sniffing at the cause of a world lying in wickedness, roughly ordering Lazarus off their doorstep, sending their dogs, not to lick his sores, but to hound him off their premises; catching all the pure rain of God’s blessing into the stagnant, ropy, frog-inhabited pool of their own selfishness—right-handed men, worse than useless—while many a man with large heart and little purse, has, out of his limited means, made poverty leap for joy, and started an influence that overspans the grave, and will swing ‘round and ‘round the throne of God, world without end. It is high time that you left-handed men, who have been longing for this gift, and that eloquence, and the other man’s wealth, should take your left hand out of your pockets. Who made all these railroads? Who set up all these cities? Who started all these churches, and schools and asylums? Who has done the tugging and running and pulling? Men of no wonderful endowments, thousands of them acknowledging themselves to be left-handed, and yet they were earnest, and yet they were determined, and yet they were triumphant. But I do not suppose that Ehud, the first time he took a sling in his left hand, could throw a stone at a hair’s breadth, and not miss. I suppose it was practise that gave him the wonderful dexterity. Go forth to your spheres of duty, and be not discouraged if, in your first attempts, you miss the mark. Ehud missed it. Take another stone, put it carefully into the sling, swing it around your head, take better aim, and the next time you will strike the center. The first time a mason rings his trowel upon the brick, he does not expect to put up a perfect wall. The first time a carpenter sends the plane over a board, or drives a bit through a beam, he does not expect to make a perfect execution. The first time a boy attempts a rhyme, he does not expect to chime a “Lalla Rookh,” or a “Lady of the Lake.” Do not be surprised if, in your first efforts at doing good, you are not very largely successful. Understand that usefulness is an art, a science, a trade. There was an oculist performing a very difficult operation on the human eye. A young doctor stood by and said, “How easily you do that; it does not seem to cause you any trouble at all.” “Ah,” said the old oculist, “it is very easy now, but I spoiled a hatful of eyes to learn that.” Be not surprised if it takes some practise before we can help men to moral eyesight, and bring them to a vision of the Cross. Left-handed men, to the work! Take the Gospel for a sling, and faith and repentance for the smooth stone from the brook; take sure aim, God direct the weapon, and great Goliaths will tumble before you. When Garibaldi was going out to battle, he told his troops what he wanted them to do, and after he had described his plan of action, they said, “General, what are you going to give us for all this?” “Well,” he replied, “I don’t know what else you will get, but you will get hunger and cold and wounds and death. How do you like it?” His men stood before him for a little while in silence, and then they threw up their hands and cried, “We are the men! we are the men!” The Lord Jesus Christ calls you to his service. I do not promise you an easy time in this world. You may have persecutions and trials, and misrepresentations; but afterward there comes an eternal weight of glory, and you can bear the wounds and the bruises and the misrepresentations, if you can have the reward afterward. Have you not enough enthusiasm to cry out, “We are the men! We are the men!” I learn also from this subject danger of worldly elevation. This Eglon was what the world called a great man. There were hundreds of people who would have considered it the greatest honor of their life just to have him speak to them; yet, although he is so high up in worldly position, he is not beyond the reach of Ehud’s dagger. I see a great many people trying to climb up in social position, having an idea that there is a safe place somewhere far above, not knowing that the mountain of fame has a top like Mont Blanc, covered with perpetual snow. We laugh at the children of Shinar for trying to build a tower that could reach to the heavens; but I think, if our eyesight were only good enough, we could see a Babel in many a dooryard. Oh, the struggle is fierce. It is store against store, house against house, street against street, nation against nation. The goal for which men are running is chairs and chandeliers and mirrors and houses and lands and presidential equipments. If they get what they anticipate, what have they? Men are not safe from calumny while they live, and, worse than that, they are not safe after they are dead; for I have seen swine root up graveyards. One day a man goes up into publicity, and the world does him honor, and people climb up into sycamore-trees to watch him as he passes, and, as he goes along on the shoulders of the people, there is a waving of hats and a wild huzza. To-morrow the same man is caught between the jaws of the printing-press and mangled and bruised, and the very same persons who applauded him before, cry, “Down with the traitor! down with him!” Belshazzar sits at the feast, the mighty men of Babylon sitting all around him. Wit sparkles like the wine, and the wine like the wit. Music rolls up among the chandeliers; the chandeliers flash down on the decanters. The breath of hanging gardens floats in on the night air; the voice of revelry floats out. Amidst wreaths and tapestry and folded banners, a finger writes: The march of a host is heard on the stairs. Laughter catches in the throat. A thousand hearts stop beating. The blow is struck. The blood on the floor is richer-hued than the wine on the table. The kingdom has departed. Belshazzar was no worse, perhaps, than hundreds of people in Babylon, but his position slew him. Oh, be content with just such a position as God has placed you in. It may not be said of us, “He was a great general” or “He was an honored chieftain” or “He was mighty in worldly attainments;” but this thing may be said of you and of me, “He was a good citizen, a faithful Christian, a friend of Jesus.” And that in the last day will be the highest of all eulogiums. I learn further from this subject that death comes to the summer-house. Eglon did not expect to die in that fine place. Amidst all the flower-leaves that drifted like summer snow into the window; in the tinkle and dash of the fountains; in the sound of a thousand leaves flutting on one tree-branch; in the cool breeze that came up to shake feverish trouble out of the king’s locks—there was nothing that spake of death, but there he died! In the winter, when the snow is a shroud, and when the wind is a dirge, it is easy to think of our mortality; but when the weather is pleasant, and all our surroundings are agreeable, how difficult it is for us appreciate the truth that we are mortal! And yet my text teaches that death does sometimes come to the summer-house. He is blind, and cannot see the leaves. He is deaf, and cannot hear the fountains. If death would ask us for victims, we could point him to hundreds of people who would rejoice to have him come. Push back the door of that hovel. Look at that little child—cold and sick and hungry. It has never heard the name of God but in blasphemy. Parents intoxicated, staggering around its straw bed. O Death, there is a mark for thee! Up with it into the light! Before those little feet stumble on life’s pathway, give them rest. Here is an aged man. He has done his work. He has done it gloriously. The companions of his youth all gone, his children dead, he longs to be at rest, and wearily the days and the nights pass. He says, “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.” O Death, there is a mark for thee! Take from him the staff, and give him the scepter! Up with him into the light, where eyes never grow dim, and the hair whitens not through the long years of eternity. Ah! Death will not do that. Death turns back from the straw bed, and from the aged man ready for the skies, and comes to the summer-house. What doest thou here, thou bony, ghastly monster, amidst this waving grass, and under this sunlight sifting through the tree branches? Children are at play. How quickly their feet go, and their locks toss in the wind. Father and mother stand at the side of the room looking on, enjoying their glee. It does not seem possible that the wolf should ever break into that fold and carry off a lamb. Meanwhile the old archer stands looking through the thicket. He points his arrow at the brightest of the group—he is a sure marksman—the bow bends, the arrow speeds! Hush now. The quick feet have stopped, and the locks toss no more in the wind. Laughter has gone out of the hall. Death in the summer-house! Here is a father in mid-life; his coming home at night is the signal for mirth. The children rush to the door and there are books on the evening stand and the hours pass away on glad feet. There is nothing wanting in that home. Religion is there, and sacrifices on the altar morning and night. You look in that household and say, “I cannot think of anything happier. I do not really believe the world is so sad a place as some people describe it to be.” The scene changes. Father is sick. The doors must be kept shut. The death-watch chirps dolefully on the hearth. The children whisper and walk softly where once they romped. Passing to the house late at night, you see the quick glancing of lights from room to room. It is all over! Death in the summer-house! Here is an aged mother—aged, but not infirm. You think you will have the joy of caring for her wants a good while yet. As she goes from house to house, to children and grandchildren, her coming is a dropping of sunlight in the dwelling. Your children see her coming through the lane, and they cry, “Grandmother’s come!” Care for you has marked up her face with many a deep wrinkle, and her back stoops with carrying your burdens. Some day she is very quiet. She says she is not sick, but something tells you, you will not much longer have a mother. She will sit with you no more at the table, nor at the hearth. Her soul goes out so gently you do not exactly know the moment of its going. Fold the hands that have done so many kindnesses for you right over the heart that has beat with love toward you since before you were born. Let the pilgrim rest. She is weary. Death in the summer-house! Gather about us what we will of comfort and luxury, when the pale messenger comes he does not stop to look at the architecture of the house before he comes in; nor, entering, does he wait to examine the pictures we have gathered on the wall; or, bending over your pillow, he does not stop to see whether there is color in the cheek or gentleness in the eye or intelligence in the brow. But what of that? Must we stand forever mourning among the graves of our dead? No, no! The people in Bengal bring cages of birds to the graves of their dead and then they open the cages and the birds go singing heavenward. So I would bring to the graves of your dead all bright thoughts and congratulations and bid them sing of victory and redemption. I stamp on the bottom of the grave and it breaks through into the light and the glory of heaven. The ancients used to think that the straits entering the Red Sea were very dangerous places, and they supposed that every ship that went through those straits would be destroyed, and they were in the habit of putting on weeds of mourning for those who had gone on that voyage, as though they were actually dead. Do you know what they called those straits? They called them the “Gate of Tears.” I stand at the gate of tears through which many of your loved ones have gone, and I want to tell you that all are not shipwrecked that have gone through those straits into the great ocean stretching out beyond. The sound that comes from that other shore, on still nights when we are wrapped in prayer, makes me think that the departed are not dead. We are the dead—we who toil; we who weep; we who sin—we are the dead. How my heart aches for human sorrow! this sound of breaking hearts that I hear all about me! this last look of faces that never will brighten again! this last kiss of lips that never will speak again! this widowhood and orphanage! Oh, when will the day of sorrow be gone! After the sharpest winter the spring dismounts from the shoulder of a southern gale and puts its warm hand upon the earth, and in its palm there comes the grass and there come the flowers and God reads over the poetry of bird and brook and bloom and pronounces it very good. What if every winter had not its spring and every night its day and every gloom its glow and every bitter now its sweet hereafter! If you have been on the sea, you know, as the ship passes in the night, there is a phosphorescent track left behind it; and as the waters roll up they toss with unimaginable splendor. Well, across this great ocean of human trouble Jesus walks. Oh, that in the phosphorescent track of his feet we might all follow and be illumined! There was a gentleman in a rail-car who saw in that same car three passengers of very different circumstances. The first was a maniac. He was carefully guarded by his attendants; his mind, like a ship dismasted, was beating against a dark, desolate coast, from which no help could come. The train stopped, and the man was taken out into the asylum, to waste away, perhaps, through years of gloom. The second passenger was a culprit. The outraged law had seized on him. As the cars jolted the chains rattled. On his face were crime, depravity, and despair. The train halted and he was taken out to the penitentiary, to which he had been condemned. There was the third passenger, under far different circumstances. She was a bride. Every hour was gay as a marriage-bell. Life glittered and beckoned. Her companion was taking her to his father’s house. The train halted. The old man was there to welcome her to her new home, and his white locks snowed down upon her as he sealed his word with a father’s kiss. Quickly we fly toward eternity. We will soon be there. Some leave this life condemned culprits and they refuse a pardon. Oh, may it be with us, that, leaving this fleeting life for the next, we may find our Father ready to greet us to our new home with him forever. That will be a marriage banquet! Father’s welcome! Father’s bosom! Father’s kiss! Heaven! Heaven! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 73: 071. SHAMGAR'S OX-GOAD ======================================================================== Shamgar’s Ox-Goad Judges 3:31 : “After him was Shamgar, who slew of the Philistines six hundred men with an ox-goad.” One day while Shamgar, the farmer, was plowing with a yoke of oxen, his commands of “Whoa! Haw! Gee!” were changed to the sound of battle. Philistines, always ready to make trouble, march up with sword and spear. Shamgar, the plowman, had no sword, and would not probably have known how to wield it, if he had possessed one. But fight he must, or go down under the stroke of the Philistines. He had an ox-goad—a weapon used to urge on the lazy team; a weapon about eight feet long, with a sharp iron at one end to puncture the beast, and a wide iron chisel, or shovel, at the other end, with which to scrape the clumps of soil from the plowshare. Yet, with the iron prong at one end of the ox-goad and the iron scraper at the other, it was not such a weapon as one would desire to use in battle with armed Philistines. But God helped the farmer, and, leaving the oxen to look after themselves, he charged upon the invaders of his homestead. Some of the commentaries, to make it easier for Shamgar, suggest that perhaps he led a regiment of farmers into the combat; his ox-goad only one of many ox-goads. But the Lord does not need any of you to help in making the Scriptures; and Shamgar, with the Lord on his side, was mightier than six hundred Philistines with the Lord against them. The battle opened. Shamgar, with muscle strengthened by open air, and plowman and reaper and thresher’s toil, uses the only weapon at hand, and he swings the ox-goad up and down, and this way and that; now stabbing with the iron prong at one end of it and now thrusting with the iron scraper at the other and now bringing down the whole weight of the instrument upon the heads of the enemy. The Philistines are in a panic and the supernatural forces come in and a blow that would not under other circumstances have prostrated or slain left its victim lifeless; until, when Shamgar walked over the field, he counted one hundred dead, two hundred dead, three hundred dead, four hundred dead, five hundred dead, six hundred dead—all the work done by an ox-goad with iron prong at one end and an iron shovel at the other. The fame of this achievement by this farmer with an awkward weapon of war spread abroad, and lionized him, until he was hoisted into the highest place of power, and became the third of the mighty judges of Israel. So you see that Cincinnatus was not the only man lifted from plow to ruler’s seat. For what reason was this unprecedented and unparalleled victory of a farmer’s ox-goad put into this Bible, where there was no spare room for the unimportant and the trivial? It was, first of all, to teach you, and to teach me, and to teach all past ages since then, and to teach all ages to come, that in the war for God, and against sin, we ought to put to the best use the weapon we happen to have on hand. Why not Shamgar wait until he could get a war-charger, with neck arched, and back caparisoned, and nostrils sniffing the battle afar off; or until he could get war equipment; or could drill a regiment, and, wheeling them into line, command them forward to the charge? To wait for that would have been defeat and annihilation. So he takes the best weapon he could lay hold of, and that is an ox-goad. We are called into the battle for the right, and against wrong, and many of us have not just the kind of weapon we would prefer. It may not be a sword of argument. It may not be the spear of sharp, thrusting wit; it may not be the battering-ram of denunciation. But there is something we can do, and some forces we can wield. Do not wait for what you have not, but use what you have. Perhaps you have not eloquence; but you have a smile. Well, a smile of encouragement has changed the behavior of tens of thousands of wanderers and brought them back to God and enthroned them in heaven. You cannot make a persuasive appeal; but you can set an example, and a good example has saved more souls than you could count in a year, if you counted all the time. You cannot give ten thousand dollars; but you can give as much as the widow of the Gospel, whose two mites, the smallest coins of the Hebrews, were bestowed in such a spirit as to make her more famous than all the philanthropists who have endowed all the hospitals and universities of all Christendom, of all time. You have very limited vocabulary; but you can say “Yes” or “No,” and a firm “yes” or an emphatic “no” has traversed the centuries, and will traverse all eternity, with good influence. You may not have the courage to confront a large assemblage, but you can tell a Sunday-school class of two—a boy and a girl—how to find Christ, and one of them may become a William Carey, to start influences that will redeem India, and the other a Florence Nightingale, who will illumine battlefields covered with the dying and the dead. There was a tough case in a town of England where a young lady, applying for a Sunday-school class, was told by the superintendent she would have to pick up one out of the street. The worst of the class brought from the street was one Bob. He was fitted out with respectable clothing by the superintendent. But after two or three Sabbaths he disappeared. He was found with his clothes in tatters, for he had been fighting. The second time Bob was well clad for school. After coming once or twice, he again disappeared, and was found in rags, consequent upon fighting. The teacher was disposed to give him up, but the superintendent said, “Let us try him again,” and the third suit of clothes was provided for him. Thereafter he came until he was converted and joined the church and started for the Gospel ministry, and became a foreign missionary, preaching and translating the Scriptures. Who was the boy called Bob? The illustrious Dr. Robert Morrison, great on earth and greater in heaven. Who his teacher was I know not; but she used the opportunity as it opened, and great has been her reward. You may not be able to load an Armstrong gun; you may not be able to hurl a Hotchkiss shell; you may not be able to shoulder a magazine rifle; but use anything you can lay your hands on. Try a blacksmith’s hammer or a merchant’s yardstick or a mason’s trowel or a carpenter’s plane or a housewife’s broom or a farmer’s ox-goad. One of the surprises of heaven will be what grand results came from some simple means. Matthias Joyce, the vile man, became a great apostle of righteousness; not from hearing John Wesley preach, but from seeing him kiss a little child on the pulpit stairs. Again, my subject springs upon us the thought that in calculating the prospects of religious attempt, we must take omnipotence and omniscience and omnipresence and all the other attributes of God into the calculation. Whom do you see on that plowed field of my text? One hearer says, “I see Shamgar.” Another hearer says, “I see six hundred Philistines.” My hearers, you have missed the chief personage on that battlefield of plowed ground. I also see Shamgar, and six hundred Philistines; but more than all and mightier than all and more overwhelming than all, I see God. Shamgar, with his unaided arm, howsoever muscular, and with that humble instrument made for agricultural purposes, and never constructed for combat, could not have wrought such victory. It was Omnipotence above and beneath and back of and at the point of the ox-goad. Before that battle was over, the plowman realized this, and all the six hundred Philistines realized it, and all who visited the battlefield afterward appreciated it. I want in heaven to hear the story, for it can never be fully told on earth—perhaps some day may be set apart for the rehearsal, while all heaven listens—the story of how God blessed awkward and humble instrumentalities. Many an evangelist has come into a town given up to worldliness. The pastors say to the evangelist, “We are glad you have come, but it is a hard field, and we feel sorry for you. The members of our churches play progressive euchre and go to the theatre and bet at the horse-races, and gaiety and fashion have taken possession of the town. We have advertised your meetings, but are not very hopeful. God bless you.” This evangelist takes his place on platform or pulpit. He never graduated at college, and there are before him twenty graduates of the best universities. He never took one lesson in elocution, and there are before him twenty trained orators. Many of the ladies present are graduates of the highest female seminaries, and one slip in grammar or one mispronunciation will arouse a suppressed giggle. Amid the general chill that pervades the house, the unpretending evangelist opens his Bible and takes for his text, “Lord, that my eyes may be opened.” Opera-glasses in the gallery curiously scrutinize the speaker. He tells in a plain way the story of the blind man, tells two or three touching anecdotes, and the general chill gives way before a strange warmth. A classical hearer who took the first honor at Yale, and who is a prince of proprieties, finds his spectacles become dim with a moisture suggestive of tears. A worldly mother who has been bringing up her sons and daughters in utter godlessness, puts her handkerchief to her eyes and begins to weep. Highly educated men who came to criticise and pick to pieces and find fault, bow on their gold-headed canes. What is that sound from under the gallery? It is a sob, and sobs are catching; and all along the wall, and all up and down the audience, there is deep emotion, so that when at the close of the service anxious souls are invited to special seats, or the inquiry-room; they come up by scores and kneel and repent and rise up pardoned; the whole town is shaken, and places of evil amusement are sparsely attended, and rum-holes lose their patrons, and the churches are thronged, and the whole community is cleansed and elevated and rejoiced. What power did the evangelist bring to bear to capture that town for righteousness? Not one brilliant epigram did he utter; not one graceful gesture did he make; not one rhetorical climax did he pile up. But there was something about him that people had not taken in the estimate when they prophesied the failure of that work. They had not taken into the calculation the omnipotence of the Holy Ghost. It was not the flash of a Damascus blade. It was God, before and behind and all around the ox-goad. When people say that crime will triumph and the world will never be converted because of the seeming insufficiency of the means employed, they count the six hundred armed Philistines on one side and Shamgar, the farmer, awkwardly equipped, on the other side; not realizing that the chariots of God are twenty thousand, and that all heaven, cherubic, seraphic, archangelic, deific, is on what otherwise would be the weak side. Napoleon, the author of the saying, “God is on the side of the heaviest artillery,” lived to find out his mistake; for at Waterloo, the one hundred and sixty guns of the English overcame the two hundred and fifty guns of the French. God is on the side of the right; and one man in the right will eventually be found stronger than six hundred men in the wrong. In all estimates of any kind of Christian work, do not make the mistake every day made of leaving out the Head of the Universe. Again, my subject springs upon us the thought that in God’s service it is best to use weapons that are particularly suited to us. Shamgar had, like many of us, been brought up on a farm. He knew nothing about javelins and bucklers and helmets and breastplates and greaves of brass and catapults and balistæ, and iron scythes fastened to the axles of chariots. But he was familiar with the flail of the threshing-floor, and knew how to pound with that; and the ax of the woods, and knew how to hew with that; and the ox-goad of the plowman, and knew how to thrust with that. And you and I will do best to use those means that we can best handle, those weapons with which we can make the most execution. Some in God’s service will do best with the pen; some with the voice; some by extemporaneous speech, for they have the whole vocabulary of the English language half-way between their brain and tongue; and others will do best with manuscript spread out before them. Some will serve God by the plow, raising wheat and corn, and giving liberally of the proceeds of their farming to churches and missions; some as merchants, and out of their profits they will dedicate a tenth to the Lord; some as physicians, prescribing for the world’s ailments; and some as attorneys, defending innocence and obtaining rights that would not otherwise be recognized; and some as sailors, helping bridge the sea; and some as teachers and pastors. The Kingdom of God is dreadfully retarded by so many of us attempting to do that which we cannot do—reaching up for broadsword or falchion or bayonet or scimitar or Enfield rifle or Paixhans guns, while we ought to be content with an ox-goad. I thank God that there are tens of thousands of Christians whom you never heard of, and never will hear of until you see them in the high places of heaven, who are now in a quiet way in homes and schoolhouses and in praying circles and by sick-beds and up dark alleys, saying the saving word and doing the saving deed, the aggregation of their work overpowering the most ambitious statistics. In the grand review of heaven, when the regiments pass the Lord of Hosts, there will be whole regiments of nurses and Sabbath-school teachers and tract distributers and unpretending workers, before whom, as they pass, the kings and queens of God and the Lamb will lift flashing coronet and bow down in recognition and reverence. The most of the Christian work for the world’s reclamation and salvation will be done by people of one talent and two talents; while the ten-talent people are up in the astronomical observatories studying other worlds—though they do little or nothing for the redemption of this world—or are up in the rarified realms of “Higher Criticism” trying to find out proofs that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, or to prove that the throat of the whale was not large enough to swallow the minister who declined the call to Nineveh, or apologizing for the Almighty for certain inexplicable things they have found in the Scriptures. It will be found out at the last that the Krupp guns have not done so much to capture this world for God as the ox-goads. Years ago I was to summer in the Adirondacks, and my wealthy friend, who was a great hunter and fisherman, said: “I am not going to the Adirondacks this season, and you can take my equipment and I will send it up to Paul Smith’s.” Well, it was there when I arrived in the Adirondacks, a splendid outfit, that cost many hundreds of dollars—a gorgeous tent, and such elaborate fishing apparatus, such guns of all styles of exquisite make; and reels and pouches and bait and torches and lunch baskets and many more things that I could not even guess the use of. And my friend of the big soul had even written on and engaged men who should accompany me into the forest and carry home the deer and the trout. If the mountains could have seen and understood it at the time, there would have been panic among the antlers and the fins, through all the “John Brown’s Tract.” Well, I am no hunter, and not a roebuck or a game-fish did I injure. But there were hunters there that season who had nothing but a plain gun and a rug to sleep on and a coil of fishing-line and a box of ammunition and bait, who came in ever and anon with as many of the captives of forest and stream as they and two or three attendants could carry. Now, I fear that many Christian workers who have most elaborate educational and theological and professional equipment, and most wonderful weaponry, sufficient, you would think, to capture a whole community or a whole nation for God, will have in the Last Day but little except their fine tackling to show; while some who had no advantages, except that which they got in prayer and consecration, will prove, by the souls they have brought to the shore of eternal safety, that they have been gloriously successful as fishers of men, and in taking many who, like the hart, were panting after the water-brooks. What made the Amalekites run before Gideon’s army? Each one of the army knew how much racket the breaking of one pitcher would make. So three hundred men that night took three hundred pitchers, and a lamp inside the pitcher, and at a given signal the lamps were lighted and the pitchers were violently dashed down. The flash of the light and the racket of three hundred demolished pitchers sent the enemy into wild flight. Not much of a weapon, you would say, is a broken pitcher; but the Lord made that awful crash of crockery the means of triumph for his people. And there is yet to be a battle with the pitchers. The night of the world’s dissipation may get darker and darker, but after a while, in what watch of the night I know not, all the ale pitchers and the wine pitchers and the beer pitchers and the whiskey pitchers of the earth will be hurled into demolition by converted inebriates and Christian reformers; and at that awful crash of infernal crockery the Amalekitish host of pauperism and loaferdom and domestic quarrel and cruelty and assassination will fly the earth. Take the first weapon you can lay your hands on. Why did David choose the sling when he went at Goliath, and Goliath went at him? Brought up in the country, like every other farmer’s boy he knew how to manage a sling. Saul’s armor was first put on him, but the giant’s armor was too heavy. The helmet was clapped on him as an extinguisher, and David said, “I cannot go with these, for I have not proved them.” And the first wise thing David did after putting on Saul’s armor was to put it off. Then the brook Elah—the bed of which was dry when I saw it, and one vast reach of pebbles—furnished the five smooth stones with one of which Goliath was prostrated. Whether it be a boy’s sling or a broken pitcher or an ox-goad take that which you can manage and ask God for help, and no power on earth or in hell can stand before you. Go out, then, I charge you, against the Philistines. We must admit the odds are against us—six hundred to one. In the matter of dollars, those devoted to worldliness and sin and dissipation, when compared with the dollars devoted to holiness and virtue—six hundred to one. The houses set apart for vice and despoliation and ruin, as compared with those dedicated to good—six hundred to one. Of printed newspaper sheets scattered abroad from day to day, those depraving as compared with those elevating are six hundred to one. The agencies for making the world worse, compared with the agencies for making the world better—six hundred to one. But Moses in his song chants, “How should one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight?” and in my text one ox-goad conquers six hundred uplifted battle-axes; and the day of universal victory is coming, unless the Bible be a fabrication and eternity a myth and the chariots of God are unwheeled on the golden streets, and the last regiment of the celestial hosts lie dead on the plains of heaven. With us or without us, the work will be done. Oh! get into the ranks somewhere, armed somehow; you with a needle, you with a pen, you with a good book, you with a loaf of bread for the hungry, you with a vial of medicine for the sick, you with a pair of shoes for the barefooted, you with word of encouragement for the young man trying to get back from evil ways; you with some story of the Christ who came to heal the worst wounds and pardon the blackest guilt and call the farthest wanderer home. I say to you, as the watchman of London used to say at night to the householders, before the. time of street-lamps came: “Hang out your light! Hang out your light!” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 74: 072. WHERE'S MOTHER? ======================================================================== Where’s Mother? Judges 5:28 : “The mother of Sisera looked out at a window.” Spiked to the ground of Jael’s tent lay the dead commander-in-chief of the Canaanitish host, General Sisera, not far from the river Kishon, which was only a dry bed of pebbles when in 1889, in Palestine, we crossed it, but the gullies and ravines which ran into it indicated the possibility of great freshets like the one at the time of the text. General Sisera had gone out with nine hundred iron chariots, but he was defeated, and, his chariot-wheels interlocked with the wheels of other chariots, he could not retreat fast enough; and so he leaped to the ground and ran till, exhausted, he went into Jael’s tent for safety. She had just been churning, and when he asked for water she gave him buttermilk, which in the East is considered a most refreshing drink. Very tired, and supposing he was safe, he went to sleep upon the floor, but Jael, who had resolved upon his death, took a tentpin, long and round and sharp, and a hammer, and putting the sharp end of the tentpin to the temple of Sisera with one hand, with her other hand she lifted the hammer and brought it down on the head of the pin with a stout stroke, when Sisera struggled to rise, and she struck him again, and he struggled to rise, and the third time she struck him, and the commander-in-chief of the Canaanitish host lay dead. Meanwhile, in the distance Sisera’s mother sits amid the surroundings of wealth and pomp and scenes palatial, waiting for his return. Every mother expects her son to be victorious, and this mother looked out at the window expecting to see him drive up in his chariot, followed by wagons loaded with embroideries, and also by regiments of men vanquished and enslaved. I see her now sitting at the window, in high expectation. She watches the furthest turn of the road. She looks for the flying dust of the swift hoofs. The first flash of the bit of the horse’s bridle she will catch. The ladies of her court stand round and she tells them of what they shall have when her son comes up—chains of gold and carcanets of beauty, and dresses of such wondrous fabric and splendor as the Bible only hints at but leaves us to imagine. “He ought to be here by this time,” says his mother, “that battle is surely over. I hope that freshet of the river Kishon has not impeded him. I hope those strange appearances we saw last night in the sky were not ominous, when the stars seemed to fight in their courses. No, no! He is so brave in battle I know he has won the day. He will soon be here.” But alas! for the disappointed mother; she will not see the glittering headgear of the horses at full gallop bringing her son home from victorious battle. As a solitary messenger arriving in hot haste rides up to the window at which the mother of Sisera sits, he cries: “Your armies are defeated and your son is dead,” there is a scene of horror and anguish from which we turn away. Now you see the full meaning of my short text: “The mother of Sisera looked out at a window.” Well, we are all out in the battle of life; it is raging now and the most of us have a mother watching and waiting for news of our victory or defeat; if she be not sitting at the window of earth, she is sitting at a window of heaven, and she is going to hear all about it. By all the rules of war, Sisera ought to have been triumphant. He had nine hundred iron chariots and a host many thousands vaster than the armies of Israel. But God was on the other side; and the angry freshets of Kishon and the hail, the lightning and the unmanageable war horses and the capsized chariots and the stellar panic in the sky discomfited Sisera. Josephus in his history describes the scene in the following words: “When they were come to a close fight there came down from heaven a great storm with a vast quantity of rain and hail, and the wind blew the rain in the face of the Canaanites, and so darkened their eyes that their arrows and slings were of no advantage to them, nor would the coldness of the air permit the soldiers to make use of their swords: while this storm did not so much incommode the Israelites, because it came on their backs. They also took such courage upon the conviction that God was assisting them that they fell upon the very midst of their enemies and slew a great number of them; so that some of them fell by the Israelites, some fell by their own horses which were put into disorder, and not a few were killed by their own chariots.” Hence, my hearers, the bad news brought to the mother of Sisera looking out at the window. And our mother, whether sitting at a window of earth or a window of heaven, will hear the news of our victory or defeat. Not according to our talents or educational equipment or our opportunities, but according as God is for us or against us. “Where’s mother?” is the question most frequently asked in many households. It is asked by the husband as well as the child, coming in at nightfall. “Where’s mother?” It is asked by the little ones when they get hurt and come in crying with the pain: “Where’s mother?” It is asked by those who have seen some grand sight or heard some good news or received some beautiful gift: “Where’s mother?” She sometimes feels wearied by the question, for they all ask it and keep asking it all the time. She is not only the first to hear every case of perplexity, but she is the judge in every court of domestic appeal. That is what puts the premature wrinkles on so many maternal faces, and powders white so many maternal foreheads. You see it is a question that keeps on for all the years of childhood. It comes from the nursery and from the evening stand, where the boys and girls are learning their school lesson, and from the starting out in the morning, when the cape or hat or slate or book or overshoe is lost, until at night, all out of breath, the youngsters come in and shout until you can hear them from cellar to garret, and from front door to the back fence of the back yard. “Where’s mother?” Indeed a child’s life is so full of that question that if he be taken away, one of the things that the mother most misses and the silence that most oppresses her, is the absence of that question, which she will never hear on earth again, except she hears it in a dream which sometimes restores the nursery just as it was; and then the voice comes back so natural, and so sweet, and so innocent, and so inquiring, that the dream breaks at the words, “Where’s mother?” If that question were put to most of us now, we would have to say, if we spoke truthfully, that, like Sisera’s mother, she is at the palace window. She has become a queen unto God forever, and she is pulling back the rich folds of the King’s upholstery to look down at us. We are not told the particulars about the residence of Sisera’s mother, but there is in that scene in the Book of Judges so much about embroideries and needlework and ladies in waiting that we know her residence must have been princely and palatial. So we have no minute and particular description of the palace at whose window our glorified mother sits, but there is so much in the closing chapters of the good old Book about crowns, and pearls big enough to make a gate out of one of them, new songs, and marriage suppers, and harps, and white horses, with kings in the stirrups, and golden candlesticks, that we know the heavenly residence of our mother is superb, is unique, is colonnaded, is domed, is embowered, is fountained, is glorified, beyond the power of pencil or pen or tongue to present, and in the window of that palace the mother sits, watching for news from the battle. What a contrast between that celestial surrounding and her once earthly surroundings. What a work to bring up a family, in the old time way, with but little or no hired help, except perhaps for the washing-day, or for the swine-slaughtering, commonly called “the killing-day.” There was then no reading of elaborate treatises on the best modes of rearing children, and then leaving it all to hired help, with one or two visits a day to the nursery to see if the principles adopted are being carried out. The most of those old folks did the sewing, the washing, the mending, the darning, the patching, the millinery, the mantua-making, the housekeeping, and in hurried harvest time helped spread the hay or tread down the load in the mow. They were at the same time caterers, tailors, doctors, chaplains, and nurses for the whole household all together down with the measles or scarlet fever, or round the house with whooping coughs and croups and run-round fingers and earaches, and all the infantile distempers which at some time swoop upon every large household. Some of those mothers never got rested in this world. Instead of the self-rocking cradles of our day, which, wound up, will go hour after hour for the solace of the young slumberer, it was weary foot on the rocker sometimes half the day or half the night—rock—rock—rock—rock. Instead of our drugstores filled with all the wonders of materia medica, and called up through a telephone, with them the only drugstore short of four miles’ ride was the garret, with its bunches of peppermint and pennyroyal and catnip and mustard and camomile flowers, which were expected to do everything. Just think of it! Fifty years of preparing breakfast, dinner, and supper. The chief music they heard was that of spinning-wheel and rocking-chair. Fagged out, head-achy, and with ankles swollen. Those old-fashioned mothers—if any persons ever fitted appropriately into a good, easy comfortable heaven, they were the folks, and they got there and they are rested. They wear no spectacles, for they have their third sight—as they lived long enough on earth to get their second sight—and they do not have to pant for breath after going up the emerald stairs of the Eternal Palace, at whose window they now sit waiting for news from the battle. But if anyone keeps on asking the question “Where’s mother?” I answer, she is in your present character. The probability is that your physical features suggest her. If there be seven children in a household at least six of them look like their mother, and the older you get, the more you will look like her. But I speak now especially of your character, and not of your looks. This is easily explained. During the first ten years of your life you were almost all the time with her, and your father you saw only mornings and nights. There are no years in any life so important for impression as the first ten. Then and there is the impression made for virtue or vice, for truth or falsehood, for bravery or cowardice, for religion or skepticism. Suddenly start out from behind a door and frighten the child, and you may shatter his nervous system for a lifetime. During the first ten years you can tell him enough spook stories to make him a coward till he dies. Act before him as though Friday were an unlucky day, and it were baleful to have thirteen at the table, or see the moon over the left shoulder, and he will never recover from the idiotic superstitions. You may give that girl before she is ten years old a fondness for dress that will make her a mere “dummy frame” or fashion-plate for forty years. Ezekiel 16:44 : “As is the mother so is her daughter.” Before one decade has passed you can decide whether that boy shall be a Shylock or a George Peabody. Boys and girls are generally echoes of fathers and mothers. What an incoherent thing for a mother out of temper to punish a child for getting mad, or for a father who smokes to shut his boy up in a dark closet because he has found him with an old stump of a cigar in his mouth; or for that mother to rebuke her daughter for staring at herself too much in the looking-glass, when the mother has her own mirrors so arranged as to repeat her form from all sides. The great English poet’s loose moral character was decided before he left the nursery, and his schoolmaster in the school-room overheard this conversation: “Byron, your mother is a fool,” and he answered, “I know it.” You can hear through all the heroic life of Senator Sam Houston the words of his mother, when she in the war of 1812 put a musket in his hand and said: “There, my son, take this and never disgrace it, for remember I had rather all my sons should fill one honorable grave than that one of them should turn his back on an enemy. Go and remember, too, that while the door of my cottage is open to all brave men, it is always shut against cowards.” Agrippina, the mother of Nero, a murderess, you are not surprised that her son was a murderer. Give that child an overdose of catechism, and make him recite verses of the Bible as a punishment, and make Sunday a bore, and he will become a stout antagonist of Christianity. Impress him with the kindness and the geniality and the loveliness of religion and he will be its advocate and exemplar for all time and eternity. On one occasion, while I was traveling in the West, right before our express train on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the preceding train had gone down through a broken bridge, twelve cars falling a hundred feet and then consumed, I saw that only one span of the bridge was down and all the other spans were standing. Plan a good bridge of morals for your sons and daughters, but have the first span of ten years defective and through that they will crash down, though all the rest keep standing. O man! O woman! if you have preserved your integrity and are really Christian, you have first of all to thank God, and I think next you have to thank your mother. The most impressive thing at the inauguration of James A. Garfield as President of the United States was that after he had taken the oath of office he turned round, and in the presence of the Supreme Court and the Senate of the United States, kissed his old mother. If I had time to take statistics from among you, and I could ask what proportion of you who are Christians owe your salvation tinder God to maternal fidelity, I think about three-fourths of you would spring to your feet. “Ha! ha!” said the soldiers of the regiment to Charlie, one of their comrades, “What has made the change in you? You used to like sin as well as any of us.” Pulling from his pocket his mother’s letter in which, after telling of some comforts she had sent him, she concluded: “We are all praying for you, Charlie, that you may be a Christian,” he said, “Boys that’s the sentence.” The trouble with Sisera’s mother was, sitting at the window watching for news of her son from the battle-field, that she had the two bad qualities of being dissolute and being too fond of personal adornment. The Bible account says: “Her wise ladies answered her, yea, she returned answer to herself: ‘Have they not sped? Have they not divided the prey; to every man a damsel or two; to Sisera a prey of divers colors, a prey of divers colors of needlework, of divers colors of needlework on both sides?’“ She makes no anxious utterance about the wounded in battle, about the bloodshed, about the dying, about the dead, about the principles involved in the battle going on; a battle so important that the stars and the freshets took part, and the clash of swords was answered by the thunder of the skies. What she thinks most of is the bright colors of the wardrobes to be captured, and the needlework. “To Sisera a prey of divers colors, a prey of divers colors of needlework, of divers colors of needlework on both sides.” Now, neither Sisera’s mother nor anyone else can say too much in eulogy of the needle. It has made more useful conquests than the sword. Pointed at one end, and with an eye at the other, whether of bone or ivory as in earliest time, or of bronze, as in Pliny’s time, or of steel, as in modern time; whether laboriously fashioned as formerly by one hand or as now, when a hundred workmen in a factory are employed to make the different parts of one needle, it is an instrument divinely ordered for the comfort, for the life, for the health, for the adornment of the human race. The eye of the needle hath seen more domestic comfort and more gladdened poverty and more Christian service than any other eye. The modern sewing-machine has in no wise abolished the needle, but rather enthroned it. Thank God for the needlework, from the time when the Lord Almighty from the heavens ordered in regard to the embroidered door of the ancient tabernacle: “Thou shalt make a hanging for the door of the tent of blue and purple and scarlet and fine-twined linen, wrought with needlework,” down to the womanly hands which this season are presenting for benevolent purposes their needlework. But there was nothing except vanity and worldliness and social splash in what Sisera’s mother said about the needlework she expected her son would bring home from the battle. And I am not surprised to find that Sisera fought on the wrong side, when his mother at the window of my text, in that awful exigency had her chief thought on drygoods achievement and social display. God only knows how many homes have made shipwreck on the wardrobe. And that mother who sits at the window watching for vainglorious triumph of millinery and fine colors, and domestic pageantry, will after a while hear as bad news from her children out in the battle of life, as Sisera’s mother heard from the struggle at Esdrælon. But if you still press the question “Where’s mother?” I will tell you where she is not, though once she was there. Some of you started with her likeness in your face and her principles in your soul. But you have cast her out. That was an awful thing for you to do, but you have done it. That hard, grinding, dissipated look you never got from her. If you had seen anyone strike her, you would have struck him down, without much care whether the blow was just sufficient or fatal; but, my boy, you have struck her down—struck her innocence from your face and struck her principles from your soul. You struck her down! The tentpin that Jael drove three times into the skull of Sisera was not so cruel as the stab you have made more than three times through your mother’s heart. But she is waiting yet, for mothers are slow to give up their boys—waiting at some window, it may be a window on earth or at some window in heaven. All others may cast you off. Your wife may seek divorce and have no more patience with you. Your father may disinherit you and say, “Let him never again darken the door of our house.” But there are two persons who do not give you up—God and mother. How many disappointed mothers waiting at the window. Perhaps the panes of the window are not great glass plate, bevel-edged and shaded by exquisite lambrequin, but the window is made of small panes, I would say about six or eight of them, in summer wreathed with trailing vine, and in winter pictured by the Raphaels of the frost, a real country window. The mother sits there knitting, or busy with her needle of homely repairs, when she looks up, and sees coming across the bridge of the meadow brook a stranger who dismounts in front of the window. He lifts and drops the heavy knocker of the farmhouse door. “Come in!” is the response. He gives his name, and says, “I have come on a sad errand.” “There is nothing the matter with my son in the city, is there?” she asks. “Yes!” he says. “Your son got into an unfortunate encounter with a young man in a liquor saloon last night, and is badly hurt. The fact is he cannot get well. I hate to tell you all. I am sorry to say he is dead.” “Dead!” she cries as she totters back. “Oh, my son! my son! my son! Would God I had died for thee!” That is the ending of all her cares and anxieties and good counsels for that boy. That is her pay for her self-sacrifices in his behalf. That is the bad news from the battle. So the tidings of derelict or Christian sons travel to the windows of earth, or the windows of heaven at which mothers sit. “But,” says some one, “are you not mistaken about my glorified mother hearing of my evil doings since she went away?” Says some one else: “Are you not mistaken about my glorified mother hearing of my self-sacrifice and moral bravery and struggle to do right?” No! heaven and earth are in constant communication. There are trains running every five minutes—trains of immortals ascending and descending. Spirits going from earth to heaven to live there. Spirits descending from heaven to earth to minister and help. They hear from us many times every day. Do they hear good news or bad news from this battle, this Sedan, this Thermopylae, this Austerlitz, in which every one of us is fighting on the right side or the wrong side? O God! whose I am, and whom I am trying to serve, as a result of this sermon, roll over on all mothers a new sense of their responsibility; and upon all children, whether still in the nursery or out on the tremendous Esdrælon of mid-life or old age, the fact that their victories or defeats sound clear out, clear up to the windows of sympathetic maternity. Oh, is not this the minute when the cloud of blessing filled with the exhaled tears of anxious mothers shall burst upon us all in showers of mercy! There is one thought that is almost too tender for utterance. I almost fear to start it, lest I have not enough control of my emotion to conclude it. As when we were children we so often came in from play or from a hurt or from some childish injustice practiced upon us, and as soon as the door was opened we cried: “Where’s mother?” and she said: “Here I am,” and we buried our weeping faces in her lap; so after a while, when we get through with the pleasures and hurts of this life, we will, by the pardoning mercy of Christ, enter the heavenly home, and among the first questions, not the first but among the first, will be the old question that we used to ask, the question that is being asked in thousands of places at this very moment—the question: “Where’s mother?” And it will not take long for us to find her or for her to find us, for she will have been watching at the window for our coming, and with the other children of our household of earth we will again gather round her, and she will say: “Well! how did you get through the battle of life? I have often heard from others about you; but now I want to hear it from your own souls. Tell me all about it, my children!” And then we will tell her of all our earthly experiences, the holidays, the marriages, the birth-hours, the burials, the heartbreaks, the losses, the gains, the victories, the defeats, and she will say, “Never mind, it is all over now. I see each one of you has a crown which was given you at the gate as you came through. Now cast it at the feet of the Christ who saved you and me and saved us all. Thank God we are never to part, and for all the ages of eternity you will never again have to ask, ‘Where’s mother?’“ ======================================================================== CHAPTER 75: 073. THE BROKEN PITCHERS ======================================================================== The Broken Pitchers Judges 7:20-21 : “And the three companies blew the trumpets, and brake the pitchers, and held the lamps in their left hands, and the trumpets in their right hands to blow withal... And they stood every man in his place round about the camp: and all the host ran, and cried, and fled.” That is the strangest battle ever fought. God had told Gideon to go down and drive out of the land the Midianites, but his army is too large; for the glory must be given to God, and not to man. And so proclamation is made that all those of the troops who are afraid, and want to go home, may go; and twenty-two thousand of them scampered away, leaving only ten thousand men. But God says the army is too large yet; and so he orders these ten thousand remaining to march down to a stream, and commands Gideon to notice in what manner these men drink of the water as they come to it. If they get down on all-fours and drink, then they are to be pronounced lazy and incompetent for the campaign; but if, in passing through the stream, they scoop up the water in the palm of their hands and drink, and pass on, they are to be the men selected for the battle. Well, the ten thousand men march down to the stream and most of them go down on all-fours and plunge their mouths, like a horse or an ox, into the water and drink; but there are three hundred men who, instead of stooping, just dip the palm of their hands in the water and bring it to their lips, “lapping it as a dog lappeth.” Those three hundred brisk, rapid, enthusiastic men are chosen for the campaign. They are each to take a trumpet in the right hand and a pitcher in the left hand, and there must be a lamp inside the pitcher, and then at a given signal they are to blow the trumpets and throw down the pitchers and hold up the lamps. So it was done. It is night. I see a great host of Midianites, sound asleep in the valley of Jezreel. Gideon comes up with his three hundred picked men and surrounds the camp on all sides, and when everything is ready, the signal is given and they blow the trumpets and they throw down the pitchers and hold up the lamps, and the great host of Midianites, waking out of a sound sleep, take the crash of the crockery and the glare of the lamps for the coming on of an overwhelming foe; and they run and cut themselves to pieces and horribly perish. The lessons of this subject are very spirited and impressive. This seemingly valueless lump of quartz has the pure gold in it. The smallest dewdrop on the meadow at night has a star sleeping in its bosom, and the most insignificant passage of Scripture has in it a shining truth. God’s mint coins no small change. I learn in the first place, from this subject, the lawfulness of Christian stratagem. You know very well that the greatest victories ever gained by Washington or Napoleon were gained through the fact that they came when and in a way they were not expected—sometimes falling back to draw out the foe, sometimes breaking out from ambush, sometimes crossing a river on unheard-of rafts; all the time keeping the opposing forces in wonderment as to what would be done next. The northern troops beat their life out in the straightforward fight at Fredericksburg, but it was through strategy they got the victory at Lookout Mountain. You all know what strategy is in military affairs. Now I think it is high time we had this art sanctified and spiritualized. In the church, when we are about to make a Christian assault, we send word to the opposing force when we expect to come, how many troops we have, and how many rounds of shot, and whether we will come with artillery, infantry, or cavalry, and of course we are defeated. There are thousands of men who might be surprised into the kingdom of God. We need more tact and ingenuity in Christian work. It is in spiritual affairs, as in military, that success depends in attacking that part of the castle which is not armed and intrenched. For instance, here is a man all armed on the doctrine of election; all his troops of argument and prejudice are at that particular gate. You may batter away at that side of the castle for fifty years and you will not take it; but just wheel your troops to the side gate of the heart’s affections, and in five minutes you capture him. I never knew a man to be saved through a brilliant argument. You cannot hook men into the kingdom of God by the horns of a dilemma. There is no grace in syllogisms. Here is a man armed upon the subject of the perseverance of the saints; he does not believe in it. Attack him at that point, and he will persevere to the very last in not believing it. Here is a man armed on the subject of baptism; he believes in sprinkling or immersion. All your discussion of ecclesiastical hydropathy will not change him. I remember, when I was a boy, that with other boys I went into the river on a summer day to bathe, and we used to dash the water on each other, but never got any result except that our eyes were blinded; and all this splashing of water between Baptists and Pedo-baptists never results in any thing but the blurring of the spiritual eyesight. In other words, you never can capture a man’s soul at the point at which he is especially intrenched. But there is in every man’s heart a bolt that can be easily withdrawn. A little child four years old may touch that bolt and it will spring back and the door will swing open and Christ will come in. I think that the finest of all the fine arts is the art of doing good, and yet this art is the least cultivated. We have in the kingdom of God today enough troops to conquer the whole earth for Christ if we only had skilful maneuvering. I would rather have the three hundred lamps and pitchers of Christian stratagem than one hundred thousand drawn swords of literary and ecclesiastical combat. I learn from this subject, also, that a small part of the army of God will have to do all the hard fighting. Gideon’s army was originally composed of thirty-two thousand men, but they went off until there were only ten thousand left, and that was subtracted from until there were only three hundred. It is the same in all ages of the Christian church; a few men have to do the hard fighting. Take a membership of a thousand, and you generally find that fifty people do the work. Take a membership of five hundred, and you generally find that ten people do the work. There are scores of churches where two or three people do the work. We have to mourn that there is so much useless lumber in the mountains of Lebanon. I think, of the ten million membership of the Christian church today, if five millions of the names were taken off the books, the church would be stronger. You know that the more cowards and drones there are in any army the weaker it is. I would rather have the three hundred picked men of Gideon than the twenty-two thousand unsifted host. How many Christians there are standing in the way of all progress! I think it is the duty of the church of God to ride over them, and the quicker it does it, the quicker it does its duty. Do not worry, O Christian, if you have to do more than your share of the work. You had better thank God that he has called you to be one of the picked men, rather than to belong to the host of stragglers. Would not you rather be one of the three hundred that fight, than the twenty-two thousand that desert? I suppose those cowardly Gideonites who went off congratulated themselves. They said, “We got rid of all that fighting, did not we? How lucky we have been; that battle costs us nothing at all.” But they got none of the spoils of the victory. After the battle the three hundred men went down and took the wealth of the Midianites, and out of the cups and platters of their enemies they feasted. And the time will come, my dear brethren, when the hosts of darkness will be routed, and Christ will say to his troops, “Well done, my brave men, go up and take the spoils! Be more than conquerors forever!” and in that day all deserters will be shot! Again: I learn from this subject, that God’s way is different from man’s, but is always the best way. If we had the planning of that battle, we would have taken those thirty-two thousand men that originally belonged to the army, and we would have drilled them, and marched them up and down by the day and week and month, and we would have them equipped with swords or spears, according to the way of arming in those times; and then we would have marched them down in solid column upon the foe. But that is not the way. God depletes the army, and takes away all their weapons, and gives them a lamp and a pitcher and a trumpet, and tells them to go down and drive out the Midianites. I suppose some wiseacres were there who said, “That is not military tactics. The idea of three hundred men, unarmed, conquering such a great host of Midianites!” It was the best way. What sword, spear, or cannon ever accomplished such a victory as the lamp, pitcher, and trumpet? God’s way is different from man’s way, but it is always best! Take, for instance, the composition of the Bible. If we had the writing of the Bible, we would have said, “Let one man write it. If you have twenty or thirty men to write a poem or make a statute or write a history or make an argument there will be flaws and contradictions.” But God says, “Let not one man do it, but forty men shall do it.” And they did, differing enough to show there had been no collusion between them, but not contradicting each other on any important point, while they all wrote from their own standpoint and temperament; so that the matter-of-fact man has his Moses; the romantic nature his Ezekiel; the epigrammatic his Solomon; the warrior his Joshua; the sailor his Jonah; the loving his John; the logician his Paul. Instead of this Bible, which now I can lift in my hand; instead of the Bible that the child can carry to school this afternoon; instead of the little Bible the sailor can put in his jacket pocket when he goes to sea—if it had been left to men to write, it would have been a thousand volumes, judging from the amount of ecclesiastical controversy which has arisen. God’s way is different from man’s, but it is best, infinitely best. So it is in regard to the Christian’s life. If we had had the planning of a Christian’s life we would have said, “Let him have eighty years of sunshine, a fine house to live in; let his surroundings all be agreeable; let him have sound health; let no chill shiver through his limbs, no pain furrow his brow, or trouble shadow his soul.” I enjoy the prosperity of others so much, I would let every man have as much money as he wants, and roses for his children’s cheeks, and fountains of gladness glancing in their large round eyes. But that is not God’s way. It seems as if a man must be cut and hit and pounded just in proportion as he is useful. His child falls from a third-story window and has its life dashed out; his most confident investment tumbles him into bankruptcy; his friends, upon whom he depended, aid the natural force of gravitation in taking him down; his life is a Bull Run defeat. Instead of twenty-two thousand advantages, he has only ten thousand—ay, only three hundred—ay, none at all. How many good people there are who are at their wits’ end about their livelihood, about their health, about their reputation. But they will find out it is the best way after a while; God will show them that he depletes their advantages just for the same reason he depleted the army of Gideon—that they may be induced to throw themselves on his mercy. A grapevine says, in the early spring, “How glad I am to get through the winter! I shall have no more trouble now! Summer weather will come, and the garden will be very beautiful!” But the gardener comes, and cuts the vine here and there with his knife. The twigs begin to fall, and the grapevine calls out, “Murder! what are you cutting me for?” “Ah,” says the gardener, “I don’t mean to kill you. If I did not do this you would be the laughing-stock of all the other vines before the season is over.” Months go on, and one day the gardener comes under the trellis, where great clusters of grapes hang, and the grapevine says, “Thank you, sir; you could not have done anything so kind as to have cut me with that knife.” “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” “Every branch that beareth fruit he purgeth that it may bring forth more fruit.” No pruning, no grapes; no grind-ing-mill, no flour; no battle, no victory; no cross, no crown! So God’s way, in the redemption of the world, is different from ours. If we had our way, we would have had Jesus stand in the door of heaven and beckon the nations up to light, or we would have had angels flying around the earth proclaiming the unsearchable riches of Christ. Why is it that the cause goes on so slowly? Why is it that the chains stay on, when God could knock them off? Why do thrones of despotism stand, when God could so easily demolish them? It is his way, in order that all generations may co-operate, and that all men may know they cannot do the work themselves. Just in proportion as these pyramids of sin get up in height will they come down in ghastliness of ruin. O thou father of all iniquity! If thou canst hear my voice above the crackling of the flames, drive on thy projects, dispatch thy emissaries, build thy temples, and forge thy claims; but know that thy fall from heaven was not greater than thy final overthrow shall be when thou shalt be driven disarmed into thy fiery den; and for every lie thou hast framed upon earth thou shalt have an additional hell of fury poured into thine anguish by the vengeance of our God; and all heaven shall shout at the overthrow, as from the ransomed earth the song breaks through the skies, “Hallelujah! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! Hallelujah! for the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus Christ!” God’s way in the composition of the Bible, God’s way in the Christian’s life, God’s way in the redemption of the world, God’s way in everything—different from man’s way, but the best. I learn from this subject, that the overthrow of God’s enemies will be sudden and terrific. There is the army of the Midianites down in the valley of Jezreel. I suppose their mighty men are dreaming of victory. Mount Gilboa never stood sentinel for so large a host. The spears and the shields of the Midianites gleam in the moonlight, and glance on the eye of the Israelites, who hover like a battle of eagles, ready to swoop from the cliff. Sleep on, oh, army of the Midianites! With the night to hide them and the mountain to guard them and strong arms to defend them let no slumbering foeman dream of disaster! Peace to the captains and the spearmen! Crash go the pitchers! up flare the lamps! To the mountains! fly! fly! Troop running against troop, thousands trampling upon thousands. A wild stampede! Hark to the scream and groan of the routed foe, with the Lord God Almighty after them! How sudden the onset, how wild the consternation, how utter the defeat! I do not care so much what is against me, if God is not. You want a better sword or carbine than I have even seen, to go out and fight against the Lord omnipotent. Give me God for my ally, and you may have all the battlements and battalions. I saw the defrauder in his splendid house. It seemed as if he had conquered God, as he stood amidst the blaze of chandeliers and pier mirrors. In the diamonds of the wardrobe I saw the tears of the widows whom he had robbed, and in the snowy satin the pallor of the white-cheeked orphans whom he had wronged. The blood of the oppressed glowed in the deep crimson of the imported chair. The music trembled with the sorrow of unrequited toil. But the wave of mirth dashed higher on reefs of coral and pearl. The days and the nights went merrily. No sick child dared pull that silver door-bell. No beggar dared sit on that marble step. No voice of prayer floated amidst that tapestry. No shadow of a judgment-day darkened that fresco. No tear of human sympathy dropped upon that upholstery. Pomp strutted through the hall, and Dissipation filled her cup and all seemed safe as the Midianites in the valley of Jezreel. But God came. Calamity smote the money-market. The partridge left its eggs unhatched. Crash went all the porcelain pitchers! Ruin, rout, dismay, and woe in the valley of Jezreel! Alas for those who fight against God! Only two sides. Man immortal, which side are you on? Woman immortal, which side are you on? Do you belong to the three hundred that are going to win the day, or to the great host of Midianites asleep in the valley, only to be roused up in consternation and ruin? Suddenly the golden bowl of life will be broken, and the trumpet blown that will startle our souls into eternity. The day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night, and as the God-armed Israelites upon the sleeping foe. Ha! canst thou pluck up courage for the day when the trumpet which hath never been blown shall speak the roll-call of the dead; and the earth, dashing against a lost meteor, have its mountains scattered to the stars and oceans emptied in the air? Oh, then, what will become of you? What will become of me? If those Midianites had only given up their swords the day before the disaster, all would have been well; and if you will now surrender the sins with which you have been fighting against God, you will be safe. Oh, make peace with him now, through Jesus Christ the Lord. With the clutch of a drowning man seize the cross. Oh, surrender! Surrender! Christ, with his hand on his pierced side, asks you to. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 76: 074. STORMED AND TAKEN ======================================================================== Stormed and Taken Judges 9:48-49 : “And Abimelech gat him up to mount Zalmon, he and all the people that were with him; and Abimelech took an ax in his hand, and cut down a bough from the trees, and took it, and laid it on his shoulder. And all the people likewise cut down every man his bough, and followed Abimelech, and put them to the hold, and set the hold on fire upon them; so that all the men of the town of Shechem died also, about a thousand men and women.” Abimelech is a name malodorous in Bible history, and yet full of profitable suggestion. Buoys are black and uncomely, but they tell where the rocks are. The snake’s rattle is hideous, but it gives timely warning. From the piazza of my summer home, night by night I saw a lighthouse fifteen miles away, not placed there for adornment, but to tell mariners to stand off from that dangerous point. So all the iron-bound coast of moral danger is marked with Saul and Herod and Rehoboam and Jezebel and Abimelech. These bad people are mentioned in the Bible, not only as warnings, but because there were sometimes flashes of good conduct in their lives worthy of imitation. God sometimes drives a very straight nail with a very poor hammer. The city of Shechem had to be taken, and Abimelech and his men were to do it. I see the dust rolling up from their excited march. I hear the shouting of the captains and the yell of the besiegers. The swords clack sharply on the parrying shields, and the vociferation of two armies in death-grapple is horrible to hear. The battle goes on all day, and as the sun is setting Abimelech and his army cry, “Sur-render!” to the beaten foe. And, unable longer to resist, the city of Shechem falls; and there are pools of blood and dissevered limbs, and glazed eyes looking up pleading for mercy that war never shows, and dying soldiers with their head on the lap of mother or wife or sister who have come out for the last offices of kindness and affection; and a groan rolls across the city, stopping not, because there is no spot for it to rest, so full is the place of other groans. A city wounded! A city dying! A city dead! Wail for Shechem, all ye who know the horrors of a sacked town! As I look over the city I can find only one building standing, and that is the temple of the god Berith. Some soldiers outside of the city in a tower, finding that they can no longer defend Shechem, now begin to look out for their own personal safety, and they fly to this temple of Berith. They get within the door, shut it, and they say: “Now we are safe. Abimelech has taken the whole city, but he cannot take this temple of Berith. Here we shall be under the protection of the gods.” O Berith, the god! do your best now for these refugees. If you have eyes, pity them. If you have hands, help them. If you have thunderbolts, strike for them. But how shall Abimelech and his army take this temple of Berith and the men who are there fortified? Will they do it with sword? Nay. Will they do it with spear? Nay. With battering arm, rolled up by hundred-armed strength, crashing against the walls? Nay. Abimelech marches his men to a wood in Zalmon. With his ax he hews off a limb of a tree, and puts that limb upon his own shoulder, and then he says to his men, “You do the same.” They are obedient to their commander. What a strange army, with what strange equipment! They come up to the foot of the temple of Berith, and Abimelech takes his limb of a tree and throws it down; and the first platoon of soldiers come up and they throw down their branches; and the second platoon, and the third, until all around about the temple of Berith there is a pile of tree-branches. The Shechemites look out from the window of the temple upon what seems to them childish play on the part of their enemies. But soon the flints are struck, and the spark begins to kindle the brush, and the flame comes up all through the pile, and the red element leaps to the casement, and the woodwork begins to blaze, and one arm of flame is thrown up on the right side of the temple, and another arm of flame is thrown up on the left side of the temple, until they clasp their lurid palms under the wild night sky, and the cry of “Fire!” within and “Fire!” without announces the terror and the strangulation and the doom of the Shechemites, and the complete overthrow of the temple of the god Berith. Then there went up a shout, long and loud, from the stout lungs and swarthy chests of Abimelech and his men, as they stood amid the aches and the dust, crying: “Victory! Victory!” Now, I learn first from this subject the folly of depending upon any one form of tactics in anything we have to do for this world or for God. Look over the weaponry of olden times—javelins, battle-axes, habergeons—and show me a single weapon with which Abimelech and his men could have gained such complete victory. It is no easy thing to take a temple thus armed. I saw a house where, during revolutionary times, a man and his wife kept back a whole regiment hour after hour, because they were inside the house and the assaulting soldiers were outside the house. Yet here Abimelech and his army come up, they surround this temple, and they capture it without the loss of a single man on the part of Abimelech, although I suppose some of the old Israelitish heroes told Abimelech: “You are only going up there to be cut to pieces.” Yet you are willing to testify today that by no other mode—certainly not by ordinary modes—could that temple so easily, so thoroughly have been taken. Fathers and mothers, brethren and sisters in Jesus Christ, what the church most wants to learn is that any plan is right, is lawful, is best, which helps to overthrow the temple of sin, and capture this world for God. We are very apt to stick to the old modes of attack. We put on the old-style coat of mail. We come up with the sharp, keen, glittering steel spear of argument, expecting in that way to take the castle, but they have a thousand spears where we have ten. And so the castle of sin stands. We will never capture this world for God by any keen saber of sarcasm, by any glittering lances of rhetoric, by any sapping and mining of profound disquisition, by any gunpowdery explosions of indignation, by sharp shootings of wit, by howitzers of mental strength made to swing shell five miles, by cavalry horses, gorgeously caparisoned, pawing the air. In vain all the attempts on the part of these ecclesiastical foot soldiers, lighthorsemen and grenadiers. I propose a different style of tactics. Let each one go to the forest of God’s promise and invitation, and hew down a branch, and put it on his shoulder, and let us all come around these obstinate iniquities, and then, with this pile, kindled by the fires of a holy zeal and the flames of a consecrated life, we will burn them out. What steel cannot do fire may. I announce myself in favor of any plan of religious attack that succeeds—any plan of religious attack, however radical, however odd, however unpopular, however hostile to all the conventionalities of Church and State. We want more heart in our song, more heart in our almsgiving, more heart in our prayers, more heart in our preaching. Oh, for less of Abimelech’s sword, and more of Abimelech’s conflagration! I have often heard There is a fountain filled with blood sung artistically by four birds perched on their Sunday roost in the gallery, until I thought of Jenny Lind and Nilsson and Sontag and all the other warblers; but there came not one tear to my eye, nor one master emotion to my heart. But one night I went down to the African Methodist meetinghouse in Philadelphia, and at the close of the service a black woman, in the midst of the audience, began to sing that hymn, and all the audience joined in, and we were floated some three or four miles nearer heaven than I have ever been since. I saw with my own eyes that “fountain filled with blood”—red, agonizing, sacrificial, redemptive—and I heard the crimson plash of the wave as we all went down under it: For sinners plunged beneath that flood Lose all their guilty stains. O my friends, the Gospel is not a syllogism; it is not casuistry, it is not polemics, or the science of squabble. It is blood-red fact; it is warm-hearted invitation; it is leaping, bounding, flying good news; it is efflorescent with all light; it is rubescent with all glow; it is arborescent with all sweet shade. I have seen the sun rise on Mount Washington, and from the Tip-top House; but there was no beauty in that compared with the day-spring from on high when Christ gives light to a soul. I have heard Parepa sing; but there was no music in that compared with the voice of Christ when he said: “Thy sins are forgiven thee; go in peace.” Good news! Let every one cut down a branch of this tree of life and wave it. Let him throw it down and kindle it. Let all the way from Mount Zalmon to Shechem be filled with the tossing joy. Good news! This bonfire of the Gospel shall consume the last temple of sin, and will illumine the sky with apocalyptic joy that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Any new plan that makes a man quit his sin, and that prostrates a wrong, I am as much in favor of as though all the doctors and the bishops and the archbishops and the synods and the academical gownsmen of Christianity sanctioned it. The temple of Berith must come down, and I do not care how it comes. Still further, I learn from this subject the power of example. If Abimelech had sat down on the grass and told his men to go and get the boughs, and go out to the battle, they would never have gone at all; or, if they had, it would have been without any spirit or effective result; but when Abimelech goes with his own ax and hews down a branch, and with Abimelech’s arm puts it on Abimelech’s shoulder, and marches on—then, my text says, all the people did the same. How natural that was! What made Garibaldi and Stonewall Jackson the most magnetic commanders of this century? They always rode ahead. Oh, the overcoming power of example! Here is a father on the wrong road; all his boys go on the wrong road. Here is a father who enlists for Christ; his children enlist. I saw, in some of the picture-galleries of Europe, that before many of the great works of the masters—the old masters—there would be sometimes four or five artists taking copies of the pictures. These copies they were going to carry with them, perhaps to distant lands; and I have thought that your life and character are a masterpiece, and it is being copied, and long after you are gone it will bloom or blast in the homes of those who knew you, and be a Gorgon or a Madonna. Look out what you say. Look out what you do. Eternity will hear the echo. The best sermon ever preached is a holy life. The best music ever chanted is a consistent walk. I saw, near the beach, a wrecker’s machine. It was a cylinder with some holes at the side, made for the thrusting in of some long poles with strong leverage; and when there is a vessel in trouble or going to pieces out in the offing, the wreckers shoot a rope out to the suffering men. They grasp it, and the wreckers turn the cylinder, and the rope winds around the cylinder, and those who are shipwrecked are saved. So at your feet today there is an influence with a tremendous leverage. The rope attached to it swings far out into the billowy future. Your children, your children’s children, and all the generations that are to follow, will grip that influence and feel the long-reaching pull long after the figures on your tombstone are so near worn out that the visitor cannot tell whether it was in 1895, or 1795, or 1695 that you died. Still further, I learn from this subject the advantages of concerted action. If Abimelech had merely gone out with a tree-branch the work would not have been accomplished; or if ten, twenty or thirty men had gone; but when all the axes are lifted, and all the sharp edges fall, and all these men carry each his tree-branch down and throw it about the temple, the victory is gained—the temple falls, my friends. Where there is one man in the Church of God at this day shouldering his whole duty there are a great many who never lift an ax or swing a bow. It seems to me as if there were ten drones in every hive to one busy bee; as though there were twenty sailors sound asleep in the ship’s hammocks to four men on the stormy deck. It seems as if there were fifty thousand men belonging to the reserve corps, and only one thousand active combatants. We all want our boat to get over to the golden sands, but the most of us are seated either in the prow or in the stern, wrapped in our striped shawl, holding a big-handled sunshade, while others are blistered in the heat, and pull until the oarlocks groan and the blades bend till they snap. Oh, religious sleepy-heads, wake up! While we have in our church a great many who are toiling for God, there are some too lazy to brush the flies off their heavy eyelids. You have lived so long in one place that the ants and caterpillars have begun to crawl over you. What do you know about a living Gospel, made to storm the world? Now, my idea of a Christian is a man on fire with zeal for God; and if your pulse ordinarily beats sixty times a minute when you think of other themes and talk about other themes, if your pulse does not go up to seventy-five or eighty when you come to talk about Christ or heaven, you do not know the one, and have a poor chance of getting to the other. In a former charge, one Sabbath I took into the pulpit the church records and I laid them on the pulpit and opened them, and said, “Brethren, here are the church records.” Some were afraid that I would read the names, for at that time some of them were deep in the worst kind of oil stock, and were idle as to Christian work. But if ministers of Christ today should bring the church record into the pulpit and read, oh, what a flutter there would be! There would not be fans enough in church to keep the cheeks cool. I do not know but it would be a good thing if the minister, once in a while, should bring the church record into the pulpit, and call the roll, for that is what I consider every church record to be—merely a muster roll of the Lord’s army—and the reading of it should reveal where every soldier is, and what he is doing. Suppose, in military circles, on the morning of battle the roll is called, and out of a thousand men only a hundred men in the regiment answered. What excitement there would be in the camp! What would the colonel say? What high talking there would be among the captains and majors and the adjutants! Suppose word came to headquarters that these delinquents excused themselves on the ground that they had overslept themselves, or that the morning was damp and they were afraid of getting their feet wet, or that they were busy cooking rations. My friends, this is the morning of the day of God Almighty’s battle! Do you not see the troops? Hear you not all the trumpets of heaven and all the drums of hell? Which side are you on? If you are on the right side, to what cavalry troop, to what artillery service, to what garrison duty do you belong? In other words, in what Sabbath-school do you teach? in what prayer-meeting do you exhort? to what penitentiary do you go to declare eternal liberty? In what almshouse do you announce the riches of heaven? What broken bone of sorrow have you ever set? Are you doing nothing? Is it possible that a man or woman sworn to be a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ is doing nothing? Then hide the horrible secret from the angels. Keep it away from the book of judgment. If you are doing nothing do not let the world find it out, lest they charge your religion with being a false-face. Do not let your cowardice and treason be heard among the martyrs about the throne, lest they forget the sanctity of the place and curse your betrayal of that cause for which they agonized and died. May the eternal God rouse us all to action! As for myself, I feel I would be ashamed to die and enter heaven until I have accomplished something more decisive for the Lord that bought me. I would like to join with you in an oath, with hand high uplifted to heaven, swearing new allegiance to Jesus Christ, and to work more for his kingdom. Are you ready to join with me in some new work for Christ? I feel that there is such a thing as claustral piety, that there is such a thing as insular work; but what we want is concerted action. The temple of Berith is very broad, and it is very high. It has been going up by the hands of men and devils, and no human enginery can demolish it; but if the one hundred and fifty thousand ministers of Christ in this country should each take a branch of the tree of life, and all their congregations should do the same, and we should march on and throw these branches around the great temples of sin and worldliness and folly, it would need no match or coal or torch of ours to touch off the pile; for, as in the days of Elijah, fire would fall from heaven, and kindle the bonfire of Christian victory over demolished sin. It is kindling now! Huzza! The day is ours! Still further, I learn from this subject the danger of false refuges. As soon as these Shechemites got into the temple they thought they were safe. They said: “Berith will take care of us. Abimelech may batter down everything else; he cannot batter down this temple where we are now hid.” But very soon they heard the timbers crackling, and they were smothered with smoke, and they miserably died. And you and I are just as much tempted to false refuges. The mirror this morning may have persuaded you that you have a comely cheek; your best friends may persuade you that you have elegant manners. Satan may have told you that you are all right; but bear with me if I tell you that if unpardoned you are all wrong. I have no clinometer by which to measure how steep is the inclined plane you are descending, but I know it is very steep. “Well,” you say, “if the Bible is true I am a sinner. Show me some refuge; I will step right into it.” I suppose all of you are at this moment stepping into some kind of refuge. Here you step in the tower of good works. You say: “I shall be safe here in this refuge.” The battlements are adorned; the steps are varnished; on the wall are pictures of all the suffering you have alleviated, and all the schools you have established, and all the fine things you have ever done. Up in that tower you feel you are safe. But hear you not the tramp of your unpardoned sins all around the tower? They each have a match. They are kindling the combustible material. You feel the heat and the suffocation. Oh, may you leap in time, the Gospel declaring: “By the deeds of the law shall no flesh living be justified.” “Well,” you say, “I have been driven out of that tower; where shall I go?” Step into this tower of indifference. You say: “If this tower is attacked it will be a great while before it is taken.” You feel at ease. But there is an Abimelech, with ruthless assaults, coming on. Death and his forces are gathering around, and they demand that you surrender everything, and they clamor for your immortal overthrow, and they throw their skeleton arms in the windows, and with their iron fists they beat against the door, and while you are trying to keep them out you see the torches of judgment kindling, and every forest is a torch, and every mountain a torch, and every sea a torch, and while the Alps, and Pyrenees, and Himalayas turn into a live coal, blown redder and redder by the whirlwind breath of a God Omnipotent, what will become of your refuge of lies? “But,” says some one, “you are engaged in a very mean business, driving us from tower to tower.” Oh, no! I want to tell you of a Gibraltar that never has been and never will be taken; of a wall that no Satanic assault can scale; of a bulwark that the judgment earthquakes cannot budge. The Bible refers to it when it says: “In God is thy refuge, and underneath thee are the everlasting arms.” Fling yourself into it! Tread down unceremoniously everything that intercepts you. Wedge your way there. There are enough hounds of death and peril after you to make you hurry. Many a man has perished just outside the tower, with his foot on the step, with his hand on the latch. Get inside! Not one surplus second have you to spare. Quick, quick, quick! Great God, is life such an uncertain thing? If I bear a little too hard with my right foot on the earth, does it break through into the grave? Is this world which swings at the speed of thousands of miles an hour around the sun going with tenfold more speed toward the judgment day? I am overborne with the thought, and in the conclusion I cry to one and I cry to the other: “Oh, time! Oh, eternity! Oh, the dead! Oh, the judgment day! O Jesus! O God!” But catching at the last apostrophe, I feel that I have something to hold on to; for “in God is thy refuge, and underneath thee are the everlasting arms.” And, exhausted with my failure to save myself, I throw my whole weight of body, mind, and soul on this divine promise, as a weary child throws itself into the arms of its mother; as a wounded soldier throws himself on the hospital pillow; as a pursued man throws himself into the refuge; for “God is thy refuge, and underneath thee are the everlasting arms.” Oh, for a flood of tears with which to express the joy of this eternal rescue! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 77: 075. BROKEN PROMISES OF MARRIAGE ======================================================================== Broken Promises of Marriage Judges 11:35 : “I have opened my mouth unto the Lord and I cannot go back.” General Jephthah, the commander-in-chief of the Israelitish forces, is buckling on the sword for the extermination of the pestiferous Ammonites, and looking up to the sky, he promises that if God will give him the victory, he will put to death and sacrifice as a burnt offering the first thing that comes out from the door of his homestead when he goes back. The hurrahing of triumph soon runs along the line of all the companies, regiments, and divisions of Jephthah’s army. A worse-beaten enemy than those Ammonites never strewed any plain with their carcases. General Jephthah, fresh from his victory, is now on his way home. As he comes over the hills and through the valleys, the whole march for his men is a cheer, but for him a great anxiety, for he remembers his vow to slay and burn the first thing that comes forth from his house to greet him after his victory. Perhaps it may be the old watch-dog that shall first come out; and who could get heart to beat out the life of a faithful creature like that, as he comes fawning and barking and frisking and putting up his paw against his master in merry welcome after long absence? No; it was not that which came forth to meet Jephthah. Perhaps it may be a young dove let out from its cage in the general’s home, which, gaining its liberty, may seem to rejoice in the public gladness and flutter on the shoulder of the familiar head of the household. But who could have the heart to slay such a winged innocent? No; it was not that which came forth to meet Jephthah. Or it may be some good neighbor that will rush out to greet him after having first been in to tell the family of the near approach of the general. But who could slay a neighbor who had come on the scene to rejoice over the reunited household? No; it was not that which came forth to meet Jephthah. As he advances upon his home the door opens, and out of it comes one whose appearance under other circumstances would have been an indescribable joy, but under the pledge of a sacrifice becomes a horror which blanches his cheek and paralyzes his form and almost hurls him flat to the earth. His child, his only child, his daughter, comes skipping out to greet him, her step keeping time to a timbrel which she shakes and smites. Did ever a conqueror’s cheer end in such a bitter groan? All the glories of victorious war are blotted out from Jephthah’s memory, and his banner is folded in grief, and his sword goes back into the scabbard with dolorous clang, and the muffled drum takes the place of the cymbals and the “tremolo” the place of the trumpet, and he cries out: “Alas, my daughter, thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me; for I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot go back.” During two months, amid the mountains, without shelter the maidens who would have been at her wedding ranged with Jephthah’s daughter up and down, bewailing her coming sacrifice. Commentators and theologians are in dispute as to whether that girl was slain or not, and as to whether, if she were slain, it was right or wrong in Jephthah to be the executioner, a discussion into which I shall not be diverted from the overmastering consideration that we had better look out what we promise, better be cautious what engagement we make, better that in regard to all matters of betrothal and plighted vow we feel the responsibility, lest we have either to sacrifice our pledge or sacrifice an immortal being, and we be led to cry out with the paroxysm of a Jephthah: “I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back.” There is one ward in almost all the insane asylums, and many graves in almost every cemetery, that you need to visit. They are occupied by the men and women who are the victims of broken promises of marriage. The women in those wards and in those mortuary receptacles are in the majority, because woman lives more in her affections than does man, and laceration of them, in her case, is more apt to be a dementia and a fatality. In some regions of this land the promise of marriage is considered to have no solemnity or binding force. It was only made in fun. They may change their mind. The engagement may stand until some one more attractive in person, or opulent in estate, appears on the scene; then the rings are returned, and the amatory letters, and all relationship ceases. And so there are ten thousand Jephthah’s daughters sacrificed as burnt offerings. The whole subject needs to be taken out of the realm of comedy into tragedy, and men and women need to understand that, while there are exceptions to the rule, once having solemnly pledged to each other heart and hand, the forfeiture and abandonment of that pledge makes the transgressor in the sight of God a perjurer, and so the Day of Judgment will reveal it. The one has lied to the other; and all liars shall have their place in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone. If a man or woman make a promise in the business world, is there any moral obligation to fulfil it? If a man sign a note for five hundred dollars, ought he to pay it? If a contract be signed involving the building of a house, or the furnishing of a bill of goods, ought they stand by that contract? “Oh, yes,” always answered. Then I ask the further question: Is the heart, the happiness, the welfare, the temporal and eternal destiny of a man or woman worth as much as the house, worth five hundred dollars, worth anything? The realm of profligacy is filled with men and women as a result of the wrong answer to that question. The most aggravating, stupendous and God-defying lie is a lie in the shape of broken espousal. But suppose a man changes his mind, ought he not back out? Not one in ten thousand. What if I change my mind about a promissory note, and decline to pay it, and suddenly put my property in such shape that you could not collect your note? How would you like that? That, you say, would be a fraud. So is the other a fraud, and punish it God will certainly, as you live, and just as certainly if you do not live. I have known men, betrothed to loving and good womanhood, resigning their engagement, and the victim went down in hasty consumption, while suddenly the recreant man would go up the aisle of a church in brilliant bridal party, and the two promised “I will,” with a solemnity that seemed insurance of a lifetime happiness. But the simple fact was, that was the first act of a Shakespearian play entitled “Taming the Shrew.” He found out, when too late, that he had not married into the family of the “Graces,” but into the family of the “Furies.” To the day of his death, the murder of his first betrothal followed him. The Bible extols one who “sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not.” That is, when you make a promise, keep it at all hazards. There may be cases where deception has been used at the time of engagement, and extraordinary circumstances where the promise is not binding, but in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, engagement is as binding as marriage. Robert Burns, with all his faults, well knew the force of a marital engagement. In obedience to some rustic idea, he standing on one side the brook Ayr, and Mary Campbell on the other, they bathed their hands in the water and then put them on the boards of a Bible, making their pledge of fidelity. On the cover of the Old Testament of that book, to this day in Robert Burns’s handwriting may be found the words, “Leviticus 19:12 : ‘Ye shall not swear by my name falsely; I am the Lord.’“ And on the cover of the New Testament in his own handwriting, “Matthew 5:33 : ‘Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths.’“ Suppose a ship-captain offers his services to take a ship out to sea. After he gets a little way he comes alongside of a vessel with a more beautiful flag, and which has perhaps a richer cargo, and is bound for a more attractive port. Suppose he rings a bell for the engineer to slow up, and the screw stops. Now I see the captain being lowered over the side of the vessel into a small boat, and he crosses to the gayer and wealthier craft and climbs up the side and is seen walking the bridge of the other ship. I pick up his resigned speaking-trumpet and I shout through it: “Captain, what does this mean? Did you not promise to take this ship to Southampton, England?” “Yes,” says the captain, “but I have changed my mind, and I have found I can do better and I am going to take charge here. I shall send back to you all the letters I got while managing that ship and everything I got from your ship and it will be all right.” You tell me that the worst punishment for such a captain as that is too good for him. But it is just what a man or woman does who promises to take one through the voyage of life, across the ocean of existence and then breaks the promise. What American society needs to be taught is that betrothal is an act so solemn and tremendous that all men and women must stand back from it until they are sure it is right and sure that it is best and sure that no retreat will be desired. Before that promise of lifetime companionship, any amount of romance that you wish, any ardor of friendship, any coming and going. But espousal is a gate, a golden gate, which one should not pass, unless he or she expects never to return. Engagement is the porch of which marriage is the castle, and you have no right in the porch if you do not mean to pass into the castle. The trouble has always been that this whole subject of affiance has been relegated to the realm of frivolity and joke and considered not worth a sermon or even a serious paragraph. And so the massacre of human lives has gone on and the devil has had it his own cruel way, and what is mightily needed is that pulpit and platform and printing-press all speak a word of unmistakable and thunderous protest on this subject of infinite importance. We put clear out into thin poesy and light reading the marital engagements of Petrarch and his Laura, Dante and his Beatrice, Chaucer and his Philippa, Lorenzo de Medici and his Lucretia, Spencer and his Rosalind, Waller and his Saccharissa, not realizing that it was the style of their engagement that decided their happiness or wretchedness, their virtue or their profligacy. All the literary and military and religious glory of Queen Elizabeth’s reign cannot blot out from one of the most conspicuous pages of history her infamous behavior toward Seymour and Philip and Melville and Leicester and others. All the ecclesiastical robes that Dean Swift ever rustled through consecrated places cannot hide from intelligent people of all ages the fact that by promises of marriage, which he never fulfilled, he broke the heart of Jane Waring after an engagement of seven years and the heart of Stella after an engagement of fourteen years and the poetic stanzas he dedicated to their excellences only make the more immortal his own perfidy. “But suppose I should make a mistake,” says some man or woman, “and I find it out after the engagement and before marriage?” My answer is, you have no excuse for a mistake on this subject. There are so many ways of finding out all about the character and preferences and dislikes and habits of a man or woman, that if you have not brain enough to form a right judgment in regard to him or her, you are not so fit a candidate for the matrimonial altar as you are for an idiot asylum. Notice what society your especial friend prefers, whether he is industrious or lazy, whether she is neat or slatternly, what books are read, what was the style of ancestry, noble or depraved; and if there be any unsolved mystery about the person under consideration, postpone all promise until the mystery is solved. Jackson’s Hollow, Brooklyn, was part of the city not built on for many years, and every time I crossed it I said to myself or to others, why is not this land built on? I found out afterward that the title to the land was in controversy and no one wanted to build there until that question was decided. After-ward I understood the title was settled and now buildings are going up all over it. Do not build your happiness for this world on a character, masculine or feminine, that has not a settled and undisputed title to honor and truth and sobriety and righteousness. O woman, you have more need to pause before making such an important promise than man, because if you make a mistake it is worse for you. If a man blunder about promise of marriage or go on to an unfortunate marriage, he can spend his evenings away, and can go to the club or the Republican or Democratic headquarters and absorb his mind in city or State or national elections, or smoke himself stupid or drink himself drunk. But there is no place of reputable retreat for you, O woman, and you could not take narcotics or intoxicants and keep your respectability. Before you promise, pray and think and study and advise. There will never again in your earthly history be a time when you so much need God. It seems to me that the world ought to cast out from business credits and from good neighborhood those who boast of the number of hearts they have won, as the Indian boasts of the number of scalps he has taken. If a man will lie to a woman and a woman will lie to a man about so important a matter as that of a lifetime’s welfare, they will lie about a bill of goods and lie about finances and lie about anything. Society to-day is brim full of gallants and man-milliners and carpet knights and coquettes and those most God-forsaken of all wretches—flirts. And they go about drawing-rooms and the parlors of watering-places, simpering and bowing and scraping and whispering and then return to the club-rooms, if they be men, or to their social gatherings, if they be women, to chatter and giggle over what was said to them in confidence. Condign punishment is apt to come upon them, and they get paid in their own coin. I could point you to a score whom society has let drop very hard, in return for their base traffic in human hearts. And here my idea widens and I have to say, not only to those who have made a mistake in solemn promise of marriage, but to those who have already at the altar been pronounced one when they are two, or in diversity of tastes and likes and dislikes are neither one nor two, but a dozen—make the best you can of an awful mistake. And here let me answer letters that come from every State of the American Union and from across the sea and are coming year after year from men and women who are terrifically allianced and tied together in a hard knot—a very hard knot. The letters run something like this: “What ought I to do? my husband is a drunkard.” “My wife is a gad-about, and will not stay at home.” “My companion is ignorant and hates books and I revel in them.” “I like music, and a piano sets my husband crazy.” “I am fond of social life, and my husband is a recluse.” “I am trying to be good, and my lifelong associate is very bad; what shall I do?” My answer is, there are certain good reasons for divorcement. The Bible recognizes them; but it must be the very last resort, and only after all reasonable attempts at reclamation and adjustment have proved a dead failure. When such attempts fail, it is generally because of meddlesome outsiders; and women tell the wronged wife how she ought to stand on her rights and men tell the wronged husband how he ought to stand on his rights. And let husband and wife, in an unhappy marriage relation, stand punctiliously on their rights and there will be no readjustment and only one thing will be sure to them and that is a hell on earth. If you are unhappily married, in most cases I advise you to make the best you can of an awfully bad bargain. Do not project your peculiarities more than is necessary. Perhaps you may have some faults of your own, which the other party in the marital alliance may have to suffer. You are in the same yoke. If you pull aside, the yoke will only twist your neck. Better pull ahead. The world is full of people who made mistakes about many things, and among other things about betrothal and marriage, and yet have been tolerably happy and very useful in the strength of God, and by the grace promised in every time of need, if those who seek it conquer the disadvantageous circumstances. I am acquainted with lovely women, married to contemptible men, and genial men yoked with termagants inspired of the devil. And yet, under these disadvantages, my friends are useful and happy. God helps people in other kinds of martyrdom to sing in the flame, and he will help you in your lifelong misfortune. Remember the patience of Job. What a wife he had! At a time when he was one great blotch of eruptions and his property was destroyed by a tornado, and, more than all, bereavement had come, and the poor man needed all wise counsel, she advises him to go to cursing and swearing. She wanted him to poultice his boils with blasphemy. But he lived right on through his marital disadvantages, recovered his health and his fortune, and raised a splendid family, and the closing paragraph of the Book of Job has such a jubilance that I wonder people do not oftener read it: “So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.” Now, my badly-married friend of either sex, if Job could stand it by the help of God, then you can stand it by the same divine reinforcement. You have other relations, O woman, beside the wifely relation. If you are a mother, train up your children for God and heaven. If you are a member of a church, help move on its enterprises. You can get so much of the grace of God in your heart that all your home trials will seem insignificant. How little difference does it make what your unrighteous husband calls you, if God calls you his child, and you are an heiress of whole kingdoms beyond the sky? Immerse yourself in some kind of outside usefulness, something that will enlist your prayers, your sympathies, your hand, your needle, your voice. Get your heart on fire with love to God and the disenthrallment of the human race, and the troubles of your home will be blotted out in the glory of your consecrated life. I cry out to you, O woman, as Paul exclaims in his letter to the Corinthians: “What knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband?” And if you cannot save him, you can help in the grander, mightier enterprise of helping save the world. Out of the awful mistake of your marriage rise into the sublimest life of self-sacrifice for God and suffering humanity. Instead of settling down to mope over your domestic woes, enlist your energies for the world’s redemption. Some parts of Holland keep out the ocean only by dykes or walls of stout masonry. The Dutch engineer having these dykes in charge was soon to be married to a maiden living in one of the villages, the existence of which depended on the strength of these dykes. And there was to be a great feast in one of the villages that approaching evening, in honor of the coming bridegroom. That day a great storm threatened the destruction of the dykes, and hence the destruction of thousands of lives in the villages sheltered by that stone wall. The ocean was in full wrath, beating against the dykes, and the tides and the terror were still rising. “Shall I go to the feast,” says the engineer, “or shall I go and help my workmen take care of the dykes?” “Take care of the dykes,” he said to himself, “I must and will.” As he appeared on the wall, the men working there were exhausted, and shouted: “Here comes the engineer. Thank God! Thank God!” The wall was giving way stone by stone, and the engineer had a rope fastened around his body, and some of the workmen had ropes fastened around their bodies, and were let down amid the wild surges that beat the wall. Everything was giving way. “More stones!” cried the men. “More mortar!” But the answer came: “There is no more!” “Then,” cried the engineer, “take off your clothes and with them stop the holes in the wall.” And so in the chill and darkness and surf it was done, and with the workmen’s apparel the openings in the wall were partially filled. But still the tide rose, and still the ocean reared itself for more awful stroke and for the overwhelming of thousands of lives in the villages. “Now we have done all we can,” said the engineer, “down on your knees, my men, and pray to God for help.” And on the trembling and parting dykes they prayed till the wind changed and the sea subsided, and the villages below, which, knowing nothing of the peril, were full of romp and dance and hilarity, were gloriously saved. What we want in this work of walling back the oceans of poverty and drunkenness and impurity and sin is the help of more womanly and manly hands. Oh, how the tides come in! Atlantic surge of sorrow after Atlantic surge of sorrow, and the tempests of human hate and satanic fury are in full cry. O woman of many troubles, what are all the feasts of worldly delight, if they were offered you, compared with the opportunity of helping build and support barriers which sometimes seem giving way through man’s treachery and the world’s assault? O woman, to the dykes! Bring prayer, bring tears, bring cheering words! Help! Help! And having done all, kneel with us on the quaking wall until the God of the wind and the sea shall hush the one and silence the other. To the dykes! Sisters, mothers, wives, daughters of America, to the dykes! The mightiest catholicon for all the wounds and wrongs of woman or man is complete absorption in the work to rescue others. Save some man, some woman, some child! In that effort you will forget or be helped to bear your own trials, and in a little while God will take you up out of your disturbed and harrowing conjugal relation of earth into a heaven all the happier because of preceding distress. When Queen Elizabeth of England was expiring it was arranged that the exact moment of her death should be signaled to the people by the dropping of a sapphire ring from a window into the hands of an officer, who carried it at the top of his speed to King James of Scotland. But your departure from the scene of your earthly woes, if you are ready to go, will not be the dropping of a sapphire to the ground, but the setting of a jewel in the King’s coronet. Blessed be his glorious name forever! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 78: 076. MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS ======================================================================== Massacre of the Innocents Judges 11:36 : “My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth.” Jephthah was a freebooter. Early turned out from a home where he ought to have been cared for, he consorted with rough men, and went forth to earn his living as best he could. In those times it was considered right for a man to go out on independent military expeditions. Jephthah was a good man according to the light of his dark age, but through a wandering and a predatory life he became reckless and precipitate. The grace of God changes a man’s heart, but never reverses his natural temperament. The Israelites wanted the Ammonites driven out of their country, so they sent a delegation to Jephthah, asking him to become commander-in-chief of all the forces. He might have said, “You drove me out when you had no use for me, and now you are in trouble you want me back;” but he did not say that. He takes command of the army, sends messengers to the Ammonites to tell them to vacate the country, and, getting no favorable response, marshals his troops for battle. Before going out to the war Jephthah makes a very solemn vow, that if the Lord will give him the victory, then, on his return home, whatsoever first comes out of his doorway he will offer in sacrifice as a burnt-offering. The battle opens. It was no skirmishing on the edge of danger, no unlimbering of batteries two miles away, but the hurling of men on the point of swords and spears until the ground could no more drink the blood, and the horses reared to leap over the pile of bodies of the slain. In those old times, opposing forces would fight until their swords were broken, and then each one would throttle his man until they both fell, teeth to teeth, grip to grip, death-stare to death-stare, until the plain was one tumbled mass of corpses from which the last trace of manhood had been dashed out. Jephthah wins the day. Twenty cities lay captured at his feet. Sound the victory all through the mountains of Gilead. Let the trumpeters call up the survivors. Homeward to your wives and children. Homeward with your glittering treasures. Homeward to have the applause of an admiring nation. Build triumphal arches. Swing out flags all over Mizpeh. Open all your doors to receive the captured treasures. Through every hall spread the banquet. Pile up the viands. Fill high the tankards. The nation is redeemed, the invaders are routed, and the national honor is vindicated. Huzza for Jephthah, the conqueror! Jephthah, seated on a prancing steed, advances amid the acclaiming multitudes, but his eye is not on the excited populace. Remembering that he had made a solemn vow that, returning from victorious battle, whatsoever first came out of the doorway of his home, that should be sacrificed as a burnt-offering, he has his anxious look upon the door. I wonder what spotless lamb, what brace of doves will be thrown upon the fire of the burnt-offering. Oh, horrors! Paleness of death blanches his cheek. Despair seizes his heart. His daughter, his only child, rushes out the doorway to throw herself in her father’s arms and shower upon him more kisses than there were wounds on his breast or dents on his shield. All the triumphal splendor vanishes. Hold-ing back his child from his heaving breast, and pushing the locks back from the fair brow, and looking into the eyes of inextinguishable affection, with choked utterance he says, “Would God I lay stark on the bloody plain. My daughter, my only child, joy of my home, life of my life, thou art the sacrifice!” The whole matter was explained to her. This was no whining, hollow-hearted girl into whose eyes the father looked. All the glory of sword and shield vanished in the presence of the valor of that girl. There may have been a tremor of the lip, as a rose-leaf trembles in the sough of the south wind; there may have been the starting of a tear like a rain-drop shook from the anther of a water-lily; but with a self-sacrifice that man may not reach, and only woman’s heart can compass, she surrenders herself to fire and to death. She cries out in the words of my text, “My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do unto me whatsoever hath proceeded from thy mouth.” She bows to the knife, and the blood, which so often at the father’s voice had rushed to the crimson cheek, smokes in the fires of the burnt-offering. No one can tell us her name. There is no need that we know her name. The garlands that Mizpeh twisted for Jephthah the warrior have gone into the dust; but all ages are twisting this girl’s chaplet. It is well that her name came not to us, for no one can wear it. They may take the name of Deborah, or Abigail, or Miriam, but no one in all the ages shall have the title of this daughter of sacrifice. Of course this offering was not pleasing to the Lord; especially as God had made provision for just such a contingency. He could redeem his daughter for thirty shekels of silver (see Leviticus 27:4); but before you hurl your denunciations at Jephthah’s cruelty, remember that in olden times, when vows were made, men thought they must execute them, perform them, whether they were wicked or good. There were two wrong things about Jephthah’s vow. First, he ought never to have made it. Next, having made it, it were better broken than kept. But do not take on pretentious airs and say, “I could not have done as Jephthah did.” If, in former days, you had been standing on the banks of the Ganges, and you had been born in India, you might have thrown your children to the crocodiles. It is not because we are naturally any better, but because we have more Gospel light. Now I make very practical use of this question when I tell you that the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter was a type of the physical, mental, and spiritual sacrifice of ten thousand children in this day. There are parents all unwittingly bringing to bear upon their children a class of influences which will as certainly ruin them as knife and torch destroyed Jephthah’s daughter. While I speak, the whole nation, without emotion and without shame, looks upon the stupendous sacrifice. In the first place, I remark that much of the system of education in our day is a system of sacrifice. When children spend six or seven hours in school, and then must spend two or three hours in preparation for school the next day, will you tell me how much time they will have for sunshine and fresh air, and the obtaining of that exuberance which is necessary for the duties of coming life? No one can feel more thankful than I do for the advancement of common-school education. The printing of books appropriate for schools, the multiplication of philosophical apparatus, the establishment of normal schools, which provide for our children teachers of largest calibre, are themes on which every philanthopist ought to be congratulated. But this herding of great multitudes of children in ill-ventilated school-rooms, and poorly equipped halls of instruction is making many of the places of knowledge in this country a huge holocaust. Politics in many of the cities gets into educational affairs, and while the two political parties are scrabbling for the honors, Jephthah’s daughter perishes. It is so much so that there are many schools in the country to-day which are preparing tens of thousands of invalid men and women for the future; so, that, in many places, by the time the child’s education is finished the child is finished! In many places, in many cities of the country, there are large appropriations for everything else, and cheerful appropriations; but as soon as the appropriation is to be made for the educational or moral interest of a city, we are struck through with an economy that is well nigh the death of us. In connection with this I mention what I might call the cramming system of the common schools and many of the academies; children of delicate brain compelled to tasks that might appal a mature intellect; children going down to school with a strap of books half as high as themselves. The fact is, in some of the cities parents do not allow their children to graduate, for the simple reason, they say, “We cannot afford to allow our children’s health to be destroyed in order that they may gather the honors of an institution.” Tens of thousands of children educated into imbecility; so that, connected with many such literary establishments there ought to be asylums for the wrecked. It is push, and crowd, and cram, and stuff, and jam, until the child’s intellect is bewildered, and the memory ruined and the health is gone. There are children who once were full of romping and laughter, and had cheeks crimson with health, who are now turned out in the afternoon pale-faced, irritated, asthmatic, old before their time. It is one of the saddest sights on earth, an old-mannish boy, or an old-womanish girl. Girls ten years of age studying algebra! Boys twelve years of age racking their brain over trigonometry! Children unacquainted with their mother tongue crying over their Latin, French, and German lessons! All the vivacity of their nature beaten out of them by the heavy beetle of a Greek lexicon! And you doctor them for this, and you give them a little medicine for that, and you wonder what is the matter with them. I will tell you what is the matter with them. They are finishing their education! In my parish in Philadelphia, a little child was so pushed at school that she was thrown into a fever, and in her dying delirium, all night long, she was trying to recite the multiplication table. In my boyhood I remember that in our class at school there was one lad who knew more than all of us put together. If we were fast in our arithmetic, he extricated us. When we stood up for the spelling class, he was almost always the head of the class. Visitors came to his father’s house, and he was always brought in as a prodigy. At eighteen years of age he was an idiot. He lived ten years an idiot, and died an idiot, not knowing his right hand from his left, or day from night. The parents and the teachers made him an idiot. You may flatter your pride by forcing your child to know more than any other children, but you are making a sacrifice of that child, if by the additions to its intelligence you are making a subtraction from its future. The child will go away from such maltreatment with no exuberance to fight the battle of life. Such children may get along very well while you take care of them, but when you are old or dead, alas! for them, if through the wrong system of education which you adopted they have no swarthiness or force of character to take care of themselves. Be careful how you make the child’s head ache or its heart flutter. I hear a great deal about black men’s rights, and Chinamen’s rights, and Indians’ rights, and women’s rights. Would God that somebody would rise to plead for children’s rights. The Carthagenians used to sacrifice their children by putting them into the arms of an idol which thrust forth its hand. The child was put into the arms of the idol, and no sooner touched the arms than it dropped into the fire. But it was the art of the mothers to keep the children smiling and laughing until the moment they died. There may be a fascination and a hilarity about the styles of education of which I am speaking; but it is only laughter at the moment of sacrifice. Would God there were only one Jephthah’s daughter. Again: there are many parents who are sacrificing their children with wrong systems of discipline—too great rigor or too great leniency. There are children in families who rule the household. The high chair in which the infant sits is a throne and the rattle is the sceptre and the other children make up the parliament where father and mother have no vote! Such children come up to be miscreants. There is no chance in this world for a child that has never learned to mind. Such people become the botheration of the Church of God and the pest of the world. Children that do not learn to obey human authority are unwilling to learn to obey divine authority. Children will not respect parents whose authority they do not respect. Who are these young men that swagger through the street, with their thumbs in their vest, talking about their father as “the old man,” “the governor,” “the squire,” “the old chap,” or their mother as “the old woman?” They are those who in youth, in childhood, never learned to respect authority. Eli having heard that his sons had died in their wickedness, fell over backward, and broke his neck and died. Well he might. What is life to a father whose sons are debauched? The dust of the valley is pleasant to his taste, and the driving rains that drip through the roof of the sepulchre are sweeter than the wines of Heshbon. There must be harmony between the father’s government and the mother’s government. The father will be tempted to too great rigor. The mother will be tempted to too great leniency. Her tenderness will overcome her. Her voice is a little softer, her hand seems better fitted to pull out a thorn and soothe a pang. Children wanting anything from the mother, cry for it. They hope to dissolve her will with tears. But the mother must not interfere, must not coax off, must not beg for the child when the hour comes for the assertion of a parental supremacy and the subjugation of a child’s temper. There comes in the history of every child an hour when it is tested whether the parents shall rule or the child shall rule. That is the crucial hour. If the child triumphs in that hour, then he will some day make you crouch. It is a horrible scene. I have witnessed it: a mother come to old age, shivering with terror in the presence of a son who cursed her gray hairs, and mocked her wrinkled face, and begrudged her the crust she munched with her toothless gums: How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth It Is, To Have a Thankless Child. But, on the other hand, too great rigor must be avoided. It is a sad thing when domestic government becomes cold military despotism. Trappers on the prairie fight fire with fire, but you cannot successfully fight your child’s bad temper with your own bad temper. We must not be too minute in our inspection. We cannot expect our children to be perfect. We must not see everything. Since we have two or three faults of our own, we ought not to be too rough when we discover that our children have as many. If tradition be true, when we were children we were not all little Samuels, and our parents were not fearful lest they could not raise us because of our premature goodness. You cannot scold or pound your children into nobility of character. The bloom of a child’s heart can never be seen under a cold drizzle. Above all, avoid fretting and scolding in the household. Better than ten years of fretting at your children is one good, round, old-fashioned application of the slipper! That minister of the Gospel of whom we read in the newspapers that he whipped his child to death because he would not say his prayers will never come to canonization. The arithmetics cannot calculate how many thousands of children have been ruined forever either through too great rigor or too great leniency. The heavens and the earth are filled with the groan of the sacrificed. In this important matter seek divine direction, O father, O mother. Some one asked the mother of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield if she was not proud to have three such eminent sons, and all of them so good. “No,” she said, “it is nothing to be proud of, but something for which to be very grateful.” Again: there are many who are sacrificing their children to a spirit of worldliness. Some one asked a mother whose children had turned out very well, what was the secret by which she prepared them for usefulness and for the Christian life, and she said, “This was the secret: When, in the morning, I washed my children, I prayed that they might be washed in the fountain of a Saviour’s mercy. When I put on their garments, I prayed that they might be arrayed in the robe of a Saviour’s righteousness. When I gave them food, I prayed that they might be fed with manna from heaven. When I started them on the road to school, I prayed that their path might be as the shining light, brighter and brighter to the perfect day. When I put them to sleep, I prayed that they might be enfolded in the Saviour’s arms.” “Oh,” you say, “that was very old-fashioned.” It was quite old-fashioned. But do you suppose that a child under such nurture as that ever turned out bad? In our day most boys start out with no idea higher than the all-encompassing dollar. They start in an age which boasts it can scratch the Lord’s Prayer on a ten-cent piece, and the Ten Commandments on a ten-cent piece. Children are taught to reduce morals and religion, time and eternity, to vulgar fractions. It seems to be their chief attainment that ten cents make a dime, and ten dimes make a dollar. How to get money is only equaled by the other art, how to keep it. Tell me, ye who know, what chance there is for those who start out in life with such perverted sentiments? The money market resounds again and again with the downfall of such people. If I had a drop of blood on the tip of a pen, I would tell you by what awful tragedy many of the youth of this country are ruined. Further on, thousands and tens of thousands of the daughters of America are sacrificed to worldliness. They are taught to be in sympathy with all the artificialities of society. They are inducted into all the hollowness of what is called fashionable life. They are taught to believe that history is dry, but that twenty-five cent stories of adventurous love are delicious. With capacity that might have rivaled a Florence Nightingale in heavenly ministries, or made the father’s house glad with filial and sisterly demeanor, their life is a waste, their beauty a curse, their eternity a demolition. In the siege of Charleston, during our civil war, a lieutenant of the army stood on the floor beside the daughter of the ex-Governor of the State of South Carolina. They were taking the vows of marriage. A bombshell struck the roof, dropped into the group, and nine were wounded and slain; among the wounded to death the bride. While the bridegroom knelt on the carpet trying to stanch the wounds, the bride demanded that the ceremony be completed, that she might take the vows before her departure; and when the minister said, “Wilt thou be faithful unto death?” with her dying lips she said, “I will,” and in two hours she had departed. That was the slaughter and the sacrifice of the body; but at thousands of marriage altars there are daughters slain for time and slain for eternity. It is not a marriage; it is a massacre. Affianced to some one who is only waiting until his father dies, so he can get the property; then a little while they swing around in circles, brilliant circles; then the property is gone, and having no power to earn a livelihood, the twain sink into some corner of society, the husband an idler and sot, the wife a drudge, a slave and a sacrifice. Ah! spare your denunciations from Jephthah’s head, and expend them all on this wholesale modern martyrdom. I lift up my voice to-day against the sacrifice of children. I look out of my window on a Sabbath, and I see a group of children, unwashed, uncombed, unchristianized. Who cares for them? Who prays for them? Who utters to them one kind word? When the city missionary, passing along the park in New York, saw a ragged lad and heard him swearing, he said to him, “My son, stop swearing! You ought to go to the house of God to-day. You ought to be good; you ought to be a Christian.” The lad looked in his face and said, “Ah! it is easy for you to talk, well clothed as you are, and well fed; but we chaps hain’t got no chance.” Who lifts them to the altar for baptism? Who goes forth to snatch them up from crime and death and woe? Who to-day will go forth and bring them into schools and churches? No. Heap them up, great piles of rags and wretchedness and filth. Put underneath them the fires of sacrifice, stir up the blaze, put on more fagots, and while we sit in the churches with folded arms and indifferent, crime and disease and death will go on with the agonizing sacrifice. During the early French Revolution at Bourges there was a company of boys who used to train every day as young soldiers; and they carried a flag, and they had on the flag this inscription: “Tremble, tyrants, tremble; we are growing up.” Mightily suggestive! This generation is passing off, and a mightier generation is coming on. Will they be the foes of tyranny, the foes of sin, and the foes of death, or will they be the foes of God? They are coming up! I congratulate all parents who are doing their best to keep their children away from the altar of sacrifice. Your prayers are going to be answered. Your children may wander away from God, but they will come back again. A voice comes from the throne to-day, encouraging you: “I will be a God to thee, and to thy seed after thee.” And though when you lay your head in death there may be some wanderer of the family far away from God, and you may be twenty years in heaven before salvation shall come to his heart, he will be brought into the kingdom, and before the throne of God you will rejoice that you were faithful. Come at last, though so long postponed his coming. Come at last! I congratulate all those who are toiling for the outcast and the wandering. Your work will soon be over, but the influence you are setting in motion will never stop. Long after you have been garnered for the skies, your prayers, your teachings, and your Christian influence will go on, and help to people heaven with bright inhabitants. Which would you rather see?—which scene would you rather mingle in, in the last great day—being able to say, “I added house to house, and land to land, and manufactory to manufactory; I owned half the city; whatever my eye saw I had, whatever I wanted I got;” or on that day to have Christ look you full in the face and say, “I was hungry, and ye fed me; I was naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and in prison, and ye visited me; inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these my brethren, ye did it to me”? 54 55 56 ======================================================================== CHAPTER 79: 077. CONCERNING BIGOTS ======================================================================== Concerning Bigots Judges 12:6 : “Then said they unto him, Say, now, Shibboleth; and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him at the passages of Jordan.” Do you notice the difference of pronunciation between shibboleth and sibboleth? A very small and unimportant difference you say. And yet, that difference was the difference between life and death for a great many people. The Lord’s people, Gilead and Ephraim, got into a great fight, and Ephraim was worsted, and on the retreat came to the fords of the river Jordan to cross. Order was given that all Ephraimites coming there be slain. But how could it bo found out who were Ephraimites? They were detected by their pronunciation. Shibboleth was a word that stood for river. The Ephraimites had a brogue of their own, and when they tried to say shibboleth, always left out the sound of the “h.” When it was asked that they say shibboleth they said sibboleth, and were slain. “Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan.” A very small difference, you say, between Gilead and Ephraim, and yet how much intolerance about that small difference! The Lord’s tribes in our time—by which I mean the different denominations of Christians—sometimes magnify a very small difference, and the only difference between scores of denominations today is the difference between shibboleth and sibboleth. The Church of God is divided into a great number of denominations. Time would fail me to tell of the Calvinists and the Arminians and the Sabbatarians and the Baxterians and the Dunkers and the Shakers and the Quakers and the Methodists and the Baptists and the Episcopalians and the Lutherans and the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians and the Spiritualists and a score of other denominations of religionists, some of them founded by very good men, some of them founded by very egotistic men, and some of them founded by very bad men. But as I demand liberty of conscience for myself I must give that same liberty to every other man, remembering that he no more differs from me than I differ from him. I advocate the largest liberty in all religious belief and form of worship. In art, in politics, in morals and in religion let there be no gag law, no moving of the previous question, no persecution, no intolerance. You know that the air and the water keep pure by constant circulation, and I think there is a tendency in religious discussion to purification and moral health. Between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries the Church proposed to make people think aright by prohibiting discussion and by strong censorship of the press, and by rack and gibbet, and hot lead down the throat, tried to make people orthodox; but it was discovered that you cannot change a man’s belief by twisting off his head, and that you cannot make a man see things differently by putting an awl through his eyes. There is something in a man’s conscience which will hurl off the mountain that you threw upon it, and, unsinged of the fire, out of the flame will make red wings on which the martyr will mount to glory. In that time of which I speak, between the fourth and sixteenth centuries, people went from the house of God into the most appalling iniquity, and right along by consecrated altars there were tides of drunkenness and licentiousness such as the world never heard of, and the very sewers of perdition broke loose and flooded the Church. After a while the printing press was freed, and it broke the shackles of the human mind. Then there came a large number of bad books, but where there was one man hostile to the Christian religion there were twenty men ready to advocate it; so I have not any nervousness in regard to this battle going on between truth and error. The truth will conquer just as certainly as that God is stronger than the devil. Let error run, if you only let truth run along with it. Urged on by sceptic’s shout and transcendentalisms spur, let it run. God’s angels of wrath are in hot pursuit, and quicker than eagle’s beak clutches out a hawk’s heart God’s vengeance will tear it to pieces. I propose this morning to speak to you of sectarianism—its origin, its evils and its cures. There are those who would make us think that this monster, with horns and hoofs, is religion. I shall chase it to its hiding-place, and drag it out of the caverns of darkness, and rip off its hide. But I want to make a distinction between bigotry and the lawful fondness for peculiar religious beliefs and forms of worship. I have no admiration for a nothingarian. In a world of such tremendous vicissitude and temptation, and with a soul that must after a while stand before a throne of insufferable brightness, in a day when the rocking of the mountains and the flaming of the heavens and the upheaval of the sea shall be among the least of the excitements, to give account for every thought, word, action, preference, and dislike—that man is mad who has no religious preference. But our early education, our physical temperament, our mental constitution, will very much decide our form of worship. A style of psalmody that may please me may displease you. Some would like to have a minister in gown and bands and surplice, and others prefer to have a minister in plain citizen’s apparel. Some are most impressed when a little child is presented at the altar and sprinkled with the waters of a holy benediction “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”; and others are more impressed when the penitent comes up out of the river, his garments dripping with the waters of a baptism which signifies the washing away of sin. Let either have his own way. One man likes no noise in prayer—not a word, not a whisper. Another man, just as good, prefers by gesticulation and exclamation to express his devotional aspirations. One is just as good as the other. “Every man fully persuaded in his own mind.” George Whitefield was expostulating with a Quaker rather roughly for some of his religious sentiments, and the Quaker said: “George, I am as thou art; I am for bringing all men to the hope of the Gospel; therefore, if thou wilt not quarrel with me about my broad brim, I will not quarrel with thee about thy black gown. George, give me thy hand.” In tracing out the religion of sectarianism or bigotry, I find that a great deal of it comes from wrong education in the home circle. There are parents who do not think it wrong to caricature and jeer the peculiar forms of religion in the world, and the denominations that differ from their own. It is very often the case that that kind of education acts just opposite to what was expected, and the children grow up, and after a while go and see for themselves, and looking in those churches, and finding that the people are good there, and love God and keep his commandments, by natural reaction they go and join those very churches. I could mention the names of prominent ministers of the Gospel who spent their whole lives bombarding other denominations, and who lived to see their children preach the Gospel in those very denominations. But it is often the case that bigotry starts in a household, and that the subject of it never recovers. There are tens of thousands of bigots ten years old. I think sectarianism and bigotry also result from too great prominence of any one denomination in a community. All the other denominations are wrong, and his denomination is right, because his denomination is the most wealthy, or the most popular, or the most influential, and it is “our” church, and “our” religious organization, and “our” choir, and “our” minister, and the man tosses his head, and wants other denominations to know their places. It is a great deal better in any community when the great denominations of Christians are about equal in power, marching side by side for the world’s conquest. Mere outside prosperity, mere worldly power, is no evidence that the church is acceptable to God. Better a barn with Christ in the manger, than a cathedral with magnificent harmonies rolling through the long-drawn aisle, and an angel from heaven in the pulpit, if there be no Christ in the chancel, and no Christ in the robes. Bigotry is often the child of ignorance. You seldom find a man with large intellect who is a bigot. It is the man who thinks he knows a great deal, but does not. That man is almost always a bigot. The whole tendency of education and civilization is to bring a man out of that state of mind and heart. There was in the far east a great obelisk, and one side of the obelisk was white, another side of the obelisk was green, another side of the obelisk was blue, and travelers went and looked at that obelisk, but they did not walk around it. One man looked at one side, another at another side, and they came home each one looking at only one side; and they happened to meet, the story says; and they got into a rank quarrel about the color of that obelisk. One man said it was white, another man said it was green, another man said it was blue, and when they were in the very heat of the controversy a more intelligent traveler came, and said: “Gentlemen, I have seen that obelisk, and you are all right, and you are all wrong. Why did you not walk all around the obelisk?” Look out for the man who sees only one side of a religious truth. Look out for the man who never walks around about these great theories of God and eternity and the dead. He will be a bigot inevitably—the man who only sees one side. There is no man more to be pitied than he who has in his head just one idea—no more, no less. More light, less sectarianism. There is nothing that will so soon kill bigotry as God’s sunshine. So I have set before you what I consider to be the causes of bigotry. I have set before you the origin of this evil. What are some of the baleful effects? First of all it cripples investigation. You are wrong, and I am right, and that ends it. No desire for exploration, no spirit of investigation. From the glorious realm of God’s truth, over which an archangel might fly from eternity to eternity and not reach the limit, the man shuts himself out and dies, a blind mole under a corn-shock. While each denomination of Christians is to present all the truths of the Bible, it seems to me that God has given to each denomination an especial mission to give particular emphasis to some one doctrine, and so the Calvinistic churches must present the sovereignty of God, and the Arminian churches must present man’s free agency, and the Episcopal churches must present the importance of order and solemn ceremony, and the Baptist churches must present the necessity of ordinances, and the Congregational Church must present the responsibility of the individual member, and the Methodist Church must show what holy enthusiasm and hearty congregational singing can accomplish. While each denomination of Christians must set forth all the doctrines of the Bible, it is the special function of each denomination to put particular emphasis on some one doctrine. Another great damage done by the sectarianism and bigotry of the Church is that it disgusts people with the Christian religion. Now, my friends, the Church of God was never intended for a war barrack. People are afraid of a riot. You go down the street and you see an excitement, and missiles flying through the air, and you hear the sound of fire-arms. Do you, the peaceful and industrious citizen, go through that street? Oh, no! You say: “I will go around the block.” Now, men come and look upon this narrow path to heaven, and sometimes see the ecclesiastical brickbats flying every whither, and they say: “Well, I guess I’ll take the broad road; if there is so much sharp-shooting on the narrow road, I guess I will keep to the broad road.” Francis I so hated the Lutherans that he said if he thought there was one drop of Lutheran blood in his veins, he would puncture them and let that drop out. Just as long as there is so much hostility between denomination and denomination, or between one professed Christian and another, or between one church and another, just so long men will be disgusted with the Christian religion, and say: “If that is religion, I want none of it.” Again, bigotry and sectarianism do great damage, in the fact that they hinder the triumph of the Gospel. Oh, how much it wastes ammunition, how many men of splendid intellect have given their whole lives to controversial disputes, when, if they had given their life to something practical, they might have been vastly useful! Suppose this morning, while I speak, there were a common enemy coming up the bay, through the Narrows, and all the forts around New York began to fire into each other—you would cry out: “National suicide! why do not those forts blaze away in one direction, and that against the common enemy?” And yet, I sometimes see in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ a strange thing going on; church against church, minister against minister, denomination against denomination, firing away into friend’s fort, or the fort which ought to be on the same side, instead of concentrating their energy, and giving one mighty and everlasting volley against the navies of darkness riding up through the bay. I go out in the summer, and I find two beehives, and these two hives are in a quarrel. I come near enough not to be stung, but I come just near enough to hear the controversy, and one beehive says: “That field of clover is the sweetest,” and another beehive says: “That field of clover is the sweetest.” I come in between them, and I say: “Stop this quarrel; if you like that field of clover best, go there; if you like that other field of clover best, go there, but let me tell you that that hive which gets the most honey is the best hive.” So I come out between the churches of the Lord Jesus Christ. One denomination of Christians says: “That field of Christian doctrine is best,” and another says: “This field of Christian doctrine is best.” Well, I say: “Go where you get the most honey.” That is the best church which gets the most honey of Christian grace for the heart, and the most honey of Christian usefulness for the life. Besides that, if you want to build up any denomination, you will never build it up by trying to pull some other down. Intolerance never put anything down. How much has intolerance accomplished, for instance, against the Methodist Church? For long years her ministry were forbidden the pulpits of Great Britain. Why was it that so many of them preached in the fields? Simply because they could not get in the churches. And the name of the Church was given in derision and as a sarcasm. The critics of the Church said: “They have no order; they have no method in their worship; and the critics, therefore, in irony called them “Methodists.” I am told that in the Astor Library, New York, kept as curiosities, there are seven hundred and seven books and pamphlets against Methodism. Did intolerance stop that Church? No; it is either first or second amid the denominations of Christendom, her missionary stations in all parts of the world, her men not only influential in religious trusts, but influential also in secular trusts. Church marching on, and the more intolerance against it, the faster it marched. What has intolerance accomplished against the Baptist Church? If laughing scorn and tirade could have destroyed the Church it would not have today a disciple left. The Baptists were hurled out of Boston in olden times. Those who sympathized with them were imprisoned, and when a petition was offered asking leniency in their behalf, all the men who signed it were indicted. Has intolerance stopped the Baptist Church? The last statistics in regard to it showed about forty thousand churches and four million communicants. Intolerance never put down anything. In England a law was made against the Jew. England thrust back the Jew, and thrust down the Jew, and declared that no Jew should hold official position. What came of it? Were the Jews destroyed? What were we on both sides of the sea celebrating in all our churches as well as synagogues a few years ago? The one hundredth birthday anniversary of Montefiore, the Jewish philanthropist. Intolerance never put down anything. But now, my friends, having shown you the origin of bigotry, or sectarianism, and having shown you the damage it does, I want briefly to show you how we are to war against this terrible evil, and I think we ought to begin our war by realizing our own weakness and our own imperfections. If we make so many mistakes in the common affairs of life, is it not possible that we may make mistakes in regard to our religious affairs? Shall we take a man by the throat, or by the collar, because he cannot see religious truths just as we do? In the light of eternity it will be found out, I think, there was something wrong in all our creeds, and something right in all our creeds. But since we may make mistakes in regard to things of the world, do not let us be egotistic and so puffed up as to have an idea that we cannot make any mistake in regard to religious theories. And then, I think, we will do a great deal to overthrow the sectarianism from our heart, and the sectarianism from the world, by chiefly enlarging upon those things in which we agree rather than those on which we differ. Now, here is a great Gospel platform. A man comes up on this side the platform and says: “I don’t believe in baby sprinkling.” Shall I shove him off? Here is a man coming up on this side the platform, and he says: “I don’t believe in the perseverance of the saints.” Shall I shove him off? No; I will say: “Do you believe in the Lord Jesus as your Saviour? Do you trust him for time and for eternity?” He says: “Yes.” I say: “Come on, brother, one in time and one in eternity; brother now, brother forever.” Blessed be God for a Gospel platform so large that all who receive Christ may stand on it! I think we may overthrow the severe sectarianism and bigotry in our hearts, and in the Church also, by realizing that all the denominations of Christians have yielded noble institutions and noble men. There is nothing that so stirs my soul as this thought. One denomination yielded a Robert Hall and an Adoniran Judson; another yielded a Latimer and a Melville, another yielded John Wesley and the blessed Summerfield; while our own denomination yielded John Knox and the Alexanders—men of whom the world was not worthy. Now, I say, if we are honest and fair-minded men, when we come up in the presence of such churches and such denominations, although they may be different from our own, we ought to admire them, and we ought to love and honor them. Churches which can produce such men, and such large-hearted charity, and such magnificent martyrdom, ought to win our affection—at any rate, our respect. So come on, ye six hundred thousand Episcopalians in this country, and ye fourteen hundred thousand Presbyterians, and ye four million Baptists, and ye nearly five million Methodists—come on, shoulder to shoulder we will march for the world’s conquest; for all nations are to be saved, and God demands that you and I help accomplish it. Moreover, we may overthrow the feeling by joining in Christian work with other denominations. I like, when the springtime comes, and the anniversary celebrations begin, and all denominations come upon the same platform. That overthrows sectarianism. In the Young Men’s Christian Association, in the Bible Society, in the Tract Society, in the Foreign Missionary Society, shoulder to shoulder, all denominations. Perhaps I might more forcibly illustrate this truth by calling your attention to an incident which took place fourteen or fifteen years ago. One Monday morning, at about two o’clock, while her nine hundred passengers were sound asleep in her berths, dreaming of home, the steamer Atlantic crashed into Mars Head. Five hundred souls in ten minutes launched into eternity! Oh! what a scene! Agonized men and women running up and down the gangways, and clutching for the rigging, and the plunge of the helpless steamer, and the clapping of the hands of the merciless sea over the drowning and the dead, threw two continents into terror. But see this brave quartermaster pushing out with the life-line until he gets to the rock, and see these fishermen gathering up the shipwrecked, and taking them into the cabins, and wrapping them in the flannels snug and warm; and see that minister of the Gospel with three other men getting into a life-boat and pushing out for the wreck, pulling away across the surf, and pulling away until they saved one more man and then getting back with him to the shore. Can those men ever forget that night? And can they ever forget their companionship in peril, companionship in struggle; and companionship in rescue? Never! never! In whatever part of the earth they meet, they will be friends when they mention the story of that awful night when the Atlantic struck Mars Head. Well, my friends, our world has gone into a worse shipwreck. Sin drove it on the rocks. The old ship has lurched and tossed on the tempests of six thousand years. Out with the life-line! I do not care what denomination carries it. Out with the life-boat! I do not care what denomination rows it. Side by side. In the memory of common hardships and common trials, and common prayers and common tears, let us be brothers forever. We must be. One army of the living God, At whose command we bow; Part of the host have crossed the flood, And part are crossing now. And I expect to see the day when all denominations of Christians shall join hands around the cross of Christ, and recite the creed: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, and in the communion of saints, and in the life everlasting.” Amen. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 80: 078. ANGELOLOGY ======================================================================== Angelology Judges 13:19 : “And the angel did wondrously.” Fire built on a rock. Manoah and his wife had there kindled the flames for sacrifice in praise of God, and in honor of a guest whom they supposed to be a man. But, as the flame rose higher and higher, their stranger guest stepped into the flame and by one red leap ascended into the skies. Then they knew that he was an angel of the Lord. “The angel did wondrously.” Two hundred and forty-eight times does the Bible refer to the angels, yet I never heard or read a sermon on Angelology. The whole subject is relegated to the realm mythical, weird, spectral and unknown. Such adjournment is unscriptural and wicked. Of their life, their character, their habits, their actions, their velocities, the Bible gives us full-length portraits, and why this prolonged and absolute silence concerning them? Angelology is my theme. There are two nations of angels, and they are hostile to each other; the nation of good angels and the nation of bad angels. Of the former I chiefly speak today. Their capital, their headquarters, their grand rendezvous, is heaven, but their empire is the universe. They are a distinct race of creatures. No human being can ever join their confraternity. The little child who in the Sabbath-school sings, “I want to be an angel,” will never have her wish gratified. They are superhuman; but they are of different grades and ranks, not all on the same level or the same height. They have their superiors and inferiors and equals. I propose no guessing on this subject, but take the Bible for my only authority. Plato, the philosopher, guessed and divided angels into super-celestial, celestial, and sub-celestial. Dionysius, the Areopagite, guessed and divided them into three classes—the supreme, the middle and the last—and each of these into three other classes, making nine in all. Philo said that the angels were related to God, as the rays to the sun. Fulgentius said that they were composed of body and spirit. Clement said they were incorporeal. Augustine said that they had been in danger of falling, but now are beyond being tempted. But the only authority on this subject, that I respect, says they are divided into Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, Powers. Their commander-in-chief is Michael. Daniel called him Michael, St. John called him Michael. These supernal beings are more thoroughly organized than any army that ever marched. They are swifter than any cyclone that ever swept the sea. They are more radiant than any morning that ever came down the sky. They have more to do with your destiny and mine than any being in the universe except God. May the Angel of the New Covenant, who is the Lord Jesus, open our eyes and touch our tongue and rouse our soul, while we speak of their deathlessness, their intelligence, their numbers, their strength, their achievements. Yes, deathless. They had a cradle, but will never have a grave. The Lord remembers when they were born, but no one shall ever see their eye extinguished or their momentum slow up or their existence terminate. The oldest of them has not a wrinkle or a decrepitude or a hindrance; as young after six thousand years as at the close of their first hour. Christ said of the good in heaven, “Neither can they die any more, for they are equal unto the angels.” Yes. deathless are these wonderful creatures of whom I speak. They will see world after world go out, but there shall be no fading of their own brilliance. Yea, after the last world has taken its last flight, they will be ready for the widest circuit through immensity, taking a quadrillion of miles in one sweep as easy as a pigeon circles a dovecot. They are never sick. They are never exhausted. They need no sleep, for they are never tired. At God’s command, they smote with death, in one night, one hundred and eighty-five thousand of Sennacherib’s host, but no fatality can smite them. Awake, agile, multipotent, deathless, immortal! A further characteristic of these radiant folk is intelligence. The woman of Tekoah was right when she spoke to King David of the wisdom of an angel. We mortals take in what little we know through eye and ear and nostril and touch; but those beings have no physical encasement and hence they are all senses. A wall five feet thick is not solid to them. Through it they go without disturbing flake of mortar or crystal of sand. Knowledge! It flashes on them. They take it in at all points. They absorb it. They gather it up without any hinderment. No need of literature for them! The letters of their books are stars. The dashes of their books are meteors. The words of their books are constellations. The paragraphs of their books are galaxies. The pictures of their books are sunrises and sunsets and midnights auroras, and the conqueror on the white horse with the moon under his feet. Their library is an open universe. No need of telescope to see something millions of miles away, for instantly they are there to inspect and explore it. All astronomies, all geologies, all botanies, all philosophies at their feet. What an opportunity for intelligence is theirs! What facilities for knowing everything, and knowing it right away! There is only one thing that puts them to their wit’s end, and the Bible says they have to study that. They have been studying it all through the ages, and yet I warrant they have not fully grasped it—the wonders of Redemption. These wonders are so high, so deep, so grand, so stupendous, so magnificent that even the intelligence of angelhood is confounded before it. The apostle says, “Which things the angels desire to look into.” That is a subject that excites inquisitiveness on their part. That is a theme that strains their faculties to the utmost. That is higher than they can climb, deeper than they can dive. They have a desire for something too big for their comprehension. “Which things the angels desire to look into.” But that does not discredit their intelligence. No one but God himself can fully understand the wonders of Redemption. If all heaven should study it for fifty eternities they would get no further than the A B C of that inexhaustible subject. But nearly all other realms of knowledge they have ransacked and explored and compassed. No one but God can tell them anything they do not know. They have read to the last word of the last line of the last page of the last volume of investigation. And what delights me most is that all their intelligence is to be at our disposal, and, coming into their presence, they will tell us in five minutes more than we can learn by one hundred years of earthly surmising. A further characteristic of these immortals is their velocity. This the Bible puts sometimes under the figure of wings, sometimes under the figure of a flowing garment, sometimes under the figure of naked feet. As these superhumans are without bodies these expressions are of course figurative, and mean swiftness. The Bible tells us that Daniel was praying, and Gabriel flew from heaven and touched him before he got up from his knees. How far, then, did the angel Gabriel have to fly in those moments of Daniel’s prayer? Heaven is thought to be the center of the universe. Our sun and its planets only the rim of the wheel of worlds. In a moment the angel Gabriel flew from that center to this periphery. Jesus told Peter he could instantly have sixty thousand angels present if he called for them. What foot of antelope or wing of albatross could equal that velocity? Law of gravitation, which grips all things else, has no influence upon angelic momentum. Immensities before them open and shut like a fan. That they are here is no reason why they should not be a quintillion of miles hence the next minute. Our bodies hinder us, but our minds can circle the earth in a minute. Angelic beings are bodiless and have no limitation. God may with his finger point down to some world in trouble on the outmost limits of creation, and instantly an angelic cohort is there to help it. Or some celestial may be standing at the furthermost outpost of immensity, and God may say, “Come!” and instantly it is in his bosom. Abraham, Elijah, Hagar, Joshua, Gideon, Manoah, Paul, St. John, could tell of their unhindered locomotion. The red feet of summer lightning are slow compared with their hegiras. This doubles up and compresses infinitudes into infinitesimals. This puts all the astronomical heavens into a space like the balls of a child’s rattle. This mingles into one the Here and the There, the Now and the Then, the Beyond and the Yonder. Another remark I have to make concerning these illustrious immortals is that they are multitudinous. Their census has never been taken and no one but God knows how many they are, but all the Bible accounts suggest their immense numbers. Companies of them, regiments of them, armies of them, mountain-tops haloed by them, skies populous with them. John speaks of angels and other beings around the throne as ten thousand times ten thousand. Now, according to my calculation, ten thousand times ten thousand are one hundred million. But these are only the angels in one place. David counted twenty thousand of them rolling down the sky in chariots. When God came away from the riven rocks of Mount Sinai, the Bible says he had the companionship of ten thousand angels. I think they are in every battle, in every exigency, at every birth, at every pillow, at every hour, at every moment. The earth full of them. The heavens full of them. They outnumber the human race in this world. They outnumber ransomed spirits in glory. When Abraham had his knife uplifted to slay Isaac, it was an angel who arrested the stroke, crying: “Abraham! Abraham!” It was a stairway of angels that Jacob saw while pillowed in the wilderness. We are told an angel led the hosts of Israelites out of Egyptian serfdom. It was an angel that showed Hagar the fountain where she filled the bottle for the lad. It was an angel that took Lot out of doomed Sodom. It was an angel that shut up the mouths of the hungry monsters when Daniel was thrown into the caverns. It was an angel that fed Elijah under the juniper tree. It was an angel that announced to Mary the approaching nativity. They were angels that chanted when Christ was born. It was an angel that strengthened our Saviour in his agony. It was an angel that encouraged Paul in the Mediterranean shipwreck. It was an angel that burst open the prison, gate after gate, until Peter was liberated. It was an angel that stirred the Pool of Siloam where the sick were healed. It was an angel that John saw flying through the midst of heaven and an angel with foot planted on the sea and an angel that opened the book and an angel that sounded the trumpet, and an angel that thrust in the sickle and an angel that poured out the vials and an angel standing in the sun. It will be an angel with uplifted hand, swearing that Time shall be no longer. In the great final harvest of the world, the reapers are the angels. Yea, the Lord shall be revealed from heaven with mighty angels. Oh, the numbers and the might and the glory of these supernals! Fleets of them! Squadrons of them! Host beyond host! “Rank above rank! Millions on millions! And all on our side if we will have them. This leads me to speak of the offices of these supernals. To defend, to cheer, to rescue, to escort, to give victory to the right, and overthrow the wrong; that is their business. Just as alert today and efficient as when in Bible times they spread wing or unsheathed sword or rocked-down penitentiaries or filled the mountains with horses of fire hitched to chariots of fire and driven by reinsmen of fire. They have turned your steps a hundred times, and you knew it not. You were on the way to do some wrong thing, and they changed your course. They brought some thought of Christian parentage, or of loyalty to your own home, and that arrested you. They arranged that some one should meet you at that crisis, and propose something honorable and elevating or they took from your pocket some ticket to evil amusement, a ticket that you never found. It was an angel of God, and perhaps the very one that guided you to this service, and that now waits to report some holy impression to be made upon your soul, tarrying with one foot upon the doorstep of your immortal spirit, and the other foot lifted for ascent into the skies. By some prayer detain him until he can tell of a repentant and ransomed soul! Or you were some time borne down with trouble, bereavement, persecution, bankruptcy, sickness, and all manner of troubles beating their discords in your heart and life. You gave up; you said: “I cannot stand it any longer. I believe I will take my life. Where is the rail-train or the deep wave or the precipice that will end this torment of earthly existence?” But suddenly your mind brightened. Courage came surging into your heart like oceanic tides. You said: “God is on my side and all these adversities he can make turn out for my good.” Suddenly you felt a peace, a deep peace, the peace of God that passeth all understanding. What made the change? A sweet and mighty and comforting angel of the Lord met you. That was all. What an incentive to purity and righteousness is this doctrine that we are continually under angelic observation! Eyes ever on you, so that the most secret misdeed is committed in the midst of an audience of immortals. No door so bolted, no darkness so Cimmerian, as to hinder that supernal eyesight. Not critical eyesight, not jealous eyesight, not baleful eyesight, but friendly eyesight, sympathetic eyesight, helpful eyesight. Confidential clerk of store with great responsibility on your shoulders and no one to applaud your work when you do it well, and sick with the world’s ingratitude, think of the angels in the counting-room raptured at your fidelity! Mother of household, stitching, mending, cooking, dusting, planning, up half the night, or all night, with the sick child, day in and day out, year in and year out, worn with the monotony of a life that no one seems to care for, think of the angels in the nursery, angels in all the rooms of your toiling, angels about the sick cradle, and all in sympathy! Railroad engineer, with hundreds of lives hanging on your wrist, standing amid the cinders and the smutch, rounding the sharp curve, and by appalling declivity, discharged and disgraced if you make a mistake, but not one word of approval if you take all the trains in safety for ten years, think of the angels by the throttle-valve, angels by the roaring furnace of the engine, angels looking from the overhanging crag, angels bracing the racing wheels off the precipice, angels when you mount the thunderbolt of a train, and angels when you dismount! Can you not hear them, louder than the jamming of the car-coupling, louder than the bell at the crossing, louder than the whistle that sounds like the scream of a flying fiend—the angelic voices saying: “You did it well; you did it well”? If I often speak of engineers, it is because I ride so much with them. I always accept their invitation to join them on their locomotive, and among them are some of the grandest men alive. Men and women of all circumstances, only partly appreciated, or not appreciated at all, never feel lonely again or unregarded again! Angels all around; angels to approve, angels to help, angels to remember. Yea, while all the good angels are friends of the good, there is one special angel your body-guard. This idea, until this present study of angelology, I supposed to be fanciful, but I find it clearly stated in the Bible. When the disciples were praying for Peter’s deliverance from prison, and he appeared at the door of the prayer-meeting, they could not believe it was Peter. They said: “It is his angel.” So these disciples in special nearness to Christ, evidently believed that every worthy soul has an angel. Jesus said of his followers: “Their angels behold the face of my Father.” Elsewhere it is said: “He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep the in all thy ways.” Angel-shielded, angel-protected, angel-guarded, angel-canopied art thou! No wonder that Charles Wesley hymned these words: Which of the petty kings of earth Can boast a guard like ours, Encircled from our second birth With all the heavenly powers? Valerius and Rufinus were put to death for Christ’s sake in the year 287, and after the day when their bodies had been whipped and pounded into a jelly, in the night in prison, and before the next day when they were to be executed, they both thought they saw angels standing with two glittering crowns, saying: “Be of good cheer, valiant soldiers of Jesus Christ! a little more of battle and then these crowns are yours.” And I am glad to know that before many of those who have passed through great sufferings in this life some angel of God has held a blazing coronet of eternal reward. Yea, we are to have such a guardian angel to take us upward when our work is done. You know, we are told an angel conducted Lazarus to Abraham’s bosom. That shows that none shall be so poor in dying he cannot afford angelic escort. It would be a long way to go alone, and up paths we have never trod, and amid blazing worlds swinging in unimaginable momentum, out and on through such distances and across such infinitudes of space, we should shudder at the thought of going alone. But the angelic escort will come to your languishing pillow or the place of your fatal accident, and say: “Hail, immortal one! All is well; God hath sent me to take you home.” And, without tremor or slightest sense of peril, you will away and upward, further on and further on, until after a while heaven heaves in sight, and the rumble of chariot wheels and the roll of mighty harmonies are heard in the distance, and nearer you come, and nearer still, until the brightness is like many mornings suffused into one, and the gates lift, and you are inside the amethystine walls and on the banks of the jasper sea, forever safe, forever free, forever well, forever rested, forever united, forever happy. Mothers, do not think your little children go alone when they quit this world. Out of your arms into angelic arms; out of sickness into health; out of the cradle into a Saviour’s bosom. Not an instant will the darlings be alone between the two kisses—the last kiss of earth and the first kiss of heaven. “Now, angels, do your work!” cried an expiring Christian. Yes; a guardian angel for each one of you. Put yourself now in accord with him. When he suggests the right, follow it; when he warns you against the wrong, shun it. Sent forth from God to help you in this great battle against sin and death, accept his deliverance. When tempted to a feeling of loneliness and disheartenment, appropriate the promise: “The angel of the Lord encampeth around about them that fear him and delivereth them.” Oh, I am so glad that the spaces between here and heaven are thronged with these supernaturals taking tidings home, bringing messages here, rolling back obstacles from our path and giving us defense; for terrific are the forces who dispute our way, and if the nation of the good angels is on our side, the nation of bad angels is on the other. Paul had it right when he said: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” In that awful fight may God send us mighty angelic re-enforcement! We want all their wings on our side, all their swords on our side, all their chariots on our side. Thank God that those who are for us are mightier than those who are against us! And that thought makes me jubilant as to the final triumph. Belgium, you know, was the battle-ground of England and France. Yea, Belgium more than once was the battle-ground of opposing nations. It so happens that this world is the Belgium or battle-ground between the angelic nations, good and bad. Michael, the commander-in-chief on one side; Lucifer, as Byron calls him, or Mephistopheles, as Goethe calls him, or Satan, as the Bible calls him, the commander-in-chief on the other side. All pure angelhood under the one leadership, and all abandoned angelhood under the other leadership. Many a skirmish have the two armies had, but the great and decisive battle is yet to be fought. Either from our earthly homes or down from our supernal residences, may we come in on the right side; for on that side are God and heaven and victory. Meanwhile the battle is being set in array; and the forces celestial and demoniacal are confronting each other. Hear the boom of the great cannonade already opened! Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Dominations, Principalities and Powers are beginning to ride down their foes, and until the work is completed: “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon!” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 81: 079. BRAWN AND MUSCLE ======================================================================== Brawn and Muscle Judges 14:1 : “And Samson went down to Timnath.” There are two sides to the character of Samson. The one phase of his life, if followed into the particulars, would administer to the grotesque and the mirthful; but there is a phase of his character fraught with lessons of solemn and eternal import. To these graver lessons we devote our morning sermon. This giant no doubt, in early life, gave evidences of what he was to be. It is almost always so. There were two Napoleons—the boy Napoleon and the man Napoleon—but both alike; two Howards—the boy Howard and the man Howard—but both alike; two Samsons—the boy Samson and the man Samson—but both alike. This giant was no doubt the hero of the playground, and nothing could stand before his exhibitions of youthful prowess. At eighteen years of age he was betrothed to the daughter of a Philistine. Going down toward Timnath, a lion came out upon him, and, although this young giant was weaponless, he seized the monster by the long mane and shook him as a hungry hound shakes a March hare, and made his bones crack, and left him by the wayside bleeding under the smiting of his fist and the grinding heft of his heel. One time, passing along this place, he went into the thicket to see the remains of the lion that he had slain; but under the hot sun of the climate, all the perishable parts of the carcass had gone, and under the washing of the rain and the shining of the sun, the bones of the skeleton were white and clean and pure and sweet as is a vase of porcelain. The bees had found the skeleton and made it a hive; and they brought to it the sweetness of the grass tops and the juices from the pomegranate with the aroma from the wild woods where the flowers stood in the gloom of the forest like pale nuns in nature’s convent. Afterward he made a very foolish riddle about the honey gathered in the skeleton—a riddle so foolish that it has been recorded as a warning to those who attempt facetiousness without having any talent for it. Through the treachery of his wife, the riddle was found out and Samson was so enraged that he slew thirty men. Still further to vent his rage, he set on fire three hundred foxes and these affrighted creatures ran into the shocks of corn and the haymows, until all the land was ablaze with desolation. One day, surrounded by three hundred men, Samson took a jawbone from the roadside and hewed down those armed men as in a harvest field the full-headed grain tumbles under the swing of the scythe. There he stands, looming up above other men, a mountain of flesh; his arms bunched with muscle that can lift the gate of a city, taking an attitude defiant of everything. His hair had never been cut, and it rolled down in seven great plaits over his shoulders, adding to his bulk, fierceness, and terrible appearance. The Philistines want to conquer him, and therefore they must find out where the secret of his strength lies. There is a dissolute woman living in the valley of Sorek by the name of Delilah. They appoint her the agent in the case. The Philistines are secreted in the same building, and then Delilah goes to work and coaxes Samson to tell what is the secret of his strength. “Well,” he says, “if you should take seven green withes such as they fasten wild beasts with and put them around me I should be perfectly powerless.” So she binds him with the seven green withes. Then she claps her hands and says: “They come—the Philistines!” and he walks out as though there were no impediment. She coaxes him again, and says: “Now tell me the secret of this great strength;” and he replies: “If you should take some ropes that have never been used and tie me with them I should be just like other men.” She ties him with the ropes, claps her hands, and shouts: “They come—the Philistines!” He walks out as easily as he did before—not a single obstruction. She coaxes him again, and he, beginning to get near the secret, says: “Now, if you should take these seven long plaits of hair, and by this house-loom weave them into a web, I could not get away.” So the house-loom is rolled up, and the shuttle flies backward and forward, and the long plaits of hair are woven into a web. Then she claps her hands, and says: “They come—the Philistines!” He walks out as easily as he did before, dragging a part of the loom with him. But after a while, she persuades him to tell the truth. He says: “If you should take a razor or shears and cut off this long hair, I should be powerless and in the hands of my enemies.” Samson sleeps, and that she may not wake him up during the process of shearing, help is called in. You know that the barbers of the East have such a skilful way of manipulating the head to this very day that, instead of waking up a sleeping man, they will put a man wide awake sound asleep. I hear the blades of the shears grinding against each other, and I see the long locks falling off. Then his pledge which made him a Nazarite was broken. The shears or razor accomplishes what green withes and new ropes and house-loom could not do. Suddenly she claps her hands, and says: “The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!” He rouses up with a struggle, but his strength is all gone. He is in the hands of his enemies. I hear the groan of the giant, as they take his eyes out, and then I see him staggering on in his blindness, feeling his way as he goes on toward Gaza. The prison door is open and the giant is thrust in. He sits down and puts his hands on the mill-crank, which, performing the work usually done by a horse, he turns with exhausting horizontal motion, day after day, week after week, month after month—work, work, work! The consternation of the world is in captivity, his locks shorn, his eyes punctured, grinding corn in Gaza! First of all, behold in this giant of the text that physical power is not always an index of moral power. He was a huge man—the lion found it out, and the three thousand men whom he slew found it out; yet he was dominated by petty revenges and out-gianted by low passion. I am far from throwing any discredit upon physical stamina. There are those who seem to have great admiration for delicacy and sickliness of constitution. I never could see any glory in weak nerves or sick headache. Whatever effort in our day is made to make the men and women more robust should have the favor of every good citizen as well as of every Christian. Gymnastics may be positively religious. Good people sometimes ascribe to a wicked heart what they ought to ascribe to a slow liver. The body and the soul are such near neighbors that they often catch each other’s diseases. Those who never saw a sick day, and who, like Hercules, show gigantic promise in the cradle, have more to answer for than those who are the subjects of lifelong infirmities. He who can lift twice as much as you can and walk twice as far and work twice as long will have a double account to meet in the judgment. How often it is that you do not find physical energy indicative of spiritual power. If a clear head is worth more than one dizzy with perpetual vertigo; if muscles with the play of health in them are worth more than those drawn up in chronic “rheumatics”; if an eye quick to catch passing objects is better than one with vision dim and uncertain—then God will require of us efficiency just in proportion to what he has given us. Physical energy ought to be a type of moral power. We ought to have as good digestion of truth as we have capacity to assimilate food. Our spiritual hearing ought to be as good as our physical hearing. Our spiritual taste ought to be as clear as our tongue. Samsons in body, we ought to be giants in moral power. But while you find a great many men who realize that they ought to use their money aright, and use their intelligence aright, how few men you find aware of the fact that they ought to use their physical organism aright. With every thump of the heart there is something saying, “Work! work!” and, lest we should complain that we have no tools to work with, God gives us our hands and feet, with every knuckle, with every joint, and with every muscle saying to us, “Lay hold and do something.” But how often it is that men with physical strength do not serve Christ. They are like a ship full manned and full rigged, capable of vast tonnage, able to endure all stress of weather, yet swinging idly at the docks, while they ought to be crossing and recrossing the great ocean of human suffering and sin with God’s supplies of mercy. How often it is that physical strength is used in doing positive damage, or in luxurious ease, when, with sleeves rolled up and bronzed bosom, fearless of the shafts of opposition, it ought to be laying hold with all its might, and tugging away trying to lift up this sunken wreck of a world. It is a most shameful fact that much of the business of the church and of the world must be done by those comparatively invalid—Richard Baxter, by reason of his diseases, all his days sitting in the door of the tomb, yet writing more than a hundred volumes, and sending out an influence for God that will endure as long as the “Saints’ Everlasting Rest.” Edward Payson, never knowing a well day; yet how he preached, and how he wrote, helping thousands of dying souls like himself to swim in a sea of glory! And Robert McCheyne, a walking skeleton; yet you know what he did in Dundee, and how he shook Scotland with zeal for God. Philip Doddridge, advised by his friends because of his illness not to enter the ministry, yet you know what he did for the “Rise and Progress of Religion” in the church and in the world. Wilberforce was told by his doctors that he could not live a fortnight, yet at that very time he was entering upon philanthropic enterprises that demanded the greatest endurance and persistence. Robert Hall, suffering excruciations, so that often in his pulpit while preaching he would stop and lie down on a sofa, then getting up again to preach about heaven until the glories of the celestial city dropped on the multitude, doing more work, perhaps, than almost any well man in his day. How often it is that men with great physical endurance are not as great in moral and spiritual stature. While there are achievements for those who are bent all their days with sickness—achievements of patience, of prayer, of self-denial, of Christian endurance—I call upon men of health today, men of muscle, men of nerve, men of physical power, to devote themselves to the Lord. Giants in body, you ought to be giants in soul. Behold also in the story of my text illustration of the fact of the damage that strength can do if it be misguided. It seems to me that this man spent a great deal of his time in doing evil—this Samson of my text. To pay a bet which he had lost by the guessing of his riddle, he robs and kills thirty people. He was not only gigantic in strength, but gigantic in mischief, and a type of those men in all ages of the world who, powerful in body or mind or in social position and wealth have used their power for iniquitous purposes. It is not the small, weak men of the day who do the damage. These small men who go swearing and loafing about your stores and shops and banking-houses, assailing Christ and the Bible and the church—they do not do the damage. They have no influence. They are vermin that you crush with your foot. But it is the giants of the day, the misguided giants, giants in physical power, giants in mental acumen, giants in social position or giants in wealth, who do the damage. The men with sharp pens that stab religion and throw their poison all through our literature; the men who use the power of wealth to sanction iniquity or bribe justice, or make truth and honor bow to their golden scepter. Look out for them! In the middle and the latter part of the eighteenth century no doubt there were thousands of men in Paris and Edinburgh and London who hated God and blasphemed the name of the Almighty; but they did but little mischief—they were small men, insignificant men. Yet there were giants in those days. Who can calculate the soul-havoc of a Rousseau, going on with a very enthusiasm of iniquity, with fiery imagination seizing upon all the impulsive natures of his day; or of David Hume, who employed his life as a spider employs its summer, in spinning out silken webs to trap the unwary; or of Voltaire, the most learned man of his day, marshaling a great host of skeptics, and leading them out in the dark land of infidelity; or of Gibbon, who showed an uncontrollable grudge against religion in his history of one the most fascinating periods of the world’s existence—the decline and fall of the Roman Empire—a book in which, with all the splendors of his genius, he magnified the errors of Christian disciples, while with a sparseness of notice that never can be forgiven he treated of the Christian heroes of whom the world was not worthy? Oh, men of stout physical health, men of great mental stature, men of high social position, men of great power of any sort, I want you to understand your power, and I want you to know that that power devoted to God will be a crown on earth to you, typical of a crown in heaven; but misguided, bedraggled in sin, administrative of evil, God will come out against you with his condemnation in the day when millionaire and pauper, master and slave, king and subject, shall stand side by side in the judgment, and moneybags and judicial ermine and royal robe shall be riven with the lightnings. Behold, also, how a giant may be slain of a woman. Delilah started the train of circumstances that pulled down the temple of Dagon about Samson’s ears. Tens of thousands of giants have gone down to death and hell through the same impure fascinations. It seems to me that it is high time that pulpit and platform and printing-press speak out against the impurities of modern society. Fastidiousness and Prudery say: “Better not speak—you will rouse up adverse criticism; you will make worse what you want to make better; better deal in glittering generalities; the subject is too delicate for polite ears.” But there comes a voice from heaven overpowering the mincing sentimentalities of the day, saying: “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgressions and the house of Jacob their sins.” The trouble is that when people write or speak upon this theme they are apt to cover it up with the graces of belles-lettres, so that the crime is made attractive instead of repulsive. Lord Byron in “Don Juan” adorns this crime until it smiles like a May queen. Michelet, the great French writer, covers it up with bewitching rhetoric until it glows like the rising sun, when it ought to be loathsome as a smallpox hospital. There are today influences abroad which if unresisted by the pulpit and the printing-press will turn New York and Brooklyn into Sodom and Gomorrah, fit only for the storm of fire and brimstone that whelmed the cities of the plain. You who are seated in your Christian homes, compassed by moral and religious restraints, do not realize the gulf of iniquity that bounds you on the north and the south and the east and the west. While I speak there are tens of thousands of men and women going over the awful plunge of an impure life; and while I cry to God for mercy upon their souls, I call upon you to enroll yourselves in the defense of your homes, your churches, and your nation. There is a banqueting hall that you have never heard described. You know all about the feast of Ahasuerus, where his many lords sat. You know all about Belshazzar’s carousal, where the blood of the murdered king spurted into the faces of the banqueters. You may know of the scene of riot and wassail when there was set before Æsopus one dish of food that cost four hundred thousand dollars. But I speak now of a different banqueting hall. Its roof is fretted with fire. Its floor is tessellated with fire. Its chalices are chased with fire. Its song is a song of fire. Its walls are buttresses of fire. Solomon refers to it when he says: “Her guests are in the depths of hell.” Our American communities are suffering from the iniquitous doctrine of Free-loveism, which, years ago, was even preached on the platform and in some of the churches of this country. I charge upon Free-loveism that it has blighted innumerable homes, and that it has sent innumerable souls to ruin. Free-loveism is bestial; it is worse—it is infernal. It has furnished this land with about one thousand divorces annually. In one county in the State of Indiana it furnished eleven divorces in one day before dinner. It has led to elopements, North, South, East, and West. You can hardly take up a paper but you read of an elopement. As far as I can understand the doctrine of Free-loveism it is this: that every man ought to love somebody else’s wife, and every wife somebody else’s husband. They do not like our Christian organization of society, and I wish they would all elope, the wretches of one sex taking the wretches of the other, and start to-morrow morning for the great Sahara desert, until the simoom shall sweep seven feet of sand all over them, and not one passing caravan for the next five hundred years bring back one miserable bone of their carcasses. Free-loveism! It is the double-distilled extract of nux vomica, ratsbane, and adder’s tongue. Never until society goes back to the old Bible and hears its eulogy of purity and its anathema of uncleanness—never until then will this evil be extirpated. Behold also in this giant of the text and in the giant of our own century that great physical power must crumble and depart. The Samson of the text long ago went away. He fought the lion. He fought the Philistines. He could fight anything, but Death was too much for him. He may have required a longer grave and a broader grave; but the tomb nevertheless was his terminus. If, then, we are to be compelled to go out of this world, where are we to go to? This body and soul must soon part. What shall be the destiny of the former I know—dust to dust. But what shall be the destiny of the latter? Shall it rise into the companionship of the white-robed, whose sins Christ has slain; or will it go down among the unbelieving, who tried to gain the world and save their souls, but were swindled out of both? Blessed be God, we have a Champion. He is so styled in the Bible: A Champion who has conquered death and hell, and he is ready to fight all our battles from the first to the last. “Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah, mighty to save?” If we follow in the wake of that Champion, death has no power and the grave no victory. The worst man trusting in him shall have his dying pangs alleviated and his future illumined. In the light of this subject I want to call attention to the fact that we must be brought into judgment for the employment of our physical organism. Shoulder, brain, hand, foot—we must answer in judgment for the use we have made of them. Have they been used for the elevation of society or for its depression; in proportion as our arm is strong and our step elastic will our account at last be measured. Thousands of sermons are preached to invalids. I preach this sermon to stout men and healthful women. We must give to God an account for the right use of this physical organism. These invalids have comparatively little to account for, perhaps. They could not lift twenty pounds. They could not walk half a mile without sitting down to rest. In the preparation of this subject I have said to myself, how shall I account to God in judgment for the use of a body which never knew one moment of real sickness? Rising up in judgment, standing beside the men and the women who had only little physical energy, and yet consumed that energy in a conflagration of religious enthusiasm, how will we feel abashed! Oh, men of the strong arm and the stout heart, what use are you making of your physical forces? Will you be able to stand the test of that day when we must answer for the use of every talent, whether it were a physical energy or a mental acumen or a spiritual power? Hark! it thunders. The day approaches, and I see one who in this world was an invalid, and as she stands before the throne of God to answer she says, “I was sick all my days. I had but very little strength, but I did as well as I could in being kind to those who were more sick and more suffering.” And Christ will say, “Well done, faithful servant.” And then a little child will stand before the throne, and she will say, “On earth I had a curvature of the spine, and I was very weak, and I was very sick; but I used to go out and gather flowers out of the wild wood and bring them to my sick mother, and she was comforted when she saw the sweet flowers out of the wild wood. I didn’t do much, but I did something.” And Christ shall say, as he takes her up in his arm and kisses her, “Well done, well done, faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.” What, then, will be said to us—we to whom the Lord gave physical strength and continuous health? Hark! it thunders again. The Judgment! the Judgment! I said to an old Scotch minister, who was one of the best friends I ever had, “Doctor, did you every know Robert Pollock, the Scotch poet, who wrote ‘The Course of Time’?” “Oh, yes,” he replied, “I knew him well; I was his classmate,” he replied. And then the doctor went on to tell me that the writing of “The Course of Time” exhausted the health of Robert Pollock, and he expired. It seems as if no man could have such a glimpse of the day for which all other days were made as Robert Pollock had, and long survive that glimpse. In the description of that day he says, among other things: Begin the woe, ye woods, and tell it to the doleful winds, And doleful winds wail to the howling hills, And howling hills mourn to the dismal vales, And dismal vales sigh to the sorrowing brooks, And sorrowing brooks weep to the weeping stream, And weeping stream awake the groaning deep; Ye heavens, great archway of the universe, put sackcloth on; And ocean, robe thyself in garb of widowhood, And gather all thy waves into a groan, and utter it, Long, loud, deep, piercing, dolorous, immense. The occasion asks it, Nature dies, and angels come to lay her in her grave. What Robert Pollock saw in poetic dream, you and I will see in positive reality. The Judgment! the Judgment! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 82: 080. THE CHOICE OF A WIFE ======================================================================== The Choice of a Wife Judges 14:3 : “Is there never a woman among the daughters of thy brethren, or among all my people, that thou goest to take a wife of the uncircumcised Philistines?” Samson, the giant, is here asking consent of his father and mother to marriage with one whom they thought unfit for him. He, was wise in asking their counsel, but not wise in rejecting it. Captivated with her looks, the big son wanted to marry the daughter of one of the hostile families, a deceitful, hypocritical, whining and saturnine creature, who afterward made for him a world of trouble till she quit him forever. In my text the parents forbade the banns, practically saying: “When there are so many honest and beautiful maidens of your own country, are you so hard put for a lifetime partner that you propose conjugality with this foreign flirt? Is there such a dearth of lilies in your Israelitish gardens that you must wear on your heart a Philistine thistle? Do you take a crab-apple because there are no pomegranates? Is there never a woman among the daughters of thy brethren, or among all my people, that thou goest to take a wife of the uncircumcised Philistines?” Excuseless was he for such a choice in a land and amid a race celebrated for female loveliness and moral worth, a land and a race of which self-denying Abigail and heroic Deborah and dazzling Miriam and pious Esther and glorious Ruth and Mary, who hugged to her heart the blessed Lord, were only magnificent specimens. The midnight folded in their hair, the lakes of liquid beauty in their eye, the gracefulness of spring morning in their posture and gait, were only typical of the greater brilliance and glory of their soul. Likewise excuseless is any man in our time who makes lifelong alliance with anyone who, because of her disposition or heredity or habits or intellectual vanity or moral twistification may be said to be of the Philistines. The world never owned such opulence of womanly character, or such splendor of womanly manners, or multitudinous instances of wifely, motherly, daughterly, sisterly devotion, as it owns today. I have not words to express my admiration for good womanhood. Woman is not only man’s equal, but in affection and religious nature, which is the best part of us, she is seventy-five per cent. his superior. Yea, during the last twenty years, through the increased opportunity opened for female education, the women of the country are better educated than the majority of men; and if they continue to advance in mentality at the present rate, before long the majority of men will have difficulty in finding in the opposite sex enough ignorance to make appropriate consort. If I am under a delusion as to the abundance of good womanhood abroad, consequent upon my surroundings since the hour I entered this life until now, I hope the delusion will last until I embark from this planet. So, you understand, if I say in this course of sermons something that seems severe, I am neither cynical nor disgruntled. There are, in almost every farmhouse in the country, in almost every home of the great towns, conscientious women, worshipful women, self-sacrificing women, holy women, innumerable Marys, sitting at the feet of Christ; innumerable mothers, helping to feed Christ in the person of His suffering disciples; a thousand capped and spectacled grandmothers Lois, bending over Bibles whose precepts they have followed from early girlhood; and tens of thousands of young women that are dawning upon us from school and seminary, that are going to bless the world with good and happy homes, that shall eclipse all their predecessors, a fact that will be acknowledged by all men except those who are struck through with moral decay from toe to cranium; and more inexcusable than the Samson of the text is that man who, amid all this unparalleled munificence of womanhood, marries a fool. But some of you are abroad suffering from such disaster, and to halt others of you from going over the same precipice, I cry out in the words of my text: “Is there never a woman among the daughters of thy brethren, or among all my people, that thou goest to take a wife of the uncircumcised Philistines?” That marriage is the destination of the human race is a mistake that I want to correct before I go further. There are multitudes who never will marry, and still greater multitudes who are not fit to marry. In Great Britain today there are nine hundred and forty-eight thousand more women than men, and that, I understand, is about the ratio in other lands. By mathematical and inexorable law, you see, millions of women will never marry. The supply for matrimony greater than the demand, the first lesson of which is that every woman ought to prepare to take care of herself if need be. Then there are thousands of men who have no right to marry, because they have become so corrupt of character that their offer of marriage is an insult to any good woman. Society will have to be toned up and corrected on this subject, so that it shall realize that if a woman who has sacrificed her honor is unfitted for marriage, so is any man who has ever sacrificed his purity. What right have you, O masculine beast! whose life has been loose, to take under your care the spotlessness of a virgin reared in the sanctity of a respectable home? Will a buzzard dare to court a dove? But the majority of you will marry, and have a right to marry, and as your religious teacher I wish to say to these men, in the choice of a wife first of all seek divine direction. About thirty-five years ago, when Martin Farquhar Tupper, the English poet, urged men to prayer before they decided upon matrimonial association, people laughed. And some of them have lived to laugh on the other side of their mouth. The need of divine direction I argue from the fact that so many men, and some of them strong and wise, have wrecked their lives at this juncture. Witness Samson and this woman of Timnath! Witness Socrates, pecked of the historical Xanthippe! Witness Job, whose wife had nothing to prescribe for his carbuncles but allopathic doses of profanity! Witness Ananias, a liar, who might perhaps been cured by a truthful spouse, yet marrying as great a liar as himself—Sapphira! Witness John Wesley, one of the best men that ever lived, united to one of the most, outrageous and scandalous of women, who sat in City Road Chapel, making mouths at him while he preached! Witness the once connubial wretchedness of John Ruskin, the great art essayist, and Frederick W. Robertson, the great preacher! Witness a thousand hells on earth kindled by unworthy wives, termagants that scold like a March northeaster; female spendthrifts, that put their husbands into fraudulent schemes to get money enough to meet the lavishment of domestic expenditure; opium-using women—about four hundred thousand of them in the United States—who will have the drug though it should cause the eternal damnation of the whole household; heartless and overbearing, and namby-pamby and unreasonable women, yet married—married, perhaps, to good men! These are the women who build the low club-houses, where the husbands and sons go because they cannot stand it at home. On this sea of matrimony, where so many have been wrecked, am I not right in advising divine pilotage? Especially is devout supplication needed, because of the fact that society is so full of artificialties that men are deceived as to whom they are marrying, and no one but the Lord knows. After the dressmaker and the milliner and the jeweler and the hair-adjuster and the dancing-master and the professor of the cosmetic art have completed their work, how is an unsophisticated man to decipher the physiological hieroglyphics, and make accurate judgment of who it is to whom he offers hand and heart? That is what makes so many recreant husbands. They make an honorable marriage contract, but the goods delivered are so different from the sample by which they bargained. They were simply swindled, and they backed out. They mistook Jezebel for Longfellow’s Evangeline, and Lucretia Borgia for Martha Washington. Aye, as the Indian chief boasts of the scalps he has taken, so there are in society today many coquettes who boast of the masculine hearts they have captured. And these women, though they may live amid richest upholstery, are not so honorable as the cyprians of the street, for these advertise their infamy, while the former profess heaven while they mean hell. There is so much counterfeit womanhood abroad it is no wonder that some cannot tell the genuine coin from the base. Do you not realize that you need divine guidance when I remind you that mistake is possible in this important affair, and, if made, is irrevocable? The worst predicament possible is to be unhappily yoked together. You see it is impossible to break the yoke. The more you pull apart, the more galling the yoke. The minister might bring you up again, and in your presence read the marriage ceremony backward, might put you on the opposite sides of the altar from where you were when you were united, might take the ring off the finger, might rend the wedding-veil asunder, might tear out the marriage leaf from the family Bible record, but all that would fail to unmarry you. It is better not to make the mistake than to attempt its correction. But men and women do not reveal all their characteristics till after marriage, and how are you to avoid committing the fatal blunder? There is only one Being in the universe who can tell you whom to choose, and that is the Lord of Paradise. He made Eve for Adam, and Adam for Eve, and both for each other. Adam had not a large group of women from whom to select a wife, but it is fortunate, judging from some mistakes which he afterward made, that it was Eve or nothing. There is in all the world some one who was made for you, as certainly as Eve was made for Adam. All sorts of mistakes occur because Eve was made out of a rib from Adam’s side. Nobody knows which of his twenty-four ribs was taken for a nucleus. If you depend entirely upon yourself in the selection of a wife, there are twenty-three possibilities to one that you will select the wrong rib. By the fate of Ahab, whose wife induced him to steal; by the fate of Macbeth, whose wife pushed him into massacre; by the fate of James Ferguson, the philosopher, whose wife entered the room while he was lecturing and wilfully upset his astronomical apparatus, so that he turned to the audience and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have the misfortune to be married to this woman;” by the fate of Bulwer, the novelist, whose wife’s temper was so incompatible that he furnished her a beautiful house near London and withdrew from her company, leaving her with the dozen dogs whom she entertained as pets; by the fate of John Milton, who married a termagant after he was blind, and when some one called her a rose the poet said: “I am no judge of flowers, but it may be so, for I feel the thorns daily;” by the fate of an Englishman whose wife was so determined to dance on his grave that he was buried in the sea; by the fate of a village minister, whom I knew, whose wife threw a cup of hot tea across the table because they differed in sentiment—by all these scenes of disquietude and domestic calamity, we implore you to be cautious and prayerful before you enter into the connubial state, which decides whether a man shall have two heavens or two hells, a heaven here and heaven forever, or a hell now and a hell hereafter. By the bliss of Pliny, whose wife, when her husband was pleading in court, had messengers coming and going to inform her what impression he was making: by the joy of Grotius, whose wife delivered him from prison under the pretense of having books carried out lest they be injurious to his health, she sending out her husband unobserved in one of the bookcases; by the good fortune of Roland, in Louis’ time, whose wife translated and composed for her husband, while Secretary of the Interior—talented, heroic, wonderful Madame Roland; by the happiness of many a man who has made intelligent choice of one capable of being prime counselor and companion in brightness and grief—pray to Almighty God morning, noon and night that at the right time and in the right way he will send you a good, honest, loving, sympathetic wife; or, if she is not sent to you, that you may be sent to her. At this point, let me warn you not to let a question of this importance be settled by the celebrated matchmakers flourishing in almost every community. Depend upon your own judgment divinely illumined. These brokers in matrimony are ever planning how they can unite impecunious innocence to an heiress, or celibate woman to millionaire or marquis, and that in many cases makes life an unhappiness. How can any human being, who knows neither of the two parties as God knows them, and who is ignorant of the future, give such direction as you require at such a crisis? Take the advice of the earthly matchmaker instead of the divine guidance, and you may some day be led to use the words of Solomon, whose experience in home life was as melancholy as it was multitudinous. One day his palace, with its great wide rooms, and great wide doors, and great wide hall, was too small for him when the loud tongue of a woman belabored him about some of his neglects, and he retreated to the housetop to get relief from the lingual bombardment. And while there he saw a poor man on one corner of the roof with a mattress for his only furniture, and the open sky his only covering. And Solomon envies him and cries out: “It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop than with a brawling woman in a wide house.” And one day, during the rainy season, the water leaked through the roof of the palace and began to drop in a pail or pan set there to catch it. And at one side of him all day long the water went drop! drop! drop! while on the other side a female companion quarreling about this, and quarreling about that, the acrimonious and petulant words falling on his ear in ceaseless pelting—drop! drop! drop! and he seized his pen and wrote: “A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike.” If Solomon, had been as prayerful at the beginning of his life as he was at the close, how much domestic infelicity he would have avoided! But prayer about this will amount to nothing unless you pray soon enough. Wait until you are fascinated and the equilibrium of your soul is disturbed by a magnetic and exquisite presence, and then you will answer your own prayers, and you will mistake your own infatuation for the voice of God. If you have this prayerful spirit you will surely avoid all female scoffers at the Christian religion; and there are quite a number of them in all communities. It must be told that, though the influence that keeps woman from being estimated and treated as a slave—aye, as a brute and a beast of burden—is Christianity, since where it is not dominant she is so treated, yet there are women who will so far forget themselves and forget their God that they will go and hear lecturers malign Christianity and scoff at the most sacred things of the soul. A good woman, overpersuaded by her husband, may go once to hear such a tirade against the Christian religion, not fully knowing what she is going to hear; but she will not go twice. A woman not a Christian, but a respecter of religion, said to me: “I was persuaded by my husband to go and hear an infidel lecturer once, but going home, I said to him, ‘My dear husband, I would not go again though my refusal should result in our divorcement forever.’“ And the woman was right. If after all that Christ and Christianity have done for a woman, she can go again and again to hear such assaults, she is an awful creature, and you had better not come near such a reeking lepress. She needs to be washed, and for three weeks to be soaked in carbolic acid, and for a whole year fumigated, before she is fit for decent society. While it is not demanded that a woman be a Christian before marriage, she must have regard for the Christian religion or she is a bad woman and unworthy of being your companion in a life charged with such stupendous solemnity and vicissitudes. What you want, O man! in a wife, is not a butterfly of the sunshine, not a giggling nonentity, not a painted doll, nor a gossiping gadabout, not a mixture of artificialities which leave you in doubt as to where the humbug ends and the woman begins, but an earnest soul, one that can not only laugh when you laugh, but weep when you weep. There will be wide, deep graves in your path of life, and you will both want steadying when you come to the verge of them, I tell you! When your fortune fails you will want some one to talk of treasures in heaven, and not charge you with a bitter “I told you so.” As far as I can analyze it, sincerity and earnestness are the foundation of all worthy wifehood. Get that, and you get all. Fail to get that, and you get nothing but what you will wish you never had got. Do not make the mistake that the man of the text made in letting his eye settle the question in which coolest judgment directed by divine wisdom is all-important. He who has no reason for his wifely choice except a pretty face is like a man who should buy a farm because of the dahlias in the front door-yard. Beauty is a talent, and when God gives it, he intends it as a benediction upon a woman’s face. When the good Princess of Wales dismounted from the rail-train last summer, and I saw her radiant face, I could understand what they told me the day before, that, when at the great military hospital where there were the wounded and sick from the Egyptian and other wars, the Princess passed through, all the sick were cheered at her coming, and those who could be roused neither by doctor nor nurse from their stupor, would get up on their elbows to look at her, and wan and wasted lips prayed an audible prayer: “God bless the Princess of Wales! Doesn’t she look beautiful?” But how uncertain is the tarrying of beauty in a human countenance! Explosion of a kerosene lamp soon turns it into scarification, and a scoundrel with one dash of vitriol may dispel it, or Time will drive his chariot wheels across that bright face, cutting it up in deep ruts and gullies. But there is an eternal beauty of the face of some women, whom a rough and ungallant world may criticise as homely; and though their features may contradict all the laws of Lavater on physiognomy, yet they have graces of soul that will keep them attractive for time and glorious through all eternity. There are two or three circumstances in which the plainest wife is a queen of beauty to her husband, whatever her stature or profile. By financial panic or betrayal of business partner, the man goes down, and returning to his home that evening, he says: “I am ruined; I am in disgrace forever; I care not whether I live or die.” It is an agitated story he is telling in the household that winter night. He says: “The furniture must go, the house must go, the social position must go,” and from being sought for obsequiously they must be cold-shouldered everywhere. After he ceases talking, and the wife has heard all in silence, she says: “Is that all? Why, you had nothing when I married you, and you have only come back to where you started. If you think that my happiness and that of the children depend upon these trappings, you do not know me, though we have lived together thirty years. God is not dead, and the National Bank of Heaven has not suspended payment, and if you don’t mind, I don’t care a cent. What little we need of food and raiment the rest of our lives we can get, and I don’t propose to sit down and mope and groan. Mary, hand me that darning-needle. I declare! I have forgotten to set the rising for those cakes!” And while she is busy at it he hears her humming Newton’s old hymn, “To-Morrow:” It can bring with it nothing But he will bear us through; Who gives the lilies clothing Will clothe his people too; Beneath the spreading heavens No creature but is fed; And he who feeds the ravens Will give his children bread. Though vine nor fig-tree neither Their wonted fruit should bear, Though all the fields should wither Nor flocks nor herds be there; Yet God the same abiding, His praise shall tune my voice; For while in him confiding I cannot but rejoice. The husband looks up in amazement and says: “Well, well, you are the greatest woman I ever saw. I thought you would faint dead away when I told you.” And as he looks at her, all the glories of physiognomy in the court of Louis XV and on the modern fashion plates are tame as compared with the superhuman splendors of that woman’s face. Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette, and La Belle Hamilton, the enchantment of the court of Charles II, are nowhere. There is another time when the plainest wife is a queen of beauty to her husband. She has done the work of life. She has reared her children for God and heaven, and though some of them may be a little wild they will yet come back, for God has promised. She is dying, and her husband stands by. They think over all the years of their companionship, the weddings and the burials, the ups and the downs, the successes and the failures. They talk over the goodness of God and his faithfulness to children’s children. She has no fear about going. The Lord has sustained her so many years she would not dare to distrust him now. The lips of both of them tremble as they say good-by and encourage each other about an early meeting in a better world. The breath is feebler and feebler, and stops. Are you sure of it? Just hold that mirror at the mouth and see if there is any vapor gathering on the surface. Gone! As one of the neighbors takes the old man by the arm gently, and says: “Come, you had better go into the next room and rest,” he says: “Wait a moment; I must take one more look at that face and at those hands!” Beautiful! Beautiful! My friends, I hope you do not call that death. That is an autumnal sunset. That is a crystalline river pouring into a crystal sea. That is the solo of human life overpowered by hallelujah chorus. That is a queen’s coronation. That is heaven. That is the way my father stood at eighty-two, seeing my mother depart at seventy-nine. Perhaps so your father and mother went. I wonder if we will die as well? ======================================================================== CHAPTER 83: 081. THE SHEARS OF DELILAH ======================================================================== The Shears of Delilah Judges 16:19 : “And she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head; and she began to afflict him, and the strength went from him.” It would take a skilful photographer to picture Samson as he really was. The most facile words are not supple enough to describe him. He was a giant and a child; the conqueror and the victim; able to snap a lion’s jaw and yet captured by the sigh of a maiden. He was ruler and slave; a commingling of virtues and vices, the sublime and the ridiculous; sharp enough to make a good riddle, and yet weak enough to be caught in the most superficial stratagem; honest enough to settle his debt, and yet outrageously robbing somebody else to get the material to pay it; a miracle and a scoffing; a crowning glory and a burning shame. There he stands, looming up above other men, a mountain of flesh; his arms bunched with muscle that can lift the gate of a city; taking an attitude defiant of armed men and wild beasts. His hair had never been cut, and it rolled down in seven great plaits over his shoulders, adding to his fierceness and terror. The Philistines want to conquer him, and therefore they must find out where the secret of his strength lies. There is a woman living in the valley of Sorek by the name of Delilah. They appoint her the agent in the case. The Philistines are secreted in the same building, and then Delilah goes to work and coaxes Samson to tell what is the secret of his strength. “Well,” he says, “if you should take seven green withes, such as they fasten wild beasts with, and put them around me, I should be perfectly powerless.” So she binds him with the seven green withes. Then she claps her hands, and says, “They come—the Philistines!” and he walks out as though there were no impediment. She coaxes him again, and says, “Now tell me the secret of this great strength;” and he replies, “If you should take some ropes that have never been used, and tie me with them, I should be just like other men.” She ties him with the ropes, claps her hands, and shouts, “They come—the Philistines!” He walks out as easily as he did before—not the slightest obstruction. She coaxes him again, and he says, “Now, if you should take these seven long plaits of hair, and by this house-loom weave them into a web, I could not get away.” He was getting dangerously near the truth. So the house-loom is rolled up, and the shuttle flies backward and forward, and the long plaits of hair are woven into a web. Then she claps her hands, and says, “They come—the Philistines!” He walks out as easily as he did before, dragging a part of the loom with him. But after a while she persuades him to tell the whole truth. He says, “If you should take a razor, or shears, and cut off this long hair, I should be powerless in the hands of my enemies.” Samson sleeps, and, that she may not wake him up during the process of shearing, help is called in. You know that the barbers of the East have such a skilful way of manipulating the head, to this very day, that, instead of waking up a sleeping man, they will put a man, wide awake, sound asleep. I hear the blades of the shears grinding against each other, and I see the long locks falling off. The shears, or razor, accomplishes what green withes and new ropes and house-loom could not do. Suddenly she claps her hands, and says, “The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!” He rouses up with a struggle, but his strength is all gone! He is in the hands of his enemies! I hear the groan of the giant as they take his eyes out, and then I see him staggering on in his blindness, feeling his way as he goes on toward Gaza. The prison-door is opened, and the giant is thrust in. He sits down and puts his hands on the mill-crank, which, with exhausting horizontal motion, goes day after day, week after week, month after month—work, work, work! The consternation of the world in captivity, his locks shorn, his eyes punctured, grinding corn in Gaza! Alas! for those fatal shears. They did the work, and they have kept on doing the work. They have not yet finished their mission. Those shears are busy today cutting off not only the locks of Samson, but also of Delilah. It seems to me that it is high time that pulpit and platform and printing-press speak out against the impurities of modern society. Fastidiousness and Prudery say, “Better not speak; you will rouse up adverse criticism; you will make worse what you want to make better; better deal in glittering generalities; the subject is too delicate for polite ears.” But there comes a voice from heaven overpowering the mincing sentimentalities of the day, saying, “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins.” So that, turning away from the advice of men, I take counsel of God, and this day arraign, expose, and denounce the impurities of modern society. The trouble is that when people write or speak upon this theme they are apt to cover it up with the graces of belles-lettres, so that the crime is made attractive instead of repulsive. Lord Byron in “Childe Harold” adorns this crime until it smiles like a May-queen. Michelet, the great French writer, covers it up with passionate rhetoric, until it glows like the rising sun. Before I get through, you will find that I am not making that mistake, for instead of making this crime, so prevalent in modern society, attractive, I shall make it as loathsome as a smallpox hospital. There are today influences abroad which, if unresisted by the pulpit and the printing-press, will turn New York and Brooklyn into cities like Sodom and Gomorrah, fit only for the storm of fire and brimstone that whelmed the cities of the plain. You who are seated in your Christian homes, compassed by moral and religious restraints, do not realize the gulf of iniquity that bounds you on the north and the south and the east and the west; but I shall this day open the door of ghastliness and horror, and compel you to see and compel you to listen until, God helping, you shall be startled and aroused, throwing out one arm for help and the other arm for battle. While I speak, there are tens of thousands of men and women going over the awful plunge of an impure life; and while I cry to God for mercy upon their souls, I call upon you to marshal in the defense of your homes, your church, and your nation. There is a banqueting-hall that you have never heard described. You know all about the feast of Ahasuerus, where a thousand lords sat. You know all about Belshazzar’s carousal, where the blood of the murdered king spirted into the faces of the banqueters. You may know of the scene of riot and wassail when there was set before Æsopus one dish of food that cost four hundred thousand dollars. But I speak today of a different banqueting-hall. Its roof is fretted with fire. Its floor is tessellated with fire. Its chalices are chased with fire. Its song is a song of fire. Its walls are buttresses of fire. It is the banqueting-hall of a libertine’s and adulteress’s perdition. Solomon refers to it when he says, “Her guests are in the depths of hell.” I shall explain to you how so often the shears of destruction come upon the locks of Samson and Delilah. Beginning on the lower round, I have to tell you that pauperism is the cause of a great deal of the prevalent uncleanness. There are many people in our midst who have to choose between the almshouse and crime. There are women who can get neither sewing nor any other kind of work. What are they to do? What shall become of them? Thousands and tens of thousands of them have been fighting the battle for bread five, ten, fifteen years. They sold the piano, they sold the pictures, they sold the library, they sold the carpet, they sold the chairs, they sold the bed, they sold the wardrobe; there is one thing more to sell, and that is their immortal nature. At that crisis infamous solicitation meets them, and they go down. With one awful fling they throw away their needle and their soul. Besides this, there are in this cluster of cities—and when I say in this sermon this cluster of cities, I mean New York, Jersey City, and Brooklyn—there are in this cluster of cities six hundred thousand people who are jammed together in tenement-houses, with no opportunity for seclusion or decency, and do you wonder that so many of them forget the covenant of their God? Forty and fifty families sometimes, literally forty and fifty families, crowded together under one roof. One hundred and seventy thousand families living in twenty-seven thousand houses—this tenement-house outrage more terrible than anything to be found in all Christendom, putting out of sight almost the London stories of St. Giles and Whitechapel. These tenement-houses are the hopper for the mill that is grinding up the bodies and the souls of men, women, and little children. Some time ago a girl of fourteen years came into one of the reform schools in New York. The teacher of the school said, “Poor girl, did you forget your mother, and that it was a sin?” She looked up and said, “No, I didn’t forget my mother. My mother has no clothes, and I have no shoes, and this dress is almost worn out, and the winter’s coming on. I know what it is to make money, sir. Why, I have taken care of myself since I was ten years of age. You think it was a sin, do you?” And the tears rolled down her face, and she did not try to wipe them away. “It was a sin, but I do not ask you to forgive me. Men can’t forgive, but God can. I know, sir, what men are. The rich do wickedness, but nothing is said about them. But I am poor, and God knows that many a time I have gone hungry all day because I didn’t dare to spend a penny or two—all I had left. Oh, sir, I sometimes wish that I could die. I wonder why God don’t kill me.” Alas! for the poor things. Do you wonder that they go down? Moral: do all you can for the poor. Keep them from being crowded off into sin. Do not get the idea often uttered in derision that anybody is weak who yields to such temptations. There are sitting before me today five hundred people in furs and diamonds who, under the same pressure, would have gone overboard! If, man or woman, you have not done as badly as they, it is because you have not been as much tempted. If Delilah has not shorn your locks, it is because she has not had the same chance at you. Again I remark, that the corrupt literature of this day is the cause of much uncleanness. I referred to this in a former sermon, but I reserved to this day some facts which will appall you. You know that there are hundreds of thousands of sheets in the shape of impure novelette literature going abroad, every plot of those novelettes turning on libertinism and full of salacious suggestion. Much of the printing-press of the country reeks with pollution. The child that comes to fifteen or sixteen years of age now in these cities has read more bad books and seen more bad pictures than your grandmother and grandfather read or saw up to the time they put on spectacles. There was one citizen in Brooklyn who made four hundred thousand dollars by publishing corrupt books, and when he was seized by governmental authority there was found thirty thousand dollars’ worth of stock on hand. That man is dead, but his wife has his money, and now moves, I am told, in respectable circles. It must be told that of the four men who originally published all the impure books and newspapers in this country, three of them lived in Brooklyn. Two of them are dead, thank God! I wish they all were. In the city of New York there was one house under the control of a man who was a member of the church, and that house did nothing but make bad books, circulars, and pictures. When the authorities seized upon the place, they found whole tons of stereotyped plates for doing nothing but the printing of bad circulars and books. That man was a member of a church. He was awfully pious! He had on the mantel in his factory a rack containing religious tracts, with the inscription on the outside, “Take one.” I do not know whether to this day he has been excommunicated, for other churches have not the moral courage which the Session of this church had when, last spring, finding a bad man in our membership, they unanimously ejected him, all the sixteen men of the Session having the moral daring to vote “Aye.” God speed the day when it shall be impossible for a man to practice iniquity and yet keep his place in the membership of a Christian church! But to go back to my theme. There was one man in our neighboring city who published and sold to one dealer one hundred and twenty-five thousand unclean books. When the authorities came upon him there were found forty thousand copies yet unsold. Binding these bad books in one of the factories were forty young women. One hundred and ninety thousand impure photographs and engravings have been arrested in their flight of death. Twenty tons of iniquitous literature have been thrown into the flames. But the tide of evil goes on. How many are engaged in it? Some with the title of M. D. at the end of their names, implying that they are public benefactors and friends of humanity. These people despoil the souls of men and women, if not in one way, then in another. They send their circulars and handbills far away. They put their infamous pictures on the back of playing-cards. They cut them into watch-cases. The vendors in this business have the names of all the boarding-schools in the country, male and female; and not only the names of all the schools, but the names of all the students. The catalogues have been found in possession of these vultures, and their circulars and their pictures and their books go through the post-office department to all the young. The base circulars and advertisements are thrown into your doorway. They are flinging across this land the plagues of Egypt, the frogs and the boils and the murrain and the lice, turning the rivers into blood and the heavens into darkness. You, the father and mother, do not know it; but your children come to fifteen or sixteen years of age have seen the pictures and have read the books. There is not a school, not a shop, not a factory, not a home but has been assaulted in some way by this literature. So far from exaggerating the evil, if you could today understand the magnitude of it, it seems to me you would rise up from your seats and shriek out with horror. These villains—be they authors, engravers, publishers, or vendors—ought to be seized of the law, summarily tried, sentenced to the full extent of the statute, and on swiftest express train hurried up to Sing Sing Penitentiary; and no man found in gubernatorial or Presidential chair should ever dare to pardon one of them. This evil does not need the snail-pace of the law; it wants the quick spring of human and divine indignation. Again: Infidelity and skepticism are the two blades of a shears which clip off much of the purity of the land. I do not mean to say that all skeptics are themselves unclean, but I do say that they open one of the widest doors to this iniquity. Purity and the sanctity of the marriage relation have only one foundation, and that is this book which King James got fifty-four ministers to translate, and which Robert Barker first printed in English. You throw away your Bible, and you throw away the mightiest bulwark of chastity and the marriage relation. A man that fights against that book fights in behalf of licentiousness. Infidelity is the mother of Fourierism, Communism, Mormonism, Socialism, Freeloveism, and much of what is falsely called “Woman’s Rights.” I abhor the whole herd of them. There are many rights that belong to women which I hope in some day will be accorded to her; but I tell you, my Christian brethren, this whole subject of “Woman’s Rights” in our day is so mixed up with infidelity and lust that you had better, if you are decent people, come off that platform, and let the maniacs have it all to themselves. We propose to build a Christian platform, on which we shall discuss the rights of both sexes, as God in his word lays down those rights. I charge upon Freeloveism that it has blighted innumerable homes, and that it has sent innumerable souls to ruin. Freeloveism is bestial; it is worse—it is infernal. It has furnished this land with about five hundred divorces annually. In one county in the State of Indiana it furnished eleven divorces in one day before dinner. It has roused up elopements North, South, East, and West. You can hardly take up a paper but you read of an elopement. As far as I can understand the doctrine of Freeloveism, it is this: that every man ought to have somebody else’s wife, and every wife somebody else’s husband! They do not like our Christian organization of society, and I wish they would all elope, the wretches of one sex taking the wretches of the other, and start to-morrow morning for the great Sahara Desert, until the simoom shall sweep seven feet of sand over all of them, and not one passing caravan for the next five hundred years bring back one miserable bone of their carcasses. Freeloveism! It is the double-distilled extract of nux vomica, ratsbane, and adder’s-tongue. Freeloveism has raised in this city of Brooklyn a stench that has gone all over the world, and I think they will have to shut up the windows and gates of heaven to keep out the insufferable malodor. Never, until society goes back to the old Bible, and hears its eulogy of purity and its anathema of uncleanness, never until then will the fatal shears be unriveted. Again: The evil solicitation of the street shears off much of the moral strength. The uncleanness under the gas-light of the street-lamp may disgust you, but it is an appalling fact that night by night there are thousands going down under the process. Solomon a good many years ago gave a picture of Broadway and the Bowery after nine o’clock at night: “She sitteth at the door of her house, on a seat in the high places of the city, to call passengers who go right on their ways: whoso is simple, let him turn in hither; and as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there.” Forty-five hundred of those lost souls trudging the streets in this cluster of cities night by night on their errand of death! Hovering around hotels and depots! Flaunting their insignia of iniquity! Laughing the fiend’s laugh! Rolling up and down in surges of death! Forty-five hundred taking down their victims! New York pre-eminent above all the cities in this land for this infamy! One of the superintendents of police declared there were enough houses of iniquity in New York to make a line three miles long, and that they would crowd Broadway from the Battery to Houston street, in solid blocks, on each side; some of them having all the repulsions of Water street and of the sailors’ boarding-house, but some having all the glitter of the Fifth avenue parlor. Upholstery outflaming the setting sun; mirrors winged with cherubim; fountains trickling mid-room into aquariums afloat with bright fins; pictures that rival the Louvre and Luxembourg; carpets embracing the feet with their luxuriance; Chickering grand pouring out upon the night air snatches of opera to charm passers-by. But the dead are there; and if the enchanter’s wand could only be turned backward, or inverted, the upholstery would turn into a shroud, and the bright fountain into waters ropy and scummed, and the chandelier into the fretted roof of a sepulchre, and the song into a dirge, and the gay denizens of the place into the wan faces of the damned. These places are all the time being filled up by the tides that are coming in from the villages and the cities around us—aye, from the beautiful houses of this city, pouring in and falling down into an aggregation of misery and suffering inexpressible. Nine-tenths of the inmates are the victims of man’s profligacy, and are now taking their vengeance on society; reaching up from the depths of their souls’ suicide, clutching for immortal souls, dragging them down to their abysm; and every time they clutch with skeleton fingers, hearts are breaking, and homes are falling, and desolations are accumulating. Do you know there are men who do nothing else but try to draw souls into this whirlpool? The first time I ever saw the city—it was the city of Philadelphia—I was a mere lad. I stopped at a hotel, and I remember in the even-tide one of these men plied me with his infernal art. He saw I was green. He wanted to show me the sights of the town. He painted the path of sin until it looked like emerald; but I was afraid of him. I shrank back from the basilisk—I made up my mind he was a basilisk. I remember how he wheeled his chair round in front of me, and, with a concentred and diabolical effort, attempted to destroy my soul; but there were good angels in the air that night. It was no good resolution on my part, but it was the all-encompassing grace of a good God that delivered me. Beware! beware! oh, young man. “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is death.” If all the victims of this temptation, in all lands and ages, could be gathered together, they would make a host vaster than that which Xerxes led across the Hellespont, than that which Napoleon marshaled at Austerlitz, than that which Wellington led into Waterloo; and if they could be stretched out in single file across this continent, I think the vanguard of the host would stand on the beach of the Pacific, while yet the rear-guard stood on the beach of the Atlantic. But I must close the black lids of this fearful subject. It seems as if for the last hour I had been walking through the leprous lazaretto, groans on every side, and the air heavy with moral contagion. I am preaching this sermon, not because I expect to reclaim any one that has gone astray in this fearful path, but because I want to utter a warning for those who still maintain their integrity. The cases of reclamation are so few, probably you do not know one of them. I have seen a good many start out on that road. How many have I seen come back? Not one that I now think of. It seems as if the spell of death is on them, and no human voice nor the voice of God can break the spell. Their feet are hoppled. Their wrists are handcuffed. They have around them a girdle of reptiles, bunched at the waist, fastening them to an iron doom; and every time they breathe, the forked tongues strike them, and the victims strain to break away, until the tendons snap, and the blood exudes; and in the contortions of the eternally destroyed they cry out, “Take me back to my father’s house! Where is mother? Take me home! Take me home!” But no, I do not believe there is one out of five thousand that ever comes back. It seems as if the infatuation is fatal. One went forth from a bright Christian home. There was no reason why she should forsake it; but induced by unclean novelette literature she started off, and sat down at the banquet of devils. Every few weeks she would come back to her father’s house, and hang up her hat and shawl in the old place, as though she expected to stay; but in a few hours, as if hounded by an inexorable fate, she would take down her hat and the shawl and start out. When they called her back she slammed the door in their faces, and cried, “O mother! it’s too late!” Do I stand before a man today the locks of whose strength are being toyed with? Let me beg you to escape, lest the shears of destruction take your moral and spiritual integrity. Do you not see your sandals beginning to curl on that red-hot path? This day, in the name of Almighty God, I tear off the beautifying veil and the embroidered mantle of this old hag of iniquity, and I show you the ulcers, and the bloody ichor, and the cancered lip, and the eaten-up nostril, and the parting joints, and the macerated limbs, and the wriggling putrefaction, and I cry out, “Oh, horror of horrors!” May the lightnings of an incensed God strike every house of shame, and consume all the tons of impure literature, and write on the heavens, in capitals of fire a mile high, “All whoremongers and adulterers and sorcerers shall Have their place in the lake that burneth with fire and brimestone, which is the second death.” May God forbid that any of you who have been invited into the ways of pleasantness and the paths of peace should turn your back on your safety and happiness, and go to sit down in a dungeon, where the eternally destroyed forever grind in the mills of despair, their locks shorn, and their eyes out. Samson ungianted. ======================================================================== CHAPTER 84: 082. AMUSEMENTS ======================================================================== Amusements Judges 16:25 : “And it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they said: ‘Call for Samson, that he may make us sport.’ And they called for Samson out of the prison-house; and he made them sport.” There were three thousand people assembled in the temple of Dagon. They had come to make sport of eyeless Samson. They were all ready for the entertainment. They began to clap and pound, impatient for the amusement to begin, and they cried: “Fetch him out! Fetch him out!” Yonder I see the blind old giant coming, led by the hand of a child into the very midst of the temple. At his first appearance there goes up a shout of laughter and derision. The blind old giant pretends he is tired and wants to rest himself against the pillars of the house, so he says to the lad who leads him: “Bring me where the main pillars are.” The lad does so. Then the strong man puts his hands on one of the pillars, and, with the mightiest push that mortal ever made, throws himself forward until the whole house comes down in thunderous crash, grinding the audience like grapes in a wine-press. “And so it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they said, ‘Call for Samson, that he may make us sport.’ And they called for Samson out of the prison-house; and he made them sport.” In other words, there are amusements that are destructive and bring down disaster and death upon the heads of those who practise them. While they laugh and cheer, they die. The three thousand who perished that day in Gaza are nothing compared with the tens of thousands who have been destroyed, body, mind and soul by bad amusements and by good amusements carried to excess. In my sermons you must have discovered that I have no sympathy with ecclesiastical strait-jackets, or with that wholesale denunciation of amusements in which many indulge. I believe the Church of God has made a tremendous mistake in trying to suppress the sportfulness of youth and drive out from men their love of amusement. If God ever implanted anything in us, he implanted this desire. But instead of providing for this demand of our nature, the Church of God has for the main part ignored it. As in a riot the mayor plants a battery at the end of the street and has it fired off, so that everything is cut down that happens to stand in the range, the good as well as the bad; so there are men in the church who plant their batteries of condemnation and fire away indiscriminately. Everything is condemned. They talk as if they would like to have our youth dress in blue uniforms, like the children of an orphan asylum, and march down the path of life to the tune of the “Dead March” in Saul. They hate a blue sash or a rosebud in the hair, or a tasseled gaiter, and think a man almost ready for the lunatic asylum who utters a conundrum. Young Men’s Christian Associations of the country are doing a glorious work. They have fine reading-rooms, and all the influences are of the best kind; and they are now adding gymnasiums and bowling-alleys, where, without any evil surroundings, our young men may get physical as well as spiritual improvement. We are dwindling away to a narrow-chested, weak-armed, feeble-voiced race, when God calls us to a work in which he wants physical as well as spiritual athletes. I would to God that the time might soon come when in all our colleges and theological seminaries, as at Princeton, gymnasiums shall be established. We spend seven years of hard study in preparation for the ministry, and come out with bronchitis and dyspepsia and liver complaint, and then crawl up into the pulpit and the people say: “Don’t he look heavenly!” because he looks sickly. Let the Church of God direct, rather than attempt to suppress, the desire for amusement. The best men that the world ever knew have had their sports. William Wilberforce trundled hoop with his children. Martin Luther helped dress the Christmas tree. Ministers have pitched quoits, philanthropists have gone a-skating, prime ministers have played ball. Our communities are filled with men and women who have in their souls unmeasured resources for sportfulness and frolic. Show me a man who never lights up with sportfulness and has no sympathy with the recreations of others, and I will show you a man who is a stumbling-block. Such men are caricatures of religion. They lead young people to think that a man is good in proportion as he groans and frowns and looks sallow; and that the height of a man’s Christian stature is in proportion to the length of his face. I would trade off five hundred such men for one bright-faced, radiant Christian, on whose face are the words: “Rejoice evermore!” Every day by his cheerful face he preaches fifty sermons. I will go further and say that I have no confidence in a man who makes a religion of his gloomy looks. That kind of a man always turns out badly. I would not want him for the treasurer of an orphan asylum. The orphans would suffer. Among forty people whom I received into the church at one communion, there was only one applicant of whose piety I was suspicious. He had the longest story to tell; had seen the most visions, and gave an experience so wonderful that all the other applicants were discouraged. I was not surprised, the year after, to learn that he had run off with the funds of the bank with which he was connected. Who is this black angel that you call religion—wings black, feet black, feathers black? Our religion is a bright angel—feet bright, eyes bright, wings bright—taking her place in the soul. She pulls a rope that reaches to the skies and sets all the bells of heaven a-chiming. There are some persons who, when talking to a minister, always feel it appropriate to look lugubrious. Go forth, O people, to your lawful amusements. God means you to be happy. But, when there are so many sources of innocent pleasure, why tamper with anything that is dangerous and polluting? Why stop our ears to a heaven full of songsters to listen to the hiss of a dragon? Why turn back from the mountain-side all a-bloom with wild flowers and a-dash with the nimble torrents, and with blistered feet attempt to climb the hot sides of Cotopaxi. Now, all opera-houses, theatres, bowling-alleys, skating rinks and all kinds of amusement, good and bad, I put on trial and judge of them by certain cardinal principles. First, you may judge of any amusement by its healthful result or by its baneful reaction. There are people who seem made up of hard facts. They are a combination of multiplication tables and statistics. If you show them an exquisite picture they will begin to discuss the pigments involved in the coloring; if you show them a beautiful rose, they will submit it to a botanical analysis, which is only the post-mortem examination of a flower. They never do anything more than feebly smile. There are no great tides of feeling surging up from the depth of their soul in billow after billow of reverberating laughter. They seem as if nature had built them by contract and made a bungling job out of it. But, blessed be God, there are people in the world who have bright faces and whose life is a song, an anthem, a pæan of victory. Even their troubles are like the vines that crawl up the side of a great tower, on the top of which the sunlight sits and the soft airs of summer hold perpetual carnival. They are the people you like to have come to your house; they are the people I like to have come to my house. Now, it is these exhilarant and sympathetic and warm-hearted people that are most tempted to pernicious amusements. In proportion as a ship is swift, it wants a strong helmsman; in proportion as a horse is spirited, it wants a strong driver; and these people of exuberant nature will do well to look at the reaction of all their amusements. If an amusement sends you home at night nervous so you cannot sleep, and you rise in the morning, not because you are slept out, but because your duty drags you from your slumbers—you have been where you ought not to have been. There are amusements that send a man next day to his work bloodshot, yawning, stupid, nauseated; and that proves that they are wrong kinds of amusements. There are entertainments that give a man disgust with the drudgery of life: with tools because they are not swords, with working aprons because they are not robes, with cattle because they are not infuriated bulls of the arena. If any amusement sends you home longing for a life of romance and thrilling adventure, love that takes poison and shoots itself, moonlight adventures and hairbreadth escapes, you may depend upon it that you are the sacrificed victim of unsanctified pleasure. Our recreations are intended to build us up, and if they pull us down as to our moral or as to our physical strength, you may come to the conclusion that they are pernicious. Still further, those amusements are wrong which lead into expenditure beyond your means. Money spent in recreation is not thrown away. It is all folly for us to come from a place of amusement feeling that we have wasted our money and time. You may by it have made an investment worth more than the transaction that yielded you thousands of dollars. But how many properties have been riddled by costly amusements? The table has been robbed to pay the club dues. The champagne has cheated the children’s wardrobe. The carousing party has burned up the boy’s primer. The table-cloth of the corner saloon is in debt to the wife’s faded dress. Excursions that in a day make a tour around a whole month’s wages, ladies whose lifetime business it is to “go shopping,” have their counterpart in uneducated children, bankruptcies that shock the money market and appal the church, and that send drunkenness staggering across the richly figured carpet of the mansion and dashing into the mirror, and drowning out the carol of music with the whooping of bloated sons come home to break their old mother’s heart. When men go into amusements that they cannot afford, they first borrow what they cannot earn, and then they steal what they cannot borrow. First they go into embarrassment and then into theft; and when a man gets as far on as that he does not stop short of the penitentiary. There is not a prison in the land where there are not victims of unsanctified amusements. How often I have had parents come to me and ask me to go and beg their boy off from the consequence of crimes that he had committed against his employer—the taking of funds out of the employer’s till, or the falsification of the accounts! Why, he had salary enough to pay all lawful expenditure, but not enough salary to meet his sinful amusements. And again and again I have gone and implored for the young man—sometimes, alas! the petition unavailing. How brightly the path of unrestrained amusement opens! The young man says: “Now I am off for a good time. Never mind economy; I’ll get money somehow. What a fine road! What a beautiful day for a ride! Crack the whip, and over the turnpike! Come, boys, fill high your glasses! Drink! Long life, health, plenty of rides just like this!” Hardworking men hear the clatter of the hoofs and look up and say: “Why, I wonder where those fellows get their money from. We have to toil and drudge; they do nothing.” To these gay men life is a thrill and an excitement. They stare at other people and in turn are stared at. The watch chain jingles. The cup foams. The cheeks flush, the eyes flash. The midnight hears their guffaw. They swagger. They jostle decent men off the sidewalk. They take the name of God in vain. They parody the hymn they learned at their mother’s knee; and to all pictures of coming disaster they cry out: “Who cares!” and to the counsel of some Christian friend: “Who are you?” Passing along the street some night you hear a shriek in a grogshop, the rattle of the watchman’s club, the rush of the police. What is the matter now? Oh, this reckless young man has been killed in a grogshop fight. Carry him home to his father’s house. Parents will come down and wash his wounds and close his eyes in death. They forgive him all he ever did, though he cannot in his silence ask it. The prodigal has got home at last. Mother will go to her little garden and get the sweetest flowers and twist them into a chaplet for the silent heart of the wayward boy and push back from the bloated brow the long locks that were once her pride. And the air will be rent with the father’s cry: “O my son, my son, my poor son; would God I had died for thee, O my son, my son!” You may judge of amusements by their effect upon physical health. The need of many good people is physical recuperation. There are Christian men who write hard things against their immortal souls, when there is nothing the matter with them but an incompetent liver. There are Christian people who seem to think that it is a good sign to be poorly, and because Richard Baxter and Robert Hall were invalids they think that by the same sickness they may come to the same grandeur of character. I want to tell Christian people that God will hold you responsible for your invalidism if it is your own fault, and when, through right exercise and prudence, you might be well and athletic. The effect of the body upon the soul you acknowledge. Put a man of mild disposition upon the animal diet on which the Indian lives, and in a little while his blood will change its chemical proportions. It will become like unto the blood of the lion or the tiger or the bear, while his disposition will change and become fierce, cruel, and unrelenting. The body has a powerful effect upon the soul. There are people whose ideas of heaven are all shut out with clouds of tobacco smoke. There are people who dare to shatter the physical vase in which God put the jewel of eternity. There are men with great hearts and intellects in bodies worn out by their own neglects. Magnificent machinery capable of propelling a great Campania across the Atlantic, yet fastened in a rickety North River propeller. Physical development which merely shows itself in a fabulous lifting, or in perilous rope-walking, or in pugilistic encounter, excites only our contempt; but we confess to great admiration for the man who has a great soul in an athletic body; every nerve, muscle and bone of which is consecrated to right uses. Oh, it seems to me outrageous that men, through neglect, should allow their physical health to go down beyond repair, spending the rest of their life not in some great enterprise for God and the world, but in studying what is the best thing to take for dyspepsia. A ship which ought with all sails set and every man at his post to be carrying a rich cargo for eternity, employing all its men in stopping up leakages! When you may through some of the popular and healthful recreations of our time work off your spleen and your querulousness and one-half of your physical and mental ailments, do not turn your back from such a grand medicament. Again, judge of the places of amusement by the companionship into which they introduce you. If you belong to an organization where you have to associate with the intemperate, with the unclean, with the abandoned, however well they may be dressed, in the name of God quit it. They will despoil your nature. They will undermine your moral character. They will drop you when you are destroyed. They will not give one cent to support your children when you are dead. They will weep not one tear at your burial. They will chuckle over your damnation. But the day comes when the men who have exerted evil influence upon their fellows will be brought to judgment. Scene: the last day. Stage: the rocking earth. Enter dukes, lords, kings, beggars, clowns. No sword. No tinsel. No crown. For footlights, the kindling flames of a world. For orchestra, the trumpets that wake the dead. For gallery, the clouds filled with angel spectators. For applause, the clapping floods of the sea. For curtains, the heavens rolled together as a scroll. For tragedy, the doom of the destroyed. For farce, the effort to serve the world and God at the same time. For the last scene of the fifth act, the tramp of nations across the stage—some to the right, others to the left. Again, any amusement that gives you a distaste for domestic life is bad. How many bright domestic circles have been broken up by sinful amusements! The father went off, the mother went off, the child went off. There are all around us the fragments of scattered households. Oh! if you have wandered away, I would like to charm you back by the sound of that one word, “Home.” Do you not know that you have but little more time to give to domestic welfare? Do you not see, father, that your children are soon to go out into the world, and all the influence for good you are to have over them you must have now? Death will break in on your conjugal relations, and, alas! if you have to stand over the grave of one who perished for your neglect. I saw a wayward husband standing at the death-bed of his Christian wife, and I saw her point to a ring on her finger and heard her say to her husband, “Do you see that ring?” He replied, “Yes, I see it.” “Well,” said she, “do you remember who put it there?” “Yes,” said he, “I put it there.” And all the past seemed to rush upon him. By the memory of that day, when in the presence of men and angels, you promised to be faithful in joy and sorrow and in sickness and in health; by the memory of those pleasant hours when you sat together in your new house talking of a bright future; by the cradle and the anxious hour when one life was spared and another given; by that sick bed, when the little one lifted up the hands and called for help and you knew he must die, and he put one arm around each of your necks and brought you very near together in that dying kiss; by the little grave in the cemetery that you never think of without a rush of tears; by the family Bible, where, between the leaves of its stories of heavenly love, is the brief but expressive record of births and deaths; by the neglects of the past and by the agonies of the future; by a Judgment Day when husbands and wives, parents and children, in immortal groups will stand to be caught up in shining array or to shrink down into darkness—by all that, I beg you to give to home your best affections. I look in your eyes today, and I ask you the question that Gehazi asked of the Shunammite: “Is it well with thee? Is it well with thy husband? Is it well with thy child?” God grant that it may be everlastingly well! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 85: 083. MIGHTIER DEAD THAN ALIVE ======================================================================== Mightier Dead Than Alive Judges 16:30 : “So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” Samson in the text was deified and became the Hercules of Greece. He was a giant warrior, born to be a leader, and Paul applauds him as a man who “through faith subdued kingdoms.” He was a friend of God and an enemy of unrighteousness. But the most memorable scene in his life was the death-scene. The Philistines, his enemies, gathered round him in a great building to mock him. With supernatural strength he laid hold of the pillars and flung everything into ruin, destroying the lives of the three thousand scoffers, among them the lords of Philistia. He had slain many of the enemies of God during his life; but my text says his last achievement was the mightiest. “So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” It is sometimes the case that after a most industrious, useful, and eminent life, the last hours are more potent than the long years that preceded. In the overshadowing event of this day we find illustrations of my text. President Garfield, as many orators will say, was all his life the enemy of sin, the enemy of sectionalism, the enemy of everything small-hearted; impure and debasing, and he made many a crushing blow against those moral and political Philistines, but in his death he made mightier conquest. The eleven weeks of dying have made more illustrious record than the fifty years of living. “So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” As a matter of inspiration and comfort, I propose to show you that President Garfield’s expiration is a mightier good than a prolonged lifetime possibly could be. Mind you, there was no time at which his deathbed could have been so emphatic. If he had died a few years before, his departure would not have been so conspicuous. If he had died one month before, his administration would not have been fairly launched. If he had died six months later, his advanced policy of reform would have cut the friendship of a great multitude, and if he had died years after, he would! have been out of office and in the decline of life. But he died at the time when all parties had turned to him with unparalleled expectation. There has not been a time in all the fifty years of his past when his deathbed could have been so effective; and in the next fifty years there could not have been a time when his deathbed would have been so overwhelmingly impressive. “So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” First, our President’s death, more than his life, eulogizes the Christian religion. We all talk about the hope of the Christian and the courage of the Christian and the patience of the Christian. Put all the sermons on these subjects for the last twenty years together, and they would not make such an impression as the magnificent demeanor of this dying Chief Magistrate. He was no more afraid to die than you are to go home this morning. Without one word of complaint he endures an anguish that his autopsy alone could reveal to the astonished world. For eighty days in inquisition of pain, yet often smiling, often facetious, always calm, giving military salute to a soldier who happened to look in at the window, talking with Cabinet officers about the affairs of state, reading the public bulletins in regard to his condition, watching his own pulse; and so undisturbed of soul that I warrant you if it had not been for his dependent family and the nation, whom he wanted to serve, he would have been glad to depart any time right up to the God who made him, and the Christ who redeemed him, and the Holy Ghost who comforted him. Oh, sirs! all he ever did in confirmation of religion in days of health was nothing compared with what he did for it in this last crisis. James A. Garfield learned his religion from his mother in the days when she was trying in widowhood and poverty to bring up her boys aright; from that same old mother that sat with her Bible in her lap in her bedroom last Tuesday morning, when the dreadful news came that her son was dead. James A. Garfield had no new religion to experiment with in his last hours. It was the same Gospel into the faith of which he was baptized, when in early manhood he was immersed in the river in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. That religion had stood the test through all the buffetings and persecutions, through the hard work of life, and did not forsake him in the solemn close. There have been thousands of deathbeds as calm and beautiful as this, but they were not so conspicuous. This electrifies Christendom. This encourages all the pain-struck in hospitals, and scattered all up and down the world, to suffer patiently. The consumptive, the cancered, and the palsied, and the fevered, and the dying of all nations lift their heads from their hot pillows, and bless this heroic, this triumphant, this illustrious sufferer. The religion that upheld him under surgeon’s knife, and amid the appalling days and nights at Long Branch and at Washington, is a good religion to have. Show us in all the ages among the enemies of Christianity a deathbed that will compare with this radiant sunset! Again, our President’s death will do more for the consummation of right feeling between North and South than all his administration of four years could have accomplished. This is not “shaking hands across the bloody chasm,” according to the rhetoric of campaign documents. This is shaking hands across the palpitating heart that was large enough to take in both sections. This expiring man took the hand of the North and the hand of the South and joined them together, and practically said, with a dying pathos that can never be forgotten: “Be brothers!” Where now are the flags at half mast? At New Orleans and Boston, Chicago and Charleston. There is absolutely today no Republican party and no Democratic party. A new party has swallowed up all—a party of national sympathy. The bulletins on the south side of Mason and Dixon’s line have been as carefully watched as on the north side. We have been trying to arbitrate old difficulties and settle old grudges, yet the old quarrel has ever and anon broken out in a new place. But this requiem which shakes the land forever drowns out all sectional discords. After all that has been done and said during the last eleven weeks the people of the South will be welcome in all our homes as we shall be welcome in theirs. He who tries hereafter to kindle the old fires of hatred will find little fuel and no sulphurous match. Alabama and Massachusetts, stand up and be married! South Carolina and New York, join hands in betrothal! Georgia and Ohio, I pronounce you one! Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder. The seal is set by the cold, emaciated hand of our dead President. No living man could have accomplished it. More of the sectional prejudices, and the misinterpretations, and the bitternesses of old war times have perished in the last eleven weeks than in all the seventeen years since the war ended; and so the dead which Garfield slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his whole life. Again, President Garfield’s sickness and death have educated the world, as all his life and the life of a thousand men beside could not have educated it in the wonders of the human body. For the last two months all Christendom has been studying anatomy and physiology. Never since the world stood has there been so much known about respiration, about pulsation, about temperature, about gunshot wounds, about febrile rise, about digestion, about convalescence. The vast majority of the race have hitherto wandered about stupidly ignorant of this masterpiece of God, the human mechanism. The last eleven weeks have educated ten thousand nurses for the sick. The invalids of all lands for this experience will have better attendance, more kindness, more opportunity for restoration. Never has there been such examination of dictionaries to find the meaning of a medical phrase. One new word of the morning bulletins has set the leaves of all the lexicons in America a-flutter. Garfield, during his life, had often talked on these themes in college class-rooms and on lecture platforms, and he was a scientist in these things, but he did more for the slaying of popular ignorance on this subject in his death than he did in all his life. Since the time when David the Psalmist, probably returned from an Oriental dissecting-room, wrote the autopsy, “We are fearfully and wonderfully made,” and Solomon, who was wise in physiology as well as in everything else, called the spinal marrow the silver cord (or “ever the silver cord be loosed”), and called the head the “golden bowl,” because the skull is round like a bowl, and the membrane which contains the brain is yellow like gold (or “the golden bowl be broken”); and called the veins of the human body a pitcher, because they carry the crimson liquid from the heart, the fountain, all through all the organs of the body (or “the pitcher be broken at the fountain”); and called the lungs a wheel, because they draw to themselves and let go away like a well-bucket, and called the stomach the cistern (the “wheel broken at the cistern”) and showed that he knew what Harvey thought he was discovering thousands of years after concerning the circulation of the blood—I say since those obscure times down to these days, when all physicians are busy instructing the people, and all medical colleges, and all high schools, are scattering physiological and anatomical information, there has never been so much wisdom on these subjects as today; and the most potent of all the teachers has been the sick and dying bed of our President, mightier in his death than in his life. Again, these last scenes must impress the world, as no preachment ever did, that when our time comes to go, the most energetic and skilful physicians cannot hinder the event. Was there ever so much done to save a man’s life as the life of President Garfield? Is the season too hot, there is manufactured for his sick room in August an October day. Is he to be transported to the seaside? all the wheels and all the steam whistles and all the voices along the line of progress are hushed for two hundred miles, and a new section of railroad is built to let him pass over. Added to the medical skill of the Capital are the skill of Philadelphia and New York. All the medical ingenuity of the last three hundred years flashes its electric light upon the wound. Paris and London and Edinburgh applaud the treatment. He had all the courage that comes from the hand of a wife who was sure he would get well. He had physicians who did not stand with cold, scientific calculation, studying the case; but splendid men whose hearts grew strong or faint as the patient’s pulse was strong or faint, and they were as great nurses as they were great surgeons. But the doctors could not keep him. His wife could not keep him. All the arms of five children hung around his neck could not keep him. His great spirit pushes them all back from the gates of life, and soars away into the infinities. My Lord and My God! solemnize us with this consideration. My hearer, if you and I were sick I am sure we would have good medical attendance and good nursing, plenty of watchers and plenty of attendants. The world is naturally very kind to the sick. We who have good homes would have sympathetic though trembling hands to hold ours in the last exigency. We all have those who love us as we love them, but when the time fixed by the merciful God arrives we must be off. There is no need of our getting nervous about it or fretting about it. All we have to do is to keep our hearts right with God and do our best, and then be as unfluttered as was our dying President. After the mightiest surgery of America and the world had to surrender on that Monday night at the stroke of the Death Angel, surely we cannot resist it! In the emphasizing of all these great truths, James A. Garfield is mightier lying on his catafalque at Cleveland than in the White House receiving the honors of foreign embassage. Who knows but that his death will save millions of people for this world and the next? Fifty millions of people—nay, North and South America, and Europe, and parts of Asia—called to thoughts of mortality and the great future! Who knows but it may awaken whole nations from the death of sin to the life of the Gospel? When last week I saw one line of mourning from Detroit, Michigan, to Brooklyn, I wondered if God would not use this great grief for the purification of the nation. O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the nation! Enough the Sabbath breakings, and the impurities, and the blasphemy, and the official corruption in this country! By the result of this terrific event let these dogs of hell be driven back to their fiery kennels. Against all these evils the Presidential giant is mightier dead than when alive. But while the nation has this comfort there are three words that will leap to our lips, and they have been reiterated oftener than any other words for the past few days. Poor Mrs. Garfield! More pathetic words I never read than these in the Friday newspapers which said that with two of her children she had gone over to the White House to get the property of her family and have it sent to her home in Ohio. Can you imagine anything more full of torture than to walk through the room filled with associations of her husband’s kindness, of her husband’s anxieties, and of her husband’s long-continued physical anguish? She had with her womanly arms fought by his side all the way up the steep of life. She had helped him in their economies when they were very poor; with her own needle clothing their family, with her own hands making him bread. When the world frowned upon him in the days of scandalous assault she never forsook his side. They had together won the battle, and had seated themselves at the very top to enjoy the victory. Then the blow came. What a reversal of fortune! From what midnoon to what midnight! It is said that this will kill her. I do not believe it. The God who has helped her thus far will help her all the way through. When the broken circle gathers in the future days at the old home at Mentor, the mighty God who protected James A. Garfield at Chickamauga and in the fiery hell of many battles will protect his wife, his children, and his old mother. Upon all the seven broken hearts let the comfort descend! What consolations they have! It was a great thing to have had such a son! It was a great thing to have been the wife of such a man! It was a great thing to have been the children of such a father! While theirs and ours is the grief, I am glad on his account that he has gone. He had suffered enough. Enough the cut of the lancets, and the thrusts of the catheter, and the pangs of head and side and feet and back! Ascend, oh, disenthralled spirit, and take thy place with those who came out of great tribulation, and had their robes made white in the blood of the Lamb! This Samson of intellectual strength, this giant of moral power, had—like the one in the text—in other days slain the lion of wrathful opposition, and had carried off the gates of wrong from the rusted hinges. But the peroration of his life is stronger than any passage which went before. The dead which this giant slew in his death were more than those whom he slew in his life. May we all learn the practical lessons with which our subject is filled! Behold the contrast between Friday, the fourth of March, 1881, and Friday, the twenty-third of September, 1881! On the former day Washington was ablaze with banners. Each State of the Union had its triumphal arch. Great men of this country and vast populations filled the streets! Procession such as had never moved from the White House and the Capitol! Military display that would have confounded hostile nations. The city shaken with cannonading by day, and the night on fire with pyrotechnics! Thousands of all political parties who congratulated the President pronounced that fourth of March the brightest day that had ever shone on American institutions. That night, or soon after, in some room of the Presidential mansion, I warrant you, there assembled husband and wife and five children, and the aged mother, taking a long breath after the excitement of the inauguration. The highest point of honor that mortal man can reach had been won. But behold Friday, September 23d, the dead President in the Rotunda, his bereaved wife at a friend’s house; a dangerously sick child four hundred miles away at Williamstown, Mass.; military on guard around the casket; hundreds of thousands of people gazing on the face so emaciated that none would know it; the poor black woman falling on her knees beside the coffin, expressing the anguish of speechless multitudes when she said: “Oh, dear! how he must have suffered!” Friday, fourth of March, 1881! Friday, September 23, 1881! To the words of comfort I have uttered today I add this lesson, which seems to sound out from the tramp of pall-bearers and from the rolling of the draped rail-train moving westward, and from the open grave now waiting to receive our dead President: “Put not your trust in princes nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.” Fare thee well, departed chieftain! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 86: 084. RUTH ======================================================================== Ruth ======================================================================== CHAPTER 87: 085. THE CHOICE OF A HUSBAND ======================================================================== The Choice of a Husband Ruth 1:9 : “The Lord grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband.” This was the prayer of pious Naomi for Ruth and Orpah, and is an appropriate prayer now in behalf of unmarried womanhood. Naomi, the good old soul, knew that the devil would take their cases in hand if God did not, so she prays: “The Lord grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband.” In this series of sermons on the marriage relation I last Sabbath gave prayerful and Christian advice to men in regard to the selection of a wife, and today I give the same prayerful and Christian advice to women in regard to the selection of a husband, but in all these sermons saying much that I hope will be appropriate for all ages and all classes. I applaud the celibacy of a multitude of women who, rather than make unfit selection, have made none at all. It has not been a lack of opportunity for marital contract on their part, but their own culture and refinement, and their exalted idea as to what a husband ought to be, have caused their disinclination. They have seen so many women marry imbeciles or ruffians or incipient sots or lifetime incapables or magnificent nothings or men who before marriage were angelic and afterward diabolic that they have been alarmed and stood back. They saw so many boats go into the maelstrom that they steered into other waters. Better for a woman to live alone, though she live a thousand years, than to be allied to one of these masculine failures with which society is surfeited. The patron saint of almost every family circle is some such unmarried woman, and among all the families of cousins she moves around, and her coming in each house is the morning, and her going away is the night. In my large circle of kindred, perhaps twenty families in all, it was an Aunt Phœbe. Paul gave a letter of introduction to one whom he calls “Phœbe, our sister,” as she went up from Cenchrea to Rome, commending her for her kindness and Christian service, and imploring for her all courtesies. I think Aunt Phœbe was named after her. Was there a sickness in any of the households, she was there ready to sit up and count out the drops of medicine. Was there a marriage, she helped deck the bride for the altar. Was there a new soul incarnated, she was there to rejoice at the nativity. Was there a sore bereavement, she was there to console. The children rushed out at her first appearance, crying, “Here comes Aunt Phœbe,” and but for parental interference they would have pulled her down with their caresses—for she was not very strong, and many severe illnesses had given her enough glimpses of the next world to make her heavenly-minded. Her table was loaded up with Baxter’s Saints’ Rest,Doddridge’s Rise and Progress,and Jay’s Morning and Evening Exercises,and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,and like books, which) have fitted out whole generations for the heaven upon which they have already entered. If you would know how her presence would soothe an anxiety or lift a burden or cheer a sorrow or leave a blessing on every room in the house, ask any of the Talmages. She had tarried at her early home, taking care of an invalid father, until the bloom of life had somewhat faded; but she could interest the young folks with some three or four tender passages in her own history, so that we all knew that it was not through lack of opportunity that she was not the queen of one household, instead of being a benediction on a whole circle of households. At about seventy years of age she made her last visit to my house, and when she sat in my Philadelphia church I was more embarrassed at her presence than by all the audience, because I felt that in religion I had got no further than the A B C, while she had learned the whole alphabet, and for many years had finished the Y and Z. When she went out of this life into the next, what a shout there must have been in heaven, from the front door clear up to the back seat in the highest gallery! I saw the other day in the village cemetery of Somerville, N. J., her restingplace, the tombstone having on it the words which thirty years ago she told me she would like to have inscribed there, namely: “The Morning Cometh.” Had she a mission in the world? Certainly. As much as Caroline Herschel, first amanuensis for her illustrious brother, and then his assistant in astronomical calculations, and then discovering worlds for herself, dying at ninety-eight years of age, still busy with the stars till she sped beyond them; as much as had Florence Nightingale, the nurse of the Crimea; or Grace Darling, the oarswoman of the Long Stone Lighthouse; or Mary Lyon, the teacher of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary; or Hannah More, the Christian authoress of England; or Dorothea Dix, the angel of mercy for the insane; or Anna Etheridge, among the wounded of Blackburn’s Fort; or Margaret Breckenridge, at Vicksburg; or Mary Shelton, distributing roses and grapes and cologne in Western hospital; or thousands of other glorious women like them, who never took the marriage sacrament. Appreciate all this, my sister, and it will make you deliberate before you rush out of the single state into another, unless you are sure of betterment. Deliberate and pray. Pray and deliberate. As I showed you in my former sermon, a man ought to supplicate Divine guidance in such a crisis; how much more important that you solicit it! It is easier for a man to find an appropriate wife than for a woman to find a good husband. This is a matter of arithmetic, as I showed in the former discourse. Statistics show that in Massachusetts and New York States women have a majority of hundreds of thousands. Why this is we leave others to surmise. It would seem that woman is a favorite with the Lord, and that therefore he has made more of that kind. From the order of the creation in paradise it is evident that woman is an improved edition of man. But whatever be the reason for it, the fact is certain that she who selects a husband has a smaller number of people to select from than he who selects a wife. Therefore a woman ought to be especially careful in her choice of lifetime companionship. She cannot afford to make a mistake. If a man err in his selection he can spend his evenings at the club, and dull his sensibilities by tobacco smoke; but scarcely any woman has a club-room for refuge, and would find it difficult to habituate herself to cigars. If a woman make a bad job of marital selection, the probability is that nothing but a funeral can relieve it. Divorce cases in court may interest the public, but the love-letters of a married couple are poor reading, except for those who write or receive them. Pray God that you be delivered from irrevocable mistake! Avoid affiance with a despiser of the Christian religion, whatever else he may have or may not have. I do not say he must needs be a religious man, for Paul says the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife; but marriage with a man who hates the Christian religion will insure you a life of wretchedness. He will caricature your habit of kneeling in prayer. He will speak depreciatingly of Christ. He will wound all the most sacred feelings of your soul. He will put your home under the anathema of the Lord God Almighty. In addition to the anguish with which he will fill your life, there is great danger that he will despoil your hope of heaven, and make your marriage relation an infinite and eternal disaster. If you have made such engagement, your first duty is to break it. My word may come just in time to save your soul. Further, do not unite in marriage with a man of bad habits in the idea of reforming him. If now, under the restraint of your present acquaintance, he will not give up his bad habits, after he has won the prize you cannot expect him to do so. You might as well plant a violet in the face of a northeast storm with the idea of appeasing it. You might as well run a schooner alongside of a burning ship with the idea of saving the ship. The consequence will be, schooner and ship will be destroyed together. The almshouse could tell the story of a hundred women who married men to reform them. If by twenty-five years of age a man has been grappled by intoxicants, he is under such headway that your attempt to stop him would be very much like running up the track with a wheelbarrow to stop a Hudson River express train. What you call an inebriate nowadays is not a victim to wine or whisky, but to logwood and strychnine and nux vomica. All these poisons have kindled their fires in his tongue and brain, and all the tears of a wife weeping cannot extinguish the flames. Instead of marrying a man to reform him, let him reform first, and then give him time to see whether the reform is to be permanent. Let him understand that if he cannot do without bad habits for two years he must do without you forever. Avoid union with one supremely selfish, or so wound up in his occupation that he has no room for another. You occasionally find a man who spreads himself so widely over the path of life that there is no room for any one to walk beside him. He is not the one blade of a scissors incomplete without the other blade, but he is a chisel made to cut his way through life alone, or a file full of roughness, made to be drawn across society without any affinity for other files. His disposition is a lifelong protest against marriage. Others are so married to their occupation or profession that the taking of any other bride is a case of bigamy. There are men as severely tied to their literary work as was Chatterton, whose essay was not printed because of the death of the Lord Mayor. Chatterton made out the following account: “Lost by the Lord Mayor’s death in this essay one pound eleven shillings and sixpence. Gained in elegies and essays five pounds and five shillings.” Then he put what he had gained by the Lord Mayor’s death opposite to what he had lost, and wrote under it: “Am glad he is dead by three pounds thirteen shillings and sixpence.” When a man is as hopelessly literary as that he ought to be a perpetual celibate; his library, his laboratory, his books are all the companionship needed. Indeed, some of the mightiest men this world ever saw have not entered into matrimony. Cowper, Pope, Newton, Swift, Locke, Walpole, Gibbon, Hume, Arbuthnot were single. Some of these marriage would have helped. The right kind of a wife would have cured Cowper’s gloom, and given Newton more practicability, and been a relief to Locke’s overtasked brain. A Christian wife might have converted Hume and Gibbon to a belief in Christianity. But Dean Swift did not deserve a wife, from the way in which he broke the heart of Jane Waring first, and Esther Johnson afterward, and last of all “Vanessa.” The great wit of his day, he was outwitted by his own cruelties. Amid so many possibilities of fatal mistake, am I not right in urging you to seek the unerring wisdom of God, and before you are infatuated? Because most marriages are fit to be made convinces us that they are divinely arranged. Almost every cradle has an affinity toward some other cradle. They may be on the opposite sides of the earth, but one child gets out of this cradle, and another child gets out of that cradle, and with their first steps they start for each other. They may diverge from the straight path, going toward the North, or South, or East, or West. They may fall down, but the two rise facing each other. They are approaching all through infancy. The one all through the years of boyhood is going to meet the one who is coming through all the years of girlhood to meet him. The decision of parents as to what is best concerning them, and the changes of fortune, may for a time seem to arrest the two journeys; but on they go. They may never have seen each other. They may never have heard of each other. But the two pilgrims who started at the two cradles are nearing. After eighteen, twenty, or thirty years, the two come within sight. At the first glance they may feel a dislike, and they may slacken their step; yet something that the world calls fate, and that religion calls Providence, urges them on and on. They must meet. They come near enough to join hands in social acquaintance, after a while to join hands in friendship, after a while to join hearts. The delegate from the one cradle comes up the east side of the church with her father. The delegate from the other cradle comes up the west aisle of the church. The two long journeys end at the snowdrift of the bridal veil. The two chains made out of many years are forged together by the golden link which the groom puts upon the third ringer of the left hand. One on earth, may they be one in heaven! But there are so many exceptions to the general rule of natural affinity that only those are safe who pray for a heavenly hand to lead them. Because they depended on themselves and not on God there are thousands of women every year going to the slaughter. In India women leap on the funeral pyre of a dead husband. We have a worse spectacle than that in America—women innumerable leaping on the funeral pyre of a living husband. Avoid all proposed alliances through newspaper advertisements. Many women, just for fun, have answered such advertisements, and have been led on from step to step to catastrophe infinite. All the men who write such advertisements are villains and lepers—all, without a single exception. All! All!! Do you answer them just for fun? I will tell you a safer and healthier fun. Thrust your hand through the cage at a menagerie, and stroke the back of a cobra from the East Indies. Put your head in the mouth of a Numidian lion, to see if he will bite. Take a glassful of Paris green mixed with some delightful henbane. These are not such perilous fun as answering newspaper advertisements for a wife. My advice is: Marry a man who is a fortune in himself. Houses, lands and large inheritance are well enough, but the wheel of fortune turns so rapidly that through some investment all these in a few years may be gone. There are some things, however, that are a perpetual fortune—good manners, geniality of soul, kindness, intelligence, sympathy, courage, perseverance, industry and whole-heartedness. Marry such a one and you have married a fortune, whether he have an income now of fifty thousand dollars a year or an income of one thousand dollars. A bank is secure according to its capital stock, and not to be judged by the deposits for a day or a week. A man is rich according to his sterling qualities, and not according to the mutability of circumstances, which may leave with him a large amount of resources today and withdraw them to-morrow. If a man is worth nothing but money he is poor indeed. If a man have upright character he is rich. Property may come and go, he is independent of the markets. Nothing can buy him out, nothing can sell him out. He may have more money one year than another, but his better fortunes never vacillate. Yet do not expect to find a perfect man. If you find one without any faults, incapable of mistakes, never having guessed wrongly, his patience never having been perturbed, immaculate in speech, in temper, in habits, do not marry him. Why? Because you would be party to a swindle. What would you do with a perfect man, you who are not perfect yourself? And how dare you hitch your imperfection fast on such supernatural excellence? What a companion you would make for an angel! In other words, there are no perfect men. There never was but one perfect pair, and they slipped down the banks of Paradise together. We occasionally find a man who says he never sins. We know he lies when he says it. We have had financial dealings with two or three perfect men, and they cheated us woefully. Do not, therefore, look for an immaculate husband, for you will not find him. But do not become cynical on this subject. Society has a great multitude of grand men who know how to make home happy. When they come to be husbands they evince a nobility of nature and a self-sacrificing spirit that surprise even the wife. These are the men who cheerfully sit in dark and dirty business offices, ten feet by twelve, in summer time hard at work while the wives and daughters are off at Saratoga, Mount Desert or the White Sulphur. These are the men who, never having had much education themselves, have their sons at Yale and Harvard and Virginia University. These are the men who work themselves to death by fifty years of age, and go out to Greenwood leaving large estate and generous life insurance provision for their families. There are husbands and fathers in our land by the hundreds who would die for their households. If outlawry should ever become dominant in our cities they would stand in their doorway, and with their own arm would cleave down, one by one, fifty invaders face to face, foot to foot, and every stroke a demolition. This is what makes an army in defense of a country fight more desperately than an army of conquest. It is not so much the abstract sentiment of a flag as it is wife and children and home that turns enthusiasm into a fury. The world has such men by the million, and the homunculi that infest all our communities must not hinder women from appreciating the glory of true manhood. I was reading of a bridal reception. The young man had brought home the choice of his heart in her elaborate and exquisite apparel. As she stood in the gay drawing-room, and amid the gay group, the young man’s eyes filled with tears of joy as he thought that she was his. Years passed by, and they stood in the same parlor on another festal occasion. She wore the same dress, for business had not opened as brightly to the young husband as he expected, and he had never been able to purchase for her another dress. Her face was not as bright and smooth as it had been years before, and a care-worn look had made its signature on her countenance. As the husband looked at her he saw the difference between this occasion and the former, and he went over where she sat, and said: “You remember the time when we were here before. You have the same dress on. Circumstances have somewhat changed, but you look to me far more beautiful than you did then.” There is such a thing as conjugal fidelity, and many of you know it in your own homes. But, after all the good advice we may give you, we come back to the golden pillar from which we started, the tremendous truth that no one but God can guide you in safety about this matter that may decide your happiness for two worlds, this and the next. So, my sister, I put your case where Naomi put that of Ruth and Orpah when she said: “The Lord grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband.” I imagine the hour for which you pledged your troth has arrived. There is much merry-making among your young friends, but there is an undertone of sadness in all the house. Your choice may have been the gladdest and the best, and the joy of the whole round of relatives, but when a young eaglet is about to leave the old nest, and is preparing to put out into sunshine and storm for itself, it feels its wings tremble somewhat. So she has a good cry before leaving home, and at the marriage father and mother always cry, or feel like it. If you think it is easy to give up a daughter in marriage, though it be with brightest prospects, you will think differently when the day comes. To have all along watched her from infancy to girlhood, and from girlhood to womanhood, studious of her welfare, her slightest illness an anxiety, and her presence in your home an ever-increasing joy, and then have her go away to some other home—aye, all the redolence of orange-blossoms, and all the chime of marriage-bells, and all the rolling of wedding march in full diapason, and all the hilarious congratulations of your friends cannot make you forget that you are suffering a loss irreparable. But you know it is all right, and you have a remembrance of an embarkation just like it twenty-five or thirty years ago, in which you were one of the parties; and, suppressing as far as possible your sadness, you say, “Good-by.” I hope that you, the departing daughter, will not forget to write often home; for, whatever betide you, the old folks will never lose their interest in your welfare. Make visits to them also as often and stay as long as you can, for there will be changes at the old place after a while. Every time you go you will find more gray hairs on father’s head and more wrinkles on mother’s brow; and after a while you will notice that the elastic step has become decrepit. And some day one of the two pillars of your early home will fall, and after a while the other pillar of that home will fall, and it will be a comfort to yourself if, when they are gone, you can feel that while you are faithful in your new home you never forget your old home, and the first friends you ever had, and those to whom you are more indebted than you ever can be to any one else except to God—I mean your father and mother. Alexander Pope put it in effective rhythm when he said: Me let the tender office long engage To rock the cradle of reposing age; With lenient arts extend a mother’s breath, Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death; Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, And keep a while one parent from the sky. And now I commend all this precious and splendid young womanhood before me today to the God “who setteth the solitary in families.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 88: 086. ORPHA'S RETREAT ======================================================================== Orpha’s Retreat Ruth 1:14 : “And they lifted up their voices and wept, and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clave unto her.” Moab was a heathen land. Naomi is about to leave it and go into the land of Bethlehem. She has two daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah, who conclude to go with her. Naomi tells them they had better not leave their native land and undertake the hardship of the journey, but they will not be persuaded. They all three start out on their journey. After a while, Naomi, although she highly prized the company of her two daughters-in-law, attempted to again persuade them to go back because of the hardship and self-denial through which they would be obliged to go. Ruth responds in the words from which I once discoursed to you: “Entreat me not to leave thee, nor to return from following after thee, for where thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge, thy people shall be my people and thy God my God, where thou diest will I die and there will I be buried, the Lord do so to me and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.” Not so with her sister Orpah. Her determination had already been shaken. The length and peril of the journey began to appall her, and she had worshiped the gods of Moab so long that it was hard to give them up. From that point Orpah turned back, the parting being described in the words of my text: “And they lifted up their voice and wept again, and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clave unto her.” Learn from this story of Orpah that some of those who did not leave the Moab of their iniquities are persons of fine susceptibility. It was compassion for Naomi in widowhood and sorrow that led Orpah to start with her toward Bethlehem. It was not because of any lack of affection for her that she turned back. We know this from the grief exhibited at parting. I do not know but that she had as much warmth and ardor of nature as Ruth, but she lacked the courage and persistence of her sister-in-law. That there are many with as fine susceptibility as Orpah who will not take up their cross and follow Christ, is a truth which needs but little demonstration. Many of those who have become the followers of Jesus have but little natural impressibility. Grace often takes hold of the hardest heart and the most unlovely character and transforms it. It is a hammer that breaks rocks. In this, Christ often shows his power. It wants but little generalship to conquer a flat country, but might of artillery and heroism to take a fort manned and ready for raking cannonade. The great Captain of our salvation has forced his way into many an armed castle. I doubt not that Christ could have found many a fisherman naturally more noble-hearted than Simon Peter, but there was no one by whose conversion he could more gloriously have magnified his grace. The conversion of a score of Johns would not have illustrated the power of the Holy Ghost as much as the conversion of one Peter. It would have been easier to drive twenty lambs like John into the fold than to tame one lion like Peter. God has often made some of his most efficient servants out of men naturally unimpressionable. As men take stiff and unwieldy timbers, and under huge-handed machinery bend them into the hulk of great ships, thus God has often shaped and bent into his service the most unwieldy natures, while those naturally impressionable are still in their unchanged state. Oh, how many, like Orpah, have warm affections and yet never become Christians! Like Orpah, they know haw to weep, but they do not know how to pray. Their fineness of feeling leads them into the friendships of the world, but not into communion with God. They can love everybody but him, who is altogether lovely. All other sorrow rends their heart, but they are untouched by the woes of a dying Christ. Good news fills them with excitement, but the glad tidings of great joy and salvation stir not their soul. Anxious to do what is right, yet they rob God. Grateful for the slightest favors, they make no return to him who wrung out the last drop of blood from his heart to deliver them from going down to the pit. They would weep at the door of a prison at the sight of a wicked captive in chains, but have no compassion for their own souls over which Satan, like a grim jailer, holds the lock and key. When repulsive, grasping, unsympathetic natures resist the story of a Saviour’s love, it does not excite our surprise; but it is among the greatest of wonders that so many who exhibit Orpah’s susceptibility also exhibit Orpah’s obduracy. We are not surprised that there is barrenness in a desert, but a strange thing is it that sometimes the Rose of Sharon will not grow in a garden. On a summer morning we are not surprised to find a rock without any dew on it, but if, going among a flock of lilies, we saw in them no glittering drops, we would say, “What foul sprite has been robbing these vases?” We are not surprised that Herod did not become a Christian, but how strange that the young man Jesus loved for his sweetness of temper should not have loved the Redeemer. Hard-hearted Felix trembled, proud Nebuchadnezzar repented, and cruel Manasseh turned unto the Lord; but many a nature, affectionate and gentle, has fought successfully against divine influences. Many a dove has refused to come in the window of the ark, although finding no rest for the sole of her foot. Again: The history of Orpah impresses upon me the truth that there are many who make a good starting, but after a while change their minds and turn back. When these three mourners start from their home in Moab there is as much probability that Orpah will reach Bethlehem as that her sister-in-law and her mother-in-law Naomi will arrive there. But while these continue in the journey they commenced, Orpah after a while gets discouraged and turns back. This is the history of many a soul. Perhaps it was during a revival of religion they resolved upon a Christian life, and made preparations to leave Moab. Before that they were indifferent to the sanctuary, and they looked upon churches as necessary evils. The minister almost always preached poor sermons, because they had not the heart to hear them. They thought the bread was not good because their appetite was poor. Religion did very well for invalids and the aged, but they had no desire for it. Suddenly a change came upon their soul. They found that something must be done. Every night there was a thorn in their pillow. There was gall in their wine. They found that their pleasures were only false lights of a swamp that rise out of decay and death. Losing their self-control they were startled by their own prayer, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” They did not suspect it, but the Holy Ghost was in their soul. Without thinking what they were doing, they brushed the dust off the family Bible. The ground did not feel as firm under them nor did the air seem as bright. They tried to dam back the flood of their emotions, but the attempt failed, and they confessed their anguish of soul before they meant to. The secret was out! They wanted to know what they must do to be saved. With Ruth and Naomi, weeping Orpah started for the land of Bethlehem. They longed for the Sabbath to come. Straight as an arrow to the mark the sermon struck them. They thought the minister must have heard of their case and was preaching right at them. They thought the sermon was very short, nor did they once coil themselves up in their pew with their eyes shut and head averted with an air of unmoved dignity. They began to pray with an earnestness that astonished themselves and astonished others. Shoving the plane or writing up accounts or walking the street, when you might have thought their mind entirely upon the world, they were saying within themselves: “Oh, that I were a Christian!” Orpah is fully started on the road to Bethlehem. Christian friends observing the religious anxiety of the awakened soul say, “He must certainly be a Christian. There is another soldier in Christ’s ranks, another sick one has been cured of the leprosy.” The observers turn their attention another way; they say, “Orpah is safe enough; she has gone to Bethlehem.” Starting out for heaven is a very different thing from arriving there. Remember Lot’s wife. She looked back with longing to the place from which she came, and was destroyed. Half way between Sodom and the city of Refuge that strange storm comes upon her, and its salt and brimstone gather on her garments until they are so stiffened she cannot proceed, nor can she lie down, because of this dreadful wrapping around her garments and limbs; and long after her life has gone she still stands there so covered up by the strange storm that she is called a pillar of salt, as some sailor on ship’s deck in the wintry tempest stands covered with a mail of ice. Ten thousand times ten thousand men have been destroyed half-way between Sodom and the city of Refuge. Orpah might as well never have started as afterward to turn back. Yet multitudes have walked in her footsteps. Go among those the least interested in sacred things and you will find that they were once out of the land of Moab. Every one of them prayed right heartily and studied their Bibles and frequented the sanctuary, but Lot’s wife looked back wistfully to Sodom, and Orpah. retreated from the company of Ruth and Naomi. It is an impressive thought that after Orpah had gone so far as actually to look over into the land of Bethlehem she turned back and died in Moab. Again: Let our subject impress upon us the truth (that those who have once felt it their duty to leave their natural state cannot give up their duty and go back to hardness of heart without a struggle. After Orpah had thoroughly made up her mind to go back to the place from which she started, she went through the sad scene of parting with Ruth and Naomi. My text says, “They lifted up their voice and wept.” Ah, my hearers, it requires more decision and perseverance to stay away from the kingdom of God than to enter it. Although she did not know it, Orpah passed through a greater struggle in turning back into the land of Moab than would have been necessary to take her clear through to Bethlehem. Suppose you that those persons who have remained in their evil ways have had no struggle? Why, they have been obliged to fight every inch of their way. The road to death is not such easy traveling as some ministers have been accustomed to describe it. From beginning to end it is fighting against the sharp sword of the Spirit. It is climbing over the cross. It is wading through the deep blood of the Son of God. It is scaling mountains of privilege. It is wading through lakes of sorrow. It is breaking over communion tables and baptismal fonts and pulpits and Bibles. It is wedging one’s self through between pious kindred who stand before and press us back and hold on to us by their prayers even after we have passed them in our headlong downward career. No man ought to think of undertaking to go back into Moab after having come within sight of Bethlehem unless we have a heart that cannot be made to quake, and a sure foot that will not slip among infinite perils, and an arm that can drive back the Son of God, who stands in the center of the broad road spreading out his arms and shouting into the ear of the thoughtless pilgrim, “Stop! Stop!” We talk about taking up the cross and following Jesus, but that cross is not half so heavy as the burden which the sinner carries. It is a very solemn thing to be a Christian, but it is a more solemn thing not to be a Christian. There are multitudes who, afraid of the self-denials of the Christian, rush into the harder self-denials of the unbelievers. Any yoke but Christ’s, however tight and galling! Orpah goes back to her idolatries, but she returns weeping; and all who follow her will find the same sorrows. Just in proportion as Gospel advantages have been numerous will be the disturbance of the heart that will not come to Christ. The Bible says, in regard to the place where Christ was buried, “In the midst of the garden there was a sepulchre;” and in the midst of the most flowery enjoyments of the unpardoned there is a chilliness of death. Although they may pull out the arrows that strike their soul from the Almighty’s quiver, there remain a sting and a smarting. If men wrench themselves away from Christ they will bear the mark of his hand by which he would have rescued them. The pleasures of the world may give temporary relief from the upbraidings of conscience, but are like stupefying drugs that dull the pain only temporarily. Ahab has a great kingdom, and you would think he ought to be happy with his courtiers and his chariots and palaces; yet he goes to bed sick, because Naboth will not sell him his vineyard. Haman is prime minister of the greatest nation in the world; yet one poor man, who will not bow the head, makes him utterly miserable. Herod monopolizes the most of the world’s honor, and yet is thrown into a rage because they say a little child is born in Bethlehem who may after a while dispute his authority. Byron conquered the world with his pen, and yet said that he felt more unhappiness from the criticism of the most illiterate reader than he experienced pleasure from the praise of all the talented. My friends, there is no solid happiness in anything but religion. I care not how bright a home Orpah has in Moab, when she turns away from duty she turns away from peace. Amid the bacchanalia of Belshazzar’s feast and the glittering of chalices, there always will come out a hand-writing on the wall, the fearfully ominous “Tekel,” weighed in the balances and found wanting. When you can reap harvests off bare rocks, and gather balm out of nightshade, and make sunlight sleep in the heart of sepulchers, and build a firm house on a rocking billow, then an unpardoned soul can find firm enjoyment amid its transgressions. Then can Orpah go back to Moab without weeping. Again: This subject teaches that a religious choice and the want of it frequently divide families. Ruth and Orpah and Naomi were tenderly attached. They were all widows, and their lives had been united by a baptism of tears. In the fire of trial their affections had been forged. Together they were so pleasantly united, you can hardly imagine them separated. Yet a fatal line is drawn dividing them from each other, perhaps forever. Naomi cannot live in a heathen country. She must go into Bethlehem, that there among the pious she may worship the true God. Ruth makes a similar choice, but Orpah rebels. “And they lifted up their voice and wept again, and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clave unto her.” The history of this family of Elimelech is the history of many families of this day. How often it is that in a circle of relatives, while they look alike and walk alike and talk alike, there is a great difference. Outwardly united in the affectional relations of this life, they are separated in the most important respects. Some now are the children of light, and others the children of darkness. These are alive in Christ, and those are dead in sin. Ruth in the land of Bethlehem, Orpah in Moab. Of the same family are David and Solomon, worshipers of the Most High God, and Adonijah and Absalom, who live and die the enemies of all righteousness. Belonging to the same family were the holy and devout Eli and the reckless Phinehas and Hophni. Jonathan Edwards, the good, and Pierrepont Edwards, the bad, belonged to the same family. Aaron Burr, the dissolute, had a most excellent father. Dying, yet immortal hearer, by the solemnity of the parental and filial and conjugal relation, by the sacredness of the family hearth, by the honor of the family name, by the memory of departed kindred, I point out this parting of Ruth and Orpah. Again: This subject suggests to me two of the prominent reasons why people refuse the kingdom of Christ. There may have been many other reasons why Orpah left her sister and mother-in-law, and went back home, but there were two reasons which I think were more prominent than the rest. She had been brought up in idolatries. She loved the heathen gods which her ancestors had worshiped, and, though these blocks of wood and stone could not hear, she thought they could hear, and, though they could not see, she thought they could see, and, though they could not feel, she thought they could feel. A new religion had been brought to her attention. She had married a godly man. She must often have heard her mother-in-law talk of the God of Israel. She was so much shaken in her original belief that she concluded to leave her idolatries, but, coming to the margin of the land of Bethlehem, her determination failed her, and speedily she returned to her gods. This is the very reason why multitudes of persons never become Christians. They cannot bear to give up their gods. Business is the American Juggernaut that crushes more men than the car of the Hindoos. To it they say their morning and evening prayers. A little of Christ’s religion may creep into the Sabbath, but Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday are the days devoted to this American idol. Every hour there is a sacrifice on the altar. Home duties, health of body, manly strength and immortal affections must all burn in this holocaust. Men act as though they could take their bonds and mortgages and saws and axes and trowels and daybooks with them into heaven. There are many who have no unholy thirst for gold, yet who are devoting themselves to their worldly occupations with a ruinous intensity. Men of the stock exchange, men of the yardstick, men of the saw, men of the trowel, men of the day-book, what will become of you, if unforgiven, in the great day when there are no houses to build, and no goods to sell, and no bargains to make? It is possible to devote one’s self even to a lawful calling until it becomes sinful. There is no excuse on the earth or under the earth for the neglect of our deathless spirit. Lydia was a seller of purple, yet she did not allow her occupation to keep her from becoming a Christian. Daniel was secretary of the State and attorney-general in the empire of Babylon, yet three times a day he found time to pray with his face toward Jerusalem. The man who has no time to attend to religion will have no time to enter heaven. But there are others who, while their worldly occupation has no particular fascination over them, are entirely absorbed in the gains that come to that occupation. This is the worship of Mammon. The jingle of dollars and cents is the only litany they care for. Though in the last day the earth itself will not be worth a farthing, a heap of ashes scattered in the whirlwind, they are now giving their time and eternity for the acquisition of so much of it as you might at last hold in the hollow of one hand. The American Indian who gave enough land to make a State out of for a string of beads, made a princely bargain compared with the speculation of that man who gains the whole world and loses his own soul. How much comfort do the men take who died unforgiven ten years ago, leaving large fortunes to their heirs? Do they ever come up to count the gold they hoarded or walk through the mansions they built? Though they could have bought an empire, they have not now as much money as you have this moment in your pocket. Solomon looked upon his palace and the grounds surrounding it, pools rimmed with gold, and circling roads along which, at times, rushed his fourteen hundred chariots, while under the outbranching sycamores and cedars walked the apes and peacocks, which by the navy of Hiram had been brought from Tarshish, and from the window curtains with embroidered gold and purple through which came out the thrill of harps and psalteries mingling with the song of the waters. When Solomon saw that all these luxuries of sight and sound had been purchased by his wealth, he broke forth in the exclamation, “Money answereth all things.” But we cannot receive it as literal. It cannot still the voice of conscience. It cannot drown the sorrows of the soul. It cannot put a bribe in the hand of death. It cannot unlock the gate of heaven. The tower of Siloam fell and killed eighteen of its admirers, but this idol to whose worship the exchanges and banks and custom-houses of the world have been dedicated, will fall and crush to death its thousands. But I cannot enumerate the idolatries to which men give themselves. They are kept by them from a religious life. “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon,” and the first thing that Christ does when he comes into the temple of the soul is to drive out the exchangers. But it was not only the gods of Moab that made Orpah leave her sister and mother-in-law and turn back. She doubtless had a dread of the hardship to which they would be exposed on the journey to Bethlehem, and Orpah was not alone in the fear. Doubtless some of you have been appalled and driven back by the self-denials of the Christian life. The taunt of the world, the charge of hypocrisy which they would sometimes be obliged to confront, has kept many away from the land of Bethlehem. They spend their life in counting the cost and, because a Christian life demands so much courage and faith, they dare not begin to build. Perhaps they are courageous in every other respect. They are not timid in presence of any danger except that of trusting in the infinite mercy of Christ. The sheep are more afraid of the shepherd than of the wolves. They shrink away from the presence of Christ as though he were a tyrant rather than a friend who sticketh closer than a brother. They feel more safe in the ranks of the enemy, where they must suffer infinite defeat, than in the army of Christ, which shall be more than conquerors, through him that hath loved them. Men shiver and tremble before religion as though they were commanded to throw their life away, as though it were a surrender of honor and manliness and reason and self-respect and all that is worth keeping. What has God ever done that his mercy should be doubted? Was there ever a sorrow of his frailest child that he did not pity? Was there ever a soul that he left unhelped in the darkness? Was there ever a martyr that he did not strengthen in the flames? Was there ever a dying man to whose relief he did not come at the cry of “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Aye, my soul, what has God done that so basely thou hast doubted him? Did he make the whole earth a desert? Are all the skies dark and storm-swept? Is life all sickness? Is the air all plague? Are there nothing but rods and scorpions and furnaces? God knew how many suspicions and unbeliefs men would entertain in regard to him and therefore, after making a multitude of plain and precious promises, he places his hand on his own heart and swears by his own existence: “As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth.” Why then fight against God? This day the battle rages. Thou art armed with thy sins, thy ingratitude, thy neglects, and Christ is armed against thee, but his weapons are tears, are dying agonies, are calls of mercy, and the battle-cry which he this day sends over thy soul as he rushes toward thee is “save thee from going down to the pit, for I have found a ransom.” I would not envy thy victory, O hearer, if thou dost conquer, for what wilt thou do with the weapons thou hast snatched from the armed Redeemer, what with the tears, what with his dying agonies, what with his calls for mercy? Would God that Orpah would get tired of Moab! Would God that Orpah would keep on till she reaches Bethlehem! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 89: 087. THE BEAUTIFUL GLEANER ======================================================================== The Beautiful Gleaner Ruth 2:3 : “And she went, and came, and gleaned in the field after the reapers: and her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz, who was of the kindred of Elimelech.” The time that Ruth and Naomi arrive at Bethlehem is harvest time. It was the custom commanded by Moses when a sheaf fell from a load in the harvest-field for the reapers to refuse to gather it up; that was to be left for the poor who might happen to come along that way. If there were handfuls of grain scattered across the field after the main harvest had been reaped, instead of raking it, as farmers do now, it was, by the custom of the land, left in its place, so that the poor, coming along that way, might glean it and get their bread. But, you say, “What is the use of all these harvest-fields to Ruth and Naomi? Naomi is too old and feeble to go out and toil in the sun; and can you expect that Ruth, the young and the beautiful, should tan her cheeks and blister her hands in the harvest-field?” Boaz owns a large farm, and he goes out to see the reapers gather in the grain. Coming there, right behind the swarthy, sun-browned reapers, he beholds a beautiful woman gleaning—a woman more fit to bend to a harp, or sit upon a throne, than to stoop among the sheaves. That was an eventful day! It was love at first sight. Boaz forms an attachment for the womanly gleaner—an attachment full of undying interest to the Church of God in all ages; while Ruth, with an ephah, or nearly a bushel of barley, goes home to Naomi to tell her the successes and adventures of the day. That Ruth, who left her native land of Moab in darkness, and traveled so far impelled by an undying affection for her mother-in-law, is in the harvest-field of Boaz, is affianced to one of the best families in Judah, and becomes in after time the ancestress of Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory! Out of so dark a night did there ever dawn so bright a morning? I learn, in the first place, from this subject how trouble develops character. It was bereavement, poverty and exile that developed, illustrated and announced to all ages the sublimity of Ruth’s character. That is a very unfortunate man who has no trouble. It was sorrow that made John Bunyan the better dreamer, and Dr. Young the better poet, and O’Connell the better orator, and Bishop Hall the better preacher, and Havelock the better soldier, and Kitto the better encyclopedist, and Ruth the better daughter-in-law. I once asked an aged man in regard to his pastor, who was a brilliant man, “Why is it that your pastor, so very brilliant, seems to have so little heart and tenderness in his sermons?” “Well,” he replied, “the reason is, our pastor has never had any trouble. When misfortune comes upon him, his style will be different.” After a while the Lord took a child out of that pastor’s house; and though the preacher was just as brilliant as he was before, oh, the warmth, the tenderness of his discourses! The fact is, that trouble is a great educator. You see sometimes a musician sit down at an instrument, and his execution is cold and formal and unfeeling. The reason is that all his life he has been prospered. But let misfortune or bereavement come to that man, and he sits down at the instrument, and you discover the pathos in the first sweep of the keys. Misfortune and trials are great educators. A young doctor comes into a sick room where there is a dying child. Perhaps he is very rough in his prescription, and very rough in his manner, and rough in the feeling of the pulse, and rough in his answer to the mother’s anxious question; but years roll on, and there has been one dead in his own house; and now he conies into the sick room, and with tearful eye he looks at the dying child, and he says, “Oh, how this reminds me of my Henry!” Trouble, the great educator. Sorrow—I see its touch in the grandest painting; I hear its tremor in the sweetest song; I feel its power in the mightiest argument. Grecian mythology said that the fountain of Hippocrene was struck out by the foot of the winged horse, Pegasus, and I have often noticed in life that the brightest and most beautiful fountains of Christian comfort and spiritual life have been struck out by the iron-shod hoof of disaster and calamity. I see Shadrach’s courage best by the flash of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. I see Paul’s prowess best when I find him on the foundering ship under the glare of the lightning in the breakers of Melita. God crowns his children amid the howling of wild beasts and the chopping of blood-splashed guillotine and the crackling fires of martyrdom. It took all the hostilities against the Scotch Covenanters and the fury of Lord Claverhouse to develop James Renwick and Andrew Melville and Hugh McKail, the glorious martyrs of Scotch history. It took the stormy sea and the December blast and the desolate New England coast and the war-whoop of savages to show forth the prowess of the Pilgrim Fathers: When amid the storms they sang, And the stars heard, and the sea; And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang To the anthems of the free. It took all our past national distresses, and it takes all our present national sorrows, to lift up our nation on that high career where it will march long after the foreign aristocracies that have mocked and the tyrannies that have jeered shall be swept down under the Omnipotent wrath of God, who hates despotism, and who, by the strength of his own red right arm, will make all men free. And so it is individually and in the family and in the church and in the world, that through darkness and storm and trouble men, women, churches, nations, are developed. Again: I see in my text the beauty of unfaltering friendship. I suppose there were plenty of friends for Naomi while she was in prosperity; but of all her acquaintances, how many were willing to trudge off with her toward Judah, when she had to make that lonely journey? One—the heroine of my text. One—absolutely one. I suppose when Naomi’s husband was living, and they had plenty of money, and all things went well, they had a great many callers; but I suppose that after her husband died, and her property went, and she got old and poor, she was not troubled very much with callers. All the birds that sang in the bower while the sun shone have gone to their nests, now the night has fallen. Oh, these beautiful sunflowers that spread out their color in the morning hour; but they are always asleep when the sun is going down! Job had plenty of friends when he was the richest man in Uz; but when his property went and the trials came, then there were none so much pestered him as Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. Life often seems to be a mere game, where the successful player pulls down all the other men into his own lap. Let suspicions arise about a man’s character, and he becomes like a bank in a panic, and all the imputations rush on him and break down in a day that character which in due time would have had strength to defend itself. There are reputations that have been half a century in building, which go down under some moral exposure, as a vast temple is consumed by the touch of a sulphurous match. A hog can uproot a century plant. In this world, so full of heartlessness and hypocrisy, how thrilling it is to find some friend as faithful in days of adversity as in days of prosperity! David had such a friend in Hushai. The Jews had such a friend in Mordecai, who never forgot their cause. Paul had such a friend in Onesiphorus, who visited him in jail. Christ had such in the Marys, who adhered to him on the cross. Naomi had such a one in Ruth, who cried out: “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.” Again: I learn from this subject that paths which open in hardship and darkness often come out in places of joy. When Ruth started from Moab toward Jerusalem, to go along with her mother-in-law, I suppose the people said, “What a foolish creature to go away from her father’s house, to go off with a poor old woman toward the land of Judah! They won’t live to get across the desert. They will be lost in the mountains, or the jackals of the wilderness will destroy them.” It was a very dark morning when Ruth started off with Naomi; but behold her in my text in the harvest-field of Boaz, to be affianced to one of the lords of the land, and become one of the grandmothers of Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. And so it often is that a path which starts very darkly ends very brightly. When you started out for heaven, oh, how dark was the hour of conviction—how Sinai thundered, and devils tormented, and the darkness thickened! All the sins of your life pounced upon you, and it was the darkest hour you ever saw when you first found out your sins. After a while you went into the harvest-field of God’s mercy; you began to glean in the fields of divine promise, and you had more sheaves than you could carry, as the voice of God addressed you, saying: “Blessed is the man whose transgressions are forgiven and whose sins are covered.” A very dark starting in conviction, a very bright ending in the pardon and the hope and the triumph of the Gospel. So, very often in our worldly business or in our spiritual career, we start off on a very dark path. We must go. The flesh may shrink back, but there is a voice within or a voice from above, saying: “You must go,” and we have to drink the gall, and we have to carry the cross, and we have to traverse the desert, and we are pounded and flailed of misrepresentation and abuse, and we have to urge our way through ten thousand obstacles that must be overcome by our own right arm. We have to ford the river, we have to climb the mountain, we have to storm the castle; but blessed be God, the day of rest and reward will come. On the top of the captured battlements we will shout the victory; if not in this world, then in that world where there is no gall to drink, no burdens to carry, no battles to fight. How do I know it? Know it! I know it because God says so. “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat, for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall lead them to living fountains of water, and God shall wipe all tears from their eyes.” It was very hard for Noah to endure the scoffing of the people in his day, while he was trying to build the ark, and was every morning quizzed about his old boat that would never be of any practical use; but when the deluge came, and the mountains disappeared like the backs of sea-monsters, and the elements, lashed into fury, clapped their hands over a drowned world, then Noah in the ark rejoiced in his own safety and in the safety of his family, and looked cut on the wreck of a ruined earth. Christ, hounded of persecutors, denied a pillow, worse maltreated than the thieves on either side of the cross, human hate smacking its lips in satisfaction after it had been draining his last drop of blood, the sheeted dead bursting from the sepulchers at his crucifixion. Tell me, O Gethsemane and Golgotha, were there ever darker times than those? Like the booming of the midnight sea against the rock, the surges of Christ’s anguish beat against the gates of eternity, to be echoed back by all the thrones of heaven and all the dungeons of hell. But the day of reward comes for Christ; all the pomp and dominion of this world are to be hung on his throne, crowned heads are to bow before him on whose head are many crowns, and all celestial worship is to come up at his feet, like the humming of the forest, like the rushing of the waters, like the thundering of the seas, while all heaven, rising on their thrones, beat time with their scepters. “Hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! Hallelujah, the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus Christ!” That song of love, now low and far, Ere long shall swell from star to star; That light, the breaking day which tips The golden-spired Apocalypse. Again: I learn from my subject that events which seem to be most insignificant may be momentous. Can you imagine anything more unimportant than the coming of a poor woman from Moab to Judah? Can you imagine anything more trivial than the fact that this Ruth just happened to alight—as they say—just happened to alight on that field of Boaz? Yet all ages, all generations, have an interest in the fact that she was to become an ancestor of the Lord Jesus Christ, and all nations and kingdoms must look at that one little incident with a thrill of unspeakable and eternal satisfaction. So it is in your history and in mine; events that you thought of no importance at all have been of very great moment. That casual conversation, that accidental meeting—you did not think of it again for a long while; but how it changed all the current of your life! It seemed to be of no importance that Jubal invented rude instruments of music, calling them harp and organ; but they were the introduction of all the world’s minstrelsy; and as you hear the vibration of a stringed instrument, even after the fingers have been taken away from it, so all music now of lute and drum and cornet are only the long-continued strains of Jubal’s harp and Jubal’s organ. It seemed to be a matter of very little importance that Tubal Cain learned the uses of copper and iron; but that rude foundry of ancient days has its echo in the rattle of Birmingham machinery and the roar and bang of factories on the Merrimac. It seemed to be a matter of no importance that Luther found a Bible in a monastery; but as he opened that Bible, and the brass-bound lids fell back, they jarred everything, from the Vatican to the furthest convent in Germany, and the rustling of the wormed leaves was the sound of the wings of the angel of the Reformation. So the insignificant events of this world seem, after all, to be most momentous. The fact that you came up that street or this street seemed to be of no importance to you, and the fact that you went inside of some church may seem to be a matter of very great insignificance to you, but you may find it the turning point in your history. Again: I see in my subject an illustration of the beauty of female industry. Behold Ruth toiling in the harvest-field under the hot sun, or at noon taking plain bread with the reapers, or eating the parched corn which Boaz handed to her. The customs of society, of course, have changed, and without the hardships and exposure to which Ruth was subjected, every intelligent woman will find something to do. I know there is a sickly sentimentality on this subject. In some families there are persons of no practical service to the household or community; and though there are so many woes all around about them in the world, they spend their time languishing over a new pattern, or bursting into tears at midnight over the story of some lover who shot himself! They would not deign to look at Ruth carrying back the barley on her way home to her mother-in-law, Naomi. All this fastidiousness may seem to do very well while they are under the shelter of their father’s house; but when the sharp winter of misfortune comes, what of these butterflies? Persons under indulgent parentage may get upon themselves habits of indolence; but when they come out into practical life, their soul will recoil with disgust and chagrin. They will feel in their hearts what the poet so severely satirized when he said: Folks are so awkward, things so impolite, They’re elegantly pained from morn till night. Through that gate of indolence, how many men and women have marched, useless on earth, to a destroyed eternity! Spinola said to Sir Horace Vere: “Of what did your brother die?” “Of having nothing to do,” was the answer. “Ah!” said Spinola, “that’s enough to kill any general of us.” Can it be possible in this world, where there is so much suffering to be alleviated, so much darkness to be enlightened, and so many burdens to be carried that there is any person who cannot find anything to do? Madame de Staël did a world of work in her time; and one day, while she was seated amid instruments of music, all of which she had mastered, and amid manuscript books, which she had written, some one said to her, “How do you find time to attend to all these things?” “Oh,” she replied, “these are not the things I am proud of. My chief boast is in the fact that I have seventeen trades, by any one of which I could make a livelihood if necessary.” And if in secular spheres there is so much to be done, in spiritual work how vast the field! How many dying all around about us without one word of comfort! We want more Abigails, more Hannahs, more Rebeccas, more Marys, more Deborahs consecrated—body, mind, soul—to the Lord who bought them. Once more I learn from my subject the value of gleaning. Ruth going into that harvest-field might have said: “There is a straw, and there is a straw, but what is a straw? I can’t get any barley for myself or my mother-in-law out of these separate straws.” Not so said beautiful Ruth. She gathered two straws, and she put them together, and more straws, until she got enough to make a sheaf. Putting that down, she went and gathered more straws, until she had another sheaf and another and another and another, and then she brought them all together, and she threshed them out, and she had an ephah of barley, nigh a bushel. Oh, that we might all be gleaners! Elihu Burritt learned many things while toiling in a blacksmith’s shop. Abercrombie, the world-renowned philosopher, was a philosopher in Scotland, and he got his philosophy, or the chief part of it, while, as a physician, he was waiting for the door of the sick-room to open. Yet how many there are in this day who say they are so busy they have no time for mental or spiritual improvement; the great duties of life cross the field like strong reapers, and carry off all the hours, and there is only here and there a fragment left, that is not worth gleaning. You could go into the busiest day and busiest week of your life and find golden opportunities, which gathered, might at last make a whole sheaf for the Lord’s garner. It is the stray opportunities and the stray privileges which, taken up and bound together and beaten out, will at last fill you with rejoicing. There are a few moments left worth the gleaning. Now, Ruth, to the field! May each one have a measure full and running over! Ho! you gleaners, to the field! And if there be in your household an aged one or a sick relative that is not strong enough to come forth and toil in this field, then let Ruth take home to feeble Naomi this sheaf of the gleanings: “He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.” May the Lord God of Ruth and Naomi be our portion forever! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 90: 088. EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES ======================================================================== Employers and Employees Ruth 2:4 : “Boaz came from Bethlehem, and said unto the reapers, The Lord be with you. And they answered him, The Lord bless thee.” Different nations have different styles of salutation. A Moor rides at full run to meet a stranger, halts suddenly, and fires a pistol over his head. A Persian meets a Persian, and he says, “Is thine exalted highness good?” A Turk meets a Turk, and says, “May your shadow never be lifted from your head.” A Pole meets a Pole, and he says, “Art thou gay?” The ancient Roman met the ancient Roman, and said, “Be healthy, be strong.” The graceful Frenchman asks, “How do you carry yourself?” The practical Englishman, “How do you do?” In my text is the salutation of a wealthy employer to his hardworking employees. Boaz came from Bethlehem to the reapers. He might have said to them, “Why do you not set up that grain straight? Why do you allow this grain to lie around loose? Why do you swing that sickle in that awkward way? Hallo! you young men, lying under the trees, why are you not at work?” He said no such thing. There were courtesy and kindness and sympathy and prayerfulness in the salutation. “Boaz came to the reapers and he said, The Lord be with you; and the reapers answered, The Lord bless thee.” For kindness always evokes kindness, and politeness always begets politeness. The whole tendency of our time, as you have noticed, is to make the chasm between employer and employee wider and wider. In olden time the head man of the factory, the master builder, the capitalist, the head man of the firm worked side by side with the employees, working sometimes at the same bench, dining at the same table; and there are those here who can remember the time when the clerks of large commercial establishments were accustomed to board with the head men of the firm. All that is changed, and the tendency is to make the distance between employer and employee more certain; the tendency is to make the employee feel he is wronged by the success of the capitalist, and to make the capitalist feel: “Now, my laborers are only beasts of burden; I must give so much money for so much drudgery, just so many pieces of silver for so many beads of sweat.” In other words, the bridge of sympathy is broken down at both ends. That feeling was well described by Thomas Carlyle when he said: “Plugson, of St. Dolly Undershot, buccaneer-like, says to his men. ‘Noble spinners, this is the hundredth thousand we have gained wherein I mean to dwell and plant my vineyards. The one hundred thousand pound is mine, the daily wage was yours. Adieu, noble spinners; drink my health with this groat each which I give you over and above.’“ Now, what we want is to rebuild that bridge of sympathy; and I put the trowel to one of the abutments today, and I preach more especially to employers as such, although what I have to say will be appropriate to all. I want to say to all those to whom these words may come, that all ship-owners, all capitalists, all commercial firms, all master builders, all housewives are bound to be interested in the entire welfare of their subordinates. Years ago some one gave three prescriptions for becoming a millionaire: First, spend your life in getting and keeping the earnings of other people. Secondly, have no anxiety about the worriments, the losses, the disappointments of others. Thirdly, do not mind the fact that your vast wealth implies the poverty of a great many people. Now, there is not a man of my acquaintance who would consent to go out into life with those three principles to earn a fortune. It is your desire to do your whole duty to the men and women in your service. First of all, then, pay as large wages as are reasonable, and as your business will afford. “God bless yous” are well in their place, but they do not buy coal nor pay house rent, nor get shoes for the children. At the same time, you, the employer, ought to remember through what straits and strains you got the fortune by which you built the store or run the factory. You are to remember that you take all the risks, and the employee takes none, or scarcely any. You are to remember that there may be reverses in fortune, and that some new style of machinery may make your machinery valueless, or some new style of tariff set your business back hopelessly and forever. You must take all that into consideration, and then pay what is reasonable. Do not be too ready to cut down wages. As far as possible pay all, and pay promptly. There is a great deal of Bible teaching on this subject. Malachi: “I will be a swift witness against all sorcerers, and against all adulterers, and against those who oppress the hireling in his wages.” Leviticus: “Thou shalt not keep the wages of the hireling all night unto the morning.” Colossians: “Masters, give to your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a master in heaven.” So you see it is not a question between you and your employee so much as it is a question between you and God. Do not say to your employees, “Now, if you don’t like this place, get another,” when you know they cannot get another. As far as possible, once a year visit at their homes your clerks and your workmen. That is the only way you can become acquainted with their wants. You will by such process find out that there is a blind parent or a sick sister being supported. You will find some of your young men in rooms without any fire in winter, and in summer sweltering in ill-ventilated apartments. You will find how much depends upon the wages you pay or withhold. On Saturday morning, when you come into your counting-room and draw the check which will bring the money for the wages or the salaries, you will have a thrill of satisfaction in knowing it is not only the money you give to the young man, but the relief to the dire necessities which stand back of him. Moreover, it is your duty as employer, as far as possible, to mold the welfare of the young man. You ought to advise him about investments, about life insurance, about savings banks. You ought to give him the benefit of your experience. There are hundreds and thousands of employers in England, I am glad to say, who are settling in the very best possible way the destiny of their employees. Such men as Ashworth, of Turton; Marshall, of Leeds; Lister, of Bradford; Acroid, of Halifax, and in our own land grand men so near at home it might offend their modesty if I mentioned their names. These men have built reading-rooms, libraries, concert-halls, afforded croquet-lawns, cricket-grounds, gymnasiums, choral societies for their employees, and they have not merely paid the wages at night, or the wages on Saturday night, but through the contentment and the thrift and the good morals of their employees they are paying wages from generation to generation forever. Again, I counsel all employers to look well after the physical health of their subordinates. You are expected to understand better than they all the questions of ventilation and sunshine, and all the laws of hygiene. There are stores and banking-houses and factories and newspaper establishments where the atmosphere is death. Your employees may not always appreciate your work, as that style of kindness was not appreciated in the instance mentioned by Charles Reade, where in a great factory a fan was provided for the blowing away of the dust of metal and stone, the dust rising from the machinery, and some of the workmen refused to put this great fan in motion. They seemed to prefer to inhale the filings, the poisonous filings, into their lungs. But in the vast majority of cases your employees will appreciate every kindness in that direction. Do not put on them any unnecessary fatigue. I never could understand why the drivers on our city cars, when they were drawn by horses must stand all day when they might just as well sit down and drive. It seems to me most unrighteous that so many of the female clerks in our stores should be compelled to stand all day, and through those hours when there are but few or no customers. These people have aches and annoyances and weariness enough without putting upon them any additional fatigue. Unless those female clerks must go up and down on the business of the store, let them sit down. At the end of the year you will find that they have sold as many goods and made as fine bargains—yea, better; for one clerk with clear brain and rested body and radiance will sell more goods than two clerks with health impaired. Then I would have you carry out this sanitary idea, and put into as few hours as possible the work of the day. I have been informed by the secretary of a Young Men’s Christian Association—an institution which is doing a mighty work for all our cities, and a mightier work today than ever before—I have been informed by the secretary of that association that there are ten thousand grocer clerks in his city who go to business at five o’clock in the morning and continue until ten o’clock at night. Now that is inhuman. It seems to me that all the merchants in all departments ought by simultaneous movement to come out in behalf of the early-closing practise. These young men ought to have an opportunity of going to the public libraries, to the reading rooms, to the concert-halls, to the gymnasiums, to the churches. They have nerves, they have brain, they have intellectual aspirations, they have immortal spirits. If they can do a good round day’s work in nine or ten hours, you have no right to keep them harnessed for seventeen. I do not think that any intelligent employer can afford to be reckless of the physical and mental health of his subordinates. But, above all, I charge you, O employers! that you look after the moral and spiritual welfare of your employees. First, know where they spend their evenings. That decides everything. You do not want around your money-drawer a young man who went last night to see “Jack Sheppard.” A man who comes into the store in the morning ghastly with midnight revelry is not the man for your business. The young man who spends his evenings in the society of refined women, or in a musical or artistic circles, or in literary improvement, is the young man for your store. Without any disgusting inquisitiveness, without any impertinence, you ought to have your young men understand that you are interested so much in their welfare that you want to know where they spend their leisure hours, and if they are the kind of men you want around you, they will frankly and gladly tell you. Do not say of these young men, “If they do their work in the business hours, that is all I have to ask.” God has made you that young man’s guardian. I want you to understand that many of these young men are orphans, or worse than orphans, flung out into society to struggle for themselves. Treat that young man as you would like to have your son treated if you were dead. Be father to that clerk. There is nothing more beautiful than to hear an aged merchant addressing his clerk, and saying: “My son!” That young man in your employ has a history. His father was a drunkard. His first remembrance of his father was coming home late at night intoxicated, and the children hiding under the bed frightened. And that young man has stood many a time between father and mother, keeping her from the brutal blow. He is prematurely old in trying to provide for the house rent and clothing for his younger brothers and sisters. He may seem to you like all other young men, but God and his mother know he is a hero. At twenty years of age he has suffered as much as many have suffered at sixty. Do not tread on him. Do not swear at him. Do not send him on a useless errand. Say “Good-morning!” and “Good-night!” and “Good-by!” You are deciding that man’s destiny for two worlds. One of my earliest remembrances is of old Arthur Tappen. There were many differences of opinion about his politics, but no one who ever knew Arthur Tappen, and knew him well, doubted his being an earnest Christian. In his store in New York he had a room where every morning he called his employees together, and he prayed with them, read the Scriptures to them, sang with them, and then they entered upon the duties of the day. On Monday morning the exercises differed, and he gathered the young men together and asked them where they had attended church, what had been their Sabbath experiences, and what had been the sermon. Samuel Budgett had the largest business in the west of England. He had in a room of his warehouse a place pleasantly furnished with comfortable seats and Fletcher’s Family Devotions and Wesleyan hymn-books, and he gathered his employees together every morning, and having sung, they knelt down and prayed side by side, employer and employee. Do you wonder at that man’s success, and that, though thirty years before, he had been a partner in a small retail shop in a small village, at his death he bequeathed many millions? God can trust such a man as that with plenty of money. Sir Titus Salt had wealth which was beyond computation, and at Saltaire, England, he had a church and a chapel built and supported by himself—the church for those who preferred the Episcopal service, and the chapel for those who preferred the Methodist service. At the opening of one of his factories he gave a great dinner, and there were thirty-five hundred people present, and in his after-dinner speech he said to these people gathered: “I cannot look around me and see this vast assemblage of friends and work-people without being moved. I feel greatly honored by the presence of the nobleman at my side, and I am especially delighted at the presence of my work-people. I hope to draw around me a population that will enjoy the beauties of this neighborhood—a population of well-paid, contented, happy operatives. I have given instructions to my architects that nothing is to be spared to render the dwelling of the operatives a pattern to the country, and if my life is spared by Divine Providence, I hope to see satisfaction, contentment, and happiness around me.” That is Gospel. That is Christian character demonstrated. There are others in this country and in other lands on a smaller scale doing their very best for their employees. They have not forgotten their own early struggles. They remember the first yard of cloth they measured, the first quarter of tea they weighed, the first banister they turned, the first roof they shingled. They remember how they were discouraged, and how hungry they were, and how cold and how tired they were, and though now they may be between sixty and seventy years of age, they know just how a boy feels between ten and twenty, and how a young man feels between twenty and thirty. They have not forgotten it. Those wealthy employers were not originally let down out of heaven with pulleys of silk in a wicker-basket satin-lined, fanned by cherubic wings. They started in roughest cradle, on whose rocker misfortune put her violent foot and tipped them into the cold world. Those old men are sympathetic with the boys. But you are not only to be kind to those who are under you—Christianly kind—but you are also to see that your head clerks and your agents and your overseers in stores are kind to those under them. Sometimes men will get a little brief authority in a store or in a factory, and while they are very courteous to you, the capitalist, or to you, the head man of the firm, they are most brutal in their treatment of those under them. God only knows what some of the lads suffer in the cellars and in the lofts of some of our great establishments. They have no one to appeal to. The time will come when their arm will be strong, and they can defend themselves, but not now. Alas! for some of the cash boys and the messenger boys and the boys that sweep the store. Alas! for some of them. Now, you, the capitalist, you, the head man of the firm, must look, supervise, see those all around you, investigate all beneath you. And then I charge you not to put unnecessary temptation in the way of your young men. Do not keep large sums of money lying around unguarded. Know how much money there is in the till. Do not have the account-books loosely kept. There are temptations inevitable to young men, and enough of them, without your putting any unnecessary temptation in their way. Men in Wall Street having thirty years of reputation for honesty have dropped into Sing Sing and perdition, and you must be careful how you try a lad of fifteen. And if he do wrong, do not pounce on him like a hyena. If he prove himself unworthy of your confidence, do not call in the police, but give him another chance, or take him home and tell why you dismissed him, to those who will give him another chance. Many a young man has done wrong once who will never do wrong again. Ah, my friends! I think we can afford to give everybody another chance, when God knows we should all have been in perdition if he had not given us ten thousand chances. Then, if in moving around your store you are inexorable with young men, God will remember it. Some day the wheel of fortune will turn, and you will be a pauper, and your daughter will go to the workhouse and your son will die on the scaffold. If in moving among your young men you see one with an ominous pallor of the cheek, or you hear him coughing behind the counter, say to him, “Stay home a day or two and rest,” or, “Go out and breathe the breath of the hills.” If his mother die, do not demand that on the day after the funeral he be in the store. Give him at least one week to get over that which he will never get over. O employers, urge upon your employees above all, a positively religious life. You can do it. You are in a position not to be laughed at, or jeered at, or scoffed at. You hold the keys of that establishment, and by your position you have a claim on their reverence. Now, urge all those employees into a religious life. So far from that, how is it, young men? Instead of being cheered on the road to heaven, some of you are caricatured, and it is a hard thing for you to keep your Christian integrity in that store or factory where there are so many hostile to religion. Zethan, a brave general under Frederick the Great, was a Christian. Frederick the Great was an infidel. One day Zethan, the venerable, white haired general, asked to be excused from military duty that he might attend the holy sacrament. He was excused. A few days after Zethan was dining with the king and with many notables of Prussia, when Frederick the Great, in a jocose way, said, “Well, Zethan, how did the sacrament of last Friday digest?” Then the venerable old warrior arose and said: “For your majesty I have risked my life many a time on the battlefield, and for your majesty I would be willing any time to die; but you do wrong when you insult the Christian religion. You will forgive me if I, your old military servant, cannot bear in silence any insult to my Lord and Saviour.” Frederick the Great leaped to his feet, and he put out his hand, and he said, “Happy Zethan, forgive me, forgive me; you will never be bothered again.” Oh, there are many being scoffed at for their religion, and I thank God there are many young men as brave as Zethan. Go to heaven yourself, O employer! Take all your people with you. Soon you will be through buying and selling, and through with manufacturing and building, and God will ask you, “Where are all those people over whom you had so great influence? Are they here? Will they be here?” O ship-owners, into what harbor will your crew sail? After being tossed on so many seas, will they gain the port of heaven? O bankers, will those young men who are running up and down the long lines of figures, and handling the checks and the drafts, and handling the rolls of government securities, answer right that question of profit and loss: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Are they keeping their accounts right with God?—the credit account of mercies received, and the debt account of sins forgiven. O you dry-goods merchants, are those young men under your care, who are providing fabrics of apparel for head and hand and foot and back, to go unclothed into eternity? O you merchant grocers, are those young men that under your care are providing food for the bodies and the families of men, to go starved forever? O you manufacturers of the United States, with so many wheels flying, and so many bands pulling, and so many new patterns turned out, and so many goods shipped—are the spinners, are the carmen, are the draymen, are the salesmen, are the watchers of your establishment working out everything but their own salvation? Can it be that, having those people under your care five, ten, twenty years, you have made no everlasting impression for good on their immortal souls? God turn us all back from such selfishness, and teach us to live for others and not for ourselves. Christ sets us the example of sacrifice, and so do many of his disciples. In California, a gentleman who had just returned from the Sandwich Islands told me this incident. He said that which you know, that one of the Sandwich Islands is devoted to lepers. People getting sick of the leprosy on the other islands are sent to that isle of lepers. They never come off. They are in different stages of the disease, but all that die on that island die of leprosy. On one of the healthy islands there was a physician who always wore his hand gloved, and it was often discussed why he always had a glove on that hand, under all circumstances. One day this physician came to the city authorities, and he withdrew his glove and he said to the officers of the law, “You see on that hand a spot of the leprosy, and that I am doomed to die. I might hide this for a little while, and keep away from the isle of lepers; but I am a physician, and I can go on that island and administer to the sufferings of those who are further gone in the disease, and I should like to go now. It would be selfish in me to stay amid these luxurious surroundings when I might be of so much help to the wretched. Send me to the isle of lepers.” They, seeing the spot of leprosy, of course took the man into custody. He bade farewell to his family and to his friends. It was an agonizing parting. He could never see them again. He was taken to the isle of lepers, and there wrought among the sick until prostrated by his own death, which at last came. Oh, that was magnificent self-denial, magnificent sacrifice, only surpassed by that of him who exiled himself from the health of heaven to this leprous island of a world that he might physician our wounds and weep our griefs and die our deaths, turning this isle of a leprous world into a great blooming paradisiacal garden. Whether employer or employee, let us catch that spirit. I can do no better thing for you than to give you both the salutation of Boaz to the reapers and of the reapers to Boaz: “The Lord be with thee. The Lord bless thee.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 91: 089. A BROODING GOD ======================================================================== A Brooding God Ruth 2:12 : “The Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.” Scene: An Oriental harvest-field. Grain standing. Grain in swaths. Grain in sheaves. At the side of the field, a white tent in which to take the nooning, jars of vinegar or of sour wine to quench the thirst of the hot working-people. Swarthy men striking their sickles into the rustling barley. Others twisting the bands for the sheaves, putting one end of the band under the arm, and with the free arm and foot collecting the sheaf. Sun-burned women picking up the stray straws and bringing them to the binders. Boaz, a fine-looking Oriental, gray-bearded and bright-faced, the owner of the field, looking on, and estimating the value of the grain and calculating so many ephahs to the acre; and, with his large, sympathetic heart, pitying the overtasked workmen and the women, with faces white enough to faint, in the hot noonday sun. But there is one woman who especially attracts the man’s attention. She is soon to be with him the joint owner of the field. She has come from a distant land for the sole purpose of being kind to an aged woman. I know not what her features were; but when the Lord God sets behind a woman’s face the lamp of courage and faith and self-sacrifice there comes out a glory independent of features. She is to be the ancestress of Jesus Christ. Boaz, owner of the field, as soon as he understands that it is Ruth, accosts her with the blessing: “A full reward be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.” Christ compares himself to a hen gathering the chickens under her wings. In Deuteronomy, God is represented as an eagle stirring up her nest. In a great many places in the Psalms, David makes ornithological allusions; while my text mentions the wings of God, under which a poor, weary soul had come to trust. I ask your attention, therefore, this morning, while, taking the suggestion of my text, I speak to you in all simplicity and love of the wings of the Almighty. First, I remark that they were swift wings under which Ruth had come to trust. There is nothing in all the handiwork of God more curious than a bird’s wing. You have been surprised, sometimes, to see how far it could fly with one stroke of the wing; and, when it has food in prospect or when it is affrighted the pulsations of the bird’s wing are unimaginable for velocity. The English lords used to pride themselves on the speed of their falcons. These birds, when trained, had in them the dart of the lightning. How swift were the carrier-pigeons in the time of Antony and at the siege of Jerusalem! Wonderful speed! A carrier-pigeon was thrown up at Rouen and came down at Ghent—ninety miles off—in one hour. The carrier-pigeons were the telegraphs of the olden time. Swallows have been shot in our latitude having the undigested rice of Georgia swamps in their crops, showing that they had come four hundred miles in six hours. It has been estimated that, in the ten years of a swallow’s life, it flies far enough to have gone around the world eighty-nine times, so great is its velocity. And so the wings of the Almighty, spoken of in the text, are swift wings. They are swift when they drop upon a foe, and swift when they come to help God’s friends. If a father and his son be walking by the way and the child goes too near a precipice, how long does it take for the father to deliver the child from danger? Longer than it takes God to swoop for the rescue of His children. The fact is that you can not get away from the care of God. If you take the steamship, or the swift rail-train, he is all the time along with you. “Whither shall I go from thy spirit, and whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold! thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall hold me.” The Arabian gazelle is swift as the wind. If it gets but one glimpse of the hunter, it puts many crags between. Solomon four or five times compares Christ to an Arabian gazelle (calling it by another name) when he says: “My beloved is like a roe.” The difference is, that the roe speeds the other way; Jesus speeds this. Who but Christ could have been quick enough to help Peter, when the water-pavement broke? Who but Christ could have been quick enough to help the Duke of Argyle, when, in his dying moment, he cried: “Good cheer! I could die like a Roman, but I mean to die like a Christian. Come away, gentlemen. He who goes first, goes cleanest?” I had a friend who stood by the rail-track at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, when the ammunition had given out at Antietam; and he saw the train from Harrisburg, freighted with shot and shell, as it went thundering down toward the battlefield. He said that it stopped not for any crossing. They put down the brakes for no grade. They held up for no peril. The wheels were on fire with the speed as they dashed past. If the train did not come up in time with the ammunition, it might as well not come at all. So, my friends, there are times in our lives when we must have help immediately or perish. The grace that comes too late is no grace at all. What you and I want is a God—now. Oh! is it not blessed to think that God is always so quick in the rescue of his dear children? When a sinner seeks pardon, or a baffled soul needs help, swifter than thrush’s wing, swifter than swallow’s wing, swifter than ptarmigan’s wing, swifter than flamingo’s wing, swifter than eagle’s wing, are the wings of the Almighty. I remark further, carrying out the idea of my text, that the wings under which Ruth had come to trust were very broad wings. There have been eagles shot on the Rocky Mountains with wings that were seven feet from tip to tip. When the king of the air sits on the crag, the wings are spread over all the eaglets in the eyrie, and when the eagle starts from the rock, the shadow is like the spreading of a storm-cloud. So the wings of God are broad wings. Ruth had been under those wings in her infantile days; in the days of her girlhood in Moab; in the day when she gave her hand to Mahlon, in her first marriage; in the day when she wept over his grave; in the day when she trudged out into the wilderness of poverty; in the day when she picked up the few straws of barley dropped by ancient custom in the way of the poor. Oh! yes, the wings of God are broad wings. They cover up all our wants, all our sorrows, all our sufferings. He puts one wing over our cradle, and he puts the other over our grave. Yes, my dear friends, it is not a desert in which we are placed; it is a nest. Sometimes it is a very hard nest, like that of the eagle, spread on the rock, with ragged moss and rough sticks, but still it is a nest; and, although it may be very hard under us, over us are the wings of the Almighty. There sometimes comes a period in one’s life when he feels forsaken. There has been such a period in your life. You said, “Every thing is against me. The world is against me. The Church is against me. No sympathy; no hope. Everybody that comes near me thrusts at me. I wonder if there is a God, anyhow!” Everything seems to be going slipshod and at haphazard. There does not seem to be any hand on the helm. Job’s health fails. David’s Absalom gets to be a reprobate. Martha’s brother dies. Abraham’s Sarah goes into the grave of Machpelah. “Woe worth the day in which I was born!” has said many a Christian. David seemed to scream out in his sorrow, as he said: “Is his mercy clear gone forever? And will he be favorable no more? And hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?” Job, with his throat swollen and ulcered until he could not even swallow the saliva that ran into his mouth, exclaims: “How long before thou wilt depart from me, and leave me alone, that I may swallow down my spittle?” Have there never been times in your life when you envied those who were buried? when you longed for the grave-digger to do his work for you? I have seen such days. Oh, the faithlessness of the human heart! God’s wings are broad, whether we know it or not. Sometimes the mother-bird goes away from the nest, and it seems very strange that she should leave the callow young. She plunges her beak into the bark of the tree, and then drops into the grain-field, and into the chaff at the barn-door, and into the furrow of the plowboy. Meanwhile, the birds in the nest shiver and complain and call and wonder why the mother-bird does not come back. Ah! she has gone for food. After a while there is a whirr of wings, and the mother-bird stands on the edge of the nest and the little ones open their mouths and the food is dropped in; and then the old bird spreads out her feathers, and all is peace. But sometimes God leaves us. He goes off to get food for our soul; and then he comes back after a while to the nest, and says, “Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it;” and he drops into it the sweet promises of his grace, and the love of God is shed abroad, and we are under his wings—broad wings of the Almighty. Yes; they are very broad! There is room under those wings for the thousand millions of the race. You say: “Do not get the invitation too large, for there is nothing more awkward than to have more guests than accommodations.” I know it. The Seamen’s Friend Society is inviting all the sailors. The Tract Society is inviting all the destitute. The Sabbath-schools are inviting all the children. The Missionary Society is inviting all the heathen. The printing-presses of Bible societies are going night and day, doing nothing but printing invitations to this great Gospel banquet. And are you not afraid that there will be more guests than accommodations? No! All who have been invited will not half fill up the table of God’s supply. There are chairs for more. There are cups for more. God could with one feather of his wing cover up all those who have come; and when he spreads out both wings, they cover all the earth and all the heavens. Ye Israelites, who went through the Red Sea, come under! Ye multitudes who have gone into glory for the last six thousand years, come under! Ye hundred and forty-four thousand, and the thousands of thousands, come under! Ye flying cherubim and archangel, fold your pinions, and come under! And yet there is room! Ay! if God would have all the space under his wings occupied, he must make other worlds, and people them with other myriads, and have other Resurrection and Judgment days; for broader than all space, broader than thought, wide as eternity, from tip to tip, are the wings of the Almighty! Under such provision as that can you not rejoice? Come under, ye wandering, ye weary, ye troubled, ye sinning, ye dying souls! Come under the wings of the Almighty, Whosoever will come, let him come. However ragged, however wretched, however abandoned, however woebegone, there is room enough under the wings—under the broad wings of the Almighty! Oh, what a Gospel! So glorious, so magnificent in its provisions! I love to preach it. It is my life to preach it. It is my heaven to preach it. I remark, further, that the wings under which Ruth came to trust were strong wings. The strength of a bird’s wing—of a sea-fowl’s wing, for example—you might guess it from the fact that sometimes for five, six or seven days it seems to fly without resting. There have been condors in the Andes that could overcome an ox or a stag. There have been eagles that have picked up children and swung them to the top of the cliffs. The flap of an eagle’s wing has death in it to everything it strikes. There are birds whose wings are packed with strength to fly, to lift, to destroy. So the wings of God are strong wings Mighty to save. Mighty to destroy. I preach him—”the Lord, strong and mighty—the Lord, mighty in battle!” He flapped his wing, and the antediluvian world was gone. He flapped his wing, and Babylon perished. He flapped his wing, and Herculaneum was buried. He flapped his wing, and the Napoleonic dynasty ceased. Before the stroke of that pinion a fleet is nothing. An army is nothing. An empire is nothing. A world is nothing. The universe is nothing. King—Eternal, Omnipotent—he asks no counsel from the thrones of heaven. He takes not the archangel into his cabinet. He wants none to draw his chariots, for they are the winds. None to load his batteries, for they are the lightnings. None to tie the sandals of his feet, for they are the clouds. He is the Lord God Almighty—a truth that is sad or glad, just according to the position you occupy—just as the castle is grand or terrible, according as you are inside or outside of it. If you are inside of it, it is your defense. If you are outside of it, it is your destruction. The Lord God is a tower, a stronghold, a fortress. Found in him—oh, the gladness of this truth I am preaching! The mighty God. Mighty to save. Our enemies may be strong. Our sorrows may be violent. Our sins may be great. But quicker than an eagle ever hurled down from the crags a hawk or a raven, will the Lord God strike back our sins and our temptations if they assault us when we are once seated on the eternal rock of his salvation. What a blessed thing it is to be defended by the strong wing of the Almighty! Stronger than the pelican’s wing, stronger than the albatross’s wing, stronger than the condor’s wing, are the wings of the Almighty. I have only one more thought to present. The wings under which Ruth had come to trust were gentle wings. There is nothing softer than a feather. You have noticed, when a bird returns from flight, how gently it stoops over the nest. The young birds are not afraid of having their lives trampled out by the mother-bird. The old whip-poor-will drops into its nest of leaves, the oriole into its casket of bark, the humming-bird into its hammock of moss—gentle as the light. And so, says the Psalmist, “He shall cover thee with his wing.” Oh, the gentleness of God! But even that figure does not fully set it forth; for I have sometimes looked into the bird’s nest and seen a dead bird—its life having been trampled out by the mother-bird. But no one that ever came under the feathers of the Almighty was trodden on. Blessed nest! warm nest! Why will men stay out in the cold, to be shot of temptation and to be chilled by the blast, when there is this divine shelter? More beautiful than any flower I ever saw are the hues of a bird’s plumage. Did you ever examine it? The blackbird, floating like a flake of darkness through the sunlight; the meadow-lark, with head of fawn and throat of velvet and breast of gold; the red flamingo, flying over the Southern swamps, like sparks from the forge of the setting sun; the pelican, white and black—morning and night tangled in its wings—give but a faint idea of the beauty that comes down over the soul when on it drop the feathers of the Almighty. Here fold your weary wings! This is the only safe nest. Every other nest will be destroyed. The prophet says so: “Though thou exalt thyself like the eagle, and set thy nest among the stars, yet will I bring thee down, saith the Lord of Hosts.” Under the swift wings, under the broad wings, under the strong wings, under the gentle wings of the Almighty, find shelter until these calamities be overpast. Then, when you want to change nests, it will only be from the valley of earth to the heights of heaven; and instead of “the wings of a dove,” for which David longed, not knowing that in the first mile of their flight they would give out, you will be conducted upward by the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings Ruth, the beautiful Moabitess, came to trust. God forbid that in this matter of eternal weal or woe we should be more stupid than the fowls of heaven; “for the stork knoweth her appointed time; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their going; but my people know not the judgments of the Lord.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 92: 090. 1 SAMUEL ======================================================================== 1 Samuel ======================================================================== CHAPTER 93: 091. THE CHRISTIAN MOTHER ======================================================================== The Christian Mother 1 Samuel 2:19 : “Moreover, his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him from year to year, when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice.” The story of Deborah and Abigail is very apt to discourage a woman’s soul. She says within herself, “It is impossible that I ever can achieve any such grandeur of character, and I don’t mean to try;” as though a child should refuse to play the eight notes because he cannot execute a “William Tell.” This Hannah of the text differs from the persons I just now named. She was an ordinary woman, with ordinary intellectual capacity, placed in ordinary circumstances, and yet, by extraordinary piety, standing out before all the ages to come, the model Christian mother. Hannah was the wife of Elkanah, who was a person very much like herself—unromantic and plain, never having fought a battle or been the subject of a marvelous escape. Neither of them would have been called a genius. Just what you and I might be, that was Elkanah and Hannah. The brightest time in all the history of that family was the birth of Samuel. Although no star ran along the heavens pointing down to his birthplace, I think the angels of God stooped at the coming of so wonderful a prophet. As Samuel had been given in answer to prayer, Elkanah and all his family, save Hannah, started up to Shiloh to offer sacrifices of thanksgiving. The cradle where the child slept was altar enough for Hannah’s grateful heart, but when the boy was old enough she took him to Shiloh and took three bullocks and an ephah of flour and a bottle of wine, and made offering of sacrifice unto the Lord, and there, according to a previous vow, she left him; for there he was to stay all the days of his life and minister in the tabernacle. Years rolled on, and every year Hannah made with her own hand a garment for Samuel, and took it over to him. The lad would have got along well without that garment, for I suppose he was well clad by the ministry of the tabernacle; but Hannah could not be contented unless she was all the time doing something for her darling boy. “Moreover, his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him from year to year, when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice.” Hannah stands before you, then, in the first place, as an industrious mother. There was no need for her to work. Elkanah, her husband, was far from poor. He belonged to a distinguished family; for the Bible tells us that he was the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of John, the son of Zuph. “Who were they?” you say. I do not know; but they were distinguished people, no doubt, or their names would not have been mentioned. Hannah might have seated herself with her family, with folded arms and disheveled hair, reading novels from year to year, if there had been any to read; but when I see her making that garment and taking it over to Samuel, I know she is industrious from principle as well as from pleasure. God would not have a mother become a drudge or a slave; he would have her employ all the helps possible in this day in the rearing of her children. But Hannah ought never to be ashamed to be found making a coat for Samuel. Most mothers need no counsel in this direction. The wrinkles on their brow, the pallor on their cheek, the thimble-mark on their finger, attest that they are faithful in their maternal duties. The bloom and the brightness and the vivacity of girlhood have given place to the grander dignity and usefulness and industry of motherhood. But there is a heathenish idea getting abroad in some of the families of Americans; there are mothers who banish themselves from the home circle. For three-fourths of their maternal duties they prove themselves incompetent. They are ignorant of what their children wear and what their children eat and what their children read. They intrust to irresponsible persons these young immortals, and allow them to be under influences which may cripple their bodies or taint their purity or spoil their manners or destroy their souls. From the awkward cut of Samuel’s coat you know his mother Hannah did not make it. Out from under flaming chandeliers, and off from imported carpets, and down the granite stairs, there has come a great crowd of children in this day, untrained, saucy, incompetent for all practical duties of life, ready to be caught in the first whirl of crime and sensuality. Indolent and unfaithful mothers will make indolent and unfaithful children. You cannot expect neatness and order in any house where the daughters see nothing but slatternliness and upside-downativeness in their parents. Let Hannah be idle, and most certainly Samuel will grow up idle. Who are the industrious men in all our occupations and professions? Who are they managing the merchandise of the world, building the walls, tinning the roofs, weaving the carpets, making the laws, governing the nations, making the earth to quake and heave and roar and rattle with the tread of gigantic enterprises? Who are they? For the most part they descended from industrious mothers, who, in the old homestead, used to spin their own yarn and weave their own carpets and plait their own door-mats and flag their own chairs and do their own work. The stalwart men and the influential women of this day, ninety-nine out of a hundred of them, came from such an illustrious ancestry of hard knuckles and homespun. And who are these people in society, light as froth, blown every whither of temptation and fashion—the peddlers of filthy stories, the dancing-jacks of political parties, the scum of society, the tavern-lounging, the store-infesting, the men of low wink and filthy chuckle and brass breast-pins and rotten associations? For the most part, they came from mothers idle and disgusting—the scandal-mongers of society, going from house to house, attending to everybody’s business but their own, believing in witches and ghosts, and horseshoes to keep the devil out of the churn, and by a godless life setting their children on the very verge of hell. The mothers of Samuel Johnson and of Alfred the Great and of Isaac Newton and of St. Augustine and of Richard Cecil and of President Edwards and of other great men for the most part were hard-working mothers. Now, while I congratulate all Christian mothers upon the wealth and the modern science which may afford them all kinds of help, let me say that every mother ought to be observant of her children’s walk, her children’s behavior, her children’s food, her children’s looks, her children’s companionships. However much help Hannah may have, I think she ought every year, at least, make one garment for Samuel. The Lord have mercy on the man who is so unfortunate as to have had a lazy mother. Again, Hannah stands before you as an intelligent mother. From the way in which she talked in this chapter, and from the way she managed this boy, you know she was intelligent. There are no persons in a community who need to be so wise and well-informed as mothers. Oh! this work of culture in children for this world and the next! This child is timid, and it must be roused up and pushed out into activity. This child is forward, and he must be held back and tamed down into modesty and politeness. Rewards for one, punishments for another. That which will make George will ruin John. The rod is necessary in one case, while a frown of displeasure is more than enough in another. Whipping and a dark closet do not exhaust all the rounds of domestic discipline. There have been children who have grown up and gone to glory without ever having had their ears boxed. Oh! how much care and intelligence are necessary in the rearing of children! But in this day, when there are so many books on the subject, no parent is excusable in being ignorant of the best mode of bringing up a child. If parents knew more of dietetics there would not be so many dyspeptic stomachs and weak nerves, and laggard livers among children. If parents knew more of physiology there would not be so many curved spines and cramped chests and inflamed throats and diseased lungs as there are among children. If parents knew more of art, and were in sympathy with all that is beautiful, there would not be so many children coming out into the world with boorish proclivities. If parents knew more of Christ, and practised more of his religion, there would not be so many little feet already starting on the wrong road, and all around us voices of riot and blasphemy would not come with such ecstasy of infernal triumph. The eaglets in the eyrie have no advantage over the eaglets of a thousand years ago; the kids have no superior way of climbing up the rocks than the old goats taught hundreds of years ago; the whelps know no more now than did the whelps of ages ago—they are taught no more by the lions of the desert; but it is a shame in this day, when there are so many opportunities of improving ourselves in the best manner of cultivating children, that so often there is no more advancement in this respect than there has been among the kids and the eaglets and the whelps. Again, Hannah stands before you as the type of a Christian mother. From her prayers and from the way she consecrated her boy to God, I know that she was good. A mother may have the finest culture, the most brilliant surroundings; but she is not fit for her duties unless she be a Christian mother. There may be well-read libraries in the house, and exquisite music in the parlor, and the canvases of the best artists adorning the walls, and the wardrobe be crowded with tasteful apparel, and the children be wonderful for their attainments, and make the house ring with laughter and innocent mirth; but there is something lacking in that house, if it is not also the residence of a Christian mother. I bless God that there are not many prayerless mothers. The weight of responsibility is so great that they feel the need of a divine hand to help and a divine voice to comfort and a divine heart to sympathize. Thousands of mothers have been led into the kingdom of God by the hands of their little children. There are hundreds of mothers who would not have been Christians had it not been for the prattle of their little ones. Standing some day in the nursery, they bethought themselves, “This child God has given me to raise for eternity. What is my influence upon it? Not being a Christian myself, how can I ever expect him to become a Christian? Lord help me!” Are there anxious mothers, who know nothing of the infinite help of religion? Then I commend to them Hannah, the pious mother of Samuel. Do not think it is absolutely impossible that your children come up iniquitous. Out of just such fair brows and bright eyes and soft hands and innocent hearts, crime gets its victims—extirpating purity from the heart, and rubbing out the smoothness from the brow, and quenching the lustre of the eye, and shriveling up and poisoning and putrefying and scathing and scalding and blasting and burning with shame and woe. Every child is a bundle of tremendous possibilities; and whether that child shall come forth to life, its heart attuned to the eternal harmonies, and after a life of usefulness on earth go to a life of joy in heaven; or whether across it shall jar eternal discords, and after a life of wrong-doing on earth it shall go to a home of impenetrable darkness and an abyss of immeasurable plunge, is being decided by nursery song and Sabbath lesson and evening prayer and walk and ride and look and frown and smile. Oh! how many children in glory crowding all the battlements, and lifting a million-voiced hosanna, brought to God through Christian parentage. One hundred and twenty clergymen were together, and they were telling their experience and their ancestry; and of the one hundred and twenty clergymen, how many of them, do you suppose, assigned as the means of their conversion the influence of a Christian mother? One hundred out of the one hundred and twenty! Philip Doddridge was brought to God by the Scripture lesson on the Dutch tile of a chimney fireplace. The mother thinks she is only rocking a child, but at the same time she may be rocking the fate of nations, rocking the glories of heaven. The same maternal power that may lift the child up may press a child down. A daughter came to a worldly mother and said she was anxious about her sins, and she had been praying all night. The mother said: “Oh, stop praying! I don’t believe in praying. Get over all these religious notions and I’ll give you a new dress that will cost five hundred dollars, and you may wear it next week to that party.” The daughter took the dress, and she moved in the gay circle, the gayest of all the gay, that night; and sure enough, all religious impressions were gone, and she stopped praying. A few months after she came to die, and in her closing moments said: “Mother, I wish you would bring me that dress that cost five hundred dollars.” The mother thought it a very strange request, but she brought it to please the dying child. “Now,” said the daughter, “mother, hang that dress on the foot of my bed,” and the dress was hung there, on the foot of the bed. Then the dying girl got up on one elbow and looked at her mother, and then pointed to the dress, and said: “Mother, that dress is the price of my soul!” Oh, what a momentous thing it is to be a mother! Again, and lastly, Hannah stands before you the rewarded mother. For all the coats she made for Samuel, for all the prayers she offered for him, for the discipline exerted over him, she got abundant compensation in the piety and the usefulness and the popularity of her son Samuel; and that is true in all ages. Every mother gets full pay for all the prayers and tears in behalf of her children. That man useful in commercial life; that man prominent in a profession; that master mechanic—why, every step he takes in life has an echo of gladness in the old heart that long ago taught him to be a Christian and heroic and earnest. The story of what you have done or what you have written, of the influence you have exerted, has gone back to the old homestead—for there is some one always ready to carry good tidings—and that story makes the needle in the old mother’s tremulous hand fly quicker, and the flail in the father’s hand come down upon the barn floor with a more vigorous thump. Parents love to hear good news from their children. Do you send them good news always? Look out for the young man who speaks of his father as “the governor,” the “squire,” or the “old chap.” Look out for the young woman who calls her mother her “maternal ancestor,” or the “old woman.” “The eye that mocketh at his father, and refuseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.” God grant that all these parents may have the great satisfaction of seeing their children grow up Christians. But oh! the pang of that mother who, after a life of street-gadding and gossip-retailing, hanging on the children the fripperies and follies of this world, sees those children tossed out on the sea of life like foam on the wave, or nonentities in a world where only bravery and stalwart character can stand the shock! But blessed be the mother who looks upon her children as sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty. Oh! the satisfaction of Hannah in seeing Samuel serving at the altar; of Mother Eunice in seeing her Timothy learned in the Scriptures. That is the mother’s recompense, to see children coming up useful in the world, reclaiming the lost, healing the sick, pitying the ignorant, earnest and useful in every sphere. That throws a new light back on the old family Bible whenever she reads it, and that will be ointment to soothe the aching limbs of decrepitude, and light up the closing hours of life’s day with the glories of an autumnal sunset! There she sits, the old Christian mother, ripe for heaven. Her eyesight is almost gone, but the splendors of the celestial city kindle up her vision. The gray light of heaven’s morn has struck through the gray locks which are folded back over the wrinkled temples. She stoops very much now under the burden of care she used to carry for her children. She sits at home, too old to find her way to the house of God; but while she sits there, all the past comes back, and the children that forty years ago tripped around her arm-chair with their griefs, and joys, and sorrows—those children are gone now. Some caught up into a better realm, where they shall never die, and others out in the broad world, attesting the excellency of a Christian mother’s discipline. Her last days are full of peace; and calmer and sweeter will her spirit become, until the gates of life shall lift and let the worn-out pilgrim into eternal springtide and youth, where the limbs never ache and the eyes never grow dim and the staff of the exhausted and decrepit pilgrim shall become the palm of the immortal athlete! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 94: 092. PARENTAL MISTAKES ======================================================================== Parental Mistakes 1 Samuel 4:18 : “He fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died; for he was an old man, and heavy.” This is the end of a long story of parental neglect. Judge Eli was a good man, but he let his two boys, Hophni and Phinehas, do as they pleased; and, through over-indulgence, they went to ruin. The blind old judge, ninety-eight years of age, is seated at the gate waiting for the news of an important battle in which his two sons were at the front. An express is coming, with tidings from the battle. This blind nonagenarian puts his hand behind his ear, and listens, and cries: “What meaneth the noise of this tumult?” An excited messenger, all out of breath with the speed, said to him: “Our army is defeated; the sacred chest, called the ark, is captured; and your sons are dead on the field!” No wonder the father fainted and expired. The domestic tragedy, in which these two sons were the tragedians, had finished its fifth and last act. “He fell from off the seat backward, by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died; for he was an old man, and heavy.” Eli had made an awful mistake in regard to his children. The Bible distinctly says: “His sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.” Oh, the ten thousand mistakes in rearing children—mistakes of parents, mistakes of teachers in day school and Sabbath classes, mistakes which we all make. Will it not be useful to consider them? This country is going to be conquered by a great army, compared with which that of Baldwin the First and Xerxes and Alexander and Grant and Lee, all put together, were in numbers insignificant. They will capture all our pulpits, storehouses, factories and halls of legislation; all our shipping, all our wealth and all our honors. They will take possession of all authority, from the United States Presidency down to the humblest constabulary—of everything between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. They are on the march now, and they halt neither day nor night. They will soon be here, and all the present active population of this country must surrender and give way. I refer to the great army of children. Whether they shall take possession of everything for good or for bad depends upon the style of preparation through which they pass on their way from cradle to throne. Cicero acknowledges that he kept in his desk a collection of prefaces for books, which prefaces he could at any time attach to anything he wanted to publish for himself or others; and all parents and teachers have all prepared the preface of every young life under their charge, and not only the preface, but the appendix, whether the volume be a poem or a farce. Families and schools and legislatures are in our day busily engaged in discussing what is the best mode of educating children. Before this question almost every other dwindles into insignificance, while dependent upon the proper solution is the welfare of governments and ages eternal. Carlyle tells of the war which Frederick the Second made against Queen Maria Theresa. One day she appeared before the august Diet, wearing mourning for her father, and held up in her arms before them her child, the Archduke. This so wrought upon the officers and deputies of the people that, with half-drawn swords, they broke forth in the war-cry: “Let us die for our Queen, Maria Theresa!” So, realizing that the boy of today is to be the ruler of the future, the popular sovereign, I hold him before the American people to arouse their enthusiasm in his behalf, and to evoke their oath for his defense, his education and his destiny. If a parent, you will remember when you were aroused to these great responsibilities, and when you found that you had not done all required, after you had admired the tiny hands and the glossy hair and the bright eyes that lay in the cradle, you suddenly remembered that that hand would yet be raised to bless the world with its benediction or to smite it with a curse. In Ariosto’s great poem there is a character called Ruggiero, who has a shield of insufferable splendor, but it is kept veiled, save on certain occasions; and when uncovered, it startled and overwhelmed its beholder, who before had no suspicion of its brightness. My hope today is to uncover the destiny of your child or student, about which you may have no especial appreciation, and flash upon you the splendors of its immortal nature. Behold the shield and the sword of the coming conflict! I propose in this discourse to set forth what I consider to be some of the errors prevalent in the training of children. First, I remark that many err in too great severity or too great laxity of family government. Between parental tyranny and ruinous looseness of discipline there is a medium. Sometimes the father errs on the one side and the mother on the other side. Good family government is all-important. Anarchy and misrule in the domestic circle are forerunners of anarchy and misrule in the State. In the attempt to avoid all this, and bring the children under proper laws and regulations, parents have sometimes ruled with great rigor. John Howard, who was merciful to the prisons and lazarettos, was merciless in the treatment of his children. John Milton knew everything but how to train his family. Severe and unreasonable was he in his carriage toward them. He made them read to him in four or five languages, but would not allow them to learn any of them; for, he said, that one tongue was enough for a woman. Their reading was mechanical drudgery, when, if they had understood the languages they read, the employment of reading might have been a luxury. No wonder his children despised him, and stealthily sold his books and hoped for his death. In all ages there is need of a society for the prevention of cruelty to children. When Barbara was put to death by her father because she had countermanded his order, and had three windows put into a room instead of two, this cruel parent was a type of many who have acted the Nero and the Robespierre in the home circle. The heart sickens at what you sometimes see, even in families that pretend to be Christian—perpetual scolding and hair-pulling and ear-boxing and thumping and stamping and faultfinding and teasing, until the children are vexed beyond bounds and growl in the sleeve and pout and rebel, and vow within themselves that in after days they will retaliate. That child’s nature is too delicate to be worked upon by sledge-hammer and gouge and pile-driver. Such fierce lashing, instead of breaking the high mettle to bit and trace, will make it dash off the more uncontrollable. Many seem to think that children are flax—not fit for use till they have been hetcheled and swingled. Some one talking to a child said: “I wonder what makes that tree out there so crooked.” The child replied: “I suppose it was trod on while it was young.” In some families all the discipline is concentrated upon one child’s head. If anything is done wrong, the supposition is that George did it. He broke the latch. He left open the gate. He hacked the bannisters. He whittled sticks on the carpets. And George shall be the scapegoat for all misunderstandings and suspicions. In many a household there is such an one singled out for suspicion and castigation. All the sweet flowers of his soul blasted under this perpetual northeast storm, he curses the day in which he was born. A mother was passing along the street one day, and came up to her little child, who did not see her approach, and her child was saying to her playmate: “You good-for-nothing little scamp, you come right into the house this minute or I will beat you till the skin comes off.” The mother broke in, saying: “Why, Lizzie, I am surprised to hear you talk like that to any one!” “Oh,” said the child, “I was only playing, and he is my little boy, and I am scolding him, as you did me this morning.” Children are apt to be echoes of their parents. Safer in a Bethlehem manger among cattle and camels with gentle Mary to watch the little innocent than the most extravagant nursery over which God’s star of peace never stood. Yet we may rush to the other extreme and rule children by too great leniency. The surgeon is not unkind because notwithstanding the resistance of his patient he goes straight on with firm hand and unfaltering heart to take off the gangrene. Nor is the parent less affectionate and faithful because, notwithstanding all violent remonstrances on the part of the child, he with the firmest discipline advances to the cutting off of its evil inclinations. The Bible says: “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.” Childish rage unchecked will, after a while, become a hurricane. Childish petulance will grow up into misanthropy. Childish rebellion will develop into the lawlessness of riot and sedition. If you would ruin the child, dance to his every caprice and stuff him with confectionery. Before you are aware of it that boy of six years will go down the street, a cigar in his mouth and ready on any corner with his comrades to compare pugilistic attainments. The parent who allows the child to grow up without ever having learned the great duty of obedience and submission has prepared a cup of burning gall for his own lips and appalling destruction for his descendant. Remember Eli and his two sons, Hophni and Phinehas. A second error prevalent in the training of children is a laying out of a theory and following it without adapting it to varieties of disposition. In every family you will find striking differences of temperament. This child is too timid and that too bold and this too miserly and that too wasteful; this too inactive and that too boisterous. Now, the farmer who should plant corn and wheat and turnips in just the same way, then put them through one hopper and grind them in the same mill, would not be so much of a fool as the parents who should attempt to discipline and educate all their children in the same manner. It needs a skilful hand to adjust these checks and balances. The rigidity of government which is necessary to hold in this impetuous nature would utterly crush that flexible disposition, while the gentle reproof that would suffice for the latter, would, when used on the former, be like attempting to hold a champing Bucephalus with reins of gossamer. God gives us in the disposition of each child a hint as to how we ought to train him, and, as God in the mental structure of our children indicates what mode of training is the best, he also indicates in the disposition their future occupation. Do not write down that child as dull, because it may not now be as brilliant as your other children or as those of your neighbor. Some of the mightiest men and women of the centuries had a stupid childhood. Thomas Aquinas was called at school “the dumb ox,” but afterward demonstrated his sanctified genius and was called “the angel of the schools” and “the eagle of Brittany.” Kindness and patience with a child will conquer almost anything, and they are virtues so Christlike that they are inspiring to look at. John Wesley’s kiss of a child on the pulpit stairs turned Matthias Joyce from a profligate into an evangel. The third error prevalent in the training of children is the one-sided development of either the physical, intellectual or moral nature at the expense of the others. Those, for instance, greatly mistake who, while they are faithful in the intellectual and moral culture of children, forget the physical. The bright eyes half quenched by night study, the cramped chest that comes from too much bending over school desks, the weak side resulting from sedentariness of habit, pale cheeks and the gaunt bodies of multitudes of children attest that physical development does not always go along with intellectual and moral. How do you suppose all those treasures of knowledge the child gets will look in shattered casket? And how much will you give for the wealthiest cargo when it is put into a leaky ship? From this infinite blunder of parents how many have come out in life with a genius that could have piled Ossa upon Pelion and mounted upon them to scale the heavens, but have laid down panting with physical exhaustion before a mole-hill. They who might have thrilled senates and marshaled armies and startled the world with the shock of their scientific batteries, have passed their lives in picking up prescriptions for indigestion. They owned all the thunderbolts of Jupiter, but could not get out of their rocking-chair to use them. George Washington in early life was a poor speller, and used to spell hat h-a-double-t and a ream of paper he spelled “rheam,” but he knew enough to spell out the independence of this country from foreign oppression. The knowledge of the schools is important, but there are other things quite as important. Just as great is the wrong done when the mind is cultivated and the heart neglected. The youth of this day are seldom denied any scholarly attainments. Our schools and seminaries are ever growing in efficiency, and the students are conducted through all the realms of philosophy and art and language and mathematics. The most hereditary obtuseness gives way before the onslaught of adroit instructors. But there is a development of infinite importance which mathematics and the dead languages cannot affect. The more mental power, the more capacity for evil, unless coupled with religious restraint. Whether knowledge is a mighty good or an unmitigated evil depends entirely upon which course it takes. The river rolling on between round banks makes all the valley laugh with golden wheat and rank grass, and catching hold the wheel of mill and factory, whirls it with great industries. But, breaking away from restraints and dashing over banks in red wrath, it washes away harvests from their moorings and makes the valleys shrink with the catastrophe. Fire in the furnace heats the house or drives the steamer; but, uncontrolled, warehouses go down in awful crash before it, and in a few hours half a city will lie in black ruin, walls and towers and churches and monuments. You must accompany the education of the intellect with the education of the heart, or you are rousing up within your child an energy which will be blasting and terrific. Better a wicked dunce than a wicked philosopher. The fourth error often committed in the training of children is the suppression of childish sportfulness. Parents, having for a good many years been jostled about in the rough world, often lose their vivacity, and are astonished to see their children act with so little thought of the earnest world all about them. That is a cruel parent who quenches any of the light in a child’s soul. Instead of arresting his sportfulness, go forth and help him trundle the hoop and fly the kite and build the snow castle. Those shoulders are too little to carry a burden; that brow is too young to be wrinkled; those feet are too sprightly to go along at a funeral pace. God bless their young hearts! Now is the time for them to be sportful. The fifth error in the training of childhood is the postponement of its moral culture until too late. Multitudes of children, because of their precocity, have been urged into depths of study where they ought not to go, and their intellects have been overburdened and overstrained and battered to pieces against Latin grammars and algebras, and coming forth into practical life they will hardly rise to mediocrity, and there is now a stuffing and cramming system of education in the schools of our country that is deathful to the teachers who have to enforce it, and destructive to the children who must submit to the process. You find children at nine and ten years of age with school lessons appropriate only for children of fifteen. If children are kept in school and studying from nine to three o’clock, no home study, except music, ought to be required of them. Six hours of study is enough for any child. The rest of the day ought to be devoted to recreation and pure fun. But you cannot begin too early the moral culture of a child or on too complete a scale. You can look back upon your own life and remember what mighty impressions were made upon you at five or six years of age. That child does not sit so silent during your conversation to be uninfluenced by it. You say he does not understand. Although much of the phraseology is beyond his grasp, he is gathering up from your talk influences which will affect his immortal destiny. From the question he asks you long afterward, you find he understood all about what you were saying. The song with which you sing the child to sleep will echo through all its life, and ring back from the very arches of heaven. I think that often the first seven years of a child’s life decide whether it shall be irascible, waspish, rude, false, hypocritical, or gentle, truthful, frank, obedient, honest and Christian. The present generations of men will pass off very much as they are now. Although the Gospel is offered them, the general rule is that drunkards die drunkards, thieves die thieves, libertines die libertines. Therefore to the youth we turn. Before they sow wild oats get them to sow wheat and barley. You fill the bushel measure with good corn, and there will be no room for husks. Glorious Alfred Cookman was converted at ten years of age. At Carlisle, Pennsylvania, during the progress of a religious meeting in the Methodist Church, while many were kneeling at the foot of the altar, this boy knelt in a corner of the church all by himself, and said: “Precious Saviour, thou art saving others; oh, wilt thou not save me?” A Presbyterian elder knelt beside him and led him into the light. Enthroned Alfred Cookman! Tell me from the skies, were you converted too early? But I cannot hear his answer. It is overpowered by the hosannas of the thousands who were brought to God through his ministry. Isaac Watts, the great Christian poet, was converted at nine years of age. Robert Hall, the great Baptist evangelist, was converted at twelve years of age. Jonathan Edwards, the greatest of American logicians, was converted at seven years of age. Oh for one generation of holy men and women! Shall it be the next? Fathers and mothers, you, under God, are to decide whether from your families shall go forth cowards, inebriates, counterfeiters, blasphemers, and whether there shall be those bearing your image and carrying your name festering in the low haunts of vice, and floundering in dissipation, and making the midnight of their lives horrid with a long howl of ruin, or whether from your family altars shall come the Christians, the reformers, the teachers, the ministers of Christ, the comforters of the troubled, the healers of the sick, the enacters of good laws, the founders of charitable institutions, and a great many who shall in the humbler spheres of toil and usefulness serve God and the best interests of the human race. You cannot as parents shirk the responsibility; God has charged you with a mission, and all the thrones of heaven are waiting to see whether you will do your duty. We must not forget that it is not so much what we teach our children, as what we are in their presence. We wish them to be better than we are, but the probability is that they will only be reproductions of ourselves. German literature has much to say of the “Spectre of the Brocken.” Among those mountains travelers, in certain conditions of the atmosphere, see themselves copied on a gigantic scale in the clouds. At first the travelers do not realize that it is themselves on a larger scale. When they lift a hand or move the head, this monster spectre does the same, and with such enlargement of proportions that the scene is most exciting, and thousands have gone to that place just to behold the spectre of the Brocken. The probability is that some of our faults which we consider small and insignificant, if we do not put an end to them, will be copied on a large scale in the lives of our children, and perhaps dilated and exaggerated into spectral proportions. You need not go as far off as the Brocken to see that process. The first thing in importance in the education of our children is to make ourselves, by the grace of God, fit examples for them to copy. From your side, that son or daughter, bone of your bone, heart of your heart, the father’s brow his brow, the mother’s eye his eye, shall go forth to an eternal destiny. What will be your joy if at last you hear their feet in the same golden highway and hear their voices in the same rapturous song, illustrations, while the eternal ages last, of what a faithful parent could, under God, accomplish. I was reading of a dying mother who had all her children about her, and took each one of them by the hand, and asked them to meet her in heaven, and with tears and sobs such as only those know who have stood by the deathbed of a good old mother, they all promised. But there was a young man of nineteen, who had been very wild and reckless, and hard and proud, and when she took his hand she said: “Now, my boy, I want you to promise me before I die that you will become a Christian and meet me in heaven.” The young man made no answer, for there was so much for him to give up if he made and kept such a promise. But the aged mother persisted in saying: “You won’t deny me that before I go, will you? This parting must not be forever. Tell me now you will serve God, and meet me in the land where there is no parting.” Quaking with emotion he stood, making up his mind and halting and hesitating, but at last his stubbornness yielded and he threw his arms around his mother’s neck, and said: “Yes, mother; I will, I will.” And as he finished the last word of his promise her spirit ascended. I thank God, the young man kept his promise. Yes; he kept it. May God give all mothers and fathers the gladness of their children’s salvation. For all who are trying to do their duty as parents, I quote the tremendous passage: “Train up a child in the way in which he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” If through good discipline and prayer and godly example you are acting upon that child, you have the right to expect him to grow up virtuous. And how many tears of joy you will shed when you see your child honorable and just and truthful and Christian and successful—a holy man amid a world of dishonesty, a godly woman in a world of frivolous pretension. When you come to die they will gather to bless your last hours. They will push back the white locks on your cold forehead, and say: “What a good father he always was to me!” They will fold your hands peacefully, and say: “Dear mother! She is gone. Her troubles are all over. Does she not look beautiful?” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 95: 093. THE STOLEN GRINDSTONES ======================================================================== The Stolen Grindstones 1 Samuel 13:19-21 : “Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel: for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears. But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his ax, and his mattock. Yet they had a file for the mattock, and for the coulters, and for the forks and for the axes, and to sharpen the goads.” What a galling subjugation for the Israelites! The Philistines had carried off all the blacksmiths, and torn down all the blacksmiths’ shops, and abolished the blacksmiths’ trade in the land of Israel. The Philistines would not even allow these people to work their valuable mines of copper and iron, nor might they make any swords or spears. There were only two swords left in all the land. Yea, these Philistines went on until they had taken all the grindstones from the land of Israel, so that if an Israelitish farmer wanted to sharpen his plow or his ax, he had to go over to the garrison of the Philistines to get it done. There was only one sharpening instrument left in the land, and that was a file; the farmers and the mechanics having nothing to whet up the coulter and the goad and the pick-ax, save a simple file. Industry was hindered and work practically suspended. The great idea of these Philistines was to keep the Israelites disarmed. They might get iron out of the hills to make swords of, but they would not have any blacksmiths to weld this iron. If they got the iron welded, they would have no grindstones on which to bring the instruments of agriculture or the military weapons up to an edge. Oh, you poor, weaponless Israelites, reduced to a file, how I pity you! But these Philistines were not forever to keep their heel on the neck of God’s children. Jonathan, on his hands and knees, climbs up a great rock, beyond which were the Philistines; and his armor-bearer, on his hands and knees, climbs up the same rock, and these two men, with their two swords, hew to pieces the Philistines, the Lord throwing a great terror upon them. So it was then; so it is now. Two men of God on their knees, mightier than a Philistine host on their feet! I learn, first, from this subject, that it is dangerous for the Church of God to allow its weapons to stay in the hands of its enemies. These Israelites might again and again have obtained a supply of swords and weapons, as for instance, when they took the spoils of the Ammonites; but these Israelites seemed content to have no swords, no spears, no blacksmiths, no grindstones, no active iron mines, until it was too late for them to make any resistance. I see the farmers tugging along with their pickaxes and plow, and I say, “Where are you going with those things?” They say, “Oh, we are going over to the garrison of the Philistines, to get these things sharpened.” I say, “You foolish men, why don’t you sharpen them at home?” “Oh,” they say, “the blacksmiths’ shops are all torn down, and we have nothing left us but a file.” So it is in the Church of Jesus Christ today. We are too willing to give up our weapons to the enemy. The world boasts that it has gobbled up the schools and the colleges and the arts and the sciences and the literature, and the printing-press. Infidelity is making a mighty attempt to get all our weapons in its hand, and then to keep them. You know it is making this boast all the time, and after a while, when the great battle between Sin and Righteousness has opened, if we do not look out we will be as badly off as these Israelites, without any swords to fight with and without any sharpening instruments. I call upon the superintendents of literary institutions to see to it that the men who go into the classrooms to stand beside the Leyden jars and the electric batteries and the microscopes and telescopes, be children of God, not Philistines. The Spencerian and Tyndallean thinkers of this day are trying to get all the intellectual weapons in their own grasp. We want scientific Christians to capture the science, and scholastic Christians to capture the scholarship, and philosophic Christians to capture the philosophy, and lecturing Christians to take back the lecturing platform. We want to send out against Schenkel and Strauss and Renan, a Theodore Christlieb, of Bonn, and against the infidel scientists of the day, a God-worshiping Silliman, a Hitchcock and an Agassiz. We want to capture all the philosophical apparatus, and swing around the telescopes on the swivel, until through them we can see the morning star of the Redeemer, and with mineralogical hammer discover the Rock of Ages, and amid the flora of all realms find the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley. We want a clergy learned enough to discourse of the human eye, showing it to be a microscope and telescope in one instrument, with eight wonderful contrivances, and lids closing thirty to forty thousand times a day; all its muscles and nerves and bones showing the infinite skill of an infinite God, and then winding up with the peroration, “He that formed the eye, shall he not see?” Then we want some one to discourse about the human ear, its wonderful integuments, membranes and vibratory nerves, and closing with the question, “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?” And we want some one able to expound the first chapter of Genesis, bringing to it the geology and the astronomy of the world, until, as Job suggested, “The stones of the field shall be in league” with the truth, and the stars in their course shall fight against Sisera. Oh, Church of God, go out and recapture these weapons! Let men of God go out and take possession of the platform. Let any printing-presses that have been captured by the enemy be recaptured for God; and the reporters and the typesetters and the editors and the publishers swear allegiance to the Lord God of Truth. Ah, my friend, that day must come, and if the great body of Christian men have not the faith, or the courage or the consecration to do it, then let some Jonathan on his busy hands and on his praying knees, climb up on the Rock of Hindrance, and in the name of the Lord God of Israel slash to pieces those literary Philistines. If these men will not be converted to God, then they must be overthrown. Again: I learn from this subject what a large amount of the Church’s resources is actually hidden, buried, and undeveloped. The Bible intimates that that was a very rich land, this land of Israel. It says, “The stones are iron, and out of the hills thou shalt dig brass;” and yet hundreds and thousands of dollars’ worth of this metal was kept under the hills. Well, that is the difficulty with the Church of God at this day. Its talent is not developed. If one half of its energy could be brought out, it might take the public iniquities of the day by the throat, and make them bite the dust. If human eloquence were consecrated to the Lord Jesus Christ, it would in a few years persuade this whole earth to surrender to God. There is enough undeveloped energy in one church to bring a city to Christ—enough undeveloped Christian energy in one city to bring all the United States to Christ—enough of undeveloped Christian energy in the United States to bring the whole world to Christ; but it is buried under strata of indifference, and under whole mountains of sloth. Now, is it not time for the mining to begin, for the pickaxes to plunge, and for this buried metal to be brought out and put into the furnaces, and be turned into howitzers and carbines for the Lord’s host? The vast majority of Christians in this day are useless. The most of the Lord’s army belong to the reserve corps. The most of the crew are asleep in the hammocks. The most of the metal is under the hills. Is it not time for the Church of God to rouse up and understand that we want all the energies, all the talent and all the wealth enlisted for Christ’s sake? I like the nickname that the English soldiers gave to Blucher, the commander. They called him “Old Forwards.” We have had enough retreats in the Church of Christ; let us have a glorious advance. And I say to you as the general said when his troops were affrighted—rising up in his stirrups, his hair flying in the wind, he lifted up his voice until twenty thousand troops heard him crying out, “Forward, the whole line!” We want all the laymen enlisted. Ministers are numerically too few. They do the best they can. They are the most overworked class on earth. Many of them die of dyspepsia because they cannot get the right kind of food to eat, or, getting the right kind, are so worried that they take it down in chunks. They die from consumption, coming from early and late exposure If a novelist or a historian publishes one book a year, he is considered industrious. But every faithful pastor must originate enough thought for three or four volumes a year. Ministers receive enough calls in a year from men who have maps and medicines and lightning-rods and pictures to sell, to exhaust their vitality. They are bored with agents of all sorts. They are set in draughts at funerals, and poisoned by the unventilated rooms of invalids, and waited upon by committees who want addresses made, until life becomes too heavy a burden to bear. It is not hard study that makes ministers look pale. It is the infinity of interruptions and botherations to which they are subjected. If I die before my time, it will be at the hand of committees that want a sermon or a lecture. A man called on me to give him a lecture, by which he might pay the expenses of his wedding trip. If there were fifty hours in each day of the year, and I worked forty of them, I could not do the work of one parish; and I am not behind most clergymen in disposition to toil. Numerically too weak. It is no more the work of the pulpit to convert and save the world than it is the work of the pew. If men go to ruin, there will be as much blood on your skirts as on mine. Let us quit this grand farce of trying to save the world by a few clergymen, and let all hands lay hold of the work. Give us, in all our churches, two or three aroused and qualified men and women to help. In most churches today five or ten men are compelled to do all the work. A vast majority of churches are at their wits’ end how to carry on a prayer-meeting if the minister is not there, when there ought to be enough pent-up energy and religious force to make a meeting go on with such power that the minister would never be missed. The Church stands working the pumps of a few ministerial cisterns until the buckets are dry and choked, while there are thousands of fountains from which might be dipped up the waters of eternal life. Before you and I have the sod pressing our eyelids we will, under God, decide whether our children shall grow up amid the accursed surroundings of vice and shame, or come to an inheritance of righteousness. Long, loud, bitter, will be the curse that scorches our grave if, holding within the Church today enough men and women to save the city, we act the coward or the drone. I wish I could put enough moral explosives under the conventionalities and majestic stupidities of the day to blow them to atoms, and that then, with fifty thousand men and women from all the churches, knowing nothing but Christ and a desire to bring all the world to him, we might move upon the enemy’s works. For a little while heaven would not have trumpets enough to celebrate the victories. Again: I learn from this subject that we sometimes do well to take advantage of the world’s grindstones. These Israelites were reduced to a file, and so they went over to the garrison of the Philistines to get their axes and their goads and their plows sharpened. My text distinctly states that they had no other instruments now with which to do this work, and the Israelites did right when they went over to the Philistines to use their grindstones. My friends, is it not right for us to employ the world’s grindstones. If there be art, if there be logic, if there be business faculty on the other side, let us go over and employ it, for Christ’s sake. The fact is, we fight with too dull weapons, and we work with too dull implements. We hack and we maul, when we ought to make a clean stroke. Let us go over among sharp business men and among sharp literary men and find out what their tact is, and then transfer it to the cause of Christ. If they have science and art, it will do us good to rub against it. In other words, let us employ the world’s grindstones. We will listen to their music, and we will watch their acumen, and we will use their grindstones, and will borrow their philosophical apparatus to make our experiments, and we will borrow their printing-presses to publish our Bibles, and we will borrow their rail-trains to carry our Christian literature, and we will borrow their ships to transport our missionaries. That was what made Paul such a master in his day. He not only got all the learning he could get of Doctor Gamaliel, but afterward, standing on Mars’ Hill, and in crowded thoroughfare, quoted contemporaneous Greek poetry, and grasped their logic, and wielded their eloquence, and employed their mythology, until Dionysius the Areopagite, learned in the schools of Athens and Heliopolis, went down under his tremendous power. That was what gave Thomas Chalmers his influence. He conquered the world’s astronomy and compelled it to ring out the wisdom and greatness of the Lord, until, for the second time, the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. That was what gave to Jonathan Edwards his influence in his day. He conquered the world’s metaphysics and forced it into the service of God, until not only the old meeting-house at Northampton, Massachusetts, but all Christendom, was thrilled by his Christian power. Now we all have tools of Christian power. Do not let them lose their edges. We want no rusty blades in this fight. We want no coulter that cannot rip up the glebe. We want no ax that cannot fell the trees. We want no goad that cannot start the lazy team. Let us get the very best grindstones we can find, though they be in possession of the Philistines, compelling them to turn the crank while we bear down with all our might on the swift revolving wheel, until all our energies and faculties shall be brought up to a bright, keen, sharp, glittering edge. Again, my subject teaches us on what a small allowance Philistine iniquity puts a man. Yes, these Philistines shut up the mines, and then they took the spears and the swords; then they took the blacksmiths, then took the grindstones, and they took everything but a file. Oh, that is the way sin works; it grabs everything! It begins with robbery, and ends with robbery. It despoils this faculty and that faculty and keeps on until the whole nature is done. Was the man eloquent before, it generally thickens his tongue. Was he fine in personal appearance, it mars his visage. Was he affluent, it sends the sheriff to sell him out. Was he influential, it destroys his popularity. Was he placid and genial and loving, it makes him splenetic and cross; and so utterly is he changed that you can see he is sarcastic and rasping, and that the Philistines have left him nothing but a file. “The way of the transgressor is hard!” His cup is bitter. His night is dark. His pangs are deep. His end is terrific. Philistine iniquity says to that man: “Now surrender to me and I will give you all you want—music for the dance, swift steeds for the race, imperial couch to slumber on, and you shall be refreshed with the rarest fruits, in baskets of golden filagree.” He lies. The music turns out to be a groan. The fruits burst the rind with rank poison. The filagree is made up of twisted reptiles. The couch is a grave. Small allowance of rest, small allowance of peace, small allowance of comfort. Cold, hard, rough—nothing but a file. So it was with Voltaire, the most applauded man of his day. The Scripture was his jest-book, whence he drew Bon mots to gall the Christian and the Jew. An infidel when well, but what when sick? Oh, then a text would touch him to the quick! So it was with Lord Byron: his uncleanliness in England only surpassed by his uncleanliness in Venice, then going on to end his brilliant misery at Missolonghi, fretting at his nurse, Fletcher, fretting at himself, fretting at the world, fretting at God; and he who gave the world Childe Harold, and Sardanapalus, and The Prisoner of Chillon, and The Siege of Corinth, reduced to nothing but a file. Oh, sin has a great facility for making promises; but it has just as great facility for breaking them! A Christian life is the only cheerful life, while a life of wicked surrender is remorse, ruin, and death. Its painted glee is sepulchral ghastliness. In the brightest days of the Mexican Empire, Montezuma said he felt gnawing at his heart something like a canker. Sin, like a monster wild beast of the forest, sometimes licks all over its victim in order that the victim may be more easily swallowed; but generally sin rasps and galls and tears and upbraids and files. Is it not so, Herod? Is it not so, Hildebrand? Is it not so, Robespierre? Ay; ay! It is so, it is so. “The way of the wicked he turneth upside down.” History tells us that when Rome was founded, on that day there were twelve vultures flying through the air; but when a transgressor dies the sky is black with whole flocks of them. Vultures! vultures! vultures! When I see sin robbing so many of my hearers, and I see them going down day by day and week by week, I must give a plain warning. I dare not keep it back, lest I risk the salvation of my own soul. Rover, the pirate, pulled down the warning bell on Inchcape Rock, thinking that he would have a chance to despoil vessels that were crushed on the rocks; but one night his own ship crashed down on this very rock, and he went down with all his cargo. God declares: “When I say to the wicked thou shalt surely die, and thou givest him not warning, that same man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood will I require at thy hands.” I learn from this subject what a sad thing it is when the Church of God loses its metal! These Philistines saw that if they could only get all the metallic weapons out of the hands of the Israelites, all would be well, and therefore, they took the swords and the spears. They did not want them to have a single metallic weapon. When the metal of the Israelites was gone, their strength was gone. This is the trouble with the Church of God today. It is surrendering its courage. It has not enough metal. How seldom it is that you see a man taking his position in pew or pulpit or in a religious society, and holding that position against all oppression and all trial and all persecution and all criticism. The Church of God today wants more backbone, more defiance, more consecrated bravery, more metal. How often you see a man start out in some good enterprise, and at the first blast of opposition he has collapsed, and all his courage gone; forgetting the fact that if a man be right, all the opposition of the earth pounding away at him, cannot do him any permanent damage. It is only when a man is wrong that he can be damaged. Why, God is going to vindicate his truth, and he is going to stand by you, my friends, in every effort you make for Christ’s cause and the salvation of men. Go forth in the service of Christ, and do your whole duty. You have one sphere. I have another sphere. “The Lord of hosts is with us, and the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.” We want more of the determination of Jonathan. I do not suppose he was a very wonderful man, but he got on his knees and clambered up the rock, and with the help of his armor-bearer he hewed down the Philistines; so a man of very ordinary intellectual attainments on his knees can storm anything for God, and for the truth. We want something of the determination of the general who went into the war, and as he entered his first battle his knees knocked together, his physical courage not quite up to his moral courage; and he looked down at his knees, and said: “Ah, if you knew where I was going to take you, you would shake worse than that!” There is only one question for you to ask, and for me to ask, what does God want me to do? Where is the field? Where is the work? Where is the anvil? Where is the prayer meeting? Where is the pulpit? Then, finding out what God wants us to do, let us go ahead and do it—all the energies of our body, mind and soul enlisted in the undertaking. Oh! my brethren, we have but little time in which to fight for God! You will be dead soon. Put in the Christian cause every energy that God gives you. “What thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might; for there is neither wisdom nor device in the grave” whither we are all hastening. Opportunities of usefulness gone forever; souls that might have been benefited three months ago never again coming under our Christian influence. Is it not high time that we awake out of sleep? Church of God, lift up your head at the coming victory! The Philistines will go down and the Israelites will go up. We are on the winning side. I think just now the King’s horses are being hooked up to the chariot, and when he does ride down the sky there will be such a hosanna among his friends and such a wailing among his enemies, as will make the earth tremble, and the heavens sing. I see now the plumes of the Lord’s cavalrymen tossing in the air. The archangel before the throne has already burnished his trumpet; he will put its golden lips to his own, and then he will blow the long, loud blast that will make all the nations free. Clap your hands, all ye people! Hark! I hear the falling thrones, and the dashing down of demolished iniquities. “Hallelujah, the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! Hallelujah, the kingdoms of this world are becoming the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus Christ.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 96: 094. ROCKS OF TROUBLE ======================================================================== Rocks of Trouble 1 Samuel 14:4 : “There was a sharp rock on the one side, and a sharp rock on the other side.” The cruel army of the Philistines must be taken and scattered. There is just one man accompanied by his body-guard to do that thing. Jonathan is the hero of the scene. I know that David cracked the skull of the giant with a pebble well slung, and that three hundred Gideonites scattered ten thousand Amalekites by the crash of broken crockery; but here is a more wonderful conflict. Yonder are the Philistines on the rocks. Here is Jonathan with his body-guard in the valley. On the one side is a rock called Bozez; on the other side is a rock called Seneh. These two rocks were as famous in olden times as in modern times are Plymouth Rock and Gibraltar. They were precipitous, unscalable and sharp. Between these two rocks Jonathan must make his ascent. The day comes for the scaling of the height. Jonathan on his hands and feet begins the ascent. With strain, and slip, and bruise, I suppose, but still on and up, first goes Jonathan and then goes his body-guard; Bozez on the one side, Seneh on the other side. After a sharp tug and push and clinging I see the head of Jonathan above the hole in the mountain, and then I see the head of the body-guard above the hole in the mountain and there is a challenge and a fight and a supernatural consternation. These two men, Jonathan and his body-guard, drive back and drive down the Philistines over the rocks and open a campaign which demolishes the enemies of Israel. I suppose that the overhanging and overshadowing rocks on either side did not balk or dishearten Jonathan or his body-guard, but only roused and filled them with enthusiasm as they went up. “There was a sharp rock on the one side and a sharp rock on the other side.” My friends, you have been, or are now, some of you, in this crisis of the text. If a man meet one trouble he can go through it. He gathers all his energies, concentrates them upon one point, and in the strength of God, or by his own natural determination, goes through it. But the man who has trouble to the right of him and trouble to the left of him is to be pitied. Did either trouble come alone he might endure it, but two troubles, two disasters, two overshadowing misfortunes, are Bozez and Seneh. God pity him. There is a sharp rock on the one side and a sharp rock on the other side. In this crisis of the text is that man whose fortune and health fail at the same time. Nine-tenths of all our merchants capsize in business before they come to forty-five years of age. There is some collision in commercial circles and they stop payment. It seems as if every man must put his name on the back of a note before he learns what a fool a man is who risks all his own property on the prospect that some man will tell the truth. It seems as if a man must have a large amount of unsalable goods on his own shelf before he learns how much easier it is to buy than to sell. It seems as if every man must be completely burned out before he learns the importance of always keeping fully insured. It seems as if every man must be wrecked in a financial tempest before he learns to keep things snug in case of a sudden euroclydon. When the calamity does come it is awful. The man goes home in despair and he tells his family, “We’ll have to go to the poorhouse.” He takes a dolorous view of everything. It seems as if he never could rise. But a little time passes and he says: “Why, I am not so badly off after all; I have my family left.” Before the Lord turned Adam out of Paradise he gave him Eve, so that when he lost Paradise he could stand it. Permit one who has read but few novels in all his life and who has not a great deal of romance in his composition to say that if when a man’s fortunes fail he has a good wife, a good Christian wife, he ought not to be despondent. “Oh,” you say, “that only increases the embarrassment, since you have her also to take care of.” You are an ingrate, for the woman as often supports the man as the man supports the woman. The man may bring all the dollars, but the woman generally brings the courage and the faith in God. Well, this man of whom I am speaking looks around and he finds his family is left, and he rallies, and the light comes to his eyes and the smile to his face and the courage to his heart. In two years he is quite over it. He makes his financial calamity the first chapter in a new era of prosperity. He met that one trouble—conquered it. He sat down for a little while under the grim shadow of the rock Bozez, yet he soon rose and began, like Jonathan, to climb. But how often it is that physical ailment comes with financial embarrassment. When the fortune failed it broke the man’s spirit. His nerves were shattered, his brain was stunned. I can show you hundreds of men in New York whose fortune and health failed at the same time. They came prematurely to the walking-staff. Their hand trembled with incipient paralysis. They never saw a well day since the hour when they called their creditors together for a compromise. If such men are impatient and peculiar and irritable, excuse them. They had two troubles, either one of which they could have met successfully. If, when the health went, the fortune had been retained it would not have been so bad. The man could have secured the very best medical advice and he could have had the very best medical attendance, and a long line of carriages would have stopped at the front door to inquire as to his welfare. But poverty on the one side and sickness on the other are Bozez and Seneh, and they interlock their shadows and drop them on the poor man’s way. God help him! “There is a sharp rock on the one side and a sharp rock on the other side.” Now, what is such a man to do? In the name of Almighty God, I will tell him what to do. Do as Jonathan did—climb; climb up into the sunlight of God’s favor and consolation. I can go through the churches and show you the men who lost fortune and health at the same time, and yet who sing all day and dream of heaven all night. If you have any idea that sound digestion and steady nerves and clear eyesight and good hearing and plenty of friends are necessary to make a man happy, you have miscalculated. I suppose that these overhanging rocks only made Jonathan scramble the harder and the faster to get up and out into the sunlight, and this combined shadow of invalidism and financial embarrassment has often sent a man up the quicker into the sunlight of God’s favor and the noonday of his glorious promises. It is a difficult thing for a man to feel his dependence upon God with ten thousand dollars in the bank and fifty thousand dollars in government securities, and a block of stores and three ships. “Well,” the man says to himself, “it is silly for me to pray, ‘Give me this day my daily bread’ when my pantry is full and the canals from the West are crowded with bread-stuffs destined for my storehouses.” O, my friends, if the combined misfortunes and disasters of life have made you climb up into the arms of a sympathetic and compassionate God, through all eternity you will bless him that in this world there was a sharp rock on the one side and a sharp rock on the other side. Again, that man is in the crisis of the text who has home troubles and outside persecution at the same time. The world treats a man well just as long as it pays best to treat him well. As long as it can manufacture success out of his bone and brain and muscle it favors him. The world fattens the horse it wants to drive. But let a man see it his duty to cross the track of the world, then every bush is full of horns and tusks thrust at him. They will belittle him. They will caricature him. They will call his generosity self-aggrandizement, and they will call his piety sanctimoniousness. The very worst persecution will sometime come upon him from those who profess to be Christians. John Milton, great and good John Milton, so forgot himself as to pray in so many words that his enemies might be eternally thrown down into the darkest and deepest gulf of hell, and be the undermost and most dejected and the lowest down vassals of perdition! And Martin Luther so far forgot himself as to say in regard to his theological opponents: “Put them in whatever sauce you please, roasted or fried or baked or stewed or boiled or hashed, they are nothing but asses!” Ah, my friends, if John Milton and Martin Luther could come down to such scurrility, what may you not expect from less elevated opponents? Now, the world sometimes takes after them, the newspapers take after them, public opinion takes after them, and the unfortunate man is lied about until all the dictionary of Billingsgate is exhausted on him. You often see a man whom you know to be good and pure and honest set upon by the world and mauled by whole communities, while vicious men take on a supercilious air in condemnation of him; as though Lord Jeffrey should write an essay on gentleness, or Henry VIII talk about purity, or Herod take to blessing little children. Now a certain amount of persecution rouses a man’s defiance, stirs his blood for magnificent battle, and makes him fifty times more a man than he would have been without the persecution. So it was with the great reformer when he said: “I will not be put down; I will be heard.” And so it was with Millard, the preacher, in the time of Louis XI. When Louis XI sent word to him that unless he stopped preaching in that style he would throw him into the river, he replied: “Tell the king that I will reach heaven sooner by water than he will reach it by fast horses.” A certain amount of persecution is a tonic and an inspiration, but too much of it and too long-continued becomes the rock of Bozez, throwing a dark shadow over a man’s life. What is he to do, then? Go home, you say. Good advice that. That is just the place for a man to go when the world abuses him. Go home. Blessed be God for our quiet and sympathetic homes. But there is many a man who has the reputation of having a home when he has none. Through unthinkingness or precipitation there are many matches made that ought never to have been made. An officiating priest cannot alone unite a couple. The Lord Almighty must proclaim banns. There is many a home in which there is no sympathy and no happiness and no good cheer. The clamor of the battle may not have been heard outside, but God knows, notwithstanding all the playing of the “Wedding March” and all the odor of the orange blossoms and the benediction of the officiating pastor, there has been no marriage. Sometimes men have awakened to find on one side of them the rock of persecution and on the other side the rock of domestic infelicity. What shall such a one do? Do as Jonathan did—climb. Get up into the heights of God’s consolation, from which he may look down in triumph upon outside persecution and home trouble. While good and great John Wesley was being silenced by the magistrates and having his name written on the board fences of London in doggerel, at that very time his wife was making him as miserable as she could—acting as though she were possessed with the devil, as I suppose she was; never doing him a kindness until the day she ran away, so that he wrote in his diary these words: “I did not forsake her; I have not dismissed her; I will not recall her.” Planting one foot upon outside persecution and the other foot upon home trouble, John Wesley climbed up into the heights of Christian joy, and after preaching forty thousand sermons and traveling two hundred and seventy-six thousand miles, reached the heights of heaven, though in this world he had it hard enough—”a sharp rock on the one side, and a sharp rock on the other side.” Again, that woman stands in the crisis of the text who has bereavement and a struggle for livelihood at the same time. Ah, it is a hard thing for a woman to make an honest living even when her heart is not troubled, and she has a fair cheek and the magnetism of an exquisite presence. But now the husband or the father is dead. The expenses of the obsequies have absorbed all that was left in the savings bank; and wan and wasted with weeping and watching she goes forth—a grave, a hearse, a coffin behind her—to contend for her existence and the existence of her children. When I see such a battle as that open I shut my eyes at the ghastliness of the spectacle. Men sit with embroidered slippers and write heartless essays about women’s wages; but that question is made up of tears and blood and there is more blood than tears. Oh, give women free access to all the realms where she can get a livelihood, from the telegraph office to the pulpit. Let men’s wages be cut down before hers are cut down. Men have iron in their souls and can stand it. Make the way free to her of the broken heart. May God put into my hand the cold, bitter cup of privation and give me nothing but a windowless hut for shelter for many years, rather than that after I am dead there should go out from my home into the pitiless world a woman’s arm to fight the Gettysburg, the Austerlitz, the Waterloo of life for bread. And yet how many women there are seated between the rock of bereavement on the one side and the rock of destitution on the other, Bozez and Seneh interlocking their shadow and dropping them upon her miserable way. “There is a sharp rock on the one side, and a sharp rock on the other side.” What are such to do? Somehow, let them climb up into the heights of the promise: “Leave thy fatherless children; I will preserve them alive, and let thy widows trust in me.” Or get up into the heights of that other glorious promise: “The Lord preserveth the stranger and relieveth the widow and the fatherless.” O ye sewing women on starving wages! O ye widows turned out from a once beautiful home! O ye female teachers kept on niggardly stipend! O ye despairing women seeking in vain for work, wandering along the docks and thinking to throw yourselves into the river at night! O ye women of aching sides and weak nerves and short breath and broken heart! You need something more than human sympathy. You need the sympathy of God. Climb up into his arms; he knows it all and he loves you more than father or mother or husband ever could or ever did; and instead of sitting down wringing your hands in despair you had better begin to climb. There are heights of consolation for you, though now “there is a sharp rock on the one side, and a sharp rock on the other side.” Again, that man is in the crisis of the text who has a wasted life on the one side and an unillumined eternity on the other. Though a man may all his life have cultivated deliberation and self-poise, if he gets into that position all his self-possession is gone. There are all the wrong thoughts of his existence, all the wrong words, all the wrong deeds—strata above strata, gigantic, ponderous, overshadowing. That rock I call Bozez. On the other side are all the retributions of the future, the thrones of judgment, the eternal ages, angry with his long defiance, piled up, concentrated, accumulated wrath. That rock I call Seneh. Between these two rocks Lord Byron perished, and Alcibiades perished, and Herod perished, and ten thousand times ten thousand have perished. O man immortal, man redeemed, man blood-bought, climb up out of those shadows! Climb up by the way of the cross! Have your wasted life forgiven; have your eternal life secured. Just take one look to the past and see what it has been and take one look to the future and see what it threatens to be. You can afford to lose your health, you can afford to lose your property, you can afford to lose your reputation, but you cannot afford to lose your soul. That bright, gleaming, glorious, precious, eternal possession you must carry aloft in the day when the earth burns up and the heavens burst. O God, help that man to save his soul. You see from my subject that when a man goes into the safety and peace of the Gospel he does not demean himself. There is nothing in religion that leads to unmanliness. The Gospel of Jesus Christ only asks you to climb as Jonathan did—climb toward God, climb toward heaven, climb into the sunshine of God’s favor. To become a Christian is not to go meanly down; it is to come gloriously up—up into the communion of saints, up into the peace that passeth all understanding, up into the companionship of angels. He lives up; he dies up. Oh, then, accept the wholesale invitation which I make to all people! Come up from between your invalidism and financial embarrassments. Come up from between your home trouble and your outside persecution. Come up from between your bereavements and your destitution. Come up from between a wasted life and an unillumined eternity. Like Jonathan climb with all your might instead of sitting down to wring your hands in the shadow and in the darkness—”a sharp rock on the one side, and a sharp rock on the other side.” ======================================================================== CHAPTER 97: 095. FORBIDDEN HONEY ======================================================================== Forbidden Honey 1 Samuel 14:43 : “I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in my hand, and, lo, I must die.” The honey-bee is a most ingenious architect, a Christopher Wren among insects; geometrician drawing hexagons and pentagons; a freebooter robbing the fields of pollen and aroma; wondrous creature of God whose biography, written by Huber and Swammerdam, is an enchantment for any lover of nature. Virgil celebrated the bee in his fable of Aristæus; and Moses and Samuel and David and Solomon and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and St. John used the delicacies of bee-manufacture as a Bible symbol. A miracle of formation is the bee; five eyes, two tongues, the outer having a sheath of protection, hairs on all sides of its tiny body to brush up particles of flowers, its flight so straight that all the world knows of the bee-line. The honeycomb is a place such as no one but God could plan and the honey-bee construct; its cells, sometimes a dormitory, and sometimes a storehouse, and sometimes a cemetery. These winged toilers first make eight strips of wax, and by their antennæ, which are to them hammer and chisel and a square and plumb-line, fashion them for use. Two and two these workers shape the wall. If an accident happens, they put up the buttresses of extra beams to remedy the damage. When about the year 1776 an insect before unknown, in the night-time attacked the bee-hives all over Europe, and the men who owned them were in vain trying to plan something to keep out the invader which was the terror of the bee-hives of the continent, it was found that everywhere the bees had arranged for their own protection, and built before their honeycombs an especial wall of wax with portholes through which the bees might go to and fro, but not large enough to admit the winged combatant, called the Sphinx atropos. Do you know that the swarming of the bee is divinely directed? The mother-bee starts for a new home, and because of this the other bees of the hive get into an excitement which raises the heat of the hive some four degrees, and they must die unless they leave their heated apartments, and they follow the mother-bee and alight on the branch of a tree, and cling to each other and hold on until a committee of two or three bees have explored the region and found the hollow of a tree or rock not far off from a stream of water, and they here set up a new colony, and ply their aromatic industries, and give themselves to the manufacture of the saccharine edible. But who can tell the chemistry of that mixture of sweetness, part of it the very life of the bee, and part of it the life of the fields? Plenty of this luscious product was hanging in the woods of Beth-aven during the time of Saul and Jonathan. Their army was in pursuit of an enemy that by God’s command must be exterminated. The soldiery were positively forbidden to stop to eat anything until the work was done. If they disobeyed, they were accursed. Coming through the woods, they found a place where the bees had been busy—a great honey manufactory. Honey gathered in the hollow of the trees until it had overflowed upon the ground in great profusion of sweetness. All the army obeyed orders and touched it not, save Jonathan, and he, not knowing the military order about abstinence, dipped the end of a stick he had in his hand into the candied liquid, and as yellow and tempting, it glowed on the end of the stick, he put it to his mouth and ate the honey. Judgment fell upon him, and but for special intervention he would have been slain. In my text Jonathan acknowledges his awful mistake: “I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in my hand, and, lo, I must die.” Alas, what multitudes of people in all ages have been damaged by forbidden honey, by which I mean temptation, delicious and attractive, but damaging and destructive! Corrupt literature, fascinating but deathful, comes in this category. Where one good, honest, healthful book is read now, there are a hundred made up of rhetorical trash consumed with avidity. When the boys on the cars come through with a pile of publications, look over the titles and notice that nine out of ten of the books are injurious. All the way from New York to Chicago or New Orleans notice that objectionable books dominate. Taste for pure literature is poisoned by this scum of the publishing house. Every book in which sin triumphs over virtue, or in which a glamor is thrown over dissipation, or which leaves you at its last line with less respect for the marriage institution and less abhorrence for the paramour, is a depression of your own moral character. The bookbinding may be attractive, and the plot dramatic and startling, and the style of writing sweet as the honey that Jonathan took up with his rod; but your best interests forbid the reading of it, your moral safety forbids it, your God forbids it, and one taste of it may lead to such bad results that you may have to say at the close of the experiment, or at the close of a misimproved lifetime: “I did but taste a little honey with the rod that was in my hand, and, lo, I must die.” Corrupt literature is doing more today for the disruption of domestic life than any other cause. Elope-merits, marital intrigues, sly correspondence, fictitious names given at post-office windows, clandestine meetings in parks and at ferry gates and in hotel parlors and conjugal perjuries are among the ruinous results. When a woman, young or old, gets her head thoroughly stuffed with the modern novel she is in appalling peril. But some one will say: “The heroes are so adroitly knavish, and the heroines so bewitchingly untrue, and the turn of the story so exquisite, and all the characters so enrapturing, I cannot quit them.” My brother, my sister, you can find styles of literature just as charming that will elevate and purify and ennoble and Christianize while they please. The devil does not own all the honey. There is a wealth of good books coming forth from our publishing houses that leave no excuse for the choice of that which is debauching to body, mind and soul. Go to some intelligent man or woman and ask for a list of books that will be strengthening to your mental and moral condition. Life is so short and your time for improvement so abbreviated that you cannot afford to fill up with husks and cinders and debris. In the intervals of business, that young man is reading that which will prepare him to be a merchant prince, and that young woman is filling her mind with an intelligence that will yet either make her the chief attraction of a good man’s home, or give her an independence of character that will qualify her to build her own home and maintain it in a happiness that requires no augmentation from any one of our rougher sex. That young man or young woman can, by the right literature and moral improvement of the spare ten minutes here or there every day, rise head and shoulders in prosperity and character and influence above the loungers who read nothing or read that which be-dwarfs. See all the forests of good American literature dripping with honey. Why pick up the honeycombs that have in them the fiery bees which will sting you with an eternal poison while you taste it? One book may for you or me decide everything for this world and the next. It was a turning-point with me when in a book store in Syracuse, New York, one day, I picked up a book called “The Beauties of Ruskin.” It was only a book of extracts, but it was all pure honey, and I was not satisfied until I had purchased all his works, at that time expensive beyond an easy capacity to own them, and with what delight I went through reading his “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” and his “Stones of Venice,” it is impossible for me to describe, except by saying that it gave me a rapture for good books, and an everlasting disgust for pernicious or immoral books that will last while my life lasts. All around the church and the world today there are busy hives of intelligence occupied by authors and authoresses from whose pens drip a distillation which is the very nectar of heaven, and why will you thrust your rod of inquisitiveness into the deathful saccharine of perdition? Stimulating liquors also came into the category of temptation delicious but deathful. You say, “I cannot bear the taste of intoxicating liquor, and how any man can like it is to me an amazement.” Well, then, it is no credit to you that you do not take it. Do not brag about your total abstinence, because it is not from any principle that you reject alcoholism, but for the reason that you reject certain styles of food—you simply do not like the taste of them. But multitudes of people have a natural fondness for all kinds of intoxicant. They like it so much that it makes them smack their lips to look at it. They are dyspeptic and they like to aid digestion, or they are annoyed by insomnia, and they take it to produce sleep; or they are troubled, and they take it to make them oblivious; or they feel happy, and they must celebrate their hilarity. They begin with mint julep sucked through two straws on a Long Branch piazza and end in the ditch, taking from a jug a liquid half kerosene and half whisky. They not only like it, but it is an all-consuming passion of body, mind, and soul; and after a while have it they will, though one wine-glass of it should cost the temporal and eternal destruction of themselves and all their families and the whole human race. They would say, “I am sorry it is going to cost me and my family and all the world’s population so very much, but here it goes to my lips, and now let it roll over my parched tongue and down my heated throat, the sweetest and most inspiring, the most delicious draught that ever thrilled a human frame.” To cure the habit before it comes to its last stages, various plans were tried in olden times. This plan was recommended in the books: when a man wanted to reform he put shot or bullets into the cup or glass of strong drink—one additional shot or bullet each day, that displaced so much liquor. Bullet after bullet added day by day, of course the liquor became less and less until the bullets would entirely fill up the glass, and there was no room for the liquid, and by that time it was said the inebriate would be cured. Whether any one was ever cured in that way I know not, but by long experiment it is found that the only way is to stop short off, and when a man does that he needs God to help him. And there have been more cases than you can count when God has so helped the man that he left off the drink forever; and I could count a score of them, some of them pillars in the house of God. One would suppose that men would take warning from some of the ominous names given to the intoxicants, and stand off from the devastating influence. You have noticed, for instance, that some of the restaurants are called “The Shades,” typical of the fact that it puts a man’s reputation in the shade and his morals in the shade and his prosperity in the shade and his wife and children in the shade and his immortal destiny in the shade. Now, I find on some of the liquor signs in all our cities the words “Old Crow,” mightily suggestive of the carcass and the filthy raven that swoops upon it. “Old Crow!” Men and women without numbers slain of rum, but unburied, and this evil is pecking at their glazed eyes, and pecking at their bloated cheek, and pecking at their destroyed manhood and womanhood, thrusting beak and claw into the mortal remains of what was once gloriously alive, but now morally dead. “Old Crow!” But alas! how many take no warning! They make me think of Cæsar on his way to assassination fearing nothing; though his statue in the hall crashed into fragments at his feet, and a scroll containing the names of the conspirators was thrust in his hands, yet walking right on to meet the dagger that was to take his life. This infatuation of strong drink is so mighty in many a man that, though his fortunes are crashing and his health is crashing and his domestic interests are crashing and we hand him a long scroll containing the names of perils that await him, he goes straight on to physical and mental and moral assassination. In proportion as any style of alcoholism is pleasant to your taste and stimulating to your nerves, and for a time delightful to all your physical and mental constitution, is the peril awful. Remember Jonathan and the forbidden honey in the woods at Beth-aven. Furthermore, the gamester’s indulgence must be put in the list of temptations delicious but destructive. You who have crossed the ocean many times have noticed that always one of the best rooms has, from morning until late at night, been given up to gambling practices. I heard of men who went on board with enough for a European excursion who landed without money enough to get their baggage up to the hotel or railroad station. To many there is a complete fascination in games of hazard, or the risking of money on possibilities. It seems as natural for them to bet as to eat. Indeed, the hunger for food is often overpowered by the hunger for wagers. It is absurd for those of us who have never felt the fascination of the wager to speak slightingly of the temptation. It has slain a multitude of intellectual and moral giants, men and women stronger than you or I. Down under its power went glorious Oliver Goldsmith, and Gibbon, the famous historian, and Charles Fox, the renowned statesman, and in olden times, senators of the United States, who used to be as regularly at the gambling-house all night as they were in the halls of legislation by day. Oh, the tragedies of the faro-table! I know persons who began with a slight stake in a ladies’ parlor, and ended with the suicide’s pistol at Monte Carlo. They played with the square pieces of bone with black marks on them, not knowing that Satan was playing for their bones at the same time, and was sure to sweep all the stakes off on his side of the table. State Legislatures have again and again sanctioned the mighty evil by passing laws in defense of race-tracks, and many young men have lost all their wages at such so-called “meetings.” Every man who voted for such infamous bills has on his hands and forehead the blood of these immortals. But in this connection some young converts say to me: “Is it right to play cards? Is there any harm in a game of whist or enchre?” Well, I know good men who play whist and euchre and other styles of games without any wagers. I had a friend who played cards with his wife and children, and then at the close said: “Come, now, let us have prayers.” I will not judge other men’s consciences; but I tell you that cards are in my mind so associated with the temporal and spiritual ruin of splendid young men, that I would as soon say to my family: “Come, let us have a game of cards,” as I would go into a menagerie and say: “Come, let us have a game of rattlesnakes,” or into a cemetery, and sitting down by a marble slab, say to the gravediggers: “Come, let us have a game of skulls.” Conscientious young ladies are silently saying: “Do you think card-playing will do us any harm?” Perhaps not, but how will you feel if in the great day of eternity, when we are asked to give an account of our influence, some man should say: “I was introduced to the game of chance at your house, and I went on from that sport to something more exciting, and went on down until I lost my business and lost my morals and lost my soul, and these chains that you see on my wrists and feet are the chains of a gamester’s doom, and I am on my way to a gambler’s hell.” Honey at the start, eternal catastrophe at the last. Stock-gambling comes into the same catalogue. It must be very exhilarating to go into the stock-market and, depositing a small sum of money, run the chance of taking out a fortune. Many men are doing an honest and safe business in the stock-market, and you are an ignoramus if you do not know that it is just as legitimate to deal in stocks as it is to deal in coffee or sugar or flour. But nearly all the outsiders who go there on a financial excursion lose all. The old spiders eat up the unsuspecting flies. I had a friend who put his hand on his hip-pocket and said to me in substance: “Talmage, I have here the value of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” His home is today penniless. What was the matter? Stock-gambling. Of the vast majority who are victimized you hear not one word. One great stock firm goes down, and whole columns of newspapers discuss their fraud or their disaster, and we are presented with their features and their biography. But where one such famous firm sinks, five hundred unknown men sink with them. The great steamer goes down, and all the little boats are swallowed in the same engulfment. Gambling is gambling, whether in stocks or bread-stuffs or dice or race-horse betting. Exhilaration at the start, but a raving brain and a shattered nervous system and a sacrificed property and a destroyed soul at the last. Young men, buy no lottery tickets, purchase no prize packages, bet on no baseball games or yacht-races, have no faith in luck, answer no mysterious circulars proposing great income for small investment, drive away the buzzards that hover around our hotels trying to entrap strangers. Go out and make an honest living. Have God on your side, and be a candidate for heaven. Remember, all the paths of sin are banked with flowers at the start, and there are plenty of helpful hands to fetch the gay charger to your door and hold the stirrup while you mount. But further on the horse plunges to the bit in a slough inextricable. The best honey is not like that which Jonathan took on the end of the rod and brought to his lips, but that which God puts on the banqueting table of mercy, at which we are all invited to sit. I was reading of a boy, among the mountains of Switzerland, ascending a dangerous place with his father and the guides. The boy stopped on the edge of the cliff and said, “There is a flower I mean to get.” “Come away from there,” said the father, “you will fall off.” “No,” said he; “I must get that beautiful flower;” and the guides rushed toward him to pull him back when, just as they heard him say, “I almost have it,” he fell two thousand feet. Birds of prey were seen a few days after circling through the air and lowering gradually to the place where the corpse lay. Why seek flowers off the edge of a precipice, when you can walk knee-deep amid the full bloom of the very Paradise of God? When a man may sit at the King’s banquet, why will he go down the steps and contend for the refuse and bones of a hound’s kennel? “Sweeter than honey and the honeycomb,” says David, is the truth of God. “With honey out of the rock would I have satisfied thee,” says God to the recreant. Here is honey gathered from the blossoms of trees of life, and with a rod made out of wood of the Cross I dip it up for all your souls. The poet Hesiod tells of an ambrosia and a nectar, the drinking of which would make men live forever, and one sip of the honey from the Eternal Rock will give you eternal life with God. Come off the malarial levels of a sinful life. Come and live on the uplands of grace, where the vineyards sun themselves. “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!” Be happy now and happy forever. For those who take a different course the honey will turn to gall. For many things I have admired Percy Shelley, the great English poet, but I deplore the fact that it seemed a great sweetness to him to dishonor God. The poem “Queen Mab” has in it the maligning of the Deity. Shelley was impious enough to ask for Rowland Hill’s Surrey Chapel that he might denounce the Christian religion. He was in great glee against God and the truth. But he visited Italy, and one day on the Mediterranean with two friends in a boat which was twenty-four feet long he was coming toward shore when an hour’s squall struck the water. A gentleman standing on shore through a glass saw many boats tossed in this squall, but all outrode the storm except one, in which Shelley and his two friends were sailing. That never came ashore, but the bodies of two of the occupants were washed up on the beach, one of them the poet. A funeral pyre was built on the sea-shore by some classic friends, and the two bodies were cremated. Poor Shelley! He would have no God while he lived, and I fear had no God when he died. “The Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish.” Beware of the forbidden honey! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 98: 096. HEREDITY ======================================================================== Heredity 1 Samuel 17:58 : “Whose son art thou, thou young man?” Never was there a more unequal fight than that between David and Goliath. David five feet high; Goliath ten. David a shepherd boy, brought up amid rural scenes; Goliath a warrior by profession. Goliath a mountain of braggadocia; David a marvel of humility. Goliath armed with an iron spear; David armed with a sling with smooth stones from the brook. But you are not to despise these latter weapons. There was a regiment of slingers in the Assyrian army and a regiment of slingers in the Egyptian army, and they did terrible execution, and they could cast a stone with almost as much precision and force as now can be hurled shot or shell. The Greeks in their army had slingers who would throw leaden plummets inscribed with the irritating words: “Take this!” So it was a mighty weapon David employed in that famous combat. A Jewish rabbi says that the probability is that Goliath entertained such contempt for David, that in a paroxysm of laughter he threw his head back and his helmet fell off. David saw the uncovered forehead, and, his opportunity having come, taking this sling and swinging it around his head two or three times, and aiming at that uncovered forehead, he crushed it and the monster fell. The battle over, behold a tableau: King Saul sitting; little David standing, his fingers clutched into the hair of decapitated Goliath. As Saul sees David standing there holding in his hand the ghastly, reeking, staring trophy, evidence of the complete victory over God’s enemies, the king wonders what parentage was honored by such heroism, and in my text he asks David his pedigree: “Whose son are thou, thou young man?” The king saw what you and I see, that this question of heredity is a mighty question. The longer I live the more I believe in blood—good blood, bad blood, proud blood, humble blood, honest blood, thieving blood, heroic blood, cowardly blood. The tendency may skip a generation or two, but it is sure to come out, as in a little child you sometimes see a similarity to a great-grandfather whose picture hangs on the wall. That the physical and mental and moral qualities are inheritable is patent to any one who keeps his eyes open. The similarity is so striking sometimes as to be amusing. Great families, regal or literary, are apt to have like characteristics all down through the generations, and what is more perceptible in such families may be seen on a smaller scale in all families. A thousand years have no power to obliterate the small family traits. The large lip of the House of Austria is seen in all the generations, and is called the Hapsburg lip. The House of Stuart always means in all generations cruelty and bigotry and sensuality. Witness Queen of Scots. Witness Charles I and Charles II. Witness James I and James II and all the other scoundrels of that imperial line. Scottish blood means persistence, English blood means reverence for the ancient, Welsh blood means religiosity, Danish blood means fondness for the sea, Indian blood means roaming disposition, Celtic blood means fervidity, Roman blood means conquest. The Jewish facility for accumulation you may trace clear back to Abraham, of whom the Bible says, “he was rich in silver and gold and cattle,” and to Isaac and Jacob, who had the same family characteristics. Some families are characterized by longevity, and they have a tenacity of life positively Methuselish. Others are characterized by Goliathian stature, and you can see it for one generation, two generations, five generations, in all the generations. Vigorous theology runs on in the line of the Alexanders. Tragedy runs on in the family of the Kembles. Literature runs on in the line of the Trollopes. Philanthropy runs on in the line of the Wilberforces. Statesmanship runs on in the line of the Adamses. You see these peculiarities in all generations. Henry and Catharine of Navarre religious, all their families religious. The celebrated family of the Casini, all mathematicians. The celebrated family of the Medici—grandfather, son, and Catharine—all remarkable for keen intellect. The celebrated family of Gustavus Adolphus all warriors. This law of heredity asserts itself without reference to social or political condition, for you sometimes find the ignoble in high place and the honorable in obscure place. A descendant of Edward I a toll-gatherer. A descendant of Edward III a doorkeeper. A descendant of the Duke of Northumberland a trunk-maker. Some of the mightiest families of England are extinct, while some of those most honored in the peerage go back to an ancestry of hard knuckles and rough exterior. This law of heredity entirely independent of social or political condition. Then you find avarice and jealousy and sensuality and fraud having full swing in some families. The violent temper of Frederick William is the inheritance of Frederick the Great. It is not a theory to be set forth by worldly philosophy only, but by divine authority. Do you not remember how the Bible speaks of “a chosen generation,” of “the generation of the righteous,” of “the generation of vipers,” of an “untoward generation,” of “a stubborn generation,” of “the iniquity of the past visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation?” So that the text comes with the force of a projectile hurled from mightiest catapult, “Whose son art thou, thou young man?” “Well,” says some one, “that theory discharges me from all responsibility. Born of sanctified parents we are bound to be good and we cannot help ourselves. Born of unrighteous parentage we are bound to be evil and we cannot help ourselves.” Two inaccuracies. As much as if you should say, “The centripetal force in nature has a tendency to bring everything to the center, and therefore all things come to the center. The centrifugal force in nature has a tendency to throw out everything to the periphery, and therefore everything will go out to the periphery.” You know as well as I know that you can make the centripetal overcome the centrifugal, and you can make the centrifugal overcome the centripetal. As when there is a mighty tide of good in a family that may be overcome by determination to evil, as in the case of Aaron Burr, the libertine, who had for father Rev. Aaron Burr, the consecrated president of Princeton; as in the case of Pierrepont Edwards, the scourge of New York society seventy years ago, who had a Christian ancestry; while on the other hand some of the best men and women of this day are those who have come of an ancestry of which it would not be courteous to speak in their presence. The practical and useful object of this sermon is to show to you that if you have come of a Christian ancestry, then you are solemnly bound to preserve and develop the glorious inheritance; or if you have come of a depraved ancestry, then it is your duty to brace yourself against the evil tendency by all prayer and Christian determination, and you are to find out what are the family frailities, and in arming the castle put the strongest guard at the weakest gate. With these smooth stones from the brook I hope to strike you, not where David struck Goliath, in the head, but where Nathan struck David, in the heart. “Whose son art thou, thou young man?” There is something in the periodical holidays to bring up remembrances of the old folks. Sometimes in the winter holidays, when we are accustomed to gather our families together, old times have come back again, and our thoughts have been set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” The old folks seemed to be busy at such times in making us happy, and perhaps on less resource made their sons and daughters happier than you on larger resource are able to make your sons and daughters happy. The snow lay two feet above their graves, but they shook off the white blankets and mingled in the holiday festivities—the same wrinkles, the same stoop of shoulder under the weight of age, the same old style of dress or coat, the same smile, the same tones of voice. I hope you remember them as they were before they went away. If not, I hope there are those who have recited to you what they were, and that there may be in your house some article of dress or furniture with which you associate their memories. I want to arouse the most sacred memories of your heart while I make the impassioned interrogatory in regard to your pedigree: “Whose son art thou, thou young man?” First, I accost all those who are descended from a Christian ancestry. I do not ask if your parents were perfect. There are no perfect people now, and I do not suppose there were any perfect people then. Perhaps there was sometimes too much blood in their eye when they chastised you. But from what I know of you, you got no more than you deserved, and perhaps a little more chastisement would have been salutary. But you are willing to acknowledge, I think, that they wanted to do right. From what you overheard in conversations, and from what you saw at the family altar and at neighborhood obsequies, you know that they had invited God into their heart and life. There was something that sustained those old people supernaturally. You have no doubt about their destiny. You expect if you ever get to heaven to meet them as certainly as you expect to meet the Lord Jesus Christ. That early association has been a charm for you. There was a time when you got right up from a house of iniquity and walked out into the fresh air because you thought your mother was looking at you. You have never been very happy in sin because of a sweet old face that would present itself. Tremulous voices from the past accosted you until they were seemingly audible, and you looked around to see who spoke. There was an estate not mentioned in the last will and testament, a vast estate of prayer and holy example and Christian entreaty and glorious memory. The survivors of the family gathered to hear the will read, and this was to be kept and that was to be sold and it was share and share alike. But there was an unwritten will that read something like this: “In the name of God, Amen. I, being of sound mind, bequeath to my children all my prayers for their salvation; I bequeath to them all the results of a lifetime’s toil; I bequeath to them the Christian religion which has been so much comfort to me, and I hope may be solace for them; I bequeath to them a hope of reunion when the partings of life are over; share and share alike may they have in eternal riches. I bequeath to them the wish that they may avoid my errors and copy anything that may have been worthy. In the name of the God who made me, and the Christ who redeemed me, and the Holy Ghost who sanctifies me, I make this my last will and testament. Witness, all ye hosts of heaven. Witness, time; witness, eternity. Signed, sealed, and delivered in this our dying hour. Father and Mother.” You did not get that will proved at the surrogate’s office; but I take it out today and I read it to you; I take it out of the alcoves of your heart; I shake the dust off it; I ask you will you accept that inheritance, or will you break the will? O ye of Christian ancestry, you have a responsibility vast beyond all measurement! God will not let you off with just being as good as ordinary people when you had such extraordinary advantage. Ought not a flower planted in a hothouse be more thrifty than a flower planted outside in the storm? Ought not a factory turned by the Housatonic do more work than a factory turned by a thin and shallow mountain stream? Ought not you of great early opportunity be better than those who had a cradle unblessed? A father sets his son up in business. He keeps an account of all the expenditures. So much for store fixtures, so much for rent, so much for this, so much for that, all the items aggregated, and the father expects the son to give an account. Your heavenly Father charges against you all the advantages of a pious ancestry—so many prayers, so much Christian example, so many kind entreaties—all these gracious influences one tremendous aggregate, and he asks you for an account of it. Ought not you to be better than those who had no such advantages? Better have been a foundling picked up off the city commons than with such magnificent inheritance of consecration to turn out indifferently. Ought not you, my brother, to be better, having had Christian nurture, than that man who can truly say: “The first word I remember my father speaking to me was an oath; the first time I remember my father taking hold of me was in wrath; I never saw a Bible till I was ten years of age, and then I was told it was a pack of lies. The first twenty years of my life I was associated with the vicious. I seemed to be walled in by sin and death.” Now, my brother, ought you not—I leave it as a matter of fairness with you—ought you not to be far better than those who had no early Christian influence? Standing as you do between the generation that is past and the generation that is to come, are you going to pass the blessing on, or are you going to have your life the gulf in which that tide of blessing shall drop out of sight forever? You are the trustee of piety in that ancestral line, and are you going to augment or squander that solemn trust fund? Are you going to disinherit your sons and daughters of the heirloom which your parents left you? It cannot be possible that you are going to take such a position as that. You are very careful about the life insurances and careful about the deeds and careful about the mortgages and careful about the title of your property, because when you step off the stage you want your children to get it all. Are you making no provision that they shall get grandfather’s and grandmother’s religion? What a last will and testament you are making, my brother! “In the name of God, Amen. I, being of sound mind, make this my last will and testament. I bequeath to my children all the money I ever made and all the houses I own; but I rob them of the ancestral grace and the Christian influence that I inherited. I have squandered that on my own worldliness. Share and share alike must they in the misfortune and the everlasting outrage. Signed, sealed, and delivered in the presence of God and men and angels and devils and all the generations of earth and heaven and hell.” O ye of highly favored ancestry, wake up to a sense of your opportunity and your responsibility. I think there must be an old cradle or a fragment of a cradle somewhere that could tell a story of midnight supplication in your behalf. Where is the old rocking-chair in which you were sung to sleep with the holy nursery rhyme? Where is the old clock that ticked away the moments of that sickness on that awful night when there were but three of you awake—you and God and mother? Is there not an old staff in some closet? Is there not an old family Bible on some shelf that seems to address you with a father’s or a mother’s voice, saying: “My son, my daughter, how can you reject that God who so kindly dealt with us all our lives and to whom we commended you in our prayers living and dying! By the memory of the old homestead, by the family altar, by our dying pillow, by the graves in which our bodies sleep while our spirits hover, we beg you to turn over a new leaf for the new year.” Oh, the power of ancestral piety, well illustrated by a young man of New York who attended a prayer-meeting one night and asked for prayer, and then went home and wrote down these words: “Twenty-five years ago to-night my mother went to heaven, my beautiful, blessed mother, and I have been alone, tossed up and down upon the billows of life’s tempestuous ocean. Shall I ever go to heaven? She told me I must meet her in heaven. When she took her boy’s hand in hers and turned her gentle, loving eyes on me and gazed earnestly and long into my face and then lifted them to heaven in that last prayer, she prayed that I might meet her in heaven. I wonder if I ever shall? My mother’s prayers! Oh, my sweet, blessed mother’s prayers! Did ever boy have such a mother as I had? For twenty-five years I have not heard her pray until to-night. I have heard all her prayers over again. They have had, in fact, a terrible resurrection. Oh, how she was wont to pray! She prayed as they prayed to-night, so earnest, so importunate, so believing. Shall I ever be a Christian? She was a Christian. Oh, how bright and pure and happy was her life! She was a cheerful and happy Christian. There is my mother’s Bible. I have not opened it for years. Did she believe I could ever neglect her precious Bible? She surely thought I would read it much and often. How often has she read it to me. Blessed mother, did you pray in vain for your boy? It shall not be in vain. Ah! no, no, it shall not be in vain. I will pray for myself. Who has sinned against so much instruction as I have, against so many precious prayers put up to heaven for me by one of the most lovely, tender, pious, confiding, trusting of mothers, in her heavenly Father’s care and grace? She never doubted. She believed. She always prayed as if she did. My Bible, my mother’s Bible, and my conscience remind me what I am and what I have made myself. Oh, the bitter pangs of an accusing conscience! I need a Saviour mighty to save. I must seek him. I will. I am on the sea of existence, and I can never get off from it. I am afloat. No anchor, no rudder, no compass, no book of instructions, for I have put them all away from me. Saviour of the perishing, save or I perish.” Do you wonder that the next day he arose in a prayer-meeting and said: “My brethren, I stand before you a monument of God’s amazing mercy and goodness, forever blessed be his holy name; all I have and all I am I consecrate to Jesus, my Saviour and my God”? Oh, the power of ancestral prayer. Hear it! Hear it! But I turn for a moment to those who had evil parentage, and I want to tell you that the highest thrones in heaven and the mightiest triumphs and the brightest crowns will be for those who had evil parentage, but who by the grace of God conquered. As useful, as splendid a gentleman as I know of today had for father a man who died blaspheming God until the neighbors had to put their fingers in their ears to shut out the horror. One of the most consecrated and useful Christian ministers of today was the son of a drunken horse-jockey. Tide of evil tremendous in some families. It is like Niagara Rapids, and yet men have clung to a rock and been rescued. There is a family in New York whose wealth has rolled up into many millions that was founded by a man who, after he had vast estate sent back a paper of tacks because they were two cents more than he expected. Grip and grind and gouge in the fourth generation—I suppose it will be grip and grind and gouge in the twentieth generation. The thirst for intoxicants has burned down through the arteries of a hundred and fifty years. Pugnacity or combativeness characterize other families. Sometimes one form of evil, sometimes another form of evil. But it may be resisted, it has been resisted. If the family frailty be avarice, cultivate unselfishness and charity, and teach your children never to eat an apple without offering somebody else half of it. Is the family frailty combativeness, keep out of the company of quicktempered people, and never answer an impertinent question until you have counted a hundred both ways, and after you have written an angry letter keep it a week before you send it, and then burn it up! Is the family frailty timidity and cowardice, cultivate backbone, read the biography of brave men like Joshua or Paul, and see if you cannot get a little iron in your blood. Find out what the family frailty is, and set body, mind and soul in battle array. I think the genealogical table was put in the first chapter of the New Testament, not only to show our Lord’s pedigree, but to show that a man may rise up in an ancestral line and beat back successfully all the influences of bad heredity. See in that genealogical table that good King Asa came of vile King Abia. See in that genealogical table that Joseph and Mary and the most illustrious Being that ever touched our world, or ever will touch it, had in their ancestral line scandalous Rehoboam and Tamar and Bathsheba. If this world is ever to be Edenized—and it will be—all the infected families of the earth are to be regenerated, and there will some one arise in each family line and open a new genealogical table. There will be some Joseph in the line to reverse the evil influence of Rehoboam, and there will be some Mary in the line to reverse the evil influence of Bathsheba. Perhaps the star of hope may point down to your manger. Perhaps you are to be the hero or the heroine that is to put down the brakes and stop that long train of genealogical tendencies and switch it off on another track from that on which it has been running for a century. You do that, and I will promise you as fine a palace as the architects of heaven can build, the archway inscribed with the words: “More than conqueror.” But whatever your heredity, let me say, you may be sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty. Estranged children from the homestead come back through the open gate of adoption. There is royal blood in our veins. There are crowns on our escutcheon. Our Father is King. Our Brother is King. We may be kings and queens unto God forever. Come and sit down on the ivory bench of the palace. Come and wash in the fountains that fall into the basins of crystal and alabaster. Come and look out of the upholstered window upon gardens of azalea and amaranth. Hear the full burst of the orchestra while you banquet with potentates and victors. Oh, when the text sweeps backward, let it not stop at the cradle that rocked your infancy, but at the cradle that rocked the first world, and when the text sweeps forward, let it not stop at your grave, but at the throne on which you may reign forever and ever. “Whose son art thou, thou young man?” Son of God! Heir of immortality! Take your inheritance! ======================================================================== CHAPTER 99: 097. HARP AND JAVELIN ======================================================================== Harp and Javelin 1 Samuel 18:10-11 : “And David played with his hand as at other times: and there was a javelin in Saul’s hand. And Saul cast the javelin; for he said, I will smite David even to the wall with it. And David avoided out of his presence twice.” What a spectacle for all ages! Saul, a giant, and David, an undersize. An unfortunate war-ballad had been composed and sung eulogizing David above Saul. That song threw Saul into a paroxysm of rage, which brought on one of his old spells of insanity, to which he had been subject. If one is disposed to some physical ailments and he get real mad, it is very apt to bring on one of his old attacks. Saul is a raving maniac and he goes to imitating the false prophets or sibyls, who kicked and gesticulated wildly when they pretended to be foretelling events. Whatever the physicians of the royal staff may have prescribed for the disordered king, I know not, but David prescribed music. Having keyed up the harp, his fingers began to pull the music from the vibrated strings. Thrum! Thrum! Thrum! No use. The king will not listen to the exquisite cadences. He lets fly a javelin, expecting to pin the minstrel to the wall, but David dodged the weapon, and kept on, for he was confident that he could, as before, subdue Saul’s bad spirit by music. Again the javelin is flung and David dodges it and departs. What a contrast! Roseate David with a harp and enraged Saul with a javelin. Who would not rather play the one than fling the other? But that was not the only time in the world’s history that harp and javelin met. Where their birthplace was, I cannot declare. It is said that the lyre was first suggested by the tight drawing of the sinews of a tortoise across its shell, and that the flute was first suggested by the blowing of the wind across a bed of reeds, and that the ratio of musical intervals was first suggested to Pythagoras by the different hammers on the anvil of the smithy, but the harp seems to me to have dropped out of the sky and the javelin to have been thrown up from the pit. The oldest stringed instrument of the world is the harp. Jubal sounded his harp in the book of Genesis. David played many of his Psalms on the harp while he sang them. The captives in Babylon hung their harps on the willows. Josephus celebrated the invention of the ten-stringed harp. Timotheus, the Milesian, was imprisoned for adding the twelfth string to the harp, because too much luxury of sound might enervate the people. Egyptian harps, Scottish harps, Welsh harps, Irish harps, have been celebrated. What an inspired triangle! Everlasting honors to Sebastian Erard, who, by pedals invented, called the foot as well as the hand to the harp. When the harpsichord maker for whom he worked discharged him for his genius, the employer not wanting to be eclipsed by his subordinate, Erard had to suffer from the same passion of jealousy in his employer, as threw Saul in my text into the fit during which he flung the javelin at the harpist. The harp is almost human, as you find when you put your finger on is pulse. Other instruments have louder voice, and may be better for a battle charge, but what exquisite sweetness slumbers between the harp strings, waking at the first touch of the tips of the fingers. It can weep. It can plead. It can soothe. It can pray. The flute is more mellow, the trumpet is more startling, the organ is more majestic, the cymbals are more festive, the drum is more resounding, but the harp has a richness of its own, and will continue its mission through all time, and then take part in celestial symphonies, for St. John says he heard in heaven the harps of God. But the javelin of my text is just as old. It is about five feet and a half long, with wooden handle and steel point, keen and sharp. But it belongs to the great family of death-dealers, and is brother to sword and spear and bayonet, and first cousin to all the implements that wound and slay. It has cut its way through the ages. It was old when Saul, in the scene of my text, tried to harpoon David. It has gashed the earth with grave trenches. Its keen tip is reddened with the blood of American wars, English wars, German wars, Russian wars, French wars, Crusader wars, and wars of all nations and of all ages. The structure of the javelin shows what it was made for. The plowshare is sharp, but aimed to cut the earth in preparation for harvests. The lightning rod is sharp, but aimed to disarm the lightnings and secure safety. The ax is sharp, but aimed to fell forests and clear the way for human habitation. The knife is sharp, but aimed to cut bread for sustenance. But the javelin is sharp only to open human arteries and extinguish human eyesight and take human life and fill the earth with the cries of orphanage and widowhood and childlessness. Oh, I am so glad that my text brings them so close together that we can see the contrast between the harp and javelin. The one to soothe, the other to hurt; the one to save, the other to destroy; the one divine, the other diabolic; the one to play, the other to hurl; the one in David’s skilful hand, the other in Saul’s wrathful clutch. May God speed the harp, may God grind into dulness the sharp edge of the javelin. Now what does all this make you think of? It suggests to me music as a medicine for physical and mental disorders. David took hold of the musical instrument which he best knew how to play and evoked from it sounds which were for King Saul’s diversion and medicament. But, you say, the treatment in this case was a failure. Why was it a failure? Saul refused to take the medicine. A whole apothecary shop of curative drugs will do nothing toward healing your illnesses if you refuse to take the medicine. It was not the fault of David’s prescription, but the fault of Saul’s obstinacy. David, one of the wonders of ages, stands before us in the text administering music for nervous disorder and cerebral disturbance. And David was right. Music is the mightiest force in all therapeutics. Its results may not be seen as suddenly as other forms of cure, but it is just as wonderful. You will never know how much suffering and sorrow music has assuaged and healed. A soldier in the United States army said that on the days the regimental band played near the hospitals all the sick and wounded revived, and men who were so lame they could not walk before, got up and went out and sat in the sunshine, and those so dispirited that they never expected to get home began to pack their baggage and ask about time-tables on steamboat and rail-train. Theodosius, the Emperor, wrathful at the behavior of the people of Antioch, who, on some sudden provocation, tore down the statues of emperor and empress, resolved severely to punish them, but the bishop, knowing that the emperor had a group of boys sing to him while eating at the table, taught the boys a plaintive song in which the people lamented their bad behavior, and the king, under the pathos of the music, cried out: “The city of Antioch is forgiven.” The rage of Achilles was assuaged by a harp. Asclepi-ades swayed rebellious multitudes by a harp. After the battle of Yorktown, when a musician was to suffer amputation, and before the days of anæsthetics, the wounded artist called for a musical instrument and lost not a note during the forty minutes of amputation. Filippo Palma, the great musician, confronted by an angry creditor, played so enchantingly before him that the creditor forgave the debt and gave the debtor ten guineas more to appease other creditors. An eminent physician of olden time contended (of course, carrying our theory too far) that all ailments of the world could be cured by music. The medical journals never report their recoveries by this mode. But in what twilight hour has many a saint of God solaced a heartache with a hymn hummed or sung or played! Jerome of Prague sang while burning at the stake. Over what keys of piano or organ consolation has walked. Yea, in church one hymn has rolled peace over a thousand of the worried, perplexed and agonized. While there are hymns and tunes ready for the jubilant, there is a rich hymnology for the suffering “Naomi” and “Eventide” and “Autumn Leaves” and “Come, ye disconsolate,” and whole portfolios and librettos of tears set to music. All the wonderful triumphs of surgery, and all the new modes of successful treatment of physical and mental disorders are discussed in medical conventions and spread abroad in medical books, and it is high time that some of the millions of souls that have been medicated by music, vocal and instrumental, let the world know what power there is in sweet sound, whether rolling from lip or leaping from tightened chord or ascending from ivory key. Music is a universal language. At the foot of the Tower of Babel language was split into fragments never to be again put together, but one thing was not hurt, and that is music, and it is the same all the world over. One summer in Russia at a watering-place, we were greeted as we entered a great auditorium, which was filled with thousands of Russians, whose language I could not understand any more than they could understand mine. But after the grand band had, out of compliment to us, played our two great American airs, I stepped on the platform and said to the bandmaster, “Russian air! Russian air!” and then he tapped with his baton on the music rack, and with a splendor and majesty of power that almost made us quail, the full band poured forth their national anthem. They understood our American music, and we understood their Russian music. It is a universal language and so good for universal cure. I should not wonder if in the Day of Judgment it should be found out that more souls have been saved by music than by preaching. I should not wonder if, out of the one hundred and forty thousand ransomed souls that John foresaw before the throne of God, at least one hundred and thirty thousand have been saved by sweet song. Why does not the Church on earth take the hint? Heaven is the great musical center of the universe, the place of doxologies and trumpets and harps; and, in preparation for that place we ought to make more of music on earth. A band of music at Waterloo played the retreat of the Forty-second Highlanders back to their places, and sacred music has returned many a faltering host of God into the Christian conflict with as much determination and dash as Tennyson’s “Six Hundred.” Who can tell what has been accomplished by Charles Wesley’s seven thousand hymns, or by the congregational singing of his time, which could be heard two miles off? When my dear friend, Dio Lewis (gone to rest all too soon), conducted a campaign against drunkenness at the West, and marshaled thousands of the noblest women of the land in that magnificent campaign, and whole neighborhoods and villages and cities shut up their grog-shops, do you know the chief weapon used? It was the song: Nearer, my God, to thee, Nearer to thee. They sang it at the door of hundreds of liquor saloons which had been open for years, and either at the first charge of the campaign or the second the saloon shut up. At the first verse of “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” the liquor dealers laughed; at the second verse they looked solemn; at the third verse they began to cry; and at the fourth verse they got down on their knees. You say they opened their saloons again. Yes, some of them did. But it is a great thing to have hell shut up if only for a week. Give full swing to a good Gospel hymn and it would take the whole world for God! But when in my text I see Saul declining this medicine of rhythm and cadence and actually hurling a javelin at the heart of David, the harpist, I bethink myself of the fact that sin would like to kill sacred music. We are not told what tune David was playing on the harp that day, but from the character of the man we know it was not a crazy madrigal or a senseless ditty or a sweep of strings suggestive of the melodrama, but elevated music, God-given music, inspired music, religious music, a whole heaven of it encamped under a harp-string. No wonder that wicked Saul hated it and could not abide the sound, and with all his might hurled an instrument of death at it. I know there are styles of music that sin admires, and you hear it as you pass the casino or the dance hall, and the devil has stolen most of the fiddles—though I am glad the Ole Bulls have snatched up the charmed strings from their desecration—but it is a fact that sin has a javelin for sacred sounds. In many churches the javelin of criticism has killed the music, javelin flung from organ loft or from adjoining pew of the supersensitive. Saul’s javelin aimed at David’s harp. Thousands of people so afraid they may not sing scientifically, they will not sing at all, or sing with such low tone that no one hears them. In many a church the javelin of criticism has crippled the harp of worship. If Satan could silence all the Sunday-school songs and the hymns of Christian worship, he would gain his greatest achievement. When the millenial song shall rise (and it is being made ready) there will be such a roll of voices, such a concentred power of stringed and wind instruments, such majesty, such unanimity, such continental and hemispheric and planetary acclamation, that it will be impossible to know where earth stops and heaven begins. Roll on, roll in, roll up, thou millenial harmony! See also in my subject a rejected opportunity of revenge. Why did not David pick up Saul’s javelin and hurl it back again? David had a skilful arm. He demonstrated on another occasion he could wield a sling, and he could have easily picked up that javelin, aimed it at Saul, the would-be-assassin, and left the foaming and demented monster as lifeless under the javelin as he had left Goliath under a sling. O David, now is your chance. No, no! Men and women with power of tongue or pen or hand to reply to an embittered antagonist, better imitate David, and let the javelin lie at your feet and keep the harp in your hand. Do not strike back. Do not play the game of tit-for-tat. Gibbon, in his history, tells of Bajazet, the great Moslem general, who was brought a captive to the tent of Timur. He had attempted the massacre of Timur and his men. Timur said to him: “Had you vanquished us, I am not ignorant of the fate which you reserved for myself and my troops, but I disdain to retaliate. Your life and honor are secure, and I shall express my gratitude to God by my clemency to man.” Beautiful! Revenge on Christian’s tongue or pen or hand is inapt, and more damage to the one who employs it than the one against whom it is employed. What! A javelin hurled at you and fallen at your feet, and you not hurl it back again? Yes. I have tried the plan. I learned it from my father and have practised it all my life, and it works well, and by the help of God and javelins not picked up I have conquered nearly all my foes, and preached funeral sermons in honor of most of them. The best thing you can do with a javelin hurled at you is to let it lie where it dropped, or hang it up in your museum as a curiosity. The deepest wound made by a javelin is not by the sharp edge, but at the dull end of the handle to him who wields it. I leave it to you to say which got the best of that fight in the palace—Saul or David. See also in my subject that the fact that a man sometimes dodges is not against his courage. My text says that when Saul assailed him, “David avoided out of his presence twice,” that is, when the javelin was flung, he stepped out of its direction or bent this way or that; in other words, he dodged. But all those who have read the life of David know that he was not lacking in prowess. David had faults, but cowardice was not one of them. When David, the little man, went out to meet the giant, who was, I guess, about ten feet high, it was a big undertaking, and the inequalities of the struggle were so great that it struck the giant’s idea of the ludicrous, and he suggested to the little fellow that he would make a fine dinner for a buzzard or a jackal: “Come to me and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field.” When David went out to meet that giant and conquered him, he demonstrated, as he did on other occasions, his courage. But I am so glad that when Saul flung that javelin, David dodged it, or the chief work of his life would never have been done. What a lesson this is to those who go into useless danger and expose their lives or their reputations or their usefulness unnecessarily. When duty demands, go ahead, though all earth and hell oppose. Budge not one inch from the right position. But when nothing is involved, step back or step aside. Why stand in the way of perils that you can avoid? Go not into quixotic battles to fight wind-mills. You will be of more use to the world and the Church as an active Christian man than as a target for javelins. There are Christians always in a fight. If they go into churches they fight there. If they go into presbyteries or conferences or consociations they fight there. My advice to you is, if nothing is to be gained for God or the truth, stand out of the way of the javelins. As recorded, “David avoided out of his presence twice.” Washington was as mighty in his retreats as in his advances. His army would several times have been destroyed if he had not dodged. He dodged on Long Island, he dodged on New Jersey Heights. Lincoln on his way to inauguration at Washington was waited for by assassins, but he took another train and dodged the desperadoes. We have high example of the fact that sometimes a man will serve God best by disappearing from this or that place, this or that environment. A mob brought Christ to the top of the rocks back of Nazareth. They did not like his preaching and they proposed to hurl him down the precipice. But while they were getting ready for the massacre, Christ darted into the crowd, and amid the confusion escaped to Capernaum, and continued exorcising devils and cooling fevers and filling fish-nets and giving healthy circulation of blood to paralysis, and curing dementia, and turning corpses into living men and women, and doing his chief work. What a good thing he dodged the crowd on the rocks of Nazareth! Likewise at Jerusalem one day, while he was sauntering up and down in Solomon’s Porch waiting for an opportunity to say kind words or do a useful deed, the people proposed to pay him for his self-sacrifices by stoning him to death, but the record is, “He escaped out of their hands.” See also in my subject the unreasonable attitude of javelin toward harp. What had that harp in David’s hand done to the javelin in. Saul’s hand? Had the vibrating strings of the one hurt the keen edge of the other? Was there an old grudge between the two families of sweet sound and sharp cut? Had the triangle ever insulted the polished shaft? Why the deadly aim of the destroying weapon against the instrument of soothing, calming, healing sound? Well, I will answer that if you will tell me why the hostility of so many to the Gospel, why the virulent attacks against the Christian religion, why the angry antipathy of so many to the most genial, most inviting, most salutary influence under all the heavens? Why will men give their lives to writing and speaking and warring against Christ and the Gospel? Why the javelin of the world’s hatred and rage against the harp of heavenly love? You know and I know men who get wrathfully red in the face and foaming at the mouth and use the gesture of the clenched fist and put down their feet with indignant emphasis and invoke all sarcasm and irony and vituperation and scorn and spite at the Christian religion. What has the Christian religion done that it should be so assailed? Whom hath it bitten and left with hydrophobiac virus in their veins that it should sometimes be chased as though it were a maddened canine? To head off and trip up and push down and corner our religion was the dominant thought in the life of David Hume and Voltaire and Shaftesbury, and even the Earl of Rochester, until one day in a princely house, in which they blasphemously put God on trial, and the Earl of Rochester was the attorney against God and religion and received the applause of the whole company, when suddenly the Earl was struck under conviction, and cried: “Good God, that a man who walks uprightly, who sees the wonderful works of God and has the use of his senses and reason, should use them in defying his Creator! I wish I had been a crawling leper in a ditch rather than have acted toward God as I have done.” Javelin of wit, javelin of irony, javelin of scurrility, javelin of sophistry, javelin of human and diabolic hostility have been flying for hundreds of years, and are flying now. But aimed at what? At something that has come to devastate the world? At something that slays nations? At something that would maul and trample under foot and excruciate and crush the human race? No, aimed at the Gospel harp. Harp on which prophets played with somewhat lingering and uncertain fingers, but harp on which apostles played with sublime certainty, and martyrs played while their fingers were on fire. Harp that was dripping with the blood of the Christ, out of whose heartstrings the harp was chorded and from whose dying groan the strings were keyed. Oh, gospel harp! All thy nerves a-tremble with stories of self-sacrifice. Harp thrummed by fingers long ago turned to dust. Harp that made heaven listen and will yet make all the earth hear. Harp that sounded pardon to my sinful soul and peace over the grave where my dead sleep. Harp that will lead the chant of the blood-washed throng redeemed around the throne. May a javelin slay me before I fling a javelin at that. Harp which it seems almost too sacred for me to touch, and so I call down from their thrones those who used to finger it, and ask them to touch it now. “Come down, William Cowper, and run your fingers over the strings of this harp.” He says, “I will,” and he plays: There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Immanuel’s veins. “Come down, Charles Wesley, and touch the strings.” He says, “I will,” and he plays: Jesus, lover of my soul, Let me to thy bosom fly. “Come down, Augustus Toplady, and sweep your fingers across this Gospel harp.” He says, “I will,” and he plays: Rock of ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee. “Come down, Isaac Watts, and take this harp.” He says, “I will,” and he plays: Alas I and did my Saviour bleed, And did my Sovereign die. “P. P. Bliss, come down, and thrum this Gospel harp.” He says, “I will,” and he plays: Hallelujah, ‘tis done, I believe on the Son. Ineffable harp! Transporting harp! Harp of earth! Harp of heaven! Harp saintly and seraphic! Harp of God! Oh, I like the idea of that old monument in the ancient church at Ullard, near Kilkenny, Ireland. The sculpture on that monument, though chiseled more than a thousand years ago, as appropriate today as then, the sculpture representing a harp upon a cross. That is where I hang it now; that is where you had better hang it. Let the javelin be forever buried, the sharp edge down, but hang the harp upon the cross. And now upon our souls let the harps of heaven rain music, and as, when the sun’s rays fall aslant in Switzerland, at the approach of eventide, and the shepherd among the Alps puts the horn to his lips and blows a blast, and says, “Glory be to God,” and all, the shepherds on the Alpine heights or down in the deep valleys respond with other blast of horns, saying, “Glory be to God,” and then all the shepherds uncover their heads and kneel in worship, and after a few moments of silence some shepherd rises from his knees and blows another blast of the horn, and says, “Thanks be to God,” and all through the mountains the response comes from other shepherds, “Thanks be to God;” so this moment let all the valleys of earth respond to the hills of heaven with sounds of glory and thanks, and let it be harp of earthly worship to harp of heavenly worship, and the words of St. John in the Apocalypse be fulfilled: “I heard a voice from heaven as the voice of many waters and as the voice of a great thunder, and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps.” ======================================================================== Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/500-selected-sermons-by-t-de-witt-talmage-volume-1/ ========================================================================