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TALBAGE.
Tie Great Brooilya Preacher.
tht direc-
BRooiiLYN, Oct. 15.—The character of the
hymns given out by Rev. Dr. Talroage in
the Brooklyn Tabernacle this forenoon
called for the unusual power of congrega
tional singing, organ and cornet, and the
▼oices of the thousands of worshipers made
the place resound with music. The subject
was, “Helpful Churches,” the text being
Psalms xx, 2, “Send thee help from the
sanctuary.”
If you should ask 50 men what the church
is, they would give you 50 different an
swers. One man would say, “It is a con
vention of hypocrites.” Another, “It is an
assembly of people who feel themselves a
great deal better than others.” Another,
“It is a place for gossip, where wolverine
^dispositions devour each other.” Another.
[t^ga place for the cultivation of super-
etitiouh n( A cant. ” Another, “It is an arsenal
where theologians go to get pikes and mus
kets an8 Another, “It is an art
gallery, where men go to admire grand
arehes, and exquisite fresco, and musical
warble, and the Dantesque in gloomy im-
Another man would say: “It is
the c? 8 *' t’ace on earth except my wown
home I torget thee, O Jerusalem! let
my right band * or *»°fc her cunning.”
Now friends, whatever the churoh is,
my text teftv yoa whttt ifc ov, Sbt to be, a
great, practicJ^j 10 " 1 ^ omnipotent help.
‘•Send thee help1™ m the sanctuary^*.The
pew ought to yielV^ ulne8s the b <^
The color of the uph^ fc " y ou « bt r ieId
pleasure to the eye. X? 6 e “ tlre s f, rvic «
.. ought to yield strength i? r tbe mod and
struggle of everyday life. , . .
ought to be harnessed to all tK^ lx days of
the week, drawing them in the nj
tioa.
The church ought to be a magnet, visibly
and mightily affecting all the homes of the
worshipers. Every man gets roughly jos
tled, gets abused, gets cut, gets insulted,
geta slighted, gets exasperated. By the
time the Sabbath comes lie has an accumu
lation of six days of annoyance, and that is
a starveling church service which has not
Strength enough to take that accumulated
annoyance aud hurl it into perdition.
The business man sits down in church
headachey from the week’s engagements.
Perhaps he wishes he had tarried at home
on the lounge with the newspapers and the
alippers. That man wants to be cooled off
and graciously diverted. The first wave of
the religious service ought to dash clear
over the hurricane decks and leave him
dripping with holy aud glad and heavenly
emotion. “Send thee help from the sanc
tuary.”
CHURCH MUSIC.
In the first place sanctuary help ought to
come from the music. A woman dying in
England persisted in singing to the last mo
ment. The attendants tried to persuade
her to stop, saying it would exhaust her
and make her disease worse. She an
swered: “I must sing. I am only practic
ing for the heavenly choir.” Music on
earth is a rehearsal for music in heaven. If
yoo and I are going to take part in that
great orchestra, it is high time that we
were stringing and thrumming our harps.
They tell us that Thalberg and Gott-
echalk never would go into a concert until
they had first in private rehearsed, although
they were such masters of the instrument.
And can it be that we expect to take a part
tn the great oratorio of heaven if we do not
rehearse here? But I am not speaking of
the next world. Sabbath song ought to
■et all the week to music. We want not
more harmony, not more artistic expres
sion, but more volume in our church music.
Now, I am no worshiper of noise, but I
believe that if our American churches
would with full heartiness of soul and full
a < * emphasis of voice sing the songs of Zion
tht* part of sacred worship would have ten
fold more power than it has now. Why not
foke this part of the sacred service and lift
ft to where it ought to be? All the annoy-
i of life might be drowned out of that
; song- Do you tell me that it is not
fmhionable to sing very loudly? Then, I
M y t away with the fashion. We dam back
the great Mississippi of congregational
K buying and let a few drops of melody
- triokle through the dam. I say, take away
i the dam and let the billows roar on their
h wmT fa the oceanic heart of God. Whether
^ It Is fashionable to sing loudly or not, let
- ifa Bing with an possible Aphasia.
We hear a neat deal Tt he art of sing-
Rf£feS» of magic aSasejtertsiment. of ipusi$
aa~h recreation. It is high time we heard
something of music as a help, a practical
help. In order to do this we must only
have a few hymns. New tunes and new
hymns every Sunday make poor congre
gational singing. Fifty hymns are enough
for 50 years. The Episcopal church prays
the same prayers every Sabbath and year
after year and century after century.
For that reason they have the hearty re
sponses. Let us take a hint from that fact
and let us sing the same songs Sabbath
after Sabbath. Only in that way can we
come to the full force of this exercise.
Twenty thousand years will not wear out
the hymns of William Cowper and Charles
Wesley and Isaac Watts.
Suppose now each person in this audience
has brought all the annoyances of the last
S65 days. Fill this room to the ceiling with
sacred song, and you would drown out all
those annoyances of the 365 days, and you
would drown them out for ever. Organ
and cornet are only to marshal the voice.
Let the voice fall into line, and in com
panies and in brigades by storm take the
obduracy and sin of the world. If you can
not sing for yourself, sing for others. By
trying to give others good cheer, you will
bring good cheer to your own heart.
When Londonderry, Ireland, was be
sieged many years ago, the people inside
the city were famishing, and a vessel came
up with provisiens, but the vessel ran on
the river bank and stuck fast. The enemy
went down with laughter and derision to
board the vessel, when the vessel gave a
broadside fire against the enemy, and by
the shock was turned back into the stream,
and all was well. Oh, ye who are high and
dry on the rocks of melancholy, give a
broadside fire of song against your spirit
ual enemies, and by holy rebound you will
come out into the calm waters. If we want
to make ourselves happy, we must make
others happy.
Mythology tells us of Amphion, who
played his lyre until the mountains were
moved and the walls of Thebes arose, but
religion has a mighter story to tell of how
Christian song may build whole temples of
eternal joy and lift the round earth into
sympathy with the skies. I tarried many
nights in London, and I used to hear the
bells, the small bells of the city, strike the
hour of night—1, 2, 8, 4—and after they
were done striking the hour of night then
the great St. Paul’s cathedral would come
in to mark the hours, making all the other
sounds seem utterly insignificant as with
mighty tongue it announced the hour of
the night, every stroke an overmastering
boom.
My friends, it was intended that all the
lesser sounds of the world should be
browned out in the mighty tongue of con
gregational song beating against the gates
of heaven. Do you know how they mark
the hours in heaven ? They have no clocks,
as they have no candles, but a great pen-
dul»ui of halleluiah swinging across heav-
eternity to eternity.
Let those refuse to sing
Who never knew our
But children oftJJ"!** 1 " „
Shm lil him heavenly king
6 ° ,u € SJJeak their joys abroad.
A 8ERMONIZER ON SERMONS.
Again, I remark that sanctuary help ought
to come from the sermon. Of 1,000 people
in this or any other audience how many
want sympathetic help? Do you guess 100?
Do you guess 500? You have guessed wrong.
I will tell you just the proportion. Out of
1,000 people in this audience there are just
1,000 who need sympathetic help. These
young people want it just as much as the
old. The old people sometimes seem to
think they have a monopoly of the rheu
matisms, and the neuralgias, and the head
aches, and the physical disorders of the
world, but I tell you there are no worse
heartaches than are felt by some of these
young people. '
>po you know that much of the work is
db-ie by the young? Raphael died at 37;
Richard III at 33; Gustavus Adolphus died
at 38; Innocent III c&me to his mightiest
influence at 37; Cortez conquered Mexico at
30; Don John won Lepanto at 25; Grotius
was attorney general at 24, and I have no
ticed amid all classes of men that some of
the severest battles and the toughest work
comes before 30. Therefore we must have
our sermons and our exhortation in prayer
meeting all sympathetic with the young.
And so with these people further on in
life. What do these doctors and lawyers
and merchants and mechanics care about
the abstractions of religion? What they
want is help to bear the whimsicalities of pa
tients, the browbeating of legal opponents,
the unfairness of customers, who have
plenty of fault finding for every imperfec
tion of handiwork, but no praise for 20 ex
cellencies. What does that brain racked,
hand blistered man care for Zwingle's
“Doctrine of Original Sin” or Augustine’s
“Anthropology?” You might as well go
to a man who has the pleurisy and put on
his side a plaster made out of Dr. Parr’s
“Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence.”
While all of a sermon may not be help
ful alike to all, if it be a Christian sermon
preached by a Christian man, there will be
help for every one somewhere. We go into
an apothecary store. We see others being
waited on. We do not complain because
we do not immediately get the medicine.
We know our turn will come after awhile.
And so while all parts of a sermon may not
be appropriate to our case if we wait pray
erfully before the sermon is through we
shall have the divine prescription. I say
to these young men who come here Sab
bath by Sabbath and who are going to
preach the gospel, these theological stu
dents—I say to them, we want in our ser
mons not more metaphysics, nor more
imagination, nor more logic, nor more pro
fundity.
What we want in our sermons and Chris
tian exhortations is more sympathy. When
Father Taylor preached in the Sailors’
Bethel at Boston, the Jack Tars felt that
they had help lor their duties among the
ratlines and the forecastles. When Richard
Weaver preached to the operatives in Old
ham, England, all the workingmen felt
they bad more grace for the spindles. When
Dr. South preached to kings and princes
and princesses, all the mighty men and
women who heard him felt preparation for
their high station.
the help of prayer.
Again, I remark that sanctuary help
ought to come through the prayers of all
the people. The door of the eternal store
house is hung on one hinge, a gold hinge,
the hinge of prayer—and when the whole
audience lay hold of that door it must come
open. There are here many people spend
ing their first Sabbath after some great be
reavement. What will your prayer do for
them? How will it help the tomb in that
man’s heart? Here are people who have
not been in church before for 10 years; what
will your prayer do for them by rolliug
over their soul holy memories? Here are
people in crises of awful temptation.
They are on the verge of despair or wild
blundering or theft or suicide. What will
your prayer do for them this morning in
the way of giving them strength to resist?
Will you be chiefly anxious about the fit of
the glove that you put to your forehead
while you prayed? Will you be chiefly
critical of the rhetoric of the pastor’s peti
tion? No. No. A thousand people will
feel “that prayer is for me,” aud at every
step of the prayer chains ought to drop off,
and temples of sin ought to crush into dust,
and jubilees of deliverance ought to bran
dish their trumpets. In most of our
churches we have three prayers—the open
ing prayer, what is called the “long prayer,”
and the cl*sing,prayer.
There are mffiiy people who spend the
first prayer in arranging their apparel after
entrance and spend the second prayer, the
“long prayer,” in wishing it were through
and spend the last prayer in preparing to
start for home. The most insignificant
part of every religious service is the ser
mon. The more important parts are the
Scripture lesson and the prayer. The ser
mon is only a man talking to a man. The
Scripture lesson is God talking to man.
Prayer is man talking to God. Oh, if we
understood the grandeur and the pathos of
this exercise of prayer, instead of being a
dull exercise, we would imagine that the
room was full of divine and angelic appear
ances.
But, my friends, the old style of church
will not do the work. We might as well
now try to take all the passengers from
New York to Buffalo by stage coach, or all
the passengers from Albany to Buffalo by
canalboat, or do all the battling of the
world with bow and arrow, as with the old
style of church to meet the exigencies of
this day. Unless the church in our day
will adapt itself to the time it will become
extinct. The people reading newspapers
and books all the week, in alert, pictur
esque and resounding style^wilj havg-^j
PjjriengaJ*}£il oSuoath humdrum.
we have no objections to bands and sur
plice and all the paraphernalia of clerical
life, but these things make no impression—
make no more impression on the great mass
es of the people than the ordinary business
suit that you wear in Wall street. A tailor
cannot make a minister. Some of the poor
est preachers wear the best clothes, and
many a backwoodsman has dismounted
from the saddlebags, and in his linen dust
er preached a sermon that shook earth and
heaven with its Christian eloquence. No
new gospel, only the old gospel in a way
suited to the time. No new church, but a
church to be the asylum, the inspiration,
the practical sympathy and the eternal help
of the people.
But while half of the doors of the church
are to be set open toward this world the
other half of the doors of the church must
be set open toward the next. You and I
tarry here only a brief space. We want
somebody to teach us how to get out of this
life at the right time and in the right way.
Some fall out of life, some go stumbling
out of life, some go groaning out of life,
some go cursing out of life. We want to
go singing, rising, rejoicing, triumphing.
We want half the doors of the church set
in that direction. We want half the pray
ers that way, half the sermons that way.
We want to know how to get ashore from
the tumult of this world into the land of
everlasting peace. We do not want to stand
doubting and shivering when we go away
from this world. We want our anticipa
tions aroused to the highest pitch.
We want to have the exhilaration of a
dying child in England, the father telling
me the story. When he said to her, “Is
the path narrow?” she answered: “The
path is narrow. It is so narrow that I
cannot walk arm in arm with Christ, so
Jesus goes ahead, and he says, ‘Mary,
follow.’ ” Through these church gates
set heavenward how many of your friends
and mine have gone? The last time
they were out of the house they came
to church. The earthly. pilgrimage end
ed at the pillar of publio worship, and
then they marched out to a bigger and
brighter assemblage. Some of them were
so old they could not walk without a cane
or two crutches; now they have eternal
juvenescence. Or they were so young they
could not walk except as the maternal
hand guided them; now they bound with
the hilarities celestial.
The last time we saw them they were
wasted with malarial or pulmonic disor
der, but now they have no fatigue and no
difficulty of respiration in the pure air of
heaven. How I wonder when you and I
will cross overl Some of you have had
about enough of the thumping and flailing
of this life. A draft from the fountains of
heaven would do you good. Complete re
lease you could stand very well. If you
got on the other side and had permission
to come back, you would not come.
Though you were invited to come back
anff JSIh "y5ur friends on earth, youTwould
say: “No, let me tarry here until they
come. I shall not risk going back. If a
min reaches heaven, he had better stay
here.”
THE PALM BRANCH.
Oh, I join hands with you this morning
in that uplifted splendorl
When the shore is won at last.
Who will count the billows past?
In Freyhourg, Switzerland, there is the
trunk of a tree 400 years old. That tree
was planted to commemorate an event.
About 10 miles from the city the Swiss
conquered the Burgundians, and a young
man wanted to take the tidiDgs to the city.
He took a tree branch and ran with such
speed the 10 miles that when he reached
the city waving the tree branch he had only
strength to cry, “Victory!” aud dropped
dead. The tree branch that he carried was
planted, and it grew to be a great tree 20
feet in circumference, and the remains of it
are there to this day.
My hearer, when you have fought your
last battle with sin and death aud hell, and
they have been routed in the conflict, it
will be a joy worthy of celebration. You
will fly to the city and cry “Victoryl” and
drop at the feet of the great King. Then
the palm branch of the earthly race will be
planted to become the outbranching tree
of everlasting rejoicing. *
When shall these eyes thy heaven built
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And pearly gates behold.
Thy bulwarks with salvation strong,
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