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THE BUNNY SOUTH. ATLANTA; GEORGIA; OCTOBER 14
The Great Brooklyn Preacher.
Brooklyn, Oct. 8.—In his sermon at the
Brooklyn tabernacle this morning Rev. Dr.
Talmage presented an arousing theme of
the living cities of today drawn from the
tomb of a dead city of the past. The open
ing hymn, led by cornet and organ, was
joined by the voices of the multitude;
Arm of the Lord, awake, awake,
Put on thy strength, the nations shake.
The subject was “Pompeii and Its Les
sons;” the text, Isaiah xxv, 2, “Thou hast
made of a defended city a ruin.”
A flash on the night sky greeted us as we
left the rail train at Naples, Italy. What
was the strange illumination? It was that
wrath of many centuries—Vesuvius. Giant
son of an earthquake. Intoxicated mountain
of Italy. Father of many consternations.
A volcano burning so long and yet to keep
on burning until perhaps it maybe the very
torch that will kindle the last conflagra
tion and set all the world on fire. It eclipses
In violence of behavior Cotopaxi and JEtna
and 9tromboli and Krakatoa. Awful mys
tery. Funeral pyre of dead cities. Ever
lasting paroxysm of mountains. It seems
like a chimney of hell. It roai-s with fiery
reminiscences of what it has done and with
threats of worse things that it may yet do.
I would not live in one of the villages at its
base for a present of all Italy.
On a day in December, 1631, it threw up
ashes that floated away hundreds and hun
dreds of miles, and dropped in Constanti
nople, and in the Adriatic sea, and on the
Apennines, as well as trampling out at its
own foot the lives of 18,000 people. Geolo
gists have tried to fathom its mysteries,
but the heat consumed the iron instru
ments and drove back the scorched and
blistered explorers from the cindery and
crumbling brink. It seems like the asylum
of maniac elements.
At one time, far back, its top had been
a fortress, where Spartacus fought and was
surrounded, and would have been destroyed
had it not been for the grape vines which
clothed the mountain side from top to base,
and laying hold of them he climbed hand
under hand to safety in the valley. But
for centuries it has kept its furnace burn
ing as we saw it that night on our arrival
in November of 1889.
THE DEAD CITY.
Of course the next day we started to see
some of the work wrought by that frenzied
mountain. “All out for Pompeii!” was
the cry of the conductor. And now we
stand by the corpse of that dead city. As
we entered the gate and passed between
the walls I took off my hat, as one nat
urally does in the presence of some impos
ing obsequies. That city had been at one
ume a capital of beauty and pomp, the
home of grand architecture, exquisite
painting, enchanting sculpture, unrestrain
ed carousal and rapt assemblage. A high
wall, 20 feet thick, three-quarters of it still
visible, encircled the city. On those walls at
a distance of only 100 yards from each other
towers rose for armed men who watched
the city. The streets ran at right angles
and from wall to wall, only one street ex
cepted.
In the days of the city’s prosperity its
towers glittered in the sun. Eight strong
gates for ingress and egress—Gate of the
Seashore, Gate of Herculaneum, Gate of
Vesuvius being perhaps the most impor
tant. Yonder stood the temple of Jupiter,
hoisted at an imposing elevation, and with
its six Corinthian columns of immense
girth, which stood like carved icebergs
shimmering in the light. There stands the
Temple of the Twelve Gods. Yonder see the
Temple of Hercules and the Temple of Mer
cury, with altars of marble and bas-relief,
wonderful enough to astound all succeed
ing ages of art, and the Temple of .Escula
pius, brilliant with sculpture and gorgeous
with painting.
Yonder are the theaters, partly cut into
surrounding hills and glorified with pic
tured walls and entered under arches of
imposing masonry, and with rooms for
captivated and applaudatory audiences,
seated or standing, in vast semicircle. Yon
der are the costly and immense public
baths of the city, with more than the mod-
dem ingenuities of Carlsbad. Notice the
warmth of those ancient tepidariums with
hovering radiance of roof, and the vapor of
those oaldariums with decorated alcoves,
and the cold dash of their frigidariums with
floors of mosaic and ceilings of all skillful
ly Intermingled hues and walls upholster-
fffl witl^ the, colors of the setting sun and
sofas on which to recline for slumber arter
the plunge.
Yonder are the barracks of the celebrated
gladiators. Yonder is the summer home
of Sallust, the Roman historian and sena
tor, the architecture as elaborate as his
character was corrupt. There is the resi
dence of the poet Pansa, with a compressed
Louvre and Luxembourg within his walls.
There is the home of Lucretius, with vases
and antiquities enough to turn the head of
a virtuoso. Yonder see the Forum at the
highest place of the city. It is entered by
two triumphal arches. It is bounded on
three sides by doric columns.
Yonder, in the suburbs of the city, is the
home of Arrius Diomed, the mayor of the
suburbs, terraced residence of billionaire-
dom, gardens fountained, statued, colon
naded, the cellar of that villa filled with
bottles of rarest wine, a few drops of which
were found 1,800 years afterward. Along
the streets of the city are men of might and
women of beauty formed into bronze that
many centuries had no power to bedim.
Battle scenes on walls in colors, which all
time cannot efface. Great city of Pompeii!
So Seneca and Tacitus and Cicero pro
nounce it.
A WORD PICTURE.
Stand with me on its walls this evening
of Aug. 23, A. D. 79. See the throngs pass
ing up and down in tyrian purple and gir
dles of arabesque and necks enchained with
precious stones, proud official in imposing
toga meeting the slave carrying trays
a-clink with goblets and a-smoke with
delicacies from paddock and sea, and
moralist, musing over the degradation of
the times, passes the profligate, doing his
best to make them worse. Hark to the
clatter and rataplan of the hoofs on the
streets paved with blocks of basalt. See
the verdured and flowered grounds sloping
into the most beautiful bay of all the earth
—the bay of Naples.
Listen to the rumbling chariots, carry
ing convivial occupants to halls of mirth
and masquerade and carousal. Hear the
loud dash of fountains amid the sculp
tured water nymphs. Notice the weird,
solemn, farreaching hum and din and roar
of a city at the close of a summer day. Let
Pompeii sleep well tonight, for it is the last
night of peaceful slumber before she falls
into the deep slumber of many long cen
turies. The morning of the 24th of August,
A. D. 79, has arrived, and the day rolls on,
and it is 1 o’clock in the afternoon. “Look!”
I say to you, standing on this wall, as the
sister of Pliny said to him, the Roman es
sayist and naval commander, on the day of
which I speak, as she pointed him in the
direction in which I point you.
There is a peculiar cloud on the sky, a
spotted cloud, now white, now black. It is
Vesuvius in awful and unparalleled erup
tion. Now the smoke and fire and steam
of that black monster throat rise and
spread as by gesture I now describe it. It
rises, a great column of fiery darkness,
higher and higher, and then spreads out
like the branches of a tree, with midnights
interwrapped in its foliage, wider and wid
er. Now the sun goes out, and showers of
pumice stone and water from furnaces
more than seven times heated, and ashes in
avalanche after avalanche, blinding and
scalding and suffocating, descend north,
south, east and west, burying deeper and
deeper in mammoth sepulcher such as nev
er before or since was opened—Stabiae, Her
culaneum and Pompeii—ashes ankle deep,
girdle deep, chin deep, ashes overhead.
Out of the houses and temples and the
aters and into the streets and down to the
beach fled many of the frantic, but others,
if not suffocated by the ashes, were scalded
to death by the heated deluge. And then
came heavier destruction in rocks after
rocks, crushing in homes and temples and
theaters. No wonder the sea receded from
the beach as though in terror until much of
the shipping was wrecked, and no wonder
that when they lifted Pliny the elder from
the sailcloth on which he was resting un
der the agitations of what he had seen he
suddenly expired.
For three days the entombment proceed
ed. Then the clouds lifted and the cursing
of that Apollyon of mountains subsided.
For 1,700 years that city of Pompeii lay
buried and without anything to show its
place of doom. But after 1,700 years of
obliteration a workman’s spade, digging a
well, strikes some antiquities which lead
to the exhumation of the city. Now walk
with me through some of the streets and
into some of the houses and amid the ruins
of Basilica and temple and amphitheater.
From the moment the guide met U3 at
the gate on entering Pompeii that day in
November, 1889, until he left us at the gate
on our departure the emotion I felt was
indescribable for elevation and solemnity
and sorrow and awe. Come and see the
petrified bodies of the dead found in the
city and now in the museums of Italy.
About 450 of those embalmed by that erup
tion have been recovered. Mother and
child, noble and serf, merchant and beggar
are presentable and natural after 1,700
years of burial. That woman was found
clutching her adornments when the storm
of ashes and fire began, and for 1,700 years
she continued to clutch them.
There at the soldiers’ barracks are 64
skeletons of brave men, who faithfully
stood guard at their post when the tempest
of cinders began, and after 1,700 years were
still found standing guard. There is the
form of gentle womanhood impressed upon
the hardened ashes. Pass along, and here
we see the deep ruts in the basaltic pave
ments, worn there by the wheels of the
chariots of the first century.
A VESTIBULE OF PERDITION.
There over the doorways and in the porti
cos are works of art immortalizing the de
bauchery of a city which, notwithstanding
all its splendors, was a vestibule of perdi
tion. Those gutters ran with the blood of
the gladiators, who were the prize fighters
of those ancient times, and it was sword
carrying sword until, with one skillful and
stout plunge of the sharp edge, the mauled
and gashed combatant reeled over dead, to
be carried out amid the huzzas of enrap
tured spectators. We staid among those
suggestive scenes after the hour that visit
ors are usually allowed there and staid un
til there was not a footfall to be heard with
in all that city except our own. Up this
silent street and down that silent street we
wandered. Into that windowless and roof
less home we went and came out again on
to the pavements that, now forsaken, were
once thronged with life.
And can it be that all up and down these
solemn solitudes, hearts, more than 1,860
years ago, ached and rejoiced, and feet
shuffled with the gait of old age or danced
with childish glee, and overtasked work
men carried their burdens and drunkards
staggered? On that mosaic floor did glow
ing youth clasp hands in marriage vow, and
across that threshold did pallbearers carry
the beloved dead, and gay groups once
mount these now skeletons of staircases?
While I walked and contemplated the
city seemed suddenly to be thronged with
all the population that had ever inhabited
it, and I heard its laughter and groan and
blasphemy and uncleanness and infernal
boast, as it was on the 23d of August, 79,
And Vesuvius, from the mild light with
which it flushed the sky that summer even
ing as I stood in disentombed Pompeii
seemed suddenly again to heave and flame
and rock with the lava and darkness and
desolation and woe with which, more than
18 centuries ago, it submerged Pompeii, as,
with the liturgy of fire and storm, the
mountain proclaimed at the burial, “Ashes
to ashes, dust to dust.”
MORALS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ART.
My friends, I cannot tell what practical
suggestion comes to your mind from this
walk through uncovered Pompeii, but the
first thought that absorbs me is that while
art and culture are important they cannot
save the morals or the life of a great town,
Much of the painting and sculpture of
Pompeii was so exquisite that, while some
is kept on the walls where it was first pen
ciled, to be admired by those who go there,
whole wagon loads and whole rooms full
of it have been transferred to the Museo
Borbonico at Naples, to be admired by the
centuries.
Those Pompeiian artists mixed such du
rability of colors that, though their paint-
: ings were buried in ashes and scoriae for
1,700 years, and since they were uncovered
many of them have remained there exposed
to the rains and winds and winters and
summers of 130 years, the color is as fresh
and vivid and true as though yesterday it
had passed from the easel. Which of our
modern paintings could stand all that? And
yet many of the specimens of Pompeiian art
show that the city was sunk to such a depth
of abomination that there was nothing deep
er. Sculptured and petrified and embalmed
abomination. There was a state of public
morals worse than belongs to any city now
standing under the sun.
Yet how many think that all that is nec
essary is to cultivate the mind and advance
the knowledge and improve the arts? Have
you the impression that eloquence will do
the elevating work? Why, Pompeii had
Cicero half of every year for its citizen.
Have you the idea that literature is all that
is necessary to keep a city right? Why,
Sallust, with a pen that was the boast of
Roman literature, had a mansion in that
doomed city. Do you think that sculpture
and art are quite sufficient for the produc
tion of good morals? Then correct your
delusion by examining the statues in the
Temple of Mercury at Pompeii, or the
winged figures of its Parthenon and the
colonnades and arches of this house of
Diomed.
By all means have schools and Dussel-
dorf and Dore exhibitions and galleries
where the-genius of all centures can bank
itself up in snowy sculpture, and all bric-
a-brac, and all pure art. But nothing, save
the religion of Jesus Christ, can make a
city moral. In proportion as churches and
Bibles and Christian printing presses and
revivals of religion abound is a city clean
and pure. What has Buddhism or Confu-i
cianism or Mohammedanism done in all
the hundreds of years of their progress for
the elevation of society? Absolutely noth
ing. Peking and Madras and Cairo are just
what they were ages ago, except as Chris
tianity has modified their condition.
What is the difference between our
Brooklyn and their Pompeii? No differ
ence, except that which Christianity has
wrought. Favor all good art, but take best
care of your churches, and your Sabbath
schools, and your Bibles, and your family
altars.
Yea, see in our walk today through un
covered Pompeii what sin will do for a city.
We ought to be slow to assign the judg
ments of God. Cities are sometimes afflict
ed just as good people are afflicted, and the
earthquake, and the cyclone, and the epi
demic are no sign in many cases that God
is angry with a city, but the distress is sent
for some good and kind purpose, whether
we understand it or not. The law that ap
plies to individuals may apply to Christian
cities as well, “All things work together for
good to those that love God.”
LIKE SODOM AND GOMORRAH.
But the greatest calamity of history came
upon Pompeii, not to improve its future
condition, for it was completely obliterated
and will never be rebuilt. It was so bad
that it needed to be buried 1,700 years be
fore even its ruins were fit to be uncovered.
So Sodom and Gomorrah were filled with
such turpitude that they were not only
turned under, but have for thousands of
years been kept under. The two greatest
cemeteries are the cemetery in which the
sunken ships are buried all the way be
tween Fire island and Fastnet lighthouse,
and the other cemetery is the cemetery of
dead cities.
I get down on my knees and read the
epitapheology of a long line of them: Here
lies BabylonT once calVed Tr The Tiammer of
the whole earth,” dead and buried under
piles of bitumen and broken pottery and
vitrefled bricks. And I hear a wolf howl
and a reptile hiss as I am reading this epi
taph (Isaiah xiii, 21), “The wild beast of the
desert shall be there and their houses shall
be full of doleful creatures.”
The next tomb I kneel before in this cem
etery of cities is Nineveh. Her winged
lions are down, and the slabs of alabaster
have crumbled, and the sculpture that rep
resented her battles is as completely scat
tered as the dust of the heroes who fought
them. Perhaps I put my knee into the
dust of her Sardanapalus as I stoop to read
her epitaph (Zephaniah ii, 14): “Now is
Nineveh a desolation and dry like a wil
derness, and flocks lie down in the midst
of her. All the beasts of the nations, both
the cormorant and the bittern, lodge in the
upper lintels of it.” And while I read it I
hear an owl hoot and a hyena laugh. The
next entombed city I pass has a monument
of 50 prostrate columns of gray and red
granite, and it is Tyre,
The next sepulcher of a great capital is
covered with scattered columns and de
faced sphinxes and the sands of the desert,
and it is Thebes. As I pass on I find the
resting place of Mycenae, a city of which
Homer sang, and Corinth, which rejected
Paul and depended upon her fortress Ac-
rocorinthus, which now lies dismantled on
the hill, and I move on in this cemetery of
cities, and I find the tombs of Sardis and
Smyrna and Persepolis and Memphis and
Baalbek and Carthage, and here are the
cities of the Plain and Herculaneum and
Stabia and Pompeii. Some of them have
mighty sarcophagus and hieroglyphic en
tablature, but they are dead and buried,
never to rise.
THE CEMETERY NOT YET FILLED.
But the cemetery of dead cities is not yet
filled, and if the present cities of the world
forget God and with their indecencies
shock the heavens, let them know that
God, who on the 24th of August, 79,
dropped on a city of Italy a superincum
brance that staid there 17 centuries, is still
alive and hates sin now as much as he did
then, and has at his command all the arm
ament of destruction with which he whelm
ed their iniquitous predecessors. It was
only a few summers ago that Brooklyn
and New York felt an earthquake throb
that sent the people affrighted into the
streets, and that suggested that there are
forces of nature now suppressed or held in
check which, easier than a child in a nur
sery knocks, down a row of block houses,
could prostrate a city or engulf a continent
deeper than Pompeii was engulfed.
Our hope is in the mercy of the Lord con
tinued to our American cities. It amazes
me that this city, which has the quietest
Sabbaths on the continent, and the best or
der, and the highest tone of morals of any
city that I know of, is now having brought
into as near neighborhood as Coney Island
carnivals of pugilism as debasing as any of
the gladiatorial contests of Pompeii. What
a precious crew that “Coney Island Athletic
club” is, under whose auspices these orgies
are enacted! What a degradation to the
adjective “athletic,” which ordinarily sug
gests health and muscle developed for use
ful purpose! Instead of calling it an ath
letic club they might better style it “The
Ruffian Club For Smashing the Human
Visage.”
Vile men are turning that Coney Island,
which is one of the finest watering places
on all the Atlantic coast, into a place for
the offscouring of the earth to congregate,
the low horse jockeys and gamblers, and the
pugilists,and the pickpockets,and the bloats
regurgitated from the depths of the worst
wards of these cities. They invite delegates
from universal loaferdom to come to their
carnival of knuckles. But I do not believe
that the pugilism contracted for and adver
tised for next December will take place in
our neighborhood,
Evil sometimes defeats itself by going
one step too far. You may drive the hoop
of a barrel down so hard that it breaks. I
will not believe that the international prize
fight will take place on Long Island or in
the state of New York until I see the rowdy
rabble rolling drunk off the cars at Flat-
bush avenue and with faces banged and
cut and bleeding from theimbruting scene.
Against this infraction of the law3 of the
state of New York I lift solemn protest.
The curse of Almighty God will rest upon
any community that contents to such an
outrage. Does any one think it cannot be
Stopped and that the constabulary would be
overborne? Then let Governor Flower send
down there a regiment of state militia, and
they will clean out the nuisance in one
hour.
AMERICAN POLITICS.
Warned by the doom of other cities that
have perished for their ruffianism, or then-
cruelty, or their idolatry, or their dissolute
ness, let all our American cities lead the
right way. Our only dependence is on God
and Christian influences. Politics will do
nothing but make things worse. Send poli
tics to moralize and save a city, and you
send smallpox to heal leprosy or a car
cass to relieve the air of malodor. For
what politics will do I refer you to the
eight weeks of stultification enacted at
Washington by our American senate.
American politics will become a reforma
tory power on the same day that pandemo
nium becomes a church. But there are, I
am glad to say, benign and salutary and
gracious influences organized in all our
Cities which will yet take them for God
and righteousness. Let us ply the gospel
machinery to its utmost speed and power.
City evangelization is the thought. Ac
customed as are religious pessimists to
dwell upon statistics of evil and dolorous
facts, we want some one with sanctified
heart and good digestion to put in long
line the statistics of natures transformed,
apd profligacies balked, and souls ransom
ed, and cities, redeemed.
us Pictures of churches, of schools*
of reformatory associations of -
mercy. Break in upon the “mSS <*
complaint and despondency «
Deums” and “Jubilates” of I 0 r*\ L T «
gious victory. Show that the dav L 4 reli '
when a great t idal wave of salvation ln «
overall ourcities. Show how Pomn^T* 011
will become Pompeii resurrected ru*** 1
strate the fact that there are rnilU 0D *
good men and women who will ot
selves no rest day nor night until citU^
are now of the type of the buried r ? at
Italy shall take type from the New uf* of
out ° f ^
army, -Whosoever is (earful and aS?
let him return and depart earlv from \u ’
Gilead.” Close up the ranks. Lift a*
gospel standard. Forward into this Arm
geddon that is now opening and wT
word run all along the line: Brooklyn <
God! All ourcities for God! Americafa
God! The world for God! The most oft
here gathered, though born in the counts
will die in town.
Shall our last walk be through street
where sobriety and good order dominated
grogshops stench the air? Shall ou r
book be upon city halls where j Ust j!J
reigns, or demagogues plot for the stuffing
of ballot boxes? Shall we sit for the las*
time in some church where God i S Wl >.
shiped with the contrite heart, or where
cold formalism goes through unmeaning
genuflexions? God save the cities! Right,
eousness is life; iniquity is death. Remem
ber picturesque, terraced, templed, sculm
tured, boastful, God defyingand entombed
Pompeii 1
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