The sunny South. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1875-1907, October 07, 1893, Image 11

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Newspaper Page Textyu Great Brooklyn Preacher. BROOKLYN, Oct. 1.—In hi.s sermon this forenoon in the Brooklyn Tabernacle, as in many other discourses, Rev. T. De Witt Talnlage took his hearers and readers through an untried region of thought and found a subject for most practical gospeli- zation in “The Garden of the Sea.” The text selected was Jonah ii, 5, “The weeds were wrapped about my head.” “The Botany of the Bible; or, God among the Flowers” is a fascinating subject. I hold in my hand a book which I brought from Palestine, bound in olive wood, and within it are pressed flowers, which have not only retained their color, but their aroma. Flowers from Bethlehem, flowers from Jerusalem, flowers from Gethsemane, flowers from Mount of Olives, flowers from Bethany, flowers from Siloam, flowers from the valley of Jehoshaphat, red anem ones and wild mignonette, buttercups, dai sies, cyclamens, camomile, bluebells, ferns, mosses, grasses and a wealth of flora that keeps me fascinated by the hour, and every time I open it it is a new revelation. It is the New Testament of the fields. But my text leads us into another realm of the botanical kingdom. Having spoken to yon in a course of ser mons about God everywhere—on “The As tronomy of the Bible; or, God Among the Stars;” “The Ornithology of the Bible; or, God Among the Birds;” “The Ichthyology of the Bible; or, God Among the Fishes;” "The Mineralogy of the Bible; or, God Among t he Amethysts;” “The Conchologv of the Bible; or, God Among the Shells;” "The Chronology of the Bible; or, God Among the Centuries”—I speak now to you about “The Botany of the Bible; or, God In the Gardens of the Sea.” BOTANY OF THE BIBLE. Although I purposely take this morning for consideration the least observed and least appreciated of all the botanical prod ucts of the world, we shall find the contem plation very absorbing. In all our theolog ical seminaries vrtfcere we make ministers there ought to be professors to give lessons in natural history. Physical science ought to be taught side by side with revelation. It is the same God who inspires the page of the natural world as the page of the Scrip tural world. What a freshening up it would be to our sermons to press into them even a frag ment of Mediterranean seaweed! We should have fewer sermons awfully dry if we imi tated our blessed Lord, and in our dis courses, like him, we would let a lily tyoom, or a crow fly, or a hen brood her chickens, or a crystal of salt flash out the preservative qualities of religion. The trou ble is that in many of our theological sem inaries men who are so dry themselves they never could get people to come and hear them preach are now trying to teach young men how to preach, and the student is put between two great presses of dog matic theology and squeezed until there is no life left in him. Give the poor victim at least one lesson on the botany of the Bible. That was an awful plunge that the re creant prophet Jonah made when, dropped over the gunwales of the Mediterranean ship, he sank many fathoms down into a tempestuous sea. Both before and after the monster of the deep swallowed him, he was entangled in seaweed. The jungles of the deep threw their cordage of vegeta tion around him. Some of this seaweed was anchored to the bottom of the watery abysm, and some of it was afloat and swal lowed by the great sea monster, so that while the prophet was at the bottom of the deep after he was horribly imprisoned he could exclaim and did exclaim in the words of my text, “The weeds were wrap ped about my head.” JONAH’S SUBMARINE DISCOVERIES. Jonah was the first to record that there Hre growths upon the bottom of the sea as well as upon land. The first picture I ever owned was a handful of seaweeds pressed on a page, and I called tfiem “the shorn locks of Neptune.” These products of the deep, whether brown or green or yellow or purple or red or intershot of many colors, are most fascinating. They are distributed all over the depths and from Arctic to Antarctic. That God thinks well of them I conclude from the fact that he has made 6,CXX) species Of them. Sometimes these water plants are 400 or <00 feet long, and they cable the sea. One specimen has a growth of 1,500 test*. -* •* »' _ a THE SUNNY SOUTH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA, OCTOBER 7 1893 + On the northwest shore of our country is a seaweed with leaves 30 or 40 feet long, amid which the sea otter makes his home, resting himself on the buoyancy of the leaf and stem. The thickest jungles of the tropics are not more full of vegetation than the depths of the sea. There are for ests down there, and vast prairies all abloom, and God walks there as he walked in the garden of Eden “in the cool of the day.” Oh, what entrancement, this sub aqueous world! Oh, the God given won ders of the seaweed! Its birthplace is a palace of crystal. The cradle that rocks it is the storm. Its grave is a sarcophagus of beryl and sapphire. There is no night down there. There are creatures of God on the bottom of the sea so constructed that strewn all along they make a firmament besprent with stars, constellations and galaxies of impos ing luster. The sea feather is a lamplight er. The gymnotus is an electrician, and he is surcharged with electricity and makes the deep bright with the lightning of the sea. The gorgonia flashes like jewels. There are sea anemones ablaze with light. There are the starfish and moonfish, theso called because they so powerfully suggest stellar and lunar illumination. Oh, these midnight lanterns of the ocean caverns; these processions of flame over the white floor of the deep; these illuminations three miles down under the sea; these gor geously upholstered castles of the Almighty in the underworld! The author of the text felt the pull of the hidden vegetation of the Mediterranean, whether or not he appreci ated its beauty, as he cried out, “The weeds were wrapped about my head.” THE SEPULCHER OF THE SEA. Let my subject cheer all those who had friends who have been buried at sea or in our great American lakes. Which of us brought up on the Atlantic coast has not had kindred or friend thus sepulchered P We had the useless horror of thinking that they were denied proper^ restingplace. We said: “ Oh, if they had lived to come ashore and had then expired! What an alleviation of our trouble it would have been to put them in some beautiful family plot, where we could have planted flowers and trees over them.” Why, God did bet ter for them than we could have done for them. They were let down into beautiful gardens. Before they had reached the bot tom they had garlands about their brow. In more elaborate and adorned place than we could have afforded them they were put away for the last slumber. Hear it, mothers and fathers of sailor boys whose ship went down in our last August hurricane! There are no Green woods or Laurel Hills or Mount Auburns so beautiful on the land as there are banked and terraced and scooped and hung in the depths of the sea. The bodies of our foundered and sunken friends are girdled and canopied and housed with such glories as attend no other Necropolis. They were swamped in lifeboats, or they struck on Goodwin sands or Deal beach or the Skerries, and were never heard of, or dis appeared with the City of Boston, or the Ville de Havre, or the Cymbria, or were run down in a fishing smack that put out from Newfoundland. But dismiss your previ ous gloom abou t the horrors of ocean en tombment. When Sevastopol was besieged in the Anglo-French war, Prince Mentchikof, commanding the Russian navy, saw that the only way to keep the English out of the harbor was to sink all of the Russian ships of war in the roadstead, and so 100 vessels sank. When, after the war was over, our American engineer, Gowan, de scended to the depths in a diving bell, it was an impressive spectacle. SUBLIME BURIAL. One hundred buried ships! But it is that way nearly all across the Atlantic ocean. Ships sunk not by command of admirals, but by the command of cyclones. But they all had sublime burial, and the surround ings amid which they sleep the last sleep are more imposing than the Taj Mahal, the mausoleum with walls incrusted with precious stones and built by the great mo gul of India over his empress. Your de parted ones were buried in the gardens of the sea, fenced off by hedges of coralline. The greatest obsequies ever known on the land were those of Moses, where no one but God was present. The sublime report of that entombment is in the book of Deu teronomy, which says that the Lord buried him, and of those who have gone down to slumber in the deep the same may be said—“The Lord buried them.” As Christ was buried in a garden, so your shipwreck ed friends and those who could not survive till they reached port were put down amid iridescence—“In the midst of the garden there was a sepulcher.” It has always been a mystery what was the particular mode by which George G. Cookman, the pulpit orator of the Metho dist church and the chaplain of the Ameri can congress, left this life after embarking for England on the steamship President March 11,1841. That ship never arrived in port. No one ex er signaled her, and ou both sides of the ocean it has for 50 years been questioned what became of her. But this I know about Cookman—that whether it was iceberg or conflagration midsea or collision he had more garlands on his ocean tomb than if, expiring on land, each of his million friends had put a bouquet on his casket. In the midst of the garden was bis sepulcher. JONAH’S MISTAKES. But that brings me to notice the misno mer in this Jonahitic expression of the text. The prophet not only made a mis take by trying to go to Tarshish when God told him to go to Nineveh, but he made a mistake when he styled as weeds these growths that enwrapped him on the day he sank. A weed is something that is use less. It is something you throw out from the garden. It is something that chokes the wheat. It is something to~be grubbed out from among the cotton. It is something unsightly to the eye. It is an invader of the vegetable or floral world. But this growth which sprang up from the depth of the Mediterranean or floated on its sur face was among the most beautiful things that God ever makes. It was a water plant known as the red colored alga, and no weed at all. It comes from the loom of infinite beauty. It is planted by heavenly love. It is the star of a sunken firmament. It is a lamp which the Lord kindled. It is a cord by which to bind whole sheaves of practical suggestion. It is a poem all whose cantos are rung by divine goodness. Yet we all make the mis take that Jonah made in regard to it and call it a weed. “The weeds were wrapped about my head.” Ah! that is the trouble on the land as ou the sea. We call those weeds that are flowers. Picked up on the beach of society are children without home, without oppor tunity for anything but sin, seemingly without God. They are washed up help less. They are called ragamuffins. They are spoken of as the rakings of the world. They are waifs. They are street arabs. They are flotsam and jetsam of the social sea. They are something to be left alone, or something to be trod on, or something to f ive up to decay. Nothing but weeds. hey are up the rickety stairs of that gar ret. They are down in the cellar of that tenement house. They swelter in summers when they see not one blade of green grass, and shiver in winters that allow them not one warm coat or shawl or shoe. Such the city missionary found in one of our city rookeries, and when the poor wom an was asked if she sent her children to school she replied: “No, sir, I never did send ’em to school. I know it, they ought to learn, but I couldn’t. I try to shame him sometimes (it is my husband, sir), but he drinks and then beats me—look at that bruise on my face—and I tell him to see what is comin to his children. There’s Peggy, goes sellin fruit every night in those cellars in Water street, and they’re hells, sir. She’s learnin all sorts of bad words there and don’t get back till 12 o’clock at night. If it wasn’t for her earnin a shillin or two in them places, I should starve. Oh, I wish they was out f the city. Yes, it is the truth. I would rather have all my children dead than on the street, but I can’t help it.” SAVED BY DEATH. Another one of those poor women, found by a reformatory association, recited her story of want and woe and looked up and said, “I felt so hard to lose the children when they died, but now I’m glad they’re gone.” Ask any one of a thousand such children on the streets, “Where do you live?” and they will answer, “I don’t live nowhere.” They will sleep tonight in ash barrels, or under outdoor stairs, or on the wharf, kicked and bruised and hungry. Who cares for them? Once in awhile a city missionary or a tract distributer or a teacher of ragged schools will rescue one of them, but for most people they are only weeds. Yet Jonah did not more completely mis represent the red alga about his head in the Mediterranean than most people mis judge these poor and forlorn and dying children of the street. They are not weeds. They are immortal flowers—down in the deep sea of woe, but flowers. When soci ety and the church of God come to appre ciate their eternal value, there will be more C. L. Braces and more Van Meters and more angels of mercy spending their for tunes and their lives in the rescue. Hear it, O, ye philanthropic and Chris tian and merciful souls—not weeds, but flowers. I adjure you as the friends of all newsboys’ lodging houses, of all industrial schools, of all homes for friendless girls and for the many reformatories and hu mane associations now on foot. How much they have already accomplished! Out of what wretchedness, into what good homes! Of21,000 of these picked up out of the streets and sent into country homes, only 12 chil dren turned out badly. In the last 30 years a number that no man can number of the vagrants have been lifted into respectability and usefulness and a Christian life. Many of them have homes of their own—though ragged boys once and street girls, now at the head of prosperous families, honored on earth and to be glorious in heaven. Some of them have been governors of states. Some of them are ministers of the gospel. In all departments of life those who were thought to be weeds have turned out to be flowers. One of those rescued lads from the streets of our cities wrote to another saying: “I have heard you are studying for the minis try. So am I.” My hearers, I implead you for the news boys of the streets, many of them the brightest children of the city, but with no chance. Do not step on their bare feet. Do not, when they steal a ride, cut behind. When the paper is 3 cents, once in a while give them a 5 cent piece and tell them to keep the change. I like the ring of the letter the newsboy sent back from Tnrimnti., where he had been sent to a good home, to a New York newsboys’ lodging house: “Boys, we should show ourselves that we are no fools; that we can become as respectable as any of the countrymen, for Franklin and Webster and Clay were poor boys once, and even George Law and Vanderbilt and Astor. And now, boys, stand up and let them see you have got the real stuff in you. Come out here and make respectable and honorable men, so they can say, ‘There, that boy was once a newsboy.’ ” My hearers, join the Christian philanthro pists who are changing organ grinders and bootblacks and newsboys and street arabs and cigar girls into those who shall be kings and queens unto God forever. It is high time that Jonah finds out that that which is about him is not weeds, but flowers. A WOKPSBYUL 9PA as x examine this red alga which was about the recreant prophet down in the Mediterranean depths when in the words of my text he cried out, “The weeds were wrapped about my head,” and I am led thereby to further examine this subma rine world, I am compelled to exclaim, What a wonderful God we have! I am .4^1 that by diving bell, and “Brooks’ deep sea sounding apparatus,” and ever improv ing machinery we are permitted to walk the floor of the ocean and report the won ders wrought by the great God. Study these gardens of the sea. Easier and easier shall the profounds of the ocean become to us, and more and more its opu lence of color and plant unroll, especially as “Villeroy’s submarine boat” has been constructed making it possible to navigate under the sea almost as well as on the sur face of the sea, and unless God in his mercy banishes war from the earth whole fleets of armed ships will yet far down under the water move on to blow up the argosies that float the surface. May such submarine ships be used for laying open the wonders of God’s workings in the great deep and never for human devastation! Oh, the mar vels of the water world! These so called seaweeds are the pasture fields and the forage of the innumerable animals of the deep. Not one specie of them can be spared from the economy of nature. Valleys and mountains and plants miles underneath the waves are all covered with flora and fauna. Sunken Alps and Apennines and Himalayas of Atlantic and Pacific oceans. A continent that once connected Europe and America, so that in the ages past men came on foot across from where England is to where we now stand, all sunken, and now covered with the growths of the sea, as it once was cov ered with the growths of the land. England and Ireland once all one piece of land, but now much of it so far sunken as to make a channel, and Ireland has become an island. The islands for the most part are only the foreheads of sunken conti nents. The sea conquering the land all along the coasts and crumbling the hemis pheres, wider and wider become the sub aqueous dominions. Thank God that skilled hydrographers have made us maps and charts of the rivers and lakes and seas and shown us something of the work of the eternal God in the water worlds. Thank God that the great Virginian, Lieutenant Maury, lived to give us “The Physical Geography of the Sea,” and that men of genius have gone forth to study the so called weeds that wrapped about Jonah’s head and have fouud them to be coronals of beauty, and when the tide receded these scientists have waded down and picked up divinely pictured leaves of the ocean, the naturalists Pike and Hooper and Walters gathering them from the beach of Long Island sound, and Dr. Blodgett preserving them from the shores of Key West, and Professors Emerson and Gray finding them along Boston harbor, and Professor Gibbs gathering them from Charleston harbor, and for all the other triumphs of algology, or the science of seaweed. EVIDENCE OF THE SEAS. Why confine ourselves to the old and hackneyed illustrations of the wonder work ings of God when there are at least five great seas full of illustrations as yet not marshaled, every root and frond and cell and color and movement and habit of oce anic vegetation crying out: “God! God! He made us. He clothed us. He adorned us. He was the God of our ancestors clear back to the first sea growth, when God divided the waters which were above the firmament from the waters which were under the firmament, and shall be the God of our descendants clear down to the day when the sea shall give up its dead. We have heard his command, and we have obeyed, ‘Praise the Lord, dragons and all deeps!’ ” There is a great comfort that rolls over upon us from this study of the so called seaweed, and that is the demonstrated doc trine of a particular Providence. When I find that the Lord provides in the so called seaweed the pasturage for the thronged marine world, so that not a fin or scale in all that oceanic aquarium suffers need, I conclude he will feed us, and if he suits the algae to the animal life of the deep he will provide the food for our physical and spiritual needs. And if he clothes the flowers of the deep with richness of robe that looks bright as fallen rainbows by day and at night makes the underworld look as though the sea were on fire, surely he will clothe you, “O ye of little faith!” And what fills me with unspeakable de light is that this God of depths and heights, of ocean and of continent, may through Jesus Christ, the divinely appointed means, be yours and mine, to help, to cheer, to par don, to save, to imparadise. What mat ters who in earth or hell is against us if he is for us? Omnipotence to defend us, om nipresence to companion us and infinite love to infold and uplift and enrapture us. And when God does small things so well, seemingly taking as much care with the coil of a seaweed as the outbranching of a Lebanon cedar, and with the color of a vegetable growth which is hidden fathoms out of sight as he does with the solferino and purple of a summer sunset, we will be determined to do well all we are called to do, though no (me see or appreciate us. Mighty God! Roll in upon our admiration and holy appreciation more of the ponders of this submarine world! REVELATIONS AFTER DEATH. My joy is that after we are quit of all earthly hindrances we may come back to this world and explore what we cannot now fully investigate. If we shall have power to soar into the atmospheric without fa tigue, I think we shall have power to dive into the aqueous without peril, and that the pictured and tessellated sea floor will be as accessible as now is to the traveler the floor of the Alhambra, and all the gar dens of the deep will then swing open to us {heir gates as” now to the tourist Chats- worth opens on public days its cascades and statuary and conservatories for our entrance. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” You cannot make me believe that God hath spread out all that garniture of the deep merely for the polyps and Crus tacea to look at. And if the unintelligent creatures of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic ocean he surrounds with such beautiful grasses of the deep, what a heaven we may expect for our uplifted and ransomed souls when we are unchained of the flesh and rise to realms beatific. Of the flora of that “sea of glass mingled with fire” I have no power to speak, but I shall always be glad that when the prophet of the text, flung over the gunwales of the Mediterranean ship, de scended into the boiling sea, that which he supposed to be weeds wrapped about his head were not weeds, but flowers. And am I not right in this glance at the botany of the Bible in adding to Luke’s mint anise and cumin and Matthew’s tares, and John’s vine, and Solomon’s cluster of camphire, and Jeremiah’s balm, and Job’s bulrush, and Isaiah’s terebinth, and Hosea’s thistle, and Ezekiel’s cedar, and “the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,” and the “rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley,” and the frankincense and myrrh and cassia which the astrol ogers brought to the manger at least one stalk of the alga of the Mediterranean. And now I make the marine doxology of David my peroration, for it was written about 40 or 50 miles from the place where the scene of the text was enacted. “The sea is his, and he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Oh, come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel be fore the Lord our Maker, for he is our God, and we axe the people of his pasture.” Amen. l YIAB IT COLLEGE HU This is of Interest to Every Girl The Sunny South is anxious to in- crease its circulation and thereby en large the field ot its work, which is the fostering of literature in the bouth. The following offer is in di rect line with this work: We will give free of cost a full year’s tuition, including board, at a first- class college, to any girl or young lady who sends us 250 subscribers at our regular subscription price of $2.50 a year. The young lady who sends us this number of subscribers will be en titled to a full year’s course in a strictly first-class College, such as Nashville College for Young La dies, Nashville, Tenn., or Lucy Cobb Institute, Athens, Ga. We believe there are a lot of energetic girls in the South who would like a college education and we make this offer in order to give them an opportunity to secure it. The offer is good until September 1st, 1893, and the year’s tuition at College will be given for the course that starts next September. The Sunny South is easy to canvass for, since it is the bett $2.00 a year paper published anywhere. Get your friends to take it. Write to your ac quaintances at a distance and secure their subscription. It ought to be an easy matter for a young lady who ap plies herself to the tasK to secure 250 subscribers between now and the 1st of September. Sample copies will be sent when requested. Address Sunny South Atlanta, Ga. Spider and Wasp light to Heath. A fierce battle for life between a large spider and a wasp was witness ed by a Fifteenth Ward man in his garden one day last week. The spider bad spread his web in a corner of the fence, and was patiently waiting for something to turn up. Suddenly a wasp flew into the web. He was firmly caught, but his desperate effort to escape tore several holes in the flimsy network about him. Here the spider rushed out and rapidly began to repair the breaks. The wasp tonght harder still, and seemed to be trying to get a chance to sting his sly foe. In a minute or two the wasp lay per- pectly still, as if dead. The spider rushed out and seized the body of his victim. The wasp, who had apparent ly been playing possum, suddenly be came very much alive, and in a flash spider and wasp were clasped in a death lock. There was a short, fierce struggle, and both insects fell from the dilapidated web to the ground. They lay there quite still, and the in terested spectator, stooping over them, found that both were dead.—Phila delphia Record. We offer One Hundred Dollars Reward for any case of Catarrh that cannot be cured by Hall’s Catarrh Cure. F. J. CHENEY & CO., Props. Toledo, O. We the undersigned, have known F. J. Cheney for the last 15 years, and believe him perfectly honorable in all business transactions and financially able to carry out any obligation made by their firm. West & Truax, Wholesale Druggists, To ledo, O. Waiding, Kinnan & Marvin, Wholesale Druggists, Toledo, Ouio. Hairs Catarrh Core is taken internally, acting directly upon the blood and mu cous surfaces of the system. Piise 75o. per bottle. Sold by all Druggists. Testi monials free.

Georgia Historic Newspapers

The sunny South. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1875-1907, October 07, 1893, Image 11