fe&y
ft
f
JVE COALS,
I
FROM THK DISCOURSES OF
T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D. D.
AUTHOR OF "THE MASQUE TORN OFF," "NIGHT SIDES OF CITY I.IKK,"
"FOES OF SOCIETY," "TRAPS FOR MEN," "CRUMBS SWEPT
UP," "AROUND THE TEA TABLE," ETC., ETC.
COLLATED BY
LYDIA E. WHITE.
COMPILATION AUTHORIZED BY DR. TALMAGE.
CHICAGO.
FAIRBANKS & PALMER PUBLISHING CO.
1886.
COPYRIGHTED BY
L. T. PALMER,
1885.
PUBLISHER'S PREFACE.
In issuing " Live Coals " from our press we do it in
the firm conviction that the Christian community
of the English-speaking world will appreciate this
volume. The work embraces the most popular and
powerful discourses of Dr. Talmage, as delivered by
him during the past year in the Brooklyn Tabernacle
and elsewhere, and are here for the first time collated
and published in book form
These interesting discourses are written in his
most powerful descriptive powers sparkling with
graceful imagery, and illustrated with interesting
anecdotes. They will be found the keenest, sharpest,
and most vigorous specimens of oratory ever written,
and for originality, force and splendor will bear a
favorable comparison with the greatest pulpit pro-
ductions of any age or country.
The work has been divided into four sections or
parts. I. Coals for- the Individual. II. Coals for the
Church Militant. III. Coals for the Moral Realm.
IV. Coals for the National Arena. They are Dr.
Talmage's best efforts in his earnest aggressive war-
fare upon the foes of society and the State, they ex-
pose the traps and pitfalls that beset the youth of
vi PUBLISHER'S PREFACE.
our land on every hand, every page burning with
eloquent entreaty for a better and purer life, possess-
ing an intense, soul-absorbing interest to all who
desire the advancement and higher development of
the human race. The editor of the Christian Age,
London, England, truly voices the sentiment of all
admirers of Dr. Talmage when he said : " For knowl-
edge of human life, and the adaptation of Divine
truth to the whole being of man intellectual, emo-
tional, moral, practical and for the power of apply-
ing that truth, we know not his equal."
CONTENTS.
PREFACE 5
/
TABLE OF CONTENTS 7
BIOGRAPHY.
Birthplace Date of Birth Parents Reminiscences of his Child-
hood, as given at London, Eng., Aug. 12, 1885 Anecdotes of Family
A Great Revival The Reformed Dutch Church Conversion
College Days Theological Seminary Early Ministerial Life- -Pas-
torate at Belleville, N. J. At Syracuse, N. Y. At Philadelphia, Pa.
Call to Brooklyn The Old Tabernacle Present Stately Edifice
The Tabernacle Audiences The Newspapers The Lay College
Pastoral Work Secular Criticism Foreign Criticism Visit to Eng-
land in 1885 AtWesleyan Chapel, London At Presbyterian Synod
Hall, Ediiiburg Editorial Criticism The Welcome Home Dr.
Talmage's Address 25
SECTION I.
COAI^S FOR THE INDIVIDUAL.
CHAPTER I.
BUSINESS LIFE.
The General Impression God's Intentions A School of Energy
God's Demands Anecdote of a Millionaire A School of Patience
Of Useful Knowledge Traders Manufactures A School of In-
tegrity Temptations of To-Day Honesty Scarcity of Commercial
Honesty Men who Have Conquered Heavenly Rewards 43
CHAPTER II.
GNATS AND CAMELS.
The Grub The Camel Religious Work Humor The Infini-
tesimals The Magnitudes Large versus Small Thefts Prison for
Small Crimes Palaces for Large Crimes Nervousness and Dyna-
vii
Vlll CONTENTS.
mite Dishonest Fruit Dealers False Crop Reports Society Needs
Reconstruction False Statements to Assessors All More or Less
Guilty 51
CHAPTER III.
THE INSIGNIFICANT.
Trouble Develops Character Is an Educator A Young Doctor
Grecian Mythology Past National Distresses Adversity Proves
Friendship Life a Game Paths < Hardship and Darkness The
Hour of Conviction Alone No more Hunger or Thirst Persecu-
tion of Christians The Reward The Importance of the Insignifi-
cant Indolence The Gleaner 57
CHAPTER IV.
PAUL IN A BASKET.
Great Results Hang by Slender Tenure Paul's Life His Great
Work Moses' Tiny Craft Rescue ot'John Wesley Pitcairn Islan i
Infinity made up of Infinitesimals What you "do, do Well Un-
recognized and Unrecorded Services Paul's Rescuers Early Strug-
gles of Ministers The Son at College The Sacrifices of the Family
Early Influences and Prayers 69
CHAPTER V.
THE NEEDLE.
The Praises of the Needle Operatives Its Triumphs Its Cruel-
ties Its Charities Practical Benevolence Earnest Christian Man
Against Theorists Female Benevolence Written on every Page of
History The Women of the Civil War The Unmissed Josephine's
Funeral The Grief of the French Poor 76
CHAPTER VI.
THE SECRET OUT.
The Amalekites Saul's Success Agag's Life Spared Wratli of
God Samuel not Deceived The Hypocrisy of Saul Hypocrisy
Always Exposed Hypocrites in the Church The Venom of Eccle>-
iastical Courts Ottocar and Randolphus I Hypocrisy not Confined
to the Church Putting oft" Sin on Others Extermination Necessary
Mere Profession Amounts to Nothing Value of a Church Certifi-
cate in Wall Street The Church up with the Times What we
Need 81
CHAPTER VII.
THE EVE.
An Imperial Organ The Marvels of the Human Eye Eyes of
Animals and Reptiles The Window of the Soul God's Preparation
CONTENTS. IX
for its Reception Its Residence The Contrivances of the Eye Its
Elaborate Gearing The Retina The Tear Gland Wonderful Hy-
draulic Apparatus Anecdotes Bell's Treatise on the Human Hand
The Recoil of the Question The Great Searching, Overwhelming
Eye of God 89
CHAPTER VIII.
THE EAR.
Architecture of Nations The Human Ear Its Overmastering
Architecture Scientists The External Ear The Middle Ear The
Internal Ear The Hidden Machinery of the Ear Defies Human In-
spection Vibrations per Second A Life Long Study The Musical
Composers Its Attempted Conquest Its Wonders Planned by
Jehovah The Sacred Touch Look for God in the Infinitesimal
Nearness of God The Phonograph The Ear of God 97
CHAPTER IX.
YOUR PEDIGREE.
A Mighty Question Blue Blood Characteristics from Genera-
tion to Generation The Blood of Nationalities Law of Heredity
Personal Responsibility Christian Ancestry Early Association
The Unwritten Will of the Christian Parent Vast Responsibility
Imposed A Trustee The Unwritten Will of the Wicked Evil
Parentage Overcoming its Stigma An Heir of Immortality.. . 109
CHAPTER X.
HOME.
Piety at Home Faithfulness in an Insignificant Sphere The
Definition of Home by Different Persons The Contented Home
The Wretched Home Pirvate Character Reputation Bad Temper
at Home Affable in Public Home a Refuge A Political Safe-
Guard Christian Hearth-Stone Home a School Words and Deeds
Brightest Place on Earth Cheerfulness Decorations of the Home
Good Cheer 121
CHAPTER XI.
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?
The Evolutionist's Guess Ask the Young Man Ask the Man
of Forty How to Decide the Question Mere Money Getting a
Failure The Disease of Accumulation Worldly Approval Intel-
ligence Social Position High Social Life A Life that is Worth
Living Opportunities and Responsibilities Peter Cooper Grace
Darling The Reward 131
X CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XII.
SOLICITUDE
Cause of Parental Solicitude Parental Imperfection Conscious
Insufficiency The Result of too Strict Discipline Too Great Se-
verity Too Lenient Childish Sinfulness Nagging at Children
Temptations A Farewell to Innocence Traps set for the Young
Sin Invades the Sacred Precincts of Home No Statistics Compiled
of Ruined Homes The Alleviations Immediate Correction Inno-
cent Hilarity 140
CHAPTER XIII.
ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA.
Various Ways of Lying Acquired and Natural The Tendency in
Rural Districts The Producer Plotting of Speculators God Help
the Merchants Fortunes Made by Dishonesty Large Fortunes
Made Honestly Dishonesties of Speech The Merchants Cus-
tomers Artisans Insincerity of Society False Statements of De-
nominations Misrepresentations of Individual Churches No such
Thing as a Small Sin 150
CHAPTER XIV.
THE BALANCE SHEET.
Short Allowances Taking Stock Christian Liabilities A Title
Deed Refinement of Life Sweet Sounds of the World The Vi-
cissitudes of Life All Things for our Good The Christian's Assets
in this World and the Next Death, a Black Messenger Not a Ruffian
No Tears "All are Yours" The Invalid's Reward That Glo-
rious Consummation 159
CHAPTER XV.
THE NOONTIDE OF LIFE.
The Best Part of Life's Journey Tranquilitv and Repose Youth
Manhood Old Age Wholesale Slander Looking Backward
Do Your Best All Events are Connected The Picture Galleries of
the Past Satan's Appetite The Home Gallery Looking Forward
Going Through A Look Beyond Faith's Strength 166
CHAPTER XVI.
A SCROLL OF HEROES.
Merits Acknowledged Historical Heroes Heroes of Common,
Everyday Life The Sick-Room Heroes The Heroes of Toil
The Slain by the Needle Heroes who have Endured Domestic In-
CONTENTS. XI
justices Social Wrecks A Perpetual Martyrdom The Drunkard's
Wife Heroes of Christian Charity Melrose Abbey The Righteous
Never Forsaken The Great Chaplain's Cheer 174
CHAPTER XVII.
THE BURDENS LIFTED.
Wells of Water Dr. Talmage Leaving Home A Practical Re-
ligion Necessary Business Burdens A World of Burden Bearing
Toiling for Others the Incentive Grip, Gouge & Co. God's Interest
in one's Business The Story of a Young Accountant God's Sym-
pathy A Weight of Persecution and Abuse High and Holy En-
terprise Always Abused The Treachery of the Befriended A
Cynic The Ill-Treated in Good Company 182
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE DAY WE LIVE IN.
What this Age Expects of Every One- An Aggressive Christian
The Prince of Wales' Visit Piety too Exclusive The Cactus of
North Carolina Self-Examination A Stalwart Christian Character
The Century Plant Average of Human Life The Years Re-
quired in Earning a Livelihood The Years Spent in Sleep and
Recreation The Years Spent in Childhood and Sickness The Time
Left for Exclusive Service of God Responsibilities not Discharged
by Liberal Giving Avoid Reckless Iconoclasm Scoffing Storm
the Fortress of Sin Work for All Unbounded Faith Fall of
Tyranny The March of the Hosts of the Living God 189
CHAPTER XIX.
THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT.
The Blessings of a Parental Visit Poor Relations Father of
i-,arge Wealth Should Retain Possession The Undutiful Son
Share Success with Parents The Praises of the Unmarried Sister-
hoodA Queen of Self-Sacrifice The Maiden Aunt The Bible
Narratives of Unfilial Conduct Ruth and Naomi 200
CHAPTER XX.
ORDINARY PEOPLE.
A Religion for Ordinary People The Vast Majority The
Women at the Head of Households Food Providers Decide the
Health of the World The Martyrs of Kitchen and Nursery Ordi-
nary Business Men Gray Hairs at Thirty Ages Rapidly Divine
Grace Wanted Possess the Friendship of Christ Ordinary Farmers
Christ's Best Parables Drawn from the Farmer's Life The Stone
Mason The Carpenters The Physicians If Ordinary, Thank God
Xll CONTENTS.
You are not Extraordinary Abuse and Slander of the Extraordinray
Be Content with Things we Have 205
CHAPTER XXI
THE LACHRYMAL.
The Lachrymals of the Ancients The Story of Paradise and the
PeriThe Re'turn of the Lost Sheep The Wanderer The Falling
Tear Unreported The City Missionary The Parents' Solicitude
The Training of Children The Heavenly Record Sanctified Sor-
rows Gems of Light Bright Jewels of Heaven God's Bottle.. 218
CHAPTER XXII.
SUNSET.
A Dismal Thing The Gloomy Hour of Temptation The Strong
Beneficent Influence of Jesus Necessary "Abide with Us" The
Greatest Folly The Cry of a Child The Mother's Care The Sud-
den Loss of Earthly Estate A Friend's Treachery The Accumula-
tion of Mi -fortunes Trouble must be Met and Borne The Com-
forting Influence of a Christian's Belief. 227
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN.
Trying to Extemporize a Way to Heaven The Miserable Work
of Such The Ferry Boat to Come from the Other Side Thomas
Walsh A Delusion Broken The Journev to Heaven is not Alone
Last Testimony of the Faithful Only a Ferry No Great and Peril-
ous Enterprise A Solid Landing A Real Place John's Material-
istic Heaven Satisfactory The Welcome of Friends The Recog-
nition of All The Romance in the Life of Judson 232
SECTION II.
COALS FOR THE CHURCH MILITANT. 241
CHAPTER XXIV.
DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY.
The Rising Sun of Our Time The World without the Sun In-
fidelitv and Atheism The World wi'hout Christianity Degrada-
tion of Womanhood What Christianity has done for Woman
What Infidelity Would Do The Death Bed of the Wicked The
Mightiest Restraints of To day The Grand March of Infidelity
W.'ll Infidelity Succeed? 243
CONTENTS. Xlll
CHAPTER XXV.
EVOLUTION.
No Contest Between Science and Revelation Witnesses Pro and
Con Herbert Spencer Huxley Darwin The Bible on Evolution
A Question Propounded Theory of Evolution is Infidel Agassiz
Boast of Evolutionists Their Theories Shattered Their Wander-
ings Testimony Against Evolution A Magnificent Theory Sur-
vival of the Fittest Spontaneous Generation No Natural Progress
Natural Evolution Downward Develops Dishonesty Theory of
Evolution Older than Christianity ".252
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE MISSING LINK.
The Ancestral Line The Brute Man The Brain of the Gorilla
The Brain of the Hottentot Blood Globule A Different Creation
Darwin's System Species Unchanged and Unchangeable Your
Predecessors Evolution a Mystery Brutalizing in its Tendency
Annihilation The Bible Narration Divine Evolution Monarchs
of Earth Evolution from Contestant to Conqueror 267
CHAPTER XXVII.
EVANGELISM VINDICATED.
A Roman Evangelist Eating the Book The Creeds of the Peo-
ple Evangelical Religion The Belief of the Different Denomina-
tions How they are Slandered A Charmed Key Two Destinies
Demanded by One's Common Sense The Trinity Justification by
Faith Regeneration Reconstruction Easily Understood 276
CHAPTER XXVIII.
SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY.
An Inspired Bible No Element of Weakness Stood the Assaults
of Time Errors in Transcribing Advanced Thinkers Freedom
in Religious Thought and Discussion Change of Theories The
Political Parties What I Believe to be Right What Orthodoxy
Has Done The Influence of the Entire Bible Splendors of Charac-
ter The Certitudes Palace and Penitentiary Advancements of
Our Time 284
CHAPTER XXIX.
MENDING THE BIBLE.
A Risky Business Trie Book of Genesis Disbelief of Portions
of the Bible Liberty of Discussion The Heinousness of Fault
Finding The Old Gospel Ship Opposes Expurgation Implicit Be-
lief Bible Miraculously Preserved A Matter of History The Cata-
XIV CONTENTS.
logue Unchanged for Ages All Attempts to Detract or Addto
Failures The Bible Liked As It Is A Division Critics Severely
Handled 263
CHAPTER XXX.
THE GLORIOUS MARCH.
The Glory of the Church The Church Ahead of the World
Her Possessions The Blessings of the Poor The Church Com-
pared to the Moon The Only Institution That Gives Light to the-
World Weathered all Storms Light for all Classes and Conditions
of People Compared to the Sun The Great Missions of Christ
The Church Triumphant Religious Enthusiasm Christ as a
Leader *.,.. 301
CHAPTER XXXI.
SHAMS IN RELIGION.
The Religion the World Wants A Practical Religion What
Such a Religion Will Do Adulteration of Articles of Commerce
The Remedy Philanthropy Does Not Atone For Sin Mechanism
Rectified Religion in Agriculture Religion in the Learned Profes-
sionsReligion and Good Society Misbionary Work Among the
Upper Classes The Marriage Relation A New Departure A
Beautiful Theory Witnesses of Practical Religion 310
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION.
The Crystal No Happen-So's in Theology Not a Slipshod
Universe A House of Sorrow Superior in Transparency A Trans-
parent Bible Surpasses in its Beauty Cross and Crown Beautiful
in its Symmetry Not a Sta.e Religion Superior in its Transforma-
tions Minerals Early Dissipation Chief Transforming Power not
of this World-Kill Sin or it will Kill You 322
CHAPTER XXXIII.
RELIGION AX ANTISEPTIC.
Grace Like Salt Beyond Human Skill Beautiful and Beautify-
ingA Healthy Religion What the Grace of God Will Do A
Necessity of Life Must Have More Faith The Preservative of
Governments The Trouble with Modern Philosophy The Morning
Star of Jesus 335
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE SPICERY OF RELIGION.
Theologians Agree Religion Compared A Glorious Inspiration
-- Necessary to the Housekeeper An Inspired Religion Lugubri.
CONTENTS. XV
ous Christians a Damage to Christianity More Sunshine and Fresh
Air Necessary Cheer the Sick and Poor The Two Ways of
Meeting the Poor Church Music A New Crusade A Present
and an Everlasting Redolence Chasing the Dead Comfort and
Satisfaction 341
CHAPTER XXXV.
LIVE CHURCHES.
Financial Engagements Promptly Met Half Starved Pastors
The Niggardliness of Many Churches Punctuality A Grand
Delusion Congregational Singing The Methodist Church En-
circles the World A Flourishing Sunday School Vast Multitudes
Outside Those Little Feet That Spark of Iniquity Now a Great
Army Only a Child Commodious and Appropriate Architecture
A Soul Saving Church All Must do their Best 346
CHAPTER XXXVI.
MUSIC IN WORSHIP.
The Best Music The Scotch Covenanters The Animalculse
have their Music The Music of the Bible The First Organist
The White Robed Levites What is Appropriate Music Adaptive-
ness to Devotion A Distinction Church Psalmody Correctness
Spirit and Life Drawling and Stupidity Congregational Our
Duty " Gloria in Excelsis." 359
CHAPTER XXXVII.
ABOLITION OF SUNDAY.
The Sabbath's Sanctity A Seventh Day Rest Necessary for Man
and Beast Interesting Testimony Secular Amusements The Grog
Shops The People's Rights Opposed to all Infractions A Paris
Incident A French Sabbath Compared to an American The May
Flower When it will be Destroyed 365
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE BLOOD.
Conscience A Personal Knowledge When Sin is Committed
The Moral Man Not Exempt from Sin Astray in Many Directions
The Bible's Charge The " Rider on the White Horse." Died for
their Faith Different Kinds of Hands At the Sea Beach The
Password at the Gate of Heaven 372
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CAN THE UNPARDONABLE SIN BE COMMITTED IN OUR TIME?
The Sin Against the Holy Ghost Not Possible to Commit that
Sin Now An Irrevocable Sin Impossible to Correct Mistakes
XVI CONTENTS.
God Forgives but Nature Neves Correcting Bad Habits in Children
- Incidents and Anecdotes Lost Opportunities Getting Good
Usefulness Now is Your Time 378
CHAPTER XL.
INTOLERANCE.
Difference in Pronunciation Differences in Denominations
Liberty of Conscience Agitation Tends to Purification and Moral
Health Truth will Conquer Bigotry a Child of Ignorance Causes
of Bigotry An Especial Mission People Disgusted Sectarianism
How to Build Astor Library English Law Against the Jew
Gospel Platforms How to Overthrow Intolerance Christian
Charity 385
CHAPTER XLI.
THE WITNESS STAND.
Science against Inventions Science against the Resurrection of
Christ A Play with the Skeptic Testimony versus Argument The
Weapon Used in this Conflict We Are Witnesses What It Has
Done for Us Conversion Alone Conquers Appetite Power of the
Cconforter The World Powerless to Comfort Power to Give Com-
posure The Deathbed of the Christian Their Testimony and Tri-
umphs ..396
CHAPTER XLII.
THE GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS.
The Gospel The Tabernacle The Laver The Looking-glasses
Different Mirrors Ourselves Seen as We Are God's Mercies Thank-
lessly Received Pride Why so Few Conversions A Laver Nec-
essary Fresh Testimony Required Where the Trouble Lies
Pervades Man's Whole Nature Washing Imperative, not Optional
Comfort 405
CHAPTER XLIII.
RELIGION IN DRESS.
The First Wardrobe The Goddess of Fashion The Victims of
Fashion Fashion with Men Animated Checker Boards Corsets
Destroying and Deathful Influences Fraud Expensive Wardrobes
Cause of Defaultings Country Dressed to Death The Tragedy of
Clothes The Foe of all Alms GivingGreatest Obstacles to Charity
"A Love of a Bonnet" Public Worship Distracted Belittles the
Intellect No Seat in Heaven for the Devotee of Fashion 415
CONTENTS. XV11
CHAPTER XLIV.
THE COMING SERMON.
The Sermon of To-Day What Is the Matter Unsuited to the
Age Convert the Sermon Full of a Living Christ A Loving
Christ A Short Sermon Where the Trouble Lies Europe Thrilled
A Popular Sermon Theological Professors Churches Thronged
An Awakening Sermon An Everyday Sermon 425
PART III.
COALS FOR THE MORAL REALM.
CHAPTER XLV.
THE GATES OF HELL
The Gates Described The Tuilleries Impure Literature Scien-
tific and Medical Novelette Literature The Leprous Booksellers
Family Libraries Should be Explored The Dissolute Dance Indis-
creet Apparel The Fashion Plates of any Age Alcoholic Beverage
The Chief Abetter of Sin Gates Swing In Never Outward The
Ways of Escape The Christian Press No Soft Sentimentalists
Wanted The Return of the Wanderer 435
CHAPTER XLVI.
INFLUENCE OF CLUBS.
Men Gregarious Herbs and Flowers Secret Soceities Two
Specimens of Clubs Profitable or Baleful Influences The Test
The Home Moral Bigamy Domestic Shipwrecks The Clubs Sub-
stituted for the Home Obituary Easily Written Scions of Aristoc-
racy Influence a Man's Commercial Credit Its Influence on One's
Sense of Moral and Spiritual Obligation Two Highways Attacks
the Best Men The Large Admission Fee Influence of Fathers
Upon Their Sons Sacrifice your Money Rather than your Soul. .446
CHAPTER XLVII.
HEALTH RESORTS.
Watering Places Piety Left at Home Little Piety at Health
Resorts Hard to be Good Elders and Deacons Temptations
Baleful Influence of Horse Racing The Habitues of Races Dis-
honor and Ruin Statement of a Leading Sportsman A Sacrifice of
Physical Strength A Poor Rule Hasty and Life-long Alliances
Responsible f r Many Domestic Infelicities The Soft-headed Dude
XV111 CONTENTS.
The Frothy Young Woman Baneful Literature Intoxicating
Beverages Arm Yourself Against Temptation 458
CHAPTER XLVIII.
THE ROLLER SKATING CRAZE.
The Lever Balance Wheel Other Wheels Looking for a
Healthful Amusement The World's Temptations The Theater-
Does the Roller Skate Recreation Afford Healthful Amusement?
Yes, with Restrictions Proper Precautions One Hour's Exercise
Daily Great Possibilities Vulgarity of Immodesty A Chaperone
Well Dressed Men Flirts Avoid Senseless Prolongation Let the
Law of the Parlor Dominate A Craze Deplorable Remember
One's Youth A Good Time Solon's Law Recreation an Aug-
mentation 470
CHAPTER XLIX.
TOBACCO AND OPIUM.
The Herb Yucatan its Birth Place Nearly all Use It A Poison
Truths Uttered Against the Evil Terrific Unhealth Depresses
the Nervous System Creates an Unnatural Thirst The Drunkard's
Grave Strewed with Tobacco Leaves Witnesses Incidents Related
Killed by Tobacco The Ministry Use It Unnecessary Expense
Both Sexes A Brilliant Man White Poppy Its Age The Opiu .
Eater God Does not Hear the Prayer of Such Chloral Extirp.
tion 484
CHAPTER L.
SOCIAL DISSIPATION.
Dancing The Round Dance Dancing Universal Ancient
Dancing Present Custom God Bless the Young An Abetter of
Pride Physical Ruin From Ball Room to Grave Yard Usefulness
Spoiled A Belittling Process An Incident Earnest Work A
Vast Multitude Destroyed ' 497
CHAPTER LI.
SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE.
Mystery Communications Between This and the Next World
Fingers of Superstition Modern Spiritualism, an Old Doctrine-
Necromancers of Old God's Condemnation of Such Undue Ad-
vantage Taken Remarkable Scholarship of Spirits An Affair of
Darkness Ruin Physical Health A Marital and Social Curse The
World with Spiritualism at the Head Produces Insanity False-
hoods Ruins Disciples and Mediums Ruins the Soul 506
CONTENTS. XIX
CHAPTER LII
BOOKS.
The Mighty Agency of the Printing Press Its Chief Agency
Good Journalism An Absorbing Question Keep Aloof from Iniqui-
tous A List of Good Books Three-fourths of Novels Published are
Pernicious False Pictures of Human Life Indiscriminate Readers
How to Stem the Tide Books that Corrupt the Imagination
George Sand The Criminals of the Country Apologetic for Crime
The Penalty The Midnight Reader of Romances Iniquitous
Pictorials A Plague Spot The Power of a Bad Book Examine
Your Libraries Charge! Charge!! 516
CHAPTER LIII.
ARE THEATERS IMPROVING?
Progression of the World Great Actors Secular Newspapers'
Criticism Depraved Advertisements Importation of Bad Morals
Degenerate Players An Awful Decadence East Lynne No Moral
Elevation in the Modern Play The Drama An Echo of the
Human Soul Advice to Young Men Freshen up your Work
Avoid Being Led into Sin 531
CHAPTER LIV.
ROMANCE OF CRIME.
Halo Around Iniquity The Fascinations Thrown around Crime
Fraud Jim Fiske, the Peddler An Irresistible Impression Get-
ing One's Hand In The Dishonesties of Commercial Life Gain
Obtained by Iniquity Easily Lost Trust Funds Libertinism
Unfair Treatment of Female Sex The Pulpit Must Awake Assas-
sination Murder Capital Punishment Stand Independent of Evil
Influences 541
CHAPTER LV.
ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS.
The Dead Treasurer Accounts Squared The Dishonest Fail-
ures An Appalling Fact Responsibility- of Officials The Ineffi-
cient Bank Director An Orthodox Swindler Loss of Public Confi-
dence Banks National Blessings An Epidemic Borrowing
Wall Street Speculation Sound the Alarm Religion not a Church
Delectation 552
CHAPTER LVI.
WALL STREET DEFALCATION.
The Great Wall of 1685 Birthplace of the U. S. Government-
Coronation and Burial of Fortunes Extravagance Elegances and
XX CONTENTS.
Refinements No Iron Rule Honest Failures Rare Pay as You
Go Superfluities Expenditures for Tobacco and Liquor Cause of
Pauperism My Text at the Grave of a Swindler Swindling the
Physician and Undertaker Cause of God Impoverished Keep Your
Credit Good 563
SECTION IV.
COALS FOR THE NATIONAL ARENA.
CHAPTER LVII.
NATIONAL RUIN.
Tomb of a Dead Empire Destruction of Babylon Mortality
among Nations A Call of the Roll Political Bribery Legitimate
Expenses Purchase of Suffrage Solidifying of Sections Low
State of Public Morals The Millionaires of California Son of
Cresus How to Save the Nation Who Shall Possess this Nation?
Christ or Satan? Who Shall Decide It? 575
CHAPTER LVIII.
EASY DIVORCE.
Infelicitous Homes Divorce Free Love Advocates Mormon-
ism A Positive Law Now on the Statute Books A Pustulous Lit-
erature The Laws of the States The Record by States Easy
Divorce and Dissoluteness Twin Brothers What we Want Dissat-
isfaction no Cause for Divorce Constitutional Amendment Make
Divorce Difficult Rigorous Laws A Divine Rage Against all
Enemies of the Marriage State Paradise Regained 587
CHAPTER LIX.
THE ARCH FIEND OF THE NATIONS.
Noah Introduced the Deluge of Drunkenness Unhealthful Stim-
ulants The Arch-Fiend's Cauldron of Temptation Greatest Evil of
this Nation Statistics Born with a Thirst for Strong Drink The
Last Will of the Drunkard Bitters Circulars of a Brewers' Associ-
ation A National Evil Suffering Mothers and Children Death's
Hand The Drunkard's Home The Boast of Protagoras Political
Parties Afraid The Church Teetotalism 599
CONTENTS. XXI
CHAPTER LX.
THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION.
Political Parties Mormonism A Great Evil Necessity of Im-
mediate Settlement of the Question Bigamy Punished Polygamy
Unpunished A Plank Anti-Mormonistic Wanted Immigration of
Mormons Intermarriage of Nationalities What Are We Doing
What Is Demanded The Platforms of Political Parties God's
Country Prayer Answered Four Doxologies 613
CHAPTER LXI.
BOSSISM.
The Village Boss Slavery of American Politics Official Pat-
ronage No Peril No Crisis The Old Lion Party Independence
Advocated Good Example Cry Partisanship Malediction of Public
Men Public Life A Respecter of the Christian Religion Chris-
tianity in Politics The Gospel to Be Dominant The Brightest Day
in our History 624
CHAPTER LXII.
THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE.
The Sacred Chest Holds the Fate of the Nation Ancient Forms
of Voting First Introduction of Ballot-Boxes The American Ark
of the Covenant Its Curses Ignorance Spurious Voting Intimi-
dation Bribery Defamation of Character Opinions of Political
Opponents The Rowdy and Drunken Caucus Low Politics The
Remedy Property Qualification Thorough Moralization and Chris-
tianization 635
CHAPTER LXIII.
CAPITAL AND LABOR.
Greatest War of the World Strikes Pacification a Failure
Folly of Crying Out against the Rich Or by Cynical and Unsym-
pathetic Treatment of the Laboring Classes Violence The Golden
Rule Applied to Both The Sermon Olivetic Anecdote of Wash-
ington Supply and Demand Henry Clay The Greatest Friend to
Capital and Labor 647
CHAPTER LXIV.
THE MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES.
Wreck of Arabia Petraea The Decalogue The Christly Rule-
Statements of Red-Hot Partisanship No Especial Liberty Conferred
Unchastity A Moral Leper One Sin Followed by Others All
Are Imperfect- -The Man to Select as a Candidate 660
XX11 CONTENTS.
CHAPTER LXV.
RULERS.
Morals of a Nation Seldom Higher than the Virtue of the Rulers
American Rulers Superior to all other Nations Public Wicked-
ness Incompetency lor Office Intemperance Defeats Legislation
Defeated our Armies Bribery Not Wholly American Ras-
cality Among Legislatures Revolution Ahead Bonus Siand
Aloof Faithfulness at the Ballot- Box Evangelize the People Per-
sonal Responsibility 667
CHAPTER LXVI.
DEDICATORY PRAYER.
Delivered at the Opening of the New Orleans Exposition, De-
cember 1 6, 1884 678
T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D. D.
Thomas De Witt Talmage was born on the /th
of January, 1832, in the village of Bound Brook,
Somerset County, N. J. His father was a farmer,
and a man of much vigor and consistency of charac-
ter ; his mother a woman of energy, hopefulness and
equanimity.
Both parents were marked in their characteristics,
and their differences blended in a common life ren-
dered their home one of harmony, consecration, be-
nignance and cheerfulness. The father won the
confidence and the honors a rigid, common-sense,
truly American community had to yield. The
mother was the counseling, quietly provident force
which made her a helpmeet indeed, and her home
the center and sanctuary of the sweetest influences.
The family was a deeply religious one.
The now far-famed De Witt said on August 12,
1885, at the "Faith Cure" Rooms, Bethshan, Lon-
don :
" I tell you that I believe in prayer because there
is something in the ancestral line that makes me be-
lieve. My grandfather and grandmother went to a
great revival meeting in Baskingridge, New Jersey,
25
26 BIOGRAPHY.
and they were so impressed with the religious service
that they went home and said, If we could only have
our children converted, if we could only have this
great influence in our family ! That night all the
young folks were to go off to a very gay party.
Grandmother said, ' Now, when you are all ready for
the party come into my room, as I have a word to
say to you.' She was somewhat of an invalid, not
able to get about much. The children came into the
room where she sat, and she said, ' Now you are go-
ing to the party, going to have a very gay time. I
want you to know that all the time you are there
your mother is praying for you, and that we will
kneel and pray for you until you come back.' They
all went to the gay party, and, as may be well sup-
posed, did not have a very good time. They knew
their mother was praying for them. Grandmother
went to bed, and the next morning very early she
heard crying and sobbing in the room below. It was
one of her little party crying to God for mercy, seek-
ing a new heart, wanting to act on the Christian life.
My Aunt Phoebe said to grandfather, ' Go down and
find what is the matter ; go and hunt up Samuel he
is gone to the barn ; he feels worse than I do.'
Grandfather went to the barn and found Samuel
there kneeling and crying to God for mercy. He
told him the way of salvation, so that he became a
minister of Jesus Christ, and there was no man more
useful in America during the century than he. Then
BIOGRAPHY. 27
Samuel said, ' Go to the wagon-house ; David is there.'
Grandfather went to the wagon-house. There was
David, afterward my own father. He told David
the way to the cross. David became a Christian.
David, then a young man, had some one to whom he
was affianced at the foot of the lane, not far off
Catherine Van Nest, afterward my mother. He told
the story of the cross to her, and she became a Chris-
tian. A great awakening resulted as this story went
round the neighborhood, and people heard what
things were going on in Mr. Talmage's family.
Why, they were all getting converted, and the whole
family were converted to God. And finally, as many
as two hundred and eighty from that neighborhood
stood up in one church to profess Christ. That story
lingered in my mother's mind until she made a cove-
nant, after her children were born> with five of her
neighbors, to meet and pray one afternoon of each
week for the salvation of her household. These five
mothers met. I did not hear this story till after
my mother's death. Nobody knew why these five
persons met, there was a sort of mystery about it.
Sometimes the question was put, ' Mother, where are
you going?' She used to answer, ' I am just going
off a little while.' They met to pray for their chil-
dren ; they prayed until they were all converted, my-
self the last. Oh ! I believe in prayer. 1 believe you
can get just what you ask of God if it is good for
you. This story has no end."
28 BIOGRAPHY.
From a period ante-dating the Revolution, the an.
cestors of our subject were members of the Reformed
Dutch Church, in which the father of Dr. Talmage
was the leading lay office-bearer through a life ex-
tended beyond fourscore years, and of his numerous
family, four sons are ministers of the Gospel, of
whom our subject is the youngest. The story of his
life is a simple one. He became a Christian before
he was twenty ; took the course of study preparatory
to college, much the same as other young men, and
was graduated at the New York University, in 1853.
His earliest preference was the law, the study of
which he pursued for a year after his graduation, but
the unrest within him, the voice of which soon be-
came, "Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel," turned
his steps toward the ministry, and he entered the New
Brunswick, (N. J^) Theological Seminary preparatory
thereto. This step was extremely gratifying to his
parents, and thereby one of their fondest hopes was
realized, although they had not urged the course.
He was plainly led of the Lord, and not man. The
faculties which would have made him one of the
greatest jury advocates of the age, thus were pre-
served for the saving of the souls of men, and "He
leadeth me," was written in living letters of light
over the entrance to his lifework.
The first years of his ministerial life seem to have
been disciplinary initial steps to his great mission,
that of the pastorate of the Church of the Brooklyn
BIOGRAPHY. 29
Tabernacle. His first settlement was at Belleville.
New Jersey. For three years he there underwent
an excellent practical education in the conventional
ministry. His congregation was one of the most
cultivated and exacting in the rural regions of that
sterling little State. It was known to be about the
oldest society of Protestantism in New Jersey. Jts
records, as preserved, run back over two hundred
years, but it is known to have had a strong life the
larger part of a century or more. Its structure is
regarded as one of the finest of any country congre-
gation in the United States. The value (and the
limits) of sterotyped preaching, and what he did not
know, came as an instructive and disillusionizing force
to the theological tyro of Belleville. There also
came and remained, strong friendships, inspiring re-
vivals, and sacred counsels.
By natural promotion, three years at Syracuse suc-
ceeded three at Belleville. That cultivated, critical
city furnished Mr. Talmage the value of an audience,
in which professional men predominate in influence.
His preaching there grew tonic and free. As Mr.
Pitt advised a young friend, he "risked himself."
The church grew from few to many from a state of
coma to robust life. The preacher learned to go to
school to humanity and his own heart. The lessons
they taught him agreed with what was boldest and
most compelling in the spirit of the revealed Word.
But those whose claims were sacred to him, found
30 BIOGRAPHY.
the saline climate of Syracuse a cause of unhealth.
Otherwise it is likely that one of the most delightful
regions in the United States for men of letters who
equally love nature and culture Central New
York would have been the home of Mr. Talmage
for life.
From Syracuse he went to Philadelphia, where he
spent seven years. Here his powers got "set." He
learned what he could best do. He had the courage
of his consciousness, and he did it. Previously, he
might have felt it incumbent upon him to give to
pulpit traditions the homage of compliance, though
at Syracuse, "the more excellent way" any man's
own way, provided he have the divining gift of
genius and the nature attune to all high sympathies
and purposes had in glimpses come to him. He
realized that it was his duty and mission in the world
to make it hear the gospel. The church was not to
him a select few, an organization, a monopoly. It was
meant to be the conqueror and transformer of the
world. For seven years he wrought with much suc-
cess on this theory, all the time realizing that his
plans could come to fullness only under conditions
that enabled him to build from the bottom up, an or-
ganization which could get nearer the masses, and
which would have no precedents to hamper it, and
no traditional ghosts to stand in its pathway. At the
end of this time he was called simultaneously to
three churches one in San Francisco, one in Chi-
BIOGRAPHY. 31
cago, and one in Brooklyn. That in Brooklyn was
poor ; it was on the eve of dissolution ; it possessed
but nineteen male members ; its need was greatest,
its power was least. To Brooklyn he went, and
from being the leading preacher in Philadelphia, he
became the leading preacher in the world.
His work here is known by all. It began in a
cramped brick rectangle, capable of holding 1200. In
less than two years that was exchanged for an iron
structure, with raised seats, the interior curved like
a horseshoe, the pulpit a platform bridging the ends.
It held 3,000 persons. It lasted just long enough to
revolutionize church architecture in cities into har-
mony with common sense. Smaller duplicates of it
started in every quarter, three in Brooklyn, two in
New York, one in Montreal, one in Louisville, any
number in Chicago, two in San Francisco, and like
numbers abroad. Then it was burned, and the pres-
ent stately and sensible structure rose in its place.
Gothic, of brick and stone, cathedral-like above, am-
phitheatre-like below, it seats 5,000 persons, and it is
said that 7,000 can be .accommodated within its walls.
In a large sense the people built these edifices.
Their architects were Leonard Vaux and John Welch
respectively. It is sufficiently indicative to say in
general of Dr. Talmage's work in the Tabernacle,
that his audiences are always as many as the place
will hold ; that twenty-three papers in Christendom
statedly publish his entire sermons and Friday night
32 BIOGRAPHY.
discourses, exclusive of the dailies of the United
States ; that the papers girdle the globe, being pub-
lished in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow,
Belfast, Toronto, Montreal, St. Johns, Sidney, Mel-
bourne, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Raleigh,
Kansas City, New York, and many other places. No
other preacher addresses so many constantly. The
words of no other preacher were ever before carried
by so many types, or carried so far. He has three con-
tinents for a church, and the English-speaking world
for a congregation. To pulpit labors of this respon-
sibility should be added considerable pastoral work,
the conduct of the Lay College, and constantly recur-
ring lecturing and literary work, to fill out the public
life of a very busy man.
The judgment of his generation will be divided
upon him just as that of the next will not. That he
is a topic in every newspaper is much more signifi-
cant than the fact of what treatment it gives him.
Only men of genius are universally commented on.
That the universality of the comment makes friends
and foes proves the fact of genius. This is what is
impressive. As for the quality of the comment, it
will, in nine cases out of ten, be much more a revela-
tion of the character behind the pen which writes it
than a true view or review of the man. It can be
truly said that while secular criticism in the United
States favorably regards our subject in proportion to
its intelligence and uprightness, the judgment of
BIOGRAPHY. 33
foreigners on him has long been an index to the judg-
ment that is beginning to prevail here. No other
American is read so much or so constantly abroad.
Previous fo his visit to Europe, in the summer of
1885, he had declined all invitations to preach or lec-
ture, as he needed rest, but some friendly pressure
induced him to change his determination. The ser-
mon he preached in London was delivered in the
celebrated Wesleyan Chapel, behind which is the
grave of John Wesley, and in front of which is Bun-
hill Burial Ground, where lie the bones of John
Bunyan, Isaac Watts, Daniel DeFoe, and Home
Tooke. The preacher referred in his sermon to this
hallowed ground. The Chapel was crowded to suf-
focation. During the indoor services several thou-
sand people stood in the front graveyard and in the
street, impeding travel, and awaiting Dr. Talmage
outside. After the regular service he came into the
church porch and addressed the multitude in full
voice, and then with a smiling face gave out a stirring
hymn, after singing which the populace made the
policemen happy by again freeing the thoroughfare.
Later in the season he preached in the United
Presbyterian Synod Hall, Edinburgh, the service be-
ginning at half-past two o'clock. Long before mid-
day people desirous of being present began to assem-
ble at the main entrance, and on account of the
number who had arrived by twelve o'clock it was
resolved to open the doors. In less than an hour the
34 BIOGRAPHY.
spacious building was filled in every part, all the
passages and some of the windows even being
occupied. The doors were closed shortly after one
o'clock, those outside in Castle Terrace, numbering
several thousands, being informed by means of bills
which were exhibited, that the hall was full. The
crowd continued to increase as time wore on, very
much disappointment evidently being felt at being
unable to gain admission. About two o'clock, how-
ever, an intimation that Dr. Talmage would in the
course of the afternoon address the gathering in Cas-
tle Terrace seemed to afford relief. Meanwhile, sev-
eral of Sankey's hymns were being sung inside by a
choir, aud shortly before the appointed time for the
commencement of the services, Dr. Talmage made
his appearance on the platform, accompanied by Mrs.
Talmage, and their son and two daughters. After
devotional exercises Professor Calderwood having
engaged in prayer Dr. Talmage gave out as his
text, " I will show wonders in the heavens and in the
earth." (Joel 2 : 30.)
At the close of the proceedings Dr. Talmage shook
hands with as many of the people as could get near
him, but the crowd pressed forward in such a way
that those in the front ranks were crushed to an un-
comfortable degree, and this put a temporary check
upon the leave-taking. Dr. Talmage then re-entered
the building, and made his way to the rear of the
hall, where a cab was in waiting for himself and fam-
BIOGRAPHY. 35
ily. Upon his appearance a crowd rapidly assembled,
eager to shake hands with him, and crowded around
the cab in such a way that it could not move until
the police cleared a passage. A few gentlemen
jumped upon the cab steps, ladies got their dresses
soiled with mud by rubbing against the wheels, and
some more adventurous than others, got their toes
crushed by the wheels. Dr. Talmage then stood and
shook hands over the back of the cab as hard as he
was able, and it was not until Lothian Road was
reached that the efforts of the police in keeping back
the crowd were no longer needed.
His extraordinary imagination, earnestness, des-
criptive powers and humor, his great art in grouping
and arrangement, his wonderful mastery of words to
illumine and alleviate human conditions, and to inter-
pret and inspire the harmonies of the better nature,
are appreciated by all who can put themselves in
sympathy with his originality of methods, and his
high consecration of purpose. His manner mates
with his nature. It is each sermon in action. He
presses the eyes, hands, his entire body, into the ser-
vice of the illustrative truth. Gestures are the ac-
companiment of what he says. As he stands out
before the immense throng, without a scrap of notes
or manuscript before him, the effect produced cannot
be understood by those who have never seen it. The
solemnity, the tears, the awful hush, as though the
audience could not breathe again, are oftimes painful.
36 BIOGRAPHY.
His voice is peculiar, not musical, but productive
of startling, strong effects, such as characterize no
preacher on either side of the Atlantic. His power
to grapple an audience and master it from text to
peroration has no equal. No man was ever less self-
conscious in his work. He feels a mission of evange-
lization on him as by the imposition of the Supreme.
That mission he responds to by doing the duty that is
nearest to him with all his might as confident that
he is under the care and order of a Divine Master as
those who hear him are that they are under the
spell of the greatest prose-poet that ever made the
Gospel his song, and the redemption of the race the
passion of his heart.
Now in the full meridian of his powers, the arena
of his life-work constantly widening before him, long
may he be spared to enrich the world with the ema-
nations of his genius, and to gather souls into the
great Harvest-Home of the blessed Lord and Master.
On the return of Dr. Talmage, September 14, 1885,
a large number of his congregation chartered a
steamer, and went down the Bay to meet him. On
the 1 5th a formal welcome was given him in Brooklyn
Tabernacle.
Never in the history of the Brooklyn Tabernacle had
there been such an immense audience. From seven
o'clock, the hour at which the doors were opened, a
steady stream of humanity poured into the church,
filled the galleries and the main floor, crowded around
BIOGRAPHY. 37
the organ and choir, filled the many aisles and the
wide, semi-circular corridor, and stretched far out
into the street. It was not a gathering representative
of any particular sect or church, but it was an assem-
blage of the Christian people of Brooklyn. That it
was from the Christian people of the city rather than
from Dr. Talmage's congregation was demonstrated
by the presence of the clergymen of different denom-
inations who were there to welcome the great divine.
The platform in the church was profusely decorated
with flowers for the occasion. A large floral arch
over six feet high, composed of white and red roses,
astreax, smilax, camelias, acacia roses, carnations, and
chrysanthemum roses, was stationed in the center of
the platform beside the presiding officer's chair. On
the arch were inscribed in red roses the words,
"Welcome Home." On either side of the platform
were immense stands of gladioli palms, ferns, and
other plants. Immediately above the organ was a
large floral urn surmounted by red and white roses.
At eight o'clock the sound of cheering was heard
through the open door of the Tabernacle. Every
head was turned doorward to catch a glimpse of
Rev. Dr. Talmage as he entered the church. The
dense crowd gave way on either side, and a storm of
applause greeted him. The solemnity usually ob-
served in a church was for a moment forgotten. The
sound of the organ from which welled forth the
strains of the well-known "Hail to the Chief" mingled
38 BIOGRAPHY.
with the applause, and the welcome was happy and
most spontaneous. Dr. Talmage himself appeared to
feel it as he walked down the aisle.
The scene on the street during the first part of the
welcoming exercises was a remarkable one. The
church was crowded in every part before eight
o'clock, but long after that hour people kept coming
toward the Tabernacle. When they found that en-
trance was impossible they stood before the door.
Soon the crowd increased to great dimensions, and
extended nearly the length of the block.
As he shook hands with the chairman, Rev Henry
Ward Beccher, the plaudits of the assembled thou-
sands reverberated through the vast auditorium.
The organ played " Home Again," and when the
audience had sung " Praise God from whom all
blessings flow," every one thought the welcome most
complete.
Addresses and music followed, and a welcome was
given by the children of the infant class. A bright-
eyed, fair-haired little girl, bearing a large basket of
exquisite flowers, was conducted to the platform, and
stepping to Dr. Talmage she made a pleasant little
presentation speech, in which she expressed the
pleasure of the Sunday-school that the beloved pas-
tor was back again among his people.
Dr. Talmage, in his response to the ovation, among
other things, said:
" We found everywhere that the best password in
BIOGRAPHY. 39
Europe is the word America. [Applause.] That
opens all the doors, and that wins all the suavities.
The fact is, they have their kindred on this side the
sea. Brothers and sisters on that side, brothers and
sisters on this side. They have forgotten all the un-
pleasantness we had in 1776, and 1 have no doubt
they will forgive us the fact that yesterday in the
boat race the Puritan came in sixteen minutes before
the Genesta.
" Fellow-citizens of all callings and professions and
trades, men of the law, men of the healing art, men
of the editorial chair, men of merchandise, men of
mechanism, and all the wives and mothers and sisters
and daughters of the dear homes of Brooklyn, you
cannot understand how deep an impression you have
made upon me by the flowers and the music and the
speeches and the genial appearance of your own
countenances. You have put me under everlasting
obligation, and have mortgaged me for industrious
Christian service all my life long. Shoulder to
shoulder let us stand in the great work of trying to
make the world better, and then may we rest not
very far apart in the adjoining gardens of the dead,
and may God grant us all to rise in the resurrection
of the just, when the heavens are no more."
Professor Simpson, of Edinburgh, who had been
One of Dr. Talmage's hosts across the water, said in
his address on this occasion :
" Up to this particular moment I thought I was the
4O BIOGRAPHY.
most fortunate man in creation, because such a sight
as this I don't know as it has ever been seen in
America before ; it has not been seen, I believe, on
my side of the Atlantic. We have no place in Edin-
burgh where it was possible for the people who
wanted to hear Dr. Talmagc to get near him. I ven-
tured myself that Sabbath afternoon, having with me
some of my own family and a daughter of the Lord
Mayor of London, all very eager to hear your great
pastor ; but I could not get within a street's length
of the place where the crowds were gathered around
the doors. We counted ourselves extremely fortu-
nate that he was good enough to come and take dinner
with us in our county house in Midlothian. At that
dinner-table there was a little maid from the far-off
highlands of Sutherlandshire who asked : ' Is the Dr.
Talmage who is to be at dinner to-day the great Dr.
Talmage whose sermons we all read ? ' When she
was told ' Yes,' she clapped her hands and said, ' I
will write to my mother that I had the honor of wait-
ing on Dr. Talmage.' From the highest to the low-
est we hold his name in reverence and in love."
PART I.
fop the Individual,
CHAPTER I.
BUSINESS LIFE.
We are under the impression that the moil and tug
of business life are a prison into which a man is
thrust, or that it is an unequal strife where unarmed,
a man goes forth to contend.
Business life was intended of God for grand and
glorious education and discipline, and if I shall be
helped to say what I want to say, I shall rub some of
the wrinkles of care out of your brow, and unstrap
some of the burdens from your back.
Business life was intended as a school of energy.
God gives us a certain amount of raw material out of
which we are to hew our character. Our faculties
are to be reset, rounded, and sharpened up. Our
young folks having graduated from school or college
need a higher education, that which the rasping and
collision of everyday life alone can effect. Energy is
wrought out only in a fire. After a man has been in
business activity ten, twenty, thirty years, his energy
is not to be measured by weights, or plummets, or
ladders. There is no height it cannot scale, and
there is no depth it cannot fathom, and there is no
obstacle it cannot thrash.,
Now, my brother, why did God put you in that
school of energy ? Was it merely that you might be
a yardstick to measure cloth, or a steelyard to weigh
flour ? Was it merely that you might be better quali-
43
44 BUSINESS LIKE.
fied to chaffer and higgle? No. God placed you in
that school of energy that you might be developed for
Christian work. If the undeveloped talents in the
Christian churches of to-day were brought out and
thoroughly harnessed, I believe the whole earth
would be converted to God in a twelvemonth.
There are so many deep streams that are turning no
mill-wheels, and that are harnessed to no factory-
bands.
Now, God demands the best lamb out of every
Hock. He demands the richest sheaf of every har-
vest. He demands the best men of every generation.
A cause in which Newton, and Locke, and Mansfield
toiled, you and I can afford to toil in. Oh, fora fewer
idlers in the cause of Christ, and for more Christian
workers, men who shall take the same energy that
from Monday morning to Saturday night they put
forth for the achievement of a livelihood, or the
gathering of a fortune, and on Sabbath days put it
forth to the advantage of Christ's kingdom, and the
bringing of men to the Lord.
Dr. Duff visited, he said, in South Wales, and he
saw a man who had inherited a great fortune. The
man said to him : " I had to be very busy for many
years of my life getting my livelihood. After a while
this fortune came to me, and there has been no neces-
sity that I toil since. There came a time when I said
to myself, ' Shall I now retire from business, or shall
1 go on and serve the Lord in my worldly occupa-
tion?" He said : " I resolved on the latter, and I
have been more industrious in commercial circles
than 1 ever was before, and since that hour I have
never kept a farthing for myself. I have thought it
to be a <rreat shame if I couldn't toil as hard for the
BUSINESS LIFE. 45
Lord as I had toiled for myself, and all the products
of my factories and my commercial establishments to
the last farthing have gone for the building of Chris-
tian institutions and supporting the Church of God."
Oh, if the same energy put forth for the world could
be put forth for God ! Oh, if a thousand men in
these great cities who have achieved a fortune could
see it their duty now to do all business for Christ and
the alleviation of the world's suffering!
Business life is a school of patience. In your
everyday life how many things to annoy and to dis-
quiet ! Bargains will rub. Commercial men will
sometimes fail to meet their engagements. Cash
book and money drawer will sometimes quarrel.
Goods ordered for a special emergency will come too
late, or be damaged in the transportation. People
intending no harm will go shopping without any
intention of purchase, overturning great stocks of
goods, and insisting that you break the dozen. More
bad debts on the ledger. More counterfeit bills in
the drawer. More debts to pay for other people.
More meannesses on the part of partners in business.
Annoyance after annoyance, vexation after vexation,
and loss after loss.
All that process will either break you down or
brighten you up. It is a school of patience. You
have known men under the process to become petu-
lant, and choleric, and angry, and pugnacious, and
cross, and sour, and queer, and they lost their cus-
tomers, and their name became a detestation. Other
men have been brightened up under the process.
They were toughened by the exposure. They were
like rocks, all the more valuable for being blasted.
At first they had to choke down their wrath, at first
46 BUSINESS LIFE.
they had to bite their lip, at first they thought of
some stinging retort they would like to make ; but
they conquered their impatience. They have kind
words now for sarcastic flings. They have gentle
behavior now for unmannerly customers. They are
patient now with unfortunate debtors. They have
Christian reflections now for sudden reverses.
Where did they get that patience ? By hearing a
minister preach concerning it on Sabbath? Oh, no.
They got it just where you will get it if you ever
get it at all selling hats, discounting notes, turning
banisters, plowing corn, tinning roofs, pleading
causes. Oh, that amid the turmoil and anxiety and
exasperation of everyday life you might hear the
voice of God saying: " In patience possess your soul.
Let patience have her perfect work."
Business life is a school of useful knowledge. Mer-
chants do not read many 'books, and do not study
lexicons. They do not dive into profounds of learn-
ing, and yet nearly all through their occupations
come to understand questions of finance, and politics
and geography, and jurisprudence, and ethics. Busi-
ness is a severe schoolmistress. If pupils will not
learn she strikes them over the head and heart with
severe losses. You put $5,000 into an enterprise. It
is all gone. You say, " That is a dead loss." Oh, no.
You are paying the schooling. That was only
tuition, very large tuition I told you it was a severe
schoolmistress but it was worth it. You learned
things under that process you would not have learned
in any other way.
Traders in grain come to know something about
foreign harvests; traders in fruit come to know
something about the prospects of tropical produc-
BUSINESS LIFE. 47
tion; manufacturers of American goods come to
understand the tariff on imported articles ; publishers
of books must come to understand the new law of
copyright ; owners of ships must come to know winds
and shoals and navigation ; and every bale of cotton,
and every raisin cask, and every tea box, and every
cluster of bananas is so much literature for a business
man. Now, my brother, what are you going to do
with the intelligence ? Do you suppose God put you
in this school of information merely that you might
be sharper in a trade, that you might be mor e sue
cessful as a worldling? Oh, no; it was that you
might take that useful information and use it for
Jesus Christ.
Can it be that you have been dealing with foreign
lands and never had the missionary spirit, wishing
the salvation of foreign people ? Can it be that you
have become acquainted with all the outrages
inflicted in business life, and that you have never
tried to bring to bear that Gospel which is to extir-
pate all evil and correct all wrongs, and illuminate all
darkness and lift up all wretchedness, and save men
for this world and the world to come ? Can it be
that understanding all the intricacies of business you
know nothing about those things which will last after
all bills of exchange and consignments and invoices
and rent rolls shall have crumpled up and been con-
sumed in the fires of the last great day? Can it be
that a man will be wise for time, and a fool for
eternity ?
Business life is a school for integrity. No man
knows what he will do until he is tempted. There
are thousands of men who have kept their integrity
merely because they never have been tested. A man
48 BUSINESS LIFE.
was elected treasurer of the State of Maine some
years ago. He was distinguished for his honesty,
usefulness and uprightness, but before one year had
passed he had taken of the public funds for his own
private use, and was hurled out of office in disgrace.
Distinguished for virtue before. Distinguished for
crime after. You cr~i call over the names of men
just like that, in whose honesty you had complete
confidence, but placec in certain crises of temptation
they went overboard.
Never so many temptations to scoundrelism as
now. Not a law on the statute book but has some
back door through which a miscreant can escape.
Ah ! how many deceptions in the fabric of goods; so
much plundering in commercial life that if a man
talk about living a life of complete commercial accu-
racy there are those who ascribe it to greenness and
lack of tact. More need of honesty now than ever
before, tried honesty, complete honesty, more than
in those times when business was a plain affair, and
woolens were woolens, and silks were silks, and
men were men.
How many men do you suppose there are in com-
mercial life who could say truthfully, " In all the sales
I have ever made I have never overstated the value
of goods ; in all the sales I have ever made I have
never covered up an imperfection in the fabric; of
all the thousands of dollars I have ever made I have
not taken one dishonest farthing?" There are men,
however, who can say it, hundreds who can say it,
thousands who can say it. They are more honest
than when they sold their first tierce of rice, or their
first firkin of butter, because their honesty and integ-
aity have been tested, tried and came out triumphant.
BUSINESS LIFE. 49
But they remember a time when they could have
robbed a partner, or have absconded with the funds
of a bank, or sprung a snap judgment, or made a false
assignment, or borrowed inimitably without any
efforts at payment, or got a man into a sharp corner
and fleeced him. But they never took one step on
that pathway of hell fire. They can say their prayers
without hearing the clink of dishonest dollars. They
can read their Bible without thinking of the time
when, with a lie on their soul in the Custom House,
they kissed the book. They can think of death and
the judgment that comes after it without any flinch-
ing that day when all charlatans and cheats and
jockeys and frauds shall be doubly damned. It does
not make their knees knock together, and it does not
make their teeth chatter to read "as the partridge
sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not ; so he that
getteth riches, and not by right, shall- leave them in
the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool.''
Oh, what a school of integrity business life is ! If
you have ever been tempted to let your integrity
cringe before present advantage, if you have ever
wakened up in some embarrassment, and said :
" Now, I'll step a little aside from the right path and
no one will know it, and I'll come all right again; it is
only once." Oh, that only once has ruined tens of
thousands of men for this life, and blasted their souls
for eternity. It is a tremendous school, business life,
a school of integrity.
There are men who fought the battle and gained
the victory. People come out of that man's store,
and they say : " Well, if there ever was a Christian
trader, that is one." Integrity kept the books and
waited on the customers. Light from the eternal
50 BUSINESS LIFE.
world flashed through the show windows. Love to
God and love to man presided in that storehouse.
Some day people going through the street notice
that the shutters of the window are not down. The
bar of that store door has not been removed. People
say, "What is the matter?" You go up a little
closer, and you see written on the card of that win-
dow : '' Closed on account of the death of one of the
firm." That day all through the circles of business
there is talk about how a good man has gone. Boards
of trades pass resolutions of sympathy, and churches
of Christ pray, " Help, Lord, for the godly man
ceaseth." He has made his last bargain, he has suf-
fered his last loss, he has ached with the last fatigue.
His children will get the result of his industry, or, if
through misfortune there be no dollars left, they will
have an estate of prayer and Christian example,
which will be everlasting. Heavenly rewards for
earthly discipline. There " the wicked cease from
troubling, and the weary are at rest."
CHAPTER II.
GNATS AND CAMELS.
A map after long observation has formed the sus-
picion that in a cup of water he is about to drink
there is a grub or the grandparent of a gnat. He
goes and gets a sieve or strainer. He takes the water
and pours it through the sieve in the broad light. He
says: " I would rather do anything almost than drink
this water until this larva be extirpated." This water
is brought under inquisition. The experiment is suc-
cessful. The water rushes through the sieve and
leaves against the side of the sieve the grub or gnat.
Then the man carefully removes the insect and drinks
the water in placidity. But going out one day, and
hungry, he devours a " ship of the desert," the camel,
which the Jews were forbidden to eat. The gastro-
nomer has no compunctions of conscience. He suffers
from no indigestion. He puts the lower jaw under
the camel's forefoot, and his upper jaw over the
hump of the camel's back, and gives one swallow and
the dromedary disappears forever. He strained out
a gnat, he swallowed a camel.
It is a very short bridge between a smile and a tear,
a suspension bridge from eye to lip, and it is soon
crossed over, and a smile is sometimes just as sacred
as a tear. There is as much religion, and I think a
little more, in a spring morning than in a starless
midnight. Religious work without any humor or
52 GNATS AND CAMELS.
wit in it is a banquet with a side of beef and that raw,
and no condiments, and no dessert succeeding. People
will not sit down at such a banquet. By all means
remove all frivolity and all pathos and all lightness
and all vulgarity strain them out through the sieve
of holy discrimination ; but on the other hand, beware
of that monster which overshadows the Christian
Church to-day, conventionality, coming up from the
Great Sahara Desert of Ecclesiasticism, having on its
back a hump of .sanctimonious gloom, and vehe-
mently refuse to swallow that camel.
Oh, how particular a great many people are about
the infinitesimals while they are quite reckless about
the magnitudes. What did Christ say? Did He not
excoriate the people in His time who were so careful
to wash their hands before a meal, but did not wash
their hearts? It is a bad thing to have unclean
hands; it is a worse thing to have an unclean heart.
How many people there are in our time who are
very anxious that after their death they shall be
buried with their face toward the east, and not at all
anxious that during their whole life they should face
in the right direction so that they shall come up in
the resurrection of the just whichever way they are
buried. How many there are chiefly anxious that a
minister of the Gospel shall come in the line of apos-
tolic succession, not caring so much whether he
comes from Apostle Paul or Apostle Juclas. They
have a way of measuring a gnat until it is larger than
a camel.
My subject photographs all those who are abhor-
rent of small sins while they are reckless in regard to
magnificent thefts. You will find many a merchant
who, while he is so careful that he would not take a
GNATS AND CAMELS. 53
yard of cloth or a spool of cotton from the counter
without paying- for it, and who if a bank cashier
should make a mistake and send in a roll of bills five
dollars too much would dispatch a messenger in hot
haste to return the surplus, yet who will go into a
stock company in which after a while he gets control
of the stock, and then waters the stock and makes
$100,000 appear like $200,000. He only stole $100,-
ooo by the operation. Many of the men of fortune
made their wealth in that way.
One of those men, engaged in such unrighteous
acts, that evening, the evening of the very day when
he watered the stock, will find a wharf-rat stealing a
Brooklyn Eagle from the basement doorway, and will
go out and catch the urchin by the collar, and twist
the collar so tightly the poor fellow cannot say that it
was thirst for knowledge that led him to the dishon-
est act, but grip the collar tighter and tighter, saying,
" I have been looking for you a long while ; you stole
my paper four or five times, haven't you ? you miser-
able wretch." And then the old stock gambler, with
a voice they can hear three blocks, will cry out:
" Police, police ! " That same man, the evening of
the day in which he watered the stock, will kneel
with his family in prayers and thank God for the
prosperity of the day, then kiss his children good-
night with an air which seems to say, " I hope you
will all grow up to be as good as your father ! "
Prisons for sins insectile in size, but palaces for
crimes dromedarian. No mercy for sins animalcule
in proportion, but great leniency for mastodon jn-
iquity. A poor boy slily takes from the basket of a
market woman a choke pear saving some one else
from the cholera and vou smother him in the horri-
54 GNATS AND CAMELS.
ble atmosphere of Raymond Street Jail or New York
Tombs, while his cousin, who has been skilful enough
to steal $50,000 from the city, you will make him a
candidate for the New York Legislature!
There is a great deal of uneasiness and nervous-
ness now among some people in our time who have
gotten unrighteous fortunes, a great deal of nervous-
ness about dynamite. I tell them that God will put
under their unrighteous fortunes something more ex-
plosive than dynamite, the earthquake of his omnipo-
tent indignation, It is time that we learn in America
that sin is not excusable in proportion as it declares
large dividends, and has outriders in equipage. Many
a man is riding to perdition postillion ahead, and
lackey behind. To steal one copy of a newspaper is
a gnat ; to steal many thousands of dollars is a camel.
There is many a fruit dealer who would not con-
sent to steal a basket of peaches from a neighbor's
stall, but who would not scruple to depress the fruit
market, and as long as 1 can remember we have heard
every summer the peach crop of Maryland is a fail-
ure, and by the time the crop comes in the misrepre-
sentation makes a difference of millions of dollars. A
man who would not steal one peach basket steals fifty
thousand peach baskets.
Go down to the Mercantile Library, in the reading-
rooms, and see the newspaper reports of the crops
from all parts of the country, and their phraseology
is very much the same, and the same men wrote
them, methodically and infamously carrying out the
huge lying about the grain crop from year to year
and for a score of years. After a while there will be
a " corner " in the wheat market, and men who had a
contempt for a petty theft will burglarize the wheat
GNATS AND CAMELS. 55
bin of a nation and commit larceny upon the Ameri-
can corn-crib. And in this hot weather some of the
men will sit in churches and in reformatory institu-
tions trying to strain out the small gnats of scoun-
drelism while in their grain elevators and in their
storehouses they are fattening huge camels which
they expect after a while to swallow.
'Society has to be entirely reconstructed on this
subject. We are to find that a sin is inexcusable in
proportion as it is great. I know in our time the ten-
dency is to charge religious frauds upon good men.
They say, " Oh, what a class of frauds you have in
the Church of God in this day," and when an elder
of a church, or a deacon, or a minister of the Gospel,
or a superintendent of a Sabbath-school turns out a
defaulter, what display heads there are in many of
the newspapers. Great primer type. Five line pica.
" Another Saint Absconded," " Clerical Scoundrel-
ism," " Religion at a Discount," " Shame on the
Churches," while there are a thousand scoundrels
outside the church to where there is one inside the
church, and the misbehavior of those who never see
the inside of a church is so great it is enough to
tempt a man to become a Christian to get out of their
company. But in all circles, religious and irreligious,
the tendency is to excuse sin in proportion as it is
mammoth. Even John Milton in his " Paradise Lost,"
while he condemns Satan, gives such a grand descrip-
tion of him you have hard work to suppress your ad-
miration. Oh, this straining out of small sins like
gnats, and this gulping down great iniquities like
camels.
This subject does not give the picture of one or
two persons, but is a gallery in which thousands of
56 GNATS AND CAMELS.
people may see their likenesses. For instance, all
those people who, while they would not rob their
neighbor of a farthing, appropriate the money and
the treasure of the public. A man has a house to
sell, and he tells his customer it is worth $20,000.
Next day the assessor comes around, and the owner
says it is worth $15,000. The government of the
United States took off the tax from personal income,
among other reasons because so few people would
tell the truth, and many a man with an income of
hundreds of dollars a day made statements which
seemed to imply he was about to be handed over to
the overseer of the poor. Careful to pay their pas-
sage from Liverpool to New York, yet smuggling in
their Saratoga trunk ten silk dresses from Paris and
a half-dozen watches from Geneva, Switzerland, tell-
ing the Custom House officer on the wharf, " There
is nothing in that trunk but wearing apparel," and
putting a five dollar gold piece in his hand to punc-
tuate the statement.
But let us all surrender to the charge. What an
ado about things here. What poor preparation for a
great eternity. As though a minnow were larger
than a behemoth, as though a swallow took wider
circuit than an albatross, as though a nettle were
taller than a Lebanon cedar, as though a gnat were
greater than a camel, as though a minute were longer
than a century, as though time were higher, deeper,
broader than eternity.
CHAPTER III.
THE INSIGNIFICANT.
Trouble develops character. It was bereavement,
poverty, and exile, that developed, illustrated, and
announced to all ages the sublimity of Ruth's charac-
ter. 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 bet-
ter preacher, and Havelock the better soldier, and
Kitto the better encyclopaedist, and Ruth the better
daughter-in-law.
I once asked an aged man in regard to his pastor,
who was a very 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 awhile 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 to
the instrument, and you discover the pathos in the
first sweep of the keys.
57
58 THE INSIGNIFICANT.
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 pre-
scription, and very rough in his manneY, 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 comes into the sick-room, and with tearful
eye he looks at the dying child, and he says, "Oh.
how this reminds me of my Charlie !" 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 Hip-
pocrene was struck out by the foot of the winged
horse Pegasus. 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 Dan-
J
iel'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 light-
ning in the breakers of Melita. God crowns His
children amid the howling of wild beasts, and the
chopping of blood-splashed guillotine, and the crack-
ling fires of martyrdom. It took the persecutions of
Marcus Aurelius to develop Polycarp and Justin
Martyr. It took the Pope's bull, and the cardinals'
curse, and the world's anathema to develop Martin
Luther. It took all the hostilities against the Scotch
Covenanters and the fury of Lord Claverhouse to
develop James Ren wick, and Andrew Melville, and
Hugh McKail, the glorious martyrs of Scotch history.
It took the stormy sea, and the December blast, and
THE INSIGNIFICANT. 59
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 wood
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 tyran-
nies 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.
I suppose there were plenty of friends for Naomi
while she was in prosperity ; but of all her acquaint-
ances, how many were willing to trudge off with her
toward Judah, when she had to make that lonely
journey ? 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 ! Jo j had plenty
60 THE INSIGNIFICANT.
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 that pestered as Eliphaz,
the Temanite, and Bildad, the Shuhite, and Zophar,
the Naamathite.
Life often seem to be a mere game, where the suc-
cessful player pulls down all the other men into his
own lap. Let suspicions arise about a man's char-
acter, 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 con-
sumed by the touch of a sulphurous match. A hog
can uproot a century plant.
In this world, so full of heartlessness and hy-
pocrisy, 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."
The 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
THE INSIGNIFICANT. 6 1
mother-in-law, I suppose the people said, " Oh, 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 drowned in the sea, or the jackals of the
wilderness will destroy them." It was a very dark
morning when Ruth started off with Naomi ; but be-
hold her 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 often 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 cov-
ered." 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 misrep-
resentation and abuse, and we have to urge our way
62 Tilt: INSIGNIFICANT.
through ten thousand obstacles that have been slain
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 re-
ward will come. On the tip-top of the captured bat-
tlements 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 scoffings
of the people in his day, while he was trying to build
the ark, and was every morning quizzed about his old
boat that never would be of any practical use ; but
when the drluge came, and the tops of the mountains
disappeared like the backs of sea-rnonsters, and the
elements, lashed up in fury, clapped their hands over
a drowned world, then Noah in the ark, rejoiced in
his own safety, and the safety of his family, and
looked out 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 sepulchre at His cru-
cifixion. 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
THE INSIGNIFICANT. 63
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, un-
crowned heads are to bow before Him on whose
head are many crowns, and all the celestial worship
is to come up at His feet like the humming of the
forest, like the rushing of the waters, like the thun-
derings 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 king-
doms of the Lord Jesus Christ ! "
" That song of love, now low and far,
Erelong shall swell from star to star;
That light, the breaking day which tips
The golden-spired Apocalypse."
Events which seem to be most insignificant may be
momentous. Can you imagine anything more unim-
portant 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 un-
speakable 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 phase of your life !
It seemed to be of no importance that Jubal in-
vented rude instruments of music, calling them harp
64 THE INSIGNIFICANT.
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 rat-
tle 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. It seemed to be a matter
of no importance that a woman, whose name has been
forgotten, dropped a tract in the way of a very bad
man by the name of Richard Baxter. He picked up
the tract and read it, and it was the means of his sal-
vation. In after days that man wrote a book called
"The Call to the Unconverted," that was the means
of bringing a multitude to God, among others,
Philip Doddridge. Philip Docldridge wrote a book
called "The Rise and Progress of Religion," which
has brought thousands and tens of thousands into
the kingdom of God, among others, the great Wil-
berforce. Wilberforce wrote a book called " A
Practical View of Christianity," which was the
means of bringing a great multitude to Christ, among
others, Legh Richmond. Legh Richmond wrote a
tract called " The Dairyman's Daughter," which
THE INSIGNIFICANT. 65
has been the means of the salvation of unconverted
multitudes. And that tide of influence started from
the fact that one Christian woman dropped a Chris-
tian tract in the way of Richard Baxter the tide of
influence rolling on through Richard Baxter, through
Philip Doddridge, through the great Wilberforce,
through Legh Richmond, on, on, on, forever, forever!
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 im-
portance 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 will find it the turning-
point in your history.
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 expos-
ure to which Ruth was subjected, every intelligent
woman will find something to do.
I know there is a sickly sentimentality on this sub-
ject. In some families there are persons of no prac-
tical 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, Na-
omi. 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 in-
66 THE INSIGNIFICANT.
clulgent 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 morning until night."
Through that gate of indolence, how many men
and women have marched, useless on earth, to a de-
stroyed eternity ! Spinola said to Sir Horace Vere:
" Of what did your brother die?" " Of having noth-
ing to do," was the answer. " Ah ! " said Spinola,
" that's enough to kill any general of us." Oh, can
it be possible in this world, where there is so much
suffering to be alleviated, so much darkness to be en-
lightened, and so many burdens to be carried, that
there is any person who cannot find anything
to do?
Madame de Stael 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 1 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 spir-
itual 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.
THE INSIGNIFICANT. 67
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
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-re-
nowned philosopher, was a philosopher in Scotland,
and he got his philosophy, or the chiel 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. Ah, my
friends, 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
much joy.
There are a few moments left worth the gleaning.
Now, Ruth, to the field ! May each one have a meas-
ure full and running over ! Oh, you gleaners, to the
field! And if there be in your household an aged
68 THE INSIGNIFICANT
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 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 IV.
PAUL IN A BASKET.
" Through a window in a basket was I let down
by the wall/'
On what a slender tenure great results hang. The
ropemaker who twisted that cord fastened to that
lowering basket never knew how much would
depend on the strength of it. How if it had been
broken and the apostle's life had been dashed out?
What would have become of the Christian Church?
All that magnificent missionary work in Pamphilia,
Cappadocia, Galatia, Macedonia, would never have
been accomplished. All his writings that make up
so indispensable and enchanting a part of the New
Testament would never have been written. The
story of resurrection would never have been so
gloriously told as he told it. The example of heroic
and triumphant endurance at Philippi, in the Medi-
terranean euroclydon, under flagellation and at his
beheading, would not have kindled the courage of
ten thousand martyrdoms. But that rope, holding
basket, how much depended on it? So again and
again, great results have hung on what seemed
slender circumstances.
Did ever ship of many thousand tons crossing the
sea have such important passenger as had once a
boat of leaves from taffrail to stern, only three or four
feet, the vessel made waterproof bv a coat of bitu-
69
70 PAUL IN A BASKET.
men, and floating on the Nile with the infant law-
giver of the Jews on board ? What if some crocodile
should crunch it? What if some of the cattle wading
in for a drink should sink it? Vessels of war some-
times carry forty guns looking through the port-
holes, ready to open battle. But that tiny craft on
the Nile seems to be armed with all the guns of
thunder that bombarded Sinai at the law-giving.
On how fragile craft sailed how much of historical
importance!
The parsonage at Epworth, England, is on fire in
the night, and the father rushed through the hallway
for the rescue of his children. Seven children are
out and safe on the ground, but one remains in the
consuming building. That one wakes, and finding
his bed on fire, and the building crumbling, comes
to the window, and two peasants make a ladder of
their bodies, one peasant standing on the shoulder of
the other, and down the human ladder the boy de-
scends John Wesley. If you would know how
much depended on that ladder of peasants, ask the
millions of Methodists on both sides of the sea. Ask
their mission stations all around the world. Ask
their hundreds of thousands already ascended to join
their founder, who would have perished but for the
living stairs of peasants' shoulders.
An English ship stopped at Pitcairn Island and
right in the midst of surrounding cannibalism and
squalor, the passengers discovered a Christian colony
of churches, and schools, and beautiful homes, and
highest style of religion and civilization. For fifty
years no missionary and no Christian influence had
landed there. Why this oasis of light amid a desert
of heathendom? Sixty years before, a ship had met
PAUL IN A BASKET. J\
disaster, and one of the sailors, unable to save any-
thing else, went to his trunk and took out a Bible
which his mother had placed there, and swam ashore,
the Bible held in his teeth. The Book was read on
all sides, until the rough and vicious population were
evangelized, and a church was started, and an enlight-
ened commonwealth established, and the world's his-
tory has no more brilliant page than that which tells
of the transformation of a nation by one book. It
did not seem of much importance whether the sailor
continued to hold the book in his teeth or let it fall
in the breakers, but upon what small circumstance
depended what mighty results !
There are no insignificances in our lives. The
minutest thing is part of a magnitude. Infinity is
made up of infinitesimals. Great things an aggrega-
tion of small things. Bethlehem manger pulling on
a star in the eastern sky. One book in a drenched
sailor's mouth the evangelization of a multitude.
o
One boat of papyrus on the Nile freighted with events
for all ages. The fates of Christendom in a basket
let down from a window on the wall. What you do,
do well. If you make a rope make it strong and
true, for you know not how much may depend on
your workmanship.
If you fashion a boat let it be water-proof, for you
know not who may sail in it. If you put a Bible in
the trunk of your boy as he goes from home, let it be
heard in your prayers, for it may have a mission as
far-reaching as the book which the sailor carried in
his teeth to the Pitcairn beach. The plainest man's
life is an island between two eternities eternity past
rippling against his shoulders, eternity to come
touching his brow. The casual, the accidental, that
?2 PAUL IN A BASKET.
which merely happened so are parts of a great plan,
and the rope that lets the fugitive apostle from the
Damascus wall is the cable that holds to its mooring
the ship of the Church in the northeast storm of the
centuries.
Again, notice unrecognized and unrecorded ser-
vices. Who spun that rope? Who tied it to the
basket ? Who steadied the illustrious preacher as he
stepped into it? Who relaxed not a muscle of the
arm or dismissed an anxious look from his face until
the basket touched the ground and discharged its
magnificent cargo? Not one of their names has
come to us, but there was no work done that day in
Damascus or in all the earth compared with the im-
portance of their work. What if they had in the
agitation tied a knot that could slip? What if the
sound of the mob at the door had led them to say :
" Paul must take care of himself, and we will take
care of ourselves." No, no ! They held the rope, and
in doing so did more for the Christian Church than
any thousand of us will ever accomplish. But
God knows and has made eternal record of their
risky undertaking. And they know.
How exultant they must have felt when they read
his letters to the Romans, to the Corinthians, to the
Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, to the
Colossians, to the Thessalonians, to Timothy, to
Titus, to Philemon, to the Hebrews, and when they
heard how he walked out of prison with the earth-
quake unlocking the door for him, and took command
of the Alexandrian corn-ship when the sailors were
nearly scared to death, and preached a sermon that
nearly shook Felix off his judgment seat. I hear the
men and women who helped him down through the
PAUL IN A BASKET. 73
window and over the wall talking in private over the
matter, and saying : " How glad I am that we
effected that rescue ! In coming times others may
get the glory of Paul's work, but no one shall rob us
of the satisfaction of knowing that we held the
rope."
There are said to be about sixty thousand ministers
of religion in this country. About fifty thousand I
warrant came from early homes which had to strug-
gle for the necessaries of life. The sons of rich
bankers and merchants generally become bankers
and merchants. The most of those who become
ministers are the sons of those who had terrific
struggle to get their every-day bread. The colleg-
iate and theological education of that son took every
luxury from the parental table for eight years. The
other children were more scantily appareled.
The son at college every little while got a bundle
from home. In it were the socks that mother had
knit, sitting up late at night, her sight not as good as
once it was. And there, also, were some delicacies
from the sister's hand for the voracious appetite of a
hungry student. The father swung the heavy cradle
through the wheat, the sweat rolling from his chin
bedewing every step of the way, and then sitting
down under the cherry-tree at noon thinking to him-
self : "1 am fearfully tired, but it will pay if I can
once see that boy through college, and if I can know
that he will be preaching the Gospel after I am dead."
The younger children want to know why they can't
have this and that, as others do, and the mother says :
"Be patient, my children, until your brother gradu-
ates, and then you shall -have more luxuries, but we
must see that boy through."
74 PAUL IN A BASKET.
The years go by, and the son has been ordained,
and is preaching the glorious Gospel, and a great re-
vival conies, and souls by scores and hundreds accept
the Gospel from the lips of that young preacher, and
father and mother, quite old no\v, are visiting the
son at the village parsonage, and at the close of a
Sabbath of mighty blessing, father and mother retire
to their room, the son lighting the way and asking
them if he can do anything to make them more com-
fortable, saying if they want anything in the night
just to knock on the wall. And then, all alone,
father and mother talk over the gracious influences
of the day, and say: "Well, if was worth all we
went through to educate that boy. It was a hard
pull, but we held on till the work was done. The
world may not know it, but, mother, we held the
rope, didn't we 5 " And the voice, tremulous with
joyful emotion, responds: "Yes father, we held the
rope. I feel my work is done. Now, Lord, lettest
thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have
seen thy salvation." "Pshaw!" says the father, "I
never felt so much like living in my life as now. I
want to see what that fellow is going on to do, he
has begun so well."
O men and women, vou brag sometimes how you
have fought your wav in the world, but I think there
have been helpful influences that vou have never
fully acknowledged. H:is there not been some influ-
ence in your earlv or present home that the world
can not see? Docs there not reach to you from
among the New England hills, or from Western prai-
rie, or from Southern plantation, or from English, or
Scottish, or Irish home, a cord of influence that has
kept you right when you would have gone astray,
PAUL IN A BASKET. 75
but which, after you had made a crooked track, re-
called you ? The rope may be as long as thirty years,
or five hundred miles long, or three thousand miles
long, but hands that went out of mortal sight long
ago, still hold the rope.
You want a very swift horse, and you need to
rowel him with sharpest spurs, and to let the reins
lie loose upon the neck, and to give a shout to a racer,
if you are going to ride out of reach of your mother's
prayers. Why, a ship crossing the Atlantic in seven
days can't sail away from that ! A sailor finds them
on the lookout as he takes his place, and finds them
on the mast as he climbs the ratlines to disentangle a
rope in the tempest, and finds them swinging on the
hammock when he turns in. Why not be frank and
acknowledge it the most of us would long ago have
been dashed to pieces had not gracious and loving
hands steadily, and lovingly, and mightily held the
rope.
CHAPTER V.
THE NEEDLE.
History has told the story of the crown ; the epic
poet has sung of the sword ; the pastoral poet, with
his verses full of the redolence of ciover tops and
a-rustle with the silk of the corn, has sung the praises
of the plow. I sound the praises of the needle.
From the fig-leaf robe prepared in the Garden of
Eden, to the last stitch taken, the needle has wrought
wonders of generosity, kindness, and benefaction. It
adorned the girdle of the high-priest; it fashioned
the curtains in the ancient tabernacle ; it cushioned
the chariots of King Solomon ; it provided the robes
of Queen Elizabeth, and in high places and in low
places, by the fire of the pioneer's back log, and
under the flash of the chandelier everywhere it has
clothed nakedness, it has preached the Gospel, it has
overcome hosts of penury and want with the war-
cry of "Stitch ! stitch ! stitch !"
The operatives have found a livelihood by it, and
through it the mansions of the employer have been
constructed. Amid the greatest triumphs in all ages
and lands I set down the conquests of the needle. I
admit its crimes. I admit its cruelties. It has had
more martyrs than the fire. It has butchered more
souls than the inquisition. It has punctured the eye.
It has pierced the side. It has struck weakness into
the lungs. It has sent madness into the brain. It
76
THE NEEDLE. 77
has filled the potter's field. It has pitched whole
armies of the suffering into crime, and wretchedness,
and woe. But now that I speak of Dorcas and her
ministries to the poor, I shall relate only the charities
of the needle.
This woman was a representative of all those
women who make garments for the destitute, who
knit socks for the barefooted, who prepare bandages
for the lacerated, who fix up boxes of clothing for
Western missionaries, who go into the asylums of
the suffering and destitute, bearing that Gospel which
is sight for the blind, and hearing for the deaf, and
which makes the lame man leap like a hart, and
brings the dead to life, immortal health bounding in
their pulses.
What a contrast between the practical benevolence
of this woman aiid a great deal of the charity of this
day ! This woman did not spend her time idly plan-
ning how the poor of Joppa were to be relieved ; she
took her needle and relieved them. She was not
like those persons who sympathize with imaginary
sorrows, and go out in the street and laugh at the boy
who has upset his basket of cold victuals, or like that
charity which makes a rousing speech on the benevo-
lent platform and goes out to kick the beggar from
the step, crying: "Hush your miserable howling!"
The sufferers of the world want not so much theory
as practice; not so much tears as dollars; not so
much kind wishes as loaves of bread ; not so much
smiles as shoes ; not so much "God bless yous !" as
jackets and frocks.
I will put one earnest Christian man, hard-working,
against 5,000 mere theorists on the subject of charity.
There arc a great many who have fine ideas about
78 THE NEEDLE.
church architecture who never in their life helped to
build a church. There are men who can give you
the history of Buddhism and Mohammedanism, who
never sent a farthing tor their evangelization. There
are women who talk beautifully about the suffering
of the world, who never had the courage, like Dor-
cas, to take the needle and assault it.
I am glad that there is not a page of the world's
history which is not a record of female benevolence.
God says to all lands and people : "Come now,
and hear the widow's mite rattle down into the poor-
box." The Princess of Conti sold all her jewels that
she might help the famine-stricken. Queen Blanche,
the wife of Louis VIII, of France, hearing that there
were some persons unjustly incarcerated in the
prisons, went out amid the rabble and took a stick
and struck the door as a signal that they might all
strike it, and down went the prison-door, and out
came the prisoners. Queen Maud, the wife of Henry
I., went down amid the poor and washed their sores
and administered to them cordials. Mrs. Retson, at
Matagorda, appeared on the battlefield while the
missiles of death were flying around, and cared for
the wounded.
But why go so far back? Why go so faraway?
Is there a man or woman who has forgotten the
women of the sanitary and Christian commissions, or
the fact that before the smoke had gone up from
Gettysburg and South Mountain, the women of the
North met the women of the South on the battlefield,
forgetting all their animosities while they bound up
the wounded and closed up the eyes of the slain?
Have you forgotten Dorcas, the benefactress !
There are a great many who go out of life and are
THE NEEDLE. 79
unmissed. There may be a very large funeral ; there
may be a great many carriages and a plumed hearse ;
there may be high-sounding eulogiums ; the bell may
toll at the cemetery gate ; there may be a very fine
marble shaft reared over the resting-place ; but the
whole thing may be a falsehood and a sham. The
Church of God has lost nothing. The world has lost
nothing. It is only a nuisance abated ; it is only a
grumbler ceasing to find fault; it is only an idler
stopped yawning ; it is only a dissipated fashionable
parted from his wine cellar ; while, on the other
hand, no useful Christian leaves this world without
being missed. The Church of God cries out, like the
prophet: -'Howl, fir-tree, for the cedar has fallen !"
Widowhood comes and shows the garments which
the departed had made. Orphans are lifted up to
look into the calm face of the sleeping benefactress.
Reclaimed vagrancy comes and kisses the cold brow
of her who charmed it away from sin, and all through
the streets of Joppa there is mourning, mourning
because Dorcas is dead.
I suppose you have read of the fact that when
Josephine was carried out to her grave there were
a great many men and women of pomp, and pride,
and position, that went out after her; but I am most
affected by the story of history, that on that day
there were 10,000 of the poor of France who followed
her coffin, weeping and wailing until the air rang
again, because, when they lost Josephine they lost
their last earthly friend. Oh, who would not rather
have such obsequies than all the tears that were ever
poured in the lachrymals that have been exhumed
from ancient cities ?
There may be no mass for the dead ; there may be
80 THE NEEDLE.
no costly sarcophagus ; there may be no elaborate
mausoleum ; but in the damp cellars of the city, and
through the lonely huts of the mountain glen, there
will be mourning, mourning, mourning, because Dor-
cas is dead. "Blessed are the dead who die in the
Lord ; they rest from their labors, and their works
do follow them."
CHAPTER VI.
THE SECRET OUT.
"Samuel said, What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in
mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?" I.SAM. 15: 14.
The Amalekites thought that they had conquered
God, and that He would never execute His threats
against them. They had murdered the Israelites in
battle and out of battle, and left no outrage untried.
They thought that God either did not dare to punish
them, or that He had forgotten so to do. Let us see.
Samuel, the Lord's prophet, tells Saul to go down
and destroy the Amalekites, leaving 1 not one of them
dive, and to destroy all the beasts in their possession,
ex and sheep, camel and ass.
The Amalekites and Israelites confront each other.
The trumpets of battle are blown, peal on peal.
Awful scene, that ancient battle. But huzza ! for the
Israelites. More than two hundred thousand men
wave their plumes and clap their shields, for God has
given them the victory. Huzza ! for Israel.
Yet this triumphant army is soon captured and
conquered by sheep and oxen. God told Saul to go
and destroy the Amalekites, and to destroy all the
beasts in their possession. Saul thought he knew
better than the Lord ( and so he saves Agag, the king
of the Amalekites, and saves some of the finest of the
sheep and the oxen. He thinks he has cheated the
prophet, and through him cheated the Lord, and he
81 6
82 THE SECRET OUT.
is driving 1 these sheep and oxen on toward his home
lie has no idea that Samuel, the prophet, will ever
find it. out.
Samuel meets him. Saul with solemn visage for
there is no one that can look more solemn than your
genuine hypocrite Saul says: "I have fulfilled the
commandment of the Lord." Samuel listens, and at
that moment he hears the noisy drove in the rear, and
he says to Saul : " If you have done as you have
said, if you have obeyed the Lord, what meaneth the
bleating of the sheep that I hear, and the lowing of
the oxen in mine ear?" One would have thought
that Saul's cheek would have been consumed with
blushes. No. He says : " I did not do this ; the
army did it. The army are saving these sheep and
oxen for sacrifice." Then Samuel slashes Agag to
pieces, and in Oriental style takes hold of the skirt of
his coat, and rends it apart, as much as to say, "So
shall you be rent from your crown, so shall you be
rent from your kingdom, and all nations shall know
that Saul, by disobeying God, won a flock of sheep,
but lost a kingdom."
God will expose hypocrisy. Saul thought* this
whole thing had been hushed up, and he had no idea
that the secret of his disobedience would ever come
out, and at the most inopportune time the sheep
bleat, and the oxen bellowed. A hypocrite is one
who professes to be what he is not, or to do that
which he does not. Saul was a type of a large class.
A hypocrite in our time is a man who looks awfully
solemn, whines in his prayer, never laughs or smiles,
or, if he should be caught laughing or smiling, after-
ward is apologetic, as though he had committed some
great sin. The first time he has a chance, he prays
THE SECRET OUT. 83
twenty minutes in a prayer-meeting, and if he give an
exhortation, it is with an air that seems to imply that
all men are sinners save one, his modesty forbidding
that he should state who that one is. In Churches of
Christ all over the land are ecclesiastical Uriah Heeps.
When the fox begins to pray look out for your
chickens ! The genuine impostor in religion makes a
pride of his misery. The genuine Christian finds
religion a joy. The hypocrite has pride in his being
uncomfortable.
Those are the kind of men that damage the Church
of Jesus Christ. Wolves are not of so much danger,
save when they are in sheep's clothing. Arnold was
of more peril to the American army than Cornwallis.
and his host. A ship may outride a hundred storms,
and yet a handful of worms in a plank may sink it to
the bottom. The Church of Jesus Christ has not so
much fear of cyclones of persecution as it has of the
vermin of hypocrisy sometimes infesting it.
Now, such hypocrisy will be exposed. God sees
behind the curtain as well as before the curtain. God
sees everything inside out. All their solemn looks
will not save them. All their long prayers will
not save them. All their professions of religion
will not save them. Their real character will be
demonstrated, and at the most unexpected moment
the sheep will bleat and the oxen will bellow.
One of the cruel bishops of olden time, about to
put one of the martyrs to death, began by saying;
" In the name of God, amen." The martyr said :
" Don't say ' in the name of God ! ' ' And yet how
many cruel and mean things are done in the name of
religion and sanctity. You sometimes see ecclesi-
astical courts when they are about to devour some
84 THE SECRET OUT.
good brother, begin by being tremendously pious
in their utterances, the venom of their assault corre-
sponding with the heavenly pathos of the prelude.
About to devour him, they say grace before the
meal ! Just at the time when you expect them almost
to rise in translation, and are beginning to think that
nothing but the weight of their boots and overcoats
keep them down, the sheep bleat and the oxen bellow.
Ah ! my friends, pretend to be no more than that you
are. If you have the grace of God, profess it ; but
profess to have no more than you really possess. If
you have none of it, do not profess to have it.
History tells of Ottocar who was asked to kneel
before Randolphus I. Coming into the presence of
the king, Ottocar declined to kneel, but after a while
he compromised the matter and said: " I will kneel
in private some time in your tent where no one sees
me." But the servant of the king arranged a rope
by which he could instantly let the tent drop. After
a while Ottocar came into the tent and knelt before
Randolphus in worship. The king's servant drew
the cord and the tent dropped, and Ottocar in the
presence of two great armies, was kneeling before
Randolphus. Ah ! my friends, if you pretend that
you are a servant of Jesus Christ, and at the same
time are kneeling to the world, the tent has already
dropped, and all the armies of heaven are gazing on
the hypocrisy. The universe is a very public place,
and hypocrisy always comes to exposure.
But while there is one hypocrite in the Church
there are five hundred outside of it, for the field is
larger. People sometimes look over into the Church,
and they find here and there a hypocrite, and they
denounce the Church of God. You have more on
THE SECRET OUT. 85
your side than we have on our side. Five hundred
to one. Men who in your presence are obsequious,
while at the same time they are angling for an imper-
fection. They are digging for a bait. Men who will
be in your presence in commercial circles as genial
as a summer morn, while they have the fierceness of
a catamount and the slyness of a snake and the spite
of a devil. But the gun they shoot off will burst in
their own hands ; the lies they tell crack their own
teeth, and their hypocrisy will be demonstrated, and
at the most unexpected time the sheep will bleat and
the oxen will bellow.
It is very natural to put off sin on other people.
Saul, confronted with his crime, said : " Oh, it wasn't
me, it was the army ; they saved these sheep and
oxen, and disobeyed the command of God. It wasn't
me. Oh, no, it was the army." Human nature the
same in all ages. Adam confronted with his sin, said :
" The woman tempted me and I did eat." And she
charged it upon the serpent, and if the serpent could
have spoken it would have charged it upon the devil;
when the simple circumstance, I suppose, was that
Adam saw Eve eating this forbidden fruit, and he
begged and coaxed until he got a piece of it ! Adam
just as much to blame as Eve. Ah ! my brother, you
cannot put off your sins on other people. Saul
thought he could, but he could not.
God demanded the obliteration of all of the Amal-
ekites, and the destruction of all the beasts they
owned, and Saul saves Agag, the King of the Amal-
ekites, and those fine sheep and oxen. God said,
extermination. Why, do you suppose that if we
have as many sins as there were men in the army of
the Amalekites, God is going to let us keep any of
them ? They have all to be exterminated.
86 THE SECRET OUT.
Here is a Christian man who says: " I have an
Amalekitish sin which' I call jealousy." Down with
jealousy. Here is a Christian man who savs : "I
have an Amalekitish sin which I will call backbiting:."
Down with backbiting. A Christian says: " I have
an Amalekitish sin which is an appetite for strong
drink." Down with that appetite. Meanwhile, out
yonder, there is a sin lifting up its head. What is
that? It is Agag. That is worldliness. That is a
pet sin, it is a darling sin he is going to let live. No
mercy for Agag. You cannot keep a darling sin.
Extermination !
Some Presbyterians call it "the higher life;" some
Methodists call it " perfection ;" I do not care what
you call it; but without holiness no man shall see the
Lord. We have to give up all our sins, my brothers
and sisters; give them all up. No mercy for Agag.
Saul kept, I suppose, the finest, the fattest of the
sheep, and killed the meanest. And there are many
Christians who kill their unpopular sins and keep
the respectable sins, while the Lord God from the
heavens thunders extermination.
A mere profession of religion, if it be not backed
up by right behavior, amounts to nothing, and worse
than nothing. Saul came out with a magnificent pro-
fession of religion. He says : " I have fulfilled the
commandments of the Lord. Just look at me ! See
what a hero 1 have been!" Then the sheep bleat and
the oxen bellowed. It seems to me that the Church
of Christ is to make a new departure in the direction
of straightout honesty. I believe the time will come
when men, instead of going to commercial records to
see whether a man is A i hearing that a man who
proposes a bargain is a member of the Christian
THE SECRET OUT. 87
Ghurch, a professor of religion the merchant will
say : " That is all I need."
But how much a church certificate would be worth
in Wall Street to-day, judge ye! It seems to me the
Church has not kept up with the world's enterprise.
It used to take a good while to make a sixpenny nail.
A bar would be thrust into the hot coals, and then
the bellows would blow, and then the bar would be
brought out on the anvil, and they would pound it
and smite it and cut it and cleave it, and there would
be the nail. Now, a bar is thrust into a machine, and
instantly there is a whole shower of nails on the
floor of the manufactory. It used to take a great
while to thresh wheat. The farmer would slowly un-
fasten the band from the sheaf, then he would shake
out the sheaf on the floor, and then he would take
the slow flail, and pound out the wheat from the
straw. Now, the horses start, or the engine begins
to hiss, and there are many sheaves instantly
threshed. The printing-press that made two hun-
dred and fifty impressions an hour was considered
wonderful. Now, tens of thousands of impressions
are made in the same length of time. The mail was
a very slow institution. Once in two weeks it went
from London to Edinburgh. Once in two weeks
it went from New York to Boston. Now, a half
dozen times a day you have to run to get out of the
way, or you will be run over by the wagons that
come through Nassau Street, with whole tons of
United States mail. Over eight hundred millions of
letters and papers in one year going through that
mail. Changes in jurisprudence. Constitution of the
State ot New York changed in 1846. Improvements
in the criminal code. Improvements in the civil
code. Law of 1773 not fit for 1883.
88 THE SECRET OUT.
Now, has the Church of God kept up with the
movements of the day ? with art, with science, with
modern travel. " Oh," says some one, " there are no
new principles to be evolved in religion." Ah ! I ad-
mit it. There are no new principles in nature. They
are new to us, but they are old principles brought
out into demonstration and into light. The law of
gravitation did not wait until Isaac Newton was
born. There was just as much electricity in the sum-
mer clouds before Benjamin Franklin began to play
kite with the thunderstorm, as afterward ; just as
much power in steam before Robert Fulton was born
as afterward. The carboniferous and Jurassic strata
of the earth did not wait to be laid down until Hugh
Miller plunged his geological crowbar. They are old
principles, as old as the world, but brought to new
demonstration. So I say in regard to religion. If a
man tells me he has a new religion, I say, " I have no
faith in it, for the Bible is my standard." But if he
comes and says to me, " I have a new application of
the old principle," 1 say, " Hear, hear, hear !"
Now what I want is to have this old Gospel wheel,
this grand Gospel wheel which has turned so mag-
nificently so many years, to have another band put
on it, the band connecting it with every shop, with
every store, with every banking house, with every
institution, with every place of hard work the
religion of Jesus Christ making its conquest in the
direction of common honesty, so that when a man
shall say, as Saul said, " I have fulfilled the command-
ment of the Lord," everybody will believe him.
CHAPTER VII.
THE EYE.
The imperial organ of the human system is the eye.
The surgeons, the doctors, the anatomists, and the
physiologists understand much of the glories of the
two great lights of the human face ; but the vast mul-
titudes go on from cradle to grave without any
appreciation oi the two great masterpieces of the Lord
God Almighty. If God had lacked anything of infi-
nite wisdom He would have failed in creating the
human eye. We wander through the earth trying to
see wonderful sights, but the most wonderful sight
that we ever see is not so wonderful as the instru-
ments through which we see it.
It has been a strange thing to me for thirty years
that some scientist with enough eloquence and mag-
netism, did not go through the country with illus-
trated lecture on canvas thirty feet square, to startle
and thrill and overwhelm Christendom with the
marvels of the human eye. We want the eye taken
from all its technicalities, and some one who shall lay
aside all talk about the pterygomaxillary fissures, the
sclerotica, and the chiasma of the optic nerve, and in
plain, common parlance which you and I and every-
body can understand, present the subject. We have
learned men who have been telling us what our
origin is and what we were. Oh, if some one should
come forth from the dissecting-table and from the
89
90 THE EYE.
class room of the university and take the platform,
and asking the help of the Creator, demonstrate the
wonders of what we are.
The eyes of fish and reptiles and moles and bats are
very simple things because they have not much to
do. There are insects with a hundred eyes, but the
hundred eyes have less faculty than the two human
eyes. The black beetle swimming the summer pond
has two eyes under the water and two eyes above
the water, but the four insectile are not equal to the
two human. Man placed at the head of all living
creatures must have supreme equipment, while the
blind fish in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky have
only an undeveloped organ of sight, an apology for
the eye, which, if through some crevice of the moun-
tain they should go into the sunlight, might be
developed into positive eyesight.
In the first chapter of Genesis we find that God
without any consultation created the light, created
the trees, created the fish, created the fowl, but when
He was about to create man He called a convention
of divinity, as though to imply that all the powers of
Godhead were to be enlisted in the achievement.
" Let us make man." Put a whole ton of emphasis on
that word " us." " Let us make man." And if God
called a convention of divinity to create man, I think
the two great questions in that conference were how
to create a soul, and how to make an appropriate
window for the emperor to look out of.
See how God honored the eye before he created it.
He cried until chaos was irradiated with the utter-
ance : " Let there be light " ! In other words, before
he introduced man into this temple of the world He
illumined it, prepared it for the eyesight. And so
THE EYE. 91
alter the last human eye has been destroyed in the
final demolition of the world, stars are to fall and the
sun is to cease its shining, and the moon is to turn
into blood. In other words, after the human eyes
are no more to be profited by their shining, the
chandeliers of heaven are to be turned out. God to
educate and to bless and to help the human eye, set
on the mantel of heaven two lamps a gold lamp and
a silver lamp the one for the day, and the other for
the night.
To show how God honors the eye, look at the two
halls built for the residence of the eyes. Seven bones
making the wall for each eye, the seven bones
curiously wrought together. Kingly palace of ivory
is considered rich, but the halls for the residence of
the human eyes are richer by so much as human
bone is more sacred than elephantine tusk. See how
God honored the eyes when He made a roof for them,
so that the-sweat of toil should not smart them, and
the rain dashing against the forehead might rot drip
into them ; the eyebrows not bending over the eye,
but reaching to the right and to the left so that the
rain and the sweat should be compelled to drop upon
the cheek instead of falling into this divinely pro-
tected human eyesight.
See how God honored the eye in the fact presented
by anatomists and physiologists that there are 800
contrivances in every eye. For window shutters, the
eyelids opening and closing 30,000 times a day. The
eyelashes so constructed that they have their selec-
tion as to what shall be admitted, saying to the dust,
" Stay out," and saying *o the light, ' Come in." For
inside curtain the iris, or pupil of the eye, according
as the light is greater or less, contracting or dilating.
92 THE EYE.
The eye of the owl is blind in the daytime, the
eyes of some creatures are blind at night, but the
human eye so marvelously constructed it can see
both by day and by night.
Many of the other creatures of God can move the
eye only from side to side, but the human eye so mar-
velousl v constructed, has one muscle to lift the eye and
another muscle to lower the eye, and another muscle
to roll it to the right, and another muscle to roll it to
the left, and another muscle passing through a pulley
to turn it round and round an elaborate gearing of
six muscles as perfect as God could make them.
There also is the retina gathering the rays of light
and passing the visual impression along the optic
nerve about the thickness of the lamp wick, passing
the visual impression on to the sensorium and on into
the soul. What a delicate lens, what an exquisite
screen, what soft cushions, what wonderful chemistry
of the human eye. The eye washed by a slow stream
of moisture, whether we sleep or wake, rolling imper-
ceptibly over the pebble of the eye and emptying
into a bone of the nostril a contrivance so wonder-
ful that it can see the sun, ninety-five millions of miles
away, and the point of a pin. Telescope and micro-
scope in the same contrivance. The astronomer
swings and moves this way and that, and adjusts and
readjusts the telescope until he gets it to the right
focus ; the microscopist moves this way and that, and
adjusts and readjusts the magnifying glass until it is
prepared to do its work, but the human eye without
a touch beholds the star and the smallest insect. The
traveler among the Alps with one glance taking in
Mont Blanc and the face of his watch, to see whether
he has time to climb it. Oh, this wonderful camera
THE EYE. 93
obscura which you and I carry about with us, so to-day
we can take in this audience, so from the top of Mount
Washington we can take in New England, so at night
we can sweep into our vision the constellations from
horizon to horizon. So delicate, so semi-infinite, and
,yet the light coming ninety-five millions of miles at
the rate of two hundred thousand miles a second, is
obliged to halt at the gate of the eye, waiting until
the portcullis be lifted. Something hurled ninety-
five millions of miles and striking an instrument
which has not the agitation of even winking under
the power of the stroke.
There, also, is the merciful arrangement of the tear
gland, by which the eye is washed, and through
which rolls the tide which brings the relief that
comes in tears when some bereavement or great loss
strikes us. The tear not an augmentation of sorrow,
but the breaking up of the Arctic of frozen grief in
the warm Gulf Stream of consolation. Incapacity to
weep is madness or death. Thank God for the tear
glands, and that the crystal gates are so easily
opened.
Oh, the wonderful hydraulic apparatus of the
human eye. Divinely constructed vision. Two light-
houses at the harbor of the immortal soul, under the
shining of which the world sails in and drops anchor.
What an anthem of praise to God is the human eye.
The tongue is speechless and a clumsy instrument of
expression as compared with it. Have you not seen
it flash with indignation, or kindle with enthusiasm,
or expand with devotion, or melt with sympathy, or
stare with fright, or leer with villainy, or droop with
sadness, or pale with envy, or fire with revenge, or
twinkle with mirth, or beam with love ? It is tragedy
94 THE EYE.
and comedy and pastoral and lyric in turn. Have
von not seen its uplifted brow of surprise, or its
frown of wrath, or its contraction of pain? If the
eye say one thing and the lips say another thing, you
believe the eye rather than the lips. The eyes of
Archibald Alexander and Charles S. Finney, were
the mightiest part of their sermon. George White-
Held enthralled great assemblages with his eyes,
though thev were crippled with strabismus. Many
a military chieftain has, with a look, hurled a regi-
ment t > victory or to death. Martin Luther turned
his great eye on an assassin who came to tnke his life,
and the villain fled. Under the glance of the human
eye the tiger, with five times a man's strength, snarls
back into the African jungle.
The Earl of Bridgewater, in his last will and testa-
ment bequeathed $40,000 for essavs to be written on
the power, and wisdom, and goodness of God, as
manifested in creation, and Sir Charles Bell, the
British surgeon, fresh from Corunna and Waterloo,
where he had been tending the wounded and study-
ing the formation of the human body amid the ampu-
tating horrors of the battlefield, accepted the
invitation to write one of those Bridgewater treatises,
and he wrote his book on the human hand a book
that will live as long as the world lives. 1 have only
hinted at the splendors, the glories, the wonders, the
divine revelations, the apocalypses of the human eye,
and 1 stagger back from the awful portals of the
physiological miracle which must have taxed the
ingenuity of a God, to cry out: "He that formed
the eye, shall He not see ?" Shall Herschel not know
as much as his telescope? Shall Fraunhofer not
know as much as his spectroscope? Shall Swam-
THE EYE. 95
merdain not know as much as his microscope ? Shall
Dr. Hookc not know as much as his micrometer?
Shall the thing formed know more than its maker?
"He that formed the eye, shall He not see?"
The recoil of this question is tremendous. We
stand at the center of a vast circumference of obser-
vation. No privacy. On us, eyes of cherubim, eyes
of seraphim, eyes of archangel, eyes of God. We
may not be able to see the inhabitants of other
worlds, but perhaps they may be able to see us. We
have not optical instruments strong enough to descry
them ; perhaps they have optical instruments strong
enough to descry us. The mole can not see the eagle
mid-air, but the eagle mid-sky can see the mole mid-
grass. We are able to see mountains and caverns oi
another world ; but perhaps the inhabitants of other
worlds can see the towers of our cities, the flash of
our seas, the marching of our processions, the white
robes of our weddings, the black scarfs of our
obsequies. It passes out from the guess into the posi-
tive, when we are told in the Bible that the inhab-
itants of other worlds do come or convey to this.
Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to min-
ister to those who shall be heirs of salvation? Oh,
the eye of God, so full of pity, so full of power, so
full of love, so full of indignation, so full of compas-
sion, so full of mercy. How it peers through the
darkness. How it outshines the day. How it glares
upon the offender. How it beams on the penitent
soul. Talk about the human eye as being indescrib-
ably wonderful how much more wonderful the
great, searching, overwhelming eye of God. All
eternity past and all eternity to come on that retina.
The eyes with which we look into each other's face
96 THE EYE.
to-day suggest it. It stands written twice on your
face and twice on mine, unless through casualty one
or both have been obliterated. "He that formed the
eye, shall He not see ?" Oh, the eye of God. It
sees our sorrows to assuage them, sees our perplex-
ities to disentangle them, sees our wants to sympa-
thize with them. If we fight Him back, the eye of
an antagonist. If we ask His grace, the eye of an
everlasting friend.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE EAR.
Architecture is one of the most fascinating arts,
and the study of Egyptian, Grecian, Etruscan, Ro-
man, Byzantine, Moorish, Renaissance styles of
building, has been to many a man a sublime life-
work. Lincoln and York Cathedrals, St. Paul's and
St. Peter's; and Arch of Titus, and Theban Temple,
and Alhambra, and Parthenon, are the monuments to
the genius of those who built them. But more won-
derful than any arch they ever lifted, or any transept
window they ever illumined, or any Corinthian col-
umn they ever crowned, or any Gothic cloister the}
ever elaborated, is the human ear.
Among the most skillful and assiduous physi
ologists of our time have been those who have giver
their time to the examination of the ear, and the
studying of its arches, its walls, its floor, its canals, it!
aqueducts, its galleries, its intricacies, its convulsions,
its divine machinery, and yet, it will take another
thousand years before the world comes to any ade-
quate appreciation of what God did when Heplanned
and executed the infinite and overmastering archi
tecture of the human ear. The most of it is invisible
and the microscope breaks down in the attempt at
exploration. The cartilage which we call the ear is
only the storm door of the great temple clear down
out of sight, next door to the immortal soul.
97 7
98 THE EAR.
Such scientists as Hclmholtz, and Conte, and De
Blainville, and Rank, and Buck, have attempted to
walk the Appian Way of the human ear, but the mys-
terious pathway has never been fully trodden but by
two feet the foot of sound and the foot of God.
Three ears on each side the head the external ear,
the middle ear, the internal ear, but all connected by
most wonderful telegraphy.
The external ear in all ages adorned by precious
stones or precious metals. The Temple of Jerusalem,
partly built by the contribution of earrings, and
Homer, in the Iliad, speaks of Hera, the three bright
drops, her glittering gems suspended from the ear;
and many of the adornments of our day are only
copies of ear-jewels found to-day in Pompeiian mu-
seum and Etruscan vase. But while the outer ear
may be adorned by human art, the middle and the
internal ear are adorned and garnished only by the
hand of the Lord God Almighty. The stroke of a
key of this organ sets the air vibrating, and the ear
catches the undulating sound, and passes it on
through the bonelets of the middle ear to the in-
ternal ear, which is filled with liquid, and that liquid
again vibrates until the three thousand fibers of the
human brain take up the vibration, and roll the sound
on into the soul.
The hidden machinery of the ear, by physiologists
called by the names of things familiar to us, like the
hammer, something to strike like the anvil, some-
thing to be smitten like the stirrup of the saddle
with which we mount the steed like the drum,
beaten in the march like the harp strings, to be
swept by music. Coiled like a snail shell, by which
one of the innermost passages of the ear is actually
THE EAR. 99
called like a stairway, the sound to ascend like a
bent tube of a heating apparatus, taking that \vhich
enters round and round like a labyrinth with won-
derful passages into which the thought enters only to
be lost in bewilderment. The middle ear filled with
air, the medium of the sound as it passes to the in-
ternal ear filled with liquid a muscle contracting
when the noise is too loud, just as the pupil of the
eye contracts when the light is too glaring. The ex-
ternal ear is defended by wax, which with its bitter-
ness, discourages insectile invasion. The internal
car embedded in what is by far the hardest bone of
the human system, a very rock of strength and
defiance.
The ear, so strange a contrivance, that by the esti-
mates of one scientist, it can catch the sound of
seventy-three thousand seven hundred vibrations in
a second. The outer ear taking in all kinds of sound,
whether the crash of an avalanche, or the hum of a
bee. The sound passing to the inner door of the
outside ear, halts until another mechanism, divine
mechanism, passes it on by the bonelets of the middle
ear, and coming to the inner door of the second ear,
the sound has no power to come further until another
divine mechanism passes it on through into the inner
ear, and then the sound swims the liquid until it
comes to the rail-track of the brain branchlet, and
rolls on and on until it comes to sensation, and there
the curtain drops, and a hundred gates shut, and the
voice of God seems to say to all human inspection :
" Thus far and no farther."
In this vestibule of the palace of the soul, how
many kings of thought, of medicine, of physiology,
have done penance of lifelong study, and got no
ICO THE EAR.
further than the vestibule. Mysterious home of re-
verberation and echo. Grand Central Depot of
sound. Headquarters to which there come quick
dispatches, part the way by cartilage, part the way
by air, part the way by bone, part the way by water,
part the way by nerve the slowest dispatch plung-
ing into the ear at the speed of one thousand and
ninety feet a second.
Small instrument of music on which is played all
the music you ever hear, from the grandeurs of an
August thunderstorm to the softest breathings of a
flute. Small instrument of music, only a quarter of
an inch of surface and the thinness of one two hun-
dred and fiftieth part of an inch, and that thinness
divided into three layers. In that ear musical staff,
lines, spaces, bar and rest. A bridge leading from
the outside natural world to the inside spiritual
world ; we seeing the abutment at this end of the
bridge, but the fog of an uplifted mystery hiding the
abutment at the other end of the bridge. Whisper-
ing gallery of the soul. The human voice is God's
eulogy to the ear. That voice capable of producing
seventeen trillion, five hundred and ninety-two bil-
lion, one hundred and eighty-six million, forty-four
thousand, four hundred and fifteen sounds, and all
that variety made, not for the regalement of beast or
bird, but for the human ear.
Struggling on up from six years of age when he
was left fatherless, Wagner rose from the obloquy of
the world, and oft-times all nations seemingly against
him, until he gained the favor of a king, and won the
enthusiasm of the opera houses of Europe and
America. Struggling all the way on to seventy
years of age, to conquer the world's ear.
THE EAR. IO3
In that same attempt to master the human ear and
gain supremacy over this gate of the immortal soul,
great battles were fought by Mozart, Gluck and
Weber, and by Beethoven and Meyerbeer, by Ros-
sini, and by all the roll of German and Italian and
French composers, some of them in the battle leaving
their blood on the keynotes and the musical scores.
Great battle fought for the ear fought with baton,
with organ pipe, with trumpet, with cornet-a-piston,
with all ivory and brazen and silver and golden
weapons of the orchestra ; royal theatre and cathe-
dral and academy of music the fortresses of the con-
test for the ear. England and Egypt fought for the
supremacy of the Suez Canal, and the Spartans and
the Persians fought for the defile at Thermopylae, but
the musicians of all ages have fought for the mastery
of the auditory canal and the defile of the immortal
soul and the Thermopylae of struggling cadences.
For the conquest of the ear, Haydn struggled. on
up from the garret where he had neither fire nor
food, on and on until under the too great nervous
strain of hearing his own oratorio of the " Creation "
performed, he was carried out to die, but leaving as
his legacy to the world 118 symphonies, 163 pieces
for the baritone, 1 5 masses, 5 oratorios, 42 German
and Italian songs, 39 canons, 365 English and Scotch
songs with accompaniment, and 1536 pages of libretti.
All that to capture the gate of the body that swings
in from the tympanum to the snail shell lying on the
beach of the ocean of the immortal soul.
To conquer the ear, Handel struggled on from the
time when his father would not let him go to school
lest he learn the gamut and become a musician, and
from the time when he was allowed in the organ loft
IO4 THE EAR.
just to play after the audience had left, one volun-
tary, to the time when he left to all nations his
unparalleled oratorios of " Esther," " Deborah,"
"Samson," "Jephthah," "Judas Maccabeus," " Israel
in Egypt," and the " Messiah," the soul of the great
German composer still weeping in the dead march of
our great obsequies, and triumphing in the raptures
of every Easter morn.
To conquer the ear and take this gate of the im-
mortal soul, Schubert composed his immortal "Sere-
nade," writing the staves of the music on the bill of
fare in a restaurant, and went on until he could leave
as a legacy to the world over a thousand magnificent
compositions in music. To conquer the ear and take
this gate of the soul's castle, Mozart struggled on
through poverty until he came to a pauper's grave,
and one chilly, wet afternoon the body of him who
gave to the world the " Requiem " and the " G-minor
Symphony " was crunched in on the top of two other
paupers into a grave which to this day is epitaphless.
For the ear everything mellifluous, from the birth
hour when our earth was wrapped in swaddling
clothes of light and serenaded by other worlds, from
the time when Jubal thrummed the first harp and
pressed a key of the first organ, down to the music of
this Sabbath morn. Yea, for the ear the coming
overtures of heaven, for whatever other part of the
body may be left in the dust, the ear, we know, is to
come to celestial life ; otherwise, why the " harpers
harping with their harps"? For the ear, carol of
lark and whistle of quail, and chirp of cricket, and
dash of cascade, and roar of tides oceanic, and
doxology of worshipful assembly and minstrelsy,
cherubic, seraphic, and archangelic. For the ear all
THE EAR. 105
Pandean pipes, all flutes, all clarionets, all hautboys,
all bassoons, all bells, and all organs Luzerne and
Westminster Abbey, and Freyburg, and Berlin, and
all the organ pipes set across Christendom, and great
Giant's Causeway for the monarchs of music to pass
over. For the ear, all chimes, all ticking of chro-
nometers, all anthems, all dirges, all glees, all choruses,
all lullabies, all orchestration.
Oh, the ear, the God-honored ear, grooved with
divine sculpture, and poised with divine gracefulness,
and upholstered with curtains of divine embroidery,
and corridored by divine carpentry, and pillared with
divine architecture, and chiseled in bone of divine
masonry, and conquered by processions of divine
marshaling. The ear! A perpetual point of inter-
rogation, asking how, a perpetual point of apostrophe
appealing to God. None but God could plan it.
None but God could build it. None but God could
work it. None but God could keep it. None but God
could understand it. None but God could explain it.
Oh, the wonders of the human ear. How surpass-
ingly sacred the human ear. You had better be
careful how you let the sound of blasphemy or un-
cleanness step into that holy of holies. The Bible
says that in the ancient temple the priest was set
apart by the putting of the blood of a ram on the tip
of the ear, the right ear of the priest. But, my
friends, we need all of us to have the sacred touch of
ordination on the hanging lobe of both ears, and on
the arches of the ears, on the Eustachian tube of the
ear, on the mastoid cells of the ear, on the tympanic
cavity of the ear, and on everything from the outside
rim of the outside ear clear in to the point where
sound steps off the auditory nerve and rolls on down
Id6 THE EAR.
into the unfathomable depths of the immortal soul.
The Bible speaks of "dull ears," and of "uncircum-
ciscd ears," and of " itching ears," and of " rebellious
ears," and of "open ears," and of those who have all
the organs of hearing and yet who seem to be deaf,
for it cries to them : " He that hath ears to hear, let
him hear."
Oh, yes, my friends, we have been looking for God
too far away instead of looking for Him close by and
in our own organism. We go up into the conserva-
tory and look through the telescope and see God in
Jupiter, and God in Saturn, and God in Mars; but
we could see more of Him through the microscope
of an aurist. No king is satisfied with only one resi-
dence, and in France it has been St. Cloud and Ver-
sailles and the Tuilleries, and in Great Britain it has
been Windsor and Balmoral, and Osborne. A ruler
does not always prefer the larger. The King of
earth and heaven may have larger castles and greater
palaces, but I do not think there is any one more
curiously wrought than the human ear. The heaven
of heavens cannot contain Him, and yet He says He
finds room to dwell in a contrite heart, and I think,
in a Christian ear.
We have been looking for God in the infinite let
us look for Him in the infinitesimal. God walking
the corridor of the ear, God sitting in the gallery of
the human ear, God speaking along the auditory
nerve of the ear, God dwelling in the ear to hear that
which comes from the outside, and so near the brain
and the soul He can hear all that transpires there.
The Lord of hosts encamping under the curtains of
membrane. Palace of the Almighty in the human
ear. The rider on the white horse of the Apocalypse
THE EAR. ID/
thrusting his hand into the loop of bone which the
physiologist has been pleased to call the stirrup of
the ear.
When a soul prays, God does not sit bolt upright
until the prayer travels immensity and climbs to His
ear. The Bible says He bends clear over. In more
than one place Isaiah said He bowed down His ear.
In more than one place the Psalmist said He inclined
His ear, by which I come to believe that God puts
His ear so closely down to your lips that He can
hear your faintest whisper. It is not God away off
up yonder ; it is God away down here, close up, so
close that when you pray to Him, it is not more a
whisper than a kiss. Ah ! yes, He hears the captive's
sigh and the plash of the orphan's tear, and the dying
syllables of the shipwrecked sailor driven on the
Skerries, and the infant's " Now I lay me down to
sleep," as distinctly as He hears the fortissimo of
brazen bands in the Dusseldorf festival, as easily as
He hears the salvo of artillery when the thirteen
squares of English troops open all their batteries at
once at Waterloo.
The phonograph is a newly-invented instrument
which holds not only the words you utter, but the
very tones of your voice, so that a hundred years
from now, that instrument turned, the very words
you now utter and the very tone of your voice will
be reproduced. Wonderful phonograph. As of our
beloved dead we keep a lock of hair, or picture of
the features, so the time will come when we will be
able to keep the tones of their voices and the words
they uttered. So that, if now dear friends should
speak into the phonograph some words of affection,
and then they should be taken away from us, years
108 THE EAR.
from now, from that instrument we could unroll the
words they uttered, and the very tones of their voice.
But m'ore wonderful is God's power to hold, to re-
tain. Ah! what delightful encouragement for our
prayers. What an awful fright for our hard speeches.
What assurance of warm-hearted sympathy for all
our griefs.
CHAPTER IX.
YOUR PEDIGREE.
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 the 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 difference.
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 Mary,
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, Dan-
ish blood means fondness for the sea, Indian blood
109
110 YOUR I'EDICKEE.
means roaming disposition, Celtic blood means fer-
vidly, 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 charac-
teristics. Some families are characterized by long-
evity, and they have a tenacity of life positively
Methuselish. Others art characterized by Goliathan
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 Alexan-
ders. Tragedy runs on in the family of the Kembles.
Literature runs on in the line of the Trollopes. Phi-
lanthropy runs on in the line of the Wilberforces.
Statesmanship runs on in the line of the Adamses.
Henry and Catherine, of Navarre, religious, all their
family religious. The celebrated family of the Casini,
all mathematicians. The celebrated family of the
Medici grandfather, son, and Catherine all remark-
able for keen intellect. The celebrated family of
Gustavus Adolphus all warriors.
This law of heredity asserts itself without refer-
ence to social or political condition, for you some-
times 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 door-
keeper. A descendant of the Duke of Northumber-
land a trunk-maker. Some of the mightiest families
of England arc 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 en-
tirely independent of social or political condition.
Then you find avarice, and jealousy, and sensuality,
YOUR PEDIGREE. Ill
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 genera-
tion," of " the iniquity of the past visited upon the
children unto the third and fourth generation " ?
" 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 our-
selves. Born of unrighteous parentage, we are
bound to be evil, and we cannot help ourselves."
As much as if you should say, "The centripeta'
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 tend-
ency 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,
President Burr, the consecrated ; as in the case of
Pierrepont Edwards, the scourge of New York soci-
ety 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.
112 YOUR PEDIGREE.
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 de-
praved ancestry, then it is your duty to brace your-
self against the evil tendency by all prayer and Chris-
tian determination, and you are to find out what are
the family frailties, 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.
First, I accost all those who are descended of 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 obse-
quies, 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, be-
YOUR PEDIGREE. 113
cause 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 men-
tioned in the last will and testament, a vast estate ot
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 chil-
dren 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 re-
deemed 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 to-day and I read it to you ;
I take it out of the alcoves of your heart ; I shake the
dust off of it, I ask you will you accept that inheri-
tance, 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
8
114 YOUR PEDIGREE.
being as good as ordinary people when you had such
extraordinary advantage. Ought not a flower planted
in a hot-house 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 of the expenditures. So much for
store fixtures, so much for rent, so much for this, so
much for that, and all the items aggregated, and the
father expects the son to give an account. Your
Heavenly Father charges against you all the advant-
ages 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 this morning: " 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 mat-
ter of fairness with you ought you not to be far bet-
ter than those who had no early Christian influence?
YOUR PEDIGREE. 115
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? Ah ! that
cannot be possible, that 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 and grandmother's religion?
Oh, 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 disinherit them, I rob
them of the ancestral grace and the Christian influ-
ence 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 highly favored ancestry, wake up this morn-
ing to a sense of your opportunity and your respon-
sibility. 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.
Il6 YOUR PEDIGREE.
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, saying : " My son, my daughter, how can you
reject that God who so kindly dealt with us all our
lives, and to whom we commend you in our prayers,
living and dying ! By the memory of the old home-
stead, 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."
But 1 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 to-
day, 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 to-day,
was born 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
YOUR PEDIGREE. 117
gouge in the twentieth generation. The thirst for in-
toxicants has burned down through the arteries of a
hundred and fifty years. Pugnacity or combative-
ness 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 with-
out offering somebody else half of it. Is the family
frailty combativeness, keep out of the company of
quick-tempered people, and never answer an imper-
tinent question until you have -counted a hundred
both ways, and after you have written an angry let-
ter 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 Rheoboam, and Thamar, and Bath-
sheba. 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
Il8 YOUR PEDIGREE.
evil influence of Rheoboam, 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 for-
ever. 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
loak 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 whfch you may reign forever
and ever. " Whose son art thou, thou young man? "
Son of God! Heir of mortality? Take your in-
heritance ?
HOME.
[After R. Beyschlae.]
CHAPTER X.
HOME.
There are a great many people longing for some
grand sphere in which to serve God. They admire
Luther at the Diet of Worms, and only wish that
they had some such great opportunity in which to
display their Christian prowess. They admire Paul
making Felix tremble, and they only wish that they
had some such grand occasion in which to preach
righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come.
All they want is only an opportunity to exhibit their
Christian heroism. Now, the Apostle comes to us and
he practically says : " I will show you a place where
you can exhibit all that is grand and beautiful and
glorious in Christian character, and that is, the do-
mestic circle." Let them learn first to show piety at
home.
If one is not faithful in an insignificant sphere, he
will not be faithful in a resounding sphere. If Peter
will not help the cripple at the gate of the temple he
will never be able to preach three thousand into the
kingdom at the Pentecost. If Paul will not take pains
to instruct in the way of salvation the jailor of the
Philippian dungeon, he will never make Felix trem-
ble. He who is not faithful in a skirmish would not
be faithful in an Armageddon.
The fact is, we are all placed in just the position in
which we can most grandly serve God ; and we
122 HOME.
ought not to be chiefly thoughtful about some sphere
of usefulness which we may after awhile gain, but
the all-absorbing question with you and with me
ought to be : " Lord, what wilt Thou have me now
and here to do?"
Home. Ask ten different men the meaning of that
word and they will give you ten different definitions.
To one it means love at the hearth, it means plenty
at the table, industry at the workstand, intelligence at
the books, devotion at the altar. In that household
Discord never sounds its warwhoop and Deception
never tricks with its false face. To him it means a
greeting at the door and a smile at the chair, Peace
hovering like wings, Joy clapping its hands with
laughter. Life a tranquil lake. Pillowed on the rip-
ples sleep the shadows..
Ask another man what home is, and he will tell you
it is Want looking out of a cheerless fire-grate, needy
hunger in an empty bread-tray. The damp air shiv-
ering with curses. No Bible on the shelf. Children
robbers and murderers in embryo. Obscene songs
their lullaby. Every face a picture of ruin. Want
in the background and sin staring from the front. No
Sabbath wave rolling over that doorsill. Vestibule of
the pit. Shadow of infernal walls. Furnace for forg-
ing everlasting chains. Faggots for an unending fu-
neral pile. Awful word. It is spelled with curses, it
weeps with ruin, it chokes with woe, it sweats with
the death agony of despair. The word " home " in
the one case means everything bright. The word
" home " in the other case means everything terrific.
Home is a powerful test of character. The dispo-
sition in public may be to gay costume, while in pri-
vate it is to dishabille. As play actors may appear in
HOME. 123
one way on the stage and may appear in another way
behind the scenes, so private character may be very
different from public character. Private character is
often public character turned inside out. A man
may receive you into his parlor as though he were a
distillation of smiles, and yet his heart may be a
swamp of nettles. There are business men who all
day long are mild and courteous and genial and good-
natured in commercial life, damming back their irri-
tability and their petulance and their discontent, but
at nightfall the dam breaks, and scolding pours forth
in floods and freshets.
Reputation is only the shadow of character, and a
very small house sometimes will cast a very long
shadow. The lips may seem to drop with myrrh
and cassia, and the disposition to be as bright and
warm as a sheaf of sunbeams, and yet they may only
be a magnificent show window, but a wretched stock
of goods. There is many a man who is affable in
public life and amid commercial spheres, who, in a
cowardly way, takes his anger and his petulance
home and drops them on the domestic circle.
The reason men do not display their bad temper in
public is because they do not want to be knocked
down. There are men who hide their petulance and
their irritability just for the same reason that they do
not let their notes go to protest; it does not pay. Or,
for the same reason that they do not want a man in
their stock company to sell his stock at less than the
right price lest it depreciate the value. As at sunset
sometimes the wind rises, so after a sunshiny day
there may be a tempestuous night. There are peo-
ple who in public act the philanthropist, who at home
act the Nero, with respect to their slippers and their
gown.
124 HOME.
Audubon, the great ornithologist, with gun and
pencil, went through the forests of America to bring
down and to sketch the beautiful birds, and after
years of toil and exposure completed his manuscript
and put it in a trunk in Philadelphia, and went off for
a few days of recreation and rest, and came back and
found that the rats had utterly destroyed the manu-
script ; but without any discomposure and without
any fret or bad temper, he again picked up his gun
and his pencil, and visited again all the great forests
of America and reproduced his immortal work. And
yet there are people with the ten-thousandth part of
that loss who are utterly irreconcilable, who, at the
loss of a pencil or an article of raiment, will blow as
long and loud and sharp as a northeast storm.
Now, that man who is affable in public and who is
irritable in private is making a fraudulent and over-
issue of stock, and he is as bad as a bank that might
have four or five hundred thousand dollars of bills in
circulation and no specie in the vault. Let us learn
to show piety at home. If we have it not there, we
have it not anywhere. If we have not genuine grace
in the family circle, all our outward and public plaus-
ibility merely springs from a fear of the world, or
from the slimy, putrid pool of our own selfishness. I
tell you the home is a mighty test of character.
^tVhat you arc at home you are everywhere, whether
y:>u demonstrate it or not.
Again, home is a refuge. Life is the United States
army on the national road to Mexico, a long march
with ever and anon a skirmish and a battle. At
eventide we pitch our tent and stack the arms, we
hang up the war cap, and, our head on the knapsack,
we sleep until the morning bugle calls us to march
HOME. 125
to the action. How pleasant it is to rehearse the vic-
tories and the surprises and the attacks of the day,
seated by the still camp-fire of the home circle.
Yet life is a stormy sea. With shivered masts and
torn sails, and hulk aleak, we put in at the harbor of
home. Blessed harbor ! There we go for repairs in
the dry dock. The candle in the window is to the
toiling man the lighthouse guiding him into port.
Children go forth to meet their fathers as pilots at
the "Narrows" take the hand of ships. The door-sill
of the home is the wharf where heavy life is unladen.
There is the place where we may talk of what we
have done without being charged with self-adulation.
There is the place where we may lounge without
being thought ungraceful. There is the place where
we may express gratification without being thought
silly. There is the place where we may forget our
annoyances, and exasperations, and troubles. For-
lorn earth, pilgrim, no home? Then die. That is
better. The grave is brighter, and grander, and
more glorious than this world with no tent from
marching, with no harbor from the storm, with no
place of rest from the scene of greed and gouge, and
loss and gain. God pity the man or the woman who
has no home.
Further, I remark, that home is a political safe-
guard. The safety of the State must be built on the
safety of the home. Why can not France come to a
placid republic? McMahon appoints his ministry,
and all France is aquake lest the republic be
smothered. Gambetta dies, and there are hundreds
of thousands of Frenchmen who are fearing the
return of a monarchy. France as a nation has not
the right kind of a Christian home.
126 HOME.
The Christian hearth-stone is the only hearth-stone
for a republic. The virtues cultured in the family
circle are an absolute necessity for the State. If
there be not enough moral principle to make the
family adhere, there will not be enough political
principle to make the State adhere. No home means
the Goths and Vandals, means the Nomads of Asia,
means the Numidians of Africa changing from place,
according as the pasture happens to change. Con-
founded be all those Babels of iniquity which would
overpower and destroy the home. The same storm
that upsets the ship in which the family sails will
sink the frigate of the constitution. Jails, and peni-
tentiaries, and armies, and navies, are not our best
defence. The door of the home is the best fortress.
Household utensils are the best artillery, and the
chimneys of our dwelling houses are the grandest
monuments of safety and triumph. No home, no
republic.
Home is a school. Old ground must be turned up
with subsoil plow, and it must be harrowed and re-
harrowed, and then the crop will not be as large as
that of the new ground with less culture. Now,
youth and childhood are new ground and all the
influences thrown over their heart and life will come
up in after life luxuriantly.
Every time you have given a smile of approba-
tion all the good cheer of your life will come up
again in the geniality of your children. And every
ebullition of anger, and every uncontrollable display
of indignation will be fuel to their disposition twenty
or thirty, or forty years from now fuel for a bad
fire quarter of a century from this. You praise the
intelligence of your child too much sometimes, when
DEATH ON THE PALE HORSE.
HOME. 1 29
you think he is not aware of it, and you will see the
results of it before ten years of age, in his annoying
affectations. You praise his beauty, supposing he is
not large enough to understand what you say, and
you will find him standing on a high chair before a
flattering mirror.
Words, and deeds, and example are the seed of
character, and children are very apt to be the second
edition of their parents. Abraham begat Isaac, so
virtue is apt to go down in the ancestral line ; but
Herod begat Archelaus, so iniquity is transmitted.
What vast responsibility comes upon parents in view
of this subject.
Oh, make your home the brightest place on earth
if you would charm your children to the high path
of virtue, and rectitude, and religion. Do not always
turn the blinds the wrong way. Let the light, which
puts gold on the gentian and spots the pansy, pour
into your dwellings. Do not expect the little feet to
keep step to a dead march. Do not cover up your
walls with such pictures as West's "Death on a Pale
Horse," or Tintoretto's "Massacre of the Innocents."
Rather cover them, if you have pictures, with "The
Hawking Party," and "The Mill by the Mountain
Stream," and "The Fox Hunt," and "The Children
Amid Flowers," and "The Harvest Scene," and "The
Saturday Night Marketing."
Get you no hint of cheerfulness from grasshopper's
leap, and lamb's frisk, and quail's whistle, and gar-
rulous streamlet, which, from the rock at the moun-
tain top clear down to the meadow ferns under the
shadow of the steep, comes looking to see where it
can find the steepest place to leap off at, and talking
just to hear itself talk. If all the skies hustled with
130 HOME.
tempest, and everlasting storm wandered over the
sea, and every mountain stream were raving mad,
frothing at the mouth with mud foam, and there were
nothing but simooms blowing among the hills, and
there were neither lark's carol nor humming-bird's
trill, nor waterfall's dash, but only bear's bark and
panther's scream and wolf's howl, then you might
well gather into your homes only the shadows. But
when God has strewn the earth and the heavens with
beauty and with gladness, let us take into our home
circles all innocent hilarity, all brightness, and all
good cheer. A dark home makes bad boys and bad
girls, in preparation for bad men and bad women.
CHAPTER XI.
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING ?
If we leave to the evolutionists to guess where we
came from and to the theologians to prophecy where
we are going to, we will have left for consideration
the important fact that we are here. There may be
some doubt about where the river rises and some
doubt about where the river empties, but there can
be no doubt about the fact that we are sailing on it.
So I am not surprised that everybody asks the ques-
tion, " Is life worth living?" Here is a young man of
light hair and blue eyes, and sound digestion, and gen-
erous salary, and happily affianced, and on the way to
become a partner in a commercial firm of which he is
an important clerk. Ask him whether life is worth
living. He will laugh in your face and say, " Yes,
yes, yes ! " Here is a man who has come to the for-
ties. He is at the tip-top of the hill of life. Every
step has been a stumble and a bruise. The people he
trusted have turned out deserters, and the money he
has honestly made he has been cheated out of. His
nerves are out of tune. He has poor appetite, and all
the food he does eat does not assimilate. Forty miles
climbing up the hill of life have been to him like
climbing the Matterhorn, and there are forty miles
yet to go down, and descent is always more danger-
ous than ascent. Ask him whether life is worth
132 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?
living, and he will drawl out in shivering and lugu-
brious, an appalling negative, " No, no, no!-"
How are we to decide this matter righteously and
intelligently? You will find the same man vacillat-
ing, oscillating in his opinion from dejection to exub-
erance, and if he be very mercurial in his temperament
it will depend very much upon which way the wind
blows. If the wind blow from the northwest, and you
ask him, he will say, "Yes;" and if it blow from the
northeast, and you ask him, he will say, "No." How
are we then to get the question righteously answered ?
Suppose we call all nations together in a great con-
vention on Eastern or Western hemisphere, and let all
those who are in the affirmative, say, "Aye," and all
those who are in the negative, say, ".No." While
there would be hundreds of thousands who would
answer in the affirmative, there would be more mil-
lions who would answer in the negative, and because
of the greater number who have sorrow and misfor-
tune and trouble, the " Noes" would have it. If you
ask me, " Is life worth living?" I answer, it all depends
upon the kind of life yon live.
In the first place, I remark that a life of mere money-
getting is always a failure, because you will never
get as much as you want. The poorest people in this
country are the millionaires, and next to them those
who have half a million. There is not a scissors-
grinder on the streets of New York or Brooklyn that
is so anxious to make money as these men who have
piled up fortunes year after year in storehouses, in
government securities, in tenement houses, in whole
city blocks. You ought to sec them jump when they
hear the fire-bell ring. You ought to see them in
their excitement when Marine Bank explodes. You
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 133
ought to see their agitation when there is proposed a
reformation in the tariff. Their nerves tremble like
harp-strings, but no music in the vibration. They
read the reports from Wall Street in the morning
with a concernment that threatens paralysis or ap-
oplexy, or, more probably, they have a telegraph or a
telephone in their own house, so they catch every
breath of change in the money market. The disease
of accumulation has eaten into them eaten into their
heart, into their lungs, into their spleen, into their
liver, into their bones.
That is not a life worth living. There are too many
earthquakes in it, too many agonies in it, too many
perditions in it. They build their castles, and they
open their picture galleries, and they summon prima
donnas, and they offer every inducement for happiness
to come and live there, but happiness will not come.
They* send footmaned and postillioned equipage to
bring her ; she will not ride to their door. They send
princely escort ; she will not take their arm. They
make their gateways triumphal arches ; she will not
ride under them. They set a golden throne before a
golden plate ; she turns away from the banquet. They
call to her from upholstered balcony ; she will not
listen. Mark you, this is the failure of those who
have had large accumulation.
And then you must take into consideration that the
vast majority of those who make the dominant idea
of life money-getting, fall far short of affluence. It is
estimated that only about two out of a hundred busi-
ness men have anything worthy the name of success.
A man who spends his life with the one dominant
idea of financial accumulation spends a lite not worth
living.
134 is I.IFK WORTH LIVING?
So the idea of worldly approval. If that be dom-
inant in a man's life he is miserable. Now, that is
not a life worth living. You can get slandered and
abused cheaper than that !
Take it on a smaller scale. Do not be so ambitious
to have a whole reservoir rolled over on you. But
what you see in the matter of high political prefer-
ment you see in every community in the struggle for
what is called social position.
Tens of thousands of people trying to get into that
realm, and they are under terrific tension. What is
social position ? It is a difficult thing to define, but
we all know what it is. Good morals and intelli-
gence are not necessary, but wealth, or the show of
wealth, is absolutely indispensable. There are men
to-day as notorious for their libertinism as the night
is famous for its darkness, who move in what is called
high social position. There are hundreds of out-and-
out rakes in American society whose names are men-
tioned among the distinguished guests at the great
levees. They have annexed all the known vices, and
are longing for other worlds of diabolism to conquer.
Good morals are not necessary in many of the exalted
circles of society.
Neither is intelligence necessary. You find in that
realm men who would not know an adverb from an
adjective if they met it a hundred times a day, and
who could not write a letter of acceptance or regret
without the aid of a secretary. They buy their lib-
raries by the square yard, only anxious to have the
binding Russia. Their ignorance is positively sub-
lime, making English grammar almost disreputable.
And yet the finest parlors open before them. Good
morals and intelligence arc not necessary, but wealth,
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 135
or a show of wealth, is positively indispensable. It
does not make any difference how you got your
wealth if you only got it. Perhaps you got it by fail-
ing four or five times. It is the most rapid way of ac-
cumulation in this country that is, the quickest way
to get in social position. Those who fail only once
are not very well off, but by the time a man has failed
the second time he is comfortable, and by the time
he has failed the third time he is affluent. The best
way for you to get into social position is for you to
buy a large amount on credit, then put your property
in your wife's name, have a few preferred creditors,
and then make an assignment. Then disappear from
the community until the breeze is over, and then
come back and start in the same business. Do you
not see how beautifully that will put out all the peo-
ple who are in competition with you and trying to
make an honest living? How quick.it will get you
into high social position ? What is the use of toiling
with forty or fifty years of hard work when you can
by two or three bright strokes make a great fortune.
Ah ! my friends, when you really lose your money
how quick they will let you drop, and the higher you
get the harder you will drop.
There are thousands to-day in that realm who are
anxious to keep in it. There are thousands in that
realm who are nervous for fear they will fall out of it,
and there are changes going on every year, and every
month, and every hour, which involve heartbreaks
that are never reported. High social life is constant-
ly in a flutter about the delicate question as to whom
they shall let in, and whom they shall push out, and
the battle is going on pier mirror against pier mirror,
chandelier against chandelier, wine cellar against
136 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?
wine cellar, wardrobe against wardrobe, equipage
against equipage. Uncertainty and insecurity dom-
inant in that realm, wretchedness enthroned, torture
at a premium, and a life not worth living.
A life of sin, a life of pride, a life of indulgence, a
life of worldliness, a life devoted to the world, the
flesh, and the devil is a failure, a dead failure, an in-
finite failure. I care not how many presents you
send to that cradle, or how many garlands you send
to that grave, you need to put right under the name
on the tombstone this inscription : " Better for that
man if he had never been born."
But I shall show you a life that is worth living. A
young man says : " I am here. I am not responsible
for my ancestry; others decided that. I am not respon-
sible for my temperament ; God gave me that. But
here I am, in the afternoon of the nineteenth century,
at twenty years ^f age. I am here, and I must take
an account of stock. Here I have a body which is a
divinely constructed engine. I must put it to the
very best uses, and I must allow nothing to damage
this rarest of machinery. Two feet, and they mean
locomotion. Two eyes, and they mean capacity to
pick out my own way. Two ears, and they are tele-
phones of communication with all the outside world,
and they mean capacity to catch sweetest music and
the voices of friendship the very best music. A
tongue, with almost infinity of articulation. Yes, hands
with which to welcome, or resist, or lift, or smite, or
wave, or bless hands to help myself and help others.
" Here is a word which, after Six thousand years of
battling with tempest and accident, is still grander
than any architect, human or angelic, could have
drafted. I have two lamps to light me a golden
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 137
lamp and a silver lamp a golden lamp set on the sap-
phire mantel of the day, a silver lamp set on the jet
mantle of the night. Yea, I have that at twenty
years of age \\hich defies all inventory of valuables
a soul, with capacity to choose or reject, to rejoice
or to suffer, to love or to hate. Plato says it is im-
mortal. Seneca says it is immortal. Confucius says
it is immortal. An old book among the family relics
a book with leathern cover almost worn out, and
pages almost obliterated by oft perusal, joins to the
other books in saying I am immortal. I have eighty
years for a lifetime, sixty years yet to live. I may
not live an hour, but then I must lay out my plans
intelligently and for a long life. Sixty years added
to the twenty I have already lived, that will bring
me to eighty. I must remember that these eighty
years are only a brief preface to the five hundred
thousand millions of quintillicns of years which will
be my chief residence and existence. Now, I under-
stand my opportunities and my responsibilities.
" If there is any being in the universe all wise and
all beneficent who can help a man in such a juncture,
I want him. The old book found among the family
relics tells me there is a God, and that for the sake of
His Son, one Jesus, He will give help to a man, To
Him I appeal. God help me ! Here, I have sixty
years yet to do for myself and to do for others. I
must develop this body by all industries, by all gym-
nastics, by all sunshine, by all fresh air, by all good
habits. And this soul I must have swept, and gar-
nished, and illumined, and 'glorified by all that I can
do for it and all that I can get God to do for it. It
shall be a Luxembourg of fine pictures. It shall be
an orchestra of grand harmonies. It shall be a palace
138 IS LLFK WORTH LIVING?
for God and righteousness to reign in. I wonder
how many kind words I can utter in the next sixty
years ? I will try. I wonder how many good deeds
I can do in the next sixty years? I will try. God
help me ! "
That young man enters life. He is buffeted, he is
tried, he is perplexed. A grave opens on this side
and a grave opens on that side. He falls, but he
rises again. He gets into a hard battle, but he gets
the victory. The main course of his life is in the
right direction. He blesses everybody he comes in
contact with. God forgives his mistakes, and makes
everlasting record of his holy endeavors, and at the
close of it God says to him : " Well done, good and
faithful servant; enter into the jovs of thy Lord."
My brother, my sister, I do not care whether that
man dies at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, or eighty
years of age ; you can chisel right under his name on
the tombstone these words, " His life was worth
living."
I would not find it hard to persuade you that the
poor lad. Peter Cooper, making glue for a living, and
then amassing a great fortune until he could build a
philanthropy which has had its echo in ten thousand
philanthropies all over the country I would not find
it hard to persuade you that his life was worth living.
Neither would I find it hard to persuade you that
the life of Susannah Wesley was worth living. She
sent out one son to organize Methodism and the other
son to ring his anthems all through the ages. I
would not find it hard work to persuade you that the
life of Frances Leere was\vorth living, as she estab-
lished in England a school for the scientific nursing
of the sick, and then when the war broke out be-
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 139
tween France and Germany, went to the front, and
with her own hands scraped the mud off the bodies
of the soldiers dying in the trenches, and with her
weak arm standing one night in the hospital push-
ing back a German soldier to his couch, as, all frenzied
with his wounds, he rushed toward the door, and said :
" Let me go, let me go to my liebe mutter." Major-gen-
erals standing back to let pass this angel of mercy.
Neither would I have hard work to persuade you
that Grace Darling lived a life worth living the
heroine of the lifeboat. You say : " While I know
all these lived lives worth living, I don't think my
life amounts to much." Ah! my Jfriends, whether
you live a life conspicuous or inconspicuous, it is
worth living, if you live aright. And I want my
next sentence to go down into the depths of all your
souls. You are to be rewarded, not according to the
greatness of your work, but according to the holy
industries with which you employed the talents you
really possessed. The majority of the crowns of
heaven will not be given to people with ten talents,
for most of them were tempted only to serve them-
selves. The vast majority of the crowns of heaven
will be given to people who had one talent, but gave
it all to God. And remember that our life here is
introductory to another. It is the vestibule to a pal-
ace ; but who despises the door of a Madeleine be-
cause there are grander glories within ? Your life if
rightly lived is the first bar of an eternal oratorio,
and who despises the first note of Haydn's sym-
phonies ? And the life you* live now is all the more
worth living because it t>pens into a life that shall
never end, and the last letter of the word, "time" is
the first letter of the word "eternity ! "
CHAPTER XII.
SOLICITUDE.
The first cause of parental solicitude, I think, arises
from the imperfection of parents on their own part.
We all somehow want our children to avoid our
faults. We hope that if we have any excellencies
they will copy them ; but the probability is they will
copy our faults, and omit our excellencies. Children
are very apt to be echoes of the parental life. Some
one meets a lad in the back street, finds him smok-
ing, and says : " Why, I am astonished at you ; what
would your father say if he knew this? where did
you get that cigar?" "Oh, I picked it up on the
street." " What would your father say, and your
mother say, if they knew this?" "Oh," he replies,
"that's nothing, my father smokes!" There is not
one of us to-day, who would like to have our children
copy all our example. And that is the cause of solici-
tude on the part of all of us. We have so many
faults we do not want them copied and stereotyped
in the lives and characters of those who come
after us.
Then solicitude arises from our conscious insuffi-
ciency and unwisdom of discipline. Out of twenty
parents there may be one parent who understands
how thoroughly and skillfully to discipline; perhaps
not more than one out of twenty. We, nearly all of
us, are on one side or are on the other.
140
SOLICITUDE. 141
Here is a father who says : " I am going to bring
up my children right ; my sons shall know nothing
but religion, shall see nothing but religion, and hear
nothing but religion." They are routed at 6 o'clock
in the morning to recite the Ten Commandments.
They are wakened up from the sofa on Sunday night
to recite the Westminster catechism. Their bedroom
walls are covered with religious pictures and quota-
tions of Scripture, and when the boy looks for the
day of the month he looks for it in a religious alma-
nac. If a minister comes to the house he is requested
to take the boy aside, and tell him what a great sinner
he is. It is religion morning, noon and night.
Time passes on, and the parents are waiting for the
return of the son at night. It is 9 o'clock, it is 10
o'clock, it is ii o'clock, it is 12 o'clock, it is half-past
12 o'clock. Then they hear a rattling of the night-
key, and George comes in and hastens upstairs lest
he be accosted. His father says: "George, where
have you been ? " He says : " I have been out."
Yes, he has been out, and he has been down, and he
has started on the broad road to ruin for this life and
ruin for the life to come, and the father says to his
wife : " Mother, the Ten Commandments are a fail-
ure ; no use of Westminster Catechism ; I have done
my very best for that boy ; just see how he has
turned out." Ah ! my friend, you stuffed that boy
with religion, you had no sympathy with innocent
hilarities, you had no common sense.
A man at mid-life said to me : " I haven't much de-
sire for religion ; my father was as good a man as
ever lived, but he jammed religion down my throat
when I was a boy until I got disgusted with it, and I
haven't wanted any of it since." That father erred
on one side.
142 SOLICITUDE.
Then the discipline is an entire failure in many
households because the father pulls one way and the
mother pulls the other way. The father says : " My
son, I told you if I ever found you guilty of falsehood
again I would chastise you, and I am going to keep
my promise." The mother says: ''Don't; let him
off this time."
A father says : " I have seen so many that make
mistakes by too great severity in the rearing of their
children ; now, I will let my boy do as he pleases ; he
shall have full swing ; here, my son, are tickets to the
theatre and opera ; if you want to play cards, do so;
if you don't want to play cards you need not play
them ; go when you want to and come back when
you want to ; have a good time ; go it ! " Plenty of
money for the most part, and give a boy plenty of
money, and ask him not what he does with it, and
you pay his way straight to perdition. But after a
while the lad thinks he ought to have a still larger
supply. He has been treated, and he must treat.
He must have wine suppers. There are larger and
larger expenses.
After a while, one day a messenger from the bank
over .the way calls in and says to the father of the
household of which I am speaking: " The officers of
the bank would like to have you step over a minute."
The father steps over and the bank officer says: " Is
that your check?" "No," he says, " that is not my
check ; I never make an ' H ' in that way, and I never
put. a curl to the ' Y ' in that way ; that is not my
writing; that is not my signature; that is a counter-
feit ; send for the police." " Stop," says the bank
officer, " your son wrote that."
the father and mother are waiting for the son
SOLICITUDE. 143
to come home at night. It is 12 o'clock, it is half-*
past 12 o'clock, it is i o'clock. The son comes
through the hallway. The father says ; " My son,
what does all this mean? I gave you every oppor-
tunity, I gave you all the money you wanted, and
here in my old days I find that you have become a
spendthrift, a libertine, and a sot." The son says:
*' Now, father, what is the use of your talking that
way ? You told me to go it, and I just took your
suggestion." And so to strike the medium between
severity and too great leniency, to strike the happy
medium between the two and to train our children
for God and for heaven, is the anxiety of every intel-
ligent parent.
Another great anxiety, great solicitude, is in the
fact that so early is developed childish sinfulness.
Morning glories put out their bloom in the early part
of the day, but as the hot sun comes on they close up.
While there are other flowers that blaze their beauty
along the Amazon for a week at a time without clos-
ing, yet the morning glory does its work as certainly
as Victoria regia ; so there are some children that
just put forth their bloom, and they close, and they
are gone. There is something supernatural about
them while they tarry, and there is an ethereal ap-
pearance about them. There is a wonderful depth to
their eye, and they are gone. They are too delicate
a plant for this world. The Heavenly Gardener sees
them, and He takes them in.
But for the most part, the children that live some-
times get cross, and pick up bad words in the street,
or are disposed to quarrel with brother or sister, and
show that they are wicked. You see them in the
Sabbath-school class. They are so sunshiny and
144 SOLICITUDE.
bright you would think they \vereal\vays so; but the
mother, looking over at them, remembers what an
awful time she had to get them ready. Time passes
on. They get considerably older, and the son comes
in from the street, from a pugilistic encounter, bear-
ing on his appearance the marks of defeat, or the
daughter practices some little deception in the house-
hold. The mother says : " I can't always be scolc
ing, and fretting, and finding fault, but this must be
stopped." So in many a household there is the sign
of sin, the sign of the heart's being wrong, {he sign of
the truthfulness of what the Bible says when it de-
clares, " They go astray as soon as they be born,
speaking lies."
Some go to work, and try to correct all this, and
the boy is picked at, and picked at, and picked at.
That always is ruinous. There is more help in one
good thunderstorm, than in five days of cold drizzle.
Better the old-fashioned style of chastisement, if that
be necessary, than the fretting, and the scolding,
which have destroyed so many.
There is also the cause of great solicitude some-
times because our young people are surrounded by
so many temptations. A castle may not be taken by,
a straightforward siege, but suppose there be inside
the castle an enemy, and in the night he shoves back
the bolt, and swings open the door? Our young
folks have foes without, and they have foes within.
Who does not understand it? Who is the man here
who is not aware of the fact that the young people of
this day have tremendous temptations ?
Some man will come to the young people, and try
to persuade them that purity, and honesty, and up-
rightness are a sign of weakness. Some man will
SOLICITUDE. 145
take a dramatic attitude, and he will talk to the
young man, and he will say : " You must break
away from your mother's apron-string- ; you must get
out of that Puritanical straight-jacket ; it is time you
were your own master ; you are verdant ; you are
green ; you are unsophisticated ; come with me, I'll
show you the world ; I'll show you life ; come with
me ; you need to see the world ; it won't hurt you."
After a while the young man says, " Well, I can't
afford to be odd, I can't afford to be peculiar, I can't
afford to sacrifice all my friends ; I'll just go and see
for myself." Farewell to innocence, which once
gone, never fully comes back. Do not be under
the delusion that because you repent of sin you
get rid forever of its consequences. I say farewell
to innocence, which once gone never fully comes
back.
Oh, how many traps set for the young ! Styles of
temptation just suited to them. Do you suppose
that a man who went clear to the depths of dissipa-
tion, went down in one great plunge ? Oh, no! At
first it was a fashionable hotel. Marble floor. No
unclean pictures behind the counter. No drunken
hiccough while they drink, but the click of cut glass
to the elegant sentiment. You ask that young man
now to go into some low restaurant, and get a drink,
and he would say, " Do you mean to insult me?"
But the fashionable and the elegant hotel is not
always close by, and now the young man* is on the
down grade. Further and further down until he has
about struck the bottom of the depths of ruin. Now,
he is in the low restaurant. The cards so greasy you
can hardly tell who has the best hand. Gambling
for drinks. Shuffle away, shuffle away. The land-
146 SOLICITUDE.
lord stands in his shirt-sleeves, with his hands on his
hips, waiting for an order to fill up the glasses.
The clock strikes twelve the tolling of the funeral
bell of a soul. The breath of eternal woe .flushes in
that young man's cheek. In the jets of the gaslight
the fiery tongue of the worm that never dies. Two
o'clock in the morning, and now they are sound
asleep in their chair. Landlord comes around and
says, " Wake up, wake up ! time to shut up !"
" What ! " says the young man. " Time to shut up."
Push them all out into the night air. Now they are
going home. Going home ! Let the wife crouch in
the corner and the children hide under the bed.
What was the history of that young man? He
began his dissipations in the bar-room of a Fifth Ave-
nue Hotel, and completed his damnation in the low-
est grog-shop on Atlantic Street.
Sometimes sin does not halt in that way. Some-
times sin even comes to the drawing-room. There
are leprous hearts sometimes admitted in the highest
circles of society. He is so elegant, he is so bewitch-
ing in his manner, he is so refined, he is so educated,
no one supects the sinful design ; but after a while
the talons of death come forth. What is the matter
with that house? The front windows have not been
open for six months or a year. A shadow has come
down on that domestic hearth, a shadow thicker than
one woven of midnight and hurricane. The agony
of that parent makes him say : " Oh, I wish I had
buried my children when they were small!" Loss of
property ? No. Death in the family ? No. Mad-
ness? No. Some villain, kid-gloved and diamonded,
lifted that cup of domestic bliss until the sunlight
struck it, and all the rainbows played around the rim,
SOLICITUDE. 147
and then dashed it into desolation and woe, until the
harpies of darkness clapped their hands, and all the
voices of the pit uttered a loud " Ha ! ha ! "
The statistic has never been made up in these great
cities of how many have been destroyed, and how
many beautiful homes have been overthrown. If the
statistic could be presented, it would freeze your
blood in a solid cake at your heart. Our great cities
are full of temptations, and to vast multitudes of par-
ents these temptations 'become a matter of great
solicitude.
But now for the alleviations. First of all, you save
yourself a great deal of trouble, Oh, parent, if you
can early watch the children and educate them for
God and heaven ! " The first five years of my life
made me an infidel," said Tom Paine.
A vessel puts out to sea, and after it has been five
days out there comes a cyclone. The vessel springs
a leak. The helm will not work. What is the mat-
ter? It is not seaworthy. It never was seaworthy.
Can you mend it now? It is too late. Down she
goes with 250 passengers into a watery grave. What
was the time to fix that vessel ? What was the time
to prepare it for the storm ? In the dry dock. Ah,
my friends, do not wait until your children get out
into the world, beyond the Narrows and out on the
great voyage of life! It is too late then to mend
their morals and their manners. The dry dock of the
Christian home is the place. Correct the sin now,
correct the evil now.
Just look at the character of your children now
and .get an intimation of what they are going to be.
You can tell by the way that boy divides the apple
what his proclivity is and what his sin will be, and
148 SOLICITUDE.
what style of discipline you ought to bring upon
him. You let that disposition go. You see how he
divides that apple? He takes nine-tenths of it for
himself, and he gives one-tenth to his sister. Well,
let that go, and all his life he will want the best part
of everything, and he will be grinding and grasping
to the day of his death. Begin early with your chil-
dren. You stand on the banks of a river and you try
to change its course. It has been rolling now for a
hundred miles. You cannot change it. But just go
to the source of that river, go to where the water just
drips down on the rock. Then with your knife make
a channel this way and a channel that way, and it
will take it. Come out and stand on the banks of
your child's life when it is thirty or forty years of
age, or even twenty, and try to change the course of
that life. It is top late ! It is too late ! Go further
up at the source of life and nearest to the mother's
heart where the character starts, and try to take it in
the right direction.
But oh, my friend, be careful to make a line, a dis-
tinct line between innocent hilarity on the one hand
and vicious proclivity on the other. Do not think
your children are going to ruin because they make a
racket. All healthy children make a racket. But do
not laugh at your child's sin because it is smart. If
you do, you will cry after awhile because it is mali-
cious. Rebuke the very first appearance of sin. Now
is your time. Do not begin too late.
Remember it is what you do more than what you
say that is going to affect your children. Do you
suppose Noah would have got his family to go into
the ark if he staid out ? No. His sons would have
said: "lam not going into the boat; there's some-
SOLICITUDE. 149
thing wrong ; father won't go in ; if father stays out,
I'll stay out." An officer may stand in a castle and
look off upon an army fighting ; but he cannot be
much of an officer, he cannot excite much enthusiasm
on the part of his troops, standing in a castle or on a
hill-top looking off upon the fight. It is a Garibaldi
or a Napoleon I. who leaps into the stirrups and
dashes ahead. And you stand outside the Christian
life and tell your children to go in. They will not
go. But you dash on ahead, you enter the kingdom
of God, and they themselves will become good sol-
diers of Jesus Christ. Lead, if you would have
them follow.
CHAPTER XIII.
ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA.
There are thousands of ways of telling a lie. A
man's whole life may be a falsehood, and yet never
with his lips may he falsify once. There is a way of
uttering falsehood by look, by manner, as well as by
lip. There are persons who are guilty of dishonesty
of speech and then afterward say "may be ;" call it a
white lie, when no lie is that color. The whitest lie
ever told was as black as perdition. There are those
so given to dishonesty of speech that they do not
know when they are lying.
With some it is an acquired sin, and with others it
is a natural infirmity. There are those whom you
will recognize as born liars. Their whole life, from
cradle to grave, is filled up with vice of speech.
Misrepresentation and prevarication are as natural
to them as the infantile diseases, and are a sort of
moral croup or spiritual scarlatina. Then there are
those who in after life have opportunities of develop-
ing this evil, and they go from deception to decep-
tion, and from class to class, until they are regularly
graduated liars.
There is something in the presence of natural ob-
jects that has a tendency to make one pure. The
trees never issue false stock. The wheat fields are
always honest. Rye and oats never move out in the
night, not paying for the place they occupy. Corn
150
ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 151
shocks never make false assignment. Mountain
brooks are always current. The gold of the wheat
fields is never counterfeit. But while the tendency
of agricultural life is to make one honest, honesty is
not the characteristic of all who come to the city
markets from the country districts. You hear the
creaking of the dishonest farm- wagon in almost every
street of our great cities, a farm-wagon in which
there is not one honest spoke or one truthful rivet
from tongue to tail-board. Again and again has do-
mestic economy in our great cities foundered on the
farmer's firkin. When New York, and Brooklyn,
and Cincinnati, and Boston sit down and weep over
their sins, Westchester and Long Island counties and
all the country districts ought to sit down and weep
over theirs.
The tendency in all rural districts is to suppose
that sins and transgressions cluster in our great cities ;
but citizens and merchants long ago learned that it is
not safe to calculate from the character of the apples
on the top of the farmer's barrel what is the charac-
ter of the apples all the way down toward the bot-
tom. Many of our citizens and merchants have
learned that it is always safest to see the farmer meas-
ure the barrel of beets. Milk cans are not always
honest. There are those who in country life seem
to think they have a right to overreach grain-dealers,
merchants of all styles. They think it is more hon-
orable to raise corn than to deal in corn.
The producer sometimes practically says to the
merchant: "You get your money easily, anyhow."
Does he get it easy ? While the farmer sleeps, and
he may go to sleep conscious of the fact that his corn
and rye are all the time progressing and adding to
152 ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA.
his fortune or his livelihood, the merchant tries to
sleep while conscious of the fact that at that moment
the ship may be driving on the rock, or a wave
sweeping over the hurricane deck spoiling his goods,
or the speculators may be plotting a momentary
revolution, or the burglars may be at that moment
at his money safe, or the fire may have kindled on
the very block where his store stands.
Easy is it? Let those who get their living in the
quiet farm and barn take the place of one of our city
merchants and see whether it is so easy. It is hard
enough to have the hands blistered with out-door
work, but it is harder with mental anxieties to have
the brain consumed. God help the merchants. And
do not let those who live in country life come to the
conclusion that all the dishonesties belong to city-
life. There are those who apologize for deviations
from the right and for practical deception by saying
it is commercial custom. In other words, a lie by
multiplication becomes a virtue.
There are large fortunes gathered in which there
is not one drop of the sweat of unrequited toil, and
not one spark of bad temper flashes from the bronze
bracket, and there is not one drop of needlewoman's
heart's blood on the crimson plush ; while there are
other fortunes about which it may be said that on
every door-knob and on every figure of the carpet,
and on every wall there is the mark of dishonor.
What if the hand wrung by toil, and blistered until
the skin comes off should be placed on the exquisite
wall paper, leaving its mark of blood four fingers
and a thumb? or, if in the night the man should be
aroused from his slumber again and again by his
own conscience, getting himself up on his elbow, and
crying out into the darkness : "Who is there?"
ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 153
There are large fortunes upon which God's favor
comes down, and it is just as honest and just as
Christian to be affluent as it is to be poor. In many
a house there is a blessing on every pictured wall,
and on every scroll, and on every traceried window,
and the joy that flashes in the lights, and that
showers in the music, and that dances in the quick
feet of the children pattering through the hall, has
in it the favor of God and the approval of man. And
there are thousands and tens of thousands of mer-
chants who, from the first day they sold a yard of
cloth, or a firkin of butter, have maintained their in-
tegrity. They were born honest, they will live hon-
est, and they will die honest.
But you and I know that there are in commercial
life those who are guilty of great dishonesties of
speech. A merchant says : "I am selling these goods
at less than cost." Is he getting for those goods a
price inferior to that which he paid for them ? Then
he has spoken the truth. Is he getting more ? Then
he lies. A merchant says: "I paid $25 for this
article." Is that the price he paid for it? All right.
But suppose he paid for it $23 instead of $25? Then
he lies.
But there are just as many falsehoods before the
counter as there are behind the counter. A customer
comes in and asks: "How much is this article?"
"It is five dollars." "I can get that for four some-
where else." Can he get it for four somewhere else,
or did he say that just for the purpose of getting
it cheap by depreciating the value of the goods ?
If so, he .lied. There are just as. many falsehoods
behind the counter as there are before the counter.
A man unrolls upon the counter a bale of handker-
154 ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA,
chiefs. The customer says: "Are these all silk?"
"Yes." "No cotton in them ?" "No cotton in them?"
Are those handkerchiefs all silk? Then the mer-
chant told the truth. Is there any cotton in them?
Then he lied. Moreover, he defrauds himself, lor
this customer, coming in from Hemp^tead, or Yon-
kers, or Newark, will, after a while, find out that he
has been defrauded, and the next time he comes to
town and goes shopping, he will look up at that sign
andsav: "No, I won't go there; that's the place
where I got those handkerchiefs." First, the mer-
chant insulted God, and secondly, he picked his own
pocket.
Who would take the responsibility of saying how
many falsehoods were yesterday told by hardware
men, and clothiers, and lumbermen, and tobacconists,
and jewelers, and importers, and shippers, and dealers
in furniture, and dealers in coal, and dealers in gro-
ceries? Lies about buckles, about saddles, about har-
ness, about shoes, about hats, about coats, about
shovels, about tongs, about forks, about chairs, about
sofas, about horses, about lands, about everything. I
arraign commercial falsehood as one of the crying
sins of our time.
Among the artisans are those upon whom we are
dependent for the houses in which we live, the gar-
ments we wear, the cars in which we ride. The vast
majority of them are, so far as I know them, men
who speak the truth, and they are upright, and many
of them are. foremost in great philanthropies and in
churches; but that they all do not belong to that
class every one knows.
In times when there is a great demand for labor, it
is not so easy for such men to keep their obligations,
ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 155
because they may miscalculate in regard to the
weather, or they may not be able to get the help
they anticipated in their enterprise. I am speaking
now of those who promise to do that which they
know they will not be able to do. They say they
will come on Monday ; they do not come until
Wednesday. They say they will come Wednesday ;
they do not come until Saturday. They say they
will have the job done in ten days ; they do not get
it done before thirty. And then when a man becomes
irritated and will not stand it any longer, then they
go and work for him a day or two and keep the job
along ; and then some one else gets irritated and out-
raged, and they go and work for that man and get
him pacified, and then they go somewhere else. I
believe they call that " nursing the job."
Ah, my friends, how much dishonor such men
would save their souls if they would promise to do
only that which they know they can do. " Oh,"
they say, " it's of no importance ; everybody expects
to be deceived and disappointed." There is a voice
of thunder sounding among the saws and the ham-
mers and the shears, saying : " All liars shall have
their place in the lake that burns with fire and brim-
stone." So in all styles of work there are those who
are not worthy of their work.
How much of society is insincere. You hardly
know what to believe. They send their regards ;
you do not exactly know whether it is an expression
of the heart, or an external civility. They ask you
to come to their house ; you hardly know whether
they really want you to come. We are all accustomed
to take a discount off of what we hear.
Social l?.fe is struck through with insincerity. They
156 ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA.
apologize for the fact that the furnace is out ; they
have not had any fire in it all winter. They apolo-
gize for the fare on their table ; they never live any
better. They decry their most luxuriant entertain-
ment to win a shower of approval from you. They
point at a picture on the wall as a work of one of the
old masters. They say it is an heirloom in the fam-
ily. It hung on the wall of a castle. A duke gave
it to their grandfather ! People that will lie about
nothing else will lie about a picture. On small
income we want the world to believe we are affluent,
and society to-day is struck through with cheat and
counterfeit and sham. How few people are natural.
Frigidity sails around, iceberg grinding against
iceberg. You must not laugh outright ; that is vul-
gar. You must smile. You must not dash quickly
across the room ; that is vulgar. You must glide.
Society is a round of bows and grins and grimaces
and oh's and ah's and he, he, he's, and simperings
and namby pambyisms, a whole world of which is not
worth one good honest round of laughter. From
such a hollow scene the tortured guest retires at the
close of the evening, assuring the host that he has
enjoyed himself. Society is become so contorted
and deformed in this respect that a mountain cabin
where the rustics gather at a quilting or an apple-
paring has in it more good cheer than all the frescoed
refrigerators of the metropolis.
It is hardly worth your while to ask an extreme
Calvinist what an Arminian believes. He will tell
you an Arminian believes that man can save himself.
An Arminian believes no such thing. It is hardly
worth your while to ask an extreme Arminian what
a Calvinist believes. He will tell you that a Calvin-
ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 157
1st believes that God made some men just to damn
them. A Calvinist believes no such thing.
It is hardly worth your while to ask a Pedo-Baptist
what a Baptist believes. He will tell you a Baptist
believes that immersion is necessary for salvation. A
Baptist does not believe any such thing. It is hardly
worth your while to ask a man, who very much hates
Presbyterians, what a Presbyterian believes. He
will tell you that a Presbyterian believes that there
are infants in hell a span long, and that very phra-
seology has come down from generation to genera-
tion in the Christian Church. There never was a
Presbyterian who believed that. " Oh," you say, " I
heard some Presbyterian minister twenty years ago
say so." You did not. There never was a man who
believed that, there never will be a man who will
believe that. And yet from boyhood I have heard
that particular slander against a Christian Church
going down through the community.
Then how often it is that there are misrepresenta-
tions on the part of individual churches in regard to
other churches especially if a church comes to great
prosperity. As long as a church is in poverty, and
the singing is poor and all the surroundings are de-
crepit, and the congregation are so hardly bestead in
life that their pastor goes with elbows out, then there
will always be Christian people in churches who say,
" What a pity, what a pity ! " But let the day of
prosperity come to a Christian Church, and let the
music be triumphant, and let there be vast assem-
blages, and then there will be even ministers of the
Gospel critical and denunciatory and full of misrep-
resentation and falsification, giving the impression
to the outside world that they do not like the corn
158 ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA.
because it is not ground in their mill. Oh, my
friends, let us in all departments of life stand back
from deception.
" Oh," says some one, " the deception that I prac-
tice is so small it don't amount to anything." Ah,
my friends, it does amount to a great deal. You say:
" When I deceive it is only about a case of needles,
or a box of buttons, or a row of pins." But the arti-
cle may be so small you can put it in your vest
pocket, but the sin is as big as the pyramids, and the
echo of your dishonor will reverberate through the
mountains of eternity. There is no such thing as a
small sin. They are all vast and stupendous, because
they will all have to come under inspection in the
Day of Judgment.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE BALANCE-SHEET.
The impression is abroad that religion puts a man
on short allowance ; that when the ship sailing
heavenward comes to the shining wharf it will be
found out that all the passengers had the hardest
kind of sea-fare; that the soldiers in Christ's army
march most of the time with an empty haversack ; in
a word, that only those people have a good time in
this world who take upon themselves no religious
obligation.
I want to find out whether this is f so, and I am go-
ing to take stock ; I am going to show what are the
Christian's liabilities, and what is his income, and
what are his warranty deeds, and what are his bonds
and mortgages.
Now, it would be an absurd thing to suppose that
God would give to strangers privileges and advant-
ages which He would deny His own children. If
you have a large park, a grand mansion, beautiful
fountains, stalking deer, and statuary, to whom will
you give the first right to all these possessions ? To
outsiders ? No, to your own children. You will
say : " It will be very well for outsiders to come in,
and walk these paths, and enjoy this landscape ; but
the first right to my house, and the first right to my
statuary, the first right to my gardens, shall be in the
possession of my own children."
159
l6o THE BALANCE-SHEET.
Now, this world is God's park, and while He
allows those who are not His children, and who re-
fuse His authority, the privilege of walking through
the gardens, the possession of all this grandeur of
park and mansion is in the right of the Christian
the flowers, the diamonds, the silver, the gold, the
morning brightness, and the evening shadow. The
Christian may not have the title-deed to one acre of
land, as recorded in the clerk's office, he may never
have paid one dollar of taxes ; but he can go up on a
mountain, and look off upon fifty miles of grain-field,
and say, "All this is mine ; my Father gave it to me."
So the refinements of life are the Christian's right.
He has a right to as good apparel, to as beautiful
adornments, to as commodious a residence as the
worldling. Show me any passage in the Bible that
tells the people of the world they have privileges,
they have glittering spheres, they have befitting ap-
parel, that are denied the Christian. There is no one
who has so much a right to laugh, none so much a
right to everything that is beautiful, and grand, and
sublime in life, as the Christian. "All are yours."
Can it be possible that one who is reckless and sinful,
and has no treasures laid up in heaven, is to be
allowed pleasures which the sons and daughters of
God, the owners of the whole universe, are denied?
So all the sweet sounds of the world are in the
Christian's right. There are people who have an
idea that instruments of music are inappropriate for
the Christian's parlor, or for the Christian Church.
When did the house of sin, or the bacchanal, get the
right to music ?
They have no right to it. God makes over to
Christian people all the pianos, all the harps, all the
THE BALANCE-SHEET. l6l
drums, all the cornets, all the flutes, all the organs.
People of the world may borrow them, but they only
borrow them ; they have no right or title to them.
God gave them to Christian people when He said :
"All are yours."
David no more certainly owned the harp with
which he thrummed the praises of God, than the
Church of Christ owns now all chants, all anthems,
all ivory key-boards, all organ diapasons, and God
will gather up these sweet sounds after a while, and
He will mingle these in one great harmony, and the
Mendelssohns, and the Beethovens, and the Mozarts
of the earth will join their voices, and their musical
instruments, and soft south wind and loud-lunged
euroclydon will sweep the great organ pipes, and
you shall see God's hand striking the keys, and God's
foot tramping the pedals in the great oratorio of
the ages !
So all the vicissitudes of this life, so far as they
have any religious profit, are in the right of the
Christian. You stand among the Alleghany Moun-
tains, especially near what is called the " Horseshoe,"
and you will find a train of cars almost doubling on
itself, and sitting in the back car you see a locomotive
coming as you look out of the window, and you
think it is another train, when it is only the front of
the train in which you are riding ; and sometimes
you can hardly tell whether the train is going toward
Pittsburgh or toward Philadelphia, but it is on the
track, and it will reach the depot for which it started,
and all the passengers will be discharged at the right
place. Now, there are a great many sharp curves in
life. Sometimes we seem to be going this way, and
sometimes we seem to be going that way ; but, if we
1 62 THE BALANCE-SHEET.
arc Christians, we are on the right track, and we are
going to come out at the right place. Do not get
worried, then, about the sharp curve.
A sailing vessel starts from New York to Glasgow.
Does it go in a straight line? Oh, no. It changes its
tack every little while. Now, you say, " This vessel,
instead of going to Glasgow, must be going to Havre,
or it is going to Hamburg, or it is going to Mar-
seilles." No, no. It is going to Glasgow. And in
this voyage of life we often have to change our
tacks. One storm blows us this way, and another
storm blows us that way ; but He who holds the
winds in His fist will bring us into a haven of ever-
lasting rest just at the right time. Do not worry,
then, if you have to change tacks.
One of the best things that ever happened to Paul
was being thrown off his horse. One of the best
things that ever happened to Joseph was being
thrown into the pit. The losing of his physical eye-
sight helped John Milton to see the battle of the
angels. One of the best things that ever happened to
Ignatius was being thrown to the wild beasts in the
the Coliseum, and while eighty thousand people were
jeering at his religion, he walked up to the fiercest of
all the lions, and looked him in the eye, as much as to
say, " Here I am, ready to be devoured for Christ's
sake."
All things work together for your good. If you
walk the desert, the manna will fall, and the sea will
part. II the feverish torch of sickness is kindled over
your pillow, by its light you can read the promise.
If the waves of trouble dash clear high, above your
girdle, across the blast and across the surge you can
hear the promise, " When thou passest through the
THE BALANCE-SHEET. 163
waters, I will be with thee." You never owned a
glove, or a shoe, or a hat, or a coat, more certainly
than you own all the frets, and annoyances, and exas-
perations of this life, and they are bound to work out
your present and your eternal good. They are the
saws, the hammers, the files, by which you are to be
hewn, and cut, and smoothed for your eternal well-
being.
I go further, and tell you that the Christian owns,
not only this world, but he owns the next world.
No chasm to be leaped, no desert to be crossed.
There is the wall ; there is the gate of heaven. He
owns all on this side. Now, I am going to show you
that he owns all on the other side. Death is not a
ruffian that comes to burn us out of house and home,
destroying the house of the tabernacle so that we
should be homeless forever. Oh, no ! He is only a
black messenger who comes to tell us it is time to
move ; to tell us to get out of this hut, and go up into
the palace. The Christian owns all heaven. "All are
yours." Its palaces of beauty, its towers of strength,
castles of love. He will not walk in the eternal city
as a foreigner in a strange city, but as a farmer walks
over his own premises, "All are yours." All the
mansions yours. Angels your companions. Trees
of life your shade. Hills of glory your lookout.
Thrones of heaven the place where you will shout
the triumph. Jesus is yours. God is yours.
You look up into the face of God, and say, " My
Father." You look up into the face of Jesus, and
say, " My Brother." Walk out on the battlements of
heaven, and look off upon the city of the sun.
No tears* No sorrow. No death. No smoke of
toiling warehouse curling on the air. No voice of
164 THE BALANCE-SHEET.
blasphemy thrilling through the bright, clear Sab-
bath morning. No din of strife jarring the air. Then
take out your deed, and remember that from throne
to throne, and from wall to wall, and from horizon to
horizon, " all are yours."
Then go up into the temple of the sun, worshipers
in white, each with a palm branch, and from high
gallery of that temple look down upon the thousands
of thousands, and the ten thousand times ten thou-
sand, and the one hundred and forty and four thou-
sand, and the great " multitude that no man can
number," and louder than the rush of the wheels,
louder than the tramp of the redeemed, hear a voice
saying, "All are yours." See the great procession
marching around the throne of God. Martyrs who
went up on wings of flame. Invalids who went up
from couches of distress. Toilers who went up from
the workhouse, and the factory, and the mine. All
the suffering and the bruised children of God. See
the chariots of salvation ; in them those who were
more than conquerors. See them marching around
about the throne of God forever and forever, and
know that "all are yours."
O ye who have pains of body, that exhaust your
strength and wear out your patience, I hold before
you this morning the land of eternal health, and of
imperishable beauty. O ye, who have hard work to
get your daily bread, hard work to shelter your chil-
dren from the storm, I lift before you the vision of
that land where they never hunger, and they never
thirst, and God feeds them, and robes cover them,
and the warmth of eternal love fills them, and all that
is yours. O ye whose hearts are buried in the grave
of your dead O ye whose happiness went by long
THE BALANCE-SHEET. 165
ago O ye who mourn for countenances that never
will light up, and for eyes closed forever sit no
longer among the tombs, but look here. A home
that shall never be broken up. Green fields never
cleft of the grave. Ransomed ones, from you parted
long ago, now radiant with a joy that shall never
cease, and a love that shall never grow cold, and
wearing garments that shall never wither, and know
all that is yours. Yours the love. Yours the ac-
claim. Yours the transport. Yours the cry of the
four and twenty elders. Yours the choiring of cher-
ubim. Yours the lamb that was slain.
In the vision of that orlorious consummation I
C5
almost lose my foothold, and have to hold fast lest I
be overborne by the glory. The vision rose before
St. John on Patmos, and he saw Christ in a blood-red
garment, riding on a white horse, and all heaven fol-
lowing Him on white horses. What a procession !
Let Jesus ride. He walked the way footsore, weary,
and faint. Now let Him ride. White horse of vic-
tory, bear on our Chief. Hosanna to the son of
David ! Ride on, Jesus ! Let all heaven follow Him.
These cavalry of God fought well, and they fought
triumphantly. Now let them be mounted. The
pavements of gold ring under the flying hoofs.
Swords sheathed and victories won, like conquerors
they sit on their chargers. Ye mounted troops of
God, ride on ! ride on ! ten thousand abreast, caval-
cade after cavalcade. No blood dashed to the lips.
No blood dripping from the fetlocks. No smoke of
battle breathed from the nostril. The battle is
ended the victory won !
CHAPTER XV.
NOONTIDE OF LIFE.
It seems to me that in some respects the hill-top in
the journey of life is the best part of the journey.
While in early life we are climbing up the steep
hillside, we have worries and frets, and we slip, and
we fall, and we slide back, and we run upon sharp
antagonisms, and all the professions and occupations
have drudgeries and sharp rivalries at the start. We
are afraid we will not be properly appreciated. We
toil on, and we pant, and we struggle, and we are out
of breath, and sometimes we are tempted to lie
down in the bower of lazy indulgence. In addition
to these difficulties of climbing the hill of life, there
are those who rejoice in setting a man back and try-
ing to make a young man cowed down.
Every young man has had somebody to meet him
as he was climbing up, and say to him : " Don't, don't
you can't, you can't quit, quit ! " Every young
man has had twenty disheartenments where he has
one round word of good cheer. But after we have
climbed to the top of the hill of life, then we have
comparative tranquility and repose. We begin to
look about us. We find that it is just three miles
from cradle to grave : Youth the first mile, man-
hood the second mile, old age the third mile. Stand-
ing on the hill-top of the journey of life and in the
second mile, having come up one side the hill, and
166
NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 1 67
before I go down the other side, I want to tell you
that life is to me a happiness, and much of the time
it has been to me a rapture, and sometimes an
ecstasy.
There has been a great deal of wholesale slander
of this world. People abuse it, and the traveler on
the mountain curses the chill, and the voyager on the
deep curses the restlessness, and there are those who
say it is a mean, old, despicable world, and from pole
to pole it has been calumniated ; and if the world
should present a libel suit for all those who have
slandered it, there would not be gold enough in the
mountains to pay the damages, or places enough in
the penitentiaries to hold the offenders. The people
not only slander the world, but they slander its
neighbors, and they belabor the sun, now because it
is too ardent, and now because it is too distant ; but
by experience coming up the hill of life I have found
out when there is anything wrong the trouble is not
with the sun, or the moon, or the stars, or the
meteorological conditions ; the trouble is with my-
self. Oh, I am so glad that while this world as a
finality is a dead failure, as a hotel where we stop for
awhile in our traveling on toward a better place, it
is a very good world, a very kind world, and I am
glad that the shepherd in so pleasant a place makes
his flocks rest at noon !
But having told you how life seems to me on the
hill-top of the journey, you naturally want to know
how it seems to me when I look backward, and when
I look forward. The first thing a traveler does after
climbing up to the top of a mountain is to take a long
breath, and then look about and see what is all around
him. He sees out in^this direction the winding road
l68 NOONTIDE OK LIFE.
up which he came, and out in that direction the wind-
ing road down which he shall go. And so, standing
on the hill-top of life's journey, I put my outspread
hand to my forehead, so as to keep off the glare of
the noonday's sun, and to concentre my vision, and
1 look back on the winding road on which I have
traveled, and I see far on down at the foot of that
road, in the dim distance, something small, something
insignificant, and it vibrates, and it trembles, and it
rocks. I wonder what it is. I guess what it is. A
cradle !
Then I turn, and still keeping my outspread hand
to my forehead so as to shade my eyes from the glare
of the noonday's sun, and to concentrate my vision, I
look on the winding road down which I shall travel,
and I see at the foot of the road something that does
not tremble, does not vibrate, does not rock some-
thing white and then near it a bank of the earth,
and 1 wonder what it is. Ah ! I see what it is. I
guess what it is. I know what it is. A grave.
So, standing on the hill-top, having come up one
side the hill, and before I go down the other side,
you ask me two or three questions, and I tell you that
I have learned in coming up this side of life, the steep
side, the first side I have learned that nothing is ac-
complished without hard work. And I say to the
multitude of young people starting in occupations
and professions, nothing is accomplished without
work, hard work, continuous work, all-absorbing
work, everlasting work.
A parishioner asked a clergyman why the congre-
gation had filled up, and why the church was now so
prosperous above what it had ever been before.
"Well," said the clergyman, "I will tell you the
NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 169
secret. I met a tragedian some time ago, and I said
to him, ' How is it you get along so well in your pro-
fession ? ' The tragedian replied, ' The secret is, I
always do my best ; when stormy days come, and the
theatre is not more than half or a fourth occupied, I
always do my best, and that has been the secret of
my getting on.' ' And the clergyman reciting it,
said : " I have remembered that, and ever since then
I have always done my best." And I say to you, in
whatever occupation or profession God has put you,
Do your best ; whether the world appreciates it or
not, do your best always do your best. Domitian,
the Roman emperor, for one hour every day caught
flies anid killed them with his penknife ; and there are
people with imperial opportunity who set themselves
to some insignificant business. Oh, for something
grand to do, and then concentrate all your energies of
body, mind, and soul upon that one thing, and noth-
ing in earth or hell can stand before you. There is
no such thing as good luck.
I have learned also in coming up this steep hill of
life, that all events are connected. I look back and
now see events which I thought were isolated and
alone, but I find now they were adjoined to every-
thing that went before, and everything that came
after. The chain of life is made up of a great many
links large links, small links, silver links, iron links,
beautiful links, ugly links, mirthful links, solemn links
but they are all parts of one great chain of destiny.
Each minute is made up of sixty links, and each day
is made up of twenty-four links, and each year is
made of three hundred and sixty-five links ; but they
are all parts of one endless chain which plays and
works through the hand of an all-governing God.
I/O NOONTIDE OK LIFE.
No event stands alone. Sometimes you say, " This
is my day off." You will never have a day off.
Nothing is off.
But if you continue to ask me how the past seems,
I answer it seems like three or four picture galleries
Dusseldorl, Louvre, and Luxembourg their corri-
dors interjoining. 1 close my eyes and see them
coasting the hillside, and flving the kite, and trund-
ling the hoop, and gathering nuts in the autumnal
forests, and then a little while after, bending in
anxious study over the lexicons and the trigonom-
etries. Where are those comrades? Most of them
gone. Some are in useful spheres on earth. Some
died in rapture, and a good many of them perished
in dissipation before thirty years of age. The wine-
cup, with its sharp edge, cut the jugular vein of their
soul. Poor fellows ! They tried the world without
God, and the world was too much for them. Splen-
did fellows! Oh, what forehead they had for brain,
and what muscle they had for strength, and what
gleam of eye they had for genius, and what loving
letters they got from home, and how they carried off
the bouquets on Commencement Day ! But they
made the terrific mistake of thinking religion a super-
fluity, and now they are in my memory, not so much
canvas as sculpture some Laocoon struggling with
snapped muscles, and eyes starting from the socket
for torture ; struggling amid the crushing folds of a
serpentine monstrosity, a reptile horror, a Laocoon
worse than that of the ancients.
Satan has a fastidious appetite, and the vulgar
souls he throws into a trough to fatten his swine;
but he says : "Bring to my golden plate all the fine
natures, bring to niv golden plate all the clear intel-
NOONTIDE OF LIFE. I/I
lects, bring them to me ; my knife will cut down
through the lusciousness ; fill my chalice with the
richest of their blood ; pour it in until it comes three-
fourths full ; pour it in until it comes to the rim of
the chalice ; pour it until the blood bubbles over the
rim. There, that will do now. Oh, this infernal
banquet of great souls ! Aha ! aha ! let the common
demons have the vulgar souls, but give to me, who
am the king of all diabolism, the jolliest, the gladdest,
and the grandest of all this immortal sacrifice. Aha!"
Then in my mind there is the home gallery.
Oh, those dear faces, old faces and young faces,
faces that have lost nothing of their loveliness by the
recession of years, faces into which we looked when
we sat on their laps, faces that looked up to us when
they sat on our laps, faces that wept, faces that
laughed, faces wrinkled with old age, faces all aflush
with juvenile jocundity, faces that have disappeared,
faces gone.
But you ask how the rest of the journey appears
to me. As I look down now, having come up one
side, and standing on the hill-top, and before I take
the other journey, let me say to you, the road yet to
be traveled, seems to me brighter than the one on
which I have journeyed. I would not want to live
life over again, as some wish to. If we lived life
over again we would do no better than we have
done. Our lives have been lived over five hundred
times before. We saw five hundred people make
mistakes in life, and we went right on and made the
same mistakes. Our life was not the first. There
were five hundred or a thousand people living before
us. We did not profit by their example. We went
right on and broke down in the same place, and if
1 72 NOONTIDE OF LIFE.
we did not do any better with those experiences be-
fore us, do you think we would do any better if we
tried life over again ? No. I should rather go right
on. If we tried life over again we would repeat the
same journey.
"But," says some one, "don't you know there may
be trials, hardships, sicknesses, and severe duties
ahead ?" Oh, yes ! But if I am on a railroad jour-
ney of a thousand miles, and I have gone five hun-
dred of the miles, and during those five hundred miles
I have found the bridges safe, and the track solid,
and the conductors competent, and the engineer
wide awake, does not that give me confidence for
the other five hundred miles ? God has seen me
through up to this time, and I am going to trust Him
for the rest of the journey. I believe I have a
through ticket, and although sometimes the track
may turn this way or the other way, and sometimes
we may be plunged through tunnels, and sometimes
we may have a hot box that detains the train, and
sometimes we may switch off upon a side track to let
somebody else pass, and sometimes we may see a red
flag warning us to slow up, I believe we are going
through to the right place.
I have not a fear, an anxiety, that 1 can mention. I
do not know one. I put all my case in God's hands,
and I have not any anxiety about the future. I do
not feel foolhardy. I only trust. I trust, I trust, I
trust ! And for there are those here of my own
age let me say, when we come to duties, and trials,
and hardships, God is going to see us through.
From this hill-top of life I catch a glimpse of those
hill-tops where all sorrow and sighing shall be done
away. Oh, that God would make that world to us a
NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 173
reality ! Faith in that world helped old Dr. Tyng,
when he stood by the casket of his dead son, whose
arm had been torn off in the threshing-machine, death
ensuing; and Dr. Tyng, with infinite composure,
preached the funeral sermon of his own beloved son.
Faith in that world helped Martin Luther, without
one tear, to put away in death his favorite child.
Faith in that world helped the dying woman to see
on the sky the letter "W," and they asked her what
she supposed the letter " W " on the sky meant.
"Oh," she said, "don't you know ? W stands for
welcome." O Heaven, swing open thy gates! O
Heaven, roll upon us some of thine anthems ! O
Heaven, flash upon us the vision of thy luster !
CHAPTER XVI.
A SCROLL OF HEROES.
Historians are not slow to acknowledge the merits
of great military chieftains. We have the full-length
portraits of the Baldwins, the Cromwells, and the
Marshal Neys of the world. History is not written
in black ink, but with red ink of human blood. The
gods of human ambition did not drink from bowls
made out of silver,'or gold, or precious stones, but
out of the bleached skulls of the fallen. But I am to
unroll before you a scroll of heroes that the world
has never acknowledged ; they who faced no guns,
blew no bugle blast, conquered no cities, chained no
captives to their chariot wheels, and yet, in the great
day of eternity will stand higher than those whose
names startled the nations; and seraph and rapt
spirit and archangel will tell their deeds to a listening
universe. I mean the heroes of common, everyday
life.
In this roll, in the first place, I find all the heroes
of the sick room.
When Satan had failed to overcome Job he said to
God : " Put forth thy hand and touch his bone and
his flesh, and he will curse Thee to Thy face." Satan
had found out what we have all found out, that sick-
ness is the greatest test of character. A man who
can stand that can stand anything; to be shut in a
room as fast as though it were a Bastile ; to be so
174
A SCROLL OF HEROES. 1/5
nervous you cannot endure the tap of a child's foot ;
to have luxuriant fruit, which tempts the appetite of
the robust and healthy, excite our loathing and dis-
gust when it first appears on the platter ; to have the
rapier of pain strike through the side or across the
temples like a razor, or to put the foot into a vise, or
to throw the whole body into the blaze of a fever.
Yet there have been men and women, but more
women than men, who have cheerfully endured this
hardness. Through years of exhausting rheumatisms
and excruciating neuralgias they have gone, and
through bodily distresses, that rasped the nerves, and
tore the muscles, and paled the cheeks, and stooped
the shoulders. By the dim light of the sick room
taper they saw on their wall the picture of that land
where the people are never sick. Through the dead
silence of the night they have heard the chorus of
the angels.
Those who suffered on the battlefield, amid shot and
shell, were not so much heroes and heroines as those
who in the field hospital and in the asylum had
fevers which no ice could cool and no surgeon could
cure. No shout of comrade to cheer them, but
numbness and aching and homesickness yet willing
to suffer, confident in God, hopeful of heaven.
Heroes of rheumatism, heroes of neuralgia, heroes of
spinal complaint, heroes of sick headache, heroes of
life-long invalidism, heroes and* heroines, they shall
reign forever and forever. Hark ! I catch just one
note of the eternal anthem : " There shall be no more
pain." Bless God for that.
In this roll I also find the heroes of toil, who do
their work uncomplainingly. It is comparatively
easy to lead a regiment into battle when you know
176 A SCROLL OK HEROES.
that the whole nation will applaud the victory ; it is
comparatively easy to doctor the sick when you
know that your skill will be appreciated by a large
company of friends and relatives; it is comparatively
easy to address an audience when in the gleaming
eyes and the flushed cheeks you know that your sen-
timents are adopted ; but to do sewing where you
expect that the employer will come and thrust his
thumb through the work to show how imperfect it
is, or to have the whole garment thrown back on you,
to be done over again ; to build a wall and know
there will be no one to say you did it well, but only
a swearing employer howling across the scaffold ; to
work until your eyes are dim, and your back aches,
and your heart faints, and to know that if you stop
before night your children will starve that is
heroism.
Ah, the sword has not slain so many as the needle !
The great battlefields of our last war were not
Gettysburg and Shiloh and South Mountain. The
great battlefields of the last war were in the arsenals^
and the shops and the attics, where women made
army jackets for a sixpence. They toiled on until
they died. They had no funeral eulogium, but in
the name of my God this morning I enroll their
names among those of whom the world was not
worthy ; heroes of the needle, heroes of the sewing-
machine, heroes of <he attic, heroes of the cellar,
heroes and heroines.
In this roll I also find the heroes who have uncom-
plainingly endured domestic injustices. There are
men who for their toil and anxiety have no sympathy
in their homes. Exhausting application to business
gets them a livelihood, but an unfrugal wife scatters it.
A SCROLL OF HEROES. 177
The husband is fretted at from the moment he enters
the door until he comes out of it the exasperations
of business life augmented by the exasperations of
domestic life. Such men are laughed at, but they
have a heart-breaking trouble, and they would have
long ago gone into appalling dissipations but for the
grace of God. Society to-day is strewn with the
wrecks of men who under the northeast storm of
domestic infelicitv have been driven on the rocks.
./
There are tens of thousands of drunkards in this
country to-day made such by their wives. That is
not poetry ; that is prose !
But the wrong is generally in the opposite direc-
tion. You would not have to go far to find a wife
whose life is a perpetual martyrdom something
heavier than a stroke of the fist, unkind words, stag-
gerings home at midnight, and constant maltreatment,
which have left her only a wreck of what she was on
that day when, in the midst of a brilliant assemblage,
the vows were taken and full organ played the
wedding march, and the carriage rolled away with
the benediction of the people.
What was the burning of Latimer and Ridley at
the stake compared with this? Those men soon
became unconscious in the fire, but here is a fifty
years' martyrdom, a fifty years' putting to death, yet
uncomplaining. No bitter words when rollicking
companions at two o'clock in the morning pitch the
husband dead drunk on the stoop ; no bitter words
when, wiping from the swollen brow the blood struck
out in a midnight carousal, or bending over the bat-
tered and bruised form of him who, when he took
her from her father's home, promised love and kind-
ness and protection ; nothing but sympathy, and
178 A SCROLL OF HEROES.
prayers, and forgiveness before it is asked for. No
bitter words when the family Bible goes for rum, and
the pawnbroker's shop gets the last decent dress.
Some day, desiring to evoke the story of her sor-
row, you say : " Well, how are you getting along
now ? " And rallying her trembling voice, and quiet-
ing her quivering lip, she says : " Pretty well, I thank
you ; pretty well." She never will tell you. In the
delirium of her last sickness she may tell all the
secrets of her lifetime, but she will not tell that. Not
until the books of eternity are opened on the thrones
of judgment will ever be known what she has suf-
fered. Oh, ye who are twisting a garland for the
victor ! put it on that pale brow.
When she is dead the neighbors will beg linen to
make her a shroud, and she will be carried out in a
plain box, with no silver plate to tell her years, for
she has lived a thousand years of trial and anguish.
The gamblers and the swindlers who destroyed her
husband, will not come to the funeral. One carriage
will be enough for that funeral one carriage to carry
the orphans and the two Christian women who pre-
sided over the obsequies. But there is a flash, and a
clank of a celestial door, and a shout, " Lift up your
head, ye everlasting gates, and let her come in."
And Christ will step forth, and say, "Come in! ye
suffered with Me on earth, be. glorified with Me in
heaven." What is the highest throne in heaven ?
You say, " The throne of the Lord God Almighty
and the Lamb." No doubt about it. What is the
next highest throne in heaven? While I speak it
seems to me that it will be the throne of the drunk-
ard's wife, if she, with cheerful patience, endured all
her earthly torture. Heroes and heroines.
A SCROLL OF HEROES. 179
I find also in this roll the heroes of Christian charity.
We all admire the George Peabodys and the James
Lenoxes of the earth, who give tens and hundreds of
thousands of dollars to good objects. When Moses
H. Grinnell was buried, the most significant thing
about the ceremonies was that there was no sermon
and no oration ; a plain hymn, a prayer, and a- bene-
diction. "Well," I said, "that is very beautiful."
All Christendom pronounces the eulogium of Moses
H. Grinnell, and the icebergs that stand as monu-
ments to Franklin and his men, will stand as the
monument of this great merchant, and the sunlight
that plays upon the glittering cliff will write his
epitaph.
But I am speaking of those who, out of their
pinched poverty, help others of such men as those
Christian missionaries at the West, who are living on
two hundred and fifty dollars a year, that they may
proclaim Christ to the people, one of them writing to
the secretary in New York, saying, " I thank you for
that twenty-five dollars. Until yesterday we have
had no meat in our house for three months. We
have suffered terribly. My children have no shoes
this winter." And of those people who have only
a half loaf of bread, but give a piece of it to others
who are more hungry ; and of those who have only a
scuttle of coal, but help others to fuel ; and of those
who have only a dollar in their pocket, and give
twenty-five cents to somebody else ; and of that
father who wears a shabby coat, and of that mother
who wears a faded dress, that their children may be
well appareled.
You call them paupers, or ragamuffins, or tatterde-
malions. I call them heroes and heroines. You and
ISO A SCROLL OF HEROES.
I may not know where they live, or what their name
is. God knows ; and they have more angels hovering
over them than you and I have, and they will have a
higher seat in heaven. They may have only a cup of
cold water to give a poor traveler, or may have only
picked a splinter from under the nail of a child's
finger, or have put only two mites into the treasury,
but the Lord knows them. Considering what they
had, they did more than we have ever done, and
their faded dress will become a white robe, and the
small room will be an eternal mansion, and the old
hat will be a coronet of victory, and all the ap-
plause of earth and all the shouting of heaven will be
drowned out when God rises up to give His reward
to those humble workers in His kingdom, and to say
to them, " Well done, good and faithful servants."
You have all seen or heard of the ruin of Melrose
Abbey. I suppose in some respects it is the most
exquisite ruin on earth. And yet, looking at it, I was
not so impressed you may set it down to bad taste
but I was not so deeply stirred as I was at a tomb-
stone at the foot of that abbey the tombstone planted
by Walter Scott over the grave of an old man who
had served him for a good many years in his house
the inscription most significant, and I defy any man
to stand there and read it without tears coming into
his eyes the epitaph, " Well done, good and faithful
servant." Oh, when our work is over, will it be
found that because ot anything we have done for
God, or the Church, or suffering humanity, that such
an inscription is appropriate for us? God grant it!
Do not envy any man his money, or his applause,
or his social position. Do not envy any woman her
wardrobe, or her exquisite appearance. Be the hero
A SCROLL OF HEROES. l8l
or the heroine. If there be no flour in the house, and
you do not know where your children are to get
bread, listen, and you will hear something tapping
against the window-pane. Go to the window, and
you will find it is the beak of a raven ; and open the
window, and there will fly in the messenger that fed
Elijah.
Do you think that the God who grows the cotton *""
of the South will let you freeze for lack of clothes ?
Do you think that the God who allowed the disciples
on Sunday morning to go into the grainfield, and
then take the grain, and rub it in their hands, and eat
do you think God will let you starve ? Did you
ever hear the experience of that old man : " I have
been young, and now am old ; yet have I not seen the
righteous forsaken, or his seed begging bread?"
Get up out of your discouragement, O troubled soul,
O sewing woman, O man kicked and cuffed by un-
just employers, O ye who are hard bestead in the
battle of life and know not which way to turn, O you
bereft one, O you sick one with complaints you have
told to no one ! Come and get the comfort of this
subject. Listen to our great Captain's cheer : "To
him that overcometh, will I give to eat of the fruit of
the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise
of God."
CHAPTER XVII.
BURDENS LIFTED.
In the far East, wells of water are so infrequent
that when a man owns a well he has a property of
very great value, and sometimes battles have been
fought for the possession of one well of water ; but
there is one well that every man owns, a deep well,
a perennial well, a well of tears. If a man has not a
burden on this shoulder, he has a burden on the
other shoulder.
The day I left home to look after myself and for
myself, in the wagon my father sat driving, and he
said that day something which has kept with me all
my life: "De Witt, it is always safe to trust God.
I have many a time come to a crisis of difficulty.
You may know that, having been sick for fifteen
years, it was no easy thing for me to support a fam-
ily; but always God came to the rescue. I remem-
ber the time," he said, "when I didn't know what to
do, and I saw a man on horseback riding up the farm
lane, and he announced to me that I had been nomi-
nated for the most lucrative office in all the gift of the
people of the county ; and to that office I was elected,
and God in that way met all my wants, and I tell
you it is always safe to trust Him."
Oh, my friends, what we want is a practical
religion ! The religion people have is so high up
you can not reach it.
182
BURDENS LIFTED. 183
There are a great many men who have business
burdens. When \ve see a man harried, and per-
plexed, and annoyed in business life, we are apt to
say: "He ought not to have attempted to carry so
much." Ah ! that man mav not be to blame at all.
When a man plants a business he does not know
what will be its outgrowths, what will be its roots,
what will be its branches. There is many a man
with keen foresight and large business faculty who
has been flung into the dust by unforeseen circum-
stances springing upon him from ambush. When to
buy, when to sell, when to trust, and to what amount
of credit, what will be the effect of this new inven-
tion of machinery, what will be the effect of that loss
of crop, and a thousand other questions perplex busi-
ness men until the hair is silvered and deep wrinkles
are plowed in the cheek ; and the stocks go up by
mountains and go down by valleys, and they are at
their wits' ends, and stagger like drunken men.
This is a world of burden-bearing. Where is the
soul that has not a struggle? There is never an
audience assembles on the planet where the text is
not gloriously appropriate : "Cast thy burden upon
the Lord, and He shall sustain thee."
You hear that it is avarice which drives these men
of business through the street, and that is the com-
monly accepted idea. I do not believe a word of it.
The vast multitude of these business men are toiling
on for others. To educate their children, to put
wing of protection over their households, to have
something left so when they pass out of this life their
wives and children will not have to go to the poor-
house that is the way I translate this energy in the
street and store the vast majority of that energy.
1 84 BURDENS LIFTED.
Grip, Gouge & Co., do not do all the business. Some
of us remember when the Central America was com-
ing home from California it was wrecked. President
Arthur's father-in-law was the heroic captain of that
ship, and went down with most of the passengers.
Some of them got off into the life-boats, but there
was a young man returning from California who had
a bag of gold in his hand ; and as the last boat shoved
off from the ship that was to go down, that young
man shouted to a comrade in the boat: "Here, John,
catch this gold ; there are three thousand dollars ;
take it home to my old mother, it will make her
comfortable in her last days." Grip, Gouge & Co.
do not do all the business of the world.
Ah ! mv friend, do you say that God does not care
anything about your worldly business? I tell you
God knows more about it than you do. He knows
all your perplexities ; He knows what mortgagee is
about to foreclose; He knows what note you can-
not pay ; He knows what unsalable goods you have
on your shelves; He knows all your trials, from the
day you took hold of the first yard stick down t that
sale of the last yard of ribbon, and the God who
helped David to be king, and who helped Daniel to
be prime minister, and who helped Havelock to be a
soldier, will help you to discharge all your duties.
He is going to see you through. When loss comes,
and you find vour property going, just take this
Book and put it down by your ledger, and read of
the eternal possessions that will come to you through
our Lord Jesus Christ. And when your business
partner betrays you, and your friends turn against
you, just take the insulting letter, put it down on the
table, put your Bible beside the insulting letter, and
BURDENS LIFTED. 185
then read of the friendship of Him who "sticketh
closer than a brother."
A young accountant in New York City got his
accounts entangled. He kne\y he was honest, and
yet he could not made his accounts come out right,
and he toiled at them day and night until he was
nearly frenzied. It seemed by those books that
something had been misappropriated, and he knew
before God he was honest. The last day came. He
knew if he could not that day make his accounts
come out right, he would go into disgrace and go
into banishment from the business establishment.
He went over there very early, before there was
anybody in the place, and he knelt down at the desk
and said : "Oh, Lord, Thou knowest I have tried to
be honest, but I can not make these things come out
right! Help me to-day help me this morning!"
The young man arose, and hardly knowing why he
did so, opened a book that lay on the desk, and there
was a leaf containing a line of figures which explained
everything. In other words, he cast his burden upon
the Lord, and the Lord sustained him. Young man,
do you hear that ?
Oh, yes, God has a sympathy with anybody that
is in any kind of toil! He knows how heavy is the
hod of bricks that the workman carries up the ladder
of the wall ; He hears the pickaxe of the miner down
in the coal shaft ; He knows how strong the tempest
strikes the sailor a-t masthead ; He sees the factory
girl among the spindles, and knows how her arms
ache ; He sees the sewing woman in the fourth
story, and knows how few pence she gets for making
a garment ; and louder than all the din and roar
of the city comes the voice of a sympathetic God:
1 86 BURDENS LIFTED.
"Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sus-
tain thee."
Then .there are a great many \vho have a weight
of persecution and abuse upon them. Sometimes so-
ciety gets a grudge against a man. All his motives
are misinterpreted, and his good deeds are de-
preciated. With more virtue than some of the hon-
ored and applauded, he runs only against raillery
and sharp criticism. When a man begins to go down,
he has not only the force of natural gravitation, but
a hundred hands to help him in the precipitation.
Men are persecuted for their virtues, and their suc-
cesses,. Germanicus said he had just as many bitter
antagonists as he had adornments. The character
sometimes is so lustrous that the weak eyes of Envy
and Jealousy can not bear to look at it.
It was their integrity that put Joseph in the pit,
and Daniel in the den, and Shadrach in the tire, and
sent John the Evangelist to desolate Patmos, and
Calvin to the castle of persecution, and John Huss to
the stake, and Korah after Moses, and Saul after
David, and Herod after Christ. Be sure if you have
anything to do for church or state, and you attempt
it with all your soul, lightning will strike you.
The world always has had a cross between two
thieves for the one who comes to save it. High and
.holy enterprise has always been followed by abuse.
The most sublime tragedy of self-sacrifice has come
to burlesque. The graceful gait of virtue is always
followed by scoffed with grimace and travesty. The
sweetest strain of poetry ever written has come to
ridiculous parody, and as long as there are virtue and
righteousness in the world, there will be something
for iniquity to grin at. All along the line of the ages,
BURDENS LIFTED. 187
and in all lands, the cry has been : -'Not this man
but Barabbas. Now, Barabbas was a robber."
And what makes the persecutions of life worse, is
that they come from people whom you have helped,
from those to whom you loaned money or have
started in business, or whom you rescued in some
great crisis. I think it has been the history of all our
lives the most acrimonious assault has come from
those whom we have benefited, whom we have
helped, and that makes it all the harder to bear. A
man is in danger of becoming cynical.
A clergyman of the Universalist Church went into
a neighborhood for the establishment of a church of
his denomination, and he was anxious to find some
one of that denomination, and he was pointed to a
certain house, and went there. He said to the man
of the house : "I understand you are a Universalist ;
I want you to help me in the enterprise." "Well,"
said the man, "I am a Universalist, but I have a pe-
culiar kind of Universalism." What is that?" asked
the minister. "Well," replied the other, "I have
been out in the world, and I have been cheated, and
slandered, and outraged, and abused, until I believe
in universal damnation !"
The great danger is that men will become cynical,
and given to believe, as David was tempted to say,
that all men are liars. Oh, my friends, do not let
that be the effect upon your souls !
Now, if you have come across ill-treatment, let me
tell you you are in excellent company Christ, and
Luther, and Galileo, and Columbus, and John Jay,
and Josiah Quincy, and thousands of men and women,
the best spirits of earth and heaven. Budge not one
inch, though all hell wreak upon you its vengeance,
1 88 BURDENS LIFTED.
and you be made a target for devils to shoot at. Do
you not think Christ knows all about persecution ?
Was He not hissed at? Was He not struck on the
cheek? Was He not pursued all the days of His
life? Did they not expectorate upon Him? Or, to
put it in Bible language, "They spit upon Him."
And can not He understand what persecution is ?
"Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sus-
tain thee."
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE DAY WE LIVE IN.
It is my business to tell you what style of men and
women you ought to be in order that you may meet
the demand of the age in which God has cast your
lot. If you really would like to know what this age
has a right to expect of you as Christian men and
women, then I am ready, in the Lord's name, to look
you in the face. When two armies have rushed into
battle the officers of either army do not want a philo-
sophical discussion about the chemical properties of
human blood, or the nature of gunpowder ; they
want some one to man the batteries and swab out the
guns. And now, when all the forces of light and
darkness, of heaven and hell, have plunged into the
fight, it is no time to give ourselves to the definitions,
and formulas, and technicalities, and conventionalities
of religion. What we want is practical, earnest, con-
centrated, enthusiastic, and triumphant help.
In the first place, in order to meet the special de-
mand of this age, you need to be an unmistakably
aggressive Christian. Of half-and-half Christians we
do not want any more. The Church of Jesus Christ
will be better without ten thousand of them. They
are the chief obstacle to the Church's advancement.
I am speaking of another kind of Christian. All the
appliances for your becoming an earnest Christian are
at your hand, and there is a straight path for you into
189
IQO THE DAY WE LIVE IN.
the broad daylight of God's forgiveness. You re-
member what excitement there was in this country,
years ago, when the Prince of Wales came here
how the people rushed out by hundreds of thousands
to see him. Why? Because they expected that
some day he would sit upon the throne of England.
But what was all that honor compared with the honor
to which God calls you to be sons and daughters of
the Lord Almighty ; yea, to be kings and queens
unto God ? " They shall reign with Him forever and
forever."
But my friends, you need to be aggressive Chris-
tians, and not like those persons who spend their lives
in hugging their Christian graces, and wondering
why they do not make any progress. How much
robustness of health would a man have if he hid him-
self in a dark closet ? A great deal of the piety of
the day is too exclusive. It hides itself. It needs
more fresh air, more outdoor exercise. There are
many Christians who are giving their entire life to
self-examination. They are feeling their pulse to see
what is the condition of their spiritual health. How
long would a man have robust physical health, if he
kept all the days, and the weeks, and months, and
years of his life feeling his pulse, instead of going out
into active, earnest, everyday work ?
I was once amid the wonderful, bewitching cactus
growths of North Carolina. I never was more be-
wildered with the beauty of flowers, and yet, when I
would take up one of these cactuses, and pull the
leaves apart, the beauty was all gone. You could
hardly tell that it had ever been a flower. And there t
are a great many Christian people in this day just
pulling apart their Christian experiences to see what
THE DAY WE LIVE IN. IQI
there is in them, and there is nothing left in them.
This style of self-examination is a damage instead of
an advantage to their Christian character. I re-
member when I was a boy I used to have a small
piece in the garden that T called- my own, and I
planted corn there, and every few days I would pull
it up to see how fast it was growing. Now, there are
a great many Christian people in this day whose self-
examination merely amounts to the pulling up of
that which they only yesterday, or the day before,
planted.
Oh, my friends, if you want to have a stalwart
Christian character, plant it right out-of-doors in the
great field of Christian usefulness, and though storms
may come upon it, and though the hot sun ol trial
may try to consume it, it will thrive until it becomes
a great tree, in which the fowls of heaven may have
their habitation. I have no patience with these
flower-pot Christians. They keep themselves under
shelter, and all their Christian experience in a small,
exclusive circle, when they ought to plant it in the
great garden of the Lord, so that the whole atmos-
phere could be aromatic with their Christian useful-
ness. What we want in the Church of God is more
brawn of piety.
The century plant is wonderfully suggestive and
wonderfully beautiful, but I never look at it without
thinking of its parsimony. It lets whole generations
go by before it puts forth one blossom ; so I have
really more heartfelt admiration when I see the dewy
tears in the blue eyes of the violets, for they come
every spring. My Christian friends, time is going by
so rapidly that we cannot afford to be idle.
A recent statistician says that human life now has
IQ2 THE DAY \VD LIVE IN.
an average of only thirty-two years. From these
thirty-two years you must subtract all the time you
take for sleep, and the taking of food and recreation ;
that will leave you about sixteen years. From those
sixteen years yoti must subtract all the time that you
are necessarily engaged in the earning of a liveli-
hood ; that will leave you about eight years. From
those eight years you must take all the days, and
weeks, and months all the length of time that is
passed in childhood and sickness, leaving you about
one year in which to work for God ! Oh, my soul,
wake up ! How darest thou sleep in harvest-time,
and with so few hours in which to reap? So that I
state it as a simple fact, that all the time that the vast
majority of you will have for the exclusive service of
God will be less than one year !
" But," says some man, " I liberally support the
Gospel, and the Church is open, and the Gospel is
preached; all the spiritual advantages are spread
before men, and if they want to be saved let them
come to be saved ; I have discharged all my respon-
sibility." Ah! is that the Master's spirit? Is there
not an old Book somewhere that commands us to go
out into the highways and the hedges, and compel
the people to come in ? What would have become
of you and me if Christ had not come down off the
hills of heaven, and if He had not come through the
door of the Bethlehem caravansary, and if He had
not with the crushed hand of the crucifixion knocked
at the iron gate of the sepulchre of our spiritual
death, crying, "Lazarus, come forth?" Oh, my
Christian friends, this is no time for inertia, when all
the forces of darkness seem to be in full blast ; when
steam printing presses are publishing infidel tracts ;
THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 193
when express railroad trains are carrying messengers
of sin; when fast clippers are laden with opium and
rum ; when the night air of our cities is polluted
with the laughter that breaks up from the ten thou-
sand saloons of dissipation and abandonment ; when
the fires of the second death already are kindled in
the cheeks of some who only a little while ago were
incorrupt. Oh, never since the curse fell upon the
earth has there been a time when it was such an
unwise, such a cruel, such an awful thing for the
Church to sleep. The great audiences are not gath-
ered in the Christian Church ; the great audiences
are gathered in the temples of sin tears of unuttera-
ble woe their baptism, the blood of crushed hearts
the awful wine of their sacrament, blasphemies their
litany, and the groans of the lost world the organ
dirge of their worship.
Again, if you want to be qualified to meet the
duties which this age demands of you, you must on
the one hand avoid reckless iconoclasm, and on the
other hand not stick too much to things because they
are old. The air is full of new plans, new projects,
new theories of government, new theologies, and I
am amazed to see how so many Christians want only
novelty in order to recommend a thing to their con-
fidence ; and so they vacillate, and swing to and fro,
and they are useless, and they are unhappy. New
plans secular, ethical, philosophical, religious, cisat-
lantac, transatlantic long enough to make a line
reaching from the German universities to Great Salt
Lake City. Ah, my brother, do not take hold of a
thing merely because it is new. Try it by the reali-
ties of a Judgment Day.
But, on the other hand, do not adhere to anything
194 THE DAY WE LIVE IN.
merely because it is old. There is not a single enter-
prise of the Church or the world but has sometimes
been scoffed at. There was a time when men derided
even Bible societies; and when a few young men
met near a haystack in Massachusetts and organized
the first missionary society ever organized in this
country, there went laughter and ridicule all around
the Christian Church. They said the undertaking
was preposterous. And so also the work of Jesus
Christ was assailed. People cried out : '' Who ever
heard of such theories of ethics and government?
Who ever noticed such a style of preaching as Jesus
has ? " Ezekiel had talked of mysterious wings and
wheels. Here came a man from Capernaum and
Gennesaret, and he drew his illustrations from the
lakes, from the sand, from the ravine, from the lilies,
from the cornstalks. How the Pharisees scoffed !
How Herod derided ! How Caiaphas hissed. And
this Jesus they plucked by the beard, and they spat
in his face, and they called him " this fellow !" All
the great enterprises in and out of the Church have
at times been scoffed at, and there have been a great
multitude who have thought that the chariot of
God's truth would fall to pieces if it once got out of
the old rut.
And so there are those who have no patience with
anything like improvement in church architecture,
or with anything like good, hearty, earnest church
singing, and they deride any form of religious discus-
sion which goes down walking among everyday men
rather than that which makes an excursion on rhetor-
ical stilts. Oh, that the Church of God would wake
up to an adaptability of work ! We must admit the
simple fact that the churches of Jesus Christ in this
THE DAY WE LIVE IN. IQ5
day do not reach the great masses. There are fifty
thousand people in Edinburgh who never hear the
Gospel. There are one million people in London
who never hear the Gospel. There are at least three
hundred thousand souls in the city of Brooklyn who
come not under the immediate ministrations of
Christ's truth, and the Church of God in this day,
instead of being a place full of living epistles, read
and known of all men, is more like a " dead-letter "
postoffice.
"But," say the people, "the world is going to be
converted ; you must be patient ; the kingdoms of
this world are to become the kingdoms of Christ."
Never, unless the Church of Jesus Christ puts on
more speed and energy. Instead of the Church con-
verting the world, the world is converting the
Church. Here is a great fortress. How shall it be
taken? An army comes and sits around about it,
cuts off the supplies, and says ; " Now we will just
wait until from exhaustion and starvation they will
have to give up." Weeks and months, and perhaps
a year pass along, and finally the fortress surrenders
through that starvation and exhaustion. But, my
friends, the fortresses of sin are never to be taken in
that way. If they are taken for God it will be by
storm ; you will have to bring up the great siege
guns of the Gospel to the very wall and wheel the
flying artillery into line, and when the armed infantry
of heaven shall confront the battlements you will
have to give the .quick command, " Forward !
Charge ! "
Ah, my friends, there is work for you to do and
for me to do in order to this grand accomplishment.
Here is my pulpit and I preach in it. Your pulpit is
196 THE DAY WE LIVE IN.
the bank. Your pulpit is the store. Your pulpit is
the editorial chair. Your pulpit is the anvil. Your
pulpit is the house scaffolding. Your pulpit is the
mechanic's shop. I may stand in this place and,
through cowardice or through self-seeking, may keep
back the word I ought to utter ; while you, with
sleeve rolled up and brow besweated with toil, may
utter the word that will jar the foundations of heaven
with the shout of a great victory. I tell you, every
one, go forth and preach this gospel. You have as
much right to preach as I have, or as any man has.
Only find out the pulpit where God will have you
preach and there preach.
Hedley Vicars was a wicked man in the English
army. The grace of God came to him. He became
an earnest and eminent Christian. They scoffed at
him and said : " You are a hypocrite ; you are as bad
as ever you were." Still he kept his faith in Christ,
and after awhile, finding that they could not turn
him aside by calling him a hypocrite, they said to
him : "Oh, you are nothing but a Methodist." That
did not disturb him. He went on performing his
Christian duty until he had formed all his troop into
a Bible class, and the whole encampment was shaken
with the presence of God. So Havelock went into
the heathen temple in India while the English army
was there, and put a candle into the hand of each of
the heathen gods that stood around in the heathen
temple, and by the light of those candles, held up by
the idols, General Havelock preached righteousness,
temperance, and judgment to come. And who will
say, on earth or in heaven, that Havelock had not
the right to preach ?
In the minister's house where 1 prepared for col-
THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 197
lege there was a man who worked, by the name of
Peter Croy. He could neither read nor write, but
he was a man of God. Often theologians would stop
in the house grave theologians and at family
prayer Peter Croy would be called upon to lead ;
and all those wise men sat around, wonder-struck at
his religious efficiency. When he prayed he reached
up and seemed to take hold of the very throne of the
Almighty, and he talked with God until the very
heavens were bowed down into the sitting room.
Oh, if I were dying I would rather have plain Peter
Croy kneel by my bedside and commend my immor-
tal spirit to God than the greatest archbishop,
arrayed in costly canonicals. Go preach this Gospel.
You say you are not licensed. In the name of the
Lord Almighty, I license you. Go preach this Gos-
pel preach it in the Sabbath schools, in the prayer
meetings, in the highways, in the hedges. Woe be
unto you if you preach it not.
Again, in order to be qualified to meet your duty
in this particular age you want unbounded faith in
the triumph of truth and the overthrow of wicked-
ness. How dare the Christian Church ever get dis-
couraged. Have we not the Lord Almighty on our
side ? How long did it take God to slay the hosts of
Sennacherib or burn Sodom, or shake down Jericho ?
How long will it take God, when He once rises in
His strength, to overthrow all the forces of iniquity?
Between this time and that there may be long seasons
of darkness the chariot wheels of God's Gospel may
seem to drag heavily, but here is the promise and
yonder is the throne ; and when omniscience has lost
its eyesight, and omnipotence falls back impotent,
and Jehovah is driven from His throne, then the
198 THE DAY WE LIVE IN.
Church of Jesus Christ can afford to be despondent,
but never until then. Despots may plan and armies
may march, and the congresses of the nations may
seem to think they are adjusting all the affairs of the
world, but the mighty men of the earth are only the
dust of the chariot wheels of God's providence.
I think before the sun of this centurv shall set the
last tyranny will fall, and with a splendor of demon-
stration that shall be the astonishment of the universe
God will set forth the brightness and pomp and glory
and perpetuity of His eternal government. Out of
the starr}' flags and the emblazoned insignia of this
world God will make a path for His own triumph,
and returning from universal conquest, He will sit
down, the grandest, strongest, highest throne of
earth His footstool.
Then shall all nations' song ascend
To Thee, our Ruler, Father, Friend,
Till heaven's high arch resounds again
With " Peace on earth, good will to men."
Hosts of the living God, march on! march on!
His spirit will bless you. His shield will defend you.
His sword will strike for you. March on ! march on !
The despotisms will fall, and paganism will burn its
idols, and Mohammedanism will give up its false
prophet, and Judaism will confess the true Messiah,
and the great walls of superstition will come down in
thunder and wreck at the long, loud blast of the Gos-
pel trumpet. March on ! march on ! The besiegement
will soon be ended. Only a few more steps on the
long way ; only a few more sturdy blows ; only a
few more battle cries, then God will put the laurel
upon your brow, and from the living fountains of
THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 199
heaven will bathe off the sweat and the heat and the
dust of the conflict. March on ! march on ! For
you the time for work will soon be passed, and amid
the out-flashings of the judgment throne, and the
trumpeting of resurrection angels, and the upheaving
of a world of graves, and the hosanna and the groan-
ing of the saved and the lost, we shall be rewarded
for our faithfulness, or punished for our stupidity.
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting
to everlasting, and let the whole earth be filled with
His glory.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT.
Blessed is that home where Christian parents come
to visit. Whatever may have been the style of the
architecture when they come, 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 with you, giving you the
final good-bye. Do not be embarrassed if your father
come to town and he have the manners of the shep-
herd, 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."
"What a nuisance it is to 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 day, 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
200
THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT. 201
beside Rachel, Joseph's mother. 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 re-
spected 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
can not 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 the
Providence that I felt like taking my text from Prov-
erbs: "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.
202 THE OLD FOLKS VISIT.
Share your successes with the old people. The
probability is, that the principles they inculcated
achieved your fortune. Give them a Christian per-
centage 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, Xantippe
would have been an angel compared with you. It is
easier to take care of five rollicking, romping chil-
dren than of one childish old man. Among the best
women of Brooklyn, and of yonder transpontive city
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 soaking
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 after jeweled hand was offered in marriage, but
who staid 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 a one by a nickname.
God calls her daughter, and Heaven calls her saint,
and I call her domestic martyr. A half-dozen ordi-
THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT. 203
nary 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 thou-
sand 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
especial mission, are the names of Anna Ross, and
Margaret Breckinridge, and Mary Shelton, and Anna
Etheridge, and Georgiana Willetts, the angels of the
battlefields 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 Gol-
conda 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 pal-
ace, cut with the words : "Inasmuch as ye did it to
mother."
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
^Eneas from burning Troy, on his shoulders, Anch-
ises, his father. The Athenians punished with death
204 THE OLD FOLKS VISIT.
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 Col-
chester, 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 ex-
cruciation, 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.
CHAPTER XX.
ORDINARY PEOPLE.
" Salute Asvncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes, Philo-
logus and Julia" ROMANS, 16: 14, 15.
Matthew Henry, Albert Barnes, Adam Clark,
Thomas Scott, and all the commentators pass by
these verses without any especial remark. The
other twenty people mentioned in the chapter were
distinguished for something, and were therefore dis-
cussed by the illustrious expositors ; but nothing is
said about Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas,
Hermes, Philologus, and Julia. Where were they
born? No one knows. When did they die? There
is no record of their decease. For what were they
distinguished? Absolutely for nothing, or the trait
of character would have been brought out by the
apostle. If they had been very intrepid, or opulent,
or hirsute, or musical of cadence, or crass of style, or
in any wise anomalous, that feature would have been
caught by the apostolic camera. But they were good
people, because Paul sends to them his high Chris-
tian regards. They were ordinary people, moving
in ordinary sphere, attending to ordinary duty, and
meeting ordinary responsibilities.
What the world wants is a religion for ordinary
people. If there be in the United States 55,000,000
people, there are certainly not more than 1,000.000
extraordinary ; and then there are 54,000,000 ordi-
205
206 ORDINARY PEOPLE.
nary, and we do well to turn our backs for a little
while upon the distinguished and conspicuous people
of the Bible and consider in our text the seven
ordinary. We spend too much of our time in twist-
ing garlands for remarkables, and building thrones
for magnates, and sculpturing warriors, and apotheo-
sizing philanthropists. The rank and tile of the
Lord's soldiery need especial help.
The vast majority of people will never lead an
army, will never .write a State constitution, will never
electrify a Senate, will never make an important in-
vention, will never introduce a new philosophy, will
never decide the fate of a nation. You do not expect
to ; you do not want to. You will not be a Moses to
lead a nation out of bondage. You will not be a
Joshua to prolong the daylight until you can shut five
kings in a cavern. You will not be a St. John to un-
roll an Apocalypse. You will not be a Paul to pre-
side over an apostolic college. You will not be a
Mary to mother a. Christ. You will more probably
be Asyncritus, or Fhlegon, or Hennas, or Patrobas,
or Hermes, or Philologus, or Julia.
Many of you are women at the head of households.
Every morning you plan for the day. The culinary
department of the household is in your dominion.
You decide all questions of diet. All the sanitary
regulations of your house are under your supervi-
sion. To regulate the food, and the apparel, and the
habits, and decide the thousand questions of home
life is a tax upon brain and nerve and general health
absolutely appalling, if there be no divine alleviation.
It does not help you much to be told that Elizabeth
Fry did wonderful things amid the criminals at New-
gate. It does not help you much to be told that Mrs.
ORDINARY PEOPLE. 2O/
Judson was very brave among the Bornesian canni-
bals. It does not help you very much to be told that
Florence Nightingale was very kind to the wounded
in the Crimea. It would be better for me to tell you
that the divine friend of Marv and Martha is your
friend, and that He sees all the annoyances and dis-
appointments, and abrasions, and exasperations of an
ordinary housekeeper from morn till night, and from
the first day of the year to the last day of the year,
and at your call He is ready with help and rein-
forcement.
They who provide the food of the world decide
the health of the world. One of the greatest battles
of this century was lost because the commander that
morning had a fit of indigestion. You have only to
go on some errand .amid the taverns and the hotels
of the United States and Great. Britain to appreciate
the fact, that a vast multitude of the human race are
slaughtered by incompetent cookery. Though a
young woman may have taken lessons in music, and
may have taken lessons in painting, and lessons in
astronomy, she is not well educated unless she has
taken lessons in dougli! They who decide the apparel
of the world, and the food of the world, decide the
endurance of the world.
An unthinking man may consider it a matter of
little importance the cares of the household and the
economies of domestic life but I tell you the earth
is strewn with the martyrs of kitchen and nursery.
The health-shattered womanhood of America cries
out for a God who can help ordinary women in the
ordinary duties of housekeeping. The wearing,
grinding, unappreciated work goes on, but the same
Christ who stood on the bank of Galilee in the early
2O8 ORDINARY PEOPLE.
morning and kindled the fire and had the fish
already cleaned and broiling when the sportsmen
stepped ashore, chilled and hungry, will help every
woman to prepare breakfast, whether by her own
hand, or the hand of her hired help. The God who
made indestructible eulogy of Hannah, who made a
coat for Samuel, her son, and carried it to the temple
every year, will help every woman in preparing the
family wardrobe. The God who opens the Bible
with the story of Abraham's entertainment by the
three angels on the plains of Mamre, will help every
woman to provide hospitality, however rare and em-
barrassing. It is high time that some of the attention
we have been giving to the remarkable women of the
Bible remarkable for their virtue, or their want of
it, or remarkable for their deeds Deborah and Jeze-
bel, and Herodias and Athalia, and Dorcas and the
Marys, excellent and abandoned it is high time some
of the attention we have been giving to these con-
spicuous women of the Bible be given to Julia, an
ordinary woman, amid ordinary circumstances, at-
tending to ordinary duties, and meeting ordinary
responsibilities.
Then there are all the ordinary business men.
They need divine and Christian help. When we
begin to talk about business life we shoot right off
and talk about men who did business on a large scale,
and who sold millions of dollars of goods a year ; and
the vast majority of business men do not sell a million
dollars of goods, nor half a million, nor quarter of a
million, nor the eighth part of a million. Put all the
business men of our cities, towns, villages, and neigh-
borhoods side by side, and you will find that they sell
less than fifty thousand dollars worth of goods. All
ORDINARY PEOPLE. 2OQ
these men in ordinary business liie want divine help.
You see how the wrinkles are printing on the coun-
tenance the story of worriment and care. You can
not tell how old a business man is by looking at him.
Gray hairs at thirty. A man at forty-five with the
stoop of a nonogenarian. No time to attend to im-
proved dentistry, the grinders cease because they are
few. Actually dying of old age at fort} 7 or fifty, when
they ought to be at the meridian. Many of these
business men have bodies like a neglected clock to
which you come, and you wind it up, and it begins
to buzz and roar, and then the hands start around
very rapidly, and then the clock strikes five, or ten,
or forty, and strikes without any sense, and then sud-
denly stops. So is the body of that worn out busi-
ness man. It is a neglected clock, and though by
some summer recreation it may be wound up, still
the machinery is all out of gear. The hands turn
around with a velocity that excites the astonishment
of the world. Man cannot understand the wonderful
activity, and there is a roar, and a buzz, and a rattle
about these disordered lives, and they strike ten
when they ought to strike five, and they strike twelve
when they ought to strike six, and they strike forty
when they ought to strike nothing, and suddenly
they stop. Post-mortem examination reveals the
fact that all the springs, and pivots, and weights, and
balance-wheels of health are completely deranged.
The human clock is simply run down. And at the
time when the steady hand ought to be pointing to
the industrious hours on a clear and sunlit dial, the
whole machinery of body, mind, and earthly capacity
stops forever. Greenwood has thousands of New
York and Brooklyn business men who died of old
age at thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five.
2IO ORDINARY PEOPLE.
Now, what is wanted is grace divine grace for
ordinary business men, men who are harnessed from
morn till night and all the days of their life har-
nessed in business. Not grace to lose a hundred
thousand, but grace to lose ten dollars. Not grace
to supervise two hundred and fifty employes in a fac-
torv, but grace to supervise the bookkeeper, and two
salesmen, and the small boy that sweeps out the store.
Grace to invest not in the eighty thousand dollars of
net profit, but the twenty-five hundred of clear gain.
Grace not to endure the loss of a whole shipload of
spices from the Indies, but grace to endure the loss
of a paper of collars from the leakage of a displaced
shingle on a poor roof. Grace not to endure the
tardiness of the American Congress in passing a
necessary law, but grace to endure the tardiness of
an errand boy stopping to play marbles when he
ought to deliver the goods. Such a grace as thou-
sands of business men have to-day keeping them
tranquil, whether goods sell or do not sell, whether
customers pay or do not pay, whether tariff is up or
tariff is down, whether the crops are luxuriant or a
dead failure calm in all circumstances, and amid all
vicissitudes. That is the kind of grace we want.
Millions of men want it, and they may have it for
the asking. Some hero or heroine comes to town, and
as the procession passes through the street the busi-
ness men come out and stand on tiptoe on their store
step and look at some one who in Arctic clime, or in
ocean storm, or in day of battle, or in hospital agonies
did the brave thing, not realizing that they, the en-
thusiastic spectators, have gone through trials in
business life that are just as great before God, There
are men who have gone through freezing Arctics
ORDINARY PEOPLE. 211
and burning torrids, and awful Marengoes of experi-
ences without moving five miles from their doorstep.
Now, what ordinary business men need is to realize
that they have the friendship of that Christ who
looked after the religious interests of Matthew, the
custom-house clerk, and helped Lydia, of Thyatira,
to sell the dry goods, and who opened a bakery and
fish-market in the wilderness of Asia Minor to feed
the seven thousand who had come out on a religious
picnic, and who counts the hairs of your head with as
much particularity as though they were the plumes
of a coronation, and who took the trouble to stoop
down with His finger writing on the ground, although
the first shuffle of feet obliterated the divine cali-
graphy, and who knows just how many locusts there
were in the Egyptian plague, and knew just how
many ravens were necessary to supply Elijah's pantry
by the brook Cherith, and who, as floral commander,
leads forth all the regiments of primroses, foxgloves,
daffodils, hyacinths, and lilies which pitch their tents
of beauty and kindle their camp-fires of color all
around the hemisphere that that Christ and that
God knows the most minute affairs of your business
life and however inconsiderable, understanding all
the affairs of that woman who keeps a thread-and-
needle store as well as all the affairs of a Rothschild
and a Baring.
Then there are all the ordinary farmers. We talk
about agricultural life, and we immediately shoot off
to talk about Cincinnatus, the patrician, who went
from the plow to a high position, and after he got
through the dictatorship, in twenty-one days went
back again to the plow. What encouragement is that
to ordinary farmers ? The vast majority of them none
212 ORDINARY PEOPLE.
of them will be patricians. Perhaps none of them
will be Senators. If any of them have dictatorships
it will be over forty, or fifty, or a hundred acres of
the old homestead. What those men want is grace,
to keep their patience while plowing with balky
oxen, and to keep cheerful amid the drouth that de-
stroys the corn crop, and that enables them to restore
the garden the day after the neighbor's cattle have
broken in and trampled out the strawberry bed, and
gone through the Lima-bean patch, and eaten up the
sweet corn in such large quantities that they must be
kept from the water lest they swell up and die.
Grace in catching weather that enables them, with-
out imprecation, to spread out the hay the third time,
although again, and again, and again, it has been al
most ready for the mow. A grace to doctor the cow
with a hollow horn, and the sheep with the foot rot,
and the horse with the distemper, and to compel the
unwilling acres to yield a livelihood for the family,
and schooling for the children, and little extras to
help the older boy in business, and something for the
daughter's wedding outfit, and a little surplus for the
time when the ankles will get stiff with age, and the
breath will be a little short, and the swinging of the
cradle through the hot harvest-field will bring on the
old man's vertigo. Better close up about Cincin-
natus. I know five hundred farmers just as noble as
he was.
What they want is to know that they have the
friendship of that Christ who often drew His similes
from the farmer's life, as when he said : " A sower
went forth to sow ;" as when He built His best para-
ble out of the scene of a farmer's boy coming back
from his wanderings, and the old farmhouse shook
ORDINARY PEOPLE. 213
that night with rural jubilee ; and who compared
Himself to a lamb in the pasture field, and who said
that the eternal God is a farmer, declaring : " My
Father is the husbandman."
Those stone masons do not want to hear about
Christopher Wren, the architect, who built St. Paul's
Cathedral. It would be better to tell them how to
carry the hod of brick up the ladder without slipping,
and how on a cold morning with the trowel to
smooth off the mortar and keep cheerful, and how to
be thankful to God for the plain food taken from the
pail by the roadside. Carpenters standing amid the
adze, and the bit, and the plane, and the broad axe,
need to be told that Christ was a carpenter, with his
own hand wielding saw and hammer. Oh, this is a
tired world, and it is an overworked world, and it is
an under-fed world, and it is a rung-out world, and
men and women need to know that there is rest and
recuperation in God and in that religion which was
not so much intended for extraordinary people as for
ordinary people, because there are more of them.
The healing profession has had its Abercrombies,
and its Abernethys, and its Valentine Motts, and its
Willard Parkers ; but the ordinary physicians do the
most of the world's medicining, and they need to un-
derstand that while taking diagnosis or prognosis, or
writing prescription, or compounding medicament,
or holding the delicate pulse of a dying child they
may have the presence and the dictation of the
Almighty Doctor who took the case of the madman,
and, after he had torn off his garments in foaming de-
mentia, clothed him again, body and mind, and who
lifted up the woman who for eighteen years had been
bent almost double with the rheumatism into grace-
214 ORDINARY PEOPLE.
ful stature, and who turned the scabs of leprosy into
rubicund complexion, and who rubbed the numbness
out of paralysis, and who swung wide open the
closed windows of hereditary or accidental blindness,
until the morning light came streaming through the
fleshly casements, and who knows all the diseases,
and all the remedies, and all the herbs, and all the
catholicons, and is monarch of pharmacy and thera-
peutics, and who has sent out ten thousand doctors
of whom the world makes no record ; but to prove
that they are angels of mercy, I invoke the thousands
of men whose ailments they have assuaged and the
thousands of women to whom in crises of pain they
have been next to God in benefaction.
Come', now, let us have a religion for ordinary peo-
ple in professions, in occupations, in agriculture, in
the household, in merchandise, in everything. I
salute across the centuries Asyncritus, Phlegon, Her-
nias, Patrobas, Hermes, Philologus, and Julia.
First of all, if you feel that you are ordinary, thank
God that you are not extraordinary. I am tired and
sick, and bored almost to death with extraordinary
people. They take all their time to tell us how very
extraordinary they really are. You know as well as I
do, my brother and sister, that the most of the useful
work of the world is done by unpretentious people
who toil right on by people who do not get much ap-
proval, and no one seems to say, " That is well done."
Phenomena are of but little use. Things that are ex-
ceptional cannot be depended on. Better trust the
smallest planet that swings in its orbit than ten
comets shooting this way and that, imperilling the
longevity of worlds attending to their own business.
For steady illumination better is a lamp than a rocket.
ORDINARY PEOPLE. 215
Then, if you feel that you are ordinary, remember
that your position invites the less attack. Conspicu-
ous people how they have to take it! How they
are misrepresented, and abused, and shot at! The
higher the horns of a roebuck the easier to track him
down. What a delicious thing it must be to be a
candidate for President of the United States ! It
must be so soothing to the nerves ! It must pour
into the souls of a candidate such a sense of serenity
when he reads the blessed newspapers !
I came into the possession of the abusive cartoons
in the time of Napoleon I., printed while he was yet
alive. The retreat of the army from Moscow, that
army buried in the snows of Russia, one of the most
awful tragedies of the centuries, represented under
the figure of a monster called General Frost shaving
the French Emperor with a razor oi icicle. As Satyr
and Beelzebub he is represented, page after page,
page after page. England cursing him, Spain curs-
ing him, Germany cursing him, Russia cursing him,
Europe cursing him, North and South America curs-
ing him. The most remarkable man of his day, and
the most abused. All those men in history who now
have a halo around their name, on earth wore a
crown of thorns. Take the few extraordinary rail-
road men of our time, and see what abuse comes upon
them, while thousands of stockholders escape. New
York Central Railroad has 9,265 stockholders. If
anything in that railroad affronts the people all the
abuse comes down on one man, and the 9,264 escape.
All the world took after Thomas Scott, President of
the Pennsylvania Railroad, abused him until he got
under the ground. Over 17,000 stockholders in that
company. All the blame on one man ! The Central
2l6 ORDINARY PEOPLE.
Pacific Railroad two or three men get all the blame
if anything goes wrong. There are 10,000 in that
company.
I mention these things to prove it is extraordinary
people who get abused, while the ordinary escape.
The weather of life is not so severe on the plain as it
is on the high peaks. The world never forgives a
man who knows, or gains, or does more than it can
know, or gain, or do. Parents sometimes give con-
fectionery to their children as an inducement to take
bitter medicine, and the world's sugar-plum precedes
the world's aqua-fort is. The mob cried in regard to
Christ, ' Crucify Him, crucify Him !" and they had
to say it twice to be understood, for they were so
hoarse, and they got their hoarseness by crying a
little while before at the top of their voice, "Hosanna."
The river Rhone is foul when it enters Lake Leman,
but crystalline when it comes out on the other side.
But there are men who have entered the bright lake
of wordly prosperity crystalline and came out terribly
riled. If, therefore, you feel that you are ordinary,
thank God for the defences and the tranquility of
your position.
Let us all be content with such things as we have.
God is just as good in what He keeps away from us
as in. what he gives us. Even a knot may be useful
if it is at the end of a thread.
At an anniversary of a deaf and dumb asylum, one
of the children wrote upon the blackboard words as
sublime as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the " Divina
Comedia " all compressed in one paragraph. The
examiner, in the signs of the mute language, asked
her: " Who made the world?" The deaf and dumb
girl wrote upon the blackboard, " In the beginning
ORDINARY PEOPLE. 2 17
God created the heaven and the earth." The ex-
aminer asked her, " For what purpose did Christ
come into the world ? " The deaf and dumb girl
wrote upon the blackboard : " This is a faithful say-
ing, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus
came into the world to save sinners." The ex-
aminer said to her, " Why were you born deaf and
dumb, while I hear and speak?" She wrote upon
the blackboard : " Even so, Father ; for so it seemeth
good in thy sight." Oh, that we might be baptized
with a contented spirit ! The spider draws poison
out of a flower, the bee gets honey out of a thistle;
but happiness is a heavenly elixir, and the contented
spirit extracts it, not from the rhododendron of the
hills, but from the lily of the valley.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE LACHRYMAL.
Within the past century travelers and antiquarians
have explored the ruins of ancient cities, and from the
very heart of the buried splendor they have brought
up evidence of customs long ago vanished from the
earth. From some of those tombs they have brought
up lachrymatories, or lachrymals, which are vials
made of earthenware. The tears wept over the dead
were caught and kept in this vial, or lachrymatory
or lachrymal, or bottle, and then the bottle was
placed in the tomb of the dead. There are in our
museums to-day, if you will search for them, many
specimens of these tear-bottles of olden times.
The tears that were brought up in the lachrymals
of Herculaneum and Pompeii have all gone, and
those bottles are as dry as the scoria of the volcano
that, submerged them ; but not so with the bottle in
which God gathers all our tears. So it is not a mere
soft sentiment, it is not only a poetic idea, but it is a
deep and an earnest expression of hundreds of people
here who have had misfortune, or trial, or loss, or be-
reavement, when they cry out, saying : " Put thou
my tears into thy bottle."
You have all heard of the story of paradise and the
peri. I think it might come to a better adaptation.
An angel went forth from heaven, and searched all
the earth to find some beautiful thing worth}' of celes-
218
THE LACHRYMAL. 22 I
tial transportation. That angel went down to the
gold and silver mines of the earth, yet found nothing
worthy of carrying back to God and to heaven. And
then the angel went down to the depths of the sea,
and examined all the pearls that lay there, but not
one of them was fit to take to heaven, and the angel,
utterly discouraged and despairing, stood at the foot
of a mountain and folded its wing, when, looking a
little way off, it saw a wanderer weeping over his evil
ways, and as the tears were falling down the cheek of
that wanderer the angel thrust its wing under the fall-
ing tear and captured it, and then sped away toward
the sky, and as God saw the angel flying heavenward
with that tear upon the wing, God cried out ; " Be-
hold the brightest jewel of heaven, the tear of a sin-
ner's repentance."
Oh, when I see the shepherd bringing a lost sheep
back from the wilderness, when I hear the quick tread
of a ragged prodigal coming to his father's house,
when I see the sin burned, and the passion blasted,
and the wretched and the vile appealing for God's
compassion, then I break forth into ecstasy and tri-
umph, and I cry : " More tears for God's bottle ! " I
remember only one or two lines of the old hymn
which says :
" Or sins like mountains for their size,
The seas of sovereign grace expand;
The seas of sovereign grace arise."
O wanderer, come back to thy God. That falling
tear will not drop on the cheek, it will not drop on
your hand ; it will drop into the bottle where God
keeps all our tears. God has an intimate acquaint
ance with and a tender remembrance of all poverty.
Much cf the world's want does not come to inspec
222 THE LACHRYMAL.
tion. Deacons of the church do not see it, controllers
of almshouses never report it. People who prefer to
suffer and to die in silence rather than to display
their poverty and their bitterness. Parents who fail
to get a livelihood so that they with their children
dwell in perpetual privation. Sewing women who
cannot ply the needle fast enough to earn shelter and
bread.
Sorrow and privation and woe huger than a camel
going through the eye of their needle. But whether
reported or uncomplaining, whether in seemingly
comfortable parlor or in damp cellar, or in hot gar-
ret, the angels of God watch. All those griefs are
being collected. Down on the back street, away off
amid shanties and log huts, angels of God are watch-
ing. Tears of want seething in summer's heat, tears
of want freezing in winter's cold, fall not unheeded.
They are jewels in heaven's casket. They arc
pledges of divine sympathy. They are tears for
God's bottle.
When some years ago a city missionary was cross-
ing one of the parks in New York on the Sabbath
day, he said to a lad, " What are you doing here,
breaking the Lord's day ? You ought to be at church
and worshiping God instead of breaking the Sabbath
in this way." Then the poor lad in his rags looked
up at the city missionary, and said : " Oh, sir, it's very
easy for you to talk that way, but God knows that
we poor chaps ain't got no chance." Oh, that the
tears of all the poor might drop into God's bottle.
God has an intimate acquaintance with and a ten-
der remembrance of, all our parental anxiety. You
sometimes see a man step right out from the most in-
famous surroundings into the kingdom of God. You
THE LACHRYMAL. 223
say, " That is not logical ; that man has not heard a
sermon in twenty years ; that man has not had any
alarming providence ; why is it he steps right out
from the most debased surroundings into the king-
dom of God ?" This is the secret : God one day looks
at the bottle in which He keeps the tears of His dear
children, and He finds there a parental tear which for
forty years has been unanswered, and He says, " Go
to now, and I will answer that tear." Quick as light-
ning to the heart of that debased and wandering man
comes the influence of the Holy Ghost, and he steps
out of his sin into the light of the Gospel.
Oh, this work of training children for God and for
heaven is a tremendous work. I know there are a
great many people who have not been called to pa-
rental responsibility, who have a very complete idea
about domestic discipline. They know how children
ought to be trained ! But to every intelligent parent
it is a tremendous question.
Now there is a little child, and it is a beautiful play-
thing. It lies in the mother's arms. She looks down
into the bright eyes, and she examines the dimples on
its feet, and she says : " What an exquisite organ-
ism." Beautiful plaything that child is. But one
night while that mother is rocking that child to sleep
a voice drops straight from the throne of God, say-
iag : " Do you know what you are rocking? That
is an immortal." Stars shall die, but that is an im-
mortal. The sun will die of old age, but that is
immortal.
With some of you this is the chief anxiety. You
try to train your children aright. You correct this
folly, you chide that worldliness, and your midnight
pillow is wet with weeping in parental anxiety ; and
224 THE LACHRYMAL.
you ask me to-day, you ask me in silence, but I hear
the question coming up from hundreds of souls : " Is
all this wasted ? Are my prayers going to be heard ?
Is all this solicitude for nothing?" I answer no.
God has counted all the sleepless nights. God has
heard all the counsels you ever gave to that boy or
that girl in your household. God knows it all, and
He has kept a record, and in lachrymal not such as
is taken up from ancient sepulchre, but in a lachry-
mal that stands on His eternal throne, He has gath-
ered all those exhausting tears.
The grass may be rank on your grave, and the let-
ters may have faded from the tombstone under the
dash of the elements, but He who has said, *' I will be
a God to thee and to thy seed after thee," will not
forget, and some day in heaven, while you are rang-
ing the fields of light, the gates of pearl will open,
and garlanded with glory that wanderer will rush
into your outstretched arms of welcome and triumph.
The hills may depart, and the stars may fall, and the
world may burn, and time may perish, but God will
break His oath never, never!
But you say, " Why keep in heaven the tears of
earth ? whv that great lachrymatory on the throne of
God ?" Well, my friends, I do not know that the tears
will always stay there. I do not know but that after
a while some angel passing along will look at that great
lachrymatory of heaven and find it empty. What
sprite of hell hath broken into the gates and robbed
that place of its jewels? This is the secret : Those
were sanctified sorrows, and those tears have been
changed into pearl, and now they adorn the coronets
and the robes of the ransomed.
I take 'up some coronet of light and I see gems
THE LACHRYMAL. 225
sparkling in it, and say, "From what river depth of
heaven did these jewels come ? " and a thousand
voices answer: "These are the transmuted tears
from God's bottle." Then I see a scepter stretched
down from the throne of men who were trodden on
by earth, and I see on every scepter point, and I see
inlaid in the ivory stair of the golden throne some
very bright jewels, and I say, " Whence came they?
whence came they ? " and the elders from before the
throne, and the martyrs under the altar coming up
and standing on' the sea of glass, cry in ecstasy,
" These are the transmuted tears from God's bottle."
Let the ages of heaven roll on. All the pomp and
pride of earth forgotten ; the Koh-i-noor diamonds
that were the pride of kings forgotten ; precious
stones that adorned Persian tiara or flamed in the
robes of Babylonian processions, forgotten ; the Gol-
conda mines charred in the last conflagration ; but
firm as the everlasting hills, and pure as the light
that streams from the throne, and bright as the river
that flows from under the eternal rocks, are the trans-
muted tears from God's bottle. Let that empty
lachrymatory stand forever on the steps of heaven,
on the steps of the throne. Let no hand touch it.'
Let no wing strike it. Let no collision crack it.
Purer than beryl or chrysoprasus, let it stand on the
steps of Jehovah's throne, and under the arch of the
unfading rainbow. Passing down the corridors of
the palace, the redeemed of earth will look at it, and
think of their earthly sorrows sanctified, and say,
"Why, that is what we heard of on earth; that is
what the Psalmist spoke of ; there is where our tears
were kept; that is God's bottle." And while the
redeemed of heaven are gazing on this richest inlaid
2_6 THE LACHRYMAL.
vase in glory, all the towers of heaven will strike this
silvery chime : " God hath wiped away all tears from
all faces. God hath wiped away all tears from all
faces."
CHAPTER XXII.
SUNSET.
It is a dismal thing to be getting old without the
rejuvenating influence of religion. When we step on
the down grade of life and see that it dips to the
verge of the cold river, we want to behold some one
near who will help us across it. When the sight
loses its power to glance and gather up, we need the
faith that can illumine. When we feel the failure of
the ear, we need the clear tones of that voice which
in olden times broke up the silence of the deep with
cadences of mercy. When the axe-men of death
hew down whole forests of strength and beauty
around us and we are left in solitude, we need the
dove of divine mercy to sing in our branches. When
the shadows tfegin to fall and we feel that the day is
far spent, we need most of all to supplicate the
strong, beneficent Jesus in the prayer of the villagers,
"Abide with us, for it is toward evening."
The request is an appropriate exclamation for all
those who are approached in the gloomy hour of
temptation. There is nothing easier than to be good-
natured when everything pleases, or to be humble
when there is nothing to oppose us, or forgiving
when we have not been assailed, or honest when we
have no inducement to fraud. But you have felt the
grapple of some temptation. Your nature at some
time quaked and groaned under the infernal force.
227
228 SUNSET.
You felt that the devil was after you. You saw
your Christian graces retreating. You feared that
you would fail in the awful wrestle with sin and be
thrown into the dust. The gloom thickened. The
first indications of the night were seen. In all the
trembling of your soul, in all the infernal suggestions
of Satan, in all the surging up of tumultuous passions
and excitements, you felt with awful emphasis that it
was toward evening.
In the tempted hour you need to ask Jesus to abide
with vou. You can beat back the monster that
would devour you. You can unhorse the sin that
would ride you down. You can sharpen the battle-
axe with which you split the head of helmeted abom-
ination. Who helped Paul shake the brazen-gated
heart of Felix ? Who acted like a good sailor when
all the crew howled in the Mediterranean shipwreck?
Who helped the martyrs to be firm, when one word
of recantation would have unfastened the withes of
the stake and put out the kindling fire ? When the
night of the soul came on and all the denizens of
darkness came riding upon the winds of perdition
who gave strength to the soul ? Who gave calmness
to the heart? Who broke the spell of infernal
enchantment? He who heard the request of the vil-
lagers : " Abide with us for it is toward evening."
One of the forts of France was attacked and the
outworks were taken before night. The besieging
army lay down, thinking that there was but little to
do in the morning, and that the soldiery in the fort
could be easily made to surrender. But during the
night, through a back stairs, they escaped into the
country. In the morning the besieging army sprang
upon the battlements, but found that their prey was
SUNSET. 229
gone. So when we are assaulted in temptation, there
is always some secret stair by which we might get
off. God will not allow us to be tempted above
what we are able, but with every temptation will
bring a way of escape that we may be able to bear it.
The greatest folly that ever grew on this planet is
the tendency to borrow trouble ; but there are times
when approaching sorrow is so evident that we need
to be making especial preparations for its coming.
One of your children has lately become a favorite.
The cry of that child strikes deeper into the heart
than the cry of all the others. You think more
about it. You give it more attention, not because it
is any more of a treasure than the others, but be-
cause it is becoming frail. There is something in the
cheek, in the eye and in the walk that makes you
quite sure that the leaves of the flower are going to
be scattered. The utmost nursing and medical at-
tendance are ineffectual. The pulse becomes feeble,
the complexion lighter, the step weaker, the faugh
fainter. No more romping for that one through hall
and parlor. The nursery is darkened by an approach-
ing calamity. The heart feels with mournful antici-
pation that the sun is going down. Night speeds on.
It is toward evening,
You have long rejoiced in the care of a mother.
You have done everything to make her last days
happy. You have run with quick feet to wait upon
her every want. Her presence has been a perpetual
blessing in the household. But the fruit-gatherers
are looking wistfully at that tree. Her soul is ripe
for heaven. The gates are ready to flash open for
her entrance. But your soul sinks at the thought of
separation. You can not bear to think that soon you
230 SUNSET.
will be called to take the last look at that face, which
from the first hour has looked upon you with affec-
tion unchangeable. But you see that life is ebbing,
and the grave will soon hide her from your sight.
You sit quiet. You feel heavy-hearted. The light
is fading'' from the skv, the air is chill. It is toward
o * 7
evening.
You had a considerable estate and felt independent.
In five minutes on one fair balance sheet you could
see just how you stood with the world. But there
came complications ; something that you imagined
impossible, happened. The best friend you had
proved traitor to your interest. A sudden crash of
national misfortune prostrated your credit. You
may to-day be going on in business, but you feel
anxious about where you are standing, and fear that
the next turn of the commercial wheel will bring you
prostrate, You foresee what you consider certain
defalcation. You think of the anguish of telling
your friends that you are not worth a dollar. You
know not how you will ever bring your children
home from school. You wonder how you will stand
the selling of your library, or the moving into a
plainer house. The misfortunes of life have accumu-
lated. You wonder what makes the sky so dark. It
is toward evening.
Trouble is an apothecary that mixes a great many
draughts, bitter, and sour and nauseous, and you
must drink some one of them. Trouble puts up a
great many packs, and you must carry some one of
them. There is no sandal so thick and well adjusted
but some thorn will strike through it. There is no
sound so sweet but the undertaker's screw-driver
grates through it. In this swift shuttle of the heart
SUNSET. 231
some of the threads must break. The journey from
Jerusalem to Emmaus will soon be ended. Our Bible,
our common-sense, our observation reiterates in tones
that we can not mistake, and ought not to disregard ;
it is toward evening.
Oh, then, for Jesus to abide with us ! He sweetens
the cup. He extracts the thorn. He wipes the tear.
He hushes the tempest. He soothes the soul that
flies to Him for shelter. Let the night swoop and
the euroclydon toss the sea. Let the thunders roar -
soon all will be well. Christ in the ship to soothe
His friends. Christ on the sea to stop its tumult.
Christ in the grave to scatter the darkness. Christ
in the heavens to lead the way. Blessed all such.
His arms will inclose them. His grace comfort
them. His light cheer them. His sacrifice free them.
His glory enchant them. If earthly estate take
wings, He will be an incorruptible treasure. If
friends die, He will be their resurrection. Standing
with us in the morning of your joy, and in the noon-
day of our prosperity. He will not forsake us when
the luster has faded, and it is toward evening.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN.
Every day I find people trying to extemporize a
way from earth to heaven. They gather up their
good works and some sentimental theories, and they
make a raft, shoving it from this shore, and poor,
deluded souls get on board that raft, and they go
down. The fact is, that skepticism and infidelity
never yet helped one man to die. I invite all the
ship-carpenters of worldly philosophy to come and
build one boat that can safely cross this river. I
invite them all to unite their skill, and Bolingbroke
shall lift the stanchions, and Carlyle shall set up the
timber heads, and Tyndall shall lift the bowsprit, and
Spinoza shall make the main-top gallant braces, and
Renan shall go to tacking, and wearing, and boxing
the ship.
All together in ten thousand years they will never
be able to make a boat that can cross this Jordan.
Why was it that Spinoza and Blountand Shaftesbury
lost their souls? It was because they tried to cross
the stream in a boat of their own construction.
What miserable work they all made of dying! Dio-
dorus died of mortification, because he could not
guess a conundrum which had been proposed to him
at a public dinner; Zeuxis, the philosopher, died of
mirth, laughing at a caricature of an aged woman a
caricature made by his own hand ; while another of
232
THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 233
their company and of their, kind died saying, " Must
I leave all these beautiful pictures?" and then Disked
that he might be bolstered up in the bed in his last
moments, and be shaved and painted and rouged.
Of all the unbelievers of all ages not one of them
died well. Some of them sneaked out of life ; some
of them wept themselves away into darkness ; some
of them blasphemed and raved, and tore their bed-
covers to tatters. That is the way worldly philo-
sophy helps a man to die.-
When we cross over from this world to the next,
the boat will have to come from the other side. I
stand on the eastern side of the river Jordan, and I
find no shipping at all ; but, while I am standing
there, I see a boat plowing through the river, and as
I hear the swirl of the waters, and the boat comes to
the eastern side of the Jordan, and David and his
family and his old friend step on board that boat, I
am mightily impressed with the fact that, when we
crpss over from this world to the next, the boat will
have to come from the opposite shore.
Blessed be God, there is a boat coming from the
other shore. Transportation at last for our souls
from the other shore ; everything about this Gospel
from the other shore ; pardon frcm the other shore ;
mercy from the other shore ; pity from the other
shore ; ministry of angels from the other shore ;
power to work miracles from the other shore ; Jesus
Christ from the other shore. " This is a faithful
saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ
Jesus came into the world [a foreigner] to save
sinners." I see the ferry-boat coming, and it rolls
with the surges of a Saviour's suffering ; but as it
strikes the earth the mountains rock, and the dead
234 THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN.
adjust their apparel so that they may be fit to come
out. That boat touches the earth, and glorious
Thomas Walsh gets into it, in -his expiring moment,
saying: " He has come ! He has come ! My Beloved
is mine, and I am His." Good Sarah Wesley got
into that boat, and as she shoved off from the shore
she cried : " Open the gates ! open the gates ! " And
the dying Christian soldier got into that boat. He
was fatally wounded setting up the telegraph poles
which had been torn down by the opposing army,
and in his dying moments his Christian triumph and
the feverish delirium seemed to mingle, and he
cried out with exultation : " The wires are all laid ;
the poles are all up from Stony Point to headquar-
ters ! Huzzah ! " Oh, I bless God that as the boat
came from the other shore to take David and his
men across, so, when we come to die, the boat will
come from the same direction. God forbid that T
should ever trust to anything that starts from this
side.
Now, I want to break a delusion in your mind, and
that is this. When our friends go out from this
world, we feel sorry for them because they have to
go alone, and parents hold on to the hands of their
children who are dying, and hold on with something
of the impression that the moment they let go the
little one will be in the darkness and in the boat all
alone. " Oh," the parent says, " if I could only go
with my child, I would be willing to die half a dozen
times. I am afraid she will be lost in the woods or
in the darkness ; I am afraid she will be very much
frightened in the boat ah alone." I break up the
delusion. When a soul goes to heaven it does not
go alone ; the King is on board the boat.
THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 235
Was Paul alone in the last exigency ? Hear the
shout of the scarred missionary as he cries out, " I
am now ready to be offered, and the time of my de-
parture is at hand." Was John Wesley alone in the
last exigency ? No. Hear him say, " Best of all,
God is with us." Was Sir William Forbes alone in
the last exigency ? No. Hear him say to his friends,
" Tell all the people who are coming down to the bed
of death, from my experience has no terrors." "Oh,"
say a great many people, " that does very well for
distinguished Christians ; but for me, a common man,
for me, a common woman, we can't expect that guid-
ance and help." If I should give you a passage of
Scripture that would promise to you positively, when
you are crossing the river to the next world, the King
would be in the boat, would you believe the promise ?
" Oh, yes," you say, " I would." Here is the promise :
" When thou passest through the waters, I will be
with thee ; and through the rivers, they shall not
overflow thee." Christ at the sick pillow to take the
soul out of the body ; Christ to help the soul down
the bank into the boat ; Christ mid stream ; Christ on
the other side to help the soul up the beach. Be
comforted about your departed friends. Be com-
forted about your own demise when the time shall
come. Tell it to all the people under the sun that
no Christian ever dies alone ; the King is in the
boat.
Leaving this world for heaven is onlv crossing a
ferry. Dr. Shaw estimates the average width of the
Jordan to be about thirty yards. What ! so narrow?
Yes. Yes, going to heaven is only a short trip only
a ferry. It may be eighty miles, that is eighty years,
before we get to the wet bank on the other side, and
236 THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN.
we may travel millions of miles, that is millions of
years, on the other side ; but the crossing is short. I
will tell you the whole secret. It is not five minutes
across, nor three, nor two, nor one minute. It is an
instantaneous transportation. People talk as though
leaving this life, the Christian went plunging, and
floundering, and swimming, to crawl up exhausted
on the other shore ; and to be pulled out of the pelt-
ing surf as by a Ramsgate life boat. No such thing.
It is only a ferry. It is so narrow that we can hail
each other from bank to bank. It is only four arms'
length across. The arm of earthly farewell put out
from this side, the arm of heavenly welcome put out
from the other side; while the dying Christian, stand-
ing mid-stream, stretches out his two arms, the one
to take the farewell of earth, and the other to take
the greeting of heaven. That makes four arms'
lengths across the river.
Blessed be God, that when we leave this world we
are not to have a great and perilous enterprise of
getting into heaven. Not a dangerous Franklin ex-
pedition, to find the Northwest passage among ice-
bergs, Only a ferry. That accounts for something
you have never been able to understand. You never
supposed that very nervous and timid Christian peo-
ple could be so perfectly unexcited and placid in the
last hour. The fact is, they were clear down on the
bank, and they saw there was nothing to be fright-
ened about. Such a short distance only a ferry.
With one ear they heard the funeral psalm in their
memory, and with the other ear they heard the song
of heavenly salutation. The willows on this side the
Jordan and the Lebanon cedars on the other almost
interlocked their branches. Onlv a ferrv.
THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 237
When we cross over at the last, we shall find a
solid landing. The ferry-boat means a place to start
from and a place to land. David and his people did
not find the eastern shore of the Jordan any more
solid than the western shore where he landed, and yet
to a great many heaven is not a real place. To you
heaven is a fog-bank in the distance. Now my
heaven is a solid heaven. . After the resurrection has
come you will have a resurrected foot, and some-
thing to tread on ; and a resurrected eye, and colors
to see with it ; and a resurrected ear, and music to
regale it. Smart men in this day are making a great
deal of fun about St. John's materialistic descriptions
of heaven. Well now, my friends, if you will tell me
what will be the use of a resurrected body in heaven
with nothing to tread on, and nothing to hear, and
nothing to handle, and nothing to taste, then I will
laugh too. Are you going to float about in ether for-
ever, swinging about your hands and feet through
the air indiscriminately, and one moment sweltering in
the center of the sun, and the next moment shivering
in the mountains of the moon ? That is not my
heaven.
Dissatisfied with John's materialistic heaven, theo-
logical thinkers are trying to patch up a heaven that
will do for them at the last. I never heard of any
heaven I want to go to, except St. John's heaven. I
believe I shall hear Mr. Toplady sing yet, and Isaac
Watts recite hymns, and Mozart play. ' Oh," you
say, " where would you get the organ ? " The Lord
will provide the organ. Don't you bother about the
organ. I believe I shall yet see David with a harp,
and I will ask him to sing one of the songs of Zion. I
believe after the resurrection I shall see Masillon, the
238 THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN.
great French pulpit orator, and I shall hear from his
own lips how he felt on that day when he preached
the king's funeral sermon, and flung his whole audi-
ence into a paroxysm of grief and solemnity. I have
no patience with your transcendental gelatinous gase-
ous heaven. My heaven is not a fog-bank. My eyes
are unto the hills, the everlasting hills. The King's
ferry-boat, starting from a wharf on this side, will go
to a wharf on the other side.
Our arrival will not be like stepping ashore at Ant-
werp or Constantinople, among a crowd of strangers ;
it will be among friends, good friends, warm-hearted
friends, and all their friends.
We know people whom we have never seen, by
hearing somebody talk about them very much ; we
know them almost as well as if we had seen them.
And do you not suppose that our parents and
brothers and sisters and children in heaven have
been talking about us all these years, and talking to
their friends? so that, I suppose, when we cross the
river at the last, we shall not only be met by all those
Christian friends whom we knew on earth, but by all
their friends. They will come down to the landing
to meet us. Your departed friends love you more
now than they ever did. You will be surprised at
the last to find how they know about all the affairs
of your life. Why, they are only across the ferry ;
and the boat is coming this way, and the boat is
going that way. I do not know but that they have
already asked the Lord the day, the hour, the
moment, when you are coming across, and that they
know now ; but I do know you will be met at the
landing. The poet Southey said he thought he
should know Bishop Heber in heaven by the por-
THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 239
traits he had seen of him in London ; and Dr. Ran-
dolph said he thought he would know William
Cowper, the poet, in heaven, from the pictures he had
seen of him in England ; but we will know our
departed kindred by the portraits hung in the throne-
room of our hearts.
On starlight nights you look up and I suppose it
is so with any one who has friends in heaven on
starlight nights you look up, and you cannot help
but think of those who have gone ; and I suppose
they look down, and cannot but think of us. But
they have the advantage of us. We know not just
where their world of joy is ; they know where we
are.
There was romance as well as Christian beauty in
the life of Dr. Adoniram Judson, the Baptist mis-
sionary, when he concluded to part from his wife,
she to come to America to restore her health, he to
go back to Burmah to preach the Gospel. They had
started from Burmah for the United States together,
but, getting near St. Helena, Mrs. Judson was so
much better she said : " Well, now, I can get home
very easily ; you go back to Burmah and preach the
Gospel to those poor people. I am almost well ; I
shall soon be well, and then I will return to you."
After she had made that resolution, terrific in its
grief, willing to give up her husband for Christ's
sake, she sat down in her room, and with her trem-
bling hand wrote some eight or ten verses, two or
three of which i will give you :
" We part on this green islet, love;
Thou for the eastern main ;
I for the setting sun, love:
Oh, when to meet again !
240 THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN.
" When we knelt to see our Henry die,
And heard his last faint moan,
Each wiped away the other's tears;
Now each must weep alone.
" And who can paint our mutual joy
When, all our wandering o'er,
We both shall clasp our infants three,
At home on Burmah's shore?
" But higher shall our raptures glow
On yon celestial plain,
When the loved and parted here helow
Meet ne'er to part again."
She folded that manuscript ; a relapse of her disease
came on, and she died. Dr. Judson says he put her
away, for the resurrection, on the Isle of St. Helena.
They had thought to part for a year or two ; now
they parted forever, so far as this world is concerned.
And he savs he hastened on board after the funeral
with his little children to start for Burmah, for the
vessel had already lifted her sails ; and he said : " I
sat down for some time in my cabin, my little chil-
dren around me crying, 'Mother, mother!' and I
abandoned mvself to heart-breaking grief. But one
day the thought came across me, as my faith
stretched her wing, that we should meet in heaven,
and I was comforted."
Was it, mv friends, all a delusion? When he died,
did she meet him at the landing? When she died,
did the scores of souls whom she had brought to
Christ, and who had preceded her to heaven, meet
her at the landing? I believe it; I know it. Oh,
glorious consolation, that when our poor work on
earth is clone and we cross the river, we shall be met
at the landing.
PART II.
(Joalg for 1 tjje Cfhufch Jfilitaqt,
CHAPTER XXIV.
DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY.
Christianity is the rising sun of our time, and men
have tried with the uprolling vapors of skepticism and
the smoke of their blasphemy to turn the sun into
darkness. Suppose the archangels of malice and
horror should be let loose a little while and be
allowed to extinguish and destroy the sun in the nat-
ural heavens. They would take the oceans from
other worlds and pour them on this luminary of the
planetary system, and the waters go hissing down
amid the ravines and the caverns, and there is explo-
sion after explosion, until there are only a few peaks
of fire left in the sun, and these are cooling down and
going out until the vast continents of flame are re-
duced to a small acreage of fire, and that whitens
and cools off until there are only a few coals left, and
these are whitening and going out until there is not
a spark left in all the mountains of ashes and the val-
leys of ashes and the chasms of ashes. An extin-
guished sun. A dead sun. A buried sun. Let all
worlds wail at the stupendous obsequies. Of course,
this withdrawal of the solar light and heat throws
our earth into a universal chill, and the tropics be-
come the temperate, and the temperate becomes the
Arctic, and there are frozen rivers and frozen lakes
and frozen oceans. From the Arctic and Antarctic
regions the inhabitants gather in toward the center
243
244 DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY.
and find the equator as the poles. The slain forests
are piled up into a great bonfire, and around them
gather the shivering villages and cities. The wealth
of the coal mines is hastily poured into the furnaces
and stirred into rage of combustion, but soon the
bonfires begin to lower, and the furnaces begin to go
out, and the nations begin to die. Cotopaxi, Vesu-
vius, Etna, Stromboli, California!! geysers cease to
smoke, and the ice of hailstorms remains unmelted
in their crater. All the flowers have breathed their
last breath. Ships with sailors frozen at the mast and
helmsmen frozen at the wheel, and passengers frozen
in the cabin.
All nations dying, first at the north and then at the
south. Child frosted and dead in the cradle. Oc-
togenarian frosted and dead at the hearth. Work-
men with frozen hand on the hammer and frozen foot
on the shuttle. Winter from sea to sea. All-con-
gealing winter. Perpetual winter. Globe of frigidity.
Hemisphere shackled to hemisphere by chains of ice.
Universal Nova Zembla. The earth an ice-floe grind-
ing against other ice-floes. The archangels of malice
and horror have done their work, and now they may
take their thrones of glacier, and look down on the
ruin they have wrought.
What the destruction of the sun in the natural
heavens would be to our physical earth, the destruc-
tion of Christianity would be to the moral world.
The sun turned into darkness. Infidelity in our time
is considered a great joke. There are people who
will gather to hear Christianity caricatured, and to
hear Christ assailed with quibble, and quirk, and
misrepresentation, and badinage, and harlequinade.
I propose to take Infidelity and Atheism out of the
DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 245
realms ot jocularity into one of tragedy, and show
you what these, men propose, and what, if they are
successful, they will accomplish. There are those in
all our communities who would like to see the Chris-
tian religion overthrown, and who say the world
would be better without it. I want to show you
what is the end of this road, and what is the terminus
of this crusade, and what this world would be when
Atheism and Infidelity have triumphed over it, if
they can. I say, if they can. I reiterate it, if they
can.
In the first place, it will be the complete and unut-
terable degradation of womanhood.
I will prove it by facts and arguments which no
honest man will dispute. In all communities, and
cities, and states, and nations, where the Christian re-
ligion has been dominant, woman's condition has been
ameliorated and improved, and she is deferred to and
honored in a thousand things, and ever}- gentleman
takes off his hat before her. If your associations
have been good, you know that the name of wife,
mother, daughter, suggest gracious surroundings.
Now, compare this with woman's condition in
lands where Christianity has made little or no ad-
vance in China, in Barbary, in Borneo, in Tartary,
in Egypt, in Hindostan. The Burmese sell their
wives and daughters as so many sheep. The Hindoo
Bible makes it disgraceful and an outrage for a
woman to listen to music, or look out of the window
in the absence of her husband, and gives as a lawful
ground for divorce, a woman's beginning to eat
before her husband has finished his meal. What
mean those white bundles on the ponds and rivers in
China in the morning ? Infanticide following infant-
246 DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY.
icicle. Female children destroyed, simply because
they are female. Women harnessed to a plow as an
ox. Women veiled and barricaded, and in all styles
of cruel seclusion. Her birth a misfortune. Her
life a torture. Her death a horror. The missionary
of the cross to-day, in heathen lands, preaches gen-
erally to two groups a group of men who do as
they please, and sit where they please ; the other
group women, hidden and carefully secluded in a
side apartment, where they may hear the voice of
the preacher, but may not be seen. No refinement.
No liberty. No hope for this life. No hope for the
life to come. Ringed nose. Cramoed foot. Dis-
figured face. Embruted soul.
Now, compare those two conditions. How far
toward this latter condition would woman go if
Christian influences were withdrawn, and Christi-
anity were destroyed? It is only a question of
dynamics.
If an object be lifted to a certain point and not
fastened there, and the lifting power be withdrawn,
how long before that object will fall down to the
point from which it started ? It will fall down, and
it will go still further than the point from which it
started. Christianity has lifted women up from the
very depths of degradation almost to the skies. If
that lifting power be withdrawn, she falls clear back
to the depth from which she was resurrected, not
going any lower, because there is no lower depth.
If infidelity triumph, and Christianity be over-
thrown, it means the demoralization of society. The
one idea in the Bible that atheists and infidels most
hate, is the idea of retribution. Take away the idea
of retribution and punishment from society, and it
DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 247
will begin very soon to disintegrate ; and take away
from the minds of men the fear of hell, and there are
a great many of them who would very soon turn
this world into a hell.
The majority of those who are indignant against
the Bible because of the idea of a punishment are
men whose lives are bad or whose hearts are impure,
and who hate the Bible because of the idea of future
punishment for the same reason that criminals hate
the penitentiary. Oh, I have heard this brave talk
about people fearing nothing of the consequences of
sin in the next world, and I have made up my mind
it is merely a coward's whistling to keep his courage
up. I have seen men flaunt their immoralities in the
face of the community, and I have heard them defy
the Judgment Day and scoff at the idea of any future
consequence of their sin ; but when they came to die
they shrieked until you could hear them for nearly
two blocks, and in the summer night the neighbors
got up to put the windows down because they could
not endure the horror.
I would not want to see a railroad train with five
hundred Christian people on board go down through
a drawbridge into a watery grave. I would not
want to see five hundred Christian people go into
such disaster, but I tell you plainly that I could more
easily see that than I could for any protracted time
stand and see an infidel die, though his pillow were
of eider-down and under a canopy of vermilion. I
have never been able to brace up my nerves for such
a spectacle. There is something at such a time so
indescribable in the countenance. I just looked in
upon it for a minute or two, but the clutch of his fist
was so diabolic, and the strength of his voice was so
248 DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY.
unnatural, I could not endure it. " There is no hell,
there is no hell, there is no hell ! " the man had said
for sixty years; but that night when I looked into
the dying room of my infidel neighbor, there was
something on his countenance which seemed to say,
" There is, there is, there is, there is! "
The mightiest restraints to-day against theft, against
immorality, against libertinism, against crime of all
sorts the mightiest restraints are the retributions of
eternity. Men know that they can escape the law,
but down in the offender's soul there is the realization
of the fact that they cannot escape God. He stands
at the end of the road of profligacy, and He will not
clear the guilty. Take all idea of retribution and
punishment out of the hearts and minds of men, and
it would not be long before Brooklyn and New York
and Boston and Charleston and Chicaaro became
o
Sodoms. The only restraints against the evil pas-
sions of the world to-day are Bible restraints.
Suppose now these generals of Atheism and Infidel-
ity got the victory, and suppose the} 7 marshalled a
great army made up of the majority of the world.
They are in companies, in regiments, in brigades
the whole army. Forward, march! ye host of infidels
and atheists, banners flying before, banners flying be-
hind, banners inscribed with the words: " No God !
No Christ! No punishment ! No restraints! Down
with the Bible ! Do as you please !" The sun turned
into darkness. Forward, march! ye great army of
infidels and atheists. And first of all you will attack
the churches. Away with those houses of worship!
They have been standing there so long deluding the
people with consolation in their bereavements and
sorrows. All those churches ought to be extirpated ;
DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 249
they have done so much to relieve the lost and bring
home the wandering, and they have so long held up
the idea of eternal rest after the paroxysm of this life
is over. Turn the St. Peters and St. Pauls and the
temples and tabernacles into club-houses. Away
with those churches !
Forward, march ! ye great army of infidels and
atheists, and next of all they scatter the Sabbath-
schools ; the Sabbath-schools filled with bright-eyed,
bright-cheeked little ones who are singing songs on
Sunday afternoon, and getting instruction when they
ought to be on the street corners playing marbles, or
swearing on the commons. Away with them ! For-
ward, march ! ye great army of infidels and atheists,
and next of all they will attack Christian asylums the
institutions of mercy supported by Christian philan-
thropies. Never mind the blind eyes and the deaf ears
and the crippled limbs and the weakened intellects.
Let paralyzed old age pick up its own food, and
orphans fight their own way, and the half reformed
go back to their evil habits. Forward, march! ye
great army of infidels and atheists, and with your
battle-axes hew down the cross and split up the
manger of Bethlehem. Civilization hurled back into
semi-barbarism, and semi-barbarism driven back into
Hottentot savagery. The wheel of progress turned
the other way, and turned toward the dark ages.
The clock of the centuries put back two thousand
years. Go back, you Sandwich Islands, from your
schools and from your colleges and from your re-
formed condition to what you were in 1820, when
the missionaries first came. Call home the five hun-
dred missionaries from India and overthrow their
two thousand schools, where they are trying to edu-
250 DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY.
cate the heathen, and scatter the one hundred and
forty thousand little children that they have gathered
out of barbarism into civilization. Obliterate all the
work of Dr. Duff in India, of David Abeel in China,
of Dr. King in Greece, of Judson in Burmah, of
David Brainard amid the American aborigines, and
send home the three thousand missionaries of the
cross who are toiling in foreign lands, toiling for
Christ's sake, toiling themselves into the grave. Tell
these three thousand men of God that they are of no
use. Send home the medical missionaries who are
doctoring the bodies as well as the souls of the dying
nations. Go home, London Missionary Society.
Go home, American Board of Foreign Missions.
Go home, ye Moravians, and relinquish back into
darkness and squalor and filth and death the nations
whom ye have begun to lift.
A thousand voices come up to me saying : " Do
you really think Infidelity will succeed? Has
Christianity received its death-blow ? and will the
Bible become obsolete ? " Yes, when the smoke
of the city chimney arrests and destroys the noon-
day sun. Josephus says about the time of the
destruction of Jerusalem the sun was turned into
darkness; but only the clouds rolled between the
sun and the earth. The sun went right on. It is
the same sun, the same luminary as when at the
beginning it shot out like an electric spark from
God's finger, and to-day it is warming the nations,
and to-day it is gilding the sea, and to-day it is filling
the earth with light. The same old sun, not at all
worn out, though its light steps one hundred and
ninety million miles a second, though its pulsations
are four hundred and fifty trillion undulations in a
DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 2$ I
second. Same sun with beautiful white light made
up of the violet and the indigo and the blue and the
green and the red and the yellow and the orange
the seven beautiful colors now just as when the solar
spectrum first divided them.
At the beginning God said : '' Let there be light,"
and light was, and light is, and light shall be. So
Christianity is rolling on, and it is going to warm all
nations, and all nations are to bask in its light. Men
may shut the window blinds so they cannot see it, or
they may smoke the pipe of speculation until they
are shadowed under their own vaporing ; but the
Lord God is a sun ! This white light of the Gospel
made up of all the beautiful colors of earth and
heaven violet plucked from amid the spring grass,
and the indigo of the Southern jungles, and the blue
of the skies, and the green of the foliage, and the
yellow of the autumnal woods, and the orange of the
Southern groves, and the red of the sunsets. All the
beauties of earth and heaven brought out by this
spiritual spectrum. Great Britain is going to take
all Europe for God. The United States are going to
take all America for God. Both of them together
will take all Asia for God. All three of them will take
Africa for God. " Who art thou, oh great mountain ?
before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain." The
mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. Hallelujah,
amen!
CHAPTER XXV.
EVOLUTION.
There is no contest between genuine science and
revelation. The same God who, by the hand of
prophet .wrote on parchment, by the hand of the storm
wrote on the rock. The best telescopes and micro-
scopes and electric batteries and philosophical appa-
ratus belong" to Christian universities. Who gave us
magnetic telegraphy ? Professor Morse, a Christian.
Who swung the lightnings under the sea, cabling the
continents together? Cyrus W. Field, the Christian.
Who discovered the anassthetical properties of chlo-
roform, doing more for the relief of human pain than
any man that ever lived, driving back nine-tenths of
the horrors of surgery? James Y. Simpson, of Edin-
burgh, as eminent for piety as for science ; on week
days in the university lecturing on profoundest scien-
tific subjects, and on Sabbaths preaching the Gospel
of Jesus Christ to the masses of Edinburgh. I saw
the universities of that city draped in mourning for
his death, and I heard his eulogy pronounced by the
destitute populations of the Cowgate. Science and
revelation are the bass and the soprano of the same
tune. The whole world will yet acknowledge the
complete harmony. But between science falsely so
called and revelation, there is an uncompromising
war, and one or the other must go under. And
when I say scientists, of course, I do not mean liter-
252
EVOLUTION 253
ary men or theologians who in essay or in sermon,
and without giving their life to scientific investiga-
tion look at the subject on this side or that. By sci-
entists I mean those who have a specialty in that
direction, and who, through zoological garden and
aquarium and astronomical observatory, give their
life to the study of the physical earth, its plants and
its animals, and the regions beyond so far as optical
instruments have explored them.
I put upon the witness stand, living and dead, the
leading evolutionists Ernst Heckel, John Stuart
Mill, Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Spencer. On the
witness stand, ye men of science, living and dead,
answer these questions : Do you believe the Holy
Scriptures ? No. And so they say all. Do you be-
lieve the Bible story of Adam and Eve in the Gar-
den of Eden ? No. And so they say all. Do you
believe the miracles of the Old and New Testament?
No. And so they say all. Do you believe that Jesus
Christ died to save the nations ? No. And so they
say all. Do you believe in the regenerating power
of the Holy Ghost ? No. And so they say all. Do
you believe that human supplication directed heaven-
ward ever makes any difference ? No. And so they
say all.
Herbert Spencer, in the only address he made in
this country, in his very first sentence ascribes his
physical ailments to fate, and the authorized report of
that address begins the word fate with a big "F."
Professor Heckel, in the very first page of his two
great volumes sneers at the Bible as a so-called reve-
lation. Tyndall, in his famous prayer test, defied the
whole of Christendom to show that human supplica-
tion made any difference in the result of things.
254 EVOLUTION.
John Stuart Mill wrote elaborately against Christian-
ity, and to show that his rejection of it was complete,
ordered this epitaph for his tombstone: "Most un-
happv." Huxley said that at the first reading of
Darwin's book he was convinced of the fact that
teleology, by which he means Christianity, had re-
ceived its death-blow at the hand of Mr. Darwin. All
the leading scientists who believe in evolution, with-
out one exception the world over, are infidel. I say
nothing against infidelity, mind you ; I only wish to
define the belief and the meaning of the rejection.
Now, I put opposite to each other, to show that
evolution is infidelity, the Bible account of how the
human race started, and the evolutionist account as
to how the human race started. Bible account :
" God said, let us make man in our image. God
created man in his own image ; male and female
created He them." He breathed into him the breath
of life, the whole story setting forth the idea that it
was not a perfect kangaroo, or a perfect orang outang,
but a perfect man. That is- the Bible account. The
evolutionist account: Away back in the ages there
were four or five primal germs, or seminal spores
from which all the living creatures have been evolved.
Go away back, and there you will find a vegetable
stuff that might be called a mushroom. This mush-
room by innate force develops a tadpole, the tadpole
by innate force develops a poly wog, the poly wog de-
velops a fish, the fish by natural force develops into a
reptile, the reptile develops into a quadruped, the
quadruped develops into a baboon, the baboon de-
velops into a man."
Darwin says that the human hand is only a fish's
fin developed. He says that the human lungs are
EVOLUTION. 255
only a swim bladder showing that we once floated or
were amphibious. He says the human ear could
once have been moved by force of will just as a horse
lifts its ear at a frightful object. He says the human
race were originally web-footed. From primal germ
to tadpole, from tadpole to fish, from fish to reptile,
from reptile to wolf, from wolf to chimpanzee, and
from chimpanzee to man. Now, if anybody says that
the Bible account of the starting of the human race
and the evolutionist account of the starting of the
human race are the same accounts, he makes an ap-
palling misrepresentation.
Prefer, if you will, Darwin's " Origin of the
Species " to the book of Genesis, but know you are
an infidel. As for myself, as Herbert Spencer was
not present at the creation and the Lord Almighty
was present, I prefer to take the divine account as to
what really occurred on that occasion. To show that
this evolution is only an attempt to eject God, and
to postpone Him and to put Him clear out of reach,
I ask a question or two. The baboon made the man,
and the wolf made the baboon, and the reptile made
the quadruped, and the fish made the reptile, and
the tadpole made the fish, and the primal germ made
the tadpole. Who made the primal germ? Most of
the evolutionists say : " We don't know." Others
say it made itself. Others say it was spontaneous
generation. There is not one of them who will fairly
and openly, and frankly and emphatically say, " God
made it."
The nearest to a direct answer is that made by
Herbert Spencer, in which he says it was made by
the great " unknowable mystery." But here comes
Huxley with a pail of protoplasm to explain the
256 EVOLUTION.
thing. This protoplasm, he says, is primal life giving
quality with which the race away back in the ages
was started. With this protoplasm he proposes to
explain everything. Dear Mr. Huxlev, who made
the protoplasm ?
To show you that evolution is infidel, 1 place the
Bible account of how the brute creation was started
opposite to the evolutionist's account of the way the
brute creation was started. Bible account : You
know the Bible tells how that the birds were made at
one time, and the cattle made at another time, and
the fish made at another time, and that each brought
forth after its kind. Evolutionist account : From
four or five primal germs or seminal spores all the
living creatures evolved. Hundreds of thousands of
species of insects, of reptiles, of beasts, of fish, from
four germs a statement flatly contradicting, not only
the Bible, but the very A B C of science. A species
never develops into anything but its own species. In
all the ages, and in all the world there has never
been an exception to it. The shark never comes of a
whale, nor the pigeon of a vulture, nor the butterfly
of a wasp. Species never cross over. If there be an
attempt at it, it is hybrid and hybrid is always sterile
and has no descendants.
Agassiz says that he found in a reef of Florida, the
remains of insects thirty thousand years old not
three, but thirty thousand years old and that they
were just like the insects now. There has been no
change. All the facts of ornithology and zoology,
and ichthyology and conchology, but an echo of
Genesis first, and twenty-first; " Every winged fowl
after his kind." Every creature after its kind. When
common observation and science corroborate the
EVOLUTION. 257
Bible I will not stultify myself by surrendering- to the
elaborated guesses of evolutionists.
To show that evolution is infidel I place also the
Bible account of how worlds were made opposite the
evolutionists' account of how worlds were made.
Bible account : God made two great lights the one
to rule the day, the other to rule the night ; He made
the stars also. Evolutionist account : Away back
in the ages, there was a fire mist, or star dust, and
this fire mist cooled off into granite, and then this
granite by earthquake and by storm, and by light,
was shaped into mountains, and valleys, and seas, and
so what was originally fire mist, became what we call
the earth.
Who made the fire mist? Who set the fire mist to
world making? Who cooled off the fire mist into
granite? You have pushed God some sixty or
seventy million miles from the earth, but He is too
near yet for the health of evolution. For a great
while the evolutionists boasted that they had found
the very stuff out of which this world and all worlds
were made. They lifted the telescope and they saw
it, the very material out of which worlds made them-
selves. Nebula of simple gas. The} 7 laughed in tri-
umph because they had found the factory where the
worlds were manufactured, and there was no God
anywhere around the factory! But in an unlucky
hour for infidel evolutionists the spectroscope of
Fraunhofer and Kirchoff were invented, by which
they saw into that nebula, and found it was not a
simple gas, but was a compound, and hence had to
be supplied from some other source, and that implied
a God, and away went their theory, shattered into
everlasting demolition.
17
258 EVOLUTION.
So these infidel evolutionists go wandering up and
down guessing through the universe. Anything to
push back the Jehovah from His empire and make
the one book which is His great communication to
the soul of the human race, appear obselete and a de-
rision. But 1 am glad to know that while some of
these scientists have gone into evolution, there are
more that do not believe it. Among them, the man
who by most is considered the greatest scientist we
ever had this side the water Agassiz. A name
that makes every intelligent man the earth over
uncover.
Agassis says : " The manner in which the evolution
theory in zoology is treated would lead those who
are not special zoologists to suppose that observations
have been made by which it can be inferred that
there is in nature such a thing as change among
organized beings actually taking place. There is no
such thing on record. It is shifting the ground of
observation from one field of observation to another
to make this statement, and when the assertions go
so far as to exclude from the domain of science those
who will not be dragged into this mire of mere asser-
tion, then it is time to protest."
With equal vehemence against this doctrine of evo-
lution Hugh Miller, Farraday, Brewster, Dana, Daw-
son, and hundreds of scientists in this country and
other countries have made protest. I know that the
few men who have adopted the theory make more
noise than the thousands who have rejected it. The
Bothnia of the Cunard Line took five hundred pas-
sengers safely from New York to Liverpool. Not
one of the five hundred made any excitement. But
after we had been four days out, one morning we
EVOLUTION. 259
found on deck a man's hat and coat and vest and
boots, implying that some one had jumped overboard.
Forthwith we all began to talk about that one man.
There was more talk about that one man overboard
than all the five hundred passengers that rode on in
safety. " Why did he jump overboard ? " "I won-
der when he jumped overboard?" "I wonder if
when he jumped overboard he would like to have
jumped back again?" "I wonder if a fish caught
him, or whether he went clear down to the bottom of
the sea?" And for three or four days afterward we
talked about that poor man.
Here is the glorious and magnificent theory that
God by His omnipotent power made man, and by
His omnipotent power made the brute creation, and
by His omnipotent power made all -worlds, and five
thousand scientists have taken passage on board that
magnificent theory, but ten or fifteen have jumped
overboard. They make more talk than all the five
thousand that did not jump. I am politely asked to
jump with them. Thank you, gentlemen, I am very
much obliged to you. I think I shall stick to the old
Cunarder. If you want to jump overboard, jump,
and test for yourselves whether your hand was really
a fish's fin, and whether you were web-footed origi-
nally, and whether your lungs are a swim bladder.
And as in every experiment there must be a division
of labor, some who experiment and some who observe,
you make the experiment, and I will observe.
There is one tenet of evolution which it is de-
manded we adopt, that which Darwin calls "Natural
Selection," and that which Wallace calls the "Sur-
vival of the Fittest." By this they mean that the
human race and the brute creation are all the time
260 EVOLUTION.
improving, because the weak die and the strong live.
Those who do not die survive because they are the
fittest. They say the breed of sheep and cattle, and
dogs, and men, is all the time improving, natural! v
improving. No need of God, or any Bible, or any
religion, but just natural progress.
You see the race started with " spontaneous gene-
ration," and then it goes right on until Darwin can
take us up with his " natural selection," and Wallace
can take us up with his " survival of the fittest," and
so we go right on up forever. Beautiful ! But do
the fittest survive? Garfield dead in September
Guiteau surviving until the following June. " Survi-
val of the fittest?" Ah ! no. The martyrs, religious and
political, dying for their principles, their bloody per-
secutors living on to old age. " Survival of the. fit-
test?" Five hundred thousand brave Northern men
marching out to meet five hundred thousand brave
Southern men, and die on the battlefield for a prin-
ciple. Hundreds of thousands of them went down
into the grave trenches. We staid at home in com-
fortable quarters. Did they die because they were
not as fit to live as we who survived ? Ah ! no ; not
the "survival of the fittest." Ellsworth and Nathaniel
Lyon falling on the Northern side. Albert Sidney
Johnston and Stonewall Jackson falling on the South-
ern side. Did they fall because they were not as fit
to live as the soldiers and the generals who came
back in safety ? No. Bitten with the frosts of the
second death be the tongue that dares utter it ! It is
not the " survival of the fittest."
How has it been in the families of the world ? How
was it with the child physically the strongest, intel-
lectually the brightest, in disposition the kindest?
EVOLUTION. 26l
Did that child die because it was not as fit to live as
those of your family that survived ? Not the " sur-
vival of the fittest." In all communities some of the
noblest, grandest men dying in youth, or in mid-life,
while some of the meanest and most contemptible live
on to old age. Not the " survival of the fittest."
But to show you that this doctrine is antagonistic to
the Bible and to common sense, I have only to prove
to you that there has been no natural progress. Vast
improvement from another source, but mind you, no
natural progress. Where is the fine horse in any of
our parks whose picture of eye and mane, and nostril
and neck, and haunches is worthy of being compared
to Job's picture of a horse as he thousands of years ago
heard it paw, and neigh and champ its bit for the
battle ? Pigeons of to-day not so wise as the carrier
pigeons of five hundred years ago pigeons that car-
ried the mails from army to army and from city to
city ; one of them flung into the sky at Rome or
Venice landing without ship or rail train in London.
And as to the human race, so far as mere natural
progress is concerned, it started with men ten feet
high ; now the average is about five feet six inches.
It started with men living two hundred, four hun-
dred, eight hundred, nine hundred years, and now
thirty years is more than the average of human life.
Mighty progress we have made, haven't we ? I went
into the cathedral at York, England, and the best
artists in England had just been painting a window
in that cathedral, and right beside it was a window
painted four hundred years ago, and there is not a
man on earth but would say that the modern paint-
ing of the window by the best artists of England is
not worthy of being compared with the painting of
262 EVOLUTION.
four hundred years ago right beside it. Vast im-
provement, as I shall show you in a minute or two,
but no natural evolution.
I tell you, my friends, that natural evolution is not
upward, but it is always downward. Hear Christ's
account of it. Fifteenth Matthew, and nineteenth
verse: ''Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts,
murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness,
blasphemies." That is what Christ said of Evolution.
Give natural evolution full swing in our world and
it will evolve into two hemispheres of crime, two
hemispheres of penitentiary, two hemispheres of
lazaretto, two hemispheres of brothel. New York
Tombs, Moyamensing Prison, Philadelphia; Seven
Dials, London, and Cowgate, Edinburgh, only fester-
ing carbuncles on the face and neck of natural evolu-
tion. See what the Bible says about the heart, and
then what evolution says about the heart. Evolution
says, "Better and better and better gets the heart by
natural improvement." The Bible says: "The heart
is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."
Who can know it? When you can evolve fragrance
from malodor, and can evolve an oratorio from a
buzz-saw, and can evolve fall pippins from a basket
of decayed crab apples, then you can by natural evo-
lution from the human heart develop goodness. Ah !
my friends, evolution is always downward ; it is never
upward.
What is remarkable about this thing is, it is all the
time developing its dishonesty. In our day it is
ascribing this evolution to Herbert Spencer and
Charles Darwin. It is a dishonesty. Evolution was
known and advocated hundreds of years before these
gentlemen began to be evolved. The Phoenicians,
EVOLUTION. 263
thousands of years ago, declared that the human race
wobbled out of the mud. Democritus, who lived
460 years before Christ remember that knew this
doctrine of evolution, when he said : " Everything
is composed of atoms, or infinitely small elements,
each with a definite quality, form and movement,
whose inevitable union and separation, shape all dif-
ferent things and forms, laws and efforts, and dissolve
them again for new combinations. The gods them-
selves and the human mind originated from such
atoms. There are no casualties. Everything is neces-
sary and determined by the nature of the atoms which
have certain mutual affinities, attractions, and repul.
sions." Anoximander, centuries ago, declares that
the human race started at the place where the sea
saturated the earth. Lucretius develops long cen-
turies ago, in his poems, the doctrine of evolution.
It is an old heathen corpse set up in a morgue.
Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer are trying to
galvanize it. They drag this old putrefaction of three
thousand years around the earth, boasting that it is their
originality, and so wonderful is the infatuation that
at the Delmonico dinner given in honor of Herbert
Spencer there were those who ascribed to him this
great originality of evolution. There the banqueters
sat around the table in honor of Herbert Spencer,
chewing beef and turkey and roast pig, which, ac-
cording to their doctrine of evolution, made them
eating their own relations !
There is only one thing worse than Englisii snobbery,
and that is American snobbery. I like democracy
and I like aristocracy ; but there is one kind of ocracy
in this country that excites my contempt, and that is
what Charles Kingsley, after he had witnessed it
264 INVOLUTION.
himself, called snobocracy. Now 1 say it is a gigan-
tic dishonesty when they ascribe this old heathen
doctrine of evolution to any modern gentleman.
1 am not a pessimist but an optimist. I do not be-
lieve everything is going to destruction ; I believe
everything is going on to redemption. But it will
not be through the infidel doctrine of evolution, but
through our glorious Christianity which has effected
all the good that has ever been wrought, and which
is yet to reconstruct all the nations.
The Female Hottentot.
The Female Gorilla.
THE MISSING LINK.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE MISSING LINK.
It seems to me that evolutionists are trying to im-
press the great masses of the people with the idea
that there is an ancestral line leading from the primal
germ on up through the serpent, and on up through
the quadruped, and on up through the gorilla to man.
They admit that there is " a missing link," as they
call it, but there is not a missing link it is a whole
chain gone. Between the physical construction of
the highest animal and the physical construction of
the lowest man, there is a chasm as wide as the At-
lantic Ocean.
Evolutionists tell us that somewhere in Central
Africa, or in Borneo, there is a creature half-way
between the brute and the man, and that that creat-
ure is the highest step in the animal ascent, and the
lowest step in the human creation. But what are the
facts ? The brain of the largest gorilla that was ever
found is thirty cubic inches, while the brain of the
most ignorant man that was ever found is seventy.
Vast difference between thirty and seventy. It
needs a bridge of forty arches to span that gulf.
Beside that, there is a difference between the
gorilla and the man a difference of blood globule, a dif-
ference of nerve, a difference of muscle, a difference
of bone, a difference of sinew. The horse is more
like man in intelligence, the bird is more like him in
267
26,9 THE MISSING LINK.
musical capacity, the mastiff more like him in affec-
tion. That eulogized beast of which we hear so
much, represented on the walls of ancient cities
thousands of years ago, is just as complete as it is
now, showing that there has not been a particle of
change.
Beside that, if a pair of apes had a man for descend-
ant, why would not all the apes have the same kind
of descendants? Can it be that that one favored
pair only was honored with human progeny? Be-
side that, evolution says that as one species rises to
another species, the old type dies off. Then how is
it that there are whole kingdoms of chimpanzee and
gorilla and baboon ?
The evolutionists have come together and have
tried to explain a bird's wing. Their theory has al-
ways been that a faculty of an animal while being
developed must always be useful, and always bene-
ficial, but the wing of a bird, in the thousands of
years it was being developed, so far from being any
help, must have been a hindrance, until it could be
brought into practical use away on down in the ages.
Must there not have been an intelligent will some-
where that formed that wonderful flving instrument,
so that a bird five hundred times heavier than the air,
can mount it and put gravitation under claw and
beak? That wonderful mechanical instrument, the
wing, with between twenty and thirty different ap-
parati curiously constructed, does it not imply a
divine intelligence? Does it not imply a direct act of
some outside being ? All the evolutionists in the world
cannot explain a bird's wing, or an insect's wing.
So they are confounded by the rattle of the rattle-
snake. Ages before that reptile had any enemies,
THE MISSING LINK. 269
this warning weapon was created. Why was it
created ? When the reptile far back in the ages had
no enemies, why this warning weapon ? There must
have been a divine intelligence foreseeing and know-
ing that in the ages to come that reptile would have
enemies, and then this warning weapon would be
brought into use. You see evolution at every step is
a contradiction or a monstrosity. At every stage of
animal life, as well as at every stage of human life,
there is evidence of direct action of divine will.
Beside that, it is very evident from another fact
that we are an entirely different creation, and that there
is no kinship. The animal in a few hours or months
comes to full strength and can take care of itself.
The human race for the first one, two, three, five, ten
years, is incomplete helplessness. The chick just
come out of -its shell begins to pick up its own food.
The dog, the wolf, the lion, soon earn their own liveli-
hood and act for their own defence. The human
race does not come to development until twenty or
thirty years of age, and by that time the animals that
were born the same year the man was born the
vast majority of them have died of old age. This
shows there is no kinship, there is no similarity. If
we had been born of the beast, we would have had
the beast's strength at the start, or it would have had
our weakness. Not only different but opposite.
Darwin admits that the dovecote pigeon has not
changed in thousands of years. It is demonstrated
over and over again that the lizard on the lowest
formation of rocks was just as complete as the lizard
now. It is shown that the ganoid, the first fish, was
just as complete as the sturgeon, another name for
the same fish now. Darwin's entire system is a guess,
2/0 flip: MISSING LINK.
and Huxley, and John Stuart Mill, and Tyndall, and
especially Professor Heckel, come to help him in the
guess, and guess about the brute, and guess about
man, and guess about worlds, but as to having one
solid foot of ground to stand on, they never have had
it and never will have it.
I put in opposition to these evolutionist theories
the imvard consciousness that we have no consan-
guinity with the dog that fawns at our feet, or the
spider that crawls on the wall, or the fish that flops
in the frying pan, or the crow that swoops on the
Field carcass, or the swine that wallows in the mire.
Everybody sees the outrage it would be to put beside
the Bible record that Abraham begat Isaac, and
Isaac begat Jacob, and Jacob begat Judah, the record
that the microscopic animalculae begat the tadpole,
and the tadpole begat the poly wog, and the poly wog
begat the serpent, and the serpent begat the quad-
ruped, and the quadruped begat the baboon, and the
baboon begat man.
The evolutionists tell us that the apes were origi-
nally fond of climbing the trees, but after a while they
lost their prehensile power, and therefore could not
climb with any facility, and hence they surrendered
monkeydom and set up in business as men. Failures
as apes, successes as men. According to the evolu-
tionists a man is a bankrupt monkey ! I pity the
person who in every nerve and muscle and bone and
mental faculty and spiritual experience does not real-
ize that he is higher in origin, and has had a grander
ancestry than the beasts which perish. However de-
graded men and women may be, and though they
may have foundered on the rocks of crime and sin,
and though we shudder as we pass them, neverthe-
THE MISSING LINK. 2/1
less, there is something within us that tells us they
belong to the same great brotherhood and sisterhood
of our race, and our sympathies are aroused in regard
to them. But gazing upon the swiftest gazelle, or
upon the tropical bird of most flamboyant wing, or
upon the curve of grandest courser's neck, we feel
there is no consanguinity. The grandest, the highest,
the noblest of them is ten thousand fathoms below
what we are conscious of being.
It is not that we are stronger than they, for the
lion with one stroke of his paw could put us into the
dust. It is not that we have better eyesight, for the
eagle can descry a mole a mile away. It is not that
we are fleeter of foot, for a roebuck in a flash is out
of sight, just seeming to touch the earth as he goes.
Many of the animal creation surpass us in fleetness
of foot and in keenness of nostril, and in strength
of limb ; but notwithstanding all that, there is some-
thing within us that tells us we are of celestial pedi-
gree. Not of the mollusk, not of the rizipod, not of
the primal germ, but of the living and omnipotent
God. Lineage of the skies. Genealogy of Heaven.
I tell you plainly, that if your father was a musk-
rat and your mother an opossum, and your great
aunt a kangaroo, and the toads and the snapping tur-
tles were your illustrious predecessors, my father
was God. I know it. I feel it. It thrills through
me with an emphasis and an ecstasy which all your
arguments drawn from anthropology and biology and
zoology and morology and paleontology and all the
other ologies, can never shake.
Evolution is one great mystery. It hatches out
fifty mysteries, and the fifty hatch out a thousand,
and the thousand hatch out a million. Why, my
272 THE MISSINd LINK.
brother, not admit the one great mystery of God, and
have that settle all the other mysteries? I can more
easily appreciate the fact that God, by one stroke of
His omnipotence could make man, than I could
realize ho\v, out of five millions of ages, He could
have evolved one, putting on a little here and a little
there. It would have been just as great a miracle
for God to have turned an orang-outang into a man
as to make a man out and out the one job just as big
as the other.
It seems to me we had better let God have a little
place in our world somewhere. It seems to me if we
cannot have Him make all creatures, we had better
have Him make two or three. There ought to be
some place where He could stay without interfering
with the evolutionists. " No," says Darwin, and so
for years he is trying to raise fan-tailed pigeons, and
to turn these fan-tail pigeons into some other kind of
pigeon, or to have them go into something that is not
a pigeon turning them into quail, or barnyard fowl,
or brown thresher. But pigeon it is. And others
have tried with the ox and the dog and the horse,
but they stayed in their species. If they attempt to
cross over it is a hybrid, and a hybrid is always sterile
and goes into extinction. There has been only one
successful attempt to pass over from speechless ani-
mal to the articulation of man, and that was the at-
tempt which Baalam witnessed in the beast that he
rode ; but an angel of the Lord, with drawn sword,
soon stopped that long-eared evolutionist.
But, says some one, "If we can not have God make
a man let us have Him make a horse." " Oh, no!"
says Huxley, in his great lectures in New York several
years ago. No, he does not want any God around
THE MISSING LINK. 2/3
the premises. God did not make the horse. The
horse came of the pliohippus, and the pliohippus
came from the protohippus, and the protohippus
came from the mio-hippus, and the mio-hippus came
from the meshohippus, and the meshohippus came
from the orohippus, and so away back, all the living
creatures, we trace it in a line, until we get to the
moneron, and no evidence of divine intermeddling
with the creation until you get to the moneron, and
that, Huxley says, is of so low a form of life that the
probability is it just made itself, or was the result of
spontaneous generation. What a narrow escape from
the necessity of having a God.
As near as I can tell, these evolutionists seem to
think that God at the start had not made up His mind
as to exactly what He would make, and having made
up his mind partially. He has been changing it all
through the ages. I believe God made the world as
He wanted to have it, and that the happiness of all
the species will depend upon their staying in the
species where they were created.
But, my friends, evolution is not only infidel and
atheistic and absurd ; it is brutalizing in its tendencies.
If there is anything in the world that will make a
man bestial in his habits it is the idea that he was
descended from the beast. Why, according to the
idea of these evolutionists, we are only a superior
kind of cattle, a sort of Alderney among other herds.
To be sure, we browse on better pasture, and we
have better stall and better accommodations, but then
we are only Southdowns among the great flocks of
sheep. Born of a beast, to die like a beast ; for the
evolutionists have no idea of a future world. The y
say the mind is only a superior part of the body.
18
274 THE MISSIM; LINK.
They say our thoughts are only molecular formation.
They say when the body dies, the whole nature dies.
The slab of the sepulchre is not a milestone on a
journey upward, but a wall shutting us into eternal
nothingness. We all die alike the cow, the horse,
the sheep, the man, the reptile. Annihilation is the
heaven of the evolutionist.
From such a stench ful and damnable doctrine turn
away. Compare that idea of your origin an idea
filled with the chatter of apes, and the hiss of ser-
pents, and the croak of frogs to an idea in one or
two stanzas which I shall read to you from an old
book of more than Demosthenic, or Homeric, or
Dantesque power: "What is man, that x thou art
mindful of him ? and the son of man, that thou visit-
est him ? Thou hast made him a little lower than
the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and
honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over
the works of thy hand ; thou hast put all things
under his feet. All sheep and oxen, yea, and the
beasts of the field ; the fowl of the air, and the fish
of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths
of the seas. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how excellent is
Thy name in all the earth."
How do you like that origin? The lion the mon-
arch of the field, the eagle the monarch of the air,
behemoth the monarch of the deep, but man monarch
of all. Ah! my friends, I have to say to you that I
am not so anxious to know what was my origin as to
know what will be my destiny. I do not care so
much where I came from as where I am going to. I
am not so interested in who was my ancestry ten
million years ago as I am to know where I will be
ten million years from now. I am not so much inter-
THE MISSING LINK. 2/$
ested in the preface lo my cradle as I am interested
in the appendix to my grave. I do not care so much
about protoplasm as I do about eternasm. The " was "
is overwhelmed with the "to be." And here comes
in the evolution I believe in : not natural evolution,
but gracious and divine and heavenly evolution evo-
lution out of sin into holiness, out of grief into glad-
ness, out of mortality into immortality, out of earth
into heaven ! That is the evolution I believe in.
Evolution from evolvere, unrolling ! Unrolling of
attributes, unrolling of rewards, unrolling of exper-
ience, unrolling of angelic companionship, unrolling
of divine glory, unrolling of providential obscurities,
unrolling of doxologies, unrolling of rainbow to
canopy the throne, unrolling of a new heaven and a
new earth in which to dwell righteousness. Oh, the
thought overwhelms me. I have not the physical
endurance to consider it.
Monarchs on earth of all lower orders of creation,
and then lifted to be hierarchs in Heaven. Master-
piece of God's wisdom and goodness, our humanity ;
masterpiece of divine grace, our enthronement. I
put one foot on Darwin's " Origin of the Species,"
and I put the other foot on Spencer's " Biology," and
then holding in one hand the book of Moses 1 see our
Genesis, and holding in the other hand the book of
Revelation, I see our celestial arrival. For all wars
I prescribe the Bethlehem chant of the angels. For
all sepulchres 1 prescribe the archangel's trumpet.
For all the earthly griefs I prescribe the hand that,
wipes away all tears from all eyes. Not an evolution
from beast to man, but an evolution from contestant /<>
conqueror, and from the struggle with wild beasts in
the arena of the amphitheatre to a soft, high, blissful
seat in the King's galleries.
CHAPTER XXVII.
EVANGELISM VINDICATED.
Domitian, the Roman Emperor, had in his realm
a troublesome evangelist who would keep preaching,
and so he exiled him to a barren island, as now the
Russians exile convicts to Siberia, or as sometimes
the English Government used to send prisoners to
Australia. The island I speak of is now called Pat-
mos, and is so barren and unproductive that its
inhabitants live by fishing.
But one day the evangelist of whom I speak, sit-
ting at the mouth of a cavern on the hill-side, and
perhaps half asleep under the drone of the sea, has a
supernatural dream, and before him pass, as in pano-
rama, time and eternity. Among the strange things
that he saw was an angel with a little book in his
hand, and in his dream the evangelist asked for this
little book, and the angel gave it to him, and told
him to eat it up. As in a dream things are sometimes
incongruous, the evangelist took the little book and
ate it up. The angel told him beforehand that it
would be very sweet in the mouth, but afterward he
would be troubled with indigestion. True enough,
the evangelist devours the book, and it becomes to
him a sweetness during the mastication, but after-
ward a physical bitterness.
Who the angel was and what the book was no one
can tell. The commentators do not agree, and I shall
276
EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 277
take no responsibility of interpretation, but will tell
you that it suggests to me the little book of creeds,
which skeptics take and chew up and find a very
luscious morsel to their witticism, but after awhile
it is to them a great distress. The angel of the
church hands out this little book of evangelism, and
the antagonists of the Christian Church take it and
eat it up, and it makes them smile at first, but after-
ward it is to them a dire dyspepsia.
All intelligent people have creeds that is, favorite
theories which they have adopted. Political creeds
that is, theories about tariff, about finance, about
civil service, about government. Social creeds
that is, theories about manners and customs and
good neighborhood. ^Esthetical creeds that is,
theories about tapestry, about bric-a-brac, about styles
of ornamentation. Religious creeds that is, theories
about the Deity, about the soul, about the great
future. The only being who has no creed about any-
thing is the idiot. This scoffing against creeds is
always a sign of profound ignorance on the part of
the scoffer, for he has himself a hundred creeds in
regard to other things. In our time the beliefs of evan-
gelistic churches are under a fusilade of caricature
and misrepresentation. Men set up what they call
orthodox faith, and then they rake it with the mus-
ketry of their denunciation. They falsify what the
Christian churches believe. They take evangelical
doctrines and set them in a harsh and repulsive way,
and put them out of the association with other truths.
They are like a mad anatomist who, desiring to tell
what a man is, dissects a human body and hangs up
in one place the heart, and in another place the two
lungs, and in another place an ankle bone, and says
2/8 EVANGELISM VINDICATED.
that is a man. They are only fragments of a man
wrenched out of their God-appointed places.
Evangelical religion is a healthy, symmetrical, well-
jointed, roseate, bounding life, and the scalpel and
dissecting knife of the infidel or the atheist cannot
tell you what it is. Evangelical religion is as differ--
ent from what it is represented to be by these ene-
mies, as the scarecrow, which the farmer puts in the
cornfield to keep off the ravens, is different from the
farmer himself.
For instance, these enemies of evangelism say that
the Presbyterian Church believes that God is a sav-
age sovereign, and that He made some men just to
damn them, and that there are infants in hell a span
long. These old slanders come down from genera-
tion to generation. The Presbyterian Church be-
lieves no such thing. The Presbyterian Church
believes that God is a loving and just sovereign, and
that we are free agents. " No, no ! that cannot be,"
say these men who have chewed up the creed, and
have the consequent embittered stomachs. " That is
impossible ; if God is a sovereign, we can't be free
agents." Why, my friends, we admit this in every
other direction. I, De Witt Talmage, am a free cit-
izen of Brooklyn. I go when I please, and I come
when I please, but I have at least four sovereigns.
The Church Court of our denomination ; that is my
ecclesiastical sovereign. The mayor of this city ; he
is my municipal sovereign. The governor of New
York; he is my state sovereign. The president
of the United States ; he is my national sovereign.
Four sovereigns have I, and yet in every faculty of
body, mind, and soul, I am a free man. So, you see,
it is possible that the two doctrines go side by side,
EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 2/9
and there is a common-sense way of presenting it, and
there is a way that is repulsive. If you have the two
doctrines in a worldly direction, why not in a reli-
gious direction ? If I choose to-morrow morning to
walk into the Mercantile Library, and improve my
mind, or to go through the conservatory of my
friend at Jamaica, who has flowers from all lands
growing under the arches of glass, and who has an
aquarium all a-squirm with trout and gold fish, and
there are trees bearing oranges and bananas if I want
to go there, I could. I am free to go. If I want to go
over to Hoboken, and leap into a furnace of an oil fac-
torv, if I want to jump from the platform of the Phila-
delphia express train, if I want to leap from Brooklyn
bridge, I may. But suppose I should go to-morrow,
and leap into the furnace at Hoboken, who would be to
blame ? That is all there is about sovereignty and
free agency. God rules and reigns, and He has con-
servatories, and He has blast furnaces. If you want
to walk in the gardens, walk there. If you want to
leap into the furnaces, you may.
Suppose now, a man had a charmed key with
which he could open all the jails, and he should open
Raymond Street Jail, and the New York Tombs,
and all the prisons on the continent. In three weeks
what kind of a country would this be? all the inmates
turned out of those prisons and penitentiaries. Sup-
pose all the reprobates, the bad spirits, the outrageous
spirits, should be turned into the New Jerusalem.
Why, the next morning the gates of pearl would be
found off hinge, the linchpin would be gone out of
the chariot wheels, the " house of many mansions "
would be burglarized. Assault and battery, arson,
libertinism, and assassination would reside in the
280 EVANGELISM VINDICATED.
capital of the skies. Angels of God would be in-
sulted on the streets. Heaven would be a dead fail-
ure if there were no great lock-up, if all people,
without regard to their character, when they leave
this world, go right into glory.
1 wonder if, in the temple of the skies, Charles
Guiteau and John Wilkes Booth occupy the same
pew! Your common-sense demands two destinies!
And then, as to the Presbyterian Church believing
there are infants in perdition, if you will bring me a
Presbyterian of good morals and sound mind who
will say that he believes there ever was a baby in the
lost world, or ever will be, I will make him a deed to
all my property, and he can take possession to-
morrow.
So the Episcopalian Church is misrepresented by-
the enemies of evangelism. They say thai, church sub-
stitutes forms and ceremonies for heart religion, and
it is all a matter of liturgy and genuflexion. False
again. All Episcopalians will tell you that the forms
and creeds of their church are worse than nothing
unless the heart go with them.
So also the Baptist Church has been misrepresented.
The enemies of evangelism say the Baptist Church
believes that unless a man is immersed he will never
get into heaven. False again. All the Baptists, close
communion and open communion, believe that if a
man accept the Lord Jesus Christ he will be saved,
whether he be baptized by one drop of water on the
forehead, or be plunged into the Ohio or Susque-
hanna, although immersion is the only gate by which
one enters their earthly communion.
The enemies of evangelism also misrepresent the
Methodist Church. They say the Methodist Church
EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 28 1
believes that a man can convert himself, and that con-
version in that church is a temporary emotion, and
that all a man has to do is to kneel down at the altar
and feel bad, and then the minister pats him on the
back and says, " It is all right," and that is all there is
of it. False again. The Methodist Church believes
that the Holy Ghost alone can convert a heart, and
in that church conversion is an earthquake of convic-
tion, and a sunburst of pardon. And as to mere
" temporary emotion," I wish we all had more of the
" temporary emotion " which lasted Bishop Janes and
Matthew Simpson for a half century, keeping them
on fire for God until their holy enthusiasm consumed
their bodies.
So all the evangelical denominations are misrepre-
sented. And then these enemies of evangelism go
on and hold up the great doctrines of the Christian
Churches as absurd, dry, and inexplicable technical-
ities. " There is your doctrine of the Trinity," they
say. " Absurd beyond all bounds. The idea that
there is a God in three persons ! Impossible. If it
is one God He can't be three, and if there are three,
they can't be one." At the same time all of us they
with us acknowledge trinities all around us. Trin-
ity in our own make-up body, mind, soul. Body
with which we move, mind with which we think,
soul with which we love. Three, yet one man.
Trinity in the air light, heat, moisture yet one
atmosphere. Trinity in the court room three
judges on the bench, but one court. Trinities all
around about us, in earthly government and in na-
ture. Of course, all the illustrations are defective
for the reason that the natural cannot fully illustrate
the spiritual. But suppose an ignorant man should
282 EVANGELISM VINDICATED.
come up to a chemist and say : " I deny what you
say about the water and about the air ; they are not
made of different parts. The air is one ; I breathe it
every day. The water is one ; I drink it every day.
You can't deceive me about the elements that go to
make up the air and the water." The chemist would
say : " You come up into my laboratory and I will
demonstrate this whole thing to you." The ignorant
man goes into the chemist's laboratory, and sees for
himself. He learns that the water is one and the air
is one, but they are made up of different parts. So
here is a man who says: "I can't understand the
doctrine of the Trinity." God says: " You come up
here into the laboratory after your death, and you
will see you will see it explained, you will see it
demonstrated." The ignorant man cannot under-
stand the chemistry of the water and the air until he
goes into the laboratory, and we will never under-
stand the Trinity until we go into heaven. The
ignorance of the man who cannot understand the
chemistry of the air and water does not change the
fact in regard to the composition of air and water.
Because we cannot understand the Trinity, does that
change the fact ?
"And there is your absurd doctrine about justifica-
tion by faith," say these antagonists who have chewed
up the little book of evangelism, and have the con-
sequent embittered stomach "justification by faith ;
you can't explain it." I can explain it. It is simply
this: When a man takes the Lord Jesus Christ as his
Saviour from sin, God lets the offender off. Just as
you have a difference with some one, he has injured
you, he apologizes or he makes reparation, you say,
" Now, that's all right, that's all right." Justification
EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 283
by faith is this : A man takes Jesus Christ as his
Saviour, and God says to the man, " Now, it was all
wrong before, but it is all right now ; it is all right."
That was what made Martin Luther what he was.
Justification by faith, it is going to conquer all
nations.
" There is your absurd doctrine about regenera-
tion," these antagonists of evangelism say. What is
regeneration? Why, regeneration is reconstruction.
Anybody can understand that. Have you not seen
people who are all made over again by some wonder-
ful influence? In other words, they are just as differ-
ent now from what they used to be as possible. The
old Constellation, man-of-war, lay down here at the
Brooklyn Navy Yard. Famine came to Ireland.
The old Constellation was fitted up, and though it
had been carrying gunpowder and bullets it took
bread to Ireland. You remember the enthusiasm as
the old Constellation went out of our harbor, and
with what joy it was greeted by the famishing nation
on the other side the sea. That is regeneration. A
man loaded up with sin and death loaded up with
life. Refitted. Your observation has been very
small indeed if you have not seen changes in charac-
ters as radical as that.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY.
The Bible is not only divinely inspired, but it is
divinely protected in its present shape. You could
as easily, without detection, take from the writings of
Shakspeare Hamlet, and institute in place thereof
Alexander Smith's drama, as at any time during the
last fifteen hundred years a man could have made any
important change in the Bible without immediate de-
tection. If there had been an element of weakness
or of deception, or of disintegration, the Book would
long ago have fallen to pieces. If there had been
one loose brick or cracked casement in this castellated
truth, surely the bombardment of eight centuries
would have discovered and broken through that im-
perfection. The fact that the Bible stands intact,
notwithstanding all the furious assaults on all sides
upon it, is proof to me that it is a miracle, and every
miracle is of God.
" But," say some, " do you really think the Scrip-
tures are inspired thought ? " Yes, either as history
or as guidance. Gibbon and Josephus and Prescott
record in their histories a great many things they did
not approve of. When George Bancroft put upon
his brilliant historical page the account of an Indian
massacre, does he approve of that massacre? There
are scores of things in the Bible which neither God
nor inspired men sanctioned. Either as history or
284
SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 285
as guidance, the entire Bible was inspired of God.
" But," says some one, " don't you think that the
copyists might have made mistakes in transferring
the divine words from one manuscript to another?"
Yes, no doubt there were such mistakes ; but they no
more affect the meaning of the Scriptures than the
misspelling of a word or the ungrammatical structure
of a sentence in a last will and testament affect the
validity or the meaning of that will. All the mis-
takes made by the copyists in the Scriptures do not
amount to any more importance than the difference
between your spelling in a document the word forty,
forty or fourty. This book is the last will and testa-
ment of God to our lost world, and it bequeaths
everything in the right way, although human hands
may have damaged the grammar or made unjustifia-
ble interpolation.
These men who pride themselves in our day on
being advanced thinkers in Biblical interpretation will
all of them end in atheism, if they live long enough,
and I declare here to-day they are doing more in the
different denominations of Christians, and throughout
the world, for damaging Christianity and hindering
the cause of the world's betterment, than five thou-
sand Robert Ingersolls could do. That man who
stands inside a castle is far more dangerous if he be
an enemy than five thousand enemies outside the
castle. Robert G. Ingersoll assails the castle from
the outside. These men who pretend to be advanced
thinkers in all the denominations are fighting the
truth from the inside, and trying to shove back the
bolts and swing open the gates.
Now, I am in favor of the greatest freedom of
religious thought and discussion. I would have as
286 SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY.
much liberty for heterodoxy as for orthodoxy. If 1
should change my theories of religion I should
preach them out and out, but not in this building,
for this was erected by people who believe in an
entire Bible, and it would be dishonest for me to
promulgate sentiments different from those for which
this building was put up. When we enter an)*
denomination as ministers of religion we take a
solemn vow that we will preach the sentiments of
that denomination. If we change our theories, as
we have a right to change them, then there is a world
several thousand miles in circumference, and there
are hundreds of halls and hundreds of academies of
music where we can ventilate our sentiments.
I remember that in these cities, in time of political
agitation, there are the Republican headquarters and
the Democratic headquarters. Suppose I should go
into one of these headquarters pretending to be in
sympathy with their work, at the same time elec-
tioneering for the opposite party. I would soon find
that the centrifugal force was greater than the cen-
tripetal. Now, if a man enters a denomination of
Christians, taking a solemn oath, as we all do, that
we will promulgate the theories of that denomi-
nation, and then the man shall proclaim some other
theory, he has broken his oath, and he is an out-and-
out perjurer. Nevertheless, I declare for largest
liberty in religious discussion. I would no more
have the present attempt to rear a monument to
Thomas Paine in New York interfered with than I
would have interfered with the lifting of the splendid
monument to Washington in Wall Street. Largest
liberty for the body, largest liberty for the mind,
largest liberty for the soul.
SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 287
Now, I want to show you, as a matter of advocacy
for what I believe to be the right, the splendors of
orthodoxy. Many have supposed that its disciples
are people of flat skulls, and no reading, and behind
the age, and the victims of gullibility. I shall show
you that the word orthodoxy stands for the greatest
splendors outside of heaven. Behold the splendors of
its achievements. All the missionaries of the Gos-
pel, the world round, are men who believe in an
entire Bible. Call the roll of all the missionaries
who are to-day enduring sacrifices in the ends of the
earth for the cause of religion and the world's better-
ment, and they all believe in an entire Bible. Just
as soon as a missionary begins to doubt whether
there ever was a Garden of Eden, or whether there
is any such thing as future punishment, he comes
right home from Beyrout or Madras, and goes into
the insurance business ! All the missionary societies
of this day are officered by orthodox men, and are
supported by orthodox churches.
Orthodoxy, beginning with the Sandwich Islands,
has captured vast regions of barbarism for civiliza-
tion, while heterodoxy has to capture the first square
inch. Blatant for many years in Great Britain and
the United States, and strutting about with a pea-
cockian braggadocio, it has yet to capture the first
continent, the first State, the first township, the first
ward, the first space of ground as big as you could
cover with the small end of a sharp pin. Ninety-
nine out of every hundred of the Protestant churches
of America were built by people who believed in an
entire Bible. The pulpit now may preach some
other Gospel, but it is a heterodox gun on an ortho-
dox carriage. The foundations of all the churches
288 SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY.
that are of very great use in this world to-day, were
laid by men who believed the Bible from lid to lid,
and if I can not take it in that way, I will not take it
at all.
No church of very great influence to-day but was
built by those who believe in an entire Bible. Nei-
ther will a church last long built on a part of the
Bible. You have noticed, I suppose, that as soon as
a man begins to give up the Bible, he is apt to preach
in some hall, and he has an audience while he lives,
and when he dies, the church dies. If I thought that
this church was built on a quarter of a Bible, or a
half of a Bible, or three-quarters of a Bible, or ninety-
nine one-hundredths of a Bible, I would expect it to
die when I die ; but when I know it is built on the
entire Word of God, I know it will last two hundred
years after you and I sleep the last sleep. Oh, the
splendors of an orthodoxy which, with ten thousand
hands and ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand
Christian churches, is trying to save the world !
Behold the splendors of character built by ortho-
doxy. Who had the greatest human intellect the
world ever knew ? Paul. In physical stature insig-
nificant ; in mind, head and shoulders above all the
giants of the age. Orthodox from scalp to heel.
Who was the greatest poet the ages ever saw,
acknowledged to be so both by infidels and Chris-
tians? John Milton, seeing more without eyes than
anybody else ever saw with eyes. Orthodox from
scalp to heel. Who was the greatest reformer the
world has ever seen ? so acknowledged by infidels as
well as by Christians. Martin Luther. Orthodox
from scalp to heel.
Then look at the certitudes. O man, believing in
SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 289
an entire Bible, where did you come from ? Answer:
" I descended from a perfect parentage in Paradise,
and Jehovah breathed into my nostrils the breath of
life. I am a son of God." O man, believing in a
half-and-half Bible believing in a Bible in spots,
where did you come from ? Answer : " It is all un-
certain ; in my ancestral line away back there was an
orang-outang and a tadpole and a polywog, and it
took millions of years to get me evoluted." O man,
believing in a Bible in spots, where are you going to
when you quit this world ? Answer : " Going into
a great to be, so on into the great somewhere, and
then I shall pass through on to the great anywhere,
and I shall probably arrive in the nowhere." That is
where I thought you would fetch up. O man, believ-
ing in an entire Bible, and believing with all your
heart, where are you going to when you leave this
world? Answer: "I am going to my Father's
house ; I am going into the companionship of my
loved ones who have gone before ; I am going to leave
all my sins, and I am going to be with God and like
God forever and forever." Oh, the glorious certi-
tudes, certainties of orthodoxy !
Behold the splendors of orthodoxy in its announce-
ment of two destinies.
Palace and penitentiary. Palace with gates on all
sides through which all may enter and live on celes-
tial luxuries world without end, and all for the knock-
ing and the asking. A palace grander than if all the
Alhambras and the Versailles and the Windsor castles
and the winter gardens and the imperial abodes of all
the earth were heaved up into one architectural glory.
At the other end of the universe a penitentiary where
men who want their sins can have them. Would it
19
290 SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY.
be fair that you and I should have our choice of
Christ and the palace, and other men be denied their
choice of sin and eternal degradation? Palace and
penitentiary. The first of no use unless you have the
last. Brooklyn and New York would be better places
to live in with Raymond Street Jail and the Tombs
and Sing Sing, and all the small-pox hospitals emptied
on us than heaven would be if there were no hell.
Palace and penitentiary. If I see a man with a full
bowl of sin, and he thirsts for it, and his whole nature
craves it, and he takes hold with both hands and
presses that bowl to his lips, and then presses it hard
between his teeth, and the draught begins to pour its
sweetness down his throat, shall we snatch away the
bowl and jerk the man up to the gate of heaven, and
push him in if he does not want to go and sit down
and sing psalms forever? No. God has made you
and me so completely free that we need not go to
heaven unless we prefer it. Not more free to soar
than free to sink.
Young men, old men, middle aged men, take sides
in this contest between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
" Ask for the old paths, walk therein, and ye shall
find rest for your souls." But you follow this cru-
sade against any part of the Bible first of all you
will give up Genesis, which is as true as Matthew;
then you will give up all the historical parts of the
Bible ; then after a while you will give up the mira-
cles ; then you will find it convenient to give up the
Ten Commandments: and then after a while you will
wake up in a fountainless, rockless, treeless desert
swept of everlasting sirocco. If you are laughed at
you can afford to be laughed at for standing by the
Bible, just as God has given it to you and miracu-
lously preserved it.
SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 2QI
Do not jump overboard from the staunch old
Great Eastern of old-fashioned orthodoxy until there
is something ready to take you up stronger than the
fantastic yawl which has painted on the side, " Ad-
vanced Thought," and which leaks at the prow and
leaks at the stern, and has a steel pen for one oar and
a glib tongue for the other oar, and now tips over
this way and then tips over that way, until you do
not know whether the passengers will land in the
breakers of despair or on the sinking sand of infidelity
and atheism.
I am in full sympathy with the advancements of
our time, but this world will never advance a single
inch beyond this old Bible. God was just as capable
of dictating the truth to the prophets and apostles
as he is cap'able of dictating the truth to these mod-
ern apostles and prophets. God has not learned
anything in a thousand years. He knew just as
much when He gave the first dictation as He does
now, giving the last dictation, if He is giving any
dictation at all. So I will stick to the old paths. I
prefer the thick, warm robe of the old religion old
as God the robe which has kept so many warm amid
the cold pilgrimage of this life, and amid the chills
of death. The old robe rather than the thin, uncer-
tain gauze offered us by these wise-acres who believe
the Bible in spots.
CHAPTER XXIX.
MENDING THE BIBLE.
" If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this
prophecv, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and
out of the holy city." REV. 22: 19.
You see it is a very risky business, this changing of
the Holy Scriptures.
A pulpit in New York has recently set forth the
idea that the Scriptures ought to be expurgated, that
portions of them are unfit to be read, and the inspi-
ration of much of the Bible has been denied. Among
other striking statements are these :
The Book of Genesis is a tradition of creation, a
successive layer of traditions thought out centuries
before. Moses' mistakes about creation were the
mistakes of his age. Thai there are many systems of
theology in the New Testament. That Paul had all
the notions of the rabbinical schools of his time.
That Job winds up his epilogue in genuine fairy-tale
style. That Revelation is a long array of misshapen
progeny in the apocalyptic writings, tracing them-
selves back to Daniel. That Revelation comes to a
madman, or leaves him mad. That what he calls the
abominable lewdness of some things in the Old Tes-
tament is not fit to be read. That it is an abominable
misuse of the Bible to suppose the prophecies really
foretell future events. That the book of Daniel is
not in the right place. That Solomon's Songs are not
292
MENDING THE BIBLE. 293
in the right place, and he seems to applaud the idea
of some one who said that the book of Solomon's
Songs ought not to be in any one's hands under thirty
years of age. He intimates that he does not believe
that Samson slew a thousand men with the jawbone
of an ass. That the whole Bible has been improperly
chopped up into chapters and verses.
He does not believe the beginning of the Bible,
and he does not believe the close of it, nor anything
between as fully inspired of God, and he thinks the
Book ought to be expurgated, and there are those
who re-echo the same sentiment.
Now, I believe in the largest liberty of discussion,
aud there are halls, and opera-houses, and academies
of music, where the Bible and Christianity may be
assaulted without interruption ; but when a minister
of the Gospel surrenders the faith of any denomi-
nation, his first plain, honest duty, is to get out of it.
What would you think of the clerk in a dry-goods
store, or a factory, or a banking-house, who should go
to criticising the books of the firm, and denouncing
the behavior of the firm, still taking the salarv of that
firm and the support of that firm, and doing all his
denunciation of the books of the firm under its cover?
Certainly, a minister of the Gospel ought to be as
honest with his denomination, as a dry-goods clerk is
honest with his employers.
The heinousness of finding fault with the Bible at
this time by a Christian minister is most evident. In
our day the Bible is assailed by scurrility, by mis-
representation, by infidel scientist, bv all the vice of
earth and all the venom of perdition, and at this par-
ticular time ministers of religion fall into line of crit-
icism of the Word of God. Why, it makes me think
294 MENDING THE BIBLE.
of a ship in a September equinox, the waves dashing
to the top of the smoke-stack, and the hatches
fastened down, and many prophesying the founder-
ing of the steamer, and at that time some of the
crew with axes and saws go down into the hold of
the ship, and try to saw off some of the planks and
pry out some of the timbers because the timber did
not come from the right forest ! It does not seem to
me commendable business for the crew to be helping
the winds and storms outside with their axes and
saws inside.
Now, this old Gospel ship, what with the roaring
of earth and hell around the stem and stern, and
mutiny on deck, is having a very rough voyage, but
I have noticed that not one of the timbers has started,
and the Captain says He will see it through. And I
have noticed that keelson and counter-timber knee
are built out of Lebanon cedar, and she is going to
weather the gale, but no credit to those who make
mutiny on deck.
When I see ministers of religion in this particular
day finding fault with the Scriptures, it makes me
think of a fortress terrifically bombarded, and the
men on the ramparts, instead of swabbing out and
loading the guns and helping fetch up the ammu-
nition from the magazine, are trying with crowbars
to pry out from the wall certain blocks of stone, be-
cause they did not come from the right quarry. Oh,
men on the ramparts, better fight back and fight
down the common enemy, instead of trying to make
breeches in the wall.
While I oppose this expurgation of the Scriptures,
I shall give you my reasons for such opposition.
"What. ! " say some of the theological evolutionists,
MENDING THE BIBLE. 295
whose brains have been addled by too long brooding
over them by Darwin and Spencer, " you don't now
really believe all the story of the Garden of Eden,
do you?" Yes, as much as I believe all the roses
that were in my garden last summer. " But," sav
they, " you don't really believe that the sun and moon
stood still ? " Yes, and if I had strength enough to
create a sun and moon I could make them stand still,
or cause the refraction of the sun's rays so it would
appear to stand still. " But," they say, " you don't
really believe that the whale swallowed Jonah ? "
Yes, and if I were strong enough to make a whale I
could have made very easy ingress for the refractory
prophet, leaving to Evolution to eject him, if he
were an unworthy tenant. " But," say they, " you
don't really believe that the water was turned into
wine?" Yes, just as easily as water now is often
turned into wine with an admixture of strychnine and
logwood ! " But," say they, " you don't really believe
that Samson slew a thousand with the jaw-bone of an
ass?" Yes, as I think that the man who in this day
assaults the Bible is wielding the same weapon !
There is nothing in the Bible that staggers me.
There are many things I do not understand, I do
not pretend to understand, never shall in this world
understand. But that would be a very poor God
who could be fully understood by the human. That
would be a very small Infinite that can be measured
by the finite. You must not expect to weigh the
thunderbolts of Omnipotence in an apothecary's bal-
ances. Starting with the idea that God can do any-
thing, and that He was present at the beginning, and
that He is present now, there is nothing in the Holy
Scriptures to arouse skepticism in my heart. Here I
296 MENDING THE BIBLE.
stand, a fossil of the ages, dug up from the tertiary
formation, fallen off the shelf of an antiquarian, a
man in the latter part of the glorious nineteenth cen-
tury, believing in a whole Bible, from lid to lid !
I am opposed to the expurgation of the Scriptures
in the first place, because the Bible in its present
shape has been so miraculously preserved. Fifteen
hundred years after Herodotus wrote his history,
there was only one manuscript copy of it. Twelve
hundred years after Plato wrote his book, there was
only one manuscript copy of it. God was so careful
to have us have the Bible in just the right shape, that
we have fifty manuscript copies of the New Testa-
ment, a thousand years old, and many of them fifteen
hundred years old. This Book, handed down from
the time of Christ, or just after the time of Christ,
by the hand of such. men as Origen, in the second
century, and Tertullian, in the third century men
of different ages who died for their principles. The
three best copies of the New Testament in manu-
script in the possession of three great churches the
Protestant Church of England, the Greek Church of
St. Petersburg, and the Romish Church of Italy.
It is a plain matter of history that Tischendorf
went to a convent in the peninsula of Sinai, and was
by ropes lifted over the wall into the convent, that
being the only mode of admission, and that he saw
there in the waste basket for kindling for the fires, a
manuscript of the Holy Scriptures. That night he
copied many of the passages of that Bible, but it was
not until fifteen years had passed of earnest entreaty
and prayer, and coaxing, and purchase on his part
that that copy of the Holy Scriptures was put into
the hands of the Emperor of Russia that one copy
so marvelously protected.
MENDING THE BIBLE. 297
Do you not know that the catalogue of the books
of the Old and New Testaments, as we have it, is the
same catalogue that has been coming on down
through the ages ? Thirty-nine books of the Old
Testament thousands of years ago. Thirty-nine now.
Twenty-seven books of the New Testament, sixteen
hundred years ago. Twenty-seven books of the New
Testament now. Marcion, for wickedness, was
turned out of the Church in the second century, and
in his assault on the Bible and Christianity, he inci-
dentally gives a catalogue of the books of the Bible
that catalogue corresponding exactly with ours
testimony given by the enemy of the Bible, and the
enemy of Christianity. The catalogue now, just like
the catalogue then. Assaulted and spit on, and torn
to pieces and burned, yet adhering. The book to-day,
in three hundred languages, confronting four-fifths
of the human race in their own tongue. Three hun-
dred million copies of it in existence. Does not that
look as if this Book had been divinely protected, as
if God had guarded it all through the centuries ?
Not only have all the attempts to detract from the
Book failed, but all the attempts to add to it. Many
attempts were made to add the apochryphal books
to the Old Testament. The Council of Trent, the
Synod of Jerusalem, the Bishops of Hippo, all
decided that the apochryphal books must be added
to the Old Testament. " They must stay in," said
those learned men, but they stayed out. There is
not an intelligent Christian man that to-day will put
the Book of Maccabeus or the Book of Judith beside
the Book of Isaiah or Romans. Then a great many
said, " We must have books added to the New Testa-
ment," and there were epistles and Gospels and
298 MK \DI.\G THE BIBLE.
apocalypses written and adcled to the New Testa-
ment, but the)'' have all fallen out. You cannot add
anything. You cannot subtract anything. Divinely
protected book in the present shape. Let no man
dare to lay his hands on it with the intention of
detracting from the Book, or casting out any of these
holy pages.
I am also opposed to this proposed expurgation
of the Scriptures for the fact that in proportion as
people became self-sacrificing and good and holy
and consecrated, they like the book as it is. I have
yet to find a man or a woman distinguished for self-
sacrifice, for consecration to God, for holiness of life,
who wants the Bible changed. Many of us have
inherited family Bibles. Those Bibles were in use
twenty, forty, fifty, perhaps a hundred years in the
generations. This afternoon, when you go home,
take down those family Bibles, and find out if there
are any chapters which have been erased by lead
pencil or pen, and if in any margins you can find the
words: " This chapter not fit to read." There has
been plenty of opportunity during the last half cen-
tury privately to expurgate the Bible. Do you
know any case of such expurgation? Did not your
grandfather give it to your father, and did not your
father give it to you?
Expurgate the Bible! You might as well go to
the old picture galleries in Dresden and in Venice
and in Rome and expurgate the old paintings. Per-
haps you could find a foot of Michael Angelo's " Last
Judgment" that might be improved. Perhaps you
could throw more expression into Raphael's " Ma-
donna." Perhaps you could put more pathos into
Rubens' " Descent from the Cross." Perhaps you
MENDING THE BIBLE. 299
could change the crests of the waves in Turner's
" Slave Ship." Perhaps you might go into the old
galleries of sculpture and change the forms and the
postures of the statues of Phidias and Praxiteles.
Such an iconoclast would very soon find himself in
the penitentiary. But it is worse vandalism when a
man proposes to re-fashion these masterpieces of in-
spiration and to remodel the moral giants of this gal-
lery of God.
Now, let us divide off. Let those people who do
not believe the Bible and who are critical of this and
that part of it, go clear over to the other side. Let
them stand behind the devil's guns. There can be no
compromise between infidelity and Christianity.
Give us the out and out opposition of infidelity
rather than the work of these hybrid theologians,
these mongrel ecclesiastics, these half and half evo-
luted pulpiteers who believe the Bible and do not
believe it, who accept the miracles and do not accept
them, who believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures
and do not believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures
trimming their belief on one side to suit the skep-
ticism of the world, trimming their belief on the other
side to suit the pride of their own heart, and feeling
that in order to demonstate their courage they must
make the Bible a target, and shoot at God.
There is one thing that encourages me very much,
and that is, that the Lord made out to manage the
universe before they were born, and will probably be
able to make out to manage the universe a little while
after they are dead. While I demand that the antag-
onists of the Bible, and the critics of the Bible go
clear over where they belong, on the devil's side, I ask
all the friends of this good Book to come out openly
300 MENDING THE BIBI.K.
and above board in behalf of it. That Book, which
was the best inheritance you ever received from your
ancestry, and which will be the best legacy you will
leave to your children when you bid them good-bye
as you cross the ferry to the golden city.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE GLORIOUS MARCH.
"Fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with
banners." SOLOMON'S SONG 6: 10.
The fragrance of spikenard, the flash of jewels, the
fruitfulness of orchards, the luxuriance of gardens,
the beauty of Heshbon fish-pools, the dew of the
night, and the splendor of the morning all contribute
to the richness of Solomon's style, when he comes to
speak of the glory of the Church. In contrast with
his eulogium of the Church, look at the denunciatory
things that are said in our day in regard to it. If one
stockholder become a cheat, does that destroy the
whole company ? If one soldier be a coward, does
that condemn the whole army ? And yet there are
many in this day so unphilosophic, so illogical, so
dishonest, and so unfair as to denounce the entire
Church of God because there are here and there bad
men belonging to it.
There are those who say that the Church of God
is not up to the spirit of the day in which we live ;
but I have to tell you that, notwithstanding all the
swift wheels, and the flying shuttles, and the light-
ning communications, the world has never yet been
able to keep up with the Church. As high as God
is above man, so high is the Church of God higher
than all human institutions. From her lamp the best
discoveries of the world have been lighted. The
301
302 THE GLORIOUS MARCH.
best of our inventors have believed in the Christian
religion the Fultons, the Morses, the Whitneys, the
Perrvs, and the Livingstones. She has owned the
best of the telescopes and Leyden jars; and while
infidelity and atheism have gone blindfolded among
the most startling discoveries that were about to be
developed, the earth, and the air, and the sea have
made quick and magnificent responses to Christian
philosophers.
The world will not be up to the Church of Christ
until the day when all merchandise has become hon-
est merchandise, and all governments have become
free governments, and all nations evangelized nations,
and the last deaf ear of spiritual death shall be broken
open by the million-voiced shout of nations born in a
day. The Church that Nebuchadnezzar tried to
burn in the furnace, and Darius to tear to pieces
with the lions, and Lord Claverhouse to cut with the
sword, has gone on, wading the floods and enduring
the fire, until the deepest barbarism, and the fiercest
cruelties, and the blackest superstitions have been
compelled to look to the East, crying, "Who is she
that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon
clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with ban,
ners?" God, who has determined that everything
shall be beautiful in its season, has not left the night
without charm. The moon rules the night. The
stars are only set as gems in her tiara. Sometimes
before the sun has gone down the moon mounts her
throne, but it is after nightfall that she sways her un-
disputed scepter over island and continent, river and
sea. Under her shining the plainest maple leaves be-
come shivering silver, the lakes from shore to shore
look like shining mirrors, and the ocean under her
THE ASCENSION OF CHRIST.
THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 305
glance with great tides comes up panting upon the
beach, mingling, as it were, foam and fire.
Under the witchery of the moon the awful steeps
lose their ruggedness, and the "chasms their terror.
The poor man blesses God for throwing so cheap a
light through the broken window pane of his cabin,
and to the sick it seems like a light from the other
shore that bounds this great deep of human pain and
woe. If the sun be like a song, full and loud and
poured forth from brazen instruments that fill heaven
and earth with harmony, the moon is plaintive and
sad, standing beneath the throne of God, sending up
her soft, sweet voice of praise, while the stars listen.
And the sea ! No mother ever more lovingly watched
a sick cradle than this pale watcher of the sky bends
over the weary, heart-sick, slumbering earth, singing
to it silvery music, while it is rocked in the cradle of
the spheres.
" Who is she, fair as the moon ? " Our answer is
the Church. Like the moon, she is a borrowed light.
She gathers up the glory of a Saviour's suffer-
ings, a Saviour's death, a Saviour's resurrection, a
Saviour's ascension, and pours that light on palace
and dungeon, on squalid heathenism and elaborate
skepticism, on widow's tears and martyr's robe of
flame, on weeping penitence and loud-mouthed scorn.
She is the only institution to-day that gives any
light to our world. Into her portal the poor come
and get the sympathy of a once pillowless Christ.
The bereaved come and see the bottle in which God
saves all our tears, and the captives come, and on the
sharp corners of her altars dash off their chains, and
the thirsty come and put their cup under the " Rock
of Ages," which pours forth from its smitten side
306 THE GLORIOUS MARCH.
living water, sparkling water, crystalline water, from
under the throne ot God and the Lamb. Blessed the
bell that calls her worshipers to prayer. Blessed the
water in which her members are baptized. Blessed
the wine that glows in her sacramental cup. Blessed
the songs on which her devotions travel up and the
angels of God travel down.
As the moon goes through the midst of the roaring
storm-clouds unflushed and unharmed, ' and comes
out calm and beautiful on the other side, so the
Church of God has gone through all the storms of
this world's persecution and come out uninjured, no
worse for the fact that Robespierre cursed it, and
Voltaire caricatured it, and Tom Paine sneered at it,
and all the forces of darkness have bombarded it.
Not like some baleful comet shooting across the sky,
scattering terror and dismay among the nations, but
above the long howling night of the world's wretch-
edness the Christian Church has made her mild way.
After a season of storm or fog, how you are thrilled
when the sun comes out at noonday ! The mists
travel up, hill above hill, mountain above mountain,
until they are sky lost. The forests are full of chirp
and buzz and song ; honey-makers in the log, bird's
beak pounding the bark, the chatter of the squirrel
on the rail, the call of a hawk out of the clear sky,
make you thankful for the sunshine which makes all
the world so busy and so glad. The same sun which
in the morning kindled conflagrations among the
castles of cloud stoops down to paint the lily white,
and the buttercup yellow, and the forget-me-not blue.
Light for voyager on the deep ; light for shepherds
guarding the flocks afield; light for the poor who
have no lamps to burn ; light for the downcast and
THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 3O/
the weary; light for aching ey.es and burning brain
and consuming captive ; light for the smooth brow
of childhood and the dim vision of the octogenarian ;
light for the queen's coronet and sewing-girl's nee-
dle. " Let there be light."
" Who is she that looketh forth clear as the sun ? "
Our answer is, the Church. You have been going
along a road before daybreak, and on one side you
thought you saw a lion, and on the other side you
thought you saw a goblin of the darkness, but when
the sun came out, you found these were harmless
apparitions. And it is the great mission of the
Church of Jesus Christ to come forth " clear as the
sun," to illumine all earthly darkness, to explain, as
far as possible, all mystery, and to make the world
radiant in its brightness ; and that which you thought
was an aroused lion is found out to be a slumbering
lamb ; and the sepulchral gates of your dead turn
out to be the opening gates of heaven ; and that
which you supposed was a flaming sword to keep
you out of paradise is an angel of light to beckon
you in.
The lamps on her altars will cast their glow on
your darkest pathway, and cheer you until, far
beyond the need of lantern or lighthouse, you are
safely anchored within the veil. O sun of the
Church ! shine on until there is no sorrow to soothe,
no tears to wipe away, no shackles to break, no more
souls to be redeemed. Ten thousand hands of sin
have attempted to extinguish the lamps on her altars,
but they are quenchless ; and to silence her pulpits,
but the thunder would leap, and the lightning would
flame.
The Church of God will yet come to full meridian,
308 THE GLORIOUS MARCH.
and in that day all the mountains of the world will
be sacred mountains touched with the glorv of
Calvary, and all streams will flow bv the mount of
God like cool Siloam, and all lakes be redolent with
Gospel memories like Gennesaret, and all islands of
the sea be crowned with apocalyptic vision like Pat-
mos, and all cities be sacred as Jerusalem, and all
gardens luxuriant as Paradise, with God walking in
the cool of the day. Then the chorals of grace will
drown out all the anthems of earth. Then the throne
of Christ will overtop all earthly authority. Then
the crown of Jesus will outflame all other coronets.
Sin destroyed. Death dead. Hell defeated. The
Church triumphant. All the darknesses of sin, all the
darknesses of trouble, all the darknesses of earthly
mystery, hieing themselves to their dens. " Clear
as the sun ! clear as the sun."
You know there is nothing that excites a sol-
dier's enthusiasm so much as an old flag. Many a
man almost dead, catching a glimpse of the national
ensign, has sprung to his feet, and started again into
the battle. Now, my friends, I don't want you to
think of the Church of Jesus Christ as a defeated in-
stitution, as the victim of infidel sarcasm, something
to be kicked, and cuffed, and trampled on through all
the ages of the world. It is " an army with banners."
It has an inscription and colors such as never stirred
the hearts of an earthly soldiery. We have our ban-
ner of recruit, and on it is inscribed, " Who is on the
Lord's side?" Our banner of defiance, and on it is
inscribed, " The gates of hell shall not prevail against
us." Our banner of triumph, and on it is inscribed,
" Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ ! " and we
mean to plant that banner on every hilltop, and wave
it at the gate of heaven.
THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 309
With Christ to lead us. we need not fear. I will
not underrate the enemy. They are a. tremendous
host. They come on with acutest strategy. Their
weapons by all the inhabitants of darkness have been
forged in furnaces of everlasting fire. We contend
not with flesh and blood, but, with principalities, and
powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places ; but,
if God be for us, who can be against us? Come on,
ye troops of the Lord ! Fall into line ! Close up the
ranks ! On, through burning sands and over frozen
mountain-tops, until the whole earth surrenders to
God. He made it ; He redeemed it ; He shall have it.
They shall not be trampled with hoofs, they shall not
be cut with sabers, they shall not be crushed with
wheels, they shall not be cloven with battle-axes, but
the marching, and the onset, and the victory, will be
none the less decisive for that.
With Christ to lead us, and heaven to look down
upon us, and angels to guard us, and martyr spirits
to bend from their thrones, and the voice of God to
bid us forward into the combat, our enemies shall fly
like chaff in the whirlwind, and all the towers of
heaven ring because the day is ours.
CHAPTER XXXI.
SHAMS IN RELIGION.
The world wants a religion that will work into all
the circumstances of life. We do not want a new
religion, but the old religion applied in all possible
directions.
Yonder is a river with steep and rocky banks, and
it roars like a young Niagara as it rolls on over its
rough bed. It does nothing but talk about itself all
the way from its source in the mountain to the place
where it empties into the sea. The banks are so
steep the cattle cannot come down to drink. It does
not run one fertilizing rill into the adjoining field.
It has not one grist mill or factory on either side. It
sulks in wet weather, with chilling fogs. No one
cares when that river is born among the rocks, and
no one cares when it dies into the sea. But yonder
is another river, and it mosses its banks with the
warm tides, and it rocks with floral lullaby the water
lilies asleep on its bosom. It invites herds of cattle
and flocks of sheep and coveys of birds to come
there and drink. It has three grist mills on one side
and six cotton factories on the other. It is the
wealth of two hundred miles of luxuriant farms.
The birds of heaven chanted when it was born in
the mountains, and the ocean shipping will press in
from the sea to hail it as it comes down to the Atlan-
tic coast. The one river is a man who lives for him-
310
SHAMS IN RELIGION. 311
self. The other river is a man who lives for others.
I think you will agree with me in the statement that
the great want of this world is more practical reli-
gion. We want practical religion to go into all mer-
chandise. It will supervise the labeling of goods.
It will not allow a man to say that a thing was made
in one factory when it was made in another. It will
not allow the merchant to say that watch was man-
ufactured in Geneva, Switzerland, when it was man-
ufactured in Massachusetts. It will not allow the
merchant to say that wine came from Madeira when
it came from California. Practical religion will walk
along by the store shelves, and tear off all the tags
that make misrepresentation. It will not allow the
merchant to say that is pure coffee, when dandelion
root and chicory and other ingredients go into it.
It will not allow him to say that is pure sugar, when
there are in it sand and ground glass.
When practical religion gets its full swing in the
world it will go down the street, and it will come to
that shoe store and rip off the fictitious soles of many
a fine-looking pair of shoes, and show that it is paste-
board sandwiched between the sound leather. And
this practical religion will go right into a grocery
store, and it will pull out the plug of all the adulterated
syrups, and it will dump into the ash-barrel, in front
of the store, the cassia bark that is sold for cinnamon
and the brickdust that is sold for cayenne pepper;
and it will shake out the Prussia blue from the tea
leaves, and it will sift from the flour plaster of Paris
and bonedust and soapstone, and it will, by chemical
analysis, separate the one quart of Ridge wood water
from the few honest drops of cow's milk, and it will
throw out the live animalcules from the brown sugar.
312 SHAMS IN RELIGION.
There has been so much adulteration of articles of
food that it is an amazement to me that there is a
healthy man or woman in America. Heaven only
knows what they put into the spices and into the
sugars and into the butter, and into the apothecary
drug. But chemical analysis and the microscope
have made wonderful revelations. The Board of
Health in Massachusetts analyzed a great amount of
what was called pure coffee, and found in it not one
particle of coffee. In England there is a law that for-
bids the putting of alum in bread. The public authori-
ties examined fifty-one packages of bread, and found
them all guilty. The honest physican, writing a pre-
scription, does not know but that it may bring death
instead of health to his patient, because there may be
one of the drugs weakened by a cheaper article, and
another drug may be in full force, and so the pre-
scription may have just the opposite effect intended.
Oil of wormwood warranted pure from Boston was
found to have forty -one per cent, of resin and alcohol
and chloroform. Scammony is one of the most valu-
able medical drugs. It is very rare, very precious.
It is the sap or the gum of a tree or a bush in Syria.
The root of the tree is exposed ; an incision is made
into the root, and then shells are placed at this inci-
sion to catch the sap or the gum, as it exudes. It is
very precious, this scammony. But the peasant mixes
it with a cheaper material ; then it is taken to Aleppo,
and the merchant there mixes it with a cheaper mate-
rial ; then it comes on to the wholesale druggist in
London or New York, and he mixes it with a cheaper
material ; then it comes to the retail druggist, and he
mixes it with a cheaper material, and by the time
the poor sick man gets it into his bottle, it is ashes and
SHAMS IN RELIGION. 313
chalk and sand, and some of what has been called
pure scammony after analysis, has been found to be
no scammony at all.
Now, practical religion will yet rectify all this. It
will go to those hypocritical professors of religion
who got a " corner " in corn and wheat in Chicago
and New York, sending prices up and up until they
were beyond the reach of the poor, keeping these
breadstuffs in their own hands, or controlling them
until the prices going up and up and up, they were,
after a while, ready to sell, and they sold out, making
themselves millionaires in one or two years trying
to fix the matter up with the Lord by building %
church, or a university, or a hospital deluding them-
selves with the idea that the Lord would be so
pleased with the gift He would forget the swindle.
Now, as such a man may not have any liturgy in
which to say his prayers, I will compose for him one
which he practically is making: "O Lord, we, by
getting a ' corner ' in breadstuffs, swindled the people
of the United States out of ten million dollars, and
made suffering all up and down the land, and we
would like to compromise the matter with Thee.
Thou knowest it was a scaly job, but then it was
smart. Now, here we compromise it. Take one per
cent, of the profits, and with that one per cent, you
can build an asylum for these poor miserable raga-
muffinS:Of the street, and I will take a yacht and go
to Europe, forever and ever. Amen ! "
Ah ! my friends, if a man hath gotten his estate
wrongfully and he build a line of hospitals and uni-
versities from here to Alaska, he cannot atone for it.
After a while, this man who has been getting a "cor-
ner " in wheat, dies, and then Satan gets a " corner-'
314 SHAMS IN RELIGION.
in him. He goes into a great, long Black Friday.
There is a "break" in the market. According to
Wall Street parlance, he wiped others out, and now
he is himself wiped out. No collaterals on which to
make a spiritual loan. Eternal defalcation.
But this practical religion will not only rectify all
merchandise ; it will also rectify all mechanism, and
all toil. A time will come when a man will work as
faithfully by the job as he does by the day. You say
when a thing is slightingly done: "Oh, that was
done by the job." You can tell by the swiftness or
slowness with which a hackman drives whether he is
hired by the hour or by the excursion. If he is hired
by the hour he drives very slowly, so as to make as
many hours as possible. If he is hired by the excur-
sion, he whips up the horses so as to get around and
get another customer. All styles of work have to be
inspected. Ships inspected, horses inspected, ma-
chinery inspected. Boss to watch the journeyman.
Capitalist coming down unexpectedly to watch the
boss. Conductor of a city car sounding the punch
bell to prove his honesty as a passenger hands to him
a clipped nickel. All things must be watched and
inspected. Imperfections in the wood covered with
putty. Garments warranted to last until you put
them on the third time. Shoddy in all kinds of cloth-
ing. Chromos. Pinchbeck. Diamonds for a dollar
and a half. Bookbinding that holds on until you
read the third chapter. Spavined horses, by skillful
dose of jockeys, for several days made to look spry.
Wagon tires poorly put on. Horses poorly shod.
Plastering that cracks without any provocation, and
falls off. Plumbing that needs to be plumbed. Im-
perfect car wheel that halts the whole train with a
SHAMS IN RELIGION. 315
hoi box. So little practical religion in the mech-
anism of the world. I tell you, my friends, the law of
man will ne\ 7 er rectify these things. It will be the
all-pervading influence of the practical religion of
Jesus Christ that will make the change for the
better.
Yes, this practical religion will also go into agri-
culture, which is proverbially honest, but needs to
be rectified, and it will keep the farmer from sending
to the New York market, veal that is too young to
kill, and when the farmer farms on shares, it will
keep the man who does the work from making his
half three-fourths, and it will keep the farmer from
building his post and rail fence on his neighbor's
premises, and it will make him shelter his cattle in
the winter storm, and it will keep the old elder from
working on Sunday afternoon in the new ground
where nobody sees him. And this practical religion
will hover over the house, and over the barn, and
over the field, and over the orchard.
Yes, this practical religion of which I speak, will
come into the learned professions. The lawyer will
feel his responsibility in defending innocence and
arraigning evil, and expounding the law, and it will
keep him from charging for briefs he never wrote,
and for pleas he never made, and for percentages he
never earned, and from robbing widow and orphan,
because they are defenceless. Yes, this practical re-
ligion will come into the physician's life, and he will
feel his responsibility as the conservator of the public
health, a profession honored by the fact that Christ
Himself was a physician. And it will make him hon-
est, and when he does not understand a case, he will
say so, not trying to cover up lack of diagnosis with
316 SHAMS IN RELIGION.
ponderous technicalities, or send the patient to a
reckless drugstore, because the apothecary happens
to pay a percentage on the prescriptions sent. And
this practical religion will come to the school-teacher,
making her feel her responsibility in preparing our
youth for usefulness, and for happiness, and for honor,
and will keep her from giving a sly box to a dull
head, chastising him for what he can not help, and
sending discouragement all through the after years
of a lifetime. This practical religion will also come
to the newspaper men, and it will help them in the
gathering of the news, and it will help them in set-
ting forth the best interests of society, and it will
keep them from putting the sins of the world in
larger type than its virtues, and its mistakes than its
achievements, and it will keep them from misrepre-
senting interviews with public men, and from start-
ing suspicions that never can be allayed, and will
make them stanch friends of the oppressed instead of
the oppressor.
Yes, this religion, this practical religion, will come
and put its hand on what is called good society, ele-
vated society, successful society, so that people will
have their expenditures within their income, and
they will exchange the hypocritical " not at home "
for the honest explanation " too tired," or " too busy
to see you," and will keep innocent reception from
becoming intoxicated conviviality, and it will by
frank manners and Christian sentiment drive out that
creature with sharp-toed shoe and tightly bandaged
limb, and elbows drawn back, and idiotic talk, and
infinitesimal cane, and sickening swagger, born in
America, but a poor copy of a foppish Englishman,
the nux vomica of modern society, commonly called
the " Dude."
SHAMS IN RELIGION. 317
Yea, there is great opportunity for missionary
work in what are called the successful classes of
society. It is no rare thing now to see a fashionable
woman intoxicated in the street, or the rail-car, or
the restaurant. The number of fine ladies who drink
too much is increasing. Perhaps you may find her
at the reception in most exalted company, but she
has made too many visits to the wine room, and now
her eye is glassy, and after a while her cheek is un-
naturally flushed, and then she falls into fits of excru-
ciating laughter about nothing, and then she offers
sickening flatteries, telling some homely man how
well he looks, and then she is helped into the car-
riage, and by the time the carriage gets to her home,
it takes the husband and the coachman to get her up
the stairs. The report is, She was taken suddenly ill
at a german. Ah ! no. She took too much cham-
pagne, and mixed liquors, and got drunk. That
was all.
Yea, this practical religion will have to come in and
fix up the marriage relation in America. There are
members of churches who have too many wives and
too many husbands. Society needs to be expurgated,
and washed, and fumigated, and Christianized. We
have missionary societies to reform the Five Points
in New York, and "Bedford Street, Philadelphia, and
Shoreditch, London, and the Brooklyn docks ; but
there is need of an organization to reform much that
is going on in Beacon Street, aud Madison Square,
and Rittenhouse Square, and West End, and Brook-
lyn Heights, and Brooklyn Hill. The trouble is that
people have an idea the} 7 can do all their religion on
Sunday with hymn-book, and prayer-book, and lit-
urgy, and some of them sit in church rolling up their
318 SHAMS IX RELIGION.
eyes as though they were ready for translation, when
their Sabbath is bounded on all sides by an incon-
sistent life, and while you are expecting to come out
from under their arms the wings of an angel, there
come out from their forehead the horns of a beast.
There has got to be a new departure in religion. I
do not say a new religion. Oh, no ; but the old re-
ligion brought to new appliances. In our time we
have had the daguerreotype, and the ambrotype, and
the photograph ; but it is the same old sun, and these
arts are only new appliances of the old sunlight. So
this glorious Gospel is just what we want to photo-
graph the image of God on one soul, and daguer-
reotype it on another soul. Not a new Gospel, but
the old Gospel put to new work. In our time we
have had the telegraphic invention, and the tele-
phofiic invention, and the electric light invention ;
but they are all the children of old electricity, an ele-
ment that the philosophers have a long while known
much about. So this electric Gospel needs to flash
its light on the eyes, and ears, and souls of men, and
become a telephonic medium to make the deaf hear;
a telegraphic medium to dart invitation and warning
to all nations; an electric light to illumine the
Eastern and Western hemispheres. Not a new Gos-
pel, but the old Gospel doing a new work.
Now you say, " That is a very beautiful theory,
but is it possible to take one's religion into all the
avocations and business of life?" Yes, and I will
give you some specimens. Medical doctors who
took their religion into everyday life : Dr. John
Abercrombie, of Aberdeen, the greatest Scottish
physician of his day, his book on " Diseases of the
Brain and Spinal Cord," no more wonderful than his
book on " The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings,"
SHAMS IN RELIGION. 319
and often kneeling at the bedside of his patients to
commend them to God in prayer. Dr. John Brown,
of Edinburgh, immortal as an author, dying recently
under the benediction of the sick of Edinburgh ;
myself remembering him as he sat in his study in
Edinburgh talking to me about Christ, and his hope
of heaven. And a score of Christian family physi-
cians in Brooklyn just as good as they were.
Lawyers who carried their religion into their pro-
fession : Lord Cairns, the queen's adviser for many
years, the highest legal authority in Great Britain
Lord Cairns, every summer in his vacation preaching
as an evangelist among the poor of his country.
John McLean, Judge of the Supreme Court of the
United States, and President of the American Sun-
day-School Union, feeling more satisfaction in the
latter office than in the former. And scores of
Christian lawyers as eminent in the Church of God
as they are eminent at the bar.
Merchants who took their religion into everyday
life: Arthur Tappan, derided in his day because he
established that system by which we come to find
out the commercial standing of business men, starting
that entire system, derided for it then, himself, as I
knew him well, in moral character A i. Monday
mornings inviting to a room in the top of his store-
house the clerks of his establishment, asking them
about their worldly interests and their spiritual
interests, then giving out a hymn, leading in a prayer,
giving them a few words of good advice, asking
them what church they attended on the Sabbath,
what the text was, whether they had any special
troubles of their own. Arthur Tappan. I never
heard his eulogy pronounced. I pronounce it now.
And other merchants just as good. William E.
320 SHAMS I\ RELIGION.
Docile, in the iron business, Moses II. Grinnell, in
the shipping" business, Peter Cooper, in the glue bus-
iness. Scores of men just as good as they were.
Farmers who take their religion into their occupa-
tion : Why, this minute their horses and wagons
stand around all the meeting-houses in America.
They began this day by a prayer to God, and when
they get home at noon, after they have put their
horses up, will offer a prayer to God at the table,
seeking a blessing, and this summer there will be in
their fields not one dishonest head of rye, not one
dishonest ear of corn, not one dishonest apple. Wor-
shiping God to-day away up among the Berkshire
Hills, or away down amid the lagoons of Florida, or
away out amid the mines of Colorado, or along the
banks of the Passaic and the Raritan.
Mechanics who took their religion into their oc-
cupations: James Brindley, the famous millwright,
Nathaniel Bowditch, the famous ship chandler, Elihu
Burritt, the famous blacksmith, and hundreds and
thousands of strong arms which haye made the ham-
mer and the saw and the adze and the drill and the
axe sound ' in the grand march of our national in-
dustries.
Give your heart to God and then fill your life with
good works. Consecrate to Him your store, your
shop, your banking house, your factory, and your
home. They say no one will hear it. God will hear
it. That is enough. You hardly know of any one
else than Wellington, as connected with the victory
at Waterloo ; but he did not do the hard fighting.
The hard fighting was done by the Somerset cavalry
and the Ryland regiments, and Kempt's infantry, and
the Scotch Grays, and the Life Guards. Who cares,
if only the day was won ?
SHAMS IN RELIGION. 321
In the latter part of the last century, a girl in
England became a kitchen maid in a farmhouse.
She had many styles of work and much hard work.
Time rolled on, and she married the son of a weaver
of Halifax. They were industrious, they saved
money enough after a while to build them a home.
On the morning of the day when they were to enter
that home, the young wife arose at four o'clock,
entered the front door-yard, knelt down, consecrated
the place to God, and there made this solemn vow :
" O Lord, if Thou wilt bless me in this place, the
poor shall have a share of it." Time rolled on and a
fortune rolled in. Children grew up around them,
and they all became affluent. One, a Member of
Parliament, in a public place declared that his success
came from that prayer of his mother in the door-
yard. All of them were affluent, four thousand
hands in their factories. They built dwelling houses
for laborers at cheap rents, and where they were
invalid, and could not pay, they had the houses for
nothing. One of these sons came to this country,
admired our parks, went back, bought land, opened
a great public park, and made it a present to the city
of Halifax, England. They endowed an orphanage,
they endowed two almshouses. All England has
heard of the generosity and the good works of the
Crossleys. Moral : Consecrate to God your small
means and your humble surroundings, and you will
have larger means and grander surroundings. "God-
liness is profitable unto all things, having promise of
the life that now is, and of that which is to come."
" Have faith in God by all means, but remember that
faith without works is dead."
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION.
The crystal is the star of the mountain ; it is the
queen of the cave ; it is the ear-drop of the hills ; it
finds its heaven in the diamond. Among all the
pages of natural history there is no page more inter-
esting to me than the page crystallographic.
Religion is superior to the crystal in exactness.
That shapeless mass of crystal against which you
accidentally dashed your foot is laid out with more
exactness than any earthly city. There are six styles
of crystalization, and all of them divinely ordained.
Every crystal has mathematical precision. God's
geometry reaches through it, and it is a square or it
is a rectangle or it is a rhomboid or in some w,ay it
hath a mathematical figure.
Now religion beats that in the simple fact that spir-
itual accuracy is more beautiful than material accu-
racy. God's attributes are exact. God's law exact.
God's decrees exact. God's management of the
world exact. Never counting wrong, though He
counts the grass-blades and the stars and the sands
and the cycles. His providences never dealing with
us perpendicularly when those providences ought to
be oblique, nor lateral when they ought to be verti-
cal. Everything in our life arranged without any
possibility of mistake. Each life a six-sided prism.
Born at the right time ; dying at the right time.
There are no " happen-so's " in our theology.
322
RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE.
[After A. Seifert.]
THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 325
If I thought this was a slipshod universe I would
go crazy. God is not an anarchist. Law, order,
symmetry, precision, a perfect square, a perfect rec-
tangle, a perfect rhomboid, a perfect circle. The
edge of God's robe of government never frays out.
There are no loose screws in the world's machinery.
It did not just happen that Napoleon was attacked
with indigestion at Borodino so that he became incom-
petent for the day. It did not just happen that John
Thomas, the missionary, on a heathen island, waiting
for an outfit and orders for another missionary tour,
received that outfit and those orders in a box that
floated ashore, while the ship and the crew that car-
ried the box were never heard of. The barking of
F. W. Robertson's dog, he tells us, led to a line of
events which brought him from the army into the
Christian ministry, where he served God with world-
renowned usefulness. It did not merely happen so.
I believe in a particular providence. I believe God's
geometry may be seen in all our life more beautifully
than in crystallography. Job was right. " The crys-
tal can not equal it."
Just after my arrival in Philadelphia to take a pas-
torate I was called to a house of great sorrow. The
family had been to Cape May for summering. The
son of the household had been drowned in a pond
not far from the beach. As I entered the afflicted
home and the lad prepared for the sepulchre lay in
one room, there rang through the hall the wailing of
the father and the mother, a grief appalling and inde-
scribable. The parents said they could not forgive
themselves, because they had changed their plans for
the summer and had not gone to the White Mount-
ains as they had proposed, and had gone to Cape May.
326 THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION.
" Oh," I said to them, " do not say, ' I wish we had
gone to the mountains instead of going to Cape
May ; ' do you not think God has arranged all this ?
You cannot understanq 1 now the mercy of it, but
trust Him; there are no accidents; the God who
arranges all the affairs of your life arranged the death
of that boy." Do not say, as I have often heard some
of you say, " Oh, if I had not gone here and if I had
not gone there, this would not have occurred, and
that would not have occurred ! " Things are not at
loose ends. Precision, accuracy. Job was right:
" The crystal cannot equal it."
Religion is superior to the crystal in transparency.
We know not when or by whom glass was first dis-
covered. Beads of it have been found in the tomb
of Alexander Severus. Vases of it are brought up
from the ruins of Herculaneum. There are female
adornments made out of it three thousand years ago
those adornments found now attached to the mum-
mies of Egypt. A great many commentators believe
that my text means glass. What would we do with-
out the crystal ? The crystal in the window to keep
out the storm, and let in the day the crystal over
the watch defending its delicate machinery, yet
allowing us to see the hour the crystal of the teles-
cope by which the astronomer brings distant worlds
so near he can inspect them. Oh, the triumphs of
the crystals in the celebrated windows of Rouen and
Salisbury !
But there is nothing so transparent in a crystal as
in our holy religion. It is a transparent religion.
You put it to your eye and you see man his sin, his
soul, his destiny. You look at God and you see
something of the grandeur of His character. It is a
THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 327
transparent religion. Infidels tell us it is opaque.
Do you know why they tell us it is opaque ? It is
because they are blind. The natural man receiveth
not the things of God because they are spiritually
discerned. There is no trouble with the crystal ; the
trouble is with the eyes which try to look through it.
We pray for vision, Lord, that our eyes might be
opened. When the eye-salve cures our blindness
then we find that religion is transparent.
It is a transparent Bible. All the mountains of
the Bible come out; Sinai, the mountain of the law ;
Pisgah, the mountain of prospect ; Olivet, the
mountain of instruction ; Calvary, the mountain of
sacrifice. All the rivers of the Bible come out
Hidekel, or the river of paradisaical beauty ; Jordan,
or the river of hot)- chrism ; Cherith, or the river of
prophetic supply ; Nile, or the river of palaces ; and
the pure river of life from under the throne clear as
crystal. While reading this Bible after our eyes
have been touched by grace, we find it all transpa-
rent, and the earth rocks, now with crucifixion agony
and now with judgment terror, and Christ appears
in some of His two hundred and fifty-six titles, as far
as I can count them the bread, the rock, the cap-
tain, the commander, the conqueror, the star, and on
and beyond any capacity of mind to rehearse them.
Transparent religion !
The providence that seemed dark before becomes
pellucid. Now you find God is not trying to put you
down. Now you understand why you lost that child,
and why you lost your property ; it was to prepare
you for eternal treasures. And why sickness came:
it being the precursor of immortal juvenescence.
And now you understand why they lied about you,
328 THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION.
and tried to drive you hither and thither. It was to
put you in the glorious company of such men as Ig-
natius, \vho, when he went out to be destroyed by
the lions, said : ' I am the wheat, and the teeth of
the wild beasts must first grind me before I can be-
come pure bread for Jesus Christ ; " or the company
of such men as Polycarp, who, when standing in the
midst of the amphitheater waiting for the lions to
come out of their cave and destroy him, and the peo-
ple in the galleries jeering and shouting, " The lions
for Polycarp," replied : " Let them come on," and
then stooping down toward the cave where the wild
beasts were roaring to get out, " Let them come on."
Ah, yes, it is persecution to put you in glorious com-
pany ; and while there are many things that you will
have to postpone to the future world for explanation,
I tell you that it is the whole tendency of your reli-
gion to unravel and explain and interpret and illu-
mine and irradiate.
Religion surpasses the crystal in its beauty.
That lump of crystal is put under the magnifying
glass of the crystallographer, and he sees in it indes-
cribable beauty snowdrift and splinters of hoar-frost
and corals and wreaths and stars and crowns and
castellations of conspicuous beauty. The fact is that
crystal is so beautiful that I can think of but one thing
in all the universe that is so beautiful, and that is the
religion of the Bible. No wonder this Bible rep-
resents that religion as the daybreak, as the apple
blossoms, as the glitter of a king's banquet. It is the
joy of the whole earth.
People talk too much about their cross, and not .
enough about their crown. Do you know the Bible
mentions a cross but twenty-seven times while it
THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 329
mentions a crown eighty times? Ask that old man
what he thinks of religion. He has been a close ob-
server. He has been culturing an aesthetic taste.
He has seen the sunrises of a half century. He has
been an early riser. He has been an admirer of
cameos, and corals, and all kinds of beautiful things.
Ask him what he thinks of religion, and he will tell
you, "it is the most beautiful thing I ever saw. The
crystal can not equal it."
Beautiful in its symmetry. When it presents God's
character it does not present Him as having love like
a great protuberance on one side of His nature, but
makes that love in harmony with His justice a love
that will accept all those who come to Him, and a
justice that will by no means clear the guilty. Beau-
tiful religion in the sentiment it implants! Beautiful
religion in the hope it kindles! Beautiful religion in
the fact that it proposes to garland, and enthrone,
and emparadise an immortal spirit ! Solomon says
it is a lily. Paul says it is a crown. The Apocalypse
says it is a fountain kissed of the sun. Ezekiel says
it is a foliage cedar. Christ says it is a bridegroom
come to fetch home a bride. While Job takes up a
whole vase of precious stones the topaz, and the
sapphire, and the chrysoprase and he takes out of this
beautiful vase just one crystal and holds it up until it
gleams in the warm light of the eastern sky, and he
exclaims, "The crystal can not equal it."
Oh, it is not a stale religion, it is not a stupid re-
ligion, it is not a toothless hag, as some seem to have
represented it; it is not a Meg Merrilies with shriv-
eled arm come to scare the world. It is the fairest
daughter of God, heiress of all His wealth. Her
cheek the morning sky; her voice the music of the
330 THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION.
south wind; her step the dance of the sea. Come
and woo her. The Spirit and the Bride say come,
and whosoever will, let him come. Do you agree
with Solomon, and say it is a lilv? Then pluck it,
and wear it over your heart. Do vou agree with
Paul, and say it is a crown? Then let this hour be
your coronation. Do you agree with the Apocalypse,
and say it is a springing fountain ? Then come and
slake the thirst of vour soul. Do you believe
with Ezekiel, and say it is a foliaged cedar? Then
come under its shadow. Do you believe with Christ
and say it is a bridegroom come to fetch home a
bride ? Then strike hands with your Lord, the king,
while I pronounce you everlastingly one. Or if you
think with Job that it is a jewel, then put it on your
hand like a ring, on your neck like a bead, on
vour forehead like a star, while looking into the
mirror of God's Word you acknowledge "The crystal
cannot equal it."
Religion is superior to the crystal in its transfor-
mations.
The diamond is only a crystalization of coal. Car-
bonate of lime rises till it becomes calcite or ara-
gonite. Red oxide of copper crystalizes into cubes
and octahedrons. Those crystals which adorn our
persons, and our homes, and our museums, have only
been resurrected from forms that were far from lus-
trous. Scientists for ages have been examining these
wonderful transformations. But I tell you in the
Gospel of the Son of God there is a more wonderful
transformation. Over souls, by reason of sin black-
as coal and hard as iron, God by His comforting
grace stoops and says: " They shall be Mine in the
day when I make up My jewels."
THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 331
" What," say you, " will God wear jewelry?" If
He wanted it He could make the stars of heaven His
belt and have the evening cloud for the sandals of
His feet ; but he does not want that adornment. He
will not have that jewelry. When God wants jew-
elry He comes down and digs it out of the depths
and darkness of sin. These souls are all crystaliza-
tions of mercy. He puts them on and He wears
them in the presence of the whole universe. He
wears them on the hand that was nailed, over the
heart that was pierced, on the temples that were
stung. " They shall be mine," saith the Lord, " in
the day when I make up my jewels." Wonderful
transformation ! The carbon becomes a solitaire !
Now, I have no liking for those people who are
always enlarging in Christian meetings about their
early dissipation. Do not go into the particulars,
my brothers. Simply say you were sick, but make
no display of your ulcers. The chief stock in trade
of some ministers and Christian workers seems to
be their early crimes and dissipations. The num-
ber of pockets you picked and the number of
chickens you stole make very poor prayer-meeting
rhetoric. Besides that, it discourages other Christian
people who never got drunk or stole anything. But
it is pleasant to know that those who were farthest
down have been brought highest up. Out of infernal
serfdom into eternal liberty. Out of darkness into
light. From coal to the solitaire. " The crystal can
not equal it."
But, my friends, the chief transforming power of
the Gospel will not be seen in this world and not
until heaven breaks upon the soul. When that light
falls upon the soul then you will see the crystals.
332 THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION.
Oh, what a magnificent setting for these jewels of
eternity !
"Oh," says some one, putting his hand over his
eyes, "can it be that I who have been in so much sin
and trouble will ever come to those crystals ? 4 "
Yes, it may be it will be. Heaven we must have,
whatever else we have or have not, and we have
come here to get it. " How much must I pay for
it?" you say. You will pay for it just as much as
the coal pays to become the diamond. In other
words, nothing. The same Almighty power that
makes the crystal in the mountain will change your
heart, which is harder than stone, for the promise is,
" I will take away your stony heart, and I will give
you a heart of flesh."
"Oh," says some one, "it is just the doctrine I
want ; God is to do everything and I am to do
nothing." My brother, it is not the doctrine you
want. The coal makes no resistance. It hears the
resurrection voice in the mountain, and it comes to
crystalization, but your heart resists. The trouble
with you, my brother, is, the coal wants to stay coal.
I do not ask you to throw open the door and let
Christ in. I only ask that you stop bolting it and
barring it.
O my brother, you must either kill sin or sin will
krll you. It is no wild exaggeration when I say that
any man or woman that wants to be saved may be
saved. Tremendous choice. A thousand people are
choosing this moment between salvation and destruc-
tion, between light and darkness, between heaven
and hell, between charred ruin and glorious crys-
talization.
THE ALHAMBRA.
[The Court of Lions.]
CHAPTER XXXIII.
RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC.
Grace is like salt in its beauty. In Galicia, among
the mines of salt, there are two hundred and eighty
miles of underground passages. Down in those salt
mines there are chapels, and cathedrals, and theaters,
and halls of reception, and the altars are of crystal,
and the columns are of crystal, and the ceiling is of
crystal. When the emperor comes and the princes,
all this is lighted up with torches, and the scene is
indescribable for beauty, as the emperor and the
mighty men of his realm walk through, and some
of them worship in the chancels, and others are
entertained in the theaters, and all the floor, all the
pillars, all the ceilings are of crystal. But why
should I go so far to tell you of the beauty of salt
when you can take a morning train and go to the
salt mines in a few hours ? You have it three times
a day upon your table.
It is beautiful to the naked eye, but put under the
microscope, you see the stars, and the splinters, and
the shafts, and the bridges of fire glint of the sun.
Salt has all the beauty of water foam and snowflake,
with durability added. No human skill hath ever
put in Alhambra or St. Peter's such marvelous
beauty as God hath put in one crystal of salt.
An angel would need to take all of time with an
infringement upon eternity, to sketch the beauty
335
336 RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC.
of that which you sometimes cast aside as of no
importance.
So I have to tell you that the grace of God is
beautiful and beautifying. Have you never seen a
life illumined by it? Have you never seen a soul
comforted by it ? Have you never seen a character
grandly constructed through it? I have seen it
smooth the wrinkles of care from the brow. I have
seen it seemingly change the aged into the young. I
have seen it lift the stooped shoulder and put sparkle
into the dull eye. It is beautifying in its results. It
is grand and glorious in its influence. Solomon
described its anatomical effect when he said : " It is
marrow to the bones."
Of course, I refer now to a healthy religion, not
that kind which sits for three hours on a gravestone
reading Hervey's " Meditations among the Tombs "
a kind of religion which always thrives best in a
bad state of the liver ; but a religion such as Christ
preached, the healthiest thing in all the earth, good
for the body as well as good for the soul, for it calms
the pulses and it soothes the nerves, and it quiets the
spleen, and it is a physical reinvigoration. Many a
man has felt it. I suppose when the grace of God
has triumphed in all the earth disease will be ban-
ished, and that a man one hundred years of age will
come into the house, and say : " I am very tired, and
it is time for me to go," and without one phgsical
pang heaven will have him.
When I was living in Philadelphia there was an
aged bank president ; he was somewhere in the
nineties. At the close of the business of the day, he
came home, lay down on the sofa, and said to his
daughter : " My time has come, and I must go away
RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC. 337
from you." " Why," she said, " father, are you sick?
shall I send for a doctor?" "Oh, no," he replied,
" I am not sick, but the time has come for me to go.
You have it put in the morning papers about my
death, so that they will not expect me in business
circles." And instantly he ceased to breathe. That
was beautiful that was a glorious transition from the
world. And the time will come when men will leave
the world without a pang,
The grace of God is going to do just as much for
the bodies of men as it does for the souls of men.
But I think the power of religion is chiefly seen in
the soul. It takes that which is hard and cold and
repulsive and casts it out. It makes a man all over
again. It takes his pride and his selfishness and his
worldliness and chains them chains them fast so
that they can move around with very small sweep-
for they are chained.
Go all through the underground falls of Weilitzka
and through the underground kingdoms of Holstadt
and show me anything so beautiful, so grandlv
beautiful, as this eternal crystal. It throws a beauty
over the heart, and a beauty over the life. Christ
comes into the soul and casts on it the glow of a
summer garden, as he says: "I am the rose of
Sharon and the lily of the valley." And then He
comes and throws all over the life and the heart the
beauty of a spring morning, as He cries out: " I am
the light of the world." Oh, is there in all the earth,
is there in all the heavens anything so beautiful as
the grace of God ?
Grace is like salt in the fact that it is a necessity
of life. Beasts and men die without it. What are
those paths across the Western prairie ? They have
338 RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC.
been made by the deer and buffalo coming to and
going from the salt licks. All chemists, all physiolo-
gists, all physicians will tell you that salt is an abso-
lute necessity for physical health and life. " Without
it we soon die. And I came to understand Mso that
this grace of God is an absolute necessity. I hear
people talk of it as though this religion were a mere
adornment, a shoulder-strap decorating a soldier, a
frothy, light dessert after the chief banquet has
passed, something to be tried after calomels and mus-
tard plasters have failed, but in ordinary circum-
stances of no especial importance only the jingling
of the bells on -the horse's neck while he draws the
load, but in no way helping him to draw it. Now I
denounce that style of religion. Religion, while it
is an adornment, is the first and the last necessity of
an immortal nature. I must have it, you must have
it, or we cannot live.
You know how a man would soon perish if he took
no salt with his food. The energies would flag, the
lungs would struggle with the air, slow fevers would
crawl through the brain, the heart would flutter, and
the life would be gone. And that is what is the mat-
ter with a great many people who are dying in their
souls. They take none of this salt of divine grace.
They have never tried it. They do not want it.
Weaker and weaker will they get in the spiritual life,
until after a while they will be stretched out on the
bier of death. Coffin him in a groan. Hearse him in
a sigh. Throw a wreath of nightshade on the casket.
Kindle no lamp at the head or the foot, but rather
set up the expired torches of the foolish virgins
whose lamps went out. Salt an absolute necessity
for the life of the body ; the grace of God an absolute
RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC. 339
necessity for the life of the soul. Oh, that it might
thunder in our ears to-day, " Except ye be born again
ye cannot, ye cannot see the kingdom of God."
We have got to have more faith in this Gospel, in
its power to save all classes of people, not only those
high up, but those low down, not only the wise, but
the ignorant all classes. It is going to regenerate
society. While we sit in holy places to-day, how
many thousands there are who have no Sabbath.
They pass down these streets. They know not it is
the Sabbath, except that it gives them more oppor-
tunity for dissipation and wicked hilarity, and more
time for sin. They have got to be brought under the
power of this Gospel. It is an abundant Gospel. The
Christ that saved you will save them.
"Oh," says some one out there, "if I am to be saved
I will be saved, and if I am to be lost I will be lost."
You misrepresent the Gospel, my brother. Do not
say that. There is something for you to do. Strive
to enter in at the straight gate. Take the kingdom of
heaven by violence.
This grace is also like salt in its preservative qual-
ity.
You know that salt absorbs the moisture of food,
and so food is preserved. Salt is the great anti-putre-
factive of the world. Everybody knows that. Ex-
perimenters in the preservation of food have tried
sugar and smoke and air-tight jars, and everything;
but as long as the world stands Christ's remark will
be suggestive : " Salt is good." And this grace of
God is to be the preservative of laws, of constitutions,
of government. Why is it that the United States
Government and the British Government have stood
so long? While there h-as been corruption often in
340 REI.IC1ION AN ANTISKPTIC.
high places, there have been good men always in the
front. Take the grace of God away from a nation,
and you work its destruction. It cannot live with-
out it.
So a great deal of modern philosophy. What is
the matter with it ? The grace of God has gone out
of it, and it putrefies and rots. What our schools of
learning, what our institutions of science want now
is not more Leyden jars, more galvanic batteries,
more spectroscopes, more philosophic apparatus.
Oh, no. What is most wanted is the grace of God
to teach our men of learning that the God of the
universe is the God of the Bible. Is it not strange
that with all their magnificent sweeps of the tele-
scopes they have never seen the morning star of
Jesus? or having been so long studying about light
and heat, they have never seen and felt the light and
heat of the sun of righteousness that has risen on the
world with healing in His wings? O mv friends, the
Gospel of the grace of God is the only anti-putrefac-
tive among the nations. Take that away, you take
their life away. Everything on earth is tending to
decay and death. This is the preserving quality.
" Salt is good."
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE SPICERY OF RELIGION.
All theologians agree in making Solomon a type
of Christ, and in making the Queen of Sheba a type
of every truth-seeker ; and I shall take the responsi-
bility of saying that all the spikenard, and cassia, and
frankincense which the Queen of Sheba brought to
King Solomon is mightily suggestive of the sweet spi-
ces of our holy religion. Christianity is not a collection
of sharp technicalities, and angular facts, and chro-
nological tables, and dry statistics. Our religion is
compared to frankincense and to cassia, but never to
nightshade. It is a bundle of myrrh. It is a dash of
holy light. It is a sparkle of cool fountains. It is an
opening of opaline gates. It is a collection of spices.
Would God that we were as wise in taking spices to
our Divine King as Queen Balkis was wise in taking
the spices to the earthly Solomon.
The fact is, that the duties and cares of this life,
coming to us from time to time, are stupid often, and
inane, and intolerable. Here are men who have been
battering, climbing, pounding, hammering for twenty
years, forty years, fifty years. One great, long
drudgery has their life been. Their faces anxious,
their feelings benumbed, their days monotonous.
What is necessary to brighten up that man's life, and
to sweeten that acid disposition, and to put sparkle
into the man's spirits? The spicery of our holy re-
341
342 THE SPICERY OF RELIGION.
ligion. Why, if between the losses of life there
dashed a gleam of an eternal gain; if between the
betrayals of life there came the gleam of the undying
friendship of Christ; if in dull times in business we
found ministering spirits flying to and fro in our
office, and store, and shop, everyday life, instead of
being a stupid monotone, would be a glorious inspi-
ration, pcnduluming between calm satisfaction and
high rapture.
How any woman keeps house without the religion
of Christ to help her, is a mystery to me. To have
to spend the greater part of one's life, as many
women do, in planning for the meals, and stitching
garments that will soon be rent again, and deploring
breakages, and supervising tardy subordinates, and
driving off dust that soon again will settle, and doing
the same thing day in and day out, and year in and
year out, until the hair silvers, and the back stoops,
and the spectacles crawl to the eyes, and the grave
breaks open under the thin sole of the shoe oh, it is
a long monotony ! But when Christ comes to the
drawing-room, and comes to the kitchen, and comes
to the nursery, and comes to the dwelling, then how
cheery become all womanly duties. She is never
alone now. Martha gets through fretting and joins
Mary at the feet of Jesus. All day long Deborah is
happy because she can help Lapidoth ; Hannah, be-
cause she can make a coat for young Samuel ; Miriam,
because she can watch her infant brother ; Rachel,
because she can help her father water the stock ; the
widow of Sarepta because the cruse oil is being re-
plenished.
O, woman, having in your pantry a nest of boxes
containing all kinds of condiments, why have you not
THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 343
tried in your heart and life the spicery of our holy
religion ? " Martha ! Martha ! thou art careful and
troubled about many things ; but one thing is need-
ful, and Mary hath chosen that good part which shall
not be taken away from her."
I must confess that a great deal of the religion of
this day is utterly insipid. There is nothing piquant
or elevating about it. Men and women go around
humming psalms in a minor key, and culturing
melancholy, and their worship has in it more sighs
than raptures. We do not doubt their piety. Oh,
no. But they are sitting at a feast where the cook
has forgotten to season the food. Everything is flat
in their experience and in their conversation. Emanci-
pated from sin, and death, and hell, and on their way
to a magnificent heaven, they act as though they
were trudging on toward an everlasting Botany Bay.
Religion does not seem to agree with them. It seems
to catch in the windpipe, and become a strangula-
tion instead of an exhilaration.
All the infidel books that have been written, from
Voltaire down to Herbert Spencer, have not done so
much damage to our Christianity as lugubrious
Christians. Who \vants a religion woven out of the
shadows of the night? Why go growling on your
way to. celestial enthronement? Come out of that
cave, and sit down in the warm light of the Son of
Righteousness. Away with your odes to melancholy
and Hervey's " Meditations among the Tombs."
" Then let our songs abound,
And every tear be dry ;
We're marching through Emmanuel's ground
To fairer worlds on high."
I have to say also, that we need to put more spice
and enlivenment in our religious teachings; whether it
344 THE SPICERV OF RELIGION.
be in the prayer-meeting, or in the Sabbath-school,
or in the Church. We ministers need more fresh
air and sunshine in our lungs, and our hearts, and our
heads. Do you wonder that the world is so far from
being converted when you find so little vivacity in
the pulpit and in the pew ? We want, like the Lord,
to plant in our sermons and exhortations more lilies
of the field. We want few rhetorical elaborations,
and fewer sesquipedalian words; and when we talk
about shadows, we do not want to say adumbration ;
and when we mean queerness, we do not want to talk
about idiosyncrasies; or if a stitch in the back, we do
not want to talk about lumbago ; but, in the plain ver-
nacular of the great masses, preach that Gospel which
proposes to make all men happy, honest, victorious,
and free. In other words, we want more cinnamon
and less gristle. Let this be so in all the different
departments of work to which the Lord calls us.
Let us be plain. Let us be earnest. Let us be com-
mon-sensical. When we talk to the people in a ver-
nacular they can understand, they will be very glad
to come and receive the truth we present. Would
to God that Queen Balkis would drive her spice-
laden dromedaries into all our sermons and prayer-
meeting exhortations.
More than that, we want more life and spice in our
Christian work. The poor do not want so much to
be groaned over as sung to. With the bread and
medicines, and the garments you give them, let there
be an accompaniment of smiles and brisk encourage-
ment. Do not stand and talk to them about the
wretchedness of their abode, and the hunger of their
looks, and the hardness of their lot. Ah ! they know
it better than you can tell them. Show them the
THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 345
bright side of the thing, if there be any bright side.
Tell them good times will come. Tell them that for
the children of God there is immortal rescue. Wake
them up out of their stolidity by an inspiring laugh,
and while you send in practical help, like the Queen
of Sheba also send in the spices.
There are two ways of meeting the poor. One is
to come into their house with a 1 nose elevated in dis-
gust, as much as to say : "I dont't see how you live
here in this .neighborhood. It actually makes me
sick. There is that bundle take it, you poor miser-
able wretch, and make the most of it." Another
way is to go into the abode of the poor in a manner
which seems to say : "The blessed Lord sent me.
He was poor himself. It is not more for the good
I am going to try to do you than it is for the good
you can do me." Coming in that spirit, the gift will
be as aromatic as the spikenard on the feet of Christ,
and all the hovels on that alley will be fragrant with
the spice.
We need more spice and enlivenment in our church-
music. Churches sit discussing whether they shall
have choirs, or precentors, or organs, or bass-viols,
or cornets ; I say, take that which will bring out the
most inspiring music. If we had half as much zeal
and spirit in our churches as we have in the songs of
our Sabbath-schools, it would not be long before the
whole earth would quake with the coming God.
Why, nine-tenths of the people in church do not sing ;
or they sing so feebly that the people at their elbows
do not know they are singing. People mouth and
mumble the praises of God: but there is not more
than one out of a hundred who makes a joyful noise
unto the Rock of our Salvation. Sometimes, when
TIIK SI'ICERY OF KKLIGION.
the congregation forgets itself, and is all absorbed in
the goodness of God, or the glories of heaven, I get
an intimation of what church-music will be a hun-
dred years from now, when the coming generation
shall wake up to its duty.
Soft music, long-drawn-out music, is appropriate
for the drawing-room, and appropriate for the con-
cert ; but St. John gives an idea of the sonorous and
resonant congregational singing appropriate for
churches when, in listening to the temple service of
heaven, he says : "I heard a great voice, as the voice
of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters,
and as the voice of mighty thunderings. Hallelujah,
for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth."
Join with me in a crusade, giving me not only your
hearts, but the mighty uplifting of your voices, and
I believe we can, through Christ's grace, sing five
thousand souls into the kingdom of Christ. An
argument, they can laugh at ; a sermon, they may
talk down ; but a five-thousand voiced utterance of
praise to God is irresistible. Would that Queen
Balkis would drive all her spice-laden dromedaries
into our church-music.
Religion is sweetness, and perfume, and spikenard,
and saffron, and cinnamon, and cassia and frankin-
cense, and all sweet spices together. " Oh," you
say, " I have not looked at it as such. I thought
it was a nuisance ; it had for me a repulsion ; I
held my breath as though it were a mal odor; I
have been appalled at its advance ; I have said, if
I have any religion at all, I want to have just as lit-
tle of it as is possible to get through with it."
Oh, what a mistake you have made, my brother.
The religion of Christ is a present and everlasting
THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 347
redolence. It counteracts all trouble. Just put it on
the stand beside the pillow of sickness. It catches
in the curtains, and perfumes the stifling air. It
sweetens the cup of bitter medicine, and throws a
glow on the gloom of the turned lattice. It is a
balm for the aching side, and a soft bandage for the
temple stung with pain. It lifted Samuel Rutherford
into a revelry of spiritual delight, while he was in
physical agonies. It helped Richard Baxter until, in
the midst of such a complication of diseases as per-
haps no other man ever suffered, he wrote "The Saint's
Everlasting Rest." And it poured light upon John
Bunyan's dungeon the light of the shining gate of
the shining city. And it is good for rheumatism, and
for neuralgia, and for low spirits, and for consump-
tion ; it is the catholicon for all disorders. Yes, it will
heal all your sorrows.
A widowed mother, with her little child, went
West, hoping to get better wages there ; and she was
taken sick, and died. The overseer of the poor got
her body and put it in a box, and put it in a wagon,
and started down the street toward the cemeterv at
^
full trot. The little child the only child ran after
it through the streets, bare-headed, crying; "Bring
me back my mother ! bring me back my mother !"
And it was said that as the people looked on and saw
her crying after that which lay in the box in the
wagon all she loved on earth it is said the whole
village was bathed in tears.
And that is what a great many of you are doing
chasing the dead. Dear Lord, is there no appease-
ment for all this sorrow that I see about me ? Yes,
the thought of resurrection and reunion far beyond
this scene of struggle and tears. " They shall hunger
34$ THE SPICEKY OF RELIGION.
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 away all tears
from their eyes." Across the couches of your sick,
and across the graves of your dead, 1 fling this,
shower of sweet spices. Queen Balkis, driving up
to the pillared portico of the house of cedar, carried
no such pungency of perfume as exhales to-day from
the Lord's garden. It is peace. It is sweetness. It
is comfort. It is irifinite satisfaction, this Gospel I
commend to you.
Some one could not understand why an old Ger-
man Christian scholar used to be always so calm, and
happy, and hopeful, when he had so many trials, and
sicknesses, and ailments. A man secreted himself in
the house. He said: "I mean to watch this old
scholar and Christian ; " and he saw the old Christian
man go to his room and sit down on the chair beside
the stand, and open the Bible and begin to read. He
read on and on, chapter after chapter, hour after
hour, until his face was all aglow with the tidings
from heaven, and when the clock struck twelve, he
arose and shut his Bible, and said : "Blessed Lord,
\ve are on the same old terms yet. Good-night.
Good-night." Oh, you sin-parched and you trouble-
pounded, here is comfort, here is satisfaction. Will
you come and get it? I can not tell you what the
Lord offers you hereafter so well as I can tell you
now. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be."
CHAPTER XXXV.
LIVE CHURCHES.
A live church is prompt in all its financial engage-
ments. Every religious institution has monetary re-
lations. The Bank of England ought to be no more
faithful in the discharge of its obligations than ought
the Church of Jesus Christ. If a church standing in
any community fails to pay its debts, it becomes an
injury to the place where it stands, instead of a bless-
ing. All religious institutions ought to be an example
to the world for faithfulness in the discharge of
monetary obligations. There are a thousand things
that prayer will not do. Prayer will not paint a
church, prayer will not purchase a winter's coal,
prayer will not pay an insurance, prayer will not sup-
port the institutions of religion. A prayer never
goes heaven high unless it goes pocket deep. All
our supplication in behalf of religious institutions
amounts to nothing, unless we are willing, so far as
God has prospered us, to contribute for their sup-
port.
I might at this point say that there are many
churches of Jesus Christ in our land that are utterly
failing in this direction. There are a great many of
the ministers of religion half starved to death.
" Thank you," said a minister from the far West,
when some friends from the East sent him a few
extra dollars; "thank you sir." Until that money
349
350 LIVE CHURCHES.
came we had no meat in our house for three months,
and our children this winter have worn their summer
clothes." There is no more ghastly suffering in the
United States to-day than is to be found in some of
the parsonages of this country. I denounce the nig-
gardliness of many of the churches of Jesus Christ,
keeping some men who are very apostles for piety
and consecration, in circumstances where they are
always apologetic, and have not that courage which
they would have could they stand in the presence of
people whom they knew were faithful in the dis-
charge of their financial duties to the Christian
Church. Alas ! for those men of whom the world is
not worthy. Do you know the simple fact that in
the United States to-day the salary of ministers aver-
ages less than six hundred dollars, and when you con-
sider that some of the salaries are very large, you, as
business men, will immediately see to what great
straits many of God's noblest servants are this day
reduced. A live church will look after all its finan-
cial interests, and be as prompt in the meeting of those
obligations as any bank in all the cities.
A live church will be punctual in its attendance.
If in such a church the services begin at half-past ten
o'clock in the morning, the people will not come at a
quarter of eleven. If in such a church the services
begin at half-past seven o'clock in the evening, the
people will not come at a quarter of eight. In many
churches there is great tardiness. The fact is, some
people are always late. They were born too late,
and I suppose they will die too late. It is poor in-
spiration to a Christian minister, when in preliminary
exercises, half the people seated in their pews are
looking around to see the other half come in. It is
LIVE CHURCHES. 351
very confusing to a minister of religion when, during
the opening exercises, there is the rustling of dresses
through the aisle, and the slamming of doors at the
entrance.
There ought to be no opening, preliminary exer-
cises. There is a grand delusion in the churches of
Jesus Christ on this subject. There must be no pre-
liminary exercises. The very first word of the invo-
cation is as important as anything that may come
after. Scripture lesson, the voice of God to man,
while a sermon may be only the voice of man to man.
And happy is that church where all the worshipers
are present at the beginning of the services. I know
there is a difference in timepieces, but a live church
goes by railroad time, and everybody in every com-
munity knows what that is. No man goes to take
the limited express train to Washington at five min-
utes past ten o'clock if the train started at ten. In
many of the households of Christendom, every Sab-
bath morning the family might well sing that old
hymn :
" Early, my God, without delay,
I haste to seek thy face.''
Yes, I go further, and tell you that in every live
church all the people take part in the exercises. A
stranger can tell by the way the first hymn starts,
whether it is a live church. It is a sad thing when
the music comes down in a cold drizzle from the or-
gan loft, and freezes on the heads of the silent people
beneath. It is an awful thing fora hymn to start and
then find itself lonely and unbefriended, wandering
around about, after a while lost amid the arches.
That is not melody to the Lord. In heaven they all
sing, although some sing not half as well as others.
35 2 LIVE CHURCHES.
The Methodist Church has sung its way around the
earth. A man on fire with the Gospel, as John Wes-
ley preached it, has taken his place in the far West,
and on Sabbath morning has come out in front of his
log cabin and sung :
" A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify."
And they heard it on the other side the forest, and
they gathered around the doorstep, and after a while
a church grew up, and they had a great revival, and
all the wilderness heard the voice of God. A church
that can sing can do anything that ought to be done.
In this great battle for God let us take the Bible in
one hand and the hymn book in the other, on the
way to triumphs without end, and to pleasures that
never die. Sing !
A live church will have a flourishing Sabbath-
school. It is too late in the history of the church to
argue the benefit of Sabbath-schools. A Sabbath-
school is not a supplement to the church ; it is
its right arm. "Oh," you say, " there are stupid
churches that have Sabbath-schools." Yes, and the
Sabbath-schools are stupid, too. It is a dead mother
holding a dead child. But where Sabbath after Sab-
bath, a superintendent, and teachers, and children
come, their faces aglow with enthusiasm, entering
with great heart into the services, and then retiring at
home feeling that they have been on a mount of trans-
figuration that church will be a live church.
But while we have the children of the refined and
the educated and the cultured in our churches, I de-
plore the fact that there are such vast multitudes who
get none of the benediction. What will become of
the 70,000 destitute children in New York? It is a
LIVE CHURCHES. 353
tremendous question. What will become of the
thousands of destitute children in Brooklyn? If we
do not act upon them they will act upon us. If we
do not Christianize them they will heathenize us. It
is a question not more for every Christian than for
every patriot, and every philanthropist, and every
statesman. Oh, if we could gather them all together,
what a scene of hunger and wretchedness and des-
pair and death.
If you could see those little feet on the broad road
to death, which, through Christian charity, ought to
be pressing the narrow path of life ; if you could
hear those voices in blasphemy, which ought to be
singing the praises of God ; if you could see those
hearts, which at that age ought not to be soiled with
one impure thought, already become the sewers of
iniquity ; if you could see those little ones sacrificed
on the altar of every iniquitous passion, and baptized
with fire from the lava of the pit, your soul would
recoil, crying: "Avaunt, thou dream of hell."
They are coming up. They will not always be
boys and girls. They are coming up into the men
and women of this country. That spark of iniquity
that might be put out now with one drop of the water
of life, will become a conflagration, destroying every
green thing that God ever planted in the soul. That
which ought to be the temple of the Holy Ghost will
become a scarred and blasted ruin, every light
quenched, and every altar in the dust. That petty
thief who yesterday slipped into your store and took
a piece of cloth from the counter, will become the
highway man of the forest, or the burglar at midnight,
picking the lock of your money safe and blowing up
your store to hide the villainy.
j?54 LIVE CHURCHES.
A great army, they come on with staggering step
and bloodshot eye, and drunken hoot to take the bal-
lot box and hurrah at the elections. The rough-
handed ruffianism of the country, if we do not look
out, will after a while have more power than the
tender hand of sobriety. Men bloated, and with the
signature of sin burned in from the top of their fore-
heads to the bottom of their chins, will look honest
men out of countenance. Moral corpses, that ought
to be buried a hundred feet deep to keep them from
poisoning the air, will rot in the face of the sun at
noonday. Industry in her plain frock will be des-
pised, and thousands of men unwilling to work will
wander about with their hands on their hips, saying :
"The world owes me a living," when it owes them
the penitentiary, Oh, what a power there is in in-
iquity when unrestrained and unblanched. It goes
on concentring and deepening and widening, rolling
ahead with every triumph of desolation, drowning
like surges, scorching like flames, crushing like rocks.
What are you going to do with them of this vast
multitude of children marching up to take posses-
sion of this land? "Oh," you say, "it's only a child,
it's only a child." Ah ! that child has covered up in
the ashes of its body a spark of immortality which
will blaze on with untold splendor long after yonder
sun has died of old age, and all the countless worlds
that glitter at night shall have been swept off by the
Almighty's breath as the small dust of a threshing
floor. Yet you say it is only a child.
A live church will have commodious and appro-
priate architecture. A log church may do in a place
where people live in log cabins, but in cities where
people have commodious and beautiful apartments a
LIVE CHURCHES. 355
chur.ch that is not commodious and is not beautiful,
is a moral nuisance; it is an insult to God and an in-
sult to man.
A live church must be a soul-saving church. The
Gospel ot Jesus Christ must be preached in it. A
church may be built around one man who shall read
an essay, the church may be built around one man
who shall preach something else than the Gospel, and
there may be a large congregation ; but after a while,
the man dies, and the church dies. That church has
a very poor foundation that is built on two human
shoulders.
I could te:' you of a church in the city of Boston
that was more largely attended some thirty years ago
than any other church in that city. Where is it to-
day ? Utterly gone out of existence. A man stood
there who preached everything but the Gospel of
Jesus Christ. He died, and the church died. We
want a church built on the Rock of Ages, Jesus
Christ, the Lord. That is the church that will goon
decade after decade, century after century a church
standing like Rowland Hill's old church, meaning the
Gospel all the way through. I was at the celebra.
tion of, I think, the ninetieth year of that church.
The man who founded it had long ago gone into the
skies.
"Oh," say some, "the Gospel of Jesus Christ allows
such small opportunity for man's intellect." Does
it? A man of that kind came to Rowland Hill, of
whom I just spoke, and said : "Mr. Hill, I have quit
the ministry because I am not willing to hide my
talents." Mr. Hill said : "I have known you a long
while, my friend, and I think the sooner you hide
your talents the better." Oh, there is no such field
356 LIVE CHURCHES.
for a man's intellect and a man's heart as the Gospe!
ministry. Have you powers of analysis? Exhaust
them here. Have you irresistible logic ? Grapple
with St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Have you
powers of pathos? Exhibit the love of Jesus Christ.
Have you great imagination? Dwell upon the Psalms
of David, or John's apocalyptic vision. Are you dis-
posed to bold thinking? Follow Ezekiel's wheel full
of .eyes, and hear through his chapters the rush of
the wings of the seraphim. Oh, come and preach
this Gospel ; if not in pulpits, in the store, in the fac-
tory, in the shop, in the street, in the banking-house,
everywhere. Each of you called to preach this
Gospel somewhere, a voice from the throne saying
this day : " Woe unto you if you preach not this
Gospel."
MUSIC.
[After Uaffaelle d' Urbino.J
CHAPTER XXXVI.
MUSIC IN WORSHIP.
The best music has been rendered under trouble.
The first duet that I know anything of was given by
Paul and Silas when they sang praises to God and
the prisoners heard them. The Scotch Covenanters,
hounded by the dogs of persecution, sang the psalms
of David with more spirit than they have ever since
been rendered. All our churches need arousal on
this subject. Those who can sing must throw their
souls into the exercise, and those who cannot sing
must learn how, and it shall be heart to heart, voice to
voice, hymn to hymn, anthem to anthem, and the
music shall swell jubilant with thanksgiving and
tremulous with pardon. Music seems to have been
born in the soul of the natural world. The om-
nipotent voice with which God commanded the
world into being seems to linger yet with its majesty
and sweetness, and you hear it in the grain field, in
the swoop of the wind amid the mountain fastnesses,
in the canary's warble, and the thunder shock, in the
brook's tinkle and the ocean's paean. There are soft
cadences in nature, and loud notes, some of which
we cannot hear at all, and others that are so terrific
that we cannot appreciate them.
The animalculae have their music, and the spicula
of hay and the globule of water are as certainly
resonant with the voice of God as the highest
359
360 MUSIC IN WORSHIP.
heavens in which the armies of the redeemed cele-
brate their victories. When the breath of the flower
strikes the air, and the wing of the firefly cleaves it,
there is sound and there is melody ; and as to those
utterances of nature which seem harsh and over-
whelming, it is as when you stand in the midst of a
great orchestra, and the sound almost rends your ear
because you are too near to catch the blending of the
music. So, my friends, we stand too near the desolat-
ing storm and the frightful whirlwind to catch the
blending of the music; but when that music rises to
where God is, and the invisible beings who float
above us, then I suppose the harmony is as sweet as
it is tremendous.
My chief interest is in the music of the Bible. The
Bible, like a great harp with ^innumerable strings,
swept by the fingers of inspiration, trembles with it.
So far back as the fourth chapter of Genesis you find
the first organist and harper Jubal. So far back as
the thirty-first chapter of Genesis you find the first
choir. All up and down the Bible you find sacred
music at weddings, at inaugurations, at the treading
of the wine press. Can you imagine the harmony
when these white-robed Levites, before the symbols
of God's presence, and by the smoking altars, and the
candlesticks that sprang upward and branched out
like trees of gold, and under the wings of the cheru-
bim, chanted the one hundred and thirty-sixth Psalm
of David ? You know how it was done. One part
of that great choir stood up and chanted, " Oh ! give
thanks unto the Lord, for He is good!" Then the
other part of the choir, standing in some other part
of the temple, would come in with the response :
" For His mercy endureth forever." Then the first
MUSIC IN WORSHIP. 361
part would take up the song again, and say, u Unto
Him who only doeth great wonders." The other part
of the choir would come in with the overwhelming
response, " For His mercy endureth forever," until
in the latter part of the song, the music floating back-
ward and forward, harmony grappling with harmony,
every trumpet sounding, every bosom heaving, one
part of this great white-robed choir would lift the
anthem, " Oh ! give thanks unto the God of heaven,"
and the other part of the Levite choir would come
in with the response : " For His mercy endureth
forever."
Now, my friends, how are we to decide what is
appropriate, especially for church music ? There may
be a great many differences of opinion. In some of
the churches they prefer a trained choir ; in others,
the old style precentor. In some places they prefer
the melodeon, the harp, the cornet, the organ ; in
other places they think these things are the invention
of the devil. Some would have a musical instrument
played so loud you cannot stand it, and others would
have it played so soft you cannot hear it. Some
think a musical instrument ought to be played only
in the interstices of worship, and then with indescri-
bable softness ; while others are not satisfied unless
there be startling contrasts and staccato passages that
make the audience jump, with great eyes and hair on
end, as from a vision of the Witch of Endor. But,
while there may be great varieties of opinion in
regard to music, it seems to me that the general spirit
of the Word of God indicates what ought to be the
great characteristic of church music.
And I remark, in the first place, a prominent char-
acteristic ought to be adaptiveness to devotion.
362 MUSIC IN WORSHIP.
Music that may be appropriate for a concert-hall, or
the opera-house, or the drawing-room, may be shock-
ing in church. Glees, madrigals, ballads, may be as
innocent as psalms in their places. But church music
has only one design, and that is devotion, and that
which comes with the toss, the song, and the display
of an opera-house is a hindrance to the worship.
From such performances we go away saying, " What
splendid execution ! Did you ever hear such a
soprano ? Which of those solos did you like the bet-
ter?" When, if we had been rightly wrought upon,
we would have gone away saying, "Oh, how my soul
was lifted up in the presence of God while they were
singing that first hymn ! I never had such rapturous
views of Jesus Christ as my Saviour, as when they
were singing that last doxology."
My friends, there is an everlasting distinction be-
tween music as an art and music as a help to devo-
tion. Though a Schumann composed it, though a
Mozart played it, though a Sontag sang it, away with
it if it does not make the heart better and honor
Christ. Why should we -rob the programmes of
worldly gayety, when we have so many appropriate
songs and tunes composed in our own day, as well as
that magnificent 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 ?
And in those days there were certain tunes mar-
ried 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." Born, as we have
MUSIC IN WORSHIP. 363
been, amid this great wealth of Church music,
augmented by the compositions of artists in our own
day, \ve ought not to be tempted out of the sphere
of Christian harmony, and try to seek unconsecrated
sounds. It is absurd for a millionaire to steal.
I remark also, that correctness ought to be a char-
acteristic of Church music. While we all ought to
take part in this service, with perhaps a few excep-
tions, we ought, at the same time, to culture ourselves
in this sacred art. God loves harmony, and we
ought to love it. There is no devotion in a howl.
Another characteristic must be spirit and life.
Music ought to rush from the audience like the water
from a rock clear, bright, sparkling. If all the
other part of the Church service is dull, do not have
the music dull.
With so many thrilling things to sing about, away
with all drawling and stupidity. There is nothing
that makes me so nervous as to sit in a pulpit and
look off on an audience with their eyes three-fourths
closed, and their lips almost shut, mumbling the
praises of God. People do not sleep at a coronation ;
do not let us sleep when we come to a Saviour's
coronation.
Again, Church music must be congregational.
This opportunity must be brought down within the
range of the whole audience. A song that the wor-
shipers can not sing is of no more use to them than a
sermon in Choctaw.
Let us wake up to this duty. Let us sing alone,
sing in our families, sing in our schools, sing in our
churches.
" Gloria in Excelsis " is written over many organs.
Would that by our appreciation of the goodness of
364 MUSIC INT WORSHIP.
God, and the mercy of Christ, and the grandeur of
heaven, we could have "Gloria in Excelsis" written
over all our souls. " Glory be to the Father, and to
the Son, and to the Holy Ghost ; as it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without
end."
CHAPTER XXXVII.
ABOLITION OF SUNDAY.
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 are not a subtraction,
but an addition. It has been demonstrated in all de-
partments. 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 Castle-
reagh ! this comes from non-observance of the Sab-
bath." 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 mat-
ter of 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 sea-coast, it was found out
365
ABOLITION OF SUNDAY.
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 New-
foundland 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 en-
gineer, as I was riding with him, "Why do you switch
off your locomotive on a side track and take an-
other?" as I saw he was about to do "it seems to
be a straight route." He replied: "Oh, 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 con-
trast 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 the intel-
lectual man, and dumb beast, and dead machinery,
cry out for the Lord's day.
A manufacturer declared that the goods his men
manufactured in the early part of the week, and right
after the Sabbath rest, were always better than the
goods manufactured in the latter part of the w r eek,
and when his men were tired. 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.
ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 367
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, cry out: "Remember the Sabbath day to keep
it holy !"
A London banker says : " I came to London thirty
years ago, and I have had a great deal of observation,
and I have noticed that the bankers who went to
their places of business on the Sabbath, and attended
to affairs, and settled up their accounts, failed, and
without one exception." A Boston merchant says:
"I have observed a long while, and I have noticed
when out on the Long Wharf, merchants kept their
men busy loading vessels on Sunday, and at work
from morn until night on the sacred day I noticed
all those merchants came to nothing, and their chil-
dren came to nothing." "Gentlemen," said a mer-
chant, although he is a man of the world "gentle-
men, it don't pay to work on Sunday."
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. I say it is time for all good citizens,
whether they are temperance men or not it is time
for all honest citizens, 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,
368 ABOLITION OF SUNDAY.
if they have full swing Monday, Tuesday, Wednes-
day, 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.
Then, there is an effort being made by secular
amusements to destroy our Sabbaths. In many of
the cities, all the, or 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 amusement. 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. I tell you that 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 agonies of na-
ture emphasizing the divine injunction.
"Oh," says some, "haven't you any regard for the
people's rights?" Yes. I believe in the people hav-
ing 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
ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 369
universe? Had He a right to make the enactment,
"Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy"?
There is no higher court than that. 1 declare it now,
in the presence of all the people, whether it be a pop-
ular or an unpopular thing to say, the people have
no rights except those which the Lord God 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.
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 mat-
ter?" I said to another, "What is the matter?" "Oh,"
they replied, "it is Sunday !" Sunday ! All the ve-
hicles rushing hither and thither. People talking at
the height of their voices, and in the most boisterous
manner. The Champs Elysees one great mass, one
rreat mob of pleasure-seekers. Balloons flying ; par-
rots chattering; footballs rolling; Punch and Judy
shows in scores of places, each with a shouting audi-
ence; hand-organs and cymbals, and all styles of
racket, musical and unmusical. Sunday ! 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 Sun-
day. 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 pil-
low, because there are no store doors to open, no
370 ABOLITION OF SUNDAY.
hard work to be engaged in. The family tarry
longer around the table. There is no rushing off to
business. After awhile there is a song sung. After
awhile there is a prayer offered, and after awhile
about ten o'clock, there is a long procession church-
ward, 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
best?
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 it ever leaves, if the Sabbath ever leaves this
country, it will go in the ark that floats above a del-
uge 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 all these movements are a war upon our po-
litical institutions. When the Sabbath goes down
the Republic goes down. Dissoluteness is inconsist-
ent with self-government. Sabbath-breaking is dis-
soluteness. 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 Elysees, and the republic went
down under the clattering hoofs. France has a re-
public again, but how often it quakes from end to
end, and one of the Commune has only just to plas-
ter an insurgent advertisement against a stone wall,
and all France is aquake and in fear of revolution
that is to come. France will never have any quiet,
ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 371
happy and permanent republic until she quits her
roystering 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 certain 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 per-
haps some steam tug at midnight may take him out
and drop him in the sea where the lawless winds
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 at-
tempt to overthrow it !
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE BLOOD.
" The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin."-
: JOHN 1:7.
I know that circumstances sometimes aggravate
one's transgressions. If a child unwittingly does
wrong you easily forgive him ; but we have done
wrong, and we knew we were doing wrong. Every
time man sins conscience rings the funeral bell. We
may pretend not to hear it, we may put our fingers
in our ears and try to go away from that sound ; but
having transgressed, although we may have our fin-
gers in our ears, we will hear the word coming,
" The wages of sin is death. The soul that sinneth,
it shall die. The way of the transgressor is hard."
When you and I do -wrong, when we have said that
which we ought not to have said, when we have done
that which we ought not to have done, we knew it,
we knew it.
I can come to the man who declares he is the
worst man on earth, and I can preach the Gospel
with just as much confidence to him as to this man
who has all his life preserved his integrity. Oh, the
broadness of this Gospel that says, " Whosoever,
wJiosoevcr! " However far you have wandered away
from God you can come back, though you have gone
through all the sins of the decalogue. " Whosoever,
whosoever will, let him come."
372
THE BLOOD. 373
" Oh," says some man, " all that is very true for
immoral people, but I have been a moral man all my
life, and I don't need the gracious pardon." Have
your thoughts always been right? Would you like
to have the thoughts of the last fifteen years written
out and presented before the eye of the world ? No.
And if you would not want the thoughts of the last
fifteen years all written out before the eye of the
world, certainly you could not stand the divine
scrutiny. Now, there is my right hand, and there is
my left hand. You see the one just as plainly as the
other. Well now, the sin of the heart and the sin of
the life are as plain before God, the one as the other,
and a thought to Him is just as plain as an action.
Ah ! you need the pardon of the Gospel.
You say you have never committed this, and you
have never committed that, and you would not have
done as this man did, and you would not as this man
have gone astray in this direction, and as that man in
another direction. Why, my brother, whether you
know it or not, you have gone astray in many direc-
tions. You say you have never committed murder.
How do you know ? Have you ever hated anybody?
Yes. Then you are a murderer. The Bible says so.
Christ says so. " He that hateth his brother is a
murderer." Do you hate anybody now ? Is there
anybody in all the earth you hate now ? You are a
murderer. " He that hateth his brother is a mur-
derer." So, my brother, you are not as pure as you
thought you were, you are not as good as you
thought you were, if you say you have no sin to be
forgiven.
You say you have never committed theft. I do
not suppose you have ever wronged your fellow-man,
374 TIIE BLOOD.
but have you taken an hour of a day from God and
devoted it to wrong purposes? If you have, then
you have been guilty of robbing God. It is a mean
thing to steal from a man. It is a worse thing to steal
from God. The Bible cries out, Will a man rob God ?
Yes ; we have all robbed Him. Now, let us come to
confessional, and let us acknowledge that we need
the mercy and the pardon of God. We all need it ;
there is not an exception. "All have sinned and
come short of the glory of God. There is none that
doeth good, no, not one."
Just let me blow the trumpet of resurrection, and
let the sins of the best man in this house all the sins
of his past life come up. Let the larger sin of the
hundred be captain of the company, and let the
greater sin of the thousand be colonel of the regi-
ment, and let the mightiest sin of his life command
the forces, vast as those of Xerxes, vaster, vaster.
All the sins of that man's life coming down upon him.
One man against a million transgressions, what
chance has he? Where in the round of God's
mercy is there any help for us? Rise, you seas, and
whelm the host. Strike, you lightning, and consume
the foe. The wave rolls back from the beach, and
says, " No help in me." The lightning sheathes it-
self in the black scabbard of the midnight cloud, and
says, " No help in me." Yonder I see the rider on
the white horse. Make way for the courier. He
swings his sword. It is the captain of salvation come
for our rescue. Fall back, my sins. Fall back, my
sorrows. All the transgressions of my heart and life
are utterly scattered, and I cry, " V r ictory through
our Lord Jesus Christ !" Oh, what a Christ he is.
Do you wonder that men and women have died for
THE BLOOD. 375
Him? Do you wonder that Margaret, the Scotch
girl, would not give up her Lord when fastened clown
to the beach of the sea, and the persecutors thought,
as the waves rolled on, she would give up her Christ?
But fastened down at the beach when the tide was
out, she continued in prayer until the tide came up,
came to the ankles, came to the girdle, came to the
shoulder, came to the lip, and with her last utterance
she said, " My Lord, my God ! He has been so good
to me ; I cannot surrender Him now, though the
waves may go over me my Lord, my Christ, my
pardon, my peace," and the waves rolled over her.
Do you wonder that men and women and children
have died for such a Lord as this ? Oh, do you not
want His consolation as well as pardon ? How many
of you have had misfortunes and trials, and you want
this Christ. Oh, when those into whose bosom we
have breathed our sorrows are snatched away, Christ's
heart still beats ; and when all other lights go out we
see coming out from behind the cloud something that
we cannot at first tell what it is, but it gets brighter
and brighter, and we find it. is the star, the star of
hope, the star of consolation, the star of Jesus !
Oh, there are different kinds of hands. There is
the hand of care that opens hard on you, and there is
the hand of bereavement that snatched your loved
ones away from you, and there is the hand of tempt-
ation that strikes you back into darkness ; but there
is a hand so different from all these, and it is so kind,
and it is so gentle. It is the hand that wipeth away
all tears from all eyes it is the hand of Jesus. Do
you not want Him? Would you not like to have
that pardon to-day ? Would you not like to have His
comfort?
376 THE BLOOD.
As at the sea beach we join hands and go down
and bathe, and let the waters roll over us, and we
feel great exhilaration, I wish we could by scores and
hundreds and thousands to-day just join hands, and
wade down in this great Atlantic of God's forgive-
ness not standing on the margin paddling the rip-
ples with our feet, but wading clear down in the sea
and letting the crimson billows roll over us. Oh,
you must have this Christ! If you reject Him, all
those gaping wounds will plead against you, and they
will haunt you through eternity with the thought of
what you might have been. Oh, take your feet out of
your Brother's blood ! Do not go down condemned
for fratricide and regicide and deicide. Do not do
it ! Better for thee that Calvary had never borne its
burden, and better for thee that those loving lips had
never uttered an invitation, if, rejecting all, you go
down into desolation and darkness, your hands and
feet bedabbled with the blood of the Son of God. O
dying but immortal men, O judgment-bound hearers,
repent, believe, and live ! How shall we escape if
we neglect so great salvation ?
There will be a password at the gate of heaven !
I see a great multitude coming up, and they say,
' Make way, open the gate, let us in, we were hon-
ored on earth ; we had a great position in the world,
:ind we want a great position in heaven.' But the
gate-keeper says, " I never knew you." Here come
another throng. They say, " We did a great many
magnanimous things, we endowed colleges, we estab-
lished schools, and we were celebrated for our phil-
anthropies. Open the gate now. Let us come in
and get our reward." A voice from within says, " 1
never knew you." But here come up a great throng,
THE BLOOD. 377
thousands and tens of thousands, and they knock at
the gate. They say : " We were wanderers from
God, and we deserved to die, but we heard the voice
of Jesus." "Aye," says the gate-keeper, " that is the
pass-word Jesus, Jesus, Jesus ! Lift up your heads,
ye everlasting gates, and let them come in."
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CAN THE UNPARDONABLE SIN BE COMMITTED IN
OUR TIME?
In my opinion, the sin against the Holy Ghost was
ascribing the works of the Spirit to Satanic agency.
Indeed, the Bible distinctly so declares. Here is a
man who is restored to sight after having been blind,
and in Christ's time a man says to him, " That's the
work of 'Beelzebub;" or a man dead is brought to
life by the Lord Jesus, and some one says, " That
man was brought to life by Satanic power, and not
by Divine power." As soon as a man thought that
or said that, he dropped under the curse.
I do not believe it is possible to commit that sin in
our time. I think it only could be committed in
apostolic times. The day of miracles has ceased, and
Christ is not present in body, and I have the opinion
that that sin cannot be committed in our own day.
However, it is a very dangerous thing to say any-
thing against the Holy Ghost, and the human race
has been most mercifully kept from that. You have
heard men swear by the name of Almighty God, and
swear by the name of Jesus Christ, but you have
never heard any one swear by the Holy Ghost ; so I
can feel there is salvation for all.
But there are persons who are afraid that they
have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and
that they can never be pardoned. That very anxiety
378
THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 379
was produced by the Holy Ghost, and shows you
are not forsaken. And this anxiety which you feel
in regard to this subject, and this earnest question
that you are asking, are proof positive that your soul
is being moved by the Holy Ghost, and you are not
becalmed forever. There is an opportunity of getting
into the harbor.
A man may commit an irrevocable sin.
That is, he may do a wrong that can never be cor-
rected, he may do something for which afterward he
shall seek a place of repentance and not find it,
though he seek it with tears. Esau had a birthright.
It meant temporal and spiritual blessing. In a fit of
hunger one day he traded it off for something to eat.
As though you should take bonds and mortgages and
government securities, and in some fit of recklessness
or hunger you should go into a restaurant and put
down these valuables and legally transfer them in
order that you might get some style of food. Esau
for a mess of pottage sold his birthright. He was
very sorry about it afterward, but he could not get it
back. He sought a place of repentance, and sought
it carefully and with tears, but could not find it.
Now, while I do not think it is possible for you to
commit the unpardonable sin, it is possible for you
and for me to make irrevocable mistakes, and in this
class of irrevocable mistakes, in the first place, I put
the follies of a misspent youth.
At forty, or fifty, or sixty years of age we may
wake up and say, " Oh, the neglects of my early
studies when I was at school or college ; how I
neglected geology, and mathematics, and chemistry;
I wish I had not neglected them ; how very helpful
they would have been to me in the duties of life ; I
380 THE UNPARDONABLE SIN.
am sorry." Are you sorry? You will never get
back those advantages, it does not make any differ-
ence how sorry you are. God will forgive you, but
you will never forgive yourself. You may say, " Oh,
if I had only disciplined my mind when I had 'the
opportunity ! " I do not wonder at your regret. You
can seek a place of repentance ; you will seek it in
vain, you cannot find it. A man at fifty years of age
says, " Oh, I wish I had not on me these habits of in-
dolence! When will I ever get rid of them?"
Never. Every stroke of work you do will be against
the protest of your entire physical nature. You 'get
that habit on you when you are twenty or twenty-five
years of age, and you will never get over it.
A man always every man has an idea in his mind
that somewhere in the future there will be a time
when he can correct his mistakes. If we only repent
in time God will forgive us, and then it will be just
as though we had never sinned. My subject runs in
collision with that theory. There are those who go
in the days of their youth and commit transgressions.
They call it " sowing wild oats."
They say, " Oh, we'll get over these things after a
while, and then we'll devote ourselves to high and
noble enterprises." " They that sow to the winds
will reap the whirlwind." A man at forty or fifty
years of age says, " Oh, if it wasn't for the sins of my
youth, what a strong constitution I would have had,
and how useful I might have been to the world and
the church." You are sorry. Are you? Yes, but
that does not bring back the energy that you lost.
God forgives, but the laws of nature never forgive.
Why do I say this? To give annoyance to those
who have only baneful retrospection? No, for the
THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 381
benefit of these young people. I want them to
understand that people never get over the sins of
their youth, though God may forgive those sins. I
want them to understand that eternity is wrapped up
in this hour. I want them to understand that a
minute is not made up of sixty seconds, but of ever-
lasting ages. Oh, what a dignity this gives to the
lives of these young people ! In the light of this sub-
ject life is not something to be srnirked about, not
something to be danced at, but something to be
weighed in everlasting balances, the balances of eter-
nity. Young man, the sin you committed yesterday,
the sin you commit to-day, the sin you shall commit
to-morrow, will be an everlasting sin in some re-
spects. ( God may forgive you, the laws of nature
never will. The scars of that sin will be everlasting.
We start our children. When they are ten years
of age we wake up and try to correct this or that
habit. It is too late, I believe that if parents do
not make an impression upon a child for Christ and
for heaven before ten years are past, they never will
make any impression. Talk about people beginning
life at twenty-one ; life is decided between ten and
twenty in nine cases out of ten. The following fifty
years is not of so much importance in the formation
of character as the first twenty. A man wakes up
at fifty years of age. He says, " I must become a
Christian ; here and now I yield my heart to God."
He goes home a Christian. He has spent all his life
in worldliness and sin. He says, " Now let us call
the family together, and have prayers." He opens
his Bible. He says, " Call the family together."
Where are the family ? One in New Orleans, one in
Cincinnati, one in Boston, two in eternity. Ah, he
382 THE UNPARDONABLE SIN.
cannot call his family together ! I say it for the
benefit of young parents, parents of twenty-five, or
thirty, or thirty-five, now is the time for family
prayers, now is the time to call your family together.
Oh, the time to train our children for God and for
heaven is at the start ; it is at the start. When a
man comes at fifty years of age and chooses God, I
congratulate him, but oh, I think what a pity you
did not come twenty-five years ago.
A father was trying to illustrate to his son his evil
habits, and every time the son committed a sin the
lather drove a nail into a post until there were many
nails in the post. The young man, after a while,
began to repent his sins, and give up his evil habits,
and every time he repented, the father took a nail
out of the post, until after a while the nails were all
gone out of the post. "But," said the son, "Father,
the scars are all there yet." God forgives, but the
scars stav. Do not be under the infatuation, young
men, that because God forgives you, and because so-
ciety after a while may forgive you, the laws of
nature are ever going to forgive you. The follies of
youth are irrevocable mistakes.
In Belgium, sixty years ago, some miners got into
a quarrel, and one set of miners, in order to revenge
another set of miners, set fire to the mine where they
were working. That fire has burned on for half a
century ; it is blazing to-day. They can not put it
out. It never will be put out until it is wrapped in
the greater conflagration of the last day. It is easy
to start a fire that never will be quenched. Oh,
young men, be not under the infatuation that the sins
of your youth can ever be eradicated. God will for-
give you, and you may enter heaven, but the scars
will be there yet.
THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 383
In this list I also put all lost opportunities of get-
ting good. I never come to a Saturday night but I
can see that during the week theie were opportu-
nities where I might have bettered my spiritual condi-
tion. I never come to a birthday but I think there
were times during the past year that might have
been made better, and I neglected the opportunity.
How is it with you ? Have you lost any oppor-
tunities ?
If a farmer takes a oertain number of bushels of
wheat, and he throws this wheat on a certain number
of acres of ground properly prepared, he expects a
proportionate number of sheaves. Have the sheaves
of your moral and spiritual harvest corresponded
with the truth arid the advantages planted ? I cannot
tell you, my brother, my sister. You know. You
know. - What does that mean ? Why, it means, if we
are going to get any good out of this Sabbath we are
going to get it before the hand of the clock turns
around to twelve to-night. It means that opportu-
nities gone are gone forever. It means that while at
our feasts the chalice may be passed to me and I may
decline it, yet that very chalice may come back to me
after a while ; in this matter of the Gospel feast a
chalice comes and I reject it it never comes back
never. That one opportunity gone forever.
In this class I put all lost opportunities of use-
fulness.
There is a chance of benefiting that man once
never again. You have a business partner who is a
proud, arrogant man. If ordinarily you should say
to him, " Attend to the things of the soul, become a
Christian," he would say to you, " Mind your own
business, and I'll mind mine." But there has been an
384 THE UNPARDONABLE SIN.
affliction in his household, and his heart is tender,
lie is looking for sympathy and solace. Now is your
time, oh, man ! Speak, or forever hold your peace.
You are in a religious meeting. A great impression
is being produced. Something says to you, " Now is
the time for you to speak a word for God." Your
cheek flushes ; you half arise from your seat ; you
sink back, cowering before men whose breath is in
their nostrils. Your neglect will tell on eternal ages.
A lost opportunity of getting good, or of doing
good, never comes back. You may fish for it ; it will
never take the hook. You may dig for it; it will
never be found.
CHAPTER XL.
INTOLERANCE.
" 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.''
JUDGES 12: 6.
Do you notice the difference of pronunciation be-
tween shibboleth and sibboleth? A very small and
unimportant difference, you say. And yet, that dif-
ference 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
.vas 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 be 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,
lor 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
385 *5
386 INTOLERANCE.
time by which 1 mean the different denominations
of Christians sometimes magnify a very small dif-
ference, and the only difference between scores of
denominations to-day is the difference between shib-
boleth 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, some of them founded by
very bad men. But as I demand for myself liberty
of conscience, 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 cen-
turies the Church proposed to make people think
aright by prohibiting discussion, and by strong cen-
sorship of the press, and rack, and gibbet, aud 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, or that you can make
a man see things differently by putting an awl
INTOLERANCE. 387
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.
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
skeptic'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,
Bigotry is often the child of ignorance. You sel-
dom 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 kind of 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 obe-
lisk, 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 intel-
ligent traveler came, and said : " Gentlemen, I have
seen that obelisk, and you are all right, and 'you are all
wrong. Wliy didn't you walk all round the obelisk?"
Look out for the man who sees only one side of a
388 INTOLERANCE.
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 sec-
tarianism. There is nothing that will so soon kill
bigotry as sunshine 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 great 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 taste
for exploration, no spirit of investigation. From the
glorious realm of God's truth, over which an arch-
angel 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. It stops all inves-
tigation.
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 cere-
mony, and the Baptist churches must present the ne-
cessity of ordinances, and the Congregational Church
must present the responsibility of the individual mem-
ber, and the Methodist Church must show what holy
enthusiasm hearty congregational singing can ac-
complish. While each denomination of Christians
must set forth all the doctrines of the Bible, I feel
INTOLERANCE. 389
it is especially incumbent upon 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 bar-
rack. People are afraid of a riot. You go down the
street and you see an excitement, missiles flying
through the air, and you hear the shocks of fire-arms.
Do you, the peaceful and industrious citizen, go
through that street? Oh, no! you will say, " I'll 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 it is so
rough, and there is so much sharp shooting on the
narrow road, I guess I'll try 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 de-
nomination and denomination, or between one pro-
fessed 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."
Bigotry and sectarianism do great damage in
the fact that they hinder the triumph of the Gos-
pel. Oh, how much wasted ammunition, how many
men of splendid intellect have given their whole
life to controversial disputes, when, if they had
given their life to something practical, they might
have been vastly useful! Suppose there were a
common enemy coming up the bav through the
390 INTOLKRANCK.
Narrows, and all the forts around New York be-
gan to fire into each other you would cry out,
' National suicide! why don't 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
their own 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 sometimes in the summer, and t 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 bee-
hive 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 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.
Beside that, if you want to build up any denomi-
nation, you will never build it up by trying to pull
some other down. Intolerance never put anything
INTOLERANCE. 3QI
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 Astor Library, New York, kept
as curiosities, there are seven hundred and seven
books and pamphlets against Methodism. Did Intol-
erance 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 important in religious trusts, but important
also in secular trusts. Church marching on, and the
more intolerance against it, the faster it marched.
What did Intolerance accomplish against the Bap-
tist Church? If laughing scorn and tirade could
have destroyed the church it would not have to-day
a disciple left.
The Baptists were hurled out of Boston in olden
times. Those who sympathized with them were con-
fined, and when a petition was offered asking leniency
in their behalf, all the men who signed it were in-
dicted. Has Intolerance stopped the Baptist Church ?
The last statistics in regard to it showed twenty thou-
sand churches and two million communicants. Intol-
erance never put down anything.
In England a law was made against the Jew. Eng*
land thrust back the Jew and thrust down the Jew,
and declared that no Jew should hold official posi-
39 2 INTOLERANCE.
tion. \Vhatcameofit? Were the Jews destroyed?
Was their religion overthrown? No. Who became
Prime Minister of England only a little while ago?
Who was next to the throne ? who was higher than
the throne because he was counsellor and adviser?
Disraeli, a Jew. What were we celebrating in all
our churches as well as synagogues only a few weeks
ago? The one hundredth birthday anniversary of
Montefiore, the great Jewish philanthropist. Intoler-
ance never yet put down anything.
Having shown you the origin of bigotry or sec-
tarianism, 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 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 can not 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 so egotistic and so puffed up as to
have an idea that we can not make any mistakes 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 in 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
INTOLERANCE. 393
off? Here is a man coming up on this side the plat-
form, and he says: "I don't believe in the persever-
ance 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 eternity?"
He says, "Yes." "Do you take Christ for time and
for eternity?" "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
Adoniram 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 denomi-
nations, 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 mag-
nificent martyrdom, ought to win our affection at
any rate, our respect. So, come on, ye ninety-five
thousand Episcopalians in this country, and ye four
hundred thousand Presbyterians, and ye nine hun-
dred thousand Baptists, and ye two million Metho-
dists come on; shoulder to shoulder we will march
for the world's conquest ; for all nations are to be
394 INTOLERANCE.
saved, and God demands that you and I help do it.
Forward, the whole line !
Moreover, we may also overthrow the feeling of
severe sectarianism by joining other denominations
in Christian work. I like when the springtime
comes and the anniversary occasions begin, and all
denominations come upon the same platform. That
overthrows sectarianism in the Young Men's Chris-
tian Association, in the Bible Societv, 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 four or five or six years ago. One Monday
morning at about two o'clock, while her nine hun-
dred passengers were sound asleep in her berths
dreaming of home, the steamer Atlantic crashed into
Mars Head. Five hundred souls in ten minutes
landed in 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 help-
less 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 quar-
termaster 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 for-
INTOLERANCE. 395
get their companionship in peril, companionship in
struggle, companionship in awful catastrophe and
rescue? Never! Never! In whatever part of the
earth they meet, they will be friends when they men-
tion 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 in the tempests of six thou-
sand 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 com-
mon tears, let us be brothers forever. We must be
We must be.
" Our army of the living God,
To 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 denomina*
tions 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." May God inspire us all with
the largest-hearted Christian charity.
CHAPTER XLI.
THE WITNESS-STAND.
In the days of George Stephenson, the perfecter
of the locomotive engine, the scientists proved con-
clusively that a railway train could never be driven
by steam-power successfully, and without peril ; but
the rushing express trains from Liverpool to Edin-
burgh, and from Edinburgh to London, have made
all the nations witnesses of the splendid achievements.
Machinists and navigators proved conclusively that
a steamer could never cross the Atlantic Ocean ; but
no sooner had they successfully proved the impossi-
bility of such an undertaking than the work was
done, and the passengers on the Cunard, and the
Inman, and the National, and the White Star lines
are witnesses. There went up a guffaw of wise
laughter at Professor Morse's proposition to make
the lightning of heaven his errand-boy, and it was
proved conclusively that the thing could never be
done ; but now all the news of the wide world, by
Associated Press put in your hands every morning
and night, has made all nations witnesses.
So in the time of Christ it was proved conclusively
that it was impossible for Him to rise from the dead.
It was shown logically that when a man was dead,
he was dead, and the heart and the liver and the
lungs having ceased to perform their offices, the
limbs would be rigid beyond all power of friction or
39 6
THE AGONY IN THE GABDEN.
THE WITNESS-STAND. 397
arousal. They showed it to be an absolute absurdity
that the dead Christ should ever get up alive ; but
no sooner had they proved this than the dead Christ
arose, and the disciples beheld Him, heard His voice,
and talked with Him, and they took the witness-stand
to prove that to be true which the wiseacres of the
day had proved to be impossible ; the record of the
experiment and of the testimony is : " Him hath
God raised from the dead, whereof we are witnesses."
Now, let me play the skeptic for a moment.
" There is no God," says the skeptic, " for I have
never seen Him with my physical eyesight. Your
Bible is a pack of contradictions. There never was
a miracle. Lazarus was not raised from the dead,
and the water was never turned into wine. Your
religion is an imposition on the credulity of the
ages."
The fact is, that if this world is ever brought to
God, it will not be through argument, but through
testimony. You might cover the whole earth with
apologies for Christianity and learned treatises in
defense of religion you would not convert a soul.
Lectures on the harmony between science and reli-
gion are beautiful mental discipline, but have never
saved a soul, and never will save a soul. Put a man
of the world and a man of the Church against each
other, and the man of the world will in all probability
get the triumph. There are a thousand things in
our religion that seem illogical to the world, and
always will seem illogical
Our weapon in this conflict is faith, not logic ; faith,
not metaphysics ; faith, not profundity ; faith, not
scholastic exploration. But then, in order to have
faith, we must have testimony, and if five hundred
398 THE WITNESS-STAND.
men, or one thousand men, or five hundred thousand
men, or five million men get up and tell me that they
have felt the religion of Jesus Christ a joy, a com-
fort, a help, an aspiration, I am bound as a fair-
minded man to accept their testimony.
We are witnesses that the religion of Christ is able
to convert a soul.
The Gospel may have had a hard time to conquer
us, we may have fought it back, but we were van-
quished. You say conversion is only an imaginary
thing. We know better. " We are witnesses."
There never was so great a change in our heart and
life on any other subject as on this. People laughed
at the missionaries in Madagascar because they
preached ten years without one convert; but there
are 33,000 converts in Madagascar to-day. People
laughed at Doctor Judson, the Baptist missionary,
becai-se he kept on preaching in Burmah five years
without a single convert ; but there are 20,000 Bap-
tists in Burmah to-day. People laughed at Doctor
Morrison, in China, for preaching there seven years
without a single conversion; bnt there are 15,000
Christians in China to-day. People laughed at the
missionaries for preaching at Tahiti fifteen years
without a single conversion, and at the missionaries
for preaching in Bengal seventeen years without a
single conversion ; yet in all those lands there are
multitudes of Christians to-day.
But why go so far to find evidence of the Gospel's
power to save a soul? "We are witnesses." We
were so proud that no man could have humbled us;
we were so hard that no earthly power could have
melted us; angels of God were all around about us,
they could not overcome us; but one day, perhaps at
THE WITNESS-STAND. 399
a Methodist anxious seat, or at a Presbyterian cate-
chetical lecture, or at a burial, or on horseback, a
power seized us, and made us get down, and made us
tremble, and made us kneel, and made us cry for
mercy, and we tried to wrench ourselves away from
the grasp, but we could not. It flung us flat, and
when we arose we were as much changed as
Gourgis, the heathen, who went into a prayer-
meeting with a dagger and a gun, to disturb the
meeting and destroy it, but the next day was found
crying, " Oh ! my great sins ! Oh ! my great Sav-
iour !" and for eleven years preached the Gospel of
Christ to his fellow-mountaineers, the last words an
his dying lips being, " Free grace ! " Oh, it was free
grace !
There is a man who was for ten years a hard
drinker. The dreadful appetite had sent down its
roots around the palate and the tongue, and on down
until they were interlinked with the vitals of body,
mind, and soul ; but he has not taken any stimulants
for two years. What did that? Not temperance
societies. Not prohibition laws. Not moral suasion.
Conversion did it. " Why," said one upon whom the
great change had come, " sir, I feel just as though I
were somebody else."
There is a sea-captain who swore all the way from
New York to Havana, and from Havana to San
Francisco, and when he was in port he was worse
than when he was on the sea. What power was it
that washed his tongue clean of profanities, and made
him a psalm-singer? Conversion by the Holy Spirit.
We are witnesses of the Gospel's power to com-
fort.
When a man has trouble, the world comes in and
400 THE WITNESS-STAND.
says: "Now get your mind off this; go out and
breathe the fresh air ; plunge deeper into business."
What poor advice. Get your mind off of it! When
everything is upturned with the bereavement, and
everything reminds you of what you have lost. Get
your mind off of it ! They might as well advise you
to stop thinking. You can not stop thinking, and
you can not stop thinking in that direction. Take a
walk in the fresh air ! Why, along that very street,
or that very road, she once accompanied you. Out
of that grass-plat she plucked flowers, or into that
show-window she looked, fascinated, saying, "Come
see the pictures." Go deeper into business ! Why,
she was associated with all your business ambition,
and since she has gone \~ou have no ambition left.
Oh, this is a clumsy world when it tries to comfort
a broken heart. I can build a Corliss engine, I can
paint a Raphael's " Madonna," I can play a Beetho-
ven's " Eroica Symphony," as easily as this world
can comfort a broken heart. And yet you have been
comforted. How was it done ? Did Christ come to
you and say : " Get your mind off this ; go out and
breathe the fresh air; plunge deeper into business?"
No. There was a minute when He came to you
perhaps in the watches of the night, perhaps in your
place of business, perhaps along the street and He
breathed something into your soul that gave peace,
rest, infinite quiet, so that you could take out the
photograph of the departed one and look into the
eyes and the face of the dear one, and say : "It is all
right ; she is better off ; I would not call her back.
Lord, I thank Thee that Thou hast comforted my
poor heart."
There are Christian parents who are willing to
THE WITNESS-STAND. 401
testify to the power of this Gospel to comfort. Your
son had just graduated from school or college and
was going into business, and the Lord took him. Or
your daughter had just graduated from the young
ladies' seminary, and you thought she was going to
be a useful woman, and of long life ; but the Lord
took her, and you were tempted to say, " All this cul-
ture of twenty years for nothing!" Or the little
child came home from school with the hot fever that
stopped not for the agonized prayer or for the skilful
physician, and the little child was taken. Or the
babe was lifted out of your arms by some quick
epidemic, and you stood wondering why God ever
gave you that child at all, if so soon He was to take
it away. And yet you are not repining, you are not
fretful, you are not fighting against God.
What has enabled you to stand all the trial? "Oh,"
you say, " I took the medicine that God gave my sick
soul. In my distress I threw myself at the feet of a
sympathizing God ; and when I was too weak to pray
or to look up, He breathed into me a peace that I
think must be the foretaste of that heaven where
there is neither a tear, nor a farewell, nor a grave."
Come, all ye who have been out to the grave to weep
there come, all ye comforted souls, get up off your
knees. Is there no power in this Gospel to soothe
the heart ? Is there no power in this religion to quiet
the worst paroxysm of grief ? There comes up an
answer from comforted widowhood, and orphanage,
and childlessness, saying, " Aye, aye, we are wit-
nesses."
We are witnesses of the fact that religion has
power to give composure in the last moment. I never
shall forget the first time I confronted death. We
26
402 THE WITNESS-STAND.
went across the cornfields in the country. I was led
by mv father's hand, and we came to the farmhouse
where the bereavement had come, and we saw the
crowd of wagons and carriages ; but there was one
carriage that especially attracted my boyish attention,
and it had black plumes. I said, "What's that? what's
that? Why those black tassels at the top?" and after
ft was explained to me, I was lifted up to look upon
the bright face of an aged Christian woman who three
days before had departed in triumph ; the whole
scene made an impression I never forgot.
I want to know if you have ever seen anything to
make you believe that the religion of Christ can give
composure in the final hour. Now, in the courts, at-
torney, jury and judge will never admit mere hear-
say. They demand that the witness must have seen
with his own eyes, or heard with his own ears, and
so 1 am critical in my examination of you now ; and
I want to know whether you have seen or heard any-
thing that makes you believe that the religion of
Christ gives composure in the final hour.
" Oh, yes," you say, " I saw my father and mother
depart. There was a great difference in their death-
beds. Standing by the one we felt more veneration.
By the other there was more tenderness." Before
the one you bowed perhaps, in awe. In the other
case you felt as if you would like to go along with
her.
How did they feel in that last hour? How did
they seem to act ? Were they very much frightened ?
Did they take hold of this world with both hands, as
though they did not want to give it up? " Oh, no,"
you say, " no, I remember, as though it were yester-
day ; she had a kind word for us all, and there were a
THE WITNESS-STAND. 403
few mementoes distributed among the children, and
then she told us how kind we must be to our father
in his loneliness, and then she kissed us good-bye and
went asleep as calmly as a child in a cradle."
What made her so composed ? Natural courage ?
"No," you say, "mother was very nervous; when
the carriage inclined to the side of the road, she
would cry out ; she was always rather weakly."
What, then, gave her composure ? Was it because
she did not care much for you, and the pang of part,
ing was not great ? " Oh," you say, " she showered
upon us a wealth of affection ; no mother ever loved
her children more than mother loved us ; she showed
it by the way she nursed us when we were sick, and
she toiled for us until her strength gave out." What
then, was it that gave her composure in the last
hour? Do not hide it. Be frank, and let me know.
" Oh," you say, " it was because she was so good ;
she made the Lord her portion, and she had faith
that she would go straight to glory, and that we
should all meet her at last at the foot of the throne."
Here are people who say, " I saw a Christian
brother die, and he triumphed." And some one else,
" I saw a Christian sister die, and she triumphed."
Some one else will say, " I saw a Christian daughter
die, and she triumphed." Come, all ye who have
seen the last moments of a Christian, and give testi-
mony in this cause on trial. Uncover your heads,
put your hand on the old family Bible from which
they used to read the promises, and promise in the
presence of high heaven that you will tell the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. With
what you have seen with your own eyes, and from
what you have heard with your own ears, is there
404 THE WITNESS-STAND.
power in this Gospel to give calmness and triumph
in the last exigency? The response conies from all
sides, from young, and old, and middle-aged : " We
are witnesses ! "
CHAPTER XLII.
GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS.
We often hear about the Gospel of John, and the
Gospel of Matthew, and the Gospel of Luke. There
is just as certainly a Gospel of Moses, a Gospel of
David, a Gospel of Jeremiah. In other words, Christ
is as certainly in the Old Testament as in the New.
If, after one has departed, we want to get an idea of
just how he looked, we gather up all the photographs
some taken from one side the face, others from the
other side the face, some the full face, some the full-
length portrait, and then from all these pictures we
recall to our mind just how the departed one looked.
And I want all the pictures of the evangelists and all
the pictures of ( the prophets to bring before me the
image of Jesus Christ. I want to know just how He
looked, and the more pictures I have of Him the
better I shall understand.
When the Israelites were on their march through
the wilderness they carried their church with them.
They had what they called a tabernacle, a pitched
tent. It was very costly and very beautiful. The
framework was made out of forty-eight boards of
acacia wood, set in sockets of silver. The curtains
of the building were of purple and scarlet and blue
and fine linen, and they were hung on artistic loops.
The candlestick had a shaft and branches and bowls
of gold, and there were lamps of gold, and tongs of
gold, and snuffers of gold, and rings of gold.
405
406 GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS.
Now, there is one thing in this ancient tabernacle
that especially attracts my attention, and that is the
laver. It was a great basin filled with water, and
the water went down through spouts and passed
away, and the priests came and washed their hands
and their feet as this water came down through the
spouts and passed away. The laver was made out
of the looking-glasses of the women who had fre-
quented the tabernacle, and who had made that
contribution to the furniture. The looking-glasses
were not made out of glass, but of brass of a superior
quality, polished and burnished, until just as soon as
a priest looked into the side of the laver he saw his
every feature and any spot of defilement that may
have been on his countenance ; so that this laver of
looking-glasses had two purposes; the first, to show
those who came up the defilement upon themselves,
and secondly, to offer them a place where they could
get rid of it. And as everything in the ancient
tabernacle was typical of something in the Gospel of
the Son of God, or, at any rate, suggestive of it, 1
take this laver of looking-glasses as all suggestive of
this Gospel, which first shows me sin, and then gives
me an opportunity of divine ablution.
" Oh, happy day, happy day,
When Jesus washed my sins away !"
This is the only mirror, the burnished side of this
laver is the only mirror that shows you just as you
are. Some mirrors Hatter the features, and they
make you look better than you are. Some mirrors
distort the features, and they make you look worse
than you are. This mirror this mirror of God's
Word shows you just as you are. These priests
would come in, and just as soon as they confronted
GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 407
the burnished, polished side of this looking-glass,
this metal out of which the laver was made, he saw
where there was any pollution upon his counte-
nance, where there was any spot that needed to be
cleaned off.
Just as soon as we come in and look at this mirror
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we see ourselves just
as we are. "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.
Some people call these defects imperfections, or ec-
centricities, or erratic behavior, or wild oats, or high
living ; but this Book calls them filth, transgression,
the abominable thing that God hates. Paul got one
glance at that mirror that polished mirror and he
cried out : "Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall
deliver me?" David caught one glimpse of that
mirror, and he cried out ; " Purge me with hyssop,
and I shall be clean ! " Martin Luther got one
glimpse of that mirror, and he cried out to Staupitz :
"Oh, my sins, my sins, my sins !
Mind you, I am not talking about bad habits. We
do not need any Bible to persuade us that blasphemy
is wrong, or impure life is wrong, or evil speaking is
wrong. 1 am now talking of the heart, the evil
heart, the fountain of bad thoughts, of bad words, of
bad actions. Here is ingratitude, for instance. If
you hand me a glass of water, I say, " Thank you."
If I hand you a glass of water, you say, "Thank
you." But here we have been taking ten thousand
mercies from the hand of God our hunger fed, our
thirst slaked, and we have had shelter and home, and
408 GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS.
ten thousand blessings and advantages, and yet I do
not state a thing that you will not believe when I
say that there are people in this house this morning
fifty years of age who have never got down once on
their knees and thanked God for his goodness. And
here is pride of heart. Oh, we all have felt it, the
pride that will not submit to God. Pride wants its
own way. I will not quarrel with theologians about
terms. I do not care whether you call it total de-
pravity, or whether you call it something else. This
evil nature we got from our parents, and they got it
from their parents, and it goes down from generation
to generation a nature obnoxious to God before
conversion, and after conversion there is not one in
any of us except that which the grace of God planted
and fostered and keeps.
It seems to me that the reason there are compar-
atively so few conversions in our day, is to be found
in the fact that the preaching of our day is so apt to
persuade a man that he is almost right anyhow, he
only needs a little fixing up, he only needs a few
touches of divine grace, and then he will be all right ;
only a little out of order ; only a little repair neces-
sary to our nature, instead of the broad, deep talk,
which Baxter, and Payson, and Wesley, and George
Whitefield thundered in the ears of a race trembling
on the verge of instant and eternal disaster. Ah ! my
friends, if there is any truth plainly set forth in this
Book, it is that we have thoroughly gone astray, and
that we are not by nature almost right, but alto-
gether wrong. " The heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately wicked." Some of us have
been in Hampton Court, and we remember that
room where all the four walls are covered with mir-
GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 409
rors, and it does not make any difference which way
you look, you see yourself. And when a man once
fully steps inside this precinct of the Gospel he sees
himself on all sides, every feature of moral deformity,
every spot of moral taint. The whole head is sick,
and the whole heart is faint. I do not care what
your ancestry was, your ancestry was no better than
my ancestry. But all generations have felt this
touch of sin. Have you not realized it ? I will tell
you why. You have never looked into the looking-
glass, you have never seen the mirror.
" But," says some one, " what is the use of display-
ing our defects to us if we cannot get rid of them ? "
None. You say : " What is the use of showing me
that I am a sinner if I cannot be anything but a
sinner?" No use. I cannot imagine anything
meaner than for a physician to come into a sick room
and tell the patient how bad he looks, and to dis-
course upon his affliction, and enlarge upon the fact
that his case is hopeless, and then go out with his
hands behind his back and whistling. There never
has been a case like that. No physician would be so
hard-hearted as that. If you cannot cure a disease
you certainly will not make the matter worse by dis-
coursing upon it, and I am the last man to stand here
and talk about the sin of my heart and the sin of
your heart unless there is a cure for it. There is no
use for the polished side of this laver, no use for the
burnished looking-glass, if there is no place for me to
wash and be clean.
Now, you notice that this laver of looking-glasses
spoken of in my text, was filled with fresh water
every morning. The servants of the tabernacle took
buckets, and they filled them with the water, and
410 GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS.
they brought this bright water and poured it into the
laver ; and that is a type of this Gospel of Jesus
Christ, which is a fresh Gospel fresh every year,
every day, every hour, every moment. It is not a
stagnant pool of accumulated corruption ; it is living
water breaking from the rock. Christians often
make the mistake of being satisfied with old experi-
ences. Why, my brother and sister, I do not care
what your experiences were ten, fifteen years ago.
Do not give us a stale Gospel. Give us a fresh Gos-
pel. What are you now ? Suppose a war should
come, and I could prove to the government that ten
years ago I was loyal, would that be any excuse for
my not taking the oath of allegiance? The govern-
ment would not ask me what I was ten years ago,
but, " What are you now ?" And I do not ask you
whether you were loyal to Jesus Christ ten or five
years, or one year ago. Are you loyal now? Are
you fighting under the standards of Emanuel ? Are
you a soldier of Jesus Christ now?
The trouble is, that a great many are depending
upon old insurances against the damage of sin, and
old insurances against the damage of the great
future old insurances that have run out. Suppose
that you allowed the fire insurance on your home to
expire yesterday, and to-day your home should be
consumed, would you have the impertinence to go
to-morrow morning with the papers to the insurance
company and demand the amount of the policy ? No.
If you did they would say : "You have no business
here, you have no right to ask that, you let the insur-
ance expire on Saturday ; this is Monday." O fol-
lower of the Lord Jesus, do not depend upon old in-
surances, ten, or twenty, or forty years old, as I know
GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 411
some of you are depending upon them ! You want
the policy paid up by the blood and the tears of the
Son of God.
But I notice in regard to this laver looking-glass
that the priests there washed their hands and their
feet. The water came down through the spouts
from the basin, and they carefully and completely
washed their hands and their feet, typical of the fact
that this Gospel is to reach to the very extremities
of our moral nature. Here is a man who says : " I
will fence off part of my heart, and it shall be a gar-
den full of flowers and fruits of Christian character,
and all the rest shall be the devil's commons." You
can not do it. It is all garden or none. You tell me
about a man, that he is a good Christian except in
politics. I deny your statement. If his religion will
not take him in purity through the autumnal election,
that religion is worth nothing in May, June, or July.
You say that a man is a very good man, he is a
Christian, he is useful, but he over-reaches in a bar-
gain. I deny your statement. If it is an all-per-
vading religion, if it touches a man at all at one
point of his nature, it will pervade his entire nature.
It is quite easy to be a Christian, or seems to be,
on Sabbath, surrounded by kindly influences ; but
not so easy to be a Christian when by one twitch of
the roll of goods you can cover a defect in the silk.
It is quite an easy thing to be a Christian with a
psalm-book in your hand and the Bible on your lap ;
not so easy to be a Christian when telling a merchant
you can get better goods at less price at another
store until he lets you have the goods cheaper than
he has any capacity to sell them ; he is going to hurt
himself when he does sell, for there are more lies told
412 GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS.
before the counter than behind the counter, ten to
one. Christ will have you all, or He will have none
of you. This grace must reach to the very extrem-
ities of our nature.
Suppose you have rented or purchased a whole
house, and the former owner comes to you with the
keys. There are twelve rooms in the house and he
gives you six of the keys. You say : " Where are
the other keys?" "Oh," he says, " you can't have
them ! There is a room on the second floor you
can't have, and there is' a room on the third floor and
a room on the fourth floor you can't have, and there
is a dark place in the attic you can't have, but here
are the keys for the others." You say : " I purchased
the whole house, and I want all the keys, or I don't
want any of them." Here is a man who comes to
God, and he gives part of his nature, and says: "You
may go to this and go to that, but there is something
I can't give up, there is a room in my nature I can't
surrender; and this I want to keep, and that I want
to keep. You can have half the keys of my soul, but
not all." Then Christ will not have any. He will
take everything, from cellar to attic all of the keys
to all your affections, all your hopes, all your
ambitions, all your heart, all your life, or He will not
take one key. The grace of God must touch the
extremities, the very extremities of our moral nature.
The priests when they came to this laver of looking-
glasses washed their hands and washed their feet.
I notice in this laver of looking-glasses that the
washing in it was not optional, it was imperative.
Here the priests came into the tabernacle. Suppose
now one of them should say : " I washed before I
came from home ; there's no use of my washing in
GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 413
this laver." God says: "You wash in this laver or
die." But suppose the priest had said : " Why, there
are other lavers just as bright as that from which
this water was taken, and I might wash there just as
well; why wash in the water of this laver?" God
says : " Wash here or die." Not optional impera-
tive. Typical of the Gospel which says : " You wash
in this fountain open for sin and uncleanness, or
perish." We have no choice.
" But," says some one, " couldn't God have pro-
vided other ways of salvation ?" Fifty of them, per-
haps. I do not think that God exhausted all His
wisdom when he laid out this plan of salvation. Per-
haps he might have provided fifty plans of salvation.
He provided only one. You say : " Might not a
whole line of ships sail from earth to heaven ?" Yes,
but there is only one going. Are there any other
trees as luxuriant as the tree of Calvary ? Yes,
more, for that one had neither bud nor blossom, and
it was stripped and barked, But the one path to
heaven is under the bare arm of that stripped tree.
Not optional, but imperative.
O brother, sister, come up to the laver of the
Gospel ! O afflicted soul, come and bathe off your
wounds, and, sick one, come up and cool your hot
temples. Pardon for all your sin. Comfort for all
your troubles. The dark cloud that hung thunder-
ing over Sinai floated above Calvary and burst into
a shower of the Saviour's tears. If you have any
trouble, come to God. He will make you His dar-
lings. He will make you his favorites. We cannot
in our households have favorites, but if you have a
favorite, mother, I know which one it is ; it is the
sick one, the crippled one, the one that coughs all
414 GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS.
night, the weary one, the wan one that is your
favorite. And God seems to have His favorites, and
they are the weak and the worn and the sick and the
weary. Just come up to Him to-day, and He will
put His arms around you, and He will kiss your wan
cheek, and He will say as He hushes you with the
divine lullaby : " As one whom his mother com-
forteth, so will I comfort you."
CHAPTER XLIII.
RELIGION IX DRESS.
That we should all be clad is proved by the open-
ing of the first wardrobe in Paradise, with its apparel
of dark green. That we should all, as far as our
means allows us, be beautifully and gracefully ap-
pareled, is proved by the fact that God never made
a wave but He gilded it, or a tree but He garlanded
it with blossoms, or a sky but He studded it with
stars, or allowed the smoke of a furnace to ascend
but He columned and turreted and domed and
scrolled it into outlines of indescribable gracefulness.
When I see the apple-orchards of the spring and the
pageantry of the autumnal forests I come to the con-
clusion that if Nature ever does join a church, while
she may be a Quaker in the silence of her worship,
she never will be a Quaker in the style of her dress.
Why the notches on a fern-leaf, or the stamen on a
water-lily? Why, when the day departs, does it let
the folding-doors of heaven stay open so long, when
it might go in so quickly? One summer morning I
saw an army of a million spears, each one adorned
with a diamond of the first water I mean the grass
with the dew on it. I say these things as a back-
ground, to show you that I have no prim, precise,
prudish, or cast-iron theories on the subject of human
apparel. But the goddess of fashion has set up her
throne in this country, and at the sound of the tim-
415
416 RELIGION IN DRESS.
brels we are all expected to fall down and worship.
This goddess of fashion has become a rival of the
Lord of heaven and earth ; and it is high time that
we unlimbered our batteries against this idolatry.
When I come to count the victims of fashion I
find as many masculine as feminine. Men make
an easy tirade against woman, as though she were
the chief worshiper at this idolatrous shrine, and no
doubt there are men in the more conspicuous part of
the pew who have already cast glances to the more
retired part of the pew, their look a prophecy of a gen-
erous distribution to others of the more cogent parts
of my discourse. My words shall be as appropriate
for one end of the pew as for the other. Men are as
much the idolators of fashion as women, but they
throw themselves on a different part of the altar.
With men the fashion goes to cigars, and club-rooms,
and yachting parties, and wine suppers. In the
United States the men chew up and smoke one hun-
dred millions of dollars' worth of tobacco every year.
That is their fashion.
But men do not abstain from millinery and elabora-
tion of skirt through any superiority of humility. It
is only because such appendages would be a blockade
to business. What would sashes and trails three and
a half yards long do in a Wall street stock market?
And yet men are the disciples of fashion just as much
as women. Some of them wear boots so tight they
can hardly walk in paths of righteousness. And
there are men who buy expensive suits of clothes
and never pay for them, and who go through the
streets in great stripes of color like animated checker,
boards, and suggest to one that, after all, Tweed in
prison dress may have got out of the penitentiary.
RELIGION IN DRESS. 417
Then there are multitudes of men who, not satisfied
with the bodies the Lord gave them^are padded, so
their shoulders shall be square, carrying around a
small cotton plantation ! And I understand a great
many of them now paint their eyebrows and their
lips; and I have heard from good authority that
there are multitudes of men in Brooklyn and New
York men things have got to such an awful pass
multitudes of men wearing corsets !
I say these things, because I want to show you
that I am impartial in this discussion, and that both
sexes, in the language of the Surrogate's office, shall
" share and share alike." I shall show you what are
the destroying and deathful influences of inordinate
fashion.
The first baleful influence is in fraud, illimitable
and ghastly. Do you know that Arnold of the Revo-
lution proposed to sell his country in order to get
money to supply his wife's wardrobe? I declare
here before God that the effort to keep up expensive
wardrobes in this country is sending many business
men to temporal and eternal perdition. What was it
that sent Oilman to the penitentiary, and Philadelphia
Morton to the watering of stocks, and the life-insur.
ance presidents to perjured statements about their
assets, and has completely upset our American
finances? What was it that overthrew Belknap, the
United States Secretary at Washington, the crash of
whose fall shook the continent ?
But why should I go to these infamous defaultings
to show what men will do in order to keep up great
home style and expensive wardrobe, when you and I
know scores of men who are put to their wit's end
and are lashed from January to December in the
41 8 RELIGION IN DRESS.
attempt to keep up great home style. Our Washing-
ton politicians .may theorize until the expiration of
their terms of office as to the best way of improving
our monetary condition in this country ; it will be of
no use, and things will be no better, until we learn to
put on our heads and backs and feet and hands no
more than we can pay for!
There are clerks in stores and banks on limited
salaries who, in the vain attempt to keep the ward-
robe of their family as showy as other wardrobes,
are dying of muffs, and diamonds, and camel's-hair
shawls, and high hats, and they have nothing left
except what they give to cigars and wine-suppers,
and the) r die before their time, and they will expect
us ministers to preach about them as though they
were the victims of early piety, and after a high-toned
funeral, with silver handles at the side of their coffin^
of extraordinary brightness, it will be found out that
in the act of dying and going to Greenwood they
swindled the undertaker out of his legitimate
expenses.
The country is dressed to death. You are not sur-
prised to find that the putting up of one public build-
ing in New York cost millions of dollars more than it
ought to have cost when you find out that the man
who gave out the contracts paid more than five thou-
sand dollars for his daughter's wedding dress. The
cashmeres of a thousand dollars each are not rare on
Broadway. What are men to do in order to keep up
such home wardrobes? Steal that is the only re-
spectable thing it seems to them they can do.
During the last fifteen years there have been
innumerable fine businesses shipwrecked on the
wardrobe.
RELIGION IN DRESS. 419
The temptation comes in this way : A man thinks
more of his family than he does of all the world out-
side, and if they spend the evening in describing to
him the superior wardrobe of the family across the
street, that they cannot bear the sight of, the man is
thrown on his gallantry and his pride of family, and,
without translating his feelings into plain language,
he goes into extortion and issuing false stock, and
skillful penmanship in writing somebody else's name
at the foot of a promissory note ; and they all go
down together the husband to the prison, the wife
to the sewing machine, the children to be taken care
of by those who were called poor relations. Oh, for
some new Shakespeare to arise and write the tragedy
of clothes !
Act the first of the tragedy A plain but beautiful
home. Enter, the newly-married pair. Enter, sim-
plicity of manner and behavior. Enter, as much hap-
piness as is ever found in one home.
Act the second Discontent with the humdrum of
life. Enter, envy. Enter, jealousy. Enter, desire
of display.
Act the third Enlargement of expenses. Enter,
all the queenly dressmakers. Enter, the French
milliners.
Act the fourth The tip-top of society. Enter,
princes and princesses of New York life. Enter,
magnificent plate and equipage. Enter, everything
splendid.
Act the fifth and last Winding up of the Scene.
Enter, the assignee. Enter, the sheriff. Enter, the
creditors. Enter, humiliation. Enter, the wrath of
God. Enter, the contempt of society. Enter, death.
Now let the silk curtain drop on the stage. The
farce is ended, and the lights are out.
420 RELIGION IN DRESS.
Will you forgive me if 1 say in tersest shape
possible, that some of the men in this country have
to forge, and have to perjnre, and have to swindle, to
pay for their wives' dresses ? I do not care whether
you forgive me or not.
Again, inordinate fashion is the foe of all alms-
giving.
Men and women put so much in personal display
that they often have nothing for God and the cause
of suffering humanity. A Christian man cracks his
Palais Royal gloves clear across the back by holding
on to the one cent too tight as he puts it into the
poor-box. A Christian woman, at the story of the
Hottentots, crying copious tears into a twenty-five
dollar handkerchief, and then gives a two-cent piece
to the collection, thrusting it down under the bills so
that people will not know but it was a ten-dollar gold
piece. One hundred dollars for incense to fashion.
Two cents for God.
God gives us ninety cents out of every dollar.
The other ten cents, by command of His Bible, be-
long to Him. Is not God liberal according to this
tithing system laid down in the Old Testament is
not God liberal in giving us ninety cents out of a
dollar, when He takes but ten ? We do not like that.
We want to have ninety-nine cents for ourselves and
one for God. Now, I would a great deal rather steal
tea cents from you than God. I think one reason
why a great many people do not get along in worldly
accumulation faster, is because they do not observe
this divine rule. God rises up and says: "Well, if
that man is not satisfied with ninety cents of a dollar,
then I will take the whole dollar, and I will give it to
the man or woman who is honest with me."
RELIGION IN DRESS. 421
The greatest obstacle to charity in the Christian
Church to-day is the fact that men expend so much
money on their stomachs, and women expend so
much money on their backs they have got nothing
left for the cause of God and the world's betterment.
Inordinate fashion causes distraction in worship.
You know very well there are a good many people
who come to church just as they go to the races, to
see who will come out ahead. What a flutter it
makes in church when some woman with extra-
ordinary display of fashion comes in ! " What a love
of a bonnet!" says some one. "What a perfect
fright .'"say five hundred. For the most merciless
critics in the world are fashion critics. Men and
women with souls to be saved passing the hour in
wondering where that man got his flamboyant cravat
or what store that woman patronizes. In many of
our churches the preliminary exercises are taken up
with the discussion of wardrobes. It is pitiable. Is
it not wonderful that the Lord does not strike the
meeting-house with lightning?
What distraction of public worship ! Dying men
and women, whose bodies are soon to be turned into
dust, yet before three worlds strutting like peacocks,
the awful question of the soul's destiny submerged
by the question of Creedmoor polonaise and navy
blue velvet with long fan train skirt, long enough to
drag up the church aisle, the husband's store, office,
shop, factory, fortune, and the admiration of half the
people in the building. Men and women come late
to church to show their clothes. People sitting down
in a pew, taking up a hymn book, all absorbed at the
same time in personal array, to sing :
422 RELIGION" IX DRESS.
" Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings,
Thy better portion trace ;
Rise from transitory things
Toward heaven, thy native place!"
I turn Episcopalian long enough to say, " Good
Lord, deliver us!"
Insatiate fashion also belittles the intellect.
Our minds are enlarged, or they dwindle just in
proportion to the importance of the subject on which
we constantly dwell. Can you imagine anything
more be-dwarfing to the human intellect than the
study of fashion ? I see men on the street, who,
judging from their elaboration, I think, must have
taken two hours to arrange their apparel.
What will be left of a woman's intellect after giv-
ing years and years to the discussion of such ques-
tions as the comparison between knife-plaits and
box-plaits, and borderings of gray fox fur or black
marten, or the comparative excellence of circulars of
repped Antwerp silk lined with blue fox fur, or
with Hudson Bay sable? They all land in idiocy,
the first stages or the last stages. I have seen men
at the summer watering-places, through fashion the
mere wreck of what they once were sallow of cheek,
meager of limb, gone in at the chest ; showing no
animation save in rushing across a room to pick up *
lady's fan ; simpering along the corridors the same
compliments they simpered twenty years ago. The
fools of fashion are myriad. Fashion not only de-
stroys the body, but it makes idiotic the intellect.
Yet, my friends, I have given you only the milder
phase of this evil. It shuts a great multitude out of
heaven. The first peal of thunder that shook Sinai
declared : " Thou shalt have no other god before
me," and you will have to choose between the god-
RELIGION IN DRESS. 423
dess of fashion and the Christian God. There are a
great many seats in heaven, and they are all easy
seats, but not one seat for the devotee of fashion.
You could not sail up the harbor of heaven with that
rigging. You would be fired on as a blockade-run-
ner. Heaven is for meek and quiet spirits. Heaven
is for those who think more of their souls than they
do of their bodies. Heaven is for those who have
more joy in Christian charity than they have in fash-
ionable attire.
CHAPTER XLIV.
THE COMING SERMON.
We hear a great deal in these days about the com-
ing man, and the coming woman, and the corning
time. Some one ought to tell us of the coming ser-
mon. It is a simple fact that everybody knows that
the sermon of to-day does not reach the world.
The sermon of to-day carries along with it the dead-
wood of all age's. Hundreds of years ago it was de-
cided what a sermon ought to be, and it is the attempt
of many theological seminaries and doctors of divinity
to hew the modern pulpit utterances into the same
old-style proportions. Booksellers will tell you they
dispose of a hundred histories, a hundred novels, a
hundred poems to one book of sermons.
What is the matter? Some say the age is the
worst of all the ages. It is better. Some say religion
is wearing out, when it is wearing in. Some say
there are so many who despise the Christian religion.
I answer, there never was an age when there were
so many Christians, or so many friends of Christianity
as this age has our age as to others a hundred to
one. What is the matter, then? It is simply be-
cause our sermon of to-day is not suited to the age.
It is the canal-boat in an age of locomotive and elec-
tric telegraph. The sermon will have to be shaken
out of the old grooves, or it will not be heard, and it
will not be read.
424
THE COMING SERMON. 425
Before the world is converted the sermon will have
to be converted. You might as well go into the mod-
ern Sedan or Gettysburg with bows and arrows in-
stead of rifles, and bombshells, and parks of artillery,
as to expect to conquer this world for God by the old
styles of sermonology. Jonathan Edwards preached
the sermons most adapted to the age in which he lived,
but if those sermons were preached now they would
divide an audience into two classes: Those sound
asleep and those wanting to go home.
That coming sermon will be full of a living Christ
in contradistinction to didactic technicalities. A ser-
mon may be full of Christ though hardly mentioning
His name, and a sermon may be empty of Christ
while every sentence is repetitions of His titles. The
world wants a living Christ, not a Christ standing at
the head of a formal system of theology, but a Christ
who meaps pardon and sympathy and condolence
and brotherhood and life and heaven. A poor man's
Christ. An overworked man's Christ. An invalid's
Christ. A farmer's Christ. A merchant's Christ.
An artisan's Christ. An every man's Christ.
A symmetrical and fine-worded system of theology
is well enough for theological classes, but it has no
more business in a pulpit than have the technical
phrases of an anatomist, or a physiologist, or physi-
cian in the sick room of a patient. The world wants
help, immediate and world-uplifting, and it will come
through a sermon in which Christ shall walk right
down into the immortal soul and take everlasting
possession of it, filling it as full of light as is this
noonday firmament.
Oh, in that coming sermon of the Christian Church,
there will be living illustrations taken out from every-
426 THE COMING SERMON.
day life of vicarious suffering illustrations that will
bring to mind the ghastlier sacrifice of Him who in
the high places of the field, on the cross fought our
battles and wept our griefs, and endured our struggle
and died our death.
A German sculptor made an image of Christ, and
he asked his little child, two years old, who it was,
and she said : " That must be some very great man."
The sculptor was displeased with the criticism, so he
got another block of marble and chiseled away on it
two or three years, and then he brought in his little
child, four or five years of age, and he said to her,
'" Who do you think that is?" She said, " That must
be the One who took little children in His arms and
blessed them." Then the sculptor was satisfied. O
my friends, what the world wants is not a cold Christ,
not an intellectual Christ, not a severely magisterial
Christ, but a loving Christ, spreading out His arms
of sympathy to press the whole world to His loving
heart.
The coming sermon of the Christian Church will
be a short sermon.
Condensation is demanded by the age in which we
live. No more need of long introductions and long
applications and so many divisions to a discourse that
it may be said to be hydra headed. In other days,
men got all their information from the pulpit. There
were few books and there were no newspapers, and
there was little travel from place to place, and people
would sit and listen two and a half hours to a reli-
gious discourse, and "seventeenthly" would find them
fresh and chipper. In those times there was enough
room for a man to take an hour to warm himself up
to the subject, and an hour to cool off. But what was
THE COMING SERMON. 427
a necessity then is a superfluity now. Congregations
are full of knowledge from books, from newspapers,
from rapid and continuous intercommunication, and
long disquisitions of what they know already will not
be abided. If a religious teacher cannot compress
what he wishes to say to the people in the space of
forty-five minutes, better adjourn it to some other day-
The trouble is, we preach audiences into a Chris-
tian frame and then we preach them out of it. We
forget that every auditor has so much capacity of at-
tention, and when that is exhausted he is restless. In
all religious discourse we want locomotive power and
propulsion ; we want at the same time stout brakes
to let down at the right instant. It is a dismal thing
after a hearer has comprehended the whole subject
to hear a man say, " Now, to recapitulate," and " A
few words by way of application, "and "Once more,"
and " Finally," and " Now to conclude."
Paul preached until midnight, and Eutychus got
sound asleep and fell out of a window and broke his
neck. Some would say, " Good for him." I would
rather be sympathetic like Paul, and resuscitate him.
The accident is often quoted now in religious circles
as a warning against somnolence in church. It is just
as much a warning to ministers against prolixity.
Eutychus was wrong in his somnolence, but Paul
made a mistake when he kept o till midnight. He
ought to have stopped at eleven o'clock, and there
would have been no accident. If Paul might have
gone on to too great a length, let all those of us who
are now preaching the Gospel remember that there
is a limit to religious discourse, or ought to be, and
that in our time we have no apostolic power of
miracles.
428 THE COMING SF.RMOX.
Napoleon in an address of seven minutes thrilled
his army and thrilled Europe. Christ's sermon on
the mount, the model sermon, was less than eighteen
minutes long at ordinary mode of delivery. It is not
electricity scattered all over the sky that strikes, but
electricity gathered into a thunderbolt and hurled ;
and it is not religious truth scattered over, spread
out over a vast reach of time, but religious truth
projected in compact form that flashes light upon the
soul and rives its indifference.
When the coming sermon arrives in this land and
in the Christian Church, the sermon which is to
arouse the world and startle the nations and usher in
the kingdom, it will be a brief sermon. Hear it, all
theological students, all ye just entering upon reli-
gious work, all ye men and women who in Sabbath-
schools and other departments are toiling for Christ
and the salyation of immortals. Brevity! Brevity!
The coming sermon of which I speak will be a pop-
ular sermon. There are those in these times who
speak of a popular sermon as though there must be
something wrong about it. As these critics are dull
themselves the world gets the impression that a ser-
mon is good in proportion as it is stupid. Christ was
the most popular preacher the world ever saw, and
considering the small number of the world's popula-
tion, had the largest audiences ever gathered. He
never preached anywhere without making a great
sensation. People rushed out in the wilderness to
hear Him, reckless of their physical necessities. So
great was their anxiety to hear Christ, that taking no
food with them, they would have fainted and starved
had not Christ performed a miracle and fed them.
Why did so many people take the truth at Christ's
THE COMING SERMON. 429
hands ? Because they all understood it. He illus-
trated His subject by a hen and her chickens, by a
bushel measure, by a handful of salt, by a bird's flight,
and by a lily's aroma. All'the people knew what He
meant, and they flocked to Him. And when the com-
ing sermon of the Christian Church appears it will
not be Princetonian, nor Rochesterian, nor Ando-
verian, nor Middletonian, but Olivetic plain, practi-
cal, unique, earnest, comprehensive of all the woes,
wants, sins, sorrows and necessities of an auditory.
But when that sermon does come, there will be a
thousand gleaming scimeters to charge on it. There
are in so many theological seminaries professors tell-
ing young men how to preach, themselves not know-
ing how, and I am told that if a young man in some
of our theological seminaries says anything quaint, or
thrilling, or unique, faculty and students fly at him,
and set him right, and straighten him out, and smooth
him down, and chop him off until he says everything
just as everybody else says it.
Oh, when the coming sermon of the Christian
Church arrives, all the churches of Christ in our
great cities will be thronged. The world wants spir-
itual help. All who have buried their dead want
comfort. All know themselves *o be mortal and to
be immortal, and they want to hear about the great
future. I tell you, my friends, if the people of these
great cities who have had trouble only thought they
could get practical and sympathetic help in the
Christian Church there would not be a street in New
York, or Brooklyn, or Chicago, or Charleston, or
Philadelphia, or Boston which would be passable on
the Sabbath day, if there were a church on it, for all
the people would press to that asylum of mercy, that
great house of comfort and consolation.
45 THE COMIXC SERMON.
\Vc- hearagreat deal of discussion now all ovt-rtlu-
land about why people do not go to church. Some
say it is because Christianity is dying out, and be-
cause people do not believe in the truth of God's
Word, and all that. They are false reasons. The
reason is because our sermons are not interesting and
practical, and sympathetic and helpful. Some one
might as well tell the whole truth on this subject, and
so I will tell it. The sermon of the future, the Gos-
pel sermon to come forth, and shake the nations, and
lift people out of darkness, will be a popular sermon,
just for the simple reason that it will meet the woes,
and the wants, and the anxieties of the people.
The sermon of the future will be an awakening ser-
mon. From altar-rail to the front doorstep, under
that sermon an audience will get up and start for
heaven. There will be in it many a staccato passage.
It will not be a lullaby ; it will be a battle charge.
Men will drop their sins, for the}* will feel the hot
breath of pursuing retribution ~on the back of their
necks. It will be a sermon sympathetic with all the
physical distresses as well as the spiritual distresses
of the world. Christ not only preached, but He
healed paralysis, and He healed epilepsy, and He
healed the dumb, ard the blind, and ten lepers.
That sermon of the future will be an everyday
sermon, going right down into every man's life, and
it will teach him how to vote, how to bargain, how to
plow, how to do any work he is called to, how to
wield trowel, and pen. and pencil, and yardstick, and
plane. And it will teach women how to preside over
their households, and how to educate their children,
and how to imitate Miriam, and Esther, and Vashti
and Eunice, the mother of Timothv ; and Mary, the
THE COMING SERMON. 431
mother of Christ; and those women who on North-
ern and Southern battlefields were mistaken by the
wounded for angels of mercy fresh from the throne
of God.
PART III.
(Joalg for 1 tsje ^oral
CHAPTER XLV.
THE GATES OF HELL.
You know about the gates of heaven. You have
often heard them preached about. There are three
to each point of the compass. On the north, three
gates; on the south, three gates; on the east, three
gates ; on the west, three gates ; and each gate is a
solid pearl. Oh, gate of heaven, may we all get into
it ! But who shall describe the gates of hell ? These
gates are burnished until they sparkle and glisten in
the gaslight. They are mighty, and set in sockets of
deep and dreadful masonry. They are high, so that
those who are in may not clamber over and get out.
They are heavy, but they swing easily in to let those
go in who are to be destroyed.
I remember, when the Franco-German war was
going on, that I stood one day in Paris looking at the
gates of the Tuilleries, and I was so absorbed in the
sculpturing at the top of the gates the masonry
and the bronze that I forgot myself, and after a while,
looking down, I saw that there were officers of the
law scrutinizing me, supposing, no doubt, I was a
German, and looking at those gates for adverse pur-
poses. But, my friends, we shall not stand looking
at the outside of the gates of hell. I intend to tell
you of both sides, and I shall tell you what those
gates are made of. With the hammer of God's truth
I shall pound on the brazen panels, and with the
435
43 6 THE GATES OF HELL.
lantern of God's truth I shall flash a light upon the
shining hinges.
Gate the first : Impure literature. Anthony Com-
stc.xk seized twenty tons of bad books, plates, and let-
ter-press, and when Professor Cochran, of the Poly-
technic Institute, poured the destructive acids on.
those plates, they smoked in the righteous annihila-
tion. And yet a great deal of the bad literature of
the day is not gripped of the law. It is strewn in
your parlors; it is in your libraries. Some of your
children read it at night after they have retired, the
gas-burner swung as near as possible to their pillow.
Much of this literature goes under the title of
scientific information. A book-agent with one of
these infernal books, glossed over with scientific
nomenclature, went into a hotel and sold in one day
a hundred copies, and sold them all to women ! It is
appalling that men and women who can get, through
their family physician, all the useful information they
may need, and without any contamination, should
wade chin deep through such accursed literature,
under the plea of getting useful knowledge, and that
printing-presses, hoping to be called decent, lend
themselves to this infamy. Fathers and mothers, be
not deceived by the title, "medical works." Nine-
tenths of those books come hot from the lost world,
though they may have on them the names of the
publishing houses of New York and Philadelphia.
Then, there is all *Iie novelette literature of the
day flung over the land by the million. No one
mark this no one systematically reads the average
novelette of this day and keeps either integrity or
virtue. The most of these novelettes are written by
broken-down literary men for small compensation, on
THE GATES OK HELL. 437
the principle that, having failed in literature elevated
and pure, they hope to succeed in the tainted and
the nasty. Oh, this is a wide gate of hell ! Every
panel is made out of a bad book or newspaper.
Every hinge is the interjoined type of a corrupt
printing-press. Every bolt or lock of that gate is
made out of the plate of an unclean pictorial. In
other words, there are a million men and women in
the United States to-day reading themselves into
hell!
When in your own beautiful city, a prosperous
family fell into ruins through the misdeeds of one of
its members, the amazed mother said to the officer of
the law : "Why, I never supposed there was any-
thing wrong. I never thought there could be any-
thing wrong." Then she sat weeping in silence for
some time, and said : "Oh, I have got it now ! I
know, I know! I found in her bureau, after she went
away, a bad book. That's what slew her !"
These leprous booksellers have gathered up the
catalogues of all the male and female seminaries in
the United States catalogues containing the names
and the residences of all the students, and circulars
of death are sent to every one, without any exception.
Can you imagine anything more dreadful? There is
not a young person, male or female, or an old person,*
who has not had offered to him or her, a bad book or
a bad picture. Scour your house to find out whether
there are any of these adders coiled on your parlor
center table, or coiled amid the toilet-set on the dress-
ing-case. I adjure you before the sun goes down, to
explore your family libraries with an inexorable
scrutiny. Remember that one bad book or bad pic-
ture may do the work for eternity. I want to arouse
TIIK (iATKS OF HELL.
all your suspicions about novelettes. 1 want to put
you on the watch against everything that may seem
iike surreptitious correspondence through the post-
office. 1 want you to understand that impure litera-
ture is one of the broadest, highest, mightiest gates
of the lost.
Gate the second : The dissolute dance. You shall
not divert me to the general subject of dancing.
Whatever you may think about the parlor dance, or
the methodic motion of the bodv to sounds of music
in the family or the social circle, I am not now dis-
cussing that question. I want you to unite with me
this morning in recognizing the fact that there is a
dissolute dance. You know of what I speak. It. is
seen not only in the low haunts of death, but in ele-
gant mansions. It is the first step to eternal ruin for
a great multitude of both sexes.
You know, my friends, what postures and attitudes
and figures are suggested of the devil. They who
glide into the dissolute dance glide over an inclined
plane, and the dance is swifter and swifter, wilder and
wilder, until, with the speed of lightning, they whirl
off the edges of a decent life into a fiery future. This
gate of hell swings across the Axminster of many a
fine parlor and across the ball-room of the summer
watering-place. You have no right, my brother, mv
sister you have no right to take an attitude to the
sound of music which would be unbecoming in the
absence of music.
Gate tlie third : Indiscreet apparel. The attire of
woman for the last four or five years has been beau-
tiful and graceful beyond anything I have known ;
but there are those that will always carry that which
is right into the extraordinary and indiscreet. I
THE GATES OF HELL. 439
charge Christian women neither by style of dress nor
adjustment of apparel to become administrative of
evil. Perhaps none else will dare to tell you, so I
will tell you that there are multitudes of men who
owe their eternal damnation to the boldness of wom-
anly attire.
Show me the fashion-plates of any age between this
and the time of Louis the Sixteenth, of France, and
Henry the Eighth, of England, and I will tell you the
type of morals or immorals of that age or that year.
No exception to it. Modest apparel indicates a
righteous people. Immodest apparel always indi-
cates a contaminated and depraved society. You
wonder that the city of Tyre was destroyed with
such a terrible destruction. Have you ever seen the
fashion-plates of Tyre?
I will show it to you : " Moreover, the Lord saith,
because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk
with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, walking
and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with
their feet, in that day the Lord will take away the
bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet,
and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon,
the rings and nose-jewels, the changeable suits of ap-
parel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the
crisping-pins " (Isaiah 3 : 16-22). That is the fashion-
plate of ancient Tyre. And do you wonder that God
in His indignation blotted out the city ?
Gate tlie fourth : Alcoholic beverage. All the
scenes of wickedness are under the enchantment of
the wine-cup. That is what the waitresses carry on
the platter. That is what glows on the table. That
is what shines in illuminated gardens. That is what
flushes the cheeks of the patrons who come in. That
440 THE GATES OK HELL.
is what staggers the step of the patrons as they go
out. Oh, the wine-cup is the pattern of impurity.
The officers of the law tell us that nearly all the men
who go into the shambles of death go in intoxicated,
the mental and the spiritual abolished, that the brute
may triumph.
Tell me that a young man drinks, and 1 know the
whole story. If he become a captive of the wine
cup, he will become a captive of all other vices, only
give him time. No one ever knows drunkenness
alone. That is a carrion-crow that goes in a flock,
and when you see that beak ahead, you may know
the other beaks are coming. In other words, the
wine-cup unbalances and dethrones one's better judg-
ment, and leaves one the prey of all evil appetites
that may choose to alight upon his soul.
There is not a place of any kind of sin in the United
States to-day that does not find its chief abettor in
the chalice of inebriety. There is either a drinking-
bar before, or one behind, or one above, or one under-
neath. The officers of the law have said to me :
" These people escape legal penalty because they are
all licensed to sell liquor." Then I have said to my-
self : " The courts that license the sale of strong
drink, license gambling-houses, license libertinism, li-
cense disease, license death, license all sufferings, all
crimes, all despoliations, all disasters, all murders, all
woe. It is the courts and the legislature that are
swinging wide open this grinding, creaky, stupendous
gate of the lost."
But you say, " You have described these gates of
hell, and shown us how they swing in to allow the en-
trance of the doomed. Will you not, please, tell us
how these gates may swing out to allow the escape of
the penitent?" I reply, but very few escape.
THE GATES OF HELL: 441
Of the thousand that go in, nine hundred and
ninety-nine perish. Suppose one of these wanderers
should knock at your door, would you admit her?
Suppose you knew where she came from, would you
ask her to sit down at your dining-table ? Would you
ask her to become the governess of your children ?
Would you introduce her among your own acquaint-
ance ? Would you take the responsibility of pulling
on the outside of the gate of hell while she pushed on
the inside of that gate trying to get out? You would
not not one of a thousand of you that would dare to
do it. You write beautiful poetry over her sorrows,
and weep over her misfortunes, but give her practi-
cal help you never will. There is not one person
out of a thousand that will there is not one out of
five thousand that has come so near the heart of the
Lord Jesus Christ as to dare to help one of these
fallen souls.
But you say, "Are there no ways of escape for the
poor wanderers?" Oh, yes ; three or four. The one
way is the sewing-girl's garret, dingy, cold, hunger-
blasted. But you say, " Is there no other way for her
to escape?" Oh, yes. Another way is the street
that leads to East River, at midnight, the end of the
city dock, the moon shining down on the water mak-
ing it look so smooth she wonders if it is deep enough.
It is. No boatman near enough to hear the plunge.
No watchman near enough to pick her out before she
sinks the third time. No other way ? Yes. By the
curve of the Hudson River Railroad, at the point
where the engineer of the lightning express train can-
not see a hundred yards ahead to the form that lies
across the track. He may whistle " down brakes,"
but not soon enough to disappoint the one who seeks
her death.
44- THE GATES OF HELL.
But you say, " Isn't God good, and won't He for-
give ? " Yes ; but man will not, woman will not, so-
ciety will not. The Church of God says it will, but
it will not. Our work, then, must be preventive
rather than cure.
Those gates of hell are to be prostrated just as cer-
tainly as God and the Bible are true, but it will not
be done until Christian men and women, quitting
their prudery and squeamishness in this matter, rally
the whole Christian sentiment of the church and
assail these great evils of society. The Bible utters
its denunciation in this direction again and again, and
yet the piety of the day is such a namby-pamby sort
of thing that you cannot even quote Scripture with-
out making somebody restless. As long as this holy
imbecility reigns in the Church of God, sin will laugh
you to scorn. I do not know but that before the
Church wakes up matters will get worse and worse,
and that there will have to be one lamb sacrificed
from each of the most carefully guarded folds, and
the wave of uncleanness dash to the spire of the vil-
lage church and the top of the cathedral pillar.
Prophets and patriarchs, and apostles and evangel-
ists, and Christ Himself have thundered against these
sins as against no other, and yet there are those who
think we ought to take, when we speak of these sub-
jects, a tone apologetic. I put my foot on all the
conventional rhetoric on this subject, and I tell you
plainly that unless you give up that sin your doom is
sealed, and world without end you will be chased by
the anathemas of an incensed God. I rally you to a
besiegement of the gates of hell. We want in this
besieging host no soft sentimentalists, but men who
are willing to give and take hard knocks. The gates
GATES OF HELL. 443
of Ghaza were carried off ; the gates of T.hebes were
battered down ; the gates of Babylon were destroyed,
and the gates of hell are going to be prostrated.
The Christianized printing press will be rolled up
as the chief battering-ram. Then there will be a long
list of aroused pulpits, which shall be assailing fort-
resses, and God's red-hot truth shall be the flying
ammunition of the contest; and. the sappers and the
miners will lay the train under these foundations of
sin, and at just the right time God, who leads on the
fray, will cry, " Down with the gates ! " and the ex-
plosion beneath will be answered by all the trumpets
of God on high, celebrating universal victory.
But there may be one wanderer that would like, to
have a kind word calling homeward. I have told
you that society has no mercy. Did I hint, at an
earlier point in this subject, that God will have mercy
upon any wanderer who would like to come back to
the heart of infinite love ?
A cold Christmas night in a farmhouse. Father
comes in from the barn, knocks the snow from his
shoes, and sits down by the fire. The mother sits at
the stand knitting. She says to him, " Do you re-
member it is the anniversary to-night?" The father
is angered. He never wants any allusion' to the fact
that one had gone away, and the mere suggestion
that it was the anniversary of that sad event made
him quite rough, although the tears ran down his
cheeks. The old house dog, that had played with
the wanderer when she was a child, comes up and
puts his head on the old man's knee, but he roughly
repulses the dog. He wants nothing to remind him
of the anniversary day.
A cold winter night in a city church. It is Christ
444 THE GATES OK HELL.
mas night.. They have been decorating the sanctuary.
A lost wanderer of the street, with thin shawl about
her, attracted by the warmth and light, comes in and
sits near the door. The minister of religion is preach-
ing of Him who was wounded for our transgressions
and bruised for our iniquities, and the poor soul by
the door said : " Why, that must mean me ; ' mercy
for the chief of sinners; bruised for our iniquities ;
wounded for our transgressions.' "
The music that night in the sanctuary brought
back the old hymn which she used to sing when,
with father and mother, she worshiped God in the
village church. The service over, the minister went
down the aisle. She said to him : "Were those words
forme? 'Wounded for our transgressions.' Was that
for me?" The man of God understood her not. He
knew not how to comfort a shipwrecked soul, and he
passed on and he passed out. The poor wanderer
followed into the street.
"What are you doing here, Meg?" said the police.
"What are you doing here to-night? 1 ' "Oh," she re-
plied, "I was in to warm myself;" and then the rat-
tling cough came, and she held to the railing until
the paroxysm was over. She passed on down the
street, falling from exhaustion; recovering herself
again, until after a while she reached the outskirts of
the city, and passed on into the country road. It
seemed so familiar ; she kept on the road, and she
saw in the distance a light in the window. Ah ! that
light had been gleaming there every night since she
went away. On that country road she passed until
she came, to the garden gate. She opened it and
passed up the path where she played in childhood.
She came to the steps and looked in at the fire on
THE GATES OF HELL. 445
the hearth. Then she put her fingers to the latch.
Oh, if that door had been locked she would have
perished on the threshold, for she was near to death !
But that door had not been locked since the time she
went away. She pushed open the door. She went
in and lay down on the hearth by the fire. The old
house-dog growled as he saw her enter, but there was
something in the voice he recognized, and he frisked
about her until he almost pushed her down in his joy.
In the morning the mother came down, and she
saw a bundle of rags on the hearth ; but when the
face was uplifted, she knew it, and it was no more
old Meg of the street. Throwing her arms around
the returned prodigal, she cried, "Oh, Maggie !" The
child threw her arms around her mother's neck, and
said, "Oh, mother!" and while they were embraced,
a rugged form towered above them. It was the
father. The severity all gone out of his face, he
stooped and took her up tenderly and carried her to
mother's room, and laid her down on mother's bed,
for she was dying. Then the lost one, looking up
into her mother's face, said : " 'Wounded for our
transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities !'
Mother, do you think that means me ?" "Oh, yes,
my darling," said the mother. "If mother is so glad
to get you back, don't you think God is glad to get
you back?"
And there she lay dying, and all their dreams and
all their prayers were filled with the words, "Wounded
for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities,"
until, just before the moment of her departure, her
face lighted up, showing the pardon of God had
dropped upon her soul. And there she slept away
on the bosom of a pardoning Jesus. So the Lord
took back one whom the world rejected.
CHAPTER XLVI.
INFLUENCE OF CLUBS.
I am asked what is the influence of club-houses in
America? Men are gregarious.
Cattle in herds. Birds in flocks. Fish in schools.
The human race in social circles. You may by dis-
charge of gun scatter the flock of quails, and you
mav bv plunge of the anchor send apart the denizens
of the deep; but they will reassemble. And if by
some power you could scatter all the present associa-
tions of men, they would again reassemble.
Herbs and flowers prefer to stand in associations.
You plant a forget-me-not or a heart's-ease away up
alone on the hillside, and it will soon hunt up some
other heart's-ease or forget-me-not, You find the
herbs talking to each other in the morning dew. A
galaxy of stars is a mutual life insurance company.
Once in a while you find a man unsympathetic and
alone, and like a ship's mast, ice-glazed, which the
most agile sailor could not climb ; but the most of
men have in their nature a thousand roots and a
thousand branches, and they blossom all the way to
the top, and the fowls of heaven sing amid the
branches. Because of this we have communities
and societies some for the kindling of mirth, some
for the raising of sociality, some for the advance of
a craft, some to plan for the welfare of the State
associations of artists, of merchants, o( shipwrights,
446
INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 447
of carpenters, of masons, of plumbers, of plasterers,
of lawyers, of doctors, of clergymen. Do you cry
out against this ? Then you cry out against a divine
arrangement.
You might as well preach a sermon to a busy ant-
hill or beehive against secret societies. In many of
the ages people have gathered together in associa-
tions, characterized by the old blunt Saxon desig-
nation of club. If you have read history you know
there were the King's Head Club, and the Ben
Jonson Club, and the Brothers' Club to which
Swift and Bolingbroke belonged and the Literary
Club, which Burke and Goldsmith and Johnson and
Boswell made immortal ; and Jacobin Club, and Ben-
jamin Franklin Junto Club, and others almost as cel-
ebrated and conspicuous. Some to advance arts,
some to vindicate justice, some to promote good
literature, some to destroy the body and blast the
soul. In our own time we have many clubs. They
are as different from each other as the day from the
night. I might show you two specimens.
Here is the imperial hallway. On this side is the
parlor, with the upholstery of a Kremlin or a
Tuilleries. Here is a dining-room which challenges
you to mention any luxury it cannot afford. Here is
an art gallery with pictures and statues and drawings
from the best of artists Bierstadt and Church and
Cole and Powers pictures for all moods, impas-
sioned or placid Sheridan's Ride and Farmers at
their Nooning. Shipwreck and Sunlight over the
Seas. Foaming deer with the hounds after it in the
Adirondacks. Sheep asleep on the hill-side. And
here are reading rooms with the finest of magazines,
and libraries with all styles of books, from herme-
neutics to fairy tale.
448 INFLUENCE OF CLUBS.
Men go there for ten minutes or for many hours.
Some come from beautiful and happy home circles
for a little while that they may enter into these club-
house socialities. Others come from dismembered
Households, and while they have humble lodgings
elsewhere, find their chief joy here. One blackball
amid ten votes will defeat a man's membership. For
rowdyism and gambling and drunkenness and every
style of misdemeanor a man is immediately dropped.
Brilliant club-house from top to bottom the chan-
deliers, the plate, the literature, the social prestige a
complete enchantment.
Here is another club-house. You open the door,
and the fumes of strong drink and tobacco are some-
thing almost intolerable. You do not have to ask
what those young men are doing, for you can see by
the flushed cheek and intent look and almost angry
way of tossing the dice and dropping the chips, they
are gambling.
That is an only son seated there at another table.
He had had all art, all culture, all refinement, show-
ered upon him by his parents. That is the way he
is paying them for their kindness. That is a young
married man. A few months ago, he made promises
of fidelity and kindness, every one of which he has
broken. Around a table in the club-house there is a
group telling vile stories. It is getting late now, and
three-fourths of the members of the club are intoxi-
cated. It is between twelve and one o'clock, and
after a while it is time to shut up. The conversation
has got to be groveling, base, filthy, outrageous.
Time to shut up. The young men saunter forth,
those who can walk, and balance themselves against
the lamp-post or the fence. A young man not able
INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 449
to get out has a couch extemporized for him in the
club-house, or by two comrades not quite so over-
come by strong drink, he is led to his father's house,
and the door-bell rung, and the door opens, and
these two imbecile escorts usher into the front hall
the ghastliest thing ever ushered into a father's house
a drunken son. There are dissipating club-houses
which would do well if they could make a contract
with Inferno to furnish ten thousand men a year, and
do that for twenty years, on the condition that no
more would be asked of them. They would save
the dissipating club-houses of this country would
save hundreds of homesteads, and bodies, minds,
and souls innumerable. The ten thousand they fur-
nish a year by contract would be small when com-
pared with the vaster multitudes they furnish with-
out contract. But I make a vast difference between
the club-houses. I have during my life belonged to
four clubs a base-ball club, a theological club, and
two literary clubs. They were to me physical recup-
eration, mental food, moral health.
Now, what is the principle by which we are to
judge in regard to the profitable or baleful influence
of a club-house? That is the practical and the
eternal question which hundreds of men to-day are
settling. First, I would have you test your club
house by the influence it has upon your home, if you
have a home. I have been told by a prominent
member of one of the clubs, that three-fourths of the
members are married men. That wife has lost her
influence over her husband who takes every eve-
ning's absence as an assault upon domesticity. How
are the great enterprises of art, and literature, and
education, and the public weal to go on if every man
450 INFLUENCE OF CLUBS.
has his world bounded by his front doorstep on one
side, and his back window on the other, his thoughts
rising no higher than his own attic, going down no
deeper than his own cellar? When a wife objects to
a husband's absence for some elevating purpose, she
breaks her scepter of conjugal power.
There should be no protest on the part of the wife
if the husband goes forth to some practical, useful,
honorable mission. But alas! for the fact that so
many men sacrifice all home-life for the club-house.
I have in my house the roll of the members of many
of the clubs of our great cities, and I could point you
to the names of many who have committed this
awful sacrilege.
Genial as angels at the club-house, ugly as sin at
home. Generous to a fault for all wine suppers and
yachts and horse races, but stingy about the wife's
dress and the children's shoes. That which might
have been a healthful recreation has become a usurp-
ation of his affections, and he has married it, and he
is guilty of moral bigamy.
Under that process, whatever be the wife's features,
she becomes uninteresting and homely. He criticises
everything about her. He does not like her dress ;
he does not like the way she arranges her hair ; he
cannot see how he ever was so unromantic as to offer
her his hand and heart. It is all the time talk about
money, money, money, when she ought to be talking
about Dexters and Derby Days and English drags,
with six horses all under control of one ribbon.
There are hundreds of homes in New York and
Brooklyn being clubbed to death.
Membership in some of these clubs always means
domestic shipwreck. Tell me a man has become a
INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 451
member in a certain club, and tell me nothing more
about him for ten years, and I will write his accurate
biography. By that time he is a wine-guzzler, and
his wife is broken-hearted or prematurely old, and
his property is lost or reduced, and his home is a
mere name in a directory.
" Here are six days of the secular week," says the
husband and father. " How shall I dispose of the
six nights ? Well, I will give four to my family at
home, or taking them abroad to some place where
they will be interested. Then I will give one night
to a religious service, and I will give one night to a
club-room." I congratulate vou. But here is a man
who makes a different distribution of his time. He
says : " I will give three nights to the club-room, and
I will give three nights to other duties." I begin to
tremble. Here is a man who makes a different distri-
bution of his time. He says : " Of the six. secular
nights, I will give five to the club-house, and one to
my home, and that one night I will spend in scowling
like a March squall because 1 am not spending it as I
spent the others." That man's obituary is written.
There is not one man out of ten thousand that gets
as far as that on the road to ruin that ever stops.
His physical health gives way under the late hours
and the stimulants. He is an easy prey for erysipelas
and rheumatism of the heart. The physician at one
glance sees that he will not only have that disease to
light, but many years of fast living. The clergyman
at the obsequies talks in religious generalities. The
men who got his yacht in the eternal rapids will not
come to the obsequies. Oh, no, they will have press-
ing engagements ! They will send the wife with a
wreath for the coffin-lid, and a few words of sym-
452 INFLUENCE OF CLUBS.
pathy, but they will be busy. Give me a chisel and
a mallet that I may cut the man's epitaph on his
tombstone : " Blessed are the dead who die in the
Lord, for they rest from their labors, and their works
do follow them." " Oh, no," you say, " that would
not be appropriate." Let me try again with this epi-
taph : " Let me die the death of the righteous, and
let my last end be like his." " Oh, no," you say,
" that would be horribly inappropriate." Then give
me the chisel and the mallet, and I will cut an honest
epitaph : " Here lies the victim of a dissipating club-
house."
The damage is often increased by the fact that the
scion of some aristocratic family belongs to a club,
and people born in humbler circles feel flattered to
belong to that one where he belongs, not realizing
the fact that some of the sons and grandsons of the
great commercial establishments of the past as to
mind are imbecile, as to body diseased, as to morals
rotten. They would have long ago got through with
their entire property, but the wily ancestor who got
his money by hard knocks knows how it will be, and
so he ties up everything in his will. There is nothing
left now to that unworthy descendant but his grand-
lather's name and roast beef rotundity. And yet
many a steamer is proud to be lashed fast of that
worm-eaten tug, though it pulls straight for the
breakers. I can point you to men in Brooklyn and
New York who, because of an illustrious ancestry,
are now taking scores of men to their eternal ruin.
Another test by which you mav try your club-
house, or the one into whose membership you are
invited, is the question, What is the influence of that
institution upon one's secular occupation ? I can see
INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 453
how through a club-house men may advance their
commercial interests. I have friends who have
formed their best mercantile relations through such
institutions. But what has been the influence of the
one with which you are connected upon your wordly
credit ?
Are people more cautious now how they let you
have goods ? Before you joined the club was your
credit with the commercial agency Ai ? and has it
gone clear down on the scale ? Then beware !
We every day hear the going to pieces of com-
mercial establishments through the dissipations of
some club-house libertine or club-house drunkard
who has wasted his estate, and wasted the estate of
others. The fortune is beaten to pieces with the ball-
player's bat, or cut amidship by the prow of a
regatta, or falls under the sharp hoof of the fast
horse, or is drowned in the potions of Cognac and
Mononghahela. The man's club-house was the Loch
Earn, his occupation was the Ville du Havre. They
struck on the high seas, and the Ville du Havre went
under.
Another test by which you may try all the club-
houses of these cities is the question, What influence
will that institution have upon my sense of moral
and spiritual obligation ?
I have sometimes been perplexed, as some of you
have been, at Buffalo, going to Chicago, to know
whether to take the Michigan Central or the Lake
Shore, equally safe, equally expeditious, trains arriv-
ing at the same hour ; but suppose you hear that on
one road the bridges are down, the tracks are torn
up, and the switches are unlocked, you very easily
make up your mind which is the best to take.
454 - INFLUENCE OF CLUBS.
Now, here are two highways into the great future,
the Christian highway and the unchristian; the one
safe, the other dangerous. Anything that makes me
forget that, is a bad institution. I had family prayers
before I joined the club. Do I have them now? I
attended regularly the house of God before I joined
the club. Do I now attend religious service? Would
you rather have in your hand, when you come to
die, a pack of cards or a Bible? Would you, in the
closing moment of your life, rather have the cup of
Belshazzarean wassail put to your lip, or the cup of
holy communion ? Would you, my brother, rather
have for eternal companions the swearing, carousing,
vile, story-telling crew that surround the table in a
dissipating club-house, or your little child, the bright
girl that God took? Ah! you would not have been
aw a} r so many nights if you had thought she was
going so soon. Your wife has never brightened up
since then. She has not got over it. She never will
get over it. What a pity it is that you can not spend
more evenings at home consoling that great sorrow !
Oh, you can not drown that grief in a wine-cup !
You can not forget those little arms that were thrown
around your neck while she said: ''Papa, do stay
home to-night, do stay home to-night !" You can
not wipe from your lips the dying kiss of that little
child. And yet there has been many a man so com-
pletely overborne by the fascinations of a dissipating
club-house, that he went off the night the child was
dying of scarlet fever. He came back about mid-
night, and it was all over. The eyes were closed.
The undertaker had done his work. The wife lay
unconscious in the next room, from having watched
for three weeks. He came up-stairs, and he saw the
INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 455
empty cradle, and saw the window was up. He said,
"What is the matter?" In God's judgment day he
will find out what was the matter. Oh, man astray,
God help you !
The influence which some of the club-houses are
exerting is the more to be deplored because it takes
down the very best men.
The admission fee sifts out the penurious, and
leaves only the best fellows. They are frank, they
are generous, they are whole-souled, they are talented.
Oh, I begrudge the devil such a prize ! After a
while the frank look will go out of the face, and the
features will be haggard, and when talking to you,
instead of looking you in the eye they will look
.down, and every morning the mother will kindly ask,
" My son, what kept you out so late last night?" and
he will make no answer, or he will say, " That's my
business." Then some time he will come to the store
or the bank cross and befogged, and he will neglect
some duty, and after a while he will lose his place,
and then, with nothing to do, he will come down at
ten o'clock in the morning to curse the servant be-
cause the breakfast is cold. The lad who was a clerk
in the cellar has got to be chief clerk in the great
commercial establishment ; the young man who ran
errands for the bank has got to be cashier ; thou-
sands of the young men who were at the foot of the
ladder have got to the top of the ladder ; but here
goes the victim of the dissipating club-house, with
staggering step and bloodshot eye and mud-spattered
hat set side wise on a shock of greasy hair, his cravat
dashed with cigar ashes. Look at him ! Pure-hearted
young man, look at him ! The club-house did that.
I know one such who went the whole round, and,
456 INFLUENCE OF CLUBS.
Turned out of the higher club-houses, went into the
lower club-houses, and on down, until one night
he leaped out of a third-story window to end his
wretchedness.
Let me say to fathers who are becoming dissipated,
your sons will follow you. You think your son does
not know. He knows all about it. I have heard
men who say, " I am profane, but never in the pres-
ence of my children." Your children know you
swear. I have heard men say, " I drink, but never in
the presence of my children." Your children know
you drink. I describe now what occurs in hundreds
of households in this country. The tea-hour has
arrived. The family are seated at the tea-table. Be-
fore the rest of the family arise from the table, the
father shoves back his chair, says he has an engage-
ment, lights a cigar, goes out, comes back after mid-
night, and that is the history of three hundred and
sixty-five nights of the year. Does any man want to
stultify himself by saying that that is healthy, that
that is right, that that is honorable ? Would your
wife have married you with such prospects ?
Time will pass on, and the son will be sixteen or
seventeen years of age, and you will be at the tea-
table, and he will shove back and have an engage-
ment, and he will light his cigar, and he will go out
to the club-house, and you will hear nothing of him
until you hear the night key in the door after mid-
night. But his physical constitution is not quite so
strong as yours, and the liquor he drinks is more ter-
rifically drugged than that which you drink, and so
he will catch up with you on the road to death,
though you got such a long start of him, and so you
will both go to hell together.
INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 457
The revolving Drummond light in front of a hotel,
in front of a locomotive, may flash this way, and flash
that, upon the mountains, upon the ravines, upon the
city ; but I take the lamp of God's eternal truth, and
I flash it upon all the club-houses of these cities, so
that no young man shall be deceived. By these tests
try them, try them ! Oh, leave the dissipating in-
fluences of the club-room, if the influences of your
club-room are dissipating ! Paid your money, have
you? Better sacrifice that than your soul. Good
fellows, are they ? Under that process they will not
remain such. Mollusca may be found two hundred
fathoms down beneath the Norwegian seas ; Siberian
stag get fat on the stunted growth of Altain peaks;
Hedysarium grows amid the desolation of Sahara;
tufts of osier and birch grow on the hot lips of vol-
canic Sneehattan; but a pure heart and an honest life
thrive in a 'dissipating club-house never !
The way to conquer a wild beast is to keep your
eye on him, but the way for you to conquer your
temptations, my friend, is to turn your back on them
and fly for your life.
Oh, my heart aches ! I see men struggling against
evil habits, and they want help. I have knelt beside
them, and I have heard them cry for help, and then
we have risen, and he has put one hand on my right
shoulder, and the other hand on my left shoulder,
and looked into my face with an infinity of earnest-
ness which the judgment day will have no power to
make me forget, as he has cried out with his lips
scorched in ruin, " God help me!" For such there
is no help except in the Lord God Almighty. To
His grace I commend you.
CHAPTER XLVII.
HEALTH RESORTS.
1 believe in watering-places. 1 go there some-
times. Let not the commercial firm begrudge the
clerk, or the employer the journeyman, or the patient
the physician, or the church its pastor, a season of in-
occupation. Luther used to sport with his children ;
Edmund Burke used to caress his favorite horse ;
Thomas Chalmers, in the dark hour of the Church's
disruption, played kite for recreation so I was told
by his own daughter and the busy Christ said to the
busy apostles, " Come ye apart awhile into the
desert and rest yourselves." And I have observed
that they who do not know how to rest, do not know
J
how to work.
But I have to declare this truth, that some of our
fashionable watering-places are the temporal and
eternal destruction of " a multitude that no man can
number." The first temptation that is apt to hover in
this direction is to leave your piety at home.
You will send the dog and cat and canary-bird to
be well cared for somewhere else ; but the tempta-
tion will be to leave your religion in the room with
the blinds down and the door bolted, and then you
will come back in the autumn to find that it is
starved and suffocated, lying stretched on the rug,
stark dead, There is no surplus of piety at the
watering-places. I never knew any one to grow
458
HEALTH RESORTS. 461
very rapidly in grace at the Catskill Mountain
House, or Sharon Springs, or the Falls of Mont-
morency. It is generally the case that the Sabbath
is more of a carousal than any other day, and there
are Sunday walks, Sunday rides, and Sunday
excursions.
Elders and deacons and ministers of religion, who
are entirely consistent at home, sometimes when the
Sabbath dawns on them at Niagara Falls or the
White Mountains, take the day to themselves. If
they go to the church, it is apt to be a sacred parade,
and the discourse, instead of being a plain talk about
the soul, is apt to be what is called a crack sermon
that is, some discourse picked out of the effusions of
the year as the one most adapted to excite admira-
tion ; and in those churches, from the way the ladies
hold their fans, you know that they are not so much
impressed with the heat as with the picturesqueness
of half-disclosed features. Four puny souls stand in
the organ-loft and squall a tune that nobody knows,
and worshipers, with two thousand dollars' worth
of diamonds on the right hand, drop a cent into the
poor-box, and then the benediction is pronounced,
and the farce is ended. The toughest thing 1
ever tried to do was to be good at a watering-place.
The air is bewitched with " the world, the flesh, and
the devil." There are Christians who, in three or
four weeks in such a place, have had such terrible
rents made in their Christian robe that they had to
keep darning it until Christmas, to get it mended.
The health of a great many people makes an an-
nual visit to some mineral spring an absolute neces-
sity ; but, my dear people, take your Bible along
with you, and take an hour for secret prayer every
462 HEALTH RESORTS.
day, though you be surrounded by guffaw and satur-
nalia. Keep holy the Sabbath, though they deride
you as a bigoted Puritan. Stand off from gambling
hells and those other institutions which propose to
imitate on this side the water the iniquities ot Baden-
Baden. Let your moral and your immortal health
keep pace with your physical recuperation, and re-
member that all the sulphur and chalybeate springs
cannot do you so much good as the healing, peren-
nial flood that breaks forth from the "Rock of Ages."
This may be your last summer. If so, make it a fit
vestibule of heaven.
Another temptation hovering around nearly all our
watering-places is the horse-racing business. We all
admire the horse ; but we do not think that its beauty
or speed ought to be cultured at the expense of
human degradation. The horse race is not of such
importance as the human race. The Bible intimates
that a man is better than a sheep, and I suppose he is
better than a horse, though like Job's stallion, his
neck be clothed with thunder. Horse-races in olden
times were under the ban of Christian people ; and in
our day the same institution has come up under ficti-
tious names. And it is called a " Summer Meeting,"
almost suggestive of positive religious exercises.
And it is called an "Agricultural Fair," suggestive of
everything that is improving in the art of farming.
But under these deceptive titles are the same cheat-
ing, and the same betting, and the same drunkenness,
and the same vagabondage, and the same abomination
that were to l>e found under the old horse-racing
system.
I never knew a man yet who could give nimself to
the pleasures of the turf for a long reach of time and
HEALTH RESORTS. 463
riot be battered in morals. They hook up their
spanking team, and put on their sporting cap, and
light their cigar, and take the reins, and dash down
the road to perdition ! The great day at Saratoga,
and Long Branch, and Cape May, and nearly all the
other watering-places is the day of the races. The
hotels are thronged, every kind of equipage is taken
up at an almost fabulous price ; and there are many
respectable people mingling with jockeys and gam-
blers and libertines, and foul-mouthed men and flashy
women.
The bartender stirs up the brandy smash. The
bets run high. The greenhorns, supposing all is fair,
put in their money, soon enough to lose it. Three
weeks before the race takes place, the struggle is de-
cided, and the men in the secret know on which steed
to bet their money. The two men on the horses rid-
ing around, long ago arranged who shall win. Lean-
ing from the stand, or from the carriage, are men and
women so absorbed in the struggle of bone and
muscle and mettle, that they make a grand harvest
for the pickpockets who carry off the pocketbooks
and the portemonnaies. Men, looking on, see only
two horses with two riders flying around the ring ;
but there is many a man on that stand whose honor
and domestic happiness and fortune white mane,
white foot, white flank are in the ring, racing with
inebriety, and with fraud, and with profanity, and
with ruin black neck, black foot, black flank. Neck
and neck they go in that moral Epsom. White horse
of honor; black horse of ruin. Death says, " I will
bet on the black horse." Spectator says, " I will bet
on the white horse." The white horse of honor a
little way ahead. The black horse of ruin, Satan
464 HEALTH RESORTS.
mounted, all the time gaining on him. Spectator
breathless. They put on the lash, dig in the spurs.
There ! The)' are past the stand. Sure. Just as I
expected it. The black horse of ruin has won the
race, and all the galleries of darkness "Huzza!
huzza ! " and the devils come in to pick up their
wagers. Ah, my friends, have nothing to do with
horse-racing dissipations. Long ago the English
Government got through looking to the turf for the
dragoon and the light-cavalry horse. They found
out that the turf depreciates the stock ; and it is
worse yet 'for men. Thomas Hughes, the Member of
Parliament, and the author, known all the world over,
hearing that a new turf enterprise was being started
in this country, wrote a letter in which he said,
" Heaven help you, then ; for of all the cankers of
our old civilization there is nothing in this country
approaching in unblushing meanness, in rascality,
holding its head high, to this belauded institution of
the British turf."
Another famous sportsman writes : " How many
fine domains have been shared among these hosts of
rapacious sharks during the last two hundred years ;
and unless the system be altered, how many more are
doomed to fall into the same gulf !" With the bull-
fights of Spain and the bear-baitings of the pit, may
the Lord God annihilate the infamous and accursed
horse racing of England and America.
1 go further and speak of another temptation that
hovers over the watering place, and that is the
temptation to sacrifice physical strength.
The modern Bethesda was intended to recuperate
the physical health ; and yet how many come from
the watering-places^ their health absolutely destroyed!
HEALTH RESORTS. 465
New York and Brooklyn simpletons, boasting of hav-
ing imbibed twenty glasses of Congress water before
breakfast. Families, accustomed to going to bed at
ten o'clock at night, gossiping until one or two
o'clock in the morning. Dyspeptics, usually very
cautious about their health, mingling ice-creams and
lemons and lobster salads and cocoanuts, until the
gastric juices lift up all their voices of lamentation and
protest. Delicate women and brainless young men
dancing themselves into vertigo and catalepsy.
Thousands of men and women coming back from
our watering-places in the autumn with the founda-
tions laid for ailments that will last them all their life
long.
You know as well as I do that this is the simple
truth. In the summer, you say to your good health :
" Good-bye ; I am going to have a gay time now for
a little while ; I will be very glad to see you again in
the autumn." Then in the autumn, when you are
hard at work in your office, or store, or shop, or
counting-room, Good Health will come in and say,
" Good-bye ; I am going." You say : " Where are
you going?" "Oh," says Good Health, " I am going
to take a vacation." It is a poor rule that will not
work both ways, and your good health will leave
you choleric and splenetic and exhausted. You co-
quetted with your good health in the summer time,
and your good health is coquetting with you in the
winter time. A fragment of Paul's charge to the
jailor would be an appropriate inscription for the
hotel register in every watering-place : " Do thyself
no harm. "
Another temptation hovering around the watering-
place is the formation of hasty and life-long alliances.
3P
466 HEALTH RESORTS.
The watering-places are responsible for more of the
domestic infelicities of this country than ali other
things combined. Society is so artificial there that
no sure judgment of character can be formed. They
who form companionships amid such circumstances,
go into a lottery where there are twenty blanks to
one prize. In the severe tug of life you want more
than glitter and splash. Life is not a ball-room where
the music decides the step, and bow and prance and
graceful swing of long train can make up for strong
common-sense. You might as well go among the
gaily-painted yachts of a summer regatta to find war
vessels, as to go among the light spray of the summer
watering-place to find character that can stand the
test of the great struggle of human life.
Ah, in the battle of life you want a stronger weapon
than a lace fan or a croquet mallet. The load of life
is so heavy that in order to draw it you want a team
stronger than one made up of a masculine grass-
hopper and a feminine butterfly. If there is any man
in the community that excites my contempt, and that
ought to excite the contempt of every man and
woman, it is the soft-handed, soft-headed dude who,
perfumed until the air is actually sick, spends his
summer in making killing attitudes, and waving senti-
mental adieux, and talking infinitesimal nothings, and
finding his heaven in the set of a lavender kid glove.
Boots are tight as an inquisition. Two hours of con-
summate skill exhibited in the tie of a flaming cravat.
His conversation made up of "Ahs !" and."Ohs!" and
"He hes!''
There is only one counterpart to such a man as
that, and that is the frothy young woman at the
watering-place ; her conversation made up of French
HEALTH RESORTS. 467
moonshine ; what she has in her head only equaled
by what she has on her back ; useless ever since she
was born, and to be useless until she is dead, useless
until she becomes an intelligent Christian. We may
admire music, and fair faces, and graceful step ; but
amid the heartlessness, and the inflation, and the fan-
tastic influences of our modern watering-places, be-
ware how you make life-long covenants.
Another temptation that will hover over the
watering-place is that of baneful literature.
Almost every one starting off for the summer, takes
some reading matter. It is a book out of the library,
or off the bookstand, or bought of the boy hawking
books through the cars. I really believe there is
more pestiferous trash read among the intelligent
classes in July and August, than in all the other ten
months of the year. Men and women who at home
would not be satisfied with a book that was not
really sensible, I find sitting on hotel piazza, or under
the trees, reading books the index of which would
make them blush if they knew that you knew what
the book was. "Oh," they say, " you must have in-
tellectual recreation." Yes. There is no need that
vou take along into a watering-place " Hamilton's
Metaphysics," or some ponderous discourse on the
eternal decrees, or " Faraday's Philosophy." There
are many easy books that are good. You might as
well say, " I propose now to give a little rest to my
digestive organs, and instead of eating heavy meat
and vegetables, I will, for a little while, take lighter
food a little strychnine and a few grains of rats-
bane." Literary poison in August is as bad as liter-
ary poison in December. Mark that. Do not let
the frogs and the lice of a corrupt printing-press
468 HEALTH RESORTS.
jump and crawl into your Saratoga trunk or White
Mountain valise.
Are there not good books that are easy to read-
books of entertaining travel ; books of congenial
history ; books of pure fun ; books of poetry, ring-
ing \vith merry canto ; books of fine engraving ;
books that will rest the mind as well as purify the
heart and elevate the whole life? My hearers, there
will not be an hour between this and the day of your
death when you can afford to read a book lacking in
moral principle.
Another temptation hovering all around our water-
ing-places is intoxicating beverages. 1 am told that
it is becoming more and more fashionable for women
to drink. I care not how well a woman may dress,
if she has taken enough of wine to flush her cheek
and put a glassiness on her eye, she is drunk. She
may be handed into a $2,500 carriage, and have dia-
monds enough to confound the Tiffanys she is
drunk. She may be a graduate of Packer Institute,
and the daughter of some man in danger of being
nominated for the presidency she is drunk. You
may have a larger vocabulary than I have, and you
may say in regard to her that she is " convivial," or
she is " merry," or she is " festive," or she is " exhila-
rated ; " but you cannot, with all your garlands of
verbiage, cover up the plain fact that it is an old-
fashioned case of drunk.
Now the watering-places are full of temptations to
men and women to tipple. At the close of the ten-
pin or billiard game they tipple. At the close of the
cotillion they tipple. Seated on the piazza cooling
themselves off, they tipple. The tinged glasses come
around with bright straws, and they tipple. First,
HEALTH RESORTS. 469
they take " light wines," as they call them ; but
" light wines " are heavy enough to debase the appe-
tite. There is not a very long road between cham-
pagne at five dollars a bottle and whiskey at ten
cents a glass. Satan has three or four grades down
which he takes men to destruction. One man he
takes up, and through one spree pitches him into
eternal darkness. That is a rare case. Very seldom,
indeed, can you find a man who will be such a fool as
that. Satan will take another man to a grade, to a
descent at an angle about like the Pennsylvania coal-
shoot or the Mount Washington rail-track, and shove
him off. But that is very rare.
When a man goes down to destruction, Satan
brings him to a plain. It is almost a level. The
depression is so slight that you can hardly see it.
The man does not actually know that he is on the
down grade, and it tips only a little toward darkness
just a little. And the first mile it is claret, and the
second mile it is sherry, and the third mile it is a
punch, and the fourth mile it is ale, and the fifth mile
it is porter, and the sixth mile it, is brandy, and then
it gets steeper, and steeper, and steeper, and the man
gets frightened, and says: " Oh, let me off." "No,"
says the conductor, " this is an express train, and it
don't stop until it gets to the Grand Central Depot
of Smashupton ! " Ah, " Look not thou upon the
wine when it is red, when it giveth his color in the
cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it
biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder."
My friends, whether you tarry at home which
will be quite as safe, and perhaps quite as com-
fortable or go into the country, arm yourself against
temptation. The grace of God is the only safe
shelter, whether in town or country.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE.
Archimedes eulogized the lever, and he said if he
had a place for the fulcrum outside of this world on
which the lever could rest, he could move the world ;
but he found no such resting-place for the fulcrum.
And it is not the lever that is to lift or sink this world,
but the wheel, whether the solid disk, or made up o(
the rim, and spokes, and hub. Wheel of rail train,
accelerating travel ; wheel of printing-press, multiply-
ing intelligence ; wheel of sewing-machine, alleviating
toil ; wheel of chronometer, announcing the passage
of the hours.
Balance wheel, fly wheel, belt wheel, spur wheel,
driving wheel, ratchet wheel, the wheel invented by
whom I know not, but the idea of it is suggested to us
by the planetary system, which is a wheel, and the
constellations and the galaxies, which are wheels,
and these smaller wheels playing into the great
wheel of the universe, the axis of which is the pillar
on which rests the throne of God. Tell me which
way the world's wheels turn, and I will tell you
whether it is going toward ransom or ruin. Tell me
how many revolutions they make in a minute, and I
will tell you how rapidly it hastens on toward disen-
thralment or demolition.
In our day the principle of the wheel has been ap-
plied to recreations and amusements, and the veloci-
470
THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 473
pede, and the bicycle, and the tricycle, and the roller
skate are the consequence, and the thousand-voiced
question to be met is, "Are the roller-skates wheels
of help or wheels of ruin?" Never in your time or
mine has there been such high, wide, popular agita-
tion of the question of amusements, and all ministers
of the Gospel, and all parents, and all young people,
and all old people need to be able to give an answer
to these questions, and a right answer, and a reason
for the answer.
Let me premise that for the last twenty-five years
I have been looking for some healthful amusement-
healthful for the body and the mind and an amuse-
ment that would come in time to rescue this genera-
tion. Of healthful, honest, useful amusement, you
know as well as I there has been an awful scarcity.
Plenty of places to blight and blast and consume
body, mind, and soul. No lack of gambling saloons !
Within an hour of every home, and every hotel, and
every boarding-house in these cities, there are places
where a young man may get divorced of his monev,
and where the old spider of the gaming table offici-
ates at the funeral of the innocent flies. You can
lose ten cents, or you can lose a house and lot, or you
can lose all you have in a night. Plenty of gambling
saloons! I do not know a community on earth that
is lacking in this direction. Plenty of grog-shops,
where the owner, bv expending twelve dollars for
genuine alcohol, can fix up a mixture that he can sell
for two hundred. Nice little percentage of profit!
They let a young man have all he wants as long as
his money lasts one glass, two glasses, three glasses,
four glasses, five glasses, until his money is all gone,
and it is demonstrated that he has not so much as a
474 THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE.
postage stamp left, and then they turn him into the
street to take care of himself, or be helped home by
some one not quite so intoxicated as himself, for the
grog-seller never accompanies his victim to his home,
lest at the door he confront mother or wife, to whom
the Lord may have lent, for a little while, one of His
smaller thunderbolts, with which to smite the des-
poiler into ashes. Plenty of gates of hell, and all of
them wide open, and temptresses to say, "Come in,
come in !" But of honest, useful, healthful amuse-
ments, a great scarcity.
Seven o'clock i ( . M., finds tens of thousands of
young men at their home, or at the hotel, or at the
boarding-house. The young man says, " How shall I
spend this evening ? " You say, " Go to prayer-meet-
ing." Good advice for two nights of the week, and
add to that the Sabbath night ; subtracting three
nights lor religious purposes, you have four nights
left for secular purposes. What shall the young man
do with the four other nights ? You say, " Go and
hear a lecture on astronomy." But the young man's
brain is all tired out with running up long lines of
figures in the account book, or from trying to sell
goods to people who do not want to buy them, and
he has no appetite for astronomy. He does not want
to know anything about other worlds, when he has
more than he can do to take care of this one.
Now, you are a good man, you are a good woman,
you take up a newspaper to tell that young man
where to go. You will find, if you have ever tried it,
that the vast majority of the advertisements announce
places illy ventilated, with depraving companionship,
and much of the spectacular indecent. Two hours
and a half in such a place of amusement, and the
THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 4/5
young man will come forth with body asphyxiated,
mind weakened, soul scarred. Continuous enter-
tainment of that kind makes lively work for underta-
kers, and gives tragedy of illustration for discourses
on the text, : " The end thereof is death." What our
young people want is some style of recreation that
shall help the body and help the mind something
that will allow them to be sound asleep at eleven
o'clock at night, and to awaken at seven o'clock in
the morning, or earlier, thoroughly rested.
We want something for our boys and girls that will
put them at the goal of manhood and womanhood,
ready for practical and useful life. Not mere splint-
ers of humanity, not invalids at nineteen, twenty, and
twenty-one, not masculine and feminine apologies,
but ready to command respect, and with their own
right arm, tinder God, put aside all obstacles. Now,
a great many people are asking the question : "Does
the roller-skate recreation afford this ? " This amuse-
ment was invented in 1819, by Mr. Plympton, a
Frenchman, who has been called the " father of the
rink." He kept a tight grip on the invention of the
skate until, in 1883, the patent ran out, and now there
are factories all over the land producing roller skates,
and every evening there are tens of thousands of peo-
ple, young, middle-aged, and old, on these wheels,
good or bad. You ask me if I favor the roller-skate
exercise? I reply, Yes, with restrictions, and No, if
there be no restrictions ; yes, if it be restricted, and
no, if it be unguarded. In other words, you can
make it the best thing, or you c^n make it the worst
thing. They have already, some of them, been exhil-
aration to the body they have given health to the
sick and enfeebled, and have been innocent hilarity to
47 6 THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE.
a vast multitude. Other of the rinks have broken up
families, have set surgeons to perform most painful
operations, have produced life-long ailments, and ever-
lasting misfortune. There is as much difference be-
tween skating-rinks as between light and darkness, as
between heaven and hell. I will not be misunder-
stood on this subject.
The skating rink exercise, with proper precautions
and I shall show you what they are before I get
through the skating-rink exercise, with proper pre-
cautions, seems to me the most graceful and healthful
of all amusements and all recreations. It eclipses
coasting, it eclipses croquet, it eclipses football, and
lawn-tennis, and skating under moonlight over frozen
pond, and all the other amusements and recreations,
that I know of. It is good for the muscles, it is
good for the nerves, is is good for the lungs, it is
good for the limbs, it is good for the circulation, it is
good for the spirits under proper precautions. It
has all the advantages of the gymnasium, with more
exhilaration of spirit; it has all the advantage of the
skating pond over which our fathers and mothers
used to dart, without any danger of breaking through
the ice ; it has all the exhilaration of outdoor sport,
without being dependent on the condition of the at-
mosphere. With proper precautions, I say.
It would be well if our young men almost every
night or afternoon of the secular week would take
one hour for this healthful recreation, and come back
to their duties again. It would be well if the women
of America, who decline the brisk walk called the
" constitutional," which keeps the English women
roseate and strong, would one hour one hour of the
secular afternoon or the secular evening, turn back
THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 477
on darning and mending and bread-making and
housekeeping, and try this exhilarating sport. It
would bring health to some of these hollow cheeks,
it would bring to the lack-lustre eye the lost light, it
would give strength to the worn-out body, it would
straighten the stooped shoulders and drive away con-
sumption and merciless neuralgia, and nervous pros-
tration would be gone forever. The great demand
in this country is some reasonable, honest, healthful
recreation for the women of Arnrrica, who are per-
ishing for the lack of it. It would be well if the
young man in the hotel of New York or Brooklyn,
while during the day he purchases goods for a West-
ern house, should in the evening just go to a respect-
able rink and hire a pair of skates, and interfering
with no one, independent of everybody else, take a
little of this exercise and go back to his hotel again.
But while I see the possibilities, the immense pos-
sibilities of this exercise more possibilities in it for
health than any exercise I ever heard of or ever
dreamed of, it has been the means of destruction to
body, mind, and soul of a good many. And now
come the restrictions.
First of all, let us have no more of the vulgarity or
immodesty of young women going along the streets
of these cities unattended and alone to any place of
amusement, whether it be rink or anything else. Let
them be chaperoned by mother, or older sister, or
father, or brother. If in a skating rink a man, with-
out proper introduction, tips his hat to a lad) 7 , let th^
officer of the rink hasten that offender to the door
and help him down the front steps with all modes of
accelerating momentum he can think of. If these
well-dressed devils who haunt skating rinks, and
47 8 THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE.
sometimes stand at church doors, would get their
quick justice done them, there would be less crime
abroad and less ruin of society, and more honest
amusemcMit allowed, and more pure recreation.
Another remark I have to make, and that is, let not
the bright lights and enchanting music tempt you to
senseless prolongation of the amusement. Let there
be no strife as to who shall be the swiftest skater, or
shall count up the most fabulous number of circuits.
Stop when you hfse got all the health there is in the
amusement. Remember that the laws of health are
the laws of God. Keep the Ten Commandments
written on your nerves, and on your bones, and in
the tissue of your lips, and on your lungs, and on
your heart. Remember that at the door of every
skating rink and every place of amusement, honest or
dishonest, on every cold night a whole group of
pneumonias stand ready to escort you to the sepul-
chre. Cool off before you face the north wind. Ac-
cept no unwarranted gallantries.
Let the law that dominates the parlor, dominate the
place of amusement. And I want all the people to
understand that the evil I hint at is not a character-
istic of skating rinks any more than of a great many
other places and a great many other conditions. In
other words, it is high time that people in this coun-
try understood that flirtation is damnation. When
on Broadway, New York, or Fulton street, Brooklyn,
toward the evening hour, when gentlemen of busi-
ness are returning from their work, I see the daugh-
ters of respectable families, with conspicuous behavior
and a giggle intended to attract masculine attention,
a horror goes through my soul, and I wonder if their
parents are at all observant. The vast majority of
THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 479
those who make everlasting shipwreck carry that
kind of sail. The pirates of death attack that kind
of craft. If I had a voice loud enough to be heard
from the Penobscot to the Rio Grande I would cry
out, " Flirtation is damnation ! "
A craze on any subject is deplorable. Ball-playing,
which has given to many of us the muscle and the
strength with which we have gone on to discharge
the duties of life, has become with many a dementia,
and the gamblers have clutched it with their fingers,
and from the innocent game of ball many have gone
home robbed of their person, worst of all, robbed of
their morals. Is that anything against ball playing?
Boating, which with many of us who lived on the
banks of rivers resulted in development of chest,
which has allowed us easy respiration for twenty,
thirty, forty years, and which would have given stout
lungs to many who long ago vanished under pulmo-
nary complaints innocent boating has been seized up-
on by college students, who have sacrificed book for
oar, and brain for muscle. Victors at the boat race,
dead failures in all the practical business of life. Is
that anything against boating? Strip this roller-skate
excitement of the craze, and substitute common
sense.
There is another very important thing for us all
to remember especially those of us who have got
beyond forty years of age and that is, we were boys
and girls once ourselves. From the memory of a
great many good people that seems to be obliterated.
Go back forty years, and then think what was neces-
sary for you then, and what was appropriate for you
then. Rheumatism is incompetent to give law to
solid ankles ! You can not expect people to have the
THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE.
tastes of the aged before they get to thirty. Do not
go out looking for golden rod and china asters on a
May morning. These people who have the tastes of
the aged before they get to the thirties, after a while
arc the people who bore the life out of prayer-meet-
ings, and turn religion into a sniffling cant, and
disgust the world with that which ought to be
attractive.
Do not forget that we once enjoyed the hilarities
of life, if indeed we have passed along so far that we
have forgotten it. Ah ! no, we can not improve on
God's arrangement. God knew what was best. He
made them boys and girls, and He intends them to
stay boys and girls until they are called to some other
condition. They will come to the tug of life soon
enough. Do not be envious of them, do not be jealous
of them. They have the same battle ahead that we
are fighting. Let them now cultivate broad shoulders
and brawny arms and stout health, which will be
taxed to the utmost long after you and I are under
the ground.
Nothing of a secular nature pleases me so well as
to see the young people laugh and have a good time
I mean by that a good innocent time for I say to
myself, in a little while all the generation now at the
front will pass away, and these will come on, and
they will have the battle of life to fight, and they will
have burdens to carry, and oh, how many sorrows,
and annoyances, and vexations ! I rejoice now if
they have amusement and hilarities. Let all the pro-
prietors of skating-rinks and all parents unite in one
grand conspiracy to overthrow the poor health and
the physical stagnation of our cities, and the bad
places of amusement will be empty, and the coming
THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 481
generation will have a 'vigor rebounding and athletic.
Oh, that they might all start life with more strength
of bodv than we have ! Their battle may be greater
than our battle has been. As we come on toward
the great Armageddon the strife is going to be the
more tremendous. And most certainly we want
human longevity improved. We want the average
of human life, instead of thirty, one hundred and fifty.
Why not? In olden times they lived two hundred,
three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, six hun-
dred years. The world ought to be as healthy now
as it ever was. Many of the marshes have been filled
up. Medical science has gone forth, and crippled.
and balked, and destroyed many diseases, and why
not the average of human life now something like
what it used to be? But you know now the way it
is. By the time we get our education, or learn our
trade, and get fairly started, we have to quit because
we are emeritus. We fall at the opening of the
great war of existence instead of at the close, at Bui/
Run instead of Gettysburg.
1 want all to understand that our amusements and
recreations are merely intended to fit us for use'
fulness.
I hope that none oi you, my friends, have fallen
into the delusion that your mission in life is to enjoy
yourself. You just hand me a list of the people you
find at all hours of day and night at places of entertain-
ment, and in one minute I will give you a list of the
people who are sacrificing themselves for both worlds.
Pepper, and salt, and sugar, and ' cinnamon are very
important, but that would be a very unhealthful re-
past that had nothing else on the table. Amusements
and recreations are the spice and condiment of the
31
482 THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE.
great banquet. But some of you over-pleasuring
people are feeding the body and soul on condiments.
Ah ! it is only those who have work to do, and are
doing it well it is only such persons who are really
entitled to the amusements and recreations of this
life, I know many people think this is a sarcastic
passage which says, " Rejoice, O young man, in thy
vouth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy
vouth, but know thou that for all these things God
will bring thee into judgment." It is not sarcastic, it
is not ironical ; it simply means to say, have a good
tinfe, have a real good time, but do not go into any-
lliing that will be affrighted by the judgment throne,
do not forget your duties, do not forget you are im-
mortal. We are to make these recreations of life
preparations for practical usefulness.
Solon made a law that once every year every man
should show by what trade or occupation he got his
living, and if he could not show some trade or occu-
pation by which he got his living, he was imprisoned
and punished as a thief. In olden time when a man
wanted to become a Roman citizen the officer of the
law would take his hand and feel it; and if the hand
felt hard, the conclusion was that the man was indus-
trious ; and if the hand felt soft, the conclusion was
he was idle. While in our time many a diligent man
has a soft hand for the reason that his toil is with the
brain, and hence the palm does not get calloused,
nevertheless we must all have some earnest work to
do, and we must concentrate on that work. We must
make our amusements a re-enforcement of our capac-
ity. My brother, if at the close of any recreation or
amusement you go home at night and cannot go down
on your knees and say, " O Lord, bless the amuse-
THE "ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 483
ment and entertainment of this night to my better
qualification for usefulness ! " that is an amusement in
which you ought not to have engaged. Living is a
tremendous affair, and alas ! for the man who makes
recreation a depletion instead of an augmentation.
CHAPTER XLIX.
TOBACCO AND OPIUM.
The two first born of our earth were the grass
blade and the herb. They preceded the brute cre-
ation and the human family the grass for the animal
creation, the herb for human service. The cattle
came and took possession of their inheritance, the
grass-blade ; man came and took possession of his in-
heritance, the herb. We have the herb for food as in
case of hunger, for narcotic as in case of insomnia,
for anodyne as in case of paroxysm, for stimulant as
when the pulses flag under the weight of disease.
The caterer comes and takes the herb ana presents
it in all styles of delicacy. The physician comes and
takes the herb and compounds it for physical recupe-
ration. Millions of people come and take the herb
for ruinous physical and intellectual delectation.
The herb, which was divinely created, and for good
purposes, has often been degraded for bad results.
There is a useful and a baneful employment of the
herbaceous kingdom.
There sprang up in Yucatan, of this continent, an
herb that has bewitched the world. In the fifteenth
century it crossed the Atlantic Ocean and captured
Spain. Afterward it captured Portugal. Then the
French ambassadors took it to Paris, and it captured
the French Empire. Then Walter Raleigh took it to
London, and it captured Great Britain. Nicotiana,
484
TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 483
ascribed to that genus by the botanists, but we all
know it is the exhilarating, elevating, emparadising,
nerve-shattering, dyspepsia-breeding, health-destroy-
ing tobacco. I shall not in my remarks be offensively
personal, because you all use it, or nearly all ! I know
by experience how it soothes and roseates the world,
and kindles sociality, and I also know some of its
baleful results. I was its slave, and by the grace of
God I have become its conqueror. Tens of thou-
sands of people have been asking the question during
the past two months, asking it with great pathos and
great earnestness : "Does the use of tobacco produce
cancerous and other troubles?" I shall not answer
the question in regard to any particular case, but
shall deal with the subject in a more general way.
You say to me, "Did God not create tobacco?"
Yes. You say to me, "Is not God good?" Yes.
Well, then, you say, "If God is good, and He created
tobacco, He must have created it for some good pur-
pose." Yes, your logic is complete. But God cre-
ated the common sense at the same time, by which
we are to know how to use a poison, and how not to
use it. God created that just as He created henbane
and mix vomica, and copperas, and belladonna, and
all other poisons, whether directly created by Him-
self or extracted by man.
That it is a poison no man of common sense will
deny. A case was reported where a little child lay
upon its mother's lap, and one drop fell from a pipe
to the child's lip and it went into convulsions and into
death. But you say, "Haven't people lived on in
complete use of it to old age?" Oh, yes; just as I
have seen inebriates seventy years old. In Boston,
years ago, there was a meeting in which there were
486 TOBACCO AND OPIUM.
several centenarians, and they were giving their
experience, and one centenarian said that he had lived
over a hundred years, and that he ascribed it to the
fact that he had refrained from the use of intoxicating
liquors. Right after him another centenarian said
he had lived over a hundred years, and ascribed it
to the fact that for the last fifty years he had hardly
seen a sober moment. It is an amazing thing how
many outrages men may commit upon their physical
system, and yet live on. In the case of the man of
the jug, he lived on because his body was pickled.
In the case of the man of the pipe, he lived on
because his body turned into smoked liver.
But are there no truths to be uttered in regard to
this great evil? What is the advice to be given to
the multitude of young people ? What is the advice
you are going to give to your children?
First of all, we must advise them to abstain from
the use of tobacco, because all the medical fraternity
of the United States and Great Britain agree in
ascribing to this habit terrific unhealth. The men
whose lifetime work is the study of the science of
health say so, and shall I set up my opinion against
theirs? Dr. Agnew, Dr. Olcott, Dr. Barnes, Dr.
Rush, Dr. Mott, Dr. Harvey, Dr. Hosack all the
doctors, allopathic, homoeopathic, hydropathic, eclec-
tic, denounce the habit as a matter of unhealth. A
distinguished physician declared he considered the
use of tobacco caused seventy different styles of dis-
ease, and he says: " Of all the cases of cancer in the
mouth that have come under my observation, almost
in every case it has been ascribed to tobacco."
The united testimony of all physicians is, that it
depresses the nervous system, that it takes away
TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 487
twenty-five per cent, of the physical vigor of this gen-
eration, and that it goes on as the years multiply, and,
damaging this generation with accumulated curse, it
strikes other centuries. And if it is so deleterious to
the body, how much more destructive to the mind.
An eminent physician, who was the superintendent of
the insane asylum at Northampton, Mass., says :
" Fully one-half of the patients we get in our asylum
have lost their intellect through the use of tobacco."
If it is such a bad thing to injure the body, what a
bad thing, what a worse thing it is to injure the mind,
and any man of common sense knows that tobacco
attacks the nervous system, and everybody knows
that the nervous system attacks the mind.
Beside that, all reformers will tell you that the use
of tobacco creates an unnatural thirst, and it is the
cause of drunkenness in America to-day more than
anything else. In all cases where you find men tak-
ing strong drink, you find they use tobacco. There
are men who use tobacco who do not take strong
drink, but all who use strong drink use tobacco, and
that shows beyond controversy there is an affinity be-
tween the two products. There are reformers here
to-day who will testify to you it is impossible for a
man to reform from taking strong drink until he quits
tobacco. In many of the cases where men have been
reformed from strong drink, and have gone back to
their cups, they have testified that they first touched
tobacco, and then they surrendered to intoxicants.
The pathway to the drunkard's grave and the
drunkard's hell is strewn thick with tobacco leaves.
What has been the testimony on this subject ? Is this
a mere statement of a preacher, whose business it is
to talk morals, or is the testimony of the world just as
TOBACCO AND Ol'ITM.
emphatic? What did Benjamin Franklin say? "1
never sa\v a well man, in the exercise of common
sense, who would say that tobacco did him any
good." What did Thomas Jefferson say? Certainly
he is good authority. He says in regard to the cul-
ture of tobacco, "It is a culture product! ye of infinite
wretchedness." What did Horace Greeley say of it?
" It is a profiane stench." What did Daniel Webster
say of it? " If those men must smoke, let them take
the horse-shed ! " One reason why the habit goes on
from destruction to destruction, is that so many min-
isters of the gospel take it. They smoke themselves
into bronchitis, and then the dear people have to send
them to Europe to get them restored from exhausting
religious services ! They smoke until the nervous
system is shattered. They smoke themselves to
death. I could mention the names of five distin-
guished clergymen who died of cancer in the mouth,
and the doctor said, in every case, it was the result
of tobacco. The tombstone of many a minister of
religion has been covered all over with handsome
eulogy, when if the true epitaph had been written it
would have said : " Here lies a man killed by too
much Cavendish?" They smoke until the world is
blue, and their theology is blue, and everything is
blue. How can a man stand in the pulpit and preach
on the subject of temperance when he is indulging
such a habit as that ? I have seen a cuspidor in a
pulpit into which the holy man dropped his cud
before he got up to read about "Blessed are the pure
in heart," and to read about the rolling of sin as a
sweet morsel under the tongue, and to read about
the unclean animals in Leviticus that chewed the
cud.
TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 489
About sixty-five years ago a student at Andover
Theological Seminary graduated into the ministry.
He had an eloquence and 'a magnetism which sent
him to the front. Nothing could stand before him.
But in a few months he was put in an insane asylum,
and the physician said tobacco was the cause of the
disaster. It was the custom in those days to give a
portion of tobacco to every patient in the asylum.
Nearly twenty years passed along, and that man was
walking the floor of his cell in the asylum, when his
reason returned, and he saw the situation, and he
took the tobacco from his mouth and threw it
against the iron gate of the place in which he was
confined, and he said: "What brought me here?
What keeps me here ? Tobacco ! tobacco ! God
forgive me, God help me, and I will never use it
again." He was fully restored to reason, came forth,
preached the Gospel of Christ for some ten years,
and then went into everlasting blessedness.
There are ministers of religion now in this country
who are dying by inches and they do not know what
is the matter with them. They are being killed
by tobacco. They are despoiling their influence
through tobacco. They are malodorous with tobacco.
1 could give one paragraph of history, and that
would be my own experience. It took ten cigars to
make one sermon, and I got very nervous, and I
awakened one day to see what an outrage I was com-
mitting upon my health by the use of tobacco- I
was about to change settlement, and a generous
tobacconist of Philadelphia told me if I would come
to Philadelphia and be his pastor he would give me
all the cigars I wanted for nothing, all the rest of my
life. I halted. I said to myself, " If i. smoke more
4CP TOBACCO AXD OPIUM.
than I ought to now in these war times, and when
my salary is small, what would I do if I had gratui-
tous and unlimited supply ?" Then and there, twenty-
four years ago, T quit once and forever. It made a
new man of me. Much of the time the world looked
blue before that because I was looking through
tobacco smoke. Ever since the world has been full
of sunshine, and though I have done as much work
as any one of my age, God has blessed me, it seems
to me, with the best health a man ever had.
I say that no minister of religion can afford to
smoke. Put in my hand all the money expended by
Christian men in Brooklyn for tobacco, and I will
support three orphan asylums as well and as grandly
as the three great orphan asylums already established.
Put into my hand the money spent by Christians of
America for tobacco, and I will clothe, shelter and
feed all the suffering poor of the continent. The
American chTirch gives a million dollars a year for
the salvation of the heathen, and American Christians
smoke five million dollars' worth of tobacco.
I stand here to-day in the presence of a vast multi-
tude of young people who are forming their habits.
Between seventeen and twenty-five years of age a
great many young men get on them habits in the use
of tobacco that they never get over. Let me say to
all my young friends :
You cannot afford to smoke ; you cannot afford to
chew. You either take very good tobacco, or you
take very cheap tobacco, if it is cheap T will tell you
why it is cheap. It is made of burdock and lamp-
black and sawdust and colt's foot and plantain leaves
and fuller's earth and salt and alum and lime and a
little tobacco, and you cannot ;ifford to put such a
TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 49!
mess as that in your mouth. But if you use expensive
tobacco, do you not think it would be better for you to
take that amount of money which you are now ex-
pending for this herb, and which you will expend
during the course of your life if you keep the habit
up, and with it buy a splendid farm, and make the
afternoon and the evening of your life comfortable ?
There are young men whose life is going out inch
by inch from cigarettes. Now, do you not think it
would be well to listen to the testimony of a mer-
chant of New York, who said this : " 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 I consume in cigars and all I
would consume if I keep on in the habit, and I'll see
what it will come to by compound interest." And
he gives this tremendous statistic : " Last July com-
pleted 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 $29,102.03
by compound interest. We lived in the city, but the
children, who had learned something of the enjoy-
ment of country life from their annual visits to their
grandparent, longed for a home among the green
fields. I found a very pleasant place in the country
for sale. The cigar money 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 with-'
out smoking " This is common sense as well as'
religion.
I must say a word to my friends who smoke the
best tobacco, and who could stop at any time. What
is your Christian influence in this respect? What is
492 TOBACCO AND OPIUM.
vour influence upon young men ? Do you not think
it would be better for you to exercise a little self-
denial? People wondered why George Briggs, Gov-
ernor of Massachusetts, wore a cravat but no collar-
" Oh," they said, ' it is an absurd eccentricity."
This was the history of the cravat without any
collar : For many years before he had been talking
with an inebriate, trying to persuade him to give up
the habit of drinking, and he said to the inebriate,
"Your habit is entirely unnecessary." "Ah!" re-
plied the inebriate, " we do a great many things that
are unnecessary. It isn't necessary that you should
have that collar." " Well," said Mr. Briggs, " I'll
never wear a collar again if you will stop drinking."
"Agreed," said the other. They joined hands in a
pledge that they kept for twenty years kept until
death. That is magnificent. That is Gospel, prac-
tical Gospel, worthy of George Briggs, worthy of
you. Self-denial for others. Subtraction from our
advantage that there may be an addition to some-
body else's advantage.
But what I have said has been chiefly appropriate
for men. Now my subject widens, and shall be ap-
propriate for both sexes. In all ages of the world
there has been a search for some herb or flower that
would stimulate lethargy and compose grief . Among
the ancient Greeks and Egyptians they found some-
thing they called nepenthe, and the Theban women
knew how to compound it. If a person should chew
a few of these leaves their grief would be imme-
diately whelmed with hilarity. Nepenthe passed out
from the consideration of the world, and then came
hasheesh, which is from the Indian hemp. It is man-
ufactured from the flowers at the top. The workman
TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 493
with leathern apparel walks through the field, and
the exudation of the plants adheres to the leathern
garments, and then the man comes out, and scrapes
off this exudation, and it is mixed with aromatics,
and becomes an intoxicant that has brutalized whole
nations. Its first effect is sight, spectacle glorious
and grand beyond all description, but afterward it
pulls down body, mind, and soul, into anguish.
I knew one of the most brilliant men of our time.
His appearance in a newspaper column, or a book, or
a magazine, was an enchantment. In the course of a
half hour he could produce more wit and more valu-
able information than any man I ever heard talk.
But he chewed hasheesh. He first took it out of cu-
riosity to see whether the power said to be attached
really existed. He took it. He got under the power
of it. He tried to break loose. He put his hand in
the cocatrice's den to see whether it would bite, and
he found out to his own undoing. His friends
gathered around and tried to save him, but he could
not be saved. The father, a minister of the Gospel,
prayed with him and counseled him, and out of a
comparativelv small salary employed the first medical
advice of New York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris,
London, and Berlin, for he was his only son. No
help came. First his tody gave way in pangs and
convulsions of suffering. Then his mind gave way,
and he became a raving maniac. Then his soul wenc
out, blaspheming God, into a starless eternit\-. He
died at thirty years of age. Behold the work of ac-
cursed hasheeh.
But I must put my emphasis upon the use of opium.
It is made from the white poppy. It is not a new-
discovery. Three hundred years before Christ we
494 T(>HACO> AND OPIUM.
read of it, but it was not until the seventh century
that it took up its march of death, and passing out of
the curative and the medicinal, through smoking and
mastication, it has become the curse of nations. In
1861 there were imported into this country one hun-
dred and seven thousand pounds of opium. In 1880,
nineteen years after, there were imported five hun-
dred and thirty thousand pounds of opium. In 1876
there were in this country two hundred and twenty-
five thousand opium consumers. Now it is estimated
that there are in the United States to-day six hun-
dred thousand victims of opium. It is appalling.
We do not know why some families do not get on.
There is something mysterious about them. The
opium habit is so stealthy, it is so deceitful, and it is
so deathful you can cure a hundred men of strong
drink where you can cure one opium-eater.
I have knelt down in this very church by those who
were elegant in apparel, and elegant in appearance,
and from the depths of my soul we cried out for
God's rescue. Somehow it did not come. In many
a household only a physician and pastor know it
the physician called in for physical relief, the pastor
called in for spiritual relief, and they both fail. The
physician confesses his defeat, the minister of religion
confesses his defeat, for somehow God does not seem
to hear a prayer offered for an opium-eater. His
grace is infinite, and I have been told there are cases
of reformation. I never saw one. I say this not to
wound the feelings of any who may feel this awful
grip, but to utter a potent warning that you stand
back from that gate of hell. Oh, man, oh, woman,
tampering with this great evil, have you fallen back
on this as a permanent resource, because of some
TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 495
physical distress or mental anguish ? Better stop.
The ecstacies do not pay for the horrors. The Para-
dise is followed too soon by the Pandemonium. Mor
phia, a blessing of God for the relief of sudden pain
and of acute dementia, misappropriated and never
intended for permanent use.
It is not merely the barbaric fanatics that are taken
down by it. Did you ever read De Quincey's Con-
fessions of an Opium-eater? He says that during the
first ten years the habit handed to him all the keys
of Paradise, but it would take something as mighty
as De Quincey's pen to describe the consequent hor-
rors. There is nothing that I have ever read about
the tortures of the damned that seemed more horrible
than those which De Quincey says he suffered. Sam-
uel Taylor Coleridge first conquered the world with
his exquisite pen, and then was conquered by opium.
The most brilliant, the most eloquent lawyer of the
nineteenth century went down under its power, and
there is a vast multitude of men and women but
more women than men who are going into the dun-
geon of that awful incarceration.
The worst thing about it is, it takes advantage of
one's weakness. De Quincey says : " I got to be an
opium-eater on account of my rheumatism." Cole-
ridge says ; " I got to be an opium-eater on account
of my sleeplessness." For what are you taking it?
For God's sake do not take it long. The wealthiest,
the grandest families going down under its power.
Twenty-five thousand victims of opium in Chicago.
Twenty-five thousand victims of opium in St. Louis,
and, according to that average, seventy-five thousand
victims of opium in New York and Brooklyn.
The clerk of a drugstore says : " I can tell them
496 TOBACCO AND OPIUM.
when they come in ; there is something about their
complexion, something about their manner, some-
thing about the look of their eyes, that shows they
are victims." Some in the struggle to get away
from it try chloral. Whole tons of chloral manu-
factured in Germany every vear. Baron Liebig says
he knows one chemist in Germany who manufactures
a half ton of chloral every week. Beware of hydrate
of chloral ! It is coming on with mighty tread to
curse these cities. But I am chiefly under this
head speaking of morphine. The devil of morphia
is going to be in this country, in my opinion, mightier
than the devil of alcohol.
By the power of the Christian pulpit, by the power
of the Christianized printing-press, by the power of
the Lord God Almighty, all these evils are going to
be extirpated all, all, and you have a work in re-
gard to that, and I have a work. But what we do
we had better do right away. The clock ticks now ?
and we hear it ; after awhile the clock will tick and
we will not hear it.
CHAPTER L.
SOCIAL DISSIPATION.
I am not to discuss the old question, ]<i
right or wrong? but I am to discuss the question,
Does dancing take too much place and occupy too
much time in modern society? and in my remarks
I hope to carry with me the earnest conviction of all
thoughtful persons, and I believe I will.
You will all admit, whatever you think of that
style of amusement and exercise, that from many
circles it has crowded out all intelligent conversation.
You will also admit that it has made the condition
of those who do not dance, either because they do
not know how, or because they have not the health
to endure it, or because through conscientious
scruples they must decline the exercise, very uncom-
fortable. You will also admit, all of you, that it has
passed in many cases from an amusement to a dissi-
pation, and you are easily able to understand the
bewilderment of the educated Chinaman who, stand-
ing in the brilliant circle where there was dancing
going on four or five hours, and the guests seemed
exhausted, turned to the proprietor of the house and
said : " Why don't you allow your servants to do
this for you ?"
You are also willing to admit, whatever be your
idea in regard to the amusement I am speaking of,
and whatever be vour idea of the old-fashioned
497 j*
SOCIAL DISSIPATION.
square dance, and of many of the processional romps
in which 1 can see no evil, the round dance is admin-
istrative ot evil, and ought to be driven out of all
respectable circles. I am by natural temperament
and religious theory opposed to 'the position taken by
all those who are horrified at playfulness on the part
of the young, and who think that all questions are
decided questions of decency and morals by the
position of the feet, while on the other hand, I can see
nothing but ruin, temporal and eternal, for those who
go into the dissipations of social life, dissipations
which have already despoiled thousands of young
men and young women of all that is noble in char-
acter, and useful in life.
Dancing is the graceful motion of the body ad-
justed by art to the sound and measures of musical
instrument or of the human voice. All nations have
danced. The ancients thought that Castor and Pol-
lux taught the art to the Lacedaemonians. But who-
ever started it, all climes have adopted it. In ancient
times they had the festal dance, the military dance,
the mediatorial dance, the bacchanalian dance, and
queens and lords swayed to and fro in the gardens,
and the rough backwoodsman with this exercise
awakened the echo of the forest. There is some-
thing in the sound of livelv music to evoke the
movement of the hand and foot, whether cultured or
uncultured. Passing down the street, we uncon-
sciously keep step to the sound of the brass band,
while the Christian in church with his foot beats time
while his soul rises upon some great harmony. While
this is so in civilized lands, the red men of the forest
have their scalp dances, their green-corn dances, their
war dances.
SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 499
In ancient times the exercise, was so utterly and
completely depraved that the Church anathematized
it. The old Christian fathers expressed themselves
most vehemently against it. St. Chrysostom says:
" The feet were not given for dancing, but to walk
modestly, not to leap impudently like camels." One
of the dogmas of the ancient Church reads: "A
dance is the devil's possession, and he that entereth
into a dance entereth into his possession. As many
paces as a man makes in dancing, so many paces does
he make to hell." Elsewhere the old dogmas declared
this "The woman that singeth in the dance is the
princess of the devil, and those that answer are her
clerks, and the beholders are his friends, and the
music are his bellows, and the fiddlers are the min-
isters of the devil. For, as when hogs are strayed,
if the hogsherd call one, all assemble together, so
when the devil calleth one woman to sing in the
dance, or to play on some musical instrument, pres-
ently all the dancers gather together." This indis-
criminate and universal denunciation of the exercise
came from the fact that it was utterly and completely
depraved.
But we are not to discuss the customs of the olden
times, but customs now. We are not to take the evi-
dence of the ancient fathers, but our own conscience,
enlightened by the Word of God, is to be the stan-
dard. Oh, bring no harsh criticism upon the young.
I would not drive out from their soul all the hilarities
of life. I do not believe that the inhabitants of ancient
Wales, when they stepped to the sound of the rustic
harp, went down to ruin. I believe God intended the
young people to laugh and romp and play. I do not
believe God would have put exuberance in the soul
5<X> SOCIAL DISSIPATION.
and exuberance in the body if He had not intended
they should in some wise exercise it and demonstrate
it. If a mother joins hands with her children and
cross the floor to the sound of music, I see no harm.
If a group of friends cross and recross the room to
the sound of piano well played, I see no harm. If a
company, all of whom are known to host and hostess
as reputable, cross and recross the room to the sound
of musical instrument, I see no harm. I tried for a
long while to see harm in it. 1 could not see any
harm in it. I never shall see any harm in that. Our
men need to be kept young, young for many years
longer than they are kept young. Never since my
boyhood days have I had more sympathy with the
innocent hilarities of life than 1 have now. What
though we have felt heavy burdens ! What though
we have had to endure hard knocks! Is that any
reason why we should stand in the way of those who,
unstung of life's misfortunes, are full of exhilaration,
and full of glee ?
God bless the young! They will have to wait
man}' a long year before they hear me say anything
that would depress their ardor or clip their wings, or
make them believe that life is hard and cold and
repulsive. It is not. I tell them, judging from my
own experience, that they will be treated a great deal
better than they deserve. We have no right to
grudge the innocent hilarities to the young.
As we go on in years let us remember that we had
our gleeful times; let us be able to say, " We had
our good times, let others have their good times."
Let us willingly resign our place to those who are
coming after us. I will cheerfully give them every-
thing my house, my books, my position in society,
SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 5OI
my heritage. After twenty, forty, fifty years we
have been drinking out of the cup of this life, do not
let us begrudge the passing of it that others may
take a drink. But while all this is so, we can have
no sympathy with sinful indulgences, and I am going
to speak in regard to some of them, though I should
tread on the long trail of some popular vanities.
What are the dissipations of social life to-day, and
what are the dissipations of the ballroom ? In some
cities and in some places reaching all the year round,
in other places only in the summer time and at the
watering-places. There are dissipations of social life
that are cutting a very wide swathe with the sickle
of death, and hundreds and thousands are going
clown under these influences, and my subject in
application is as wide as the continent, and as wide as
Christendom. The whirlpool of social dissipation is
drawing down some of the brightest craft that ever
sailed the sea thousands and tens of thousands of
the bodies and souls annually consumed in the con-
flagration of ribbons.
Social dissipation is the abettor of pride, it is the
instigator of jealousy, it is the sacrificial altar ot
health, it is the defiler of the soul, it is the avenue of
lust, and it is the curse of every town in America.
Social dissipation. It may be hard to draw the line
and say that this is right on the one side, and that is
wrong on the other side. It is not necessary that
we do that, for God has put a throne in every man's
soul, and I appeal to that throne to-day. When a
man does wrong he knows he does wrong, and when
he does right he knows he does right, and to that
throne that Almighty God lifted in the heart of
every man and woman, I appeal.
5O2 SOCIAL DISSIPATION.
As to the physical ruin wrought by the dissipa-
tions of social life, there can be no doubt. What
may \ve expect of people who work all day and
dance all night? After awhile they will be thrown
on society, nervous, exhausted imbeciles. These
people who indulge in the suppers and the midnight
revels and then go home in the cold unwrapped in
limbs, will after awhile be found to have been written
down in God's eternal records as suicides, as much
suicides as if they had taken their life with a pistol,
or a knife, or strychnine.
How many people in America have stepped from
the ballroom into the graveyard ! Consumptions
and swift neuralgias are close on their track. Amid
many of the glittering scenes of social life in America,
diseases stand right and left, and balance and chain.
The breath of the sepulchre floats up through the
perfume, and the froth of Death's lip bubbles up in
the champagne. I am told that in some parts of this
country, in some of the cities, there are parents who
have actually given up housekeeping and gone to
boarding, that they may give their time inimitably to
social dissipations. I have known such cases. I have
known family after family blasted in that way, in
one of the other cities where I preached. Father
and mother turning their back upon all quiet culture
and all the amenities of home, leading forth their
entire familv in the wrong direction. Annihilated,
worse than annihilated for there are some things
worse than annihilation. I give you the history ol
more than one family in America, when I say they
went on in the dissipations of social life until the
father dropped into a lower style of dissipation, and
after awhile the son was tossed out into society a
SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 503
nonentity, and after awhile the daughter eloped with
a French dancing-master, and after awhile the mother,
getting on further and further in years, tries to hide
the wrinkles, but fails in the attempt, trying all the
arts of the belle, an old flirt, a poor, miserable butter-
fly without any wings.
Let me tell you that the dissipations of American
life, of social life in America, are despoiling the use-
fulness of a vast multitude of people. What do those
people care about the fact that there are whole
nations in sorrow and suffering and agony, when they
have for consideration the more important question
about the size of a glove, or the tie of a cravat?
Which one of them ever bound up the wounds of
the hospital? Which one of them ever went out to
care for the poor? Which of them do you find in
the haunts of sin, distributing tracts? They live on
themselves, and it is very poor pasture.
Oh ! what a belittling process to the human mind
this everlasting question about dress, this discussion
of fashionable infinitesimals, this group looking ask-
ance at the glass, wondering, with an infinity of
earnestness, how that last geranium leaf does look
this shriveling of a man's moral dignity until it is not
observable to the naked eye, this Spanish inquisition
of a tight shoe, this binding up of an immortal soul in
a ruffle, this pitching off of an immortal nature over
the rocks, when God intended it for great and ever-
lasting uplifting.
You know as well as I do that the dissipations of
social life in America to-day are destroying thou-
sands and tens of thousands of people, and it is time
that the pulpits lift their voice against them, for I
now prophecy the eternal misfortune of all those who
504 SOCIAL DISSIPATION.
enter the rivalry. When did the white, glistening
boards of a dissipated ballroom ever become the
road to heaven? When was a torch for eternity
ever lighted at the chandelier of a dissipated scene ?
From a table spread after such an excited and dese-
crated scene who ever went home to pray ?
In my parish of Philadelphia there was a young
woman brilliant as a spring morning. She gave her
life to the world. She would come to religious
meetings and under conviction would for a little
while begin to pray, and then would rush off again
into the discipleship of the world. She had all the
world could offer of brilliant social position. One
day a flushed and excited messenger asked me to
hasten to her house, for she was dying. I entered
the room. There were the physicians, there was the
mother, there lay this disciple of the world. I asked
her some questions in regard to the soul. She made
no answer. I knelt down to pray. I rose again, and
desiring to get some expression in regard to her
eternal interests, I said: "Have you any hope?"
and then for the first her lips moved in a whisper as
she said : "No hope!" Then she died. The world,
she served it, and the world helped her not in the
last.
I would wish that I could marshal all the young
people in this audience to an appreciation of the fact
that you have an earnest work in life, and your
amusements and recreations are only to help you
along in that work. At the time of a religious
awakening, a Christian young woman spoke to a
man in regard to his soul's salvation. He floated out
.into the world. After awhile she became worldly in
her Christian profession. The man said one day,
SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 505
" Well, I am as safe as she is. I was a Christian, she
said she was a Christian. She talked with me about
my soul ; if she is safe I am safe." Then a sudden acci-
dent took him off, without an opportunity to utter
one word of prayer.
Do you not realize, have you not noticed, young
men and old have you not noticed that the dissi-
pations of social life are blasting and destroying a
vast multitude ?
CHAPTER LI.
SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE.
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 can not be accounted for, so many
sounds and appearances which defy acoustics and in-
vestigation, 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 unmistak-
able 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," " Re-
searches into the Phenomena of Spiritualism," and
506
SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 507
whole libraries of hocus-pocus, enough to deceive
the very elect.
Modern Spiritualism 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 per-
formed by sleight-of-hand and rank deception. Dr.
Carpenter, Robert Houdin, Mr. Waite and others
have exposed the fraud by dramatizing in the pres-
ence 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 bv
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 per-
formances, 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 postoffice which it has
established between the next world and this is an*
other Star Route postoffice, kept up at vast expense
without ever having delivered one letter from the
other world to this.
The first leading remark I have to make in regard
to Spiritualism is that it is a very old doctrine.
508 SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE.
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 ihe hand. Proof positive it was
spiritualistic influence.
After a while, Mr. Fox with his family moved into
that house, and then they had hangings 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 peddler who had been murdered
in that house years before, and who had been robbed
of his $500. Whether the spirit of the peddler came
back to collect his $500 or his bones I do not know.
But from that time on there was a constant excite-
ment 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."
Ah ! 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,
SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 509
astrologers who found out a new dispensation of the
stars, experts in palmistry who can tell by the lines
in the palm of your hand 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 wit-
ness 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 to-
gether, 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 \\ith living thunders of indignation.
After all that, be a Spiritualist if you dare !
Another remark I have to make in regard to Spirit-
ualism 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
510 SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE.
our weakness the power to marshal a host and recap-
ture 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 mes-
sage 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 excel-
lent 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
that 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." It comes in time of weakness,
and overthrows the soul. 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 of our departed
SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. $11
friends free from toil, and sin, and pain are forever
happy, and that \ve will join them, not in mysterious
and half utterances, which make the hair stand on
end, and make cold chills creep up and down 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!"
Oh, I hate 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 Spir-
itualism 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 day-
time, 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 demonstrated; 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 ice-cream
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 Spir-
512 SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE.
itualism 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 yield-
ing 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 stages 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 for you, my brother, 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 steam boiler 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 mis-
fortune ; 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
transpired 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! Wo-
men by the hundreds have by Spiritualism been
pushed off into a life of profligacy. It employs all
SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 513
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 you from one of their
prominent papers where it says: " 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 intemper-
ance 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 attrac-
tions."
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 Spirit-
ualism. 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 doc-
tors will tell you : " Spiritualism demented her."
They have been carried off into mental midnight
33
5 14 SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE.
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 Spirit-
ualism, forsook his home, took the $15,000, the only
$15,000 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 ma-
chinery 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 Atlan-
tic safe ! " The vessel came to wharf, and there was
embracing of long-absent ones; but some of these
men went up to the insane asylum to find their wives
incarcerated by this foul cheat of hell, Spiritualism.
What did Judge Edmonds say in Broadway Taber-
nacle, New York, while making argument in behalf
SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 515
of Spiritualism, himself having been fully captured.
What did Judge Edmonds say ? Readmitted 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 Spir-
itualism 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 insuffi-
ciency 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 rev-
elation 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, my brother, my sister,
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.
CHAPTER LII.
BOOKS.
The printing-press is the mightiest agency for^ood
or evil. A minister of the Gospel occupies an import-
ant position, but not one so responsible as that of the
editor and publisher. Take the one fact that from
the daily press of New York there go forth four hun-
dred and fifty thousand copies a day, and that three
of the weeklies have an aggregate circulation of one
million two-hundred thousand, and then cipher, if you
can, how far up, and how far down, and how far out,
reach the influences of the American printing-press.
I have an idea that it is to be the chief agency for
the rescue and evangelization of the world, and that
the last great battle will not be fought with guns and
swords, but with types and presses ; a gospelized
printing-press triumphing over, and trampling under
foot, and crushing out a pernicious literature.
The greatest blessing that has come to this world
since Jesus Christ came, is good journalism, and
the worst scourge, unclean journalism. You must
apply the same law to the book and the newspaper.
The newspaper is a book swifter and in more portable
shape. Under unclean literature, under pernicious
books and newspapers, tens of thousands have gone
down ; the bodies of the victims in the penitentiaries,
in the dens of shame, and some of the souls in the
asylums for the imbecile and the insane, more of the
516
BOOKS
.After C. Kiesel.]
BOOKS. 519
souls already having gone down in an avalanche of
horror and despair. The London plague is nothing
to it. That counted its victims by the thousands;
this modern pest shovels its millions into the charnel-
house of the morally dead. The longest train of cars
that ever rolled over the Erie track, or the Hudson,
is not long enough, or large enough, to hold the
beastliness and the putrefaction which has been gath-
ered up in the bad books and newspapers of America
for the last twenty years.
Now, there is no more absorbing question to-day
for every man and every patriot than this question :
Is there anything we can do to stem this awful tor-
rent of pernicious literature ? Are we to make our
minds the receptacle for all that bad people choose to
write? Are we to stoop down, and drink out of the'
trough which wickedness has filled ? Are we to mire
in iniquity, or to chase will-o'-the-wisps across swamps
of death, when God invites us into the blooming gar-
dens of His love? Is there anything you can do?
Yes. Is there anything that I can do to help stem
this mighty torrent of pernicious literature ? Yes.
The first thing for us all to do is to keep ourselves
and our families aloof from iniquitous books and
newspapers. Standing as we do, chin deep in ficti-
tious literature, the question is every day asked: Is
it right to read novels ? Well, I have to say that
there are good novels, honest novels, Christian nov-
els, useful novels, novels that make the heart purer
and the life better. The world can never pay its debt
of obligation to Hawthorne, and Landor, and Hunt,
and Mackenzie, and scores of others who in times past
have written healthful novels. The follies of the
world were never better excoriated than in the books
520 BOOKS.
of Miss Edgcworth. The memories of the past were
never better embalmed than in the writings of
Walter Scott. No healthier books have been writ-
ten than those by Fenimore Cooper, his novels full
of the breath of the seaweed and the air of the
American forests. Kingsley did a grand work in his
books in smiting morbidity and giving us the poetry
of strong muscles and good health and fresh air.
Thackeray accomplished a good work when he
caricatured pretenders to gentility and high blood.
The writings of Charles Dickens are an everlasting
protest against injustice, and a plea for the poor.
These books, read in the right time and read in
the right proportion with other books, are healthful
and beneficial. But I declare to }*ou to-day that I
believe three-fourths of the novels of the time are
pernicious and baleful to the last extent. The whole
land is flooded with the iniquity. Some of these bad
novels come forth from respectable printing presses.
Some of them are actually commended by religious
journals. You find them in the desk of the school
miss, you find them in the trunk of the young man
on his journey, you find them in the steamboat cabin,
you find them in the hotel reception room. Every-
where, everywhere, a pernicious literature. You
see a light late at night in your child's room, You
go in and say: "What are you doing?" ' Read-
ing." " What are you reading?" " A book." You
take the book and look at it, and you find it is a per-
nicious book. You say, " Where did you get it ?"
" Borrowed it." Thousands of people buy perni-
cious literature and are generous enough to let
others also be blasted.
Now, I gather to-day all the novels, good and bad ;
BOOKS. 521
all the histories, false and true ; all the romances,
beautiful and hideous ; all the epilogues, commen-
taries, catalogues ; family, city, state, national
libraries, and I heave them into one great pyramid,
and I bring to bear upon them some grand and
glorious and infallible Christian principles, so that if
you ask me to-day, Is there anything we can do to
stem this tide? I say, Yes, very much, every way.
First, we will stand aloof from all books that give
false pictures of human life. Life is neither a trag-
edy nor a farce. Men are not all either knaves or
heroes. Women are neither angels nor furies.
Judging, however, from much of the literature of
this day, we would come to the idea that life is a
fitful, fantastic, and extravagant thing, instead of a
practical and useful thing. After these people have
been reading late at night romances which glorify
iniquity and present knavery in most attractive form,
how poorly prepared are they for the work of life.
That man who is an indiscriminate novel reader is
unfit for the duties of the store, the shop, the factory.
He will be looking for his heroine in the tin shop, in
the grocery store, in the banking house, and will not
find her.
Those women who are indiscriminate readers of
novels are unfit for the duties of wife, mother, sister,
daughter the duties of home life, the duties of a
Christian life. There she sits at midnight, hands
trembling, looking aghast, bursting into tears at mid-
night over the woes of some imaginary unfortunate.
When the morrow comes she will sit by the hour
gazing at nothing and biting her nails into the quick.
The carpet that was plain enough before will be
plainer now that she has walked through tessellated
522 HOOKS.
halls, and the industrious companion will be more
unattractive now that she has lounged in the king's
park with a polished desperado. Oh, these con-
firmed readers of novels! They are unfit for the
duties of this life, which is a tremendous discipline,
and they are unfit for the work of a world where all
we gain is achieved by hard, continuous, and exhaust-
ive work. Evil and good mixed.
We will also help to stem this tide of pernicious
literature by standing aloof, we and our families,
from books which have some good, but a large
admixture of evil. You have read books that had in
them the good and the bad. Which stuck? The
bad ! There are minds like sieves, which let the
small particles of gold fall through and keep the large
cinders, while there are intellects like loadstones
plunged into filings of steel and brass, that will keep
the steel and repel the brass. But it is generally just
the opposite. You plunge through a hedge of burrs
to get one blackberry, and you will get more burrs
than blackberries. I do not care how good you are,
you cannot afford to read a bad book.
You say, " The influence is insignificant." Ah !
the scratch of a pin may produce the lockjaw. You
out of curiosity plunge into a bad book, and you have
the curiosity of a man who takes a torch into a gun-
powder mill to see whether or not it will blow up.
If you want to help stem the tide of pernicious lit-
erature, you and your families must stand back from
books which corrupt the imagination. I refer now
not to that literature which the villain has under
his coat, waiting for the school to come out, then
looking up and down the street for the police,
and then offering the book to your boy on his way
BOOKS. 523
home. I refer not to that, but to polished literature,
which comes forth with a cute plot sounding the
tocsin that arouses all the bad passions of our soul.
Years ago there came forth a French authoress
under the assumed name of George Sand. She
smoked cigars, she wore masculine apparel. She
wrote with a style ardent, eloquent, graphic in its
pictures, horrible in its suggestions, damnable in its
results, and sending forth into the libraries and the
homes of the world an influence which has not yet
relaxed ; and I want to tell you that all the infamous
stories we have got from Paris in the last five or ten
years are only copies of that woman's iniquity.
These books are sold by Christian booksellers. Under
the nostrils of your cities there is to-day a fetid, reek-
ing, unwashed literature enough to poison all the
fountains of virtue and smite your sons and daughters
as with the wings of a destroying angel, and it is
high time that the ministers of religion and all
reformers banded together and marshaled an army of
righteousness all armed to the teeth to fight back this
moral calamity.
What do you make of the fact that fifty per
cent. more than fifty per cent. of the criminals in
the jails and penitentiaries of this country are under
twenty-one years of age ; many of them under eigh-
teen, many under sixteen, many under fifteen. You
go along the corridors of the prisons, and you will
find that nine out of ten came there from reading
bad books or newspapers. The men will tell you so ;
the women will tell you so. Is not that a fact worthy
the consideration of those whose families are dear to
them?
"Oh," you say, " I am a business man, and can't be
524 BOOKS.
looking after the literature of my household ; I can't
be examining books and newspapers; they will have
to look after themselves." Suppose your child was
threatened with typhoid fever, would you have time
to go for a doctor ? would you have time to watch
the progress of the disease ? would \*ou have time to
attend the funeral? In the name of God, I warn
some of you that your children are threatened with
moral and spiritual typhoid, and if the evil be un-
arrested there will be the funeral of the body, and
the funeral of the mind, and the funeral of the soul
three funerals in one day.
If you want to help stem this tide, keep aloof, you
and your families, from all books that are apologetic
for crime.
Some of the most fascinating book-binding in our
time is thrown around sin. Vice is horrible anyhow.
It is born in shame, and it dies howling in the dark-
ness. It whips one through this life with a scourge
of scorpions, and after that God's thunders of wrath
pursue it over boundless deserts. If you want to
paint carnality, do not represent it as looking out
irom embroidered curtains, or from the window of a
royal seraglio. Paint it as writhing in the horrors of
a city hospital.
Cursed are the books which make impurity decent,
and crime honorable, and hypocrisy noble. Ye
authors who write them, ye publishers who print them,
ye booksellers who distribute them, shall be cut to
pieces, if not by an aroused public sentiment, then by
Almighty God, who will sweep you to the lowest pit
of perdition, ye murderers of souls. You may escape
in this world ; in the next the heel of calamity will
grind you, and you will be fastened to the rock, and
BOOKS. 525
vultures of despair will claw at your soul, and those
whom you have destroyed will come and torment
you, pouring hotter coals into your suffering, eter-
nally rejoicing at the outcry of your pain and the
howling of your damnation. '' God shall wound the
hairy scalp of him that goeth on in his trespasses."
There she sits at midnight, bending over the evil
romance. The tears are started. The color dashes
to the cheek, and then it fades. The hands tremble
as though a guardian angel were trying to shake the
deadly book from her grasp. Then there is a rush of
hot tears. The perspiration on her brow is the spray
dashed up from the river of death. She laughs with
a laugh that dies at its own sound. Soon in a mad-
house she will mistake the ringlets for crawling ser-
pents, and thrust her white hand through the bars of
the incarceration, and then beat her head and push it
as though she would push the scalp from the skull,
crying, " My brain, my brain !" Oh, stand off from
such infernal literature ! Why go sounding among
the reefs and among the warning buoys when there
is such a vast ocean of good literature, good books
and good newspapers? an ocean on which you may
voyage, all sail set.
I must, in this connection, call to your mind the
iniquitous pictorials of our time. For good pictures
I have great admiration. An artist, with one flash,
will do that which an author can accomplish in four
hundred pages. Fine paintings are the aristocracy
of art. Engravings are the democracy of art. A
good picture on one side of a pictorial will sometimes
do just as much good as a book of four or five hun-
dred pages. Multiply these pictures. Put them in
your household. If there are any sick, put them
526 BOOKS.
upon the couch. Put these pictorials on your walls.
Gather them in portfolios and albums. God speed
the good pictures on their errands of knowledge and
mercy. It is a mighty agency for God and the truth,
a good picture.
But you know our cities are to-day cursed with
evil pictorials. These death-warrants are on every
street. A young man purchases perhaps one copy,
and he purchases with it his eternal discomfiture.
That one bad picture poisons one soul, that soul
poisons fifty souls, the fifty despoil a hundred, the
hundred a thousand, the thousand a million, and the
million other millions, until it will take the measuring
line of eternity to tell the height, and the depth, and
the ghastliness of the great undoing. A young man
buys one copy, and he unrolls it amid roaring com-
panions ; but long after that paper is gone the evil
will be seen in the blasted imaginations of those who
looked at it. Every night the Queen of Death holds
a banquet, and these evil pictorials are the printed
invitations to the guests.
Alas ! that the fair brow of American art should
be blotched with that plague spot. Oh, young man,
buy none of that moral strychnine, do not pick up a
nest of coiled adders for your pocket. Your heart
will be more pure than your eye. A man is never
better than the picture he 'loves to look at. Show
me what style of pictures a man buys and I will tell
you his character. Out of a thousand times I will
not make one failure in judgment. When Satan fails
to get a man to read a bad book, he sometimes cap-
tures him by getting him to look at a bad picture.
When Satan goes a-fishing, he does not care whether
it is a long line or a short line, if he only hauls in his
victim.
BOOKS. 527
Oh, if in answer to this stupendous question of the
day, a question which so many answer in the negative
because they are in despairful mood, " Is there any-
thing to be done to stem this awful tide of pernicious
literature ? " if I have shown you that there is some-
thing for us to do, I shall have done a work that I
will not be ashamed of in that day which shall try
every man's work, of what sort it is. Oh, remember
that one column of good reading may save a soul,
that one column of bad reading may destroy a soul.
Benjamin Franklin said that the reading of Cotton
Mather's " Essay to Do Good " moulded his entire
life. The assassin of Lord Russell said he entered
crime through an evil romance. John Angell James,
than whom England never produced a better man,
or the Church of God honors a more consistent
Christian, declared in his old days that he had never
got over once having for fifteen minutes read a bad
book. Ah ! the power of a bad book. And then the
power of a good book.
Years ago a clergyman passing along through the
West, stopped at a hotel, and saw a woman copying
from a book. He found the book was Doddridge's
" Rise and Progress." This woman had been pleased
with the book which she had borrowed, and was
copying a passage that impressed her very much.
The clergyman happened to have a copy of Dod-
dridge's " Rise and Progress" in his valise, and gave
it to her. Thirty years passed along, and that clergy-
man came to the same hotel, and was inquiring about
the family that had lived there thirty years before,
and was pointed to a house near by. He went there,
and said to the woman, " Do you remember seeing
me before?" She said, " I don't remember ever to
$28 BOOKS.
have seen you before." " Don't you remember thirty
years ago a man giving you a copy of Doddridge's
"Rise and Progress'?" " Oh, yes, I remember that;
that saved my soul. That book I loaned to my
neighbors, and they read it, and they all came into
the kingdom, and we had a great revival. Do you
see the spire of a church out yonder? That church
was built as a consequence of that book." Oh, the
power of a good book! Oh, the power of a bad
book !
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 pass-
ages 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 bor-
rowed 'from me, could have affected his eternal
destiny ?"
Oh, go home to-day and examine your libraries,
and after you have got through your libraries,
examine the stand where the pictorials and news-
papers are, and if you find anything there that can
not stand the test of the judgment day, do not give it
to others that would despoil them ; do not sell it
that would be getting the price of blood ; but kindle
a fire on your kitchen hearth or in your back-yard,
and put the poison in and keep stirring the blaze until
everything has gone to ashes, from preface to ap-
pendix.
And crowd your minds with good books, and there
BOOKS. 529
will be no room for the bad. When Thomas Chal-
mers was riding beside a stage-driver and the horses
were going beautifully, the stage-driver drew his
long lash and struck the ear of the leader. It seemed
to Thomas Chalmers a great cruelty, and he said,
" Why did you strike that horse ; he is going splen-
didly?" "Ah!" said the stage-driver, "do you see
that frightful object along the road ? I never in the
world would have got that horse along there if I
hadn't given him something else to think of ! "
Thomas Chalmers went home and wrote his immortal
sermon, " The Expulsive Power of a New Affection."
And while you have looked after yourselves and
looked after your families, I want you to join this
great army enlisted against pernicious literature.
We are going to triumph. I feel to the tips of my
fingers and in the depths of my soul the assurance that
righteousness is going to triumph over all iniquity.
If God be with 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 de-
serted 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 again in per-
son 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 magnifi-
cent stables two horses, which she kept all the time
groomed and bridled and saddled and caparisoned, so
34
530 BOOKS.
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 even in the dream.
Oh, 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 thai sat on him
had a bow, and a crown was given unto Him: and
He went forth conquering and to conquer." Horse-
men 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 LIII.
ARE THEATRES IMPROVING?
As near as I can tell, it is about half-past four
o'clock in the morning. Signs of dawn all around
the sky. Caverns full of darkness, but the mountains
are being transfigured. The sun is coming up,
although coming very slowly. The world progresses.
Since the armies of civilization and Christianity
started on their march, they have not fallen back an
inch. There have been regiments cowardly, which
have retreated and surrendered to the enemy, just as
in all armies there are those unworthy the standard
they carry ; but the great host of God has been
answering to the command given at the start of,
" Forward, march ! "
Have the entertainments and the recreations of the
world kept abreast in this grand march of the ages ?
Are the novels of our day superior to those that are
past? Is the dance of this decade an improvement
upon the dance of other decades ? Are the opera
houses rendering grander music than that which they
rendered in other times? Are parlor games more
healthful than they used to be ? Are the theatres
advancing in moral tone ? Mark you, I am not to
discuss whether the theatre is right or wrong. I am
not to make wholesale attack upon tragedians and
comedians. There are a hundred questions in regard
to the theatre that might be asked which I shall not
531
532 ARE THEATRES IMPROVING?
this morning answer, the most of them having been
answered at some other time in this pulpit. You say
that Henry Irving, and Edwin Booth, and John Mc-
Cullough, and Joseph Jefferson are great actors, and
are honorable men. I believe it. The question that
I am to discuss to-day is: Are the theatres advancing
in high moral tone? and I shall in no wise be diverted
from that discussion.
There are three or four reasons for answering this
question in the negative, and the first is the combined
and universal testimony of all the secular newspapers
of the land that are worth anything. There is not a
secular newspaper of any power in the United States
which has not within the past few years, both in edi-
torial and reportorial column, reprehended the styles
of play most frequent. It is contrary to the financial
interests of the secular newspaper severely to criticise
the playhouse, because from it comes the largest ad-
vertising patronage, larger than from any other
source, thousands and tens of thousands of dollars a
year. When, therefore, the secular newspapers of
the land, contrary to their financial interests, severely
criticise the playhouse for imbecile and impure spec-
tacular, their testimony is to me contlusive. On the
negative side of this question I roll up all the respect,
able printing-presses of America.
Another reason for answering this question in the
negative is the depraved advertisements on the bulle-
tin boards and on the board fences and in the show
windows, from ocean to ocean. I take it for granted
that those advertisements are honest, and that night
by night are depicted the scenes there advertised.
Are those the scenes to which parents take their sons
and daughters, and young men their affianced?
ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 533
Would you allow in your parlor such brazen inde-
cency enacted as is dramatized every night in some
of the theaters of America, unless their advertise-
ments be a libel? If the pictures be genuine, the
scenes are damnable.
That which is wrong in a parlor is wrong on a
stage. It ought to require just as much complete-
ness of apparel to be honorable in one place as to be
honorable in another. If you, fathers and mothers,
take your sons and daughters to see such Sodomite
lack of robe, and then, in after time, the plowshare
of libertinism and profligacy should go through your
own household, you will get what you deserve. It
seems as if, having obtained a surplus of sanctity
during the Lenten services, right after Easter, all
through the United States, the streets become a pic-
ture gallery which rival the museums of Pompeii,
which are kept under lock and key. Where are the
mayors of the cities, and the judges of the courts,
and the police, that they allow such things ? When
our cities are blotched with these depraved adver-
tisements is it not some reason why we should think
that the theaters of this country are not very rapidly
advancing toward millennial excellence?
Another reason for answering this question in the
negative is the large importation of bad morals from
foreign countries to the American stage. .France
sent one of her queens of the stage to this country,
her infamy, instead of a shame, a boast. Never a
more popular actress on the American stage, and
never one more dissolute. Thousands and tens of
thousands of professed Christian men and women
went and burned incense before that goddess of
debauchery. England, too, has sent her delectable
534 ARE THEATRES IMPROVING?
specimens of ineffable sweetness commended by
foreign princes, not as good as their mother. When
I take into consideration this large importation of
bad morals from foreign parts, I come to the conclu-
sion that the American theatres are not, as a general
thing, advancing in moral tone.
Another reason for answering this question in the
negative is the fact that the vast majority of the
plays of the day are degenerate. I will not name
many of them, because I might advertise that which
I condemn, and the mere mention of them would be
a perfidy. If I mention any they must be those that
are a little past, but which may come back again
when the American taste wants a change of carrion.
Take the plays of the last fifteen years, and I will
admit that one-tenth of them are unobjectionable,
but the nine-tenths of them are unfit to be looked at
by the families of America. Subtract from them the
libertinism and the domestic intrigue and the inu-
endo and the vulgarity and the marital scandalism,
and you would leave those plays powerless in the
dramatic market.
Put side by side the plays of the time of Macready
and the elder Booth and the modern plays, and you
will find there has been an awful decadence. I have
not seen those plays, but I have taken the testimony
of authentic witnesses, and I have seen the skillful
analyses by critics a score of critics among them
such men as Dr. Buckley, of New York, men who
have read scores of the plays and who can report in
regard to them I take the testimony of those who
witnessed the plays, and then I take the testimony of
the critics who like the theater and who do not like
it, I put them all together, and I find a moral
decadence.
ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 535
If you who took your families to see East Lynne
will now in your cooler moments read the manuscript
of that play read the printed play, and go through
the fetid and malodorous chapters in which dishonest
womanhood is chased from iniquity to iniquity, you
will be able to judge for yourself whether that is an
improved drama. You might as well go into the
grogshop of the village hotel and sit down among
the bevy of village loafers expecting to get any moral
elevation as to get any moral elevation from a play
like the " Ticket of Leave Man," full of villainous
pictures and low slang. The play entitled " A New
Way to Pay Old Debts " is a eulogy, a practical
eulogy on deception practised on the bad, and men
and women never come from seeing that play as
pure as when they went in. " She Stoops to Con-
quer" is as full of moral miasma as the Roman
Campagna is full of typhus fever on a summer night.
You may write Oliver Goldsmith above it and
beneath it and at the close of each act, but you can
not cover up the profane and the salacious. The
" School for Scandal " is rotten clear through with
lasciviousness, and if a man should come into your
house and take that play from under his arm and read
it to your family, all the bones that were left in his
body unbroken would not be worth mentioning.
But who could mention all the Don Csesars, and
the barmaids, and the Peg Woffingtons, and the
Courtleighs, and the Lady Gay Spankers, and the
poltroons, and the scapegraces, and the people minus
all excellency plus all abomination, who gather men,
women, boys, and girls by tens of thousands every
night in the lazaretto of the average American
theater. It is estimated that there are one thousand
536 ARE THEATRES IMPROVING?
boys in Brooklyn every night breathing that pesti-
lence. Hear it, ye whose sons stay out until 1 1
o'clock at night, and you do not know where they
are! Hear it, ye philanthropists who want this
generation better than the generations that have
gone by !
Once in a while a great tragedian will render
"King Lear," or "Merchant of Venice," or "Hamlet,"
before entranced audiences, but those plays as com-
pared with the imbecile and depraved plays on the
American stage to-day, are as the few drops of pure
blood to the bad blood in a man who has passed out
from yellow fever into Asiatic cholera, and is now
winding up with first-class small-pox. Now, I say
the majority of the plays of this country being bad
in their influence, I have a right to conclude that the
theaters of America, take them as an average, are
not coming to any very large moral improvement.
Now, I demand that as men and women who love
the best interests of society, that we band together
to snatch the drama from its debased surroundings.
1 demand that as philanthropists and Christians, we
rescue the drama.
The drama is not the theater. The theater is a
human institution. The drama is a literary expres-
sion of something which God implanted in nearly
all of our souls. People talk as though it were some-
thing built up entirely outside of us by the Con-
greves and the Sheridans and the Shakespeares of
literature. Oh, no. It is an echo of something
divinely put within us. You see it in your little
child three or four years of age, with the dolls and
the cradles and the carts. You see it ten years after
in the parlor charades. You see it after in the im-
ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 537
personations at the Academy of Music. You see it
on Thanksgiving Day, when we decorate the house
of God with the fruits and harvests of the earth, that
spectacular arousing our gratitude. We see it on
Easter morn, when we spell out on the walls of
the house of God in flowers the words : " He is
Risen," that spectacular arousing our emotion. Every
parent likes it, and demonstrates it when he goes to
see the school exhibition with its dialogues and its
droll costumes. It is evidenced in the torchlight
procession amid great political excitement, that torch-
light procession only a dramatization of the political
principles proclaimed.
Dithyrambic drama, romantic drama, sentimental
drama, all an echo of the human soul. Farquhar and
Congreve put in English literature only that which
was in the English heart. Thespis and Eschylus
dramatized only that which was in the Greek heart ;
Seneca and Plautus dramatized only that which was
in the Roman heart ; Racine and Alfieri dramatized
only that which was in the French and the Italian
heart ; Shakespeare dramatized only that which was
in the world's heart. But this divine principle is not
to be despoiled and dragged into the service of sin.
It is our business to rescue it, to lift it up, to bring it
back, to exalt it. Will you suppress it? You might as
well try to suppress its Creator. Just as we cultivate
the beautiful and the sublime in taste by bird-haunted
glen and roystering stream and cascade let down
over moss-covered rocks, and the day setting up its
banners of victory in' the east, and passing out the
gates of the west, setting everything on fire, the
Austerlitz aad the Waterloo of a July thunder-storm
blazing its batteries into a sultry afternoon, and the
538 ARE THEATRES IMPROVING?
round tear of the world wet on the cheek of the
night as by these things we try to culture a taste
for the sublime and the beautiful, so we are to
culture this dramatic taste by staccato passages in
literature, by antithesis and synthesis, by all tragic
passages in human life.
We are to take this dramatic element and we are
to harness it for God. Because it has been taken into
the service of sin is nothing against it. You might
as well denounce music because in Corinth and Her-
culaneum it was used to demonstrate and set forth
depravity and turpitude. Shall we not enthrone
music on the organ because music again and again
has been trampled under the foot of impious dance?
Because there are pollutions in art shall we turn
back upon Church's " Niagara," or Powers' " Greek
Slave," or Rubens' " Descent from the Cross," or
Michael Angelo's " Last Judgment "? Because these
things have been dragged into the service of sin is
the very reason that you and I should take the drama
out and harness it for God and the truth. You Sab-
bath-school teachers want more of the dramatic ele-
ment in your work, in your recital of the Bible scene,
in the anecdote that you tell, in the descriptive
gesture, in the impersonation of the character you
present you want more of the dramatic element. I
can tell in looking over an audience of Sabbath-school
children in which teacher the dramatic element is
dominant, and in which the didactic element is
dominant.
Oh, there are hundreds of people who are trying
to do good. Have less of the didactic element, and
have more of the dramatic. The tendency in our
time is to drone religion, to moan religion, to croak
ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 539
religion, to sepulcherize religion, when it ought to be
put in animated and spectacular manner.
I say to all those young men who are preparing for
the Gospel ministry, go to your libraries, and you
will find that those who bring most souls to God,
bring most into the kingdom of our Lord Jesus
Christ, are dramatic. John Knox, dramatic ; Thomas
Chalmers, dramatic: Robert M'Cheyne, dramatic;
Rowland Hill, dramatic ; Robert Hall, dramatic ;
Robert South, dramatic ; Fenelon, dramatic ; George
Whitefield, dramatic; Dr. John Mason, dramatic;
Bourdaloue, dramatic ; Dr. Knott, dramatic ; George
W. Bethune, dramatic. And you have a right to
cultivate that element in your nature. Oh, young
men preparing for Christian work, and though you
may meet with mighty rebuff and caricature if you
attempt it, and though you may be arraigned by
church courts who will try to put you down, the
Lord will start you, and He will keep you all through,
and great will be the reward for the assiduous and
the plucky.
Oh, my friends, we want in all our work to freshen
up. We want to freshen up, you in your sphere and
I in mine. Great discussions in religious newspapers
about why people do not come to church.
I will tell you. You cannot take the old hackneyed
phrases that have come snoring down through the
centuries and arrest the attention of the masses.
People in religious work do not want the sham flow-
ers bought in a millinery shop, but the japonicas wet
with the morning dew. They do not want the bones
of the extinct megatherium of the past, but the liv-
ing reindeer caught last August at the edge of
Schroon Lake. We need, all of us, to drive out of
54O ARE THEATRES IMPROVING?
our religious work the drowsy and the tedious and
the didatic, and bring in the brightness and the vivac-
ity and the holy sarcasm and the sanctified wit and
the epigrammatic power and the blood-red earnest-
ness, and we will get it through the sanctified drama.
But let me say to hundreds of young men, do not
let your fondness for the dramatic lead you into sin.
While God has given you this faculty, cultivate it,
and cultivate it in the right direction. Admire it
when it is used for God. Abhor it when it is used
for sin. We do not try to suppress it in you. Do
not misrepresent us. We would have it directed ;
we would have it educated ; we would have it har-
nessed for multiplicand usefulness. In nowise sup-
press it. Gather all your faculties, and this among
the others, and consecrate them to the Lord Jesus
Christ.
CHAPTER LIV.
ROMANCE OF CRIME.
In our time, you know as well as I, that there is a
disposition to put a halo around iniquity if it is com-
mitted in conspicuous place, and if it is wide resound-
ing and of large proportions. In this land to-day
there are hundreds of men hiding behind the com-
munion tables and in churches of Jesus Christ, who
have no business to be there as professors of religion.
They expect to be all right with God, although they
are all wrong with man. And while I want you to
understand that by the deeds of the law no flesh liv-
ing can be justified, and a mere honest life can not
enter us into Heaven, I want you as plainly to under-
stand that unless the life is right the heart is not
right. Grace in the heart, and grace in the life ; so
we must preach sometimes the faith of the Gospel,
and sometimes the morality of the Gospel.
It seems to me there has not been a time in the last
fifty years when this latter truth needed more thor-
oughly to be presented in the American churches. It
needs to be presented to-day.
A missionary in the islands of the Pacific preached
one Sabbath on honesty and dishonesty, and on MonI
day he found his yard full of all styles of goods which
the natives had brought. He could not understand
it until a native told him : "Our gods permit us to
purloin goods, but the God you told us about yester-
541
542 ROMANCE OF CRIME.
day, the God of Heaven and earth, it seems, is against
these practices, and so we brought all the goods that
do not belong to us, and they are in the yard, and we
want you to help us to distribute them among their
rightful owners." And if in all the pulpits of the
United States to-day rousing sermons could be
preached on honesty and the evils of dishonesty, and
the sermons were blessed of God, and arrangement
should Be made by which all the goods which have
been improperly taken from one man and appropri-
ated by another man should be put in the City Halls
of the country, there is not a City Hall in the United
States that would not be. crowded from cellar to
cupola. Faith of the Gospel that we must preach
and we do preach. Morality of the Gospel we must
just as certainly proclaim.
Now look abroad and see the fascinations that are
thrown around different styles of crime. The ques-
tion that every man and woman has asked has been,
Should crime be excused because it is on a large
scale? Is iniquity guilty and to be pursued of the
law in proportion as it is on a small scale ? Shall we
have New York Tombs for the man who steals an
overcoat from a hat-rack, and all Canada for a man
to range in if he have robbed the public of three
millions?
Look upon all the fascinations thrown around fraud
in this country. You know that for years men have
been made heroes of and pictorialized and in various
styles presented to the public, as though sometimes
they were worthy of admiration if they have scattered
the funds of banks, or swallowed great estates that
did not belong to them. Our young men have been
dazed with this quick accumulation. They have
ROMANCE OF CRIME. 543
said, " That's the way to do it. What's the use of our
plodding on with small wages or insignificant salary,
when we may go into business life, and with some
stratagem achieve such a fortune as that man has
achieved ? " A different measure has been applied to
the crime of Wall Street from that which has been
applied to the spoils which the man carries up Rat
Alley.
So a peddler came down from Vermont some
years ago, took hold of the money-market of New
York, flaunted his abominations in the sight of all the
people, defied public morals every day of his life.
Young men looked up and said, " He was a peddler
in one decade, and in the next decade he is one of the
monarchs of the stock market. That's the way to
doit."
There has been an irresistible impression going
abroad among young men that the poorest way to
get money is to earn it. The young man of flaunting
cravat says to the young man of humble apparel,
"What, you only get eighteen hundred dollars a year?
Why, that wouldn't keep me in pin-money. I spend
five thousand dollars a year." " Where do you get
it?" asks the plain young man. "Oh, stocks, enter-
prises, all that sort of thing, you know." The plain
young man has hardly enough money to pay his
board, has to wear clothes after they are out of fash-
ion, and deny himself all luxuries. After a while he
gets tired of his plodding, and he goes to the man
who has achieved suddenly large estate, and he says,
'Just show me how it is done." And he is shown.
He soon learns how, and although he is almost all the
time idle now, and has resigned his position in the
bank, or the factory, or the store, he has more money
544 ROMANCE OF CRIME.
than he ever had, trades off his old silver watch fora
gold one with a flashing" chain, sets his hat a little
further over on the side of his head than he ever did,
smokes better cigars, and more of them. He has his
hand in ! Now, if he can escape the penitentiary for
three or four years, he will get into political circles,
and he will get political jobs, and will have some-
thing to do with harbors, and pavements, and docks.
Now he has got so far along he is safe for perdition.
It is quite a long road sometimes for a man to
travel before he gets into the romance of crime.
Those are caught who are only in the prosaic stage
of it. If the sheriffs and constables would only leave
them alone a little while, they would steal as well as
anybody. The) 7 might not be able to steal a whole
railroad, but they could master a load of pig-iron.
Now I always thank God when I find an estate like
that go to smash. It is plague-struck, and it blasts
the nation. I thank God when it goes into such a
wreck it can never be gathered up again. I want
it to become so loathsome and such an insuf-
ferable stench that honest young men will take warn
ing. If God should put into money or its represen-
tative the capacity to go to its lawful owner, there
would not be a bank or a safety deposit in the United
States whose walls would not be blown out, and
mortgages would rip, and parchments would rend,
and gold would shoot, and beggars would get on
horseback, and stock gamblers would go to the
almshouse.
How many dishonesties in the making out pf in-
voices, and in the plastering of false labels, and 'in the
filching of customers of rival houses, and in the
making and breaking of contracts. Young men are
ROMANCE OF CRIME. 545
indoctrinated in the idea that the sooner they get
money the better, and the getting of it on a larger
scale only proves to them their greater ingenuity.
There is a glitter thrown around about all these
things. Young men have got to find out that God
looks upon sin in a very different light.
A young man stood behind the counter in New
York selling silks to a lady, and he said before the
sale was consummated : " I see there is a flaw in that
silk." The lady recognized it, and the sale was not
consummated. The head man of the firm saw the
interview, and he wrote home to the father of the
young man living in the country, saying : " Dear sir,
come and take your boy ; he will never make a mer-
chant." The father came down from the country
home in great consternation, as any father would,
wondering wh'at his boy had done. He came to the
store, and the merchant said to him : " Why, your
son pointed out a flaw in some silk the other day,
and spoiled the sale, and we will never have that lady,
probably, again for a customer, and your son never
will make a merchant." "Is that all?" said the
father. " I am proud of him. I wouldn't for the
world have him another day under your influence.
John, get your hat and come ; let us start." There
are hundreds of young men under the pressure, under
the fascinations thrown around about commercial
iniquity. Thousands of young men have gone down
under the pressure ; other thousands have maintained
their integrity. God help you ! Let me say to you,
my young friend, that you can be a great deal
happier in poverty than you ever can be happy in
a prosperity which comes from ill-gotten gains.
" Oh," you say, " I might lose my place. It is easy
35
ROMANCE OF CRIME.
for you to stand there and talk, but it is no easy
thing to get a place when you have lost it. Besides
that, I have a widowed mother depending upon my
exertions, and you must not be too reckless in giving
advice to me." Ah, my young friend, it is always
safe to be right, but it is never safe to be wrong.
You go home and tell your mother the pressure
under which you are in that store, and I know what
she will say to you if she is worthy of you. She will
say : " My son, come out from there ; Christ has
taken care of us all these years, and He will take
care of us now ; come out of that."
And remember that the man who gets his gain by
iniquity will soon lose it all. One moment after his
departure from life he will not own an opera house,
he will not own a certificate of stock, he will not own
one dollar of government securities, and the poorest
boy that stands on the street with a penny in his
pocket, looking at the funeral procession of the dead
cheat as it goes by, will have more money than that
man who one week ago boasted that he controlled
the money market.
Oh, there is such a fearful fascination in this day
about the use of trust funds.
It has got to be popular to take the funds of others
and speculate with them. There may be many in
this house who are practicing that iniquity. Almost
every man in the course of his life has the property
of others put in his care. He has administered, per-
haps, for a dead friend ; he is an attorney, and money
passes from debtor to creditor through his hands ; or
he is in a commercial establishment, and gets a salary
lor the discharge of his responsibilities; or he is
treasurer of a philanthropic institution, and money
ROMANCE OF CRIME. 547
for the suffering goes through his hands ; or he has
some office in city, or State, or nation, and taxes, and
subsidies, and supplies, and salaries are in his hands.
Now, that is a trust. That is as sacred a trust as
God can give a man. It is the concentration of con-
fidence. Now, when -that man takes that money
the money of others and goes to speculating with it
for his own purposes, he is guilty of theft, falsehood,
and perjury, and in the most intense sense of the
word is a miscreant.
There are families to-day widows and orphans
with nothing between them and starvation but a
sewing machine, or kept out of the vortex by the
thread of a needle red with the blood of their hearts,
who were by father or husband left a competency.
You read the story in the newspaper of those who
have lost by a bank defalcation, and it is only one
line, the name of a woman you never heard of, and
just one or two figures telling the amount of stock
she had, the number of shares. It is a very short
line in a newspaper, but it is a line of agony long as
time ; it is a story long as eternity.
Now, do not come under the fascination which in-
duces men to employ trust-funds for purposes of their
own speculation. Cultivate old-fashioned honesty.
Remember the example of Wellington, who, when he
was leading the British army over the French fron-
tier, and his army was very hungry, and there was
plenty of plunder on the French frontier, and some
of the men wanted to take it, he said : " Soldiers, do
not touch that ; God will take care of us ; He will
take care of the English army ; plenty of plunder, I
know, all around, but do not take it." He told the
story afterward himself, how that the French people
54$ ROMANCE OF CRIME.
brought to him their valuables to keep he, supposed
to be their enemy brought him their valuables to
keep. And then he said, at a time when the credi-
tors of the army were calling for money and for pay
all the time, and they had so much all around about
he did not feel it right for him to take it, or for the
army to take it. An author beautifully wrote in re-
gard to it : " Nothing can be grander or more noble
and original than this admission. This old soldier,
after thirty years of service, this iron man and vic-
torious general, established in an enemy's country, at
the head of an immense army, is afraid of his credi-
tors. This is a kind of fear that has seldom troubled
conquerors and victors, and I doubt if the annals of
war present anything comparable to this sublime
simplicity."
Oh, that God would scatter these fascinations
about fraud, and let us all understand that if I steal
from you one dollar I am a thief, and if I steal from
you $500,000 I am five hundred thousand times more
of a thief !
So there has been a great deal of fascination
thrown around libertinism.
Society is very severe upon the impurity that
lurks around the alleys and low haunts of the town.
The law pursues it. smites it, incarcerates it, tries to
destroy it. You know as well as I that society
becomes lenient in proportion as impurity becomes
affluent or is in elevated circles, and finally society
is silent, or disposed to palliate. Where is the judge,
the jury, the police officer that dare arraign the
wealthy libertine? He walks the streets, he rides
the parks, he flaunts his iniquity in the eyes of the
pure. The hag of uncleanness looks out of the
ROMANCE OF CRIME. 549
tapestried window. Where is the law that dares
take the brazen wretches and put their faces in an
iron frame of a State prison window?
Sometimes it seems to me as if society were going-
back to the state of morals of Herculaneum, when it
sculptured its vileness on pillars and temple wall, and
nothing but the lava of a burning mountain could
hide the immensity of crime. At what time God will
rise up, and extirpate these evils upon society I know-
not, nor whether He will do it by fire, or hurricane,
or earthquake ; but a Holy God I do not think wilt
stand it much longer. I believe the thunderbolts are
hissing hot, and that when God comes to chastise the
community for these sins, against which He has
uttered Himself more bitterly than against any other,
the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah will be tolerable as
compared with the fate of our modern society, which
knew better, but did worse.
We want about ten thousand pulpits in America to
thunder: "All adulterers and whoremongers shall
have their place in the hell that burneth with fire and
brimstone, which is the second death." It is hell on
earth, and hell forever. We have got to understand
in Brooklyn and New York, and all parts of this
land, that iniquity on Madison Square, or Broo'klyn
Heights, or Beacon Hill, is as damnable in the sight
of God as it is in the slums. Whether it has canopied
couch of eider-down, or dwells amid the putridity of
a low tenement-house, God is after it in His ven-
geance. Yet the pulpit of the Christian Church has
been so cowed down on this subject that it hardly
dares speak, and men are almost apologetic when
they read the Ten Commandments.
Then look at the fascinations thrown around assas-
sination.
55 ROMANCE OF CRIME.
There are in all communities men who have taken
the lives of others unlawfully, not as executioners of
the law and they go scot free. You say they had
their provocations. God gave life, and He alone
has a right to take it, and He may take it by visita-
tion of Providence, or by an executioner of the law,
who is His messenger. But when a man assumes
that divine prerogative he touches the lowest depth
of crime.
Society is alert for certain kinds of murder. If a
citizen going along the road at night is waylaid and
slain by a robber, we all want the villain arrested and
executed. For all garroting, for all beating out of
life by a club, or an axe, or a slungshot, the law has
quick spring and heavy stroke ; but you know that
when men get affluent and high position, and they
avenge their wrongs by taking the lives of others,
great sympathy is excited ; lawyers plead, ladies
weep, judge halts, jury is bribed, and the man goes
free. If the verdict happen to be against him, a new
trial is called on through some technicality, and they
adjourn for witnesses that never come, and adjourn
and adjourn until the community has forgotten all
about it, and then the prison door opens, and the
murderer goes free.
Now, if capital punishment can be right, I say let
the life of the polished murderer go with the life of
the vulgar assassin. Let us have no partiality of
hemp, no aristocracy of gallows. Do not let us float
back to barbarism, when every man was his own
judge, jury and executioner, and that man had the
supremacy who had the sharpest knife, and the
strongest arm, and the quickest step, and the steal-
thiest revenge. He who wilfully and in hatred takes
ROMANCE OF CRIME. 551
the life of another is a murderer, I care not what the
provocation or the circumstances. He may be
cleared by an enthusiastic court-room, he may be
sent by the Government of the United States as
Minister to Spain, as on one occasion, or modern
literature may polish the crime until it looks like
heroism ; but in the sight of God murder is murder,
and the judgment day will so reveal it.
Now, do not be fascinated by the glamour thrown
over crime of whatever sort. Because others have
habits that seem brilliant, but yet at the same time
are wicked, do not choose such faults. Stand in-
dependent of all such influences. Put your confi-
dence in the Lord God. He will be your strength.
" Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord."
Cultivate old-fashioned honesty.
CHAPTER LV.
ABUSE OF TRUST-FUNDS.
The columns of our custom-houses and of the State
and National capitol swathed in black, and all the
flags at half mast for the dead treasurer.
At sixty-six years of age he dies, without a spot
upon his reputation, although much of his life had
been spent amid temptations which have flung a vast
multitude flat into the dust. Amid all the allure-
ments of the legal profession, and amid the oppor-
tunity of bribe-taking on the judicial bench, and for
three years holding the purse of the nation, yet not a
half penny sticking to his hand. And in his dying
hour he asks his attendant to take from the left pocket
of his coat a check and get it cashed immediately, so
that he meets the expenses of his own obsequies with
his own hand ; and after paying his way all through
life by hard work, pays his own admission fee at the
door of the sepulchre. All his accounts square with
the United States Government, square with the world,
and, I hope, square with God. What a glorious
background to the picture of present epidemic of
swindle amid trust-funds !
There has not been a time in my memory, or in
yours, when there has been such utter black irre-
sponsibility demonstrated among those who have in
charge the finances of others. This unroofing of
banks, this disappearance of administrators with the
552
ABUSE OF TRUST-FUNDS. 553
funds of large estates, this disorder in postoffice
accounts, this deficit amid United States officials, have
made a pestilence of crime which solemnizes every
thinking man and woman, and leads every philanthro-
pist and Christian to ask, "Can this plague be stayed?"
There is abroad this hour a simoon, a typhoon, a
sirocco. Things in this regard are worse and worse.
I have sometimes asked myself if it would not be bet-
ter for men making wills to bequeath their money
directly to the executors and the officers of courts,
and then appoint the widows and orphans as a com-
mittee to see that the officers and trustees of funds
get all that does not belong to them !
There are men you know them and I know them
who are sailing yachts, and driving fast horses, and
holding membership in expensive clubs, and owning
country seats, who would not be worth a dollar if
they returned to others their just rights. A crash
comes, and there is a reverse, and the man fails, and
he retires from the world, and seems about to go into
monastic life ; but in two or three years he blossoms
out again, having compromised with his creditors
that is, paid them nothing but regrets and the only
difference between the second chapter of prosperity
and the first chapter of prosperity is, that in his pic-
ture gallery now he has Raphaels and Murillos in-
stead of Kensetts, and his horses go the mile twenty
seconds sooner than their predecessors, and instead
of one country seat he has three. 1 have watched
and I have noticed that nine out of ten of the failures
in what is called high life leave men with more
money after the failure than they had before, and
that their failure is only a stratagem to get rid of the
payment of honest debts, and to put the world off the
554 ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS.
the track while they introduce a more stupendous
swindle.
It is, mv Christian friends, most appalling that,
these things are possible. I blame, first of all, direc-
tors of banks and boards having in charge great
financial interests. It ought not be possible for the
president of a bank, or the cashier, or any officer to
carry on a swindle in an institution year after year
and year after year without detection. If a swindle
go on one year, two years, three years, four years in
a moneyed institution, the directors either have part
in the infamy and pocket their share of the theft, or
they are guilty of a negligence for which God will
hold them as responsible as He holds the acknowl-
edged defrauders. What right have our large busi-
ness men to allow their names to be advertised as
directors, so that the unsophisticated put their money
in the institution, or buy script thereof, when the
directors are doing nothing for the safety of that in-
stitution? It is a deception appalling and monstrous,
and in the name of God and the rights of men I
denounce it.
Many, with small surplus and with money not
needed for immediate use, but which will, after a
while, be indispensable, have no friends capable of
advising them, and, in consequence, they take the
moral character of men advertised as directors. And
there are people who say, "I don't know anything
about these things, but there is a man who is in that
board of directors, and there is a man, and there is a
man, and I know they are all good men, and pros-
perous business men, and they would not have any-
thing to do with that which is dishonorable." When
the bank goes over, then the small earnings and the for-
ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 555
tunes of widows and orphans and the helplessly aged
go with the bank, and the directors stand with idiotic
stare, and when the inquiry is made by the frenzied
depositors and stockholders, and when outraged com-
munity arraigns them, the directors say : " Oh, I
thought it was all right; I didn't know there was
anything wrong." They ought to have known.
They stood in a position where they deluded the
public with the idea that they did know, and that they
were carefully observant of what was going on. Ad-
vertised as directors, they did not direct. They had
all the account books open before them, and they
could have audited the accounts for themselves, or
they could have taken in some expert, and had the
whole thing understood. There are, it seems, many
business men who have a pride in being directors in
a great many institutions, and they know nothing
about some of those institutions, except whether they
get their dividends or not, and their name is used as
a decoy duck to get other people to come near enough
to be made game of.
It is needed that five thousand directors of banks,
and of insurance companies, and of moneyed institu-
tions to-morrow resign or attend to their business.
Just as long as fraud is so easy in business life there
will be plenty of it. When you arrest the president
of a bank and the cashier of a bank for embezzlement,
you want plenty of sheriffs out that day to arrest all
the directors. They are all guilty either of neglect
or of complicity, if an embezzlement be going on
three or four years.
" Oh," says some one, "you had better preach the
Gospel and let business men go." My reply is, if
your Gospel does not inspire common honesty in
Feise Exchanges Books
and Musical Instruments
W. 235 Riverside A Ye,
5 56 ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS.
dealings among men, the sooner you close up that
Gospel and throw it into the depths of the Atlantic
the better.
An orthodox swindler is worse than a heterodox
swindler, and your recitation of creeds, and cathe-
chisms, and a sip out of every communion chalice
that ever glittered in Christendom, will not save your
soul unless your business life corresponds with your
Christian profession. The purest institution on earth
is the Church, and there are more men and women
of elevated character in the Christian Church than in
any fifty institutions the world has ever seen ; but I
declare what everybody knows when I say that some
of the greatest scoundrels in the world have belonged
to the Church. That time must cease when men
practicing dishonesty all the week can sit in church
and get fat on sermons about heaven, when the pulpit
ought to preach that which would either bring them
to repentance for their sin, or thunder them out of
the Christian communion, where their presence is a
sacrilege and an infamy.
We must especially deplore recent events in that
they damage the banking institution, which is the
great convenience of the centuries, indispensable to
commerce, and the advance of nations. With one
hand the bank blesses the lender, and with the other
the borrower. It was born of the necessities of the
ages, and is venerable with the marks of thousands
of years. More than two hundred years before
Christ the Bank of Ilium existed, and paid its de-
positors ten per cent. The Bible in more than one
place regulates the rate of interest. The Bank of
Venice was established in 1171, and had such high
credit that its bills were at a premium above coins
ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 557
which were frequently clipped. The Bank of Venice
founded in 1345. The Bank of Barcelona founded
in 1401. The Bank of Amsterdam founded in 1609.
The Bank of Hamburg founded in 1619, its circu-
lation based on great silver bars in the vaults. Bank
of England started by William Patterson in 1694,
and to this day managing the immense debt of Eng-
land. The Bank of Scotland founded in 1695. The
Bank of Ireland founded in 1783. The Bank of North
America planned by Robert Morris in 1781, without
whose financial help all the bravery of our grand-
fathers would not have achieved American inde-
pendence. And now we have banks by the thousand.
On their broad shoulders are the interest of private
individual and great corporations. In them are the
great arteries through which runs the current of a
nation's life They have been the rescuers of thou-
sands of financiers in day of business exigency. They
stand for accommodation, for facility, for individual,
State, and national relief, and at their head and in
their management there is as much integrity and
moral worth as in any class of men, and probably
more. How nefarious, then, the behavior of those
who bring disrepute upon this venerable, benign, and
God-honored institution.
Recent events are very much to be deplored,
because they seem to fly into the face of that divine
goodness which seems determined to bless this land.
Here we are in the fourth great national harvest, the
last greater than all. The sheaves have hardly got
into the garner. The wheat gamblers get hold the
wheat, the corn gamblers get hold the corn. The
great ocean tide of God's mercy put back by these
dykes of dishonest resistance. When God provides
558 ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS.
enough food and clothing to feed and apparel this
nation like princes, dishonest men scrabble for more
than their share, and run all hazards and keep every-
thing rocking with uncertainty, and good people say,
" What next ?"
Every week has a new revelation of business
crime. It is an epidemic. And how many more
presidents of banks and cashiers of banks are gam-
bling with other people's money, and how many bank
directors are sitting in imbecile silence, letting the
perfidy go on, a great and patient God only knows.
My opinion is, that we have nearly touched bottom.
I think that the last summer was the most valuable
summer we have had in ten years. The wind has
been pricked out of the bubble of American specu-
lation. People who thought that the Judgment Day
was at least five thousand years off, found it in the
summer of 1884. This nation has been taught, as
never before, people had better keep their hands out
of other people's pockets. Great businesses founded
on borrowed capital have been obliterated, and men
who had nothing, lost all they had.
If you want to take your own money, and put it
into kites to fly on the commons, or into pipes to
blow soap-bubbles, you may do so without wronging
society especially, unless your helpless children are
tumbled into the poorhouse to be taken care of by
the public, and they probably will ; but you have no
right to take the property of others, and turn it into
kites to fly, and soap-bubbles to blow.
There is one word that has dragged down more
people into bankruptcy, and State prison, and perdi-
tion than any other word in the commercial world,
and that is the word "borrow." The word is re-
ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 559
sponsible for nearly all the defalcations and embez-
zlements, and financial consternations of the last
four months, and of the last forty. When an exec-
utor takes money out of a large estate to speculate
with it, he does not purloin it ; he only "borrows."
When a banker makes an overdraft that he may go
into speculation, he does not commit a theft ; he
only "borrows." When some man of large financial
institution, through flaming advertisement in some
religious paper, or gilt-edged certificate, gets country
people to put their money into some enterprise for
carrying on an undeveloped nothing, it is not fraud ;
he only "borrows." When a young man having easy
access to a money drawer, or a confidential clerk
having easy access to the books, takes a certain
amount of money, and with it makes a Wall Street
excursion, he is going to put it back, he is going to
put it all back, he is going to put it back pretty soon ;
he only "borrows." What is needed is some one
with giant limb to stand at the curbstone at the foot
of Trinity Church, and at the head of Wall Street,
and when that word "borrow" comes bounding along,
kick it clear to Wall Street Ferry ; and if it strike the
deck of the ferry-boat and bound clear over to
Brooklyn Heights and Brooklyn Hill, all the better
for the City of Churches. Why, when you are going
to do wrong, pronounce so long a word as the word
borrow, a word of six letters, when you can get a
short word, a word more accurate, a word more de-
scriptive of the reality, a word of five letters the
word steal.
Ah ! my friends, it is high time that people learn
that it is death to borrow for speculative purposes.
We all sometimes borrow. We borrow legitimately,
560 ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS.
and we borrow with the divine favor. Christ, in His
Sermon on the Mount, enjoined, " From him that
would borrow of thee, turn not thou away." A
young man borrows money to get his education ; all
right. A man purchases property and cannot pay all
down in cash, and rightly borrows on mortgage.
There are crises in business when it would be wrong
not to borrow. Never speculate on borrowed money
not a dollar, not a cent, not a farthing. Young
men, young men, I warn you by your worldly pros-
pects and the value of your immortal souls, do not do
it. There are breakers distinguished for their ship-
wrecks the Han ways, the Needles, the Caskets, the
Douvers, the Anderlos, the Skerries and many a
craft has gone to pieces on those rocks ; but I have to
tell you that all the Hanways, and the Needles, and
the Caskets, and the Skerries are as nothing compared
with the long line of breakers which bound the ocean
of commercial life north, south, east, and west with
the white foam of their despair, and the dirge of their
damnation.
If I had only a worldly weapon to use on this sub-
ject I would give you the fact fresh from the highest
authority that ninety per cent, of those who go into
speculation in Wall Street lose all ; but I have a bet-
ter warning than a worldly warning. From the
place where men have perished body, mind, and
soul stand off, stand off! Abstract pulpit discus-
sion must step aside on this question. Faith and
repentance are absolutely necessary, but faith and
repentance are no more doctrines of the Bible than
commercial integrity. Render to all their dues.
Owe no man anything. And while I mean to preach
faith and repentance, more and more to preach them,
ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 561
I do not mean to spend any time in chasing the
Hittites, and Jebusites, and Gurgushites of Bible
times, when there are so many evils right around us,
destroying men and women for time and for eternity.
The greatest evangelistic preacher the world ever
saw, a man who died for his evangelism peerless
Paul wrote to the Romans : " Provide things
honest in the sight of all men ;" wrote to the Co-
rinthians, " Do that which is honest ;" wrote to the
Philippians, " Whatsoever things are honest ;" wrote
to the Hebrews, " Willing in all things to live
honestly." The Bible says that faith without works
is dead, which being liberally translated, means that
if your business life does not correspond with your
profession, your religion is a humbug.
Here is something that needs to be sounded into
the ears of all the young men of America, and iter-
ated, and reiterated ; if this country is ever to be
delivered from its calamities, and commercial pros-
perity is to be established and perpetuated, live
within your means.
I have the highest commercial authority for saying
that when the trouble broke out in Wall Street last
May, there were two hundred and twenty-five million
dollars in suspense which had already been spent.
Spend no more than you make. And let us adjust
all our business, and our homes, by the principles of
the Christian religion.
Our religion ought to mean just as much on Sat-
urday and Monday, as on the day between, and not
be a mere periphrasis of sanctity. Our religion ought
to first clean our hearts, and then it ought to clean
our lives. Religion is not, as some seem to think, a
sort of church delectation, a kind of confectionery, a
36
562 ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS.
sort of spiritual caramel, or holy gum drop, or sanc-
tified peppermint, or theological anaesthetic. It is an
omnipotent principle, all-controlling, all-conquering.
You may get along with something less than that,
and you may deceive yourself with it; but you can-
not deceive God, and you cannot deceive the world.
The keen business man will put on his spectacles, and
he will look clear through to the back of your head,
and see whether your religion is a fiction, or a fact.
And you cannot hide your samples of sugar, or rice,
or tea, or coffee, if they are false ; you cannot hide
them under the cloth of a communion table. All
your prayers go for nothing, so long as you misrep-
resent your banking institution, and in the amount of
the resources you put down more specie, and more
fractional currency, and more clearing-house certifi-
cates, and more legal-tender notes, and more loans,
and more discounts, than there really are, and when
you give an account of your liabilities you do not
mention all the unpaid dividends, and the United
States bank-notes outstanding, and the individual de-
posits, and the obligations to other banks and bankers.
An authority more scrutinizing than that of any
bank-examiner will go through, and through, and
through your business.
CHAPTER LVI.
WALL STREET DEFALCATION.
Across the island of New York in 1685 a wall of
earth and stone was built a wall cannon mounted to
keep back the savages. Along this wall ran a street,
and as the street kept the line of the wall, it was ap-
propriately called Wall Street. Short, narrow, un-
architectural, and yet unique in its history, and,
excepting- Lombard Street, London, the mightiest
street in the world.
There the United States government was born.
There Washington held his levees. There Mrs.
Adams and Mrs. Arnold and Mrs. Caldwell and Mrs.
Knox and other brilliant women of the Revolution
displayed their charms. There preached Wither-
spoon, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield.
There Dr. John Mason chided Alexander Hamilton
for writing the Constitution without any God in it.
There negroes were sold in the slave-mart. The
criminals were harnessed to wheelbarrows and com-
pelled to draw burdens. There they were lashed
through the street behind carts to which they were
fastened.
That street has seen the coronation and the burial
of ten thousand fortunes. The abode of just the op-
posites unswerving integrity and tip-top scoundrel-
ism, Heaven-descended charity and bloodless Shy-
lockism. The history of Wall street would be the
563
564 WALL STREET DEFALCATION.
history of the commerce of America. There is no
more absorbing question in America to-day than this :
What caused " Black Wednesday ?" What caused
" Black Friday ?" What has caused all the black
days of financial disaster with which Wall street has
been connected for the last forty years? Some say it
is the credit system. Something back of that. Some
say it is the spirit of gambling ever and anon be-
coming epidemic. Something back of that. Some
say it is the sudden shrinkage in the value of securi-
ties, which even the most honest and intelligent men
could not have foreseen. Something back of that. I
will give you the primal cause of all these disturbances.
It is the extravagance of modern society which impels
a man to spend more money than he can honestly
make, and he goes into Wall street in order to get
the means for inordinate display ; and sometimes the
man is to blame, and sometimes his wife, and oftener
both. Five thousand dollars income, ten thousand
dollars, twenty thousand dollars income, are not
enough for a man to keep up the style of living he
proposes, and therefore he steers his bark toward the
maelstrom. Other men have suddenly snatched up
fifty or a hundred thousand dollars why not he?
The present income of the man not being large
enough, he must move earth and hell to catch up with
his neighbors. Others have a country seat so must
he. Others have an extravagant caterer so must he.
Others have a palatial residence so must he.
Extravagance is the cause of all the defalcations of
the last forty years, and if you will go through the
history of all the great panics and the great financial
disturbances, no sooner have you found the story
than right back of it you find the story of how many
WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 565
horses the man had, how many carriages the man
had, how many residences in the country the man
had, how many banquets the man gave, always, and
not one exception, for the last forty years, either
directly or indirectly, extravagance the cause.
Now, for the elegances and the refinements and
the decorations of life I cast my vote. While I
am considering this subject a basket of flowers is
handed in flowefs paradisaical in their beauty.
White calla with a green background of begonia.
A cluster of heliotropes nestling in some geraniums.
Sepal and perianth bearing on them the marks of
God's finger. When I see that basket of flowers
they persuade me that God loves beauty and adorn-
ment and decoration. God might have made the
earth so as to supply the gross demands of sense, but
left it without adornment or attraction. Instead of
the variegated colors of the seasons, the earth might
have worn an unchanging dull brown. The tree
might have put forth its fruit without the prophecy
of leaf or blossom. Niagara might have come down
in gradual descent without thunder-winged spray.
Look out of your window any morning after there
has been a dew, and see whether God loves jewels.
Put a crystal of snow under a microscope, and see
what God thinks of architecture. God commanded
the priest of olden time to have his robe adorned
with a wreath of gold, and the hem of his garment
to be embroidered in pomegranates. The earth
sleeps, and God blankets it with the brilliants of the
night sky. The world wakes, and God washes it
from the burnished laver of the sunrise. So I have
not much patience with a man who talks as though
decoration and adornment and the elegances of life
566 WALL STREET DEFALCATION.
are a sin when they are divinely recommended. But
there is a line to be drawn between adornment and
decorations that we can afford and those we cannot
afford, and when a man crosses that line he becomes
culpable. I cannot tell you what is extravagant for
you. You cannot tell me what is extravagant for
me. What is right for a queen may be squandering
for a duchess. What may be economical for you, a
man with a larger income, will be 'wicked waste for
me, with smaller income. There is no iron rule on
this subject. Every man before God and on his
knees must judge what is extravagance, and when a
man goes into expenditures beyond his means he is
extravagant. When a man buys anything he cannot
pay for, he is extravagant.
There are tamilies in all our cities who can hardly
pay their rent, and who owe all the merchants in the
neighborhood, and yet have an apparel unfit for
their circumstances, and are all the time sailing so
near shore that business misfortune or an attack of
sickness prepares them for pauperism. You know
very well there are thousands of families in our great
cities who stay HI neighborhoods until they have
exhausted all their capacity to get trusted. They
stay in the neighborhoods until the druggist will let
them have no more medicines, and the butcher will
give them no more meat, and the bakers will give
them no more bread, and the grocery-men will give
them no more sugar. Then they find the region
unhealthy, and they hire a carman, whom they never
pay, to take them to some new quarters, where the
merchants, the druggists, the butchers, the bakers,
and the grocery men come and give Jthem the best
rounds of beef and the best sugars and the best mer-
WALL STKKF.T DEFALCATION. 567
chandise of all sorts, until they find out that the only
compensation they are going to get is the acquaint-
ance of the patrons. There are at least five thou-
sand such thieves as that in Brooklyn. You see I
call them by the right name, for if a man buys any-
thing that he does not mean to pay for, he is a thief.
Of course, sometimes men are flung of misfortunes
and they cannot, pay. I know men who are just as
honest in having failed as other men are honest in
succeeding. I suppose there is hardly a man who
has gone through life but there have been some times
when he has been so flung of misfortune he could
not meet his obligations. But all that I put aside.
There are a multitude of people who buy that which
they never intend to pay for, for which there is no
reasonable expectation they will ever be able to pav.
Now, why not save the merchant as much as you
can ? Why not go some day to his store, and when
nobody is looking, just shoulder the ham or the spare-
rib, and in modest silence steal away ? That would
be less criminal, because in the other way you take
not only the man's goods, but you take the time of
the merchant, and the time of his accountant, and
you take the time of the messenger who brought you
the goods. Now, if you must steal, steal in a way
to do as little damage to the trader as possible.
John Randolph arose in the American Senate when
a question of national finance was being discussed,
and stretching himself to his full height, in a shrill
voice he cried out : " Mr. Chairman, I have discov-
ered the philosopher's stone, which turns everything
into gold : Pay as you go ! " Society has got to be
reconstructed on this subject, or these times of defal-
cation will never end. You have no right to ride in
568 WALL STREET DEFALCATION.
a carriage for which you are hopelessly in debt to
the wheelwright who furnished the landau, and to
the horse dealer who provided the blooded span, and
to the harness-maker who caparisoned the gay steeds,
and to the livery-man who has provided the stabling,
and to the driver who with resetted hat sits on the
coach-box.
Oh, I am so glad it is not the absolute necessities
of life which send people out into dishonesties and
fling them into misfortunes. It is almost always
the superfluities. God has promised us a house, but
not a palace; raiment, but not chinchilla; food, but
not canvas-back duck. I am yet to see one of these
great panics, or one of these Wall Street defalcations,
which is not connected in some way with extrav-
agance.
Extravagance accounts for the disturbance of na-
tional finances. Aggregations are made up of units,
and when one-half of the people of this country owe
the other half, how can we expect financial pros-
perity ? Every four years we get a great spasm of
virtue, and when a President is to be elected we say,
" Now, down with the old administration, and let us
have another Secretary of the Treasury, and let us
have a new deal of things, and then we will get over
all our perturbation." 1 do not care who is President,
or who is Secretary of the Treasury, or how much
breadstuffs go out of the country, or how much
gold is imported, until we learn to pay our debts, and
it becomes a general theory in this country that men
must buy no more than they can pay for until that
time comes there will be no permanent prosperity.
Look at the pernicious extravagance : Take the one
fact that New York every year pays two million dol-
WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 569
Jars for theatrical amusements. While once in a
while a Henry Irving or an Edwin Booth or a Joseph
Jefferson thrills a great audience with tragedy, you
know as well as I do that the vast majority of the
theaters of New York are as debased, as debased they
can be, as unclean, as unclean they can be, and as
damnable, as damnable they can be. Two million
dollars the vast majority of those dollars going up
in a wrong direction.
Ninety-five millions paid in this country for cigars
and tobacco a year. One thousand five hundred mil-
lion dollars paid for strong drink in one year in this
country. With such extravagance, pernicious ex-
travagance, can there be any permanent prosperity ?
Business men, cool-headed business men, is such a
thing a possibility? One thousand five hundred mil-
lion dollars for rum. These extravagances also ac-
count, as I have already hinted, for the positive
crimes, the forgeries, the absconding of the officers
of the banks. The store on Broadway and the office
on Wall Street swamped by the residence on Madi-
son Square. The father's, the husband's craft cap-
sized by carrying too much domestic sail. That is
what springs the leak in the merchant's money till.
That is what cracks the pistols of the suicides. That
is what tears down Marine Bank. That is what
stops insurance companies. That is what halts this
nation again and again in its triumphal march of
prosperity. In the presence of this audience to-day,
and the American people so far as I can get their
attention, I want to arraign this monster curse of ex-
travagance, and I want you to pelt it with your scorn
and hurl at it yonr anathema.
Look at the one fact that it is a matter of solid sta-
5/0 WALL STREET DEFALCATION.
tistics, that in this country, in the cities of Ne\v York
and Brooklyn I will narrow it down in the cities
of New York and Brooklyn, it is estimated that there
are now over five thousand women whose apparel
costs them over two thousand dollars a year each.
Things have got to such a pass that when we cry
over our sins in church, we wipe the tears away
with a hundred-and-fifty-dollar pocket-handkerchief !
Extravagance accounts for much of the pauperism.
Who are these people whom you have to help ?
Many of them are the children of parents who had
plenty, lived in luxury, had more than they needed,
spent all they had, spent more, too, then died, and left
their families in poverty, Some of those who call
on you now for aid had an ancestry that supped on
Burgundy and woodcock. I could name a score of
men who have every luxury. They smoke the best
cigars, and they drink the finest wines, and they have
the grandest surroundings, and when they die their
families will go on the cold charity of the world.
Now, the death of such a man is a grand larceny.
He swindles the world as he goes into his coffin, and
he deserves to have his bones sold to the medical
museum for anatomical specimens, the proceeds to
furnish bread for his children.
I know it cuts close. Some of you make a great
swash in life, and after awhile you will die, and min-
isters will be sent for to come and stand by your
coffin and lie about your excellences ; but they will
not come. If you send for me, I will tell you what
my text will be : " He that provideth not for his own,
and especially for those of his own household, is
worse than an infidel." And yet we find Christian
men, men of large means, who sometimes talk elo-
WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 5/1
quently about the Christian Church and about
civilization, expending everything on themselves and
nothing on the cause of God, and they crack the
back of their Palais Royal glove in trying to hide
the one cent they put in the Lord's treasury. What
an apportionment ! Twenty thousand dollars for
ourselves, and one cent for God. Ah ! my friends,
this extravagance accounts for a great deal of what
the cause of God suffers.
And the desecration goes on, even to the funeral
day. You know very well that there are men who
die solvent, but the expenses are so great before they
get under ground they are insolvent. There are
families that go into penury in wicked response to
the demands of this day. They put in casket and
tombstone that which they ought to put in bread.
They wanted bread, you give them a tombstone.
One would think that the last two obligations peo-
ple would be particular about would be to the physi-
cian and the undertaker. Because they are the two
last obligations, those two professions are almost al-
ways cheated. They send for the doctor in great
haste, and he must come day and night. They send
for the undertaker amid the great solemnities, and
often these two men are the very last to be met with
compensation. Merchants sell goods, and the goods
are not paid for ; they take back the goods, 1 am told.
But there is no relief in this case. The man spent all
he had in luxuries and extravagance while he lived,
and then he goes out of the world, and has left noth-
ing for his family, nothing for the obsequies, and as
he goes out of the world he steals the doctor's pills
and the undertaker's slippers.
And then look how the cause of God is impover-
ished. Men give so much sometimes tor their indul-
57 2 WALL STREET DEFALCATION.
gences they have nothing for the cause of God and
religion. Twenty-two million dollars expended in
this country a year for religious purposes ; but what
are the twenty-two millions expended for religion
compared with the ninety-five millions expended on
cigars and tobacco, and then one thousand, five hun-
dred millions of dollars spent for rum, accursed rum?
So a man who had a fortune of seven hundred and
fifty thousand dollars, or what amounted to that, in
London, spent it all in indulgences, chiefly in glut-
tonies, and sent hither and yon for all the delicacies,
and often had a meal that would cost one or two
hundred dollars for himself. Then he was reduced
to one guinea, with which he bought a rare bird,
had it cooked in best style, ate it, took two hours for
digestion, walked out on Westminster Bridge, and
jumped into the Thames. On a large scale what men
are doing on a small scale.
Oh, my friends, let us take our stand against the
extravagances of society. Do not pay for things
which are frivolous when you may lack the necessi-
ties. Do not put one month's wages or salary into a
trinket, just one trinket.
Keep your credit good by seldom asking for any.
Pay ! Do not starve a whole year to afford one Bel-
shazzar's carnival. Do not buy a coat of many
colors, and then in six months be out at the elbows.
Flourish not, as some people I have known, who took
apartments at a fashionable hotel, and had elegant
drawing rooms attached, and then vanished in the
night, not even leaving their compliments for the
landlord. I tell you, my friends, in the day of God's
judgment, we will not only have to give an account
for the way we made our money, but for the way we
spent it.
(IT
PART IV.
Cloalg fiff the Wational Afena,
j(sOSR:
V
CHAPTER LVII.
NATIONAL RUIN.
On cisatlantic shores a company of American
scientists are now landing, on their way to find the
tomb of a dead empire holding in its arms a dead
city, mother and child of the same name Babylon.
The ancient mounds will invite the spades and
shovels and crowbars, while the unwashed natives
look on in surprise. Our scientific friends will find
yellow bricks still impressed with the name of
Nebuchadnezzar, and they will go down into the
sarcophagus of a monarchy buried more than two
thousand years ago. May the explorations of Raw-
linson and Lavard and Chevalier and Opperto and
Loftus and Chesney be eclipsed by the present arch-
aeological uncovering.
But is it possible this is all that remains of Babylon ?
a city once five times larger than London and twelve
times larger than New York? Walls three hundred
and seventy-three feet high and ninety-three feet
thick. Twenty-five burnished gates on each side,
with streets running clear through to corresponding
gates on the other side. Six hundred and twenty-
five squares. More pomp and wealth and splendor
and sin than could be found in any five modern cities
combined. A city of palaces and temples. A city
having within it a garden on an artificial hill four
hundred feet high, the sides of the mountain terraced.
575
576 NATIONAL RUIN.
All this built to keep the king's wife, Amyitis, from
becoming homesick for the mountainous region in
which she spent her girlhood. The waters of the
Euphrates spouted up to irrigate this great altitude
into fruits and flowers and arborescence unimagin-
able. A great river running from north to south
clear through the city, bridges over it, tunnels under
it, boats on it.
A city of bazars and of market-places, unrivaled for
aromatics, and unguents, and high-mettled horses
with grooms by their side, and thyme wood, and
African evergreens, and Egyptian linen, and all
styles of costly textile fabric, and rarest purples
extracted from shell-fish on the Mediterranean coast,
arid rarest scarlets taken from brilliant insects in
Spain, and ivories brought from successful elephan-
tine hunts in India, and diamonds whose flash was a
repartee to the sun. Fortress within fortress, embat-
tlcment rising above embattlement. Great capital of
the ages. But one night, while honest citizens were
asleep, but all the saloons of saturnalia were in full
blast, and at the king's castle they had filled the
tankards for the tenth time, and reeling, and guff-
awing, and hiccoughing, around the state table were
the rulers of the land, General Cyrus ordered his
besieging army to take shovels and spades, and they
diverted the river from its usual channel into another
direction, so that the forsaken bed of the river
became the path on which the besieging army en-
tered. When the morning dawned the conquerors
were inside the outside trenches. Babylon had
fallen.
"Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty
city, for in one hour is thy judgment come." But do
NATIONAL RUIN. 5/7
nations die ? Oh, yes, there is great mortality
among monarchies and republics. They are like
individuals in the fact that they are born, they have a
middle life, they have a decease : they have a cradle,
and a grave. Some of them are assassinated, some
destroyed by their own hand. Let me call the roll of
some of the dead civilizations, and some of the dead
cities, and let some one answer for them.
Egyptian civilization, stand up. " Dead ! " answer
the ruins of Karnak and Luxor, and from seventy
pyramids on the east side of the Nile there comes up
a great chorus, crying : " Dead, dead ! " Assyrian
Empire, stand up and answer. " Dead ! " cry the
charred ruins of Nineveh. After six hundred years
of magnificent opportunity, dead. Israelitish King-
dom, stand up. After two hundred and fifty years
of divine interposition and of miraculous vicissitude,
and of heroic behavior and of appalling depravity.
Dead ! Phoenicia, stand up and answer. After in.
venting the alphabet and giving it to the world, and
sending out her merchant caravans in one direction
to Central Asia, and sending out her navigators to the
Atlantic Ocean in another direction. Dead ! Pillars
of Hercules and rocks on which the Tyrian fishermen
dried their nets, all answer, " Dead Phoenicia."
Athens, after Phidias, after Demosthenes, after Mil-
tiades. Dead ! Sparta, after Leonidas, after Eury-
biades, after Salamis, after Thermopylae. Dead !
Roman Empire, stand up and answer. Empire once
bounded by the British Channel on the north, by the
Euphrates on the east, by the great Sahara Desert in
Africa on the south, by the Atlantic Ocean on the
west. Home of three great civilizations, owning alt
the then discovered world worth owning. Roman
37
578 NATIONAL RUIN.
Empire, answer. Gibbon, in his " Rise and Fall of
the Roman Empire," says " Dead ! " and the forsaken
seats ot the ruined Coliseum, and the skeleton of the
aqueducts, and the miasma of the Campagna, and
the fragments of the marble baths, and the useless
piers of the Bridge Triumphalis, and the Mamartine
prison, holding no more apostolic prisoners, and the
silent Forum, and Basilica of Constantine, and the
arch of Titus, and the Pantheon, come in with great
chorus, crying : " Dead, dead ! " After Horace, after
Virgil, after Tacitus, after Cicero, dead. After Hora-
tius on the bridge, and Cincinnatus, the farmer
oligarch, after Pompey, after Scipio, after Cassius,
after Constantine, after Caesar. Dead ! The war eagle
of Rome flew so high it was blinded by the sun and
came whirling down through the heavens, and the
owl of desolation and darkness built its nest in the
forsaken eyrie. Mexican Empire. Dead ! French Em-
pire. Dead !
You see, my friends, it is no unusual thing for a
government to perish, and in the same necrology of
dead nations, and in the same graveyard of expired
governments will go the United States, of America
unless there be some potent voice to call a halt, and
unless God in His mercy interfere, and through a
purified ballot-box and a widespread public Christian
sentiment the catastrophe be averted. I propose to
set before you the evils that threaten to destroy the
American Government, and to annihilate American
institutions.
The first evil that threatens the annihilation of our
American institutions is the fact that political bribery,
which once was considered a crime, has by many
come to be considered a tolerable virtue.
NATIONAL RUIN. 5/9
There is a legitimate use of money in elections, in
the printing of political tracts, and in the hiring of
public halls, and in the obtaining of campaign oratory.
Hundreds and thousands of men will have set before
them so much money for a Republican vote, and so
much money for a Democratic vote, and the superior
financial inducement will decide the action.
Unless this purchase and sale of suffrage shall
cease, the American Government will expire, and
you might as well be getting ready the monument
for another dead nation. My friends, if you have
not noticed that political bribery is one of the ghastly
crimes of this day, you have not kept your eyes
open.
Another evil threatening the destruction of Amer-
ican institutions is the solidifying of the sections
against each other. A solid North. A solid South.
If this goes on we shall, after a while, have a solid
East against a solid West, we shall have solid Middle
States against solid Northern States, we shall have a
solid New York against a solid Pennsylvania, and a
solid Ohio against a solid Kentucky.
When Garfield died, and all the States gathered
around his casket in sympathy and in tears, and as
hearty telegrams of condolence came from New Or-
leans and from Charleston as from Boston and Chi-
cago, I said to myself : " I think sectionalism is
dead." But alas ! no. The difficulty will never be
ended until each State of the nation is split up into
two or three great political parties. This ^country
cannot exist, unless it exists as one body, the national
capital, the heart, sending out through all the arteries
of communication warmth and life to the very ex-
tremities. This nation cannot exist unless it exists as
580 NATIONAL RUIN.
one family, and you might as well have solid brothers
against solid sisters, and a solid bread-tray against a
solid cradle, and a solid nursery against a solid dining-
room ; and you might as well have solid ears against
solid eyes, and solid head against solid foot. What
is the interest of Georgia is the interest of Massachu-
setts ; what is the interest of New York is the interest
of South Carolina. Does the Ohio River change its
politics when it gets below Louisville ? It is not
possible for these sectional antagonisms to continue
for a great many years without permanent compound
fracture.
Another evil threatening the destruction of our
American institutions is the low state of public
morals.
What killed Babylon? What killed Phoenicia?
What killed Rome? Their own depravity; and the
fraud and the drunkenness and the lechery which
have destroyed other nations will destroy ours unless
a merciful God prevent.
I have to tell you what you know already, that
American politics have sunken to such a low depth
that there is nothing beneath. What we see in some
directions we see in nearly all directions. The pecu-
lation and the knavery hurled to the surface by the
explosion of banks and business firms are only speci-
mens of great Cotopaxis and Strombolis of wicked-
ness that boil and roar and surge beneath, but have
not yet regurgitated to the surface. When the
heaven-descended Democratic party enacted the
Tweed rascality it seemed to eclipse everything; but
after awhile the heaven-descended Republican party
outwitted Pandemonium with the Star Route infamy.
My friends, we have in this country, people who
NATIONAL RUIN. 581
say the marriage institution amounts to nothing.
They scoff at it. We have people walking in polite
parlors in our day who are not good enough to be
scavengers in Sodom ! I went over to San Francisco
four or five years ago that beautiful city, that
Queen of the Pacific. May the blessing of God
come down upon her great churches, and her noble
men and women ! When I got into the city of San
Francisco, the mayor of the city, and the president of
the Board of Health called on me and insisted that I
go and see the Chinese quarters, no doubt, so that on
my return to the Atlantic coast I might tell what
dreadful people the Chinese are. But on the last
night of my stay in San Francisco, before thousands
of people in their great opera house, I said : "Would
you like me to tell you just what I think, plainly and
honestly?" They said; "Yes, yes, yes!" I said:
"Do you think you can stand it all ?" They said :
."Yes, yes, yes!" "Then," I said, "my opinion is that
the curse of San Francisco is not your Chinese quar-
ters, but your millionaire libertines!"
And two of them sat right before me Felix and
Drusilla. And so it is in all the cities. I never swear,
but when I see a man go unwhipt of justice, laughing
over his shame, and calling his damnable deeds gal-
lantry and peccadillo, I am tempted to hurl red-hot
anathema, and to conclude that if, according to some
people's theology, there is no hell, there ought to be !
There is enough out-and-out licentiousness in Amer-
ican cities to-day to. bring down upon them the wrath
of that God who, on the 24th of August, 79, buried
Herculaneum and Pompeii so deep in ashes that the
eighteen hundred and five subsequent years have not
been able to complete the exhumation. There are in
582 NATIONAL RUIN.
American cities to-dav whole blocks of houses which
J
the police know to be infamous, and yet by purchase
they are silenced, bv hush money, so that such places
are as much under the defence of government as
public libraries and asylums of mercy. These ulcers
on the body politic bleed and gangrene away the life
of the nation, and public authority in many of the
cities looks the other way. You can not cure such
wounds as these with a silken bandage. You will
have to cure them by putting deep in the lancet of
moral surgery and burning them out with the caustic
of holy wrath, and vvith most decisive amputation
cutting off the scabrous and putrefying abominations.
As the Romans were after the Celts, and as the Nor-
mans were after the Britons, so there are evils after
this nation which will attend its obsequies unless we
first attend theirs.
Superstition tells of a marine reptile, the cepha-
loptera, which enfolded and crushed a ship of war ;
but it is no superstition when I tell you that the his-
tory of many of the dead nations proclaim to us the
fact that our ship of state is in danger of being
crushed by the cephaloptera of national depravity.
Where is the Hercules to slay this hydra? Is it not
time to speak by pen, by tongue, by ballot-box, by
the rolling of the prison door, by hangman's halter,
by earnest prayer, by Sinaitic detonation ?
A son of King Cresus is said to have been dumb,
and to have, never uttered a word until he saw
his father being put to death. Then he broke the
shackles of silence, and cried out : " Kill not my
father, Cresus ! " When I see the cheatery and the
wantonness and the manifold crime of this country
attempting to commit patricide yea, matricide upon
NATIONAL RUIN. 583
our institutions, it seems to me that lips that hereto-
fore have been dumb ought to break the silence with
canerous tones of fiery protest.
I shall go on until I have shown you the way in
which we may save the life of the nation.
I want to put all the matter before you, so that
every honest man and woman will know just how
matters stand, and what they ought to do if they
vote, and what they ought to do if they pray. This
Nation is not going to perish. Alexander, when he
heard of the wealth of the Indies, divided Macedonia
among his soldiers. Some one asked him what he had
kept for himself, and he replied : " I am keeping
hope. And that jewel I keep bright and shining in
my soul, whatever else I shall surrender." Hope,
then, in God. He will set back these oceanic tides
of moral devastation. Do you know what is the
prize for which contention is made to-day? It is the
prize of this continent. Never since, according to
John Milton, when " Satan was hurled headlong
flaming from the ethereal skies in hideous ruin and
combustion down," have the powers of darkness been
so determined to win this continent as they are now.
What a jewel it is a jewel carved in relief, the
cameo of this planet ! On one side of us the Atlantic
Ocean, dividing us from the worn-out governments
of Europe. On the other side the Pacific Ocean,
dividing us from the superstitions of Asia. On the
north of us the Arctic Sea, which is the gymnasium
in which the explorers and navigators develop their
courage. A continent 10,500 miles long, 17,000,000
square miles, and all of it but about one-seventh capa-
ble of rich cultivation. One hundred millions of popu-
lation on this continent of North and South America
584 NATIONAL RUIN.
one hundred millions, and room for many hundred
millions more. All flora and all fauna, all metals and
all precious woods, and all grains and all fruits. The
Appalachian range the backbone and the rivers of
the ganglia carrying life all through and out to the
extremities. Isthmus of Darien the narrow waist of
a giant continent, all to be under one government,
and all free and all Christian, and the scene of Christ's
personal reign on earth if, according to the expecta-
tion of many good people, He shall at last set up His
throne in this world.
Who shall have this hemisphere? Christ or Satan?
Who shall have the shore of her inland seas, the silver
of her Nevadas, the gold of her Colorados, the teles-
copes of her observatories, the brain of her univer-
sities, the wheat of her prairies, the rice of her
savannas, the two great ocean beaches the one
reaching from Baffin's Bay to Terra del Fuego, and
the other from Behring Straits to Cape Horn and
all the moral, and temporal, and spiritual, and ever-
lasting interests of a population vast beyond all com-
putation save by Him, with whom a thousand years
areas one day? Who shall have the hemisphere?
You and I will decide that or help to decide it, by
conscientious vote, by earnest prayer, by maintenance
of Christian institutions, by support of great philan-
thropies, by putting body, mind, and soul on the
right side of all moral, religious, and national move-
ments.
THE RETURN FROM THE CHRISTENING.
[After I... Kaenunerer.]
CHAPTER LVIII.
EASY DIVORCE.
That there are hundreds and thousands of infeli-
citous homes in America, no one will doubt. If there
were only one skeleton in the closet, that might be
locked up and abandoned ; but in many a home there
is a skeleton in the hallway and a skeleton in all the
apartments.
" Unhappily married " are two words descriptive
of many a homestead. It needs no orthodox minister
to prove to a badly mated pair that there is a hell ;
they are there now.
Some say that for the alleviation of all these do-
mestic disorders of which we hear, easy divorce is a
good prescription. God sometimes authorizes di-
vorce as certainly as He authorizes marriage. I have
just as much regard for one lawfully divorced as I
have for one lawfully married. But you know, and
I know, that wholesale divorce is one of our national
scourges. I am not surprised at this when I think of
the influences which have been abroad militating
against the marriage relation.
For many years the platforms of the country rang
with talk about a free-love millennium. There were
meetings of this kind held in the Academy of Music,
Brooklyn ; Cooper Institute, New York ; Tremont
Temple, Boston, and all over the land. Some of the
women who were most prominent in that movement
587
588 EASY DIVORCE.
have since been distinguished for great promiscuosity
of affection. Popular themes for such occasions were
the tyranny of man, the oppression of the marriage
relation, women's rights, and the affinities. Promi-
nent speakers were women with short curls, and
short dress, and very long tongue, everlastingly at
war with God because they were created women ;
while on the platform sat meek men with soft accent,
and cowed demeanor, apologetic for masculinity, and
holding the parasols while the termagant orators
went on preaching the gospel of free-love.
That campaign of about twenty years set more
devils into the marriage relation than will be exor-
cised in the next fifty. Men and women went home
from such meetings so permanently confused as to
who were their wives and husbands, that they never
got out of their perplexity, and the criminal and the
civil courts tried to disentangle the Iliad of woes,
and this one got alimony, and that one got a limited
divorce, and this mother kept the children on con-
dition that the father could sometimes come and
look at them, and these went into the poorhouses,
and those went into an insane asylum, and those
went into dissolute public life, and all \Vent to de-
struction. The mightiest war ever made against the
marriage institution was that free-love campaign,
sometimes under one name, and sometimes under
another.
Another influence that has warred upon the mar-
riage relation has been polygamy in Utah. That is
a stereotyped caricature of the marriage relation,
and has poisoned the whole land. You might as
well think that you can have an arm in a state of
mortification and yet the whole body not be sickened,
EASY DIVORCE. 589
as to have those Territories polygamized and yet the
body of the nation not feel the putrefaction. Hear
it, good men and women of America, that so long
ago as 1862 a law was passed by Congress forbid-
ding polygamy in the Territories and in all the places
where they had jurisdiction. Armed with all the
power of government, and having an army at their
disposal, and yet the first brick has not been knocked
from that fortress of libertinism.
Every new President in his inaugural has tickled
that monster with the straw of condemnation, and
every Congress has stultified itself in proposing some
plan that would riot work. Polygamy stands in
Utah and in other of the Territories to-day more
entrenched, and more brazen, and more puissant, and
more braggart, and more infernal, than at any time
in its history. James Buchanan, a much-abused man
of his day, did more for the extirpation of this vil-
lany than all the subsequent administrations have
dared to do. Mr. Buchanan sent out an army, and
although it was halted in its work, still he accom-
plished more than the subsequent administrations,
which have done nothing but talk, talk, talk.
I want the people of America to know that for
twenty-two years we have had a positive law pro-
hibiting polygamy in the Territories. People are cry-
ing out for some new law, as though we had not an
old law already with which that infamy could be
swept into the perdition from which it smoked up.
Polygamy in Utah has warred against the marriage
relation throughout the land. It is impossible to
have such an awful sewer of iniquity sending up its
miasma, which is wafted by the winds north, south,
east and west, without the whole land being affected
by it.
590 EASY DIVORCE.
Another influence that has warred against the
marriage relation in this country has been a pustu-
lous literature, with its millions of sheets every week
choked with stories of domestic wrongs, and infidel-
ities, and massacres, and outrages, until it is a wonder
to me that there are any decencies or any common
sense left on the subject of marriage. One-half of
the news-stands of Brooklyn and New York and all
our cities reeking with the filth.
" Now," say some, " we admit all these evils, and
the only way to clear them out or correct them is by
easy divorce." Well, before we yield to that cry, let
us find out how easy it is now.
I have looked over the laws of all the States, and
I find that while in some States it is easier than in
others, in everv State it is easy. The State of Illinois
through its Legislature recites a long list of proper
causes for divorce, and then closes up by giving to
the courts the right to make a decree of divorce in
any case where they deem it expedient. After that
you are not surprised at the announcement that in
one county of the State of Illinois, in one year, there
were 833 divorces. If you want to know how easy
it is you have only to look over the records of the
States. In Massachusetts 600 divorces in one year ;
in Maine 478 in one year ; in Connecticut 401 divorces
in one year; in the city of San Francisco 333
divorces in 1880; in New England in one year 2113
divorces, and in twenty years in New England
twenty thousand. Is that not easy enough ?
I want you to notice that frequency of divorce al-
ways goes along with the dissoluteness of society.
Rome for five hundred years had not one case of
divorce. Those were her days of glory and virtue.
EASY DIVORCE. 591
Then the reign of vice began, and divorce became
epidemic. If you want to know how rapidly the
Empire went down, ask Gibbon. Do you know how
the Reign of Terror was introduced in France ? By
20,000 cases of divorce in one year in Paris. What
we want in this country, and in all lands, is that di-
vorce be made more, and more, and more difficult.
Then people before they enter that relation will be
persuaded that there will probably be no escape from
it, except through the door of the sepulchre. Then
they will pause on the verge of that relation, until
they are fully satisfied that it is best, and that it is
right, and that it is happiest. Then we shall have no
more marriage in fun. Then men and women will
not enter the relation with the idea it is only a trial
trip, and if they do not like it they can get out at the
first landing. Then this whole question will be taken
out of the frivolous into the tremendous, and there
will be no more joking about the blossoms in a bride's
hair than about the cypress on a coffin.
What we want is that the Congress of the United
States move for the changing the national Constitu-
tion so that a law can be passed which shall be uni-
form all over the country, and what shall be right in
one State shall be right in all the States, and what is
wrong in one State will be wrong in all the States.
How is it now ? If a party in the marriage rela-
tion gets dissatisfied, it is only necessary to move to
another State to achieve liberation from the domestic
tie, and divorce is effected so easy that the first one
party knows of it is by seeing it in the newspaper
that Rev. Dr. Somebody on April- 14, 1884, intro-
duced into a new marriage relation a member of the
household who went off on a pleasure excursion to
592 EASY DIVORCE.
Newport, or a business excursion to Chicago. Mar-
ried at the bride's house. No cards. There are
States of the Union which practically put a premium
upon the disintegration of the marriage relation,
while there are other States, like our own New York
State, that has the pre-eminent idiocy of making
marriage lawful at twelve and fourteen years of age.
The Congress of the United States needs to move
for a change of the national Constitution, and then to
appoint a committee not made up of single gentle-
men, but of men of families, and their families in
Washington \vho shall prepare a good, honest,
righteous, comprehensive, uniform law that will con-
trol everything from Sandy Hook to Golden Horn.
That will put an end to brokerages in marriage.
That will send divorce lawyers into a decent busi-
ness. That will set people agitated for many years
on the question of how shall they get away from
each other, to planning how they can adjust them-
selves to the more or less unfavorable circumstances.
More difficult divorce will put an estoppal to a
great extent upon marriage as a financial speculation.
There are men who go into the relation just as they
go into Wall Street to purchase shares. The female
to be invited into the partnership of wedlock is
utterly unattractive, and in disposition a suppressed
Vesuvius. Everybody knows it, but this masculine
candidate for matrimonial orders, through the com-
mercial agency or through the county records, finds
out how much estate is to be inherited, and he calcu-
lates it. He thinks out how long it will be before
the old man will die, and whether he can stand the
refractory temper until he does die, and then he
enters the relation ; for he says, " If I cannot stand it,
EASY DIVORCE. 593
then through the divorce law I'll back out." That
process is going on all the time, and men enter the
relation without any moral principle, without any
affection, and it is as much a matter of stock specu-
lation as anything that transpired yesterday in Union
Pacific, Wabash and Delaware and Lackawanna.
Now, suppose a man understood, as he ought to
understand, that if he goes into that relation there is
no possibility of his getting out, or no probability,
he would be more slow to put his neck in the yoke.
He should say to himself, "Rather than a Caribbean
whirlwind with a whole fleet of shipping in its arms,
give me a zephyr off fields of sunshine and gardens
of peace."
Rigorous divorce law will also hinder women
from the fatal mistake of marrying men to reform
them. If a young man by twenty-five years of age,
or thirty years of age have the habit of strong drink
fixed on him, he is as certainly bound for a drunk-
ard's grave as that train starting out from Grand
Central Depot at 8 o'clock to-morrow morning is
bound for Albany. The train may not reach Albany,
for it may be thrown from the track. The young
man may not reach a drunkard's grave, for some-
thing may throw him off the iron track of evil habit;
but the probability is that the train that starts to-
morrow morning at 8 o'clock for Albany will get
there, and the probability is that the young man who
has the habit of strong drink fixed on him before
twenty-five or thirty years of age will arrive at a
drunkard's grave. She knows he drinks, although
he tries to hide it by chewing cloves. Everybody
knows he drinks. Parents warn, neighbors and
friends warn. She will marry him, she will reform
him.
594 EASY DIVORCE.
If she is unsuccessful in the experiment, why then
the divorce law will emancipate her, because habitual
drunkenness is a cause for divorce in Indiana, Ken-
tucky, Florida, Connecticut, and nearly all the States.
So the poor thing goes to the altar of sacrifice. If
you will show me the poverty-struck streets in any
city, I will show you the homes of the women who
married men to reform them. In one case out of ten
thousand it may be a successful experiment. I never
saw the successful experiment. But have a rigorous
divorce law, and that woman will say, " If I am affi-
anced to that man, it is for life ; and if now in the
ardor of his young love, and I am the prize to be
won, he will not give up his cups, when he has won
the prize, surely he will not give up his cups." And
so that woman will say to the man, " No, sir, you are
already married to the club, and you are married to
that evil habit, and so you are married twice, and
you are a bigamist. Go ! "
A rigorous divorce law will also do much to hinder
hasty and inconsiderate marriages. Under the im-
pression that one can be easily released people enter
the relation without inquiry, and without reflection.
Romance and impulse rule the day. Perhaps the
only ground for the marriage compact is that she
likes his looks, and he admires the graceful way she
passes around the ice-cream at the picnic ! It is all
they know about each other. It is all the preparation
for life. A man, not able to pay his own board bill,
with not a dollar in his possession, will stand at the
altar and take the loving hand, and say, " With all
my worldly goods I thee endow !" A woman that
could not make a loaf of bread to save her life, will
swear to cherish and obey. A Christian will marry
EASY DIVORCE. 595
an atheist, and that always makes conjoined wretch-
edness ; for if a man does not believe there is a God
he is neither to be trusted with a dollar, nor with
your life-long happiness.
Having read much about love in a cottage people
brought up in ease will go and starve in a hovel.
Runaway matches and elopements, 999 out of 1000
of which mean death and hell, multiplying on all
hands. You see them in every day's newspapers.
Our ministers in this region have no defence such as
they have in other cities where the banns must be
previously published and an officer of the law must
give a certificate that all is right ; so clergymen are
left defenceless, and unite those who ought never to be
united. Perhaps they are too young or perhaps they
are standing already in some domestic compact.
By the wreck of ten thousand homes, by the
holocaust of ten thousand sacrificed men and women,
by the hearthstone of the family which is the corner-
stone of the State, and in the name of that God who
hath set up the family institution and who hath made
the breaking of the marital oath the most appalling
of all perjuries, I implore the Congress of the United
States to make some righteous, uniform law ior all
the States, and from ocean to ocean, on this subject
of marriage and divorce.
And, fellow-citizens, as well as fellow-Christians, let
us have a divine rage against anything that wars on
the marriage state. Blessed institution ! Instead of
two arms to fight the battle of life, four. Instead of
two eyes to scrutinize the path of life, four. Instead
of two shoulders to lift the burden of life, four.
Twice the energy, twice the courage, twice the holy
ambition, twice the probability of worldly success,
596 EASY DIVORCE.
twice the prospects of heaven. Into that matrimonial
bower God fetches two souls. Outside the bower
room for all contentions, and all bickerings, and all
controversies, but inside that bower there is room for
only one guest the angel of love. Let that angel
stand at the floral doorw/iy of this Edenic bower
with drawn sword to hew down- the worst foe of that
bower easy divorce. And for every Paradise lost
may there be a Paradise regained. And after we
quit our home here may we have a brighter home in
heaven, at the windows of which this moment are
familiar faces watching for our arrival, and won-
dering why so long we tarry.
POVERTY.
CHAPTER LIX.
THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS.
Noah did the best and the worst thing for the
world. He built an ark against the deluge of water,
but introduced a deluge against which the human
race has ever since been trying to build an ark the
deluge of drunkenness. In the opening chapters of
the Bible we hear his staggering steps. Shem and
Japhet tried to cover up the disgrace, but there he is,
drunk on wine at a time in the history of the world
when, to say the least, there was no lack of water.
Inebriation having entered the world, has not re-
treated. Abigail, the fair and heroic wife who saved
the flocks of Nabal, her husband, from confiscation
by invaders, goes home at night and finds him so in-
toxicated she can not tell him the story of his narrow
escape. Uriah came to see David, and David got
him drunk, and paved the way for the despoliation of
a household. Even the church bishops needed to be
charged to be sober and not given to too much wine ;
and so familiar were the people of Bible times with
the staggering and falling motion of the inebriate,
that Isaiah, when he comes to describe the final dis-
location of worlds, says : " The earth shall reel to and
fro like a drunkard."
Ever since apples and grapes and wheat grew the
world has been tempted to unhealthful stimulants.
But the intoxicants of the olden time were an inno-
599
600 THE ARCH-FIEND OF. THE NATIONS.
cent beverage, a harmless orangeade, a quiet syrup,
a peaceful soda water, as compared with the liquids
of modern inebriation, into which a madness, and a
fury, and a gloom, and a fire, and a suicide, and a
retribution have mixed and mingled. Fermentation
was always known, but it was not until a thousand
years after Christ that distillation was invented.
While we must confess that some of the ancient
arts have been lost, the Christian era is superior to
all others in the bad eminence of whisky and rum and
gin. The modern drunk is a hundred-fold worse than
the ancient drunk. Noah in his intoxication became
imbecile, but the victims of modern alcoholism have
to struggle with whole menageries of wild beasts and
jungles of hissing serpents and perditions of blas-
pheming demons. An arch-fiend arrived in our
world, and he built an invisible cauldron of tempta-
tion. He built that cauldron strong and stout for all
ages and all nations. First he squeezed into the caul-
dron the juices of the forbidden fruit of Paradise.
Then he gathered for it a distillation from the har-
vest fields and the orchards .of the hemispheres.
Then he poured into this cauldron capsicum, and
copperas, and logwood, and deadly nightshade, and
assault and battery, and vitriol, and opium, and rum,
and murder, and sulphuric acid, and theft, and pot-
ash, and cochineal, and red carrots, and poverty, and
death, and hops. But it was a dry compound, and it
must be moistened, and it must be liquefied, and so
the arch-fiend poured into that cauldron the tears of
centuries of orphanage and widowhood, and he
poured in the blood of twenty thousand assassina-
tions. And then the arch-fiend took a shovel that he
had brought up from the furnaces beneath, and he
THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 6oi
put that shovel into this great cauldron and begin
to stir, and the cauldron began to heave, and rock,
and boil, and sputter, and hiss, and smoke, and the
nations gathered around it with cups and tankards
and demijohns and kegs, and there was enough for
all, and the arch-fiend cried : " Aha ! champion fiend
am I. Who has done more than I have for coffins
and graveyards and prisons and insane asylums, and
the populating of the lost world ? And when this
cauldron is emptied, I'll fill it again, and I'll stir it
again, and it will smoke again, and that smoke will
join another smoke the smoke of a torment that
ascendeth forever and ever.
" I drove fifty ships on the rocks of Newfoundland
and the Skerries and the Goodwins. I defeated the
Northern army at Fredericksburg. I have ruined
more senators than will gather next winter in the
national councils. I have ruined more lords than
will be gathered in the House of Peers. The cup
out of which I ordinarily drink is a bleached human
skull, and the upholstery of my palace is so rich a
crimson because it is dyed in human gore, and the
mosaic of my floors is made up of the bones of chil-
dren dashed to death by drunken parents, and my
favorite music sweeter than Te Deum or triumphal
march my favorite music is the cry of daughters
turned out at midnight on the street because father
has come home from the carousal, and the seven-
hundred-voiced shriek of the sinking steamer because
the captain was not himself when he put the ship on
the wrong course. Champion fiend am I ! I have
kindled more fires, I have wrung out more agonies,
I have stretched out more midnight shadows, I have
opened more Golgothas, I have rolled more jugger-
602 THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS.
nauts, I have damned more souls than any other
emissary of diabolism. Champion fiend am I ! "
Drunkenness is the greatest evil of this nation, and
it takes no logical process to prove that a drunken
nation cannot long be a free nation. I call your at-
tention to the fact that drunkenness is not subsiding,
certainly that it is not at a standstill, but that it is on
an onward march, and it is a double quick. Where
there was one drunken home there are ten drunken
homes. Where there was one drunkard's grave there
are twenty drunkards' graves.
According to United States Government figures,
in 1840 there were 23,000,000 gallons of beer sold.
Last year there were 551,000,000 gallons. Accord-
ing to the governmental figures, in the year 1840 there
were 5,000,000 gallons of wine sold. Last year there
were 25,000,000 gallons of wine. It is on the increase.
Talk about crooked whisky by which men mean
the whisky that does not pay the tax to government
I tell you all strong drink is crooked. Crooked
otard, crooked cognac, crooked schnapps, crooked
beer, crooked wine, crooked whisky, because it
makes a man's path crooked, and his life crooked, and
his death crooked, and his eternity crooked.
If I could gather all the armies of the dead drunk-
ards and have them come to resurrection, and then
add to that host all the armies of living drunkards,
five and ten abreast, and then if I could have you
mount a horse and ride along that line for review,
you would ride that horse until he dropped. from
exhaustion, and you would mount another horse and
ride until he fell from exhaustion, and you would
take another and another, and you would ride along
hour after hour, and day after day. Great host, in
THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 603
regiments, in brigades. Great armies of them. And
then if you had voice enough stentorian to make
them all hear, and you could give the command,
" Forward, march !" their first tramp would make the
earth tremble. I do not care which way you look in
the community to-day, the evil is increasing.
I call your attention to the fact that there are
thousands of people born with a thirst for strong
drink a fact too often ignored. Along some ances-
tral lines there runs the river of temptation. There
are children whose swaddling clothes are torn off
the shroud of death.
Many a father has made a will of this sort : " In
the name of God, amen. I bequeath to my children
my houses and lands and estates, share and share
shall they alike. Hereto I affix my hand and seal in
the presence of witnesses." And yet, perhaps that
very man has made another will that the people have
never read, and that has not been proved in the
courts. That will put in writing would read some-
thing like this: " In the name of disease and appetite
and death, amen. I bequeath to my children my evil
habits, my tankards shall be theirs, my wine-cup shall
be theirs, my destroyed reputation shall be theirs.
Share and share alike shall they in the infamy.
Hereto I affix my hand and seal in the presence of
all the applauding harpies of hell."
From the multitude of those who have the evil
habit born with them, this army is being augmented.
And I am sorry to say that a great many of the drug-
stores are abetting this evil, and alcohol is sold under
the name of bitters.
It is bitters for this, and bitters for that, and bitters
for some other thing; and good men deceived, not
604 THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS.
knowing there is any thraldom of alcoholism coming
from that source, are going down, and some day a
man sits with the bottle of black bitters on his table,
and the cork flies out, and after it flies a fiend, and
clutches the man by his throat, and says: "Aha! I
have been after you for ten years. I have got you
now. Down with you, down with you!" Bitters?
Ah ! yes. They make a man's family bitter, and his
home bitter, and his disposition bitter, and his death
bitter, and his hell bitter. Bitters: A vast army all
the time increasing. And let me also say that it is as
thoroughly organized as any army, with commander-
in-chief, staff-officers, infantry, cavalry, batteries, sut-
lerships, and flaming ensigns, and that every candi-
date for office in America will yet have to pronounce
himself the friend or foe of the liquor traffic.
I have in my possession the circular of a brewers
association a circular sent to all candidates for office ;
it has been sent, or will be sent a form to be filled
up, saying whether the candidate is a friend of the
liquor traffic, or its enemy ; and if he is an enemy of
the business then the man is doomed ; or if he declines
to fill up the circular, and send it back, his silence is
taken as a negative answer.
It seems to me it is about time for the 17,000,000
professors of religion in America to take sides. It
is going to be an out-and-out battle between drunken-
ness and sobriety, between heaven and hell, betweeir
God and the devil. Take sides before there is any
further national decadence ; take sides before your
sons are sacrificed, and the new home of your daugh-
ter goes down under the alcoholism of an embruted
husband. Take sides while your voice, your pen,
your prayer, your vote, may have any influence in
THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 60$
arresting the despoliation of this nation. If the 17,-
000,000 professors of religion should take sides on
this subject, it would not be very long before the
destiny of this nation would be decided in the right
direction.
Is it a State evil ? or is it a national evil ? Does it
belong to the North ? or does it belong to the South ?
Does it belong to the East ? or does it belong to the
West? Ah! there is not an American river into
which its tears have not fallen, and into which its
suicides have not plunged. What ruined that
Southern plantation ? every field a fortune, the pro-
prietor and his family once the most affluent support-
ers of summer watering-places. What threw that New
England farm into decay and turned the roseate
cheeks that bloomed at the foot of the Green Moun-
tains into the pallor of despair? What has smitten
every street of every village, town, and city of this
continent with a moral pestilence ? Strong drink.
To prove that this is a national evil, I call up three
States in opposite directions Maine, Iowa, and
Georgia. Let them testify in regard to this. State
of Maine says : " It is so great an evil up here we
have anathematized it as a State." State of Iowa
says : " It is so great an evil out here we have pro-
hibited it by constitutional amendment." State of
Georgia says : " It is so great an evil down here that
ninety counties of this State have made the sale of
intoxicating drink a criminality." So the word comes
up from all sources, and it is going to be a Waterloo,
and I want you to know on what side I am going to
be when that Waterloo is fully come, and I want you
to be on the right side. Either drunkenness will be
destroyed in this countrv, or the American Govern-
606 THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS.
merit will be destroyed. Drunkenness and free insti-
tutions are coming into a death grapple.
Oh, how many are waiting to see if something can
not be done! Thousands of drunkards waiting who
cannot go ten minutes in any direction without
having the temptation glaring before their eyes or
appealing to their nostrils, they fighting against it
with enfeebled will and diseased appetite, conquering,
then surrendering, conquering again and surrender-
ing again', and crying : " How long, O Lord, how
long before these infamous solicitations shall be
gone?"
And how many mothers there are waiting to see if
this national curse cannot lift! Oh, is that the boy
that had the honest breath who comes home with
breath vitiated or disguised? What a change ! How
quickly those habits of early coming home have been
exchanged for the rattling of the night-key in the
door long after the last watchman has gone by and
tried to see that everything was closed up for the
night ! Oh, what a change for that young man who
we had hope would do something in merchandise, or
in artisanship, or in a profession, that would do honor
to the family name long after mother's wrinkled
hands are folded from the last toil ! All that ex-
changed for startled look when the door-bell rings,
lest something has happened. And the wish that the
scarlet fever twenty years ago had been fatal, for
then he would have gone directly to the bosom of
his Saviour. But alas! poor old soul, she has lived
to experience what Solomon said: "A foolish son is
a heaviness to his mother."
Oh, what a funeral it will be when that boy is
brought home dead ! And how mother will sit there
THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 607
and say: "Is this my boy that I used to fondle, and
that I walked the floor with in the night when he
was sick ? Is this the boy that I held to the baptis-
mal font for baptism ? Is this the boy for whom I
toiled until the blood burst from the tips of my fin-
gers that he might have a good start and a good
home? Lord, why hast Thou let me live to see this?
Can it be that these swollen hands are the ones that
used to wander over my face when rocking him to
sleep ? Can it be that this is the swollen brow that
I once so rapturously kissed ? Poor boy ! how tired
he does look. I wonder who struck him that blow
across the temples ! I wonder if he uttered a dying
prayer ! Wake up, my son ; don't you hear me ?
wake up ! Oh, he can't hear me ! Dead, dead, dead !
' Oh, Absalom, my son, my son, would God that I
had died for thee, oh, Absalom, my son, my son ! ' '
I am not much of a mathematician, and I cannot
estimate it ; but is there any one here quick enough
at figures to estimate how many mothers there are
waiting for something to be done ? Aye, there are
many wives waiting for domestic rescue. He prom-
ised something different from that when, after the
long acquaintance and the careful scrutiny of charac-
ter, the hand and the heart were offered and accepted.
What a hell on earth a woman lives in who has a
drunken husband !
O Death, how lovely thou art to her, and how soft
and warm thy skeleton hand ! The sepulchre at mid-
night in winter is a king's drawing-room compared
with that woman's home. It is not so much the blow
on the head that hurts, as the blow on the heart. The
rum fiend came to the door of that beautiful home
and opened the door and stood there, and said : " I
608 THE ARCH-FIEND OK THE NATIONS.
curse this dwelling with an unrelenting curse. I
curse that father into a maniac, I curse that mother
into a pauper. 1 curse those sons into vagabonds. I
curse those daughters into profligacy. Cursed be
bread-tray and cradle. Cursed be couch and chair
and family Bible with record of marriages and births
and deaths. Curse upon curse." Oh, how many
wives are there waiting to see if something cannot
be done to shake these frosts of the second death off
the orange blossoms ! Yea, God is waiting, the God
who works through human instrumentalities, waiting
to see whether this nation is going to overthrow this
evil ; and if it refuse to do so God will wipe out the
nation as He did Phoenicia, as He did Rome, as He
did Thebes, as He did Babylon. Aye, He is waiting
to see what the church of God will do. If the
church does not do its work, then He will wipe it
out as He did the church of Ephesus, church of
Thyatira, church of Sardis. The Protestant and
Roman Catholic churches to-day stand side by side
with an impotent look, gazing on this evil, which
costs this country more than a billion dollars a year
to take care of the 800,000 paupers, and the 315,000
criminals, and the 30,000 idiots, and to bury the 75,-
ooo drunkards.
Protagoras boasted that out of the sixty years of
his life forty years he had spent in ruining youth ;
but the arch fiend of the nations may make the more
infamous boast that all its life it has been ruining the
bodies, minds, and souls of the human race.
Put on your spectacles and take a candle and
examine the platforms of the two leading political
parties of this country, and see what they are doing
for the arrest of this evil, and for the overthrow of
THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 609
this abomination. Resolutions oh yes, resolutions
about Mormonism ! It is safe to attack that organ-
ized nastiness 2,000 miles away. But not one resolu-
tion against drunkenness, which would turn this
entire nation into one bestial Salt Lake City. Reso-
lutions against political corruption, but not one word
about drunkenness, which would rot this nation from
scalp to heel. Resolutions about protection, against
competition with foreign industries, but not one word
about protection of family and church and nation
against the scalding, blasting, all-consuming, damning
tariff of strong drink put upon every financial, indi-
vidual, spiritual, moral, national interest. The Demo-
cratic party in power for the most of the time for
forty years what did that national party do for the
extirpation of this evil? Nothing, absolutely noth-
ing, appallingly nothing. The Republican party has
been in power for about a quarter of a century
what has it done as a national party to extirpate this
evil ? Nothing, absolutely nothing, appallingly noth-
ing. I look in another direction.
The Church of God is the grandest and most
glorious institution on earth. What has it in solid
phalanx accomplished for the overthrow of drunken-
ness ? Have its forces ever been marshaled ? No,
not in this direction.
The church holds the balance of power in America;
and if Christian people the men and the women who
profess to love the Lord Jesus Christ, and to love
purity, and to be the sworn enemies of all unclean-
ness and debauchery and sin if all such would march
side by side and shoulder to shoulder, this evil would
soon be overthrown. Think of 300,000 churches and
Sunday-schools in Christendom, marching sboulder
39
6lO THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS.
to shoulder ! How very short a time it would take
them to put down this evil, if all the churches of God
trans-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic were armed on this
subject !
Young men of America, pass over into the army of
teetotalism. Whisky, good to preserve corpses,
ought never to turn you into a corpse. Tens of
thousands of young men have been dragged out of
respectability, and out of purity, and out of good
character, and into darkness, by this infernal stuff
called strong drink. Do not touch it ! Do not
touch it !
CHAPTER LX.
THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION.
There have been in the world hundreds of political
parties. They did their work. They lost their pres-
tige. They expired. Their names are forgotten.
Enough for me to declare what I believe God and
civilization demand of the two political parties of this
day, or their extermination. God and civilization de-
mand of the political parties of this day a plank anti-
Mormonistic. It is high time that the nation stopped
playing with this cancer. All the plasters of political
quacks only aggravate it, and nothing but the sur-
gery of the sword will cure it. All the congressional
laws on this subject have been notorious failures.
Meanwhile the great monster sits between the two
mountains the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Ne-
vadas sits in defiance and mockery, sometimes hold-
ing its sides with uncontrollable mirth at our national
impotency. Shipload after shipload of Mormons are
regurgitated at your Castle Garden, and hundreds
and thousands of them are being sent on to the great
moral lazaretto of the West. Others are on the way,
and the Atlantic is heaving toward us the great surges
of foreign libertinism. This moment the emissaries of
that organized lust are busy in Norway and Sweden
and England and Ireland and Scotland and Germany,
breaking up homes, and with infernal cords draw-
ing the population this way, a population which
613
614 THE DEMAND OF (JOD AND CIVILIZATION.
will be dumped as carrion on the American terri-
tories. American crime, with its long rake stretched
across other continents, is heaping up on this land
great winrows of abomination. Worse and worse.
Four hundred Mormons coming into our port in one
day, six hundred in another day, eight hundred in
another day.
Are we so cowardly and selfish in this generation
that we are going to bequeath to the following gen-
erations this great evil? Letting it go on until our chil-
dren come to the front and we are safely entrenched
under the mound of our own sepulchres, leaving our
children through all their active life to wonder why
we postponed this evil for their extirpation when we
might have destroyed it with a hundred-fold less ex-
posure. What a legacy for this generation to leave
the following generation ! A vast acreage of swelter-
ing putrefaction, of lowest beastliness, of suffocating
stench, all the time becoming more and more mal-odo-
rous and rotten and damnable. We want some great
political party in some strong and unmistakable plank
to declare that it will extirpate heroically and imme-
diately this great harem of the American continent.
We want some President of the United States to
come in on such an anti-Mbrmonistic platform, and in
his opening message to Congress ask for an appropri-
ation for military expedition, and then put Phil Sheri-
dan in his lightning stirrups, heading his horse west-
ward, and in one year Mormonism will be extirpated
and national decency vindicated. Compelling Mor-
monistic chiefs to take oath of allegiance will not do
it, for they have declared in open assembly that per-
jury in their cause is commendable. Religious tracts
on purity amount to nothing. They will not read
THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 615
them. Anything shorter than bayonets and any-
thing softer than bullets will never do that work.
Every day you open a paper and you see in the
State of New York some bigamist arrested and pun-
ished. What you prohibit on a small scale for a
State you allow on a large scale for a nation. Big-
amy must be put down. Polygamy must go free.
What has been the effect, my friends? It has de-
moralized this whole nation. That carbuncle on the
back of the nation has sickened all the nerves, and
muscles, and arteries, and veins, and limbs of the
body politic. I account in that way for many of the
loose ideas abroad on all sides on the subject of the
marriage relation. Divorce by the wholesale. Con-
cubinage in high circles. Libertinism, if gloved and
patent leathered, admitted into high circle. The
malaria of Salt Lake City has smitten the nation with
moral typhoid. The bad influence has well-nigh
spiked that gun of Sinai which needs to thunder
over the New England hills, over the savannas of the
South and over the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra
Nevadas clear to the Pacific coast, " Thou shalt not
commit adultery !" In 1878, in the State of Maine,
over 400 cases of divorce. In the State of Mass-
achusetts, in the same year, over 600 divorces. In
the little State of Connecticut in that year, over 400
divorces. In New England in that year 2,113
divorces. The County of Cook, in Illinois, over 800
divorces in one year. Advertisements in newspapers
saying, " Divorce legally and quietly effected. Can
pay in installments !" Some of the New York law-
yers giving their entire time to domestic separations
suborning witnesses, giving advice as to how many
months it is necessary to be out of the city, inducing
01 6 THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION.
suspicious complications, sending detective sleuth
hounds on the track of good citizens, until the honest
lawyers of these cities were compelled a little while
ago to make outcry against the bemeaning of their
honorable profession. Looser and looser ideas on
the subject of marriage, until sometimes the ques-
tion of divorce is taken into consideration in the
wedding solemnities, and people promise fidelity till
death do them part, and say afterward softly, " per-
haps," or " may be," " I rather think so." All over
this land more and more marriage in fun.
We do not want divorce made more easy in this
country ; we want it made more hard, so that people
will be more cautious in their affiancing, and you
will understand that if you marry a brute of a hus-
band or a fool of a wife, you will have to stand it.
Ah! my friends, there will be no toning up on this
subject, there will be no moral health in the United
States on the subject of the marriage relation until
this nation shall slough off this Mormonistic ulcer,
and burn out with caustic of gunpowder this wound
which has been so long feculent and ichorous and
deathful. If you are under the delusion that by mild
laws passed against Mormonism the evil will be extir-
pated, you are making an awful mistake. The sooner
you get over it the better. God and civilization
demand of both political parties now a plank anti-
Mormonistic.
Again, there is demanded of the political parties in
this day, a plank of intelligent helpfulness for the
great foreign population which have come among us.
It is too late now to discuss whether we had better
let them come. They are here. They are coming
this moment through the Narrows, they are coming
THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 6l/
this moment through the gates of Castle Garden,
they are this moment taking the first full inhalation
of the free air of America, and they will continue to
come as long as this country is the best place to live
in. You might as well pass a law prohibiting sum-
mer bees from alighting on a field of blossoming
buckwheat, you might as well prohibit the stags of
the mountains from coming down to the deer lick, as
to prohibit the hunger-bitten nations of Europe from
coming to this land of bread, as to prohibit the peo-
ple of England, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden,
and Germany, working themselves to death on small
wages on the other side the sea, from coming to this
land, where there are the largest compensations
under the sun. Why did God spread out the prai-
ries of Dakota, and roll the precious ore into Col-
orado? It was that all the earth might come and
plow, and come and dig. Just as long as the centrif-
ugal force of foreign despotisms throw them off, just
so long will the centripetal force of American institu-
tions draw them here.
And that is what is going to make this the might-
iest nation of the earth. Intermarriage of nation-
alities. Not circle intermarrying circle, and nation
intermarrying nation, but it is going to be Italian and
Norwegian, Russian and Celt, Scotch and French,
English and American. The American of a hundred
years from now is to be different from the American
of to-day. German brain, Irish wit, French civility,
Scotch firmness, English loyalty, Italian aesthetics
packed into one man, and he an American. It is this
intermarriage of nationalities that is going to make
the American race the mightiest race of the ages.
Now, I say, in God's name let them come.
6l8 THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION.
But what are we doing for the moral and intel-
lectual culture of the 500,000 foreigners who came in
one year, and the 600,000 who came in another year,
and the 800,000 who came in another year, and the
1,000,000 who came into our various American ports.
What are we doing for them ? Well, we are doing a
great deal for them. We steal their baggage as soon
as they get ashore ! We send them up to a boarding-
house where the least they lose is their money. We
swindle them within ten minutes after they get
ashore. We are doing a great deal for them ! But
what are we doing to introduce them into the duties
of good citizenship ? Many of them never saw a
ballot-box, many of them never heard of the Con-
stitution of the United States, many of them have no
acquaintance with our laws. Now, I say, let the
Government ol the United States, so commanded by
some political party, give to every immigrant who
lands here a volume in good type and well bound for
long usage a volume containing the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution of the United States,
and a chapter on the spirit of oiir Government. Let
there be such a book on every shelf of every free
library in America. While the American Bible
Society puts into the right hand of every immigrant
a copy of the Holy Scriptures, let the Government
of the United States, so commanded by some -polit-
ical party, put into the left hand of every immigrant
a volume instructing him in the duties of good
citizenship. There are thousands of foreigners in
this land who need to learn that the ballot-box is not
a footstool but a throne; not something to put your
foot on, but something to bow before.
Again, it is demanded of the political parties of this
THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 6lQ
day that they have a plank that shall acknowledge
God. Let there be no favoring of sects. Let Trini-
tarian and Unitarian, Jew and Gentile, Protestant
and Roman Catholic, be alike, in the sight of the law
every man free to worship in his own way but let
no political party think it can do its duty, unless it
acknowledges that God, who built this continent,
and revealed it at the right time to the discoverer,
and who has reared here a prosperity which has been
given to no other people. " Oh," says some one,
" there are people in this country who do not believe
in a God, and it would be an insult to them." Well,
there are people in this country who do not believe
in common decency, or common honesty, or any kind
of government, preferring % anarchy. Your every
platform is an insult to them. You ought not to re-
gard a man who does not believe in God any more
than you should regard a man who refuses to believe
in common decency. Your pocketbook is not safe a
moment in the presence of an atheist ! God is the
only source of good government. Why not, then,
say so, and let the chairman of the committee on res-
olutions in your national convention take a pen full
of ink, and with bold hand head the document with
one significant, "Whereas," acknowledging the good-
ness of God in the past, and begging His kindness
and protection for the future.
For the lack of recognition of God in your political
platforms they amount to nothing. They both make
loud declaration about civil service reform, and it has
been a failure. If you can take now in your cool
moments the declaration made by the Democratic
party in Cincinnati in 1880, and the declaration made
by the Republican party in Chicago in 1 880, and read
620 THK DEMAND OF C.OD AND CIVILIZATION.
those two declarations on the subject of civil service
reform, and then think of what has transpired, and
control your mirth, you have more self-control than
I have. My child asks me what is civil service reform,
and I tell him, as near as I can understand, it is that
when the Republican party get the government of a
State they are to turn out the Democrats, and when
the Democrats get the supremacy in the State they
are to turn out the Republicans.
Your platforms cry out for reform, and promise
reform, if they are only kept in power, or may obtain
power. How much do they mean by reform? See
what the Republican party did in 1876 in Louisiana
and what the Democratic party did three or four
years after in the gubernatorial election in Maine !
Credit Mobilier of eleven years ago, River and Har-
bor Bill, by which last year the taxpayers of the
United States were swindled out of fifty millions of
dollars in both infamies the two parties shoulder to
shoulder, and side to side. What you want is more
of God in your pronunciamentoes. Without Him
reform is retrogression, and gain is loss, and victory
is defeat.
Why, my friends, this country belongs to God, and
we ought in every possible way to acknowledge it.
From the moment that, on an October morning, in
1492, Columbus looked over the side of the ship, and
saw the carved staff which made him think he was
near an inhabited country, and saw also a thorn and
a cluster of berries type of our history ever since,
the piercing sorrows and the cluster of national joys
until this hour, our country has been bounded on
the north and south and east and west by the good-
ness of God. The Huguenots took possession of the
THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION". 621
Carolinas in the name of God ; William Penn settled
Philadelphia in the name of God ; the Hollanders
took possession of New York in the name of God ;
the Pilgrim Fathers settled New England in the name
of God. Preceding the first gun of Bunker Hill, at
the voice of prayer all heads uncovered. In the
war of 1812 an officer came to General Andrew
Jackson and said : " There is an unusual noise in the
camp ; it ought to be stopped." General Jackson
said: "What is the noise?" The officer said : "It
is the voices of prayer and praise." And the Gen-
eral said ; " God forbid that prayer and praise should
be an unusual noise in the encampment ; you had
better go and join them." Prayer at Valley Forge,
prayer at Monmouth, prayer at Atlanta, prayer at
South Mountain, prayer at Gettysburg.
" Oh," says some infidel, " the Northern people
prayed on one side, and the Southern people prayed
on the other side, and so it didn't amount to anything."
And I have heard good Christian people confounded
with the infidel statement, when it is as plain to me
as my right hand. Yes, the Northern people prayed
in one way, and the Southern people prayed in
another way, and God answered in His own way,
giving to the North the re-establishment of the Gov-
ernment, and giving to the South larger opportu-
nities, larger than she had ever anticipated, the har-
nessing Oi her rivers in great manufacturing interests,
until the Mobile, and the Tallapoosa, and the Chatta-
hoochee, are Southern Merrimacs, and the unrolling
of great mines of coal and iron, of which the world
knew nothing, and opening before her opportuni-
ties of wealth which will give ninety -nine per cent,
more of affluence than she ever possessed. And, in-
622 THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION.
stead of the black hands of American slaves emanci-
pated, there are the more industrious and black hands
of the coal and iron industries of the South which
will achieve for her fabulous and unimagined wealth.
"And there are domes of white blossoms where spread the white tent,
And theieare ploughs in the track where the war wagons went,
And there are songs where they lifted up Rachel's lament."
Oh, you are a stupid man if you do not understand
how God answered Abraham Lincoln's prayer in the
White House, and Stonewall Jackson's prayer in the
saddle, and answered all the prayers of all the cathe-
drals on both sides of Mason and Dixon's Line.
God's country all the way past. God's country
now.
Put His name in your pronunciamentoes, put His
name on your ensigns, put His name on your city
and State and national enterprises, put His name in
vour hearts. To most of us this country was the
cradle, and to most of us it will be the grave. We
want the same glorious privileges which we enjoy to
go down to our children. We can not sleep well the
last sleep, nor will the pillow of dust be easy to our
heads until we are assured that the God of our
American institutions in the past will be the God of
our American institutions in the days that are to
come. Oh, when all the rivers which empty into
the Atlantic and Pacific seas shall pull on factory
bands, when all the great mines of gold, and silver,
and iron, and coal shall be laid bare for the nation,
when the last swamp shall be reclaimed, and the last
jungle cleared, and the last American desert Eden-
ized, and from sea to sea the continent shall be occu-
pied by more than twelve hundred million souls,
may it be found that moral and religious influences
THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILUA TTON. 623
were multiplied in more rapid ratio than the popu-
lation. And then there shall be four doxologies
coming from north, and south, and east, and west
four doxologies rolling toward each other and meet-
ing mid-continent with such dash of holy joy that
they shall mount to the throne.
" And Heaven's high arch resound again
With 'peace on earth, good will to men.' "
CHAPTER LXI.
BOSSISM.
Each village and town has what is called in old-
fashioned parlance its " boss," and every city has its
" boss," and every State its " boss," and all these
" bosses " will come together and elect a great
national " boss." Against this slavery of American
politics I protest, and demand that in convention and
in ballot-box every man, without hindrance or male-
diction, vote as he thinks best, God his only judge.
In the first place, if we would break this slavery of
American politics, we must decline every four years
to believe that everything is in peril. If our Ameri-
can institutions every four years are in danger of
smash-up, the sooner they go to pieces the better,
and we have substituted a government which shall
have in it some style, some element of durability. I
remember eleven Presidential elections, and in each
one we were told that everything was in peril. As
near as I could tell, we were within a quarter of an
inch of the eternal precipice. Voters went to the
ballot-box tremulous with omens. Wagons and car-
riages were sent for the aged and the invalid. At
party expense these persons were brought forth, and
patriots who by strange coincidence at the same time
were candidates for office these patriots lifted the
invalids from the bed and the wagon, where there
were pillows and mattresses, and the unfortunates
624
BOSSISM. 625
were carefully supported on both sides to the polls,
where they deposited for the very life of the country
their precious votes,
Now, while there have been pivotal elections, in
the majority of cases there is nothing at stake but
official patronage. This magnifying of national peril
and this working before the public mind, on wires
the skeleton of national dangers every four years,
halts business and demoralizes everything. What do
Western merchants want to come here and buy
goods for if next autumn everything is to be a howl-
ing wilderness? What do Eastern men want to buy
Western lands for when everything is to be paralyzed ?
All business men will tell you that every four years
is an idle year. Why ? Because everything is stag-
nated by this cry of peril when there is no peril,
there is no crisis.
I remember that at eight years of age I stood in
the blistering sun and barefoot, at Somerville, New
Jersey, hearing a Western orator, who persuaded me
in that Presidential election that if William Henry
Harrison was elected instead of Martin Van Buren,
there would be no use of my growing up, because
there would be no country to grow in ! Not long ago,
in Music Hall, Boston, I was lecturing, and just be-
fore the lecture there -I was told a Western orator
would that night speak at Faneuil Hall ; so I hastened
through my work and got down to the Cradle of
Liberty, and found it that night rocked by the same
Western orator and the same Western speech, and
the only difference between the speech I heard forty
years ago and that speech was, in one case it was
William Henry Harrison, and in the other it was
Benjamin F. Butler.
626 BOSSISM.
Many of us remember the Presidential election
when Henry Clay and James K. Polk were the can-
didates for the Presidency. My father sat down pale
and exhausted and sick at the defeat of Henry Clay,
and said that all was lost. He had felt the magnet-
ism of that splendid Kentuckian, whose name I can
not pronounce without feeling an enthusiasm ting-
ling from scalp to heel. But was everything lost ?
Through that election we got the Texan domain, and
door after door of annexation has been opened until
when the wind blows from the west the national flag
dips into the Atlantic, and when it blows from the
east the national flag dips into the Pacific. We were
positively told that the existence of this nation de-
pended upon Mr. Lincoln's second election to the
Presidency ; but immediately after his inauguration
he died, and Andrew Johnson put the government in
just the opposite direction, and we still live.
During the sixteen years in which I have lived in
the State of New York, at every gubernatorial elec-
tion we have been told that everything was at stake.
Officers have changed, but there has been no change
in our prosperity except from good to better, and I
have noticed that the sun rises at about the same time
in the same month of the year, and the tides come in
with about the same strength, and it is high time in
this country we stop this crisis business and under-
stand that the Lord God has capacity to keep this
nation on in its high march of prosperity without
the help of Chicago conventions.
The old lion of national strength is covered all over
with greenbottle flies, sucking the life-blood from
neck and flanks.
The old lion of our national strength may shake it-
BOSSISM. 627
self terrifically, and another set of greenbottle flies,
but more hungry, will take their place. Do not
stand agape as to what will happen next. Go about
your honest everyday business. Do not believe the
political bureaus that declare that everything is in
peril. There is no more danger that this Govern-
ment is going to pieces, than that the moon is going
to pieces.
Again, if we want to break this tyranny of Amer-
ican politics, we must understand that neither party
is immaculate.
Do not vote for a man merely because your party
nominates him. If you want to know how much
better one party is than the other, I put the Louisi-
ana Returning Board of one party beside the guber-
natorial conflict of 1879, i" Maine, and I put the
Belknap frauds of one party against the Tweed lar-
cenies of the other. There is a difference in men, but
the only difference between the parties as to moral
character to-day, in my estimation, is the difference
between fifty and half a hundred. Both parties are
in need of radical reformation, and by the time they
are reformed they may be reformed out of existence.
But is there no difference? are there no preferences?
Ah ! so far from saying that, a man who does not in-
telligently, and in the fear and love of God, exercise
the right of suffrage, is not worthy of American citi-
zenship. There are preferences, and while every in-
telligent man and woman in America is to-day ask-
ing the question, " Who shall be the next President
of the United States?" I want to say two or three
things. In the first place, the next President of the
United States, and every President, ought to have an
established moral character, There have been times
628 BOSSISM.
when \\-f have had candidates for Governors, and
candidates for the Presidential chair, who were liber-
tines and gamblers and drunkards. In the House of
Representatives and in the United States Senate we
have had men who could not walk straight because
of intoxication, representing Illinois and Pennsyl-
vania and New York. I am glad to know that the
question of good morals is coming into every political
canvass. I do not care how talented a man is, if he
is bad.
Genius is worse than stupidity, if it move in the
wrong direction. In a nation where there are so
many homes, we must have at the head of it a man
who honors the sanctity of the domestic circle. In a
nation where there are so many young men looking
for an example of good character, we must have at
the head only one characterized by integrity. A man
who cannot govern himself cannot govern fifty mil-
lions of people. Our schools, our colleges, our uni-
versities, our churches, and our homesteads must
fight for good morals.
But do not listen to the hue and cry of partisan-
ship. You can get no idea from what newspapers
have to say of men, what their real character is.
The best man that God ever made, nominated on
either side, must wade through obloquy chin-deep.
Defamation elected James A. Garfield. Defamation
elected Abraham Lincoln. Defamation, I am told
by one who remembers the time, elected- Andrew
Jackson, and that is the testimony of one who is far
from liking Andrew Jackson. You have to take the
scales and put on one side all the scurrility about the
Republican candidate, and put on the other side the
scale all the scurrility about the Democratic candi-
BOSSISM. 629
date, weighing scurrility against scurrility, and the
man who is most abused and has the most scurrility
hurled upon him, will be the President. There is a
philosophy in it, my brethren. There are many bad
things about human nature, but there are many good
things about human nature, and one of the best
things about human nature is that it sympathizes
with one who is traduced.
Have nothing to do, by pen, or type, or voice, in
the malediction of public men. In the characteriz-
ation of men in private life we exercise Christian
principle, and we are, if we are good men, disposed
to put the best phase and the best interpretation on
conduct, and it is only a bad man who chooses always
to think bad of his fellows. Charity thinketh well,
if it is possible to think well.
Now, my brethren, let us in public life do as well
as we do in private life, and the same charity we ex-
tend toward those in private life extend toward those
who are in public life. Remember, my friends, when
you come to judge in regard to the character ot
men who shall be before this nation, you are
Christian patriots and not scavengers. I abhor this
defamation of public men. Just as soon as a man
comes to the front and achieves anything by his elo-
quence, or by his brilliancy, or by his public services,
all the hounds of earth and hell get after him.
Calmly and deliberately judge of men in the fear
and love of God, as you yourself would like to be
judged. You yourself perhaps may not come to
highest political position, but your sons may be on
the way to the honors of this government. Treat
men now in public life with the same fairness and
generosity that you would have your sons treated
when they come to high position in life.
630 BOSSISM.
Then, in order to be qualified for the chief office
of this nation, a man must also be a respecter of the
Christian religion. I apply no religious test. But
this country, discovered by Christian men and set-
tled by Hollanders and Huguenots and the descend-
ants of men from other lands who were persecuted
for their religious faith, and who took possession of
this land in the name of God and heaven such a
country as this must have over it one who respects
the Christian religion. Never, my Christian friends,
under any circumstances vote for any man who does
not believe in the existence of God and the divinity
of the Bible. A man who does not believe in the
existence of God and the divinity of the Bible I
would not trust him with a ten-cent piece, much less
elevate him to the Presidency. This is the only
foundation of common honesty, the Bible. I often
hear it said that the Constitution of the United States
is the foundation of our institutions. It is not. The
Bible is the foundation. Republican institutions are
an everlasting impossibility without it. Our first
President was a Christian. Let our next President
be at any rate a respecter of the Christian religion.
Then he must have heart large enough to take in
all the States and Territories. If a Western man, he
must not despise the sea-coast or want an immediate'
change of the center of commercial life. If an East-
ern man, he must not despise the West. If a South-
ern man, he must not think all men of the North of
ignoble generation. If a Northern man, he must not
want to keep up the old grudge which we settled
twenty-one years ago. He must have a heart large
enough to take in all the nation. There can never be
any more conflict in this country. The sword has
BOSSISM. 63 1
given place to the wheat cradle. The time of dark-
ness and contention has all gone by, and there is to be
no more use in this country for the musket except for
holiday turnout. Our navy-yards are going to be-
come museums containing ships used in barbaric ages
for settling by slaughter national differences. The
eagle has got to get off our coin and the dove take
its place, the bird of blood giving way for the bird of
the olive branch. I prescribe for the cure of all national
evils, and I prescribe for a defence against all national
peril the Christianization of the people. Let Chris-
tianity take possession of the ballot-box, there will be
no illegal voting. Let Christianity take charge of the
primaries and the caucuses, and we will have right-
eous nominees. Do not expect that the politicians of
this country will ever save the land. What have
they ever done for this country but get office and
make trouble ? They got us into the four years' war.
Did they get us out of it? No. The great masses
of the people rose up, fought out the fight and then
commanded peace. Politicians again and again have
ruined American commerce. Did they restore it?
No. The great masses of the people, with hard-fisted
and besweated industry, conquered those financial
calamities. So much depending upon the great masses
of the people, let us have them evangelized.
We want the Gospel of Jesus Christ dominant
that Gospel which William E. Gladstone demon-
strated when he sent an apology a few years ago to
the Austrian Government. He found he was wrong,
and apologized for it. Some said, " Oh, what imbe-
cility !" I say it was the grandest specimen of Chris-
tian character, possible. We settle individual differ-
ences by explanation and apology. Why not national
632 BOSSISM.
differences? Why by the sword? "Glory to God
in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men.''
Oh, this is the brightest day in all our history. Our
land is coming to greater and greater prosperity.
Agriculture is going to bring all its harvests, and
manufacturing is going to bring all its adroit fabrics,
and literature is going to bring all its printing-presses,
and art is going to bring all its pencils and chisels,
and commerce is going to bring all its masts, and re-
ligion is going to bring all its altars and towers, and
put them down at the feet of Him on whose vesture
and on whose thigh are written, " King of kings,
Lord of lords." Italy for pictures, France for man-
ners, Germany for scholarship, the United States for
God.
CHAPTER LXII.
THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE.
Look at it the sacred chest of the ancients. It
was about five feet long, three feet wide and three feet
high. It was within and without of pure gold. On
the top of it stood two angels facing each other with
outspread wings. In that sacred box was the law,
and there were in it a great many precious stones.
With that box went the fate of the nation. Carried
in front of the host, the waters of the Jordan parted.
Divinely charged, costlv, precious, momentous box.
No unholy hands might lay hold of it. It was called
the ark of the covenant. But you will understand it
was a box, the most precious box of the ages.
Where is it now ? Gone forever. Not a crypt of
church or museum of the world has a fragment of it.
But is not this nation God's chosen people ? Have
we not passed through the Red Sea? Have we not
been led with a pillow of fire by night ? Has this
nation no ark of the covenant? Yes. The ballot-
box, the sacred chest of the nation, the ark of the
American covenant.
In it is the law, in it is the divine and the human
will, in it is the fate of the nation. Carried in front
of our host again and again, the waters of national
trouble have parted. Mighty ark of the covenant,
the American ballot-box ! It is a very old box.
In Athens, long before the art of printing, the
633
634 THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE.
people dropped pebbles into it to give expression to
their sentiments. After that, beans were dropped
into it a white bean for the affirmative, a black bean
for the negative. After that when they wished to
vote a man out of citizenship they would write his
name upon a shell and drop that into the box.
O'Connell and Grote and Cobden and Macaulav
J
and Gladstone fought great battles in the introduc-
tion of the ballot-boxes in England, and to-day it is
one of the fastnesses of that nation. It is one of the
corner-stones of our government. It is older than
the constitution. In it is our national safety. Tell
me what will be the fate of the American ballot-box,
the ark of the American covenant, and I will tell you
what will be the fate of this nation. Give the people
once a year or once in four years an opportunity to
express their political sentiments, and you practically
avoid insurrection and revolution.
Either give them the ballot, or they will take the
sword. Without the ballot-box there can be no free
republican institutions. Milton visiting in Italy
noticed that on the sides of Vesuvius gardeners and
farmers were at work while the volcano was in erup-
tion, and he asked them if they were safe. "Yes,"
said the farmers and the gardeners, " it is safe ; all
the danger is before the eruption ; then come
earthquake and terror, but just as soon as the volcano
begins to pour forth lava we all feel at rest." It is
the suppression of political sentiment, the suppres-
sion of public opinion, that makes moral earthquake
and national earthquake. Let public opinion pour
forth, and that gives satisfaction, and that gives peace,
and that gives permanency to good government.
And yet, though the ballot-box is the sacred chest
THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE, 635
and the ark of the American covenant, you know as
well as I know, it has its sworn antagonists.
Ignorance is a mighty foe. Other things being
equal, the more intelligence a man has the better he
is qualified to exercise the right of suffrage. You
have been ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years studying
American institutions, you have canvassed all the
great questions about tariff and home rule and all
the educational questions, and everything in Amer-
ican politics you are well acquainted with. You
consider yourself competent to cast a vote ift No-
vember, and you are competent. You will take your
position in the line of electors, you will wait for
your term to come, the judge of election will an-
nounce your name, you will cast your vote, and pass
out. Well done.
But right behind you there will come a man who
cannot spell the name of controller, or attorney, or
mayor. He cannot write, or if he can write he uses a
small "I" for the personal pronoun. He could not tell
on which side of the Alleghany Mountains Ohio is.
Educated canary birds, educated horses know more
than he. He will cast his vote, and it will balance
your vote. His ignorance is as mighty as your intel-
ligence. That is not right. All men of fair mind
will acknowledge that that is not right. Until a man
can read the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution of the United States, and calculate the
interest on the American debt, and know the differ-
ence between a republican form of government and
a monarchy or a despotism, he is unfit to exercise
the right of suffrage at any ballot-box between Key
West and Alaska.
In 1872, in England, there were 2,600,000 children
636 THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE.
who ought to have been in school. There were only
1,333,000, in other words, about fifty per cent., and
of the fifty per cent, not more than five per cent, got
anything worthy the name of an education. Now,
take that foreign ignorance, and add it to our Amer-
ican ignorance, and there will be thousands and
thousands of people, who are no more qualified to ex-
ercise the right of suffrage than to lecture on astron-
omy. How are these things to be corrected ? By
laws .of compulsory education well executed. I go in
for a law which, after giving fair warning for a few
years, shall make ignorance a crime.
There is no excuse for ignorance on these subjects
in this land, where the common schools make knowl-
edge as free as the fresh air of heaven. I would have
a board of examination seated beside the officers of
registration, and let them decide whether the men
who come up to vote have any capacity to be mon-
archs in a land where we are all monarchs. One of
the most awful foes of the American ballot-box tc-day
it popular ignorance. Educate the people, give them
an opportunity to know and understand what they
do. If the}' will not take the education, deny them
the vote.
Another powerful enemy of this sacred chest, the
ark of the American covenant, the ballot-box, is spu-
rious voting.
In i88o, in Brooklyn, there were a thousand names
recorded of persons who had no residence here, and
if there were a thousand attempted frandulent votes
in the best city on the continent, what may we expect
in cities not so fortunate? What a grand thing is
the law of registration ! Without it elections in this
country would be a farce. There must be a scrutiny
THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 637
on this subject. The law must have keenest twist
for the neck of repeaters. Something more than
slight fine and short imprisonment. It is an attempt
at the assassination of the republic, when a man at-
tempts to put in a spurious vote. In olden times,
when men laid unholy hands on the ark of the cove-
nant they dropped down dead. Witness Uzzah.
And when men attempt to put unholy hands on the
American ballot-box, the ark of the American cove-
nant, they deserve extermination.
Another powerful foe of this sacred chest is
intimidation.
Corporations sometimes demand that their em-
ployes vote in this and that way. It is skillfully
done. It is not positively in so many words de-
manded, but the employe understands he will be
frozen out of the establishment unless he votes as the
firm do. So you can go into factory villages, and
having found out the politics of the head men in the
factory, you can tell which way the election is going.
Now, that is damnable. If, in any precinct in the
United States, a man cannot vote as he pleases, there
is something awfully wrong.
How do you treat that employe who votes differ-
ently from what you do? Oh, you say you do not
interfere with his right of- suffrage. But you call
him into your private office, and you find fault with
his work, and after a while you tell him there is an
uncle, or an aunt, or a niece, or a nephew that must
have that position. You do not say it is because he
voted this or that way, but he knows, and God knows
it is. If that man has given to you in hard work an
equivalent for the wages you pay him, you have no
right to ask anything else of him. He sold you his
THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE.
work ; he did not sell you his political or religious
principles. But you know as well as I do there is
sometimes on that sacred chest, the ark of the Amer-
ican covenant, a shadow corporate or monopolistic.
I do not wonder at the vehemence of Lord Chief-
Justice Holt, of England, when he said: "Let the
people vote fairly. Interference with a man's vote is
in behalf of this or that party. I give you notice
that if an offender against the law comes before me, I
will charge the jury to make him pay well for it."
No shadow plutocratic, or mobocratic, or capitalistic.
Every man voting in his own way God and his own
conscience the only dictator.
Another powerful foe of that sacred chest, the ark
of the American covenant, the ballot-box, is bribery.
You know something of the hundreds of thousands
of dollars that were expended to carry Indiana in
1880. You know something of the vast sums of
money expended in Brooklyn and New York in
other years to carry elections. Bribery is one of the*
disgraces of this country. It is often the case that a
man is nominated for office with reference to his
capacity to provide money for the elections or with
reference to his capacity to command money from
others. You know the names of men who have at
different times gone into the Gubernatorial chair or
Congressional office buying their way all through. I
tell you no news. Your patriotic heart has been
pained again and again with it.
Very often it is not money that bribes, but it is
office. "You make me President and I'll make you
Secretary of State, or Attorney-General, or some-
thing else; you make me Governor and I'll make
you Surveyor-General ; you make me Mayor and I'll
v THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 639
put you on the Water Board ; you give me position
and I'll give you position." That is the form of the
bribe often and often in these great cities. So it is
often the case that by the time a man comes to an
office to which he has been elected, he is from the
crown of head to the sole of foot mortgaged with
pledges, and the man who goes to Albany or to
Washington to get an office is applying for some
position which was given away three months before
the election. Two long lines of worm fence, one
worm fence reaching to Albany, and the other to
Washington, and there a great many citizens astride
the fence, and they are equally poised, and they are
waiting to see on which side there is most emolu-
ment, and on this side they get down. But bribery
kicks both ways. It kicks the man that offers it, and
the man that takes it. Bribery to-day you will
admit to be one of the mightiest foes of the Ameri-
can ballot-box.
Another great enemy of that sacred chest is def-
amation of character.
Can you find out from the newspapers when two
men are in office, which is the best? 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 elect-
ors 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 govern-
ment. Defamation of character.
Thomas Paine writes Washington a letter, and pub-
lishes it, saying : " Treacherous in all private friend-
640 THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE.
ship and a hypocrite in public morals, the world will
be puzzled to know whether we had. better call you
an apostate or an impostor, and whether you aban-
doned good morals, or never had any." That is
Thomas Paine's opinion of George Washington.
John Quincy Adams declared that he was solaced
.in regard to the scandals and anathemas inflicted upon
him by the fact that his father, John Adams, had to
go through the same process, and John Quincy
Adams declared he really thought in that present
election there were men who gave their entire time
to manufacturing falsehood in regard to him. Martin
Van Buren was al wavs pictorialized as a rat. Thomas
H. Benton and Amos Kendall were always pictorial-
ized as robbers with battering-rams breaking in the
door of the United States Bank.
On the day on which Thomas Jefferson was inau-
gurated President of the United States, March 4th,
1801, the following appeared in the Sentinel, of Bos-
ton : " Monumental inscription. Yesterday expired,
deeply regretted by millions of grateful Americans,
and by all good men, the Federal Administration of
the Government of the United States, animated by
Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Knox, Pickering,
McHenry, Marshall and Stoddard ; aged twelve years.
Its death was occasioned by the secret arts and open
violence of foreign and domestic demagogues. As
one tribute of gratitude in these times, this monument
to the talents and services of the deceased is raised
by the Sentinel." Under such defamation as that
Thomas Jefferson went into office.
My father told me that when Andrew Jackson was
running for President of the United States, the
whole land was flooded with coffin handbills pic-
. THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 641
tures of six dead men, in allusion to the six deserters
whom Andrew Jackson had had shot, and all the
pictorials of those times represented Jackson as tak-
ing his office from the hand of the devil.
I saw a few summers ago at Put-in-Bay, Ohio, in a
museum, a prominent paper of 1844, which spoke of
Henry Clay as a gambler, a libertine, and a murderer ;
and the manner in which he was defamed and the
outrages which were heaped upon him may be well
guessed from Mr. Clay's eulogy of his native State,
Kentucky. He said : " When I seemed to be
assailed by all the rest of the world, she interposed
her broad and impenetrable- shield, repelled the
poisoned shafts that were aimed for my destruction,
and vindicated my good name from every malignant
and unfounded aspersion."
Defamation ! It is the curse of the American
ballot-box. Just as soon as in the great cities a man
is put up for office he is made the target. The fact
that he is up is prima facie evidence that he must be
brought down. His public life, and his private life,
are scrutinized, aud all the electric lights are turned
on. How often it is that men have gone down under
such things. In every autumnal election the air is
filled with carrion crows scenting carcasses. Caw !
Caw ! Caw ! There are newspapers in the United
States that in the great autumnal elections take wild
license for liberty. They are filled with calumny.
The editorial columns of such papers reek with it ;
their columns are stuffed with it. There are news-
papers in the United States which, in the great
popular elections, breakfast, and dine, and sup on
indecency, They wallow in it. Swine in the mire.
They give more for one quill of filth than a whole
4*
642 THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE.
hogshead of decent product. There are in these
great autumnal elections men sitting in editorial
chairs who write with a quill, not plucked from the
stupid goose, or the sublime eagle, but from a turkey
buzzard ! Ghouls ! Ghouls ! They tip the city
sewer into their editorial inkstands. Defamation of
character is one of the curses of the American ballot-
box to-day. In your great presidential elections who
can tell from what he reads who is the man he ought
to vote for ? Bad men sometimes applauded, good
men denounced.
Another powerful foe ol the sacred chest, the
ark of the American covenant, the ballot-box, is the
rowdy and drunken caucus.
The ballot-box does not give any choice to a man
when the nominations are made in the back part of a
groggery. When the elector comes up he has to
choose between two evils. In some of the cities men
have come to the ballot-box to vote, and have found
both names such a scaly, greasy, and stenchful crew
they had no choice. You say vote for somebody
outside. Then they throw away their vote. Chris-
tian men of New York and Brooklyn, honorable men,
patriotic men, go and take possession of the caucuses.
First having saturated your pocket handkerchief with
cologne or some other disinfectant, go down to the
caucus and take possession of it in the name of the
Lord God Almighty and the American people,
though after you come back you should have to
hang your hat and coat on a line in the back yard
for ventilation.
In some of the States politics have got so low
that the nominees no more need good morals than
they do a bath-tub. Snatch the ballot-box from such
THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 643
men. Where is the David who will go forth and
bring the ark of the covenant back from Kirjath-
jearim? Do you not think politics have got to a
pretty low ebb in our day when a Tweed could be
sent to the Legislature of New York, and a John
Morrissey, the prince of gamblers, could be sent' to
the American Congress ?
Now, how are these things to be remedied ? Some
say by a property qualification. They say that after
a man gets a certain amount of property a certain
amount of real estate he is financially interested in
good government, and he becomes cautious and con-
servative. I reply, a property qualification would
shut off from the ballot-box a great many of the best
men in this land. Literary men are almost always
poor. A pen is a good implement to make the world
better, but it is a very poor implement to get a live-
lihood ordinarily. I have known scores 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, teachers of schools, editors of
newspapers, ministers of religion, qualified in every
possible way to vote, yet no worldly success. There
has been many a man who has not had a house on
earth who will have a mansion in heaven.
There are many who, through accidents of fortune,
have come to great success while they are profound
in their stupidity, as profound in their stupidity as a
man of large fortune with whom I was crossing the
ocean, who told me he was going to see the dykes of
Scotland ! When a member of my family asked a
lady, on her return from Europe, if she had seen
Mont Blanc, she replied: "Well, really, I don't
know ; is that in Europe ?" Ignorance by the square
644 TH E CHRISTIANIZED VOTE.
foot. Property qualification will not do. The only
way these evils will be eradicated, will be by more
thorough legal defence of the ballot-box and a more
thorough moralization and Christianization of the
people. That ark of the covenant was carried into
captivity to Kirjath-jearim, but one day the people
hooked oxen to a cart, and they put this ark on the
cart, and the cart was taken to Jersualem the ark of
the covenant coming with the shouting and thanks-
giving of the people. And though the American
ballot-box, the ark of the American covenant, our
sacred chest, has been carried again and again into
captivity by fraud and iniquity and spurious voting,
I believe it will be brought back yet by prayer and
by Christian consecration, and will be set down in
the midst of the temple of Christian patriotism.
Whose responsibility ? Yours and mine.
CHAPTER LXIII.
CAPITAL AND LABOR.
" Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so
to them." MATT. 7: 12.
The greatest war the world has ever seen is
between capital and labor. The strife is not like that
which in history is called the Thirty Years' War,
for it is a war of centuries, it is a war of five conti-
nents, it is a war hemispheric. The middle classes
in this country, upon whom the nation has depended
for holding the balance of power and for -acting as
mediators between the two extremes, are diminish-
ing, and if things go on at the same ratio as they are
now going; it will not be very long before there will
be no middle class in this country, but all will be very
rich or very poor, princes or paupers, and the coun-
try will be given up -to palaces and hovels. The
antagonistic forces are closing in upon each other.
The telegraphic operators' strikes, the railroad em-
ployes' strikes, the Pennsvlvania miners' strikes, the
movements of the boycotters and the dynamiters are
only skirmishes before a general engagement, or, if
you prefer it, escapes through the safety-valves of an
imprisoned force which promises the explosion of
society. You may pooh-pooh it ; you may say that
this trouble, like an angry child, will cry itself to
sleep; you may belittle it by calling it Fourierism,
or Socialism, or St. Simonism, or Nihilism, or Com-
645
646 CAPITAL AND LABOR.
munism ; but that will not hinder the fact that it is
the mightiest, the darkest, the most terrific threat of
this century.
M*
All attempts at pacification have been dead failures,
and monopoly is more arrogant, and the trades-unions
more bitter. " Give us more wages," cry the em-
ployes. " You shall have less," say the capitalists.
" Compel us to do fewer hours of toil in a day."
" You shall toil more hours," say the others. " Then,
under certain conditions, we will not work at all,"
say these. " Then you shall starve," say those, and
the workmen gradually using up that which they ac-
cumulated in better times, unless there be some
radical change, we shall have soon in this country
three million hungry men and women. Now three
million hungry people cannot be kept quiet. All the
enactments of legislatures and all the constabularies
of the cities, and all the army and navy of the United
States, cannot keep three million hungry people
quiet. What then? Will this war between capital
and labor be settled by human wisdom? Never!
The brow of the one becom.es more rigid, the fist of
the other more clenched.
But that which human wisdom cannot achieve will
be accomplished by Christianity if it be given full
sway. You have heard of medicines so powerful
that one drop would stop a disease and restore a
patient ; and I have to tell you that one drop of my
text properly administered will stop all these woes of
society and give convalescence and complete health
to all classes. " Whatsoever ye would that men
should do to you, do ye even so to them."
I shall first show you how this quarrel between
monopo!5* and hard work cannot be stopped, and
CAPITAL AND LABOR. 647
then I will show you how this controversy will be
settled.
In the first place, there will come no pacification to
this trouble through an outcry against rich men merely
because they are rich. There is no member of a trades-
union on earth that would not be rich if he could be.
Sometimes through a fortunate invention, or through
some accident of prosperity, a man who had nothing
comes to large estate, and we see him arrogant and
supercilious, and taking people by the throat just as
other people took him by the throat. There is some-
thing very mean about human nature when it comes
to the top. But it is no more a sin to be rich than it
is a sin to be poor. There are those who have
gathered great estate through fraud, and then there
are millionaires who have gathered their fortune
through foresight in regard to changes in the
markets, and through brilliant business faculty, and
every dollar of their estate is as honest as the dollar
which the plumber gets for mending a pipe, or the
mason gets for building a wall. There are those who
are kept in poverty because of their own fault. They
might have been well off, but they smoked or chewed
up their earnings, or they lived beyond their means,
while others on the same wages and on the same
salaries went on to competency. I know a man who
is all the time complaining of his poverty and crying
out against rich men, while he himself keeps two
dogs, and chews and smokes, and is filled to the chin
with whisky and beer!
Micawber said to David Copperfield : "Copper-
field, my boy, one pound income, twenty shillings
and sixpence expenses; result, misery. But, Copper-
field, my boy, one pound income, expenses nineteen
648 CAPITAL AND LABOR.
shillings and sixpence; result, happiness." And there
are vast multitudes of people who are kept poor be-
cause they are the victims of their o\vn improvidence.
It is no sin to be rich, and it is no sin to be poor. 1
protest against this outcry which I hear against those
who, through economy, and self-denial, and assiduity,
have come to large fortune. This bombardment
of commercial success will never stop this quarrel
between capital and labor.
Neither will the contest be settled by cynical and
unsympathetic treatment of the laboring classes.
There are those who speak of them as though they
were only cattle or draught horses. Their nerves
are nothing, their domestic comfort is nothing, their
happiness is nothing. They have no more sympathy
for them than a hound has for a hare, or a hawk for
a hen, or a tiger for a calf. When Jean Valjean, the
greatest hero of Victor Hugo's writings, after a life
of suffering and brave endurance, goes into incarce-
ration and death, they clap the book shut, and say:
'Good for him !" They stamp their feet with indig-
nation and say just the opposite of "Save the work-
ing classes." They have all their sympathies with
Shy lock, and not with Antonio and Portia. They
are plutocrats, and their feelings are infernal. Thev
are filled with irritation and irascibility on this sub-
ject. To stop this awful embroglio between capital
and labor they will lift not so much as the tip end of
the little finger.
Neither will there be anv pacification of this angry
controversy through violence. God never blessed
murder. The poorest use you can put a man to is to
kill him. Blow up to-morrow all the country-seats on
the banks of the Hudson, and all the fine houses on
CAPITAL AND LABOR. 649
Madison Square, and Brooklyn Heights, and Bunker
Hill, and Rittenhouse Square, and Beacon Street, and
all the bricks and timber and stone will just fall back
on the bare head of American labor. The worst
enemies of the working classes in the United States
and Ireland are their demented coadjutors. Assas-
sination the assassination of Lord Frederick Caven-
dish and Mr. Burke in Phcenix Park, Dublin, Ireland,
in the attempt to avenge the wrongs of Ireland, only
turned away from that afflicted people millions of
sympathizers. The recent attempt to blow up the
House of Commons, in London, had only this effect :
to throw out of employment tens of thousands of in-
nocent Irish people in England.
In this country the torch put to factories that have
discharged hands for good or bad reason ; obstruc-
tions on the rail-track in front of midnight express
trains because the offenders do not like the president
of the company ; strikes on shipboard the hour they
were going to sail, or in printing-offices the hour the
paper was to go to press, or in mines the day the coal
was to be delivered, or on house scaffoldings so the
builder fails in keeping his contract all these are
only a hard blow on the head of American labor, and
cripple its arms, and lame its feet, and pierce its
heart. Take the last great strike in America the
telegraph operators' strike and you have to find
that the operators lost four hundred thousand dol-
lars' worth of wages, and have had poorer wages
ever since. Traps sprung suddenly upon employers,
and violence, never took one knot out of the knuckle
of toil, or put one farthing of wages into a callous
palm. Barbarism will never cure the wrongs of
civilization. Mark that !
650 CAPITAL AND LABOR.
The most imperious outrage against the poor and
against the working classes will yet cower before the
law. Violence and contrary to the law will never
accomplish anything, but righteousness and accord-
ing to law, will accomplish it.
Well, if this controversy between Capital and La-
bor cannot be settled by human wisdom, if to-day
Capital and Labor stand with their thumbs on each
other's throat as they do it is time for us to look
somewhere else for relief, and it points from my text
roseate and jubilant, and puts one hand on the broad-
cloth shoulder of Capital, and puts the other hand on
the homespun-covered shoulder of Toil, and says,
with a voice that will grandly and gloriously settle
this, and settle everything, " Whatsoever ye would
that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."
That is, the lady of the household will say : " I must
treat the maid in the kitchen just as I would like to
be treated if I were downstairs and it were my work
to wash, and cook, and sweep, and it were the duty
of the maid in the kitchen to preside in this parlor."
The maid in the kitchen must say : " If my employer
seems to be more prosperous than I, that is no fault
of hers ; I shall not treat her as an enemy. I will
have the same industry and fidelity downstairs as I
would expect from my subordinates if I happened to
be the wife of a silk importer."
The owner of an iron mill, having taken a dose of
my text before leaving home in the morning, will go
into his foundry and, passing into what is called the
puddling-room, he will see a man there stripped to
the waist, and besweated and exhausted with the
labor and the toil, and he will say to him : " Why, it
.seems to be very hot in here. You look very much
CAPITAL AND LABOR. 651
exhausted. I hear your child is very sick with scar-
let fever. If you want your wages a little earlier
this week, so as to pay the nurse and get the medi
cines, just come into my office any time."
After awhile, crash goes the money-market, and
there is no more demand for the articles manufact-
ured in that iron-mill, and the owner does not know
what to do. He says, " Shall I stop the mill, or shall
I run it on half-time, or shall I cut down the men's
wages?" He walks the floor of his counting-room
all day, hardly knowing what to do. Toward eve-
ning he calls all the laborers together. They stand
all around, some with arms akimbo, some with folded
arms, wondering what the boss is going to do now.
The manufacturer say s, " Men, times are very hard ;
I don't make twenty dollars where I used to make
one hundred. Somehow, there is no demand now
for what we manufacture, or but ver}- little demand.
You see I am at vast expense, and I have called you
together this afternoon to see what you would advise.
I don't want to shut up the mill, because that would
force you out of work, and you have always been
very faithful, and I like you, and you seem to like
me, and the bairns must be looked after, and your
wife will after a while want a new dress. I don't
know what to do."
There is a dead halt for a minute or two, and then
one of the workmen steps out from the ranks of his
fellows, and says : " Boss, you have been very good
to us, and when you prospered we prospered, and
now you are in a tight place and I am sorry, and we
have got to sympathize with you. I don't know
how the others feel, but I propose that we take off
twenty per cent, from our wages, and then when the
652 CAPITAL AND LABOR.
times get good you will remember us and raise them
again." The workman looks around to his com-
rades, and says : " Boys, what do you say to this?
All in favor of my proposition will say aye." "Aye!
aye! aye!" shout two hundred voices.
But the mill owner, getting in some new ma-
chinery, exposes himself very much, and takes cold,
and it settles intp pneumonia, and he dies. In the
procession to the tomb are all the workmen, tears
rolling down their cheeks, and off upon the ground;
but an hour before the procession gets to the ceme-
tery the wives and the children of these workmen
are at the grave waiting for the arrival of the funeral
pageant. The minister of religion may have deliv-
ered an eloquent eulogium before they started from
the house, but the most impressive things are said
that day by the working-classes standing around the
tomb.
That night in all the cabins of the working-people
where they have family prayers the widowhood and
the orphanage in the mansion are remembered. No
glaring populations look over the iron fence of the
cemetery ; but, hovering over the scene, the benedic-
tion of God and man is coming from the fulfilment of
the Christlike injunction, " Whatsoever ye would
that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."
" Oh," says some man here, " that is all Utopian,
that is apocryphal, that is impossible." No. Yester-
dav I cut out of a paper this : " One of the pleasant-
est incidents recorded in a long time is reported from
Sheffield, England. The wages of the men in the
iron works at Sheffield are regulated by a board of
arbitration, by whose decision both masters and men
are bound. For some time past the iron and steel
CAPITAL AND LABOR. 653
trade has been extremely unprofitable, and the em-
ployers can not, without much loss, pay the wages
fixed by the board, which neither employers nor
employed have the power to change. To avoid this
difficulty, the workmen in one of the largest steel
works in Sheffield hit upon a device as rare as it was
generous. They offered to work for their employers
one week without any pay whatever. How much
better that plan is than a strike would be."
But you go with me and I will show you not
so far off as Sheffield, England factories, banking-
houses, storehouses, and costly enterprises where
this Christ-like injunction of my text is fully kept,
and you could no more get the employer to practice
an injustice upon his men, or the men to conspire
against the employer, than you could get your right
hand and your left hand, your right eye and your left
eye, your right ear and your left ear, into physiolog-
ical antagonism. Now, where is this to begin ? In
our homes, in our stores, on our farms not waiting
for other people to do their duty. Is there a diverg-
ence now between the parlor and the kitchen ? Then
there is something wrong, either in the parlor or the
kitchen, perhaps in both. Are the clerks in your store
irate against the firm? Then there is something
wrong, either behind the counter, or in the private
office, or perhaps in both.
The great want of the world to-day is the fulfil-
ment of this Christ-like injunction, that which He
promulgated in His sermon Olivetic. All the polit-
ical economists under the arch or vault of the heav-
ens in convention for a thousand years cannot settle
this controversy between monopoly and hard work,
between capital and labor.
654 CAPITAL AND LABOR.
During the Revolutionary war there was a heavy
piece of timber to be lifted, perhaps for some fortress,
and a corporal was overseeing the work, and he was
giving commands to some soldiers as they lifted :
" Heave away there ! yo heave ! " Well, the timber
was too heavy ; they could not get it up. There was
a gentleman riding by on a horse, and he stopped,
and said to this corporal, " Why don't you help them
lift? That timber is too heavy for them to lift."
" No," he said, " I won't ; I am a corporal." The
gentleman got off his horse, and came up to the
place. " Now," he said to the soldiers, " all together
yo heave ! " and the timber went to its place.
" Now," said the gentleman to the corporal, " when
you have a piece of timber too heavy for the men to
lift, and you want help, you send to your commander-
in-chief." It was Washington. Now, that is about all
the Gospel I know the Gospel of giving somebody
a lift, a lift out of darkness, a lift out of earth into
heaven.
"Oh," says some wiseacre ; "talk as you will, the
law of demand and supply will regulate these things
until the end of time." No, they will not, unless
God dies and the batteries of the Judgment Day are
spiked, and Pluto and Proserpine, king and queen of
the infernal regions, take full possession of this world.
Do you know who Supply and Demand are? They
have gone into partnership, and they propose to
swindle this earth, and are swindling it. You are
drowning. Supply and Demand stand on the shore,
one on one side, the other on the other side of the
life-boat, and they cry out to you : "Now, you pay
us what we ask you for getting you to shore, or go
to the bottom !" If you can borrow $5,000 you can
CAPITAL AND LABOR. 655
keep from failing in business. Supply and Demand
say: "Now, you pay us exorbitant usury, or you
go into bankruptcy." This robber firm of Supply
and Demand say to you : "The crops are short.
We bought up all the wheat and it is in our bin.
Now, you pay our price or starve." That is your
magnificent law of supply and demand.
Supply and Demand own the largest mill on earth,
and all the rivers roll over their wheel, and into their
hopper they put all the men, women and children
they can shovel out of the centuries, and the blood
and the bones redden the valley while the mill grinds.
That diabolic law of supply and demand will yet have
to stand aside, and instead thereof will come the law
of love, the law of co-operation, the law of kindness,
the law of sympathy, the law of Christ.
Have you no idea of the coming of such a time ?
Then you do not believe the Bible. All the Bible is
full of promises on this subject, and as the ages roll
on the time will come when men of fortune will be
giving larger sums to humanitarian and evangelistic
purposes, and there will be more James Lenoxes and
Peter Coopers, and William E. Dodges, and George
Peabodys. As that time comes there will be more
parks, more picture-galleries, more gardens thrown
open for the holiday people and the working-classes.
I was reading only this morning, in regard to a
charge that had been made in England against Lam-
beth Palace that it was exclusive, and that charge
demonstrated the sublime fact that to the grounds of
that wealthy estate eight hundred poor families have
free passes, and forty croquet companies and on the
half-day-holidays four thousand poor people recline
on the grass, walk through the paths, and sit under the
656 CAPITAL AND LAKOK.
trees. That is Gospel Gospel on the wing, Gospel
out of doors worth just as much as indoors. That
time is going to come.
That is only a hint of what is going to be. The
time is going to come when, if you have anything in
your house worth looking at pictures, pieces of
sculpture you are going to invite me to come and
see it, you are going to invite my friends to come and
see it, and you will say, " See whafl have been blessed
with. God has given me this, and so far as enjoying
it, it is yours also." That is Gospel.
In crossing the Alleghany Mountains many years
ago the stage halted, and Henry Clay dismounted
from the stage, and went out on a rock at the very
verge of the cliff, and he stood there with his cloak
wrapped around him, and he seemed to be listening
for something. Some one said to him, ' What are
you listening for?" Standing there on the top of
the mountain, he said : " I am listening to the tramp
of the footsteps of the coming millions of this con-
tinent."
A sublime posture for an American statesman.
You and I to-day stand on the mountain top of
privilege, and on the Rock of Ages, and we look off,
and we hear coming from the future the happy in-
dustries, and the smiling populations, and the conse-
crated fortunes, and the innumerable prosperities of
the closing nineteenth and the opening twentieth
centuries.
The greatest friend of capitalist and toiler, and the
one who will yet bring them together in complete
accord, was born one Christmas night while the cur-
tains of heaven swung, stirred by th wings angelic.
Owner of all things all the continents, all worlds,
CAPITAL AND LABOR. 657
and all the islands of light. Capitalist of immensity,
crossing over to our condition. Coming into our
world, not by gate of palace, but by door of barn.
Spending His first night amid the shepherds. Gath-
ering after around Him the fishermen to be His chief
attendants. With adze, and saw, and chisel, and axe,
and in a carpenter-shop showing himself brother with
the tradesmen. Owner of all things, and yet on a
hillock back of Jerusalem one day resigning every-
thing for others, keeping not so much as a shekel to
pay for His obsequies, by charity buried in the sub-
urbs of a city that had cast Him out. Before the
cross of such a capitalist, and such a carpenter, all
men can afford to shake hands, and worship. Here is
the every man's Christ. None so high but He was
higher. None so poor but He was poorer. At His
feet the hostile extremes will yet renounce their ani-
mosities, and countenances which have glowered
with the prejudices and revenge of centuries shall
brighten with the smile of heaven as He commands :
" Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you
do ye even so to them."
CHAPTER LXIV.
MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES.
The lightnings and earthquakes united their forces
to wreck a mountain of Arabia Petraea in olden time,
and travelers to-day find heaps of porphyry and
greenstone rocks, bowlder against bowlder, the re-
mains of the first law library, written, not on parch-
ment or papyrus, but on shattered slabs 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 few, 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 ol the able editorial.
These laws are the pillars of society, and if you re-
move 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
658
MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 659
a Nordensfeld five-barreled gun, and this is a Gatling
ten-barreled gun, and this is a Martigny thirty-seven
barreled gun." But I have to tell them that they are
all of the same calibre, and that they shoot from eter-
nity to eternity.
The Decalogue forbids idolatry, image making,
profanity, maltreatment of parents, Sabbath desecra-
tion, murder, theft, incontinence, lying, and covetous
ness. This is the Decalogue by which you and I will
have to be tried, and by that same Decalogue you and
1 must try candidates for office.
Of course we shall not find anything like perfec-
tion. 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 of the great cities of this land I re-
ceive daily or weekly newspapers, sent to me regu-
larly 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 foundation of the Amer-
660 MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES.
ican 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.
I warn you also against the mistake which many
are making, and always do make, of applying a dif-
ferent 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 illus-
trious 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 wield-
ing 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.
11 I utter a falsehood in regard to a man I may dam-
age him, but I get for myself tenfold more damage.
That is a gun that kicks.
If, for instance, a man be profane, under provo-
MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 66 1
cation he will commit any crime. I say under provo-
cation. 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 provo-
cation, 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 de-
cent when he is not and maltreats his parents by dis-
gracing their name, if they were good. Be careful,
therefore, how you charge that sin against any man
either in high 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 dis-
gusting 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 demon-
stration is doubtful as compared with it.
And, then, when you investigate a man on such
subjects, you must go the whole length of investiga-
tion, 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 forgive-
ness 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
662 MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES.
glorious exception. But do not chop off the seventh
commandment to suit the case. Do not change Fair-
banks' scale to suit what you are weighing with it.
J)o 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 scandalizer of the
human race. You are a leper. Make room for that
leper! When a man, by pen, or type or tongue, ut-
ters such a slander on the human race that there is no
such thing as purity, 1 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
defence 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 com-
pany, they nearly all gamble, they all went to places
where thev ought not. Why? The commission 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, some of them,
bombarding the suffering candidates all the week,
think no wrong in riding all Sunday, and they are
MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 663
at this moment, many of them, in the political head-
quarters calculating the chances. All the week hurl-
ing the eighth commandment at Mr. Blaine, the
seventh commandment at Mr. Cleveland, and the
ninth 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 re-
ported, and as I have heard in regard to them, bom-
barding 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 command-
ment, 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 seven ? Oh yes, we find in all departments
men are hurling their indignation against sins per-
haps 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 handle the guns, better
not experiment much with the divine ammunition.
664 MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES.
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 moun-
tain of Arabia Petraea.
.1 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
CHAPTER LXV.
RULERS.
The morals of a nation seldom rise higher than the
virtue of the rulers. Henry VIII. makes impurity
popular and national. William Wilberforce gives
moral tone to a whole empire. Sin bestarred and
epauletted makes crime respectable and brings it to
canonization. Malarias arise from the swamp and
float upward, but moral distempers descend from the
mountain to the plain. The slums only disgust men
with the bestiality of crime, but dissolute French
court or corrupt congressional delegation puts a pre-
mium upon iniquity. Many of the sins of the world
are only royal exiles. They had a throne once, but
they have been turned out, and they come down
now to be entertained by the humble and the insig-
nificant.
There is not a land on earth which has so many
moral men in authority as this land. There is not a
session of legislature, or Congress, or cabinet, but in
it are thoroughly Christian men, men whose hands
would consume a bribe, whose cheek has never been
flushed with intoxication, whose tongue has never
been smitten of blasphemy, or stung of a lie ; men
whose speeches in behalf of the right and against the
wrong remind us of the old Scotch Covenanters, and
the defiant challenge of Martin Luther, and the red
lightning of Micah and Habakkuk. These times are
665
666 RULERS.
not half as bad as the times that are gone. I judge
so from the fact that Aaron Burr, a man stuffed with
iniquity until he could hold no more, the debaucher
of the debauched, was a member of the Legislature,
then Atto'rney-General, then a Senator of the United
Sates, then Vice-President, and then at last coming
within one vote of the highest position in this nation.
I judge it from the fact that more than a half century
ago the Governor of this State disbanded the Legis-
lature of New York because it was too corrupt to sit
in council.
There is a tendency in our time to extol the past to
the disadvantage of- the present, and I suppose that
sixty years from now there may be persons who witl
represent some of us as angels, although now things
are so unpromising. But the iniquity of the past is
no excuse for the public wickedness of to-day, and so
I unroll the scroll in the presence of this assemblage.
Those who are in editorial chairs and in pulpits may
not hold back the truth. King David must be made
to feel the reproof of Nathan, and Felix must tremble
before Paul, and we may not walk with muffled feet
lest we wake up some big sinner. If we keep back
the truth, what will we do in the day when the Lord
rises up in judgment, and we are tried not only for
what we have said, but for what we have declined to
say?
In unrolling the scroll of public wickedness, I first
find incompetency fol" office.
If a man struggle for an official position for which
he has no qualification, and win that position, he com-
mits a crime against God and against society. It is
no sin for me to be ignorant of medical science ; but
.f ignorant of medical science I set myself up among
RULERS. 667
professional men, and trifle with the lives of people,
then the charlatanism becomes positive knavery. It
is no sin for me to be ignorant of machinery ; but if,
knowing nothing about it I attempt to take a steamer
across to Southampton and through darkness and
storm I hold the lives of hundreds of passengers,
then all who are slain by that shipwreck may hold me
accountable. But what shall I say of those who at-
tempt to doctor our institutions without qualification,
and who attempt to engineer our political affairs
across the rough and stormy sea, having no quali-
fication ?
We had at one time in the Congress of the United
States men who put one tariff upon linseed oil, and
another tariff upon flaxseed oil, not knowing that
they were the same thing. We have had men in our
legislatures who knew not whether to vote aye or no
until they had seen the wink of the leader. Polished
civilians acquainted with all our institutions run over
in a stampede for office by men who have not the
first qualification. And so there have been school
commissioners sometimes nominated in grog-shops,
and hurrahed for by the rabble, the men elected not
able to read their own commissions. And judges of
courts who have given sentence to criminals in such
inaccuracy of phraseology, that the criminal at the
bar has been more amused at the stupidity of the
bench than alarmed at the prospect of his own pun-
ishment. I arraign incompetency for office as one of
the great crimes of this day in public places.
I unroll still further the scroll of public wickedness,
and I come to intemperance.
There has been a great improvement in this direc-
tion. The senators who were more celebrated for
668 RULERS.
their drunkenness than their statesmanship are dead,
or compelled to stay at home. You and I very well
remember that there went from the State of New
York at one time, and from the State of Delaware,
and from the State of Illinois, and from other States,
men who were notorious everywhere as inebriates.
That day is past. The grog-shop under the national
Capitol to which our rulers used to go to get inspira-
tion before they spoke upon the great moral and finan-
cial and commercial interests of the country, has
been disbanded. But I am told even now under the
national Capitol there are places where our rulers can
get some very strong lemonade. But there has been
a vast improvement. At one time I went to Wash-
ington, to the door of the House of Representatives,
and sent in my card to an old friend. I had not seen
him for many years, and the last time I saw him he
was conspicuous for his integrity and "uprightness ;
but that day when he came out to greet me he was
staggering drunk.
The temptation to intemperance in public places
is simply terrific. How often there have been men in
public places who have disgraced the nation. Of
the men who were prominent in political circles
twenty-five or thirty years ago, how few died re-
spectable deaths. Those who died of delirium
tremens or kindred diseases were in the majority.
The doctor fixed up the case very well, and in his
report of it said it was gout, or it was rheumatism,
or it was obstruction of the liver, or it was exhaus-
tion from patriotic services ; but God knew and we
all knew, it was whiskey ! That which smote the
villain in the dark alley smote down the great orator
and the great legislator. The one you wrapped in
RULERS. 669
a rough cloth, and pushed into a rough coffin, and
carried out in a box wagon, and let him down into a
pauper's grave without a prayer or a benediction.
Around the other gathered the pomp of the land ;
and lordly men walked with uncovered heads beside
the hearse tossing with plumes on the way to a
grave to be adorned with a white marble shaft, all
four sides covered with eulogium. The one man was
killed by logwood rum at two cents a glass, the other
by a beverage three dollars a bottle. I write both
their epitaphs. I write the one epitaph with my
lead-pencil on the shingle over the pauper's grave ; I
write the other epitaph with chisel, cutting on the
white marble of the senator : " Slain by strong
drink."
You know as well as I that again and again dissi-
pation has been no hindrance to office in this coun-
try. Did we not at one time have a Secretary of the
United States carried home dead drunk? Did we
not have a Vice-President sworn in so intoxicated
the whole land hid its head in shame ? Have we not
in other times had men in the Congress of the nation
by day making pleas in behalf of the interests of the
country, and by night illustrating what Solomon said
" He goeth after her straightway as an ox to the
slaughter, and as a fool to the correction of the
stocks, until a dart strikes through his liver." Judges
and jurors and attorneys sometimes trying important
causes by day, and by night carousing together in
iniquity.
What was it that defeated the armies sometimes in
the last war? Drunkenness in the saddle. What
mean those graves on the heights of Fredericksburg ?
As you go to Richmond you see them. Drunken-
6/0 RULERS.
ness in the saddle. So again and again in the courts
we have had demonstration of the fact that impurity
walks tinder the chandeliers of the mansion and
drowses on damask upholstery. Iniquity permitted
to run unchallenged if it only be affluent. Stand
back and let this libertine ride past in his five-thou-
sand-dollar equipage, but clutch by the neck that poor
sinner who transgresses on a small scale, and fetch
him up to the police court, and give him a ride in the
city van. Down with small villainy! Hurrah for
grand iniquity ! ,
If you have not noticed that intemperance is one
of the crimes in public place to-day, you have not
been to Albany, and you have not been to Harris-
burg, and you have not been to Trenton, and you
have not been to Washington. The whole land cries
out against the iniquity. But the two political par-
tifes are silent lest they lose votes, and many of the
newspapers are silent lest they lose subscribers, and
many of the pulpits are silent because there are
offenders in the pews. Meanwhile God's indignation
gathers li.ke the flashings around a threatening cloud
just before the swoop of a tornado. The whole land
cries out to be delivered. The nation sweats great
drops of blood. It is crucified, not between two
thieves, but between a thousand, while nations pass
by wagging their heads, and saying: "Aha! aha! "
I unroll the scroll of public iniquity, and I come to
bribery bribery by money, bribery by proffered
office. Do not charge it upon American institutions.
It is a sin we got from the other side the water.
Francis Bacon, the thinker of his century, Francis
Bacon, of whom it was said when men heard him
speak they were only fearful that he would stop,
RULERS. 671
Francis Bacon, with all his castles, and all his emolu-
ments, destroyed by bribery, fined $200,000, or what
is equal to our $200,000, and hurled into London
Tower, and his only excuse was, he said all his pred-
ecessors had done the same thing. Lord Chancellor
Macclesfield destroyed by bribery. Lord Chan-
cellor Waterbury destroyed by bribery. Benedict
Arnold, selling the fort in the Highlands for $31,575.
For this sin Georgy betrayed Hungary, and Ahith-
ophel forsook David, and Judas kissed Christ. And
it is abroad in our land.
You know in many of the legislatures of this coun-
try it has been impossible to get a bill through unless
it had financial consideration. The question has been
asked softly, sometimes very softly asked in regard to
a bill, " Is there any money in it ?" and the lobbies of
the legislatures and the National Capitol have been
crowded with railroad men and manufacturers and
contractors, and the iniquity has become so great that
sometimes reformers and philanthropists have been
laughed out of Harrisburg and Albany and Trenton
and Washington, because they came empty-handed.
" You vote for this bill, and I'll vote for that bill."
" You favor that monopoly of a moneyed institution,
and I'll favor the other monopoly for another institu-
tion." And here is a bill that it is going to be very
hard to get through the legislature, and you will call
some friends together at a midnight banquet, and
while they are intoxicated you will have them promise
to vote your way.
Here are $5,000 for prudent distribution in this
direction and here are $1,000 for prudent distribution
in that direction. Now, we are within four votes of
having enough. You give $5,000 to that intelligent
6/2 RULERS.
member from Westchester and you give $2,000 to
that stupid member from Ulster, and now we are
within two votes of having it. Give $500 to this
member who will be sick and stay at home and $300
to this member who will go to see his great-aunt
languishing in her last sickness. Now the day has
come for the passing of the bill. The Speaker's
gavel strikes. " Senators, are you ready for the ques.
tion ? All in favor of voting away these thousands or
millions of dollars will say ' aye.' ' " Aye, aye, aye,
aye ! " " The ayes have it."
Some of the finest houses on Brooklyn Heights,
and Brooklyn Hill, and on Beacon Street, and on
Madison Square, and on Rittenhouse Square were
built out of money paid for votes in legislatures.
Five hundred small wheels in political machinery
with cogs reaching into one great center wheel, and
that wheel has a tire of railroad iron and a crank to
it on which Satan puts his hand and turns the center
wheel, and that turns the. five hundred other wheels
of political machinery. While in this country it is
becoming harder and harder for the great mass of
the people to get a living, there are too many men
in this country who have their two millions and their
ten millions and their twenty millions, and carry the
legislators in one pocket and the Congress of the
United States in the other.
And there is trouble ahead. Revolution. I pray
God it may be peaceful revolution and at the ballot-
box. The time must come in this country when men
shall be sent into public position who cannot be pur-
chased. , I do not want the union of Church and
State, but I declare that if the Church of God does
not show itself in favor of the great mass of the
RULERS. 673
people as well as in favor of the Lord, the time will
come when the Church as an institution will be ex-
tinct, and Christ will go down again to the beach,
and choose twelve plain, honest fishermen to come
up into the apostleship of a new dispensation of
righteousness, man ward and God ward.
You know that bribery is cursing this land. The
evil started with its greatest power during the last
war, when men said, " Now you give me this contract
above every other applicant, and you shall have ten
per cent, of all I mal^e by it. You pass these broken-
down cavalry horses as good, and you shall have
$5,000 as a bonus." " Bonus" is the word. And so
they sent down to your fathers and brothers and sons
rice that was worm-eaten, and bread that was moldy,
and meat that was rank, and blankets that were
shoddy, and cavalry horses that stumbled in the
charge, and tents that sifted the rain into exhausted
faces. But it was all right. They got the bonus.
I never so much belived in a Republican form of
government as I do to-day, for the simple reason that
any other style of government would have been con-
sumed long ago. There have been swindles en-
acted in this nation within the last thirty years
enough to swamp three monarchies. The Demo-
cratic party filled its cup of iniquity before it went
out of power before the war. Then the Republican
party came along, and its opportunities through the
contracts were greater, and so it filled its cup of in-
iquity a little sooner, and there they lie to-day, the
Democratic party and the Republican party, side by
side, great loathsome carcasses of iniquity, each one
worse than the other. Tens of thousands of good
citizens in all the parties ; but you know as well as I
43
674 RULERS.
do that party organization in this country is utterly,
utterly corrupt.
Now, if there were nothing for you and for me to
do in this matter, I would not present this subject.
There are several things for us to do.
First, stand aloof from all political office unless you
have your moral principles thoroughly settled. Do
not go into this blaze of temptation unless you are
fireproof. Hundreds of respectable men have been
destroyed for this life, and the life to come, because
they had not moral principle to stand office. You go
into some office of authority without moral prin-
ciple, and before you get through you will lie, and
you will swear, and you will gamble, and you will
steal. You say that is not complimentary. Well,
I always was clumsy at compliments.
Another thing for you to do is to be faithful at the
ballot-box. Do not stand on your dignity and say,
" I'll not go where the rabble are." If need be put
on your old clothes and just push yourself through
amid the unwashed and vote. Vote for men who
love God and hate rum. You cannot say, you ought
not to say, " I have nothing to do with this matter."
Then you will insult the graves of your fathers who
died for the establishment of the government and you
will insutt the graves of your children who may live
to feel the results of your negligence.
Another thing for you to do : Evangelize the people.
Get the hearts of the people right, and they will vote
right. That woman who this afternoon in Sunday-
school teaches six boys how to be Christians will do
more for the future of the country than the man who
writes the finest essay about the Federal Constitution.
I know there are a great many good people who think
RULERS. 6/5
that God ought to be recognized in the Constitution,
and they are making a move in that direction. I am
most anxious that God shall be in the hearts of the
people. Get their hearts right, and then they will
vote right.
If there be fifty million people in this country,
then at least the fifty-millionth part of the responsi-
bility rests on you. - What we want is a great revival
of religion reaching from sea to sea, and it is going
to come. A newspaper gentleman asked me in St.
Louis a few weeks ago what I thought of revivals.
I said I thought so much of them I never put my
faith in anything else. We want thousands in a day,
hundreds of thousands in a day, nations in a day.
Get all the people evangelized, brought under Chris-
tianized influences. These great evils that we now
so much deplore will be banished from the land.
And remember, my friends, that we are at last to
be judged, not as nations, but as individuals in that
day when empires and republics shall alike go down
and we shall have to give account for ourselves, for
what we have done and for what we have neglected
to do in that day when the earth itself will be a
heap of ashes scattered in the blast of the nostrils of
the Lord God Almighty. God save the common-
wealth of New York ! God save the United States
of America!
CHAPTER LXVI.
DEDICATORY PRAYER AT THE NEW ORLEANS EXPO-
SITION. DECEMBER 1 6, 1884.
"Lord God of nations, hear our opening prayer.
Gathered from all parts of this land, and from both
sides of the sea, and from under all skies, -we ask for
thy blessing. Let it come upon the officers, and the
directors, and the managers of this World's Exposi-
tion. May this day be the beginning of a new dispen-
sation of national prosperity and brotherhood. May
a potent influence go forth from these palaces of
industry which shall result in the world's having
more complete apparel, and better food, more com-
fortable shelter, and more thorough education. We
pray Thee that this Exposition may result in spread-
ing out the folded sails of our paralyzed shipping, in
putting bands on all the silent factory wheels, and in
starting the plow in longer, and deeper, and richer
furrow ; in opening the door to all the hidden treas-
ures of coal, and iron, and precious metal, and in
making more demand for printer's type, and painter's
pencil, and sculptor's chisel, and carpenter's rule, and
mason's trowel, and author's pen, and in commencing
for all the land a process of Edenization. By this
great gathering, day after day, and month after
month, may the last feeling of sectional discord be
gone, and North and South, East and West, carry the
four parts of one great national harmony. May it
be the unification of North and South America !
676
DEDICATORY PRAYER. 677
"Gracious God ! we pray Thee, by means of this
Exposition, solve for us the agonizing question of
supply and demand. Alas ! that there should be so
many hungry in a land of so much wheat, so many
cold in a land of so much cotton, wool, and flax. We
ask of Thee, O God, to come to the rescue of this
nation. Rouse and accelerate all our financial, com-
mercial, political, and educational interests, and as
Thou hast made of one blood all the nations of the
earth, we pray that this gathering of all nationalities
may impress upon us a true sense of our consan-
guinity. 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth
peace and good will toward men.' May the clock
strike 'one' upon a new day of prosperity and
righteousness and plenty. Quicken all our slumber-
ing industries, and let the hammers sound 'the anvil
chorus' from sea to sea. Under thy guidance may
capital and labor be crowned side by side under these
arches. Give one clear command from the heavens
to this nation, and say unto the agricultural and
manufacturing, educational and religious interests of
this country, 'Go forward!'
"Lord God of Joshua ! we do not ask that the sun
may stand still for a few hours in order to give our
best interests an opportunity of winning the day ; but
we do ask that the sun may never go down on the
prosperity of this people. God be merciful unto us,
and bless us, and make thy face to shine upon us, so
that thy name may be known upon earth, and thy
saving help among all nations, and as we have heard
that the wealth and prosperity of nations have some-
times hastened their overthrow, and as we know that
while the banqueting went on the finger of doom
came out of the black sleeve of the darkness and wrote
678 DEDICATORY PRAYER.
upon the wall, ' Weighed in the balance and found
waiting,' we pray Thee that as our prosperity goes
onward, our schools and our colleges, and our
churches, and our reformatory organizations may
prosper and triumph. And may our institutions thus
perfected and exalted, remain unmolested from inter-
nal strife and from foreign attack, until that day when
the angel, with one foot on the land, and the other
on the sea, shall swear by Him that liveth forever
and ever that time shall be no longer. And so may
the world's doom and the nation's overthrow be
simultaneous, and to God the only wise, the only
good, the only great, be glory now and forever,
Amen."
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