Newspapers / Eastern Courier (Hertford, N.C.) / Aug. 28, 1895, edition 1 / Page 2
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REY. DR. TALMAGR The Eminent New York Divine's Son -day Sermon. Subject: "Comfort." Text: '"And God shall wipe away , all tears from their eye?." Revelation vii., 17. Hiding aerossa Western prairie, will flow ers up to the hub of the carriage wheel, and While a loner distance from any shelter, there camp a sudden shower, and Svhile the rain was falling in torrents, the sun wa shining as Lriehtly as I ever saw it shine, and I thought what a beautiful speetccle this is! So the tears of the Bible are not ' midnight storm, but rain oa pansied prairies in God's swept and golden sunlight. You remember that bottle which David labeled as contain ing tears, and Mary's tears, and Paul's tears, and Christ's tears, and the harvest of joy that is to soring from the sowing of tears. God mixes them. God rounds them. God shows them where to fall. God exhales them. A census is taken of them, and there is a record as to the moment when they are born and as to the place of their grave. Tears of bad men are hot kept. Alex ander in his sorrow had the hair clipped from his horses' and mules and made a great atfo about his irrief. but in all the vases of heaven there is not one of Alexander's tears. I spak of the tears ot God's children. Alas, me. they are falling all the timel In sum mer you somjetimes hear the prowling thunder, and you see there is a storm miles away, but you know from the drift of the clouds tha it will not come any where near you. So though it may be all bright around about you. there is a shower of trouble somewhere all the time. Tears! Tears! - What is the us of them anyhow? Why not substitute laughter? Why not make this a world where all the people are well and ett rnal strangers to pain and aches? What is the use of an eastern storm when we rm'jrht have a perpetual nor'wester? Why, when a family is put .together, not have them all stay, or if they must be transplant ed to make other homes, then have them all live the family record telling a story of marringes and births, b.it of no death? Why not have the harvests chase each other with out raii truing toil? Why che hard pillow, the ban crusf. the hard struggle? It is easy enouirh to explain a sm.ile, or a success, cr a congratulation,, but come now and bring all your dictionaries, and all your philosophies, and aii your relicrious, and helo me explain ntear. A chemist will tell you that it is made up of .'ah- and lime and other compo nent parts, but he misses the chief ingredients the aeid of a soured life, the viperine sting of a bitter me-norv. the fragments of a broken heart. I will tell voii'what ate iris. It is agony in solution. Hear, then, while I discourse, of the visas of trouble: First. it is the design of trouble to keep this world from being loo attractive. Some thing must be -done to make us willing to quit this existence. If it were not for trouble, this -world would he a trood enough heaven for me. ' You audi would be willing to take a lease cf this life for 100.003,000 years if there were no trouble. The earth cushioned and imhnlstered and pillared and chandeliered with such expense, no story of "ther worl.ls could euchant us. 7 We would say: "Let well enough alon. If yon want to die and have your body dis integrated in the dust and your soul go out ou a celestial adventure, then you can go, but this world is good enough for me!" You might as well go to a man who has iust en tered the Louvre at Paris and tell him to hasten off to the picture galleries of Venice or Florence. "Why," he would say. "what is the use of mv going there? There are Pembran its and Rubensys and Raphaels here that I haven't looked at yet." No man wants to go out of this world, or out of any house, until he has a better house. To cure this wish to stav here God must somehow create a disgust for our surroundings. How shall He do it? He cannot afford to deface His horizon, or to tear off a fiery panel from the sunset, or to subtract an anther from the water lily, or to banish the pungent aroma from the mignonette, or to drag the robes of the morning in mire. You cannot expect a Christopher Wren to mar his own St. Paul's Cathedral, or a Michael Angeio to dash out his own "Lit Judgment." or a Handel to discord his "Israel in Ecrypt." and you can not expect God to spoil the architecture and music of His own world. How. then, are we to be made willing to leave? Here is where trouble comes in. . After a man has had a good deal of trouble he says: "Well, I am ready to go. If there is a house somewhere whose roof doesn't leak. I would like to live there. If there is On atmosphere somewhere that does not dis tress the lungs, I would like to breathe it. "If there is a society somewhere where there is no tittle tattle, I would like to live there. If there is a home circle somewhere where I can find my lost friends, I would like to go there." He used to read the first part of the Bibie chiefly, now he reads the last part of the Bible chiefly. Why has he changed Genesis for Revelation? Ah, he used to be anxious chiefly to know how this world was made, and all about. its geological :onstruction. Now he is chiefly anxious to snow how the nert world was made, and low Jt looks, and who live there, and how hey dress. He reads Revelation ten times low where he reads Genesis once. The old tory, "In the beginning God created the leavens and the earth," does not thrill him lalf as much as the other story, "I saw a ew heaven and a new earth." The old nan's hand trembles as ho turns over this ipocalyptic leaf, and he has to take out his land kerchief to wipe his spectacles. That xok of Revelation is a prospectus now of :he country into -Khich he is soon to Immi grate; the country in which he has lots al ready laid out, and avenues opened, and mansions built. Yet there are people here to whom this world is brighter than heaven. Well, dear souls, I do not blame you. It is natural. But after awhile you will be ready to go. It was not until Job had been worn out with bereavements that he wanted to see God. It was not until the prodigal got tired of living among the hogs that he wanted to go to his father's house. It is the ministry of trouble to make this world worth less and heaven worth more. : I Again, it is the use of trouble to make us feel cur dependence upon God. Men think that they can do anything until God shows them they can do nothing at all. We lay out ou.r great plans and we like to execute them. It looks big. God comes and takes us down, As Prometheus was assaulted by his enemy, when the lance struck him it opened a great swelling that ha J threatened his death, and he got well. So it is the arrow of; trouble :aat lets out great swellings of pride. We never feel our dependence upon God until we get trouble. I was riding with my little euild along the road, and she asked if she might drive. I said.' "Certainly." I handed over the reins to her, and 1 had to admire the glee with which she drove. But after awhile we met a team and we had to turn out. The road was narrow, and it was sheer down on both sides. She handed the reins over to me and said, "1 think you had better take charge of the horse." So we are all children, and on this road of life we like to drive. It gives one such an appearance of superiority and power. It looks big. But after awhile we meet some obstacle and we have to turn out, and the road is narrow, and it is sheer down on both sides: and then we are willing that God should take the reins and drive. All, my friends, we get upset so often because we do not hand over the reins soon enough. After a man has had trouble, prayer is with him a taking hold of the arm of God and crying out for help. I have heard earnest prayers on two or three occasions that I re member. Once, on the Cincinnati express train, going at forty miles the hour, thetrain jumped the track, and we were neara chasm eighty feet deep, and t he men whor a few minutes before, had been swearing and blas pheming God, began to pull and jerk at the bell rope and got up on the backs of the ?eats, and cried out, "O God, save us I" ' There was another time, about 800 miles out at sea. on a foundering steamer, after the last lifeboat had been split finer than kindling wood. They prayed then. Why is it you so often hear people, in reciting the last experience of some friend say, "He made the most beautiful prayer- I ever heard?" What makes it beautiful? It is the earnestness of it. Oh! I tell you, a man is in earnest when his stripped and naked soul wades out in the soundless, shoreless, bot tomless ocean of eternity. It is trouble, my friends, that makes us feel our dependence upon God. We do not know our own weakness or God's strength until the last plank breaks. It is contempti ble in us when there is nothing else to take hold of that we catch hold of God onlv. Why. you do not knoAV who the Lord is! He is not an autocrat sealed far up in a palace, .from which He emerges once a year,preceded . bv heralds swi using sworCls to clear the way. No. But a Father willing, at our call, to stand by us in every crisis and predicament of life. I tell you what some of jtou busi ness men make me think of. A young man goes off from home to earn his fortune. . He goes with his mother's consent and benedic tion. She has large wealth, but he wants to make his own fortune. He goes far away; falls sick, gets out of money. He sends for the hotel keeper where he is staying, asking for lenience, and the answer he gets is. "If you don't pay up Saturday night, you'll be removed to the hospital." The young man sends to a comrade in the same building. No help. He writes to a banker who wis a friend of his deceased father. No redef. He writes to an old schoolmate, but gets no help. Saturday night comes, and he is moved to the hospital. Getting there, he is frenzied with grief, and he borrows a sheet of paper and a post age stamp, and he sits down, and he writes home, saying- "Dear mother, I am sick un to death. Come." It is ten minutes of 10 o'clock when she gets the letter. At 10 o'clock the train starts. She is five minutes from tha depot. ". She. gets there in time to have five minutes to spare. She wonders why a train that can go thirty miles an hour cannot go sixty miles an hour. She rushes into the hospital. She says. "My son, what does all this mean? Why didn't you send for me? You sent to everybody but me. You knew I could and would help you. Is this the reward I get for my kindness to you al ways?" She bundles "him up, takes him home and gets him well very soon. Now, some of you treat God just as that young man treated his mother. When you get into a financial perplexity, you call on the ban ker, you call on the broker, you call on your creditor's, you call on your lawyer for legal counsel; you call upon everybody, and when von cannot tret any help, then you go to God. You say: VO, Lord, I come to Thee. Heln me now out of my perplexity." And the Lord comes, though it is the eleventh hour. He says: "Why did you not send for Me before? As one whom his mother cornforteth. so will I comfort you." It is to throw us back upon God that we have this ministry of tears. Again, it is the use of trouble to capaci tate us for the office of sympathy. The priests, under the old dispensation, were set apart by having water sprinkled upon their hands, feet and head, and by the sprinkling of tears people are now set apart to the ofib-e of sympathy. When we are in prosperity we like to have a great many young people around us. and we laugh when they laugh, and we romp when they romp, and we sing wlien they sing; but when we have trouble valiey twenty years, afternoon some one wanting bread, bhe we like plenty of old folks around. Why? Thev know how to talk. . Take an aged mother, seventy years of age, and she is almost omnipotent in comfort. Why.'' She has been through it all. At 7 o'clock in the morning she goes over to comfort a young mother who has just lost her babe. Grandmother knows all about that trouble. Fifty years ago she felt it. At 12 o'clock of that day she goes over to com fort a widowed soul. Shej knows all about that. She has been walking in that dark At 4 o clock in the knocks at the door, knows all about that. Two or three times in her life she came to her last loaf. At 10 o'clock that night she goes over to sit up with some one severely sick. She knows all about it. She knows all about fevers and pleurisies and broken bones. She has been doctoring all her life, spreading plasters and pouring out bitter drops and shaking up hot pillows and con triving things to tempt a poor appetite. I)rs. Abernethy and Rush and Hosack and Harvey were great doctors, but the greatest doctor the world ever saw is an old Christian woman. Dear me! Do we not remember her about the room when we were sick in our boyhood? Was there any one who could ever so touch & sore without hurting it? - ! Where did Paul get the ink with which to to write his comforting. epistle? Where did David get the ink to write Psalms? Where did John his get comforting the ink to write his comforting Revelations? They got it out of their own tears. When a man has gone through the curriculum and has taken a course of dungeon's and imprisonments and shipwrecks, he is qualified for the work of sympathy. When I began to preach, my sermons on the subject of trouble were all poetie and in semi blank verse, but God knocked the blank verse out of me long ago and I havo found out tbat I cannot comfort people except as I myself have been troubled, j God make me the son of consolation to the people! I would rather be the means of soothing one perturbed spirit to-day than to play a tuno that would set all the sons of mirth reeling in the dance. I am an herb doctor. I put into the cal dron the root out of dry ground, without form or comeliness. Then I put in tho roso of Sharon and the lily of the valley. Then I put into the caldron some of the leaves lrom the tree of life and thebraneh that was thrown into the wilderness Marah. Then I pour in the tears of Bethany and Golgotha; then I stir them up. Then I kindle under the caldron a" fire made out of tho wood of the cross, and one drop of 'that portion will euro the worst sickness that I ever afflicted a human soul. Mary and Martha shall receive their Lazarus from the tomb. Tho damsels shall rise. And on the darkness shall break the morning and God will wipe ail tears lrom their eyes. Jesus had enouah trial to make Him sym pathetic with all trial. Thej shortest verse in the Bible tells the story, "Jesus wept." The scar on the back of His either hand, the scar on the arch of either foot, the roVr of scars along the line of the hair, will kep all heaven thinking. Oh, that Great Weeper is just the one to silence all earthly trouble, wipe out all stains of earthly grie!. Gentle: Why, His step is softer than the step of the dew. It will not be a tyrant bidding you to hush up your crying. It , will be a father who will take you on His left arm, His face oeaming into yours, while with the soft tips of the fingers of the right hand He shall wipe away all tears from your eyes. Friends, if we. could get any appreciation of what God has in reserve for us, it would make us so homesick we wOuld be unfit for our everyday work. Professor Leonard, formerly of Iowa University,1 put in my hand a meteoric stone thrown off from some oth er world to this. How suggestive it was to me! And I have to tell yqu the best rep resentations we have of heaven are only aerolites flung off from that world which rolls on bearing the multitudes of the re deemed. We analyze these aerolites and find them crystallizations of tears. No won der, flung off from heaven! "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.' Have you any appreciation Of the good and glorious times your friends jare having in heaven? How different it is ' when thev cret news there of a Christian's death from what it is here! It is the difference between em barkation and coming into port. Everything depends upon which side of the river you stand when you hear of a Christian's death. If you stand on this side of the river, you mourn that they go. If you stand on the other side of the river, you rejoice thatther come. On the difference between a funeral on earth and a jubilea in heaven between requiem here and triumph there parting here and reunion there! Together!" Have you thought of it? They are together. Not one of your departed friends in one land and another in another land, but togeth?r, in dif ferent rooms of the same houe the house of many mansions. Together! I never more appreciated that thought tha i when we laid away in her last slumber ray sister Sarah. Standing there in the vil lage cemetery. I looked around and said. "There is father, there is mother, there is grandfather, there is grandmother, there are whole circles of kindred," and I thought to myself, "Together in the grave togf xer in glory." I am so impressed with the thought that I do not think it! is any fanati cism when some one is going from this world to the next if you make thsm the bearer of dispatches to your friends who are gone, saying, "Uive my love to my parents. love to my old comrades who and tell them I am trying .to ngnt o: laiih and X will awhile. with you. These tears of jbereavenient tt course your cheek, and of jpejsecutioa of trial, are not always to bo there ' tk motherly hand of God will wipe them ! away. What is the use, on! the way to sa'h a consummation what is the use of frettin about anything? Oh. what an exhilarat?! it ought to ba in Christian! Work! Se ,o the pinnacles against the sky? It h the eirt of our God, and we are approaching it oh let us be busy in the days that remain fori5 I put this balsam on thtjs wounds 0f voni heart. -T.?joice at the thought of whatour departed friends have got! rid of. and'thar you have a prospect of soon making vour own escape. Bear cheerlully the ministry & tears,i and exult at the thought that soon' is to be ended. There we shall march up the heavenly ew And ground our arms at Jesus's f3et. " THE "If BICYCLE AXD THE EIXKIXG HABIT 'the wheel never does anv other im thing in its history, and if no other benefi comes from its use, it would for one speiai reason deserve the commendation and in dorsement of every thinking person in ere made the bicycle and its use the study of years. "My attention was first called to one phase of the wheel by he experience of a young man who had been for soma time patient of mine. He hadj been in the habit of taking a glass of liquor j occasionally, ani I had warned him against allowing the habit to grow, but whateyer I said seemed to make very little impression on his min Finally, I advised him to biiya wheel. I had an object in view, but gavje him no hint of it. He learned to ride one, and one day I asked him to go out with ine for a little run in the country. When wjo got near one ot the hotels in the suburbs he proposed a drink, and I assented. I took mineral water, and he indulged in what he called a good stiff drink to brace his nerves. "I said nothing, but made up my mind to keep my eye on him rather sharply. rode for a mile or two. land although he complained of feeling somewhat reeky, he got on tolerably well until we came to an other tavern. He said he was all out of gear ami wanted to stop again. fI went with him, and the same order was repeated. Half an hour later, while riding alpng a level road, I obserwd that his wheel had taken on some eccentric motions, and was go'ng almost ar-yway but the one he desired. He becaxe angry and fractious, and ended up by run ning into a stump bv the roadside, and Ret ting a bad fall. His injuries were so serious that he had to be taken home in a carriage, and was kept indoors for sime time. "When he got out again) he came over to see me. and the conversation turned on tho best way to become an expert wheelman. It was not a little gratifying to me to have Mm, of his own accord, make the remark Jaat as long as he rode a j wheel he should never take liquor at wayside hotels. Peopld who have given some attention to the sub ject say that there is far jless intoxicating drink taken by young, meri after they bedn to ride the wheel. They find that it ia not conducive to clearness of head or steadiness of hand. They cannot go out in hilarious crowds and overindulge vfith any comfort to themselves while wheeling.. There is too much risk of life and limb about it. The bicycle and the grog shop are not g)od friends, and as I have said before, if the wheel never does anything Seise, it is worthy of all praise because it is a check oa the drinking habit." my iu my cmioren, give my are in glory, fight the good Join them after I believe the messace will h de livered, and I believe it will increase the gladness of those who are before the throne. To .r ether are they, all their tears gone My fr.ends. tais this .goal chser home "THAT 3IA:J CAXXOT BEj ELECTED. Out in the great WesternState ?f Wyom ing where the women have 'enjoyed political equality for twenty-six years, a man wa? nominated for offk-e, who was known to in dulge quite freely in the floWing bowl. The day and evening following! his nomination he took a number of boon companions out and indulged in a great bibulous jollifica tion. One of the mei on ( returning hom& from the caucus was asked by his wife, wh had been unavoidably detained at home, who had been nominated. '.;On learning hU name she promptly said: "That man can not be elected." Holding n0 further parley with her husband she kept her own council for the time being, but on the next day she put on her sun bonnet and -jyent and had a good talk over the back fence with her next door neighbor. The neighbor in her turn, put on her sun bonnet and held a caucus of two with her neighbor, andj before the wo men of that town got through with thes star chamber sessions of two, every back fence in the community was the recipient of confidential political information. Time went on and election day ame. This can didate was everwhelmingly defeated. Know ing that he had iiot offended his party, he could not understand it. Six weeks later h found out when a little womrn of his ac quaintance said to him: "We coul I not W you be elected. Mr. B., because you. would set a bad example to our boys." TKEATIXG. One of the most pernicious and fooIL;a toms is that or treating. It is a naou wv men in this country to buy drinks forvA other until in many cases they are unajltf w stand, and this is one of the causes ol much wretchedness and misery anions w people. Many men take drink after dno that they do not want, and sbend the monjj to pay for the same that the can illy to do. and as a result their "people at nos often suffer from want of the common necer saries of life. The way it is Inow done i visit a saloon with a friend to take a ana, and perhaps, meeting others in tneJ'j they are invited to take a drink also. b after round of drinks follow until ea:n o has treated, and they consider they n done their duty as American) citizens by the time the last one has treated tn effects of the liquor is beginning to ' and at last it is only a questicjn of h mere each one can take and e able u
Eastern Courier (Hertford, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
Aug. 28, 1895, edition 1
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