Newspaper Page Text
14
THE SUNNY SOUTH,
BETHEA.
God loaned us an angel, sweet and pure,
To gladden our hearts for a day;
Then he called him home, for he wanted it too,
Our beautiful baby, Bethea.
’Twis hard, so hard to let him go
At the close of that short, sweet day;
God called him home, it was best we know
For our sweet little baby, Bethea.
God called him to live in that land above,
The land of eternal day.
It is best up there, for angels love
Our dear, pretty baby, Bethea.
He is happy up there, God’s love to share,
In that land where the angels stay;
One of God's jewels, precious and rare,
Our darling baby, Bethea.
At the close of day, in the twilight dim,
His spirit flew softly away.
God loved him so well, he called him to him,
Our precious baby, Bethea.
So dear, so pretty, so precious, so sweet,
He lives where the angels stay;
Let us try to be good, and someday we will meet
Our angel baby, Bethea.
Sylvan Glenn.
Talmage’s Sermon.
SEPTEMBER 13.
O MUCH that is depressing is
said about the wickedness of
the cities it will cheer uS to
read what Dr. Talmage says in
this sermon about their coming
redemption. The text is Zacha-
riah viii. 5. “And the streets of the city
shall be full of boys and girls playing in the
streets thereof. ”
Glimpses of our cities redeemed! Now
boys and girls who play in the streets run
such risks that multitudes of them end in
ruin. But, in the coming time spoken of,
our cities will be so moral that lads and lasses
shall be as safe in the public thoroughfares
as in the nursery.
Pulpit and printing press for the most part
in our day are busy in discussing the condi
tion of the cities at this time, but would it
not be healthfully encouraging to all Chris
tian workers, and to all who are toiling to
make the world better, if we should, for a
little while, look forward to the time when
our cities shall be revolutionized by the gos
pel of the Son of God, and all the darkness of
sin and trouble and crime and suffering shall
be gone from the world?
Every man has a pride in the city of his
nativity or residence, if it be a city distin
guished for any dignity or prowess. Caesar
boasted of his native Rome, Virgil of Man
tua, Lycurgus of Sparta, Demosthenes of
Athens, Archimedes of Syracuse and Paul of
Tarsus. I should have suspicion of base
heartedness in a man who had no especial in
terest in the city of his birth or residence—
no exhilaration at the evidence of its pros
perity or its artistic embellishments or its in
tellectual advancement.
A NOTICEABLE POINT.
I have noticed that a man never likes a city
where he has not behaved well! People who
have had a free ride in the prison van never
like the city that furnishes the vehicle.
When I find Argos and Rhodes and Smyrna
trying to prove themselves the birthplace of
Homer, I conclude at once that Homer be
haved well. He liked them and they liked
him. We must not war on laudable city
pride, or, with the idea of building ourselves
up at any time, try to pull others down. Bos
ton must continue to point to its Faneuil
Hall and to its Common and to its superior ed
ucational advantages. Philadelphia must con
tinue to point to its Independence Hall and its
mint and its Girard college. Washington
must continue to point to its wondrous capi-
toline buildings. If I should find a man
coming from any city, having no pride in
that city, that city having been the place of
his nativity, or now being the place of his
residence, I would feel like asking : “What
mean thing have you done there? .What out
rageous thing have you been guilty of that
you do not like the place?”
I think we ought—and I take it for granted
you are interested in this great work of
evangelizing the cities and saving the world
—we ought to toil with the sunlight in our
faces. We are not fighting in a miserable
B.ull Run of defeat. We are on our way to
final victory. We are not following the rider
on the black horse, leading us down to death
and darkness and doom, but the rider on the
white horse, with the moon under his feet
and the stars of heaven for his tiara. Hail,
Conqueror, hail !
k I know there are sorrows, and there are
sins, and there are sufferings all around about
us, but as in some bitter, cold, winter day,
when we are thrashing our arms around us
to keep our thumbs from freezing, we think
of the warm spring day that will after awhile
come, or in the dark winter night we look up
and see the northern lights, the windows of
heaven illuminated by some great victory,
just so we look up from the night of suffer
ing and sorrow and wretchedness in our
cities, and we see a light streaming through
from the other side, and we know we are on
the way to morning—more than that, en the
way to “a morning without clouds.”
I want you to understand, all you who are
toiling for Christ, that the castles of sin are
^all going to be captured. The victory for
Christ in these great towns is going to be so
complete that not a man on earth, or an
angel in heaven, or a devil in hell will dis
pute it. How do I know? I know just as
certainly as God lives and that this is holy
truth. The old Bible is full of it. If the
nation is to be saved, of course all the cities
are to be saved. It makes a great difference
with you and with me whether we are toiling
on toward a defeat or toiling on toward a vic
tory.
A GLORIOUS TIME.
Now, in this municipal elevation of which
I speak, I have to remark there will be
greater financial prosperity than our cities
have ever seen. Some people seem to have a
morbid idea of the millennium,and they think
when the better time comes to our cities and
the world, people will give their time up to
psalm singing and the relating of their re
ligious experiences, and,as all social life will
be purified, there will be no hilarity, and, as
all business will be purified, there will be no
enterprise. There is no ground for such an
absurd anticipation. In'the time of which
I speak where now one fortune is made there
will be a hundred fortunes made. We all
know business prosperity depends upon con
fidence between man and man. Now, when
that time comes of which I speak, and when
ail double dealing, all dishonesty, and all
fraud are gone out of commercial circles,
thorough confidence will be established, and
there will be better business done and larger
fortunes gathered and mightier successes
achieved.
The great business disasters of this country
have come from the work of godless specula
tors and infamous stock gamblers. The great
foe to business is crime. When the right
shall have hurled back the wrong, and shall
have purified the commercial code, and shall
have thundered down fraudulent establish
ments, and shall have put into the hands
of honest men the keys of business—blessed
time for the bargain makers. I am not talk
ing an abstraction. I am not making a
guess. I am telling you God’s eternal truth.
In that day of which I speak taxes will be
a mere nothing. Now our business men are
taxed for everything. City taxes, county
taxes, State taxes, United States taxes, stamp
taxes, license taxes, manufacturing taxes—
taxes, taxes, taxes ! Our business men have
to make a small fortune every year to pay
their taxes. What fastens on our great in
dustries this awful load? Crime, individual
and official. We have to pay the board of the
villains who are incarcerated in our prisons.
We have to take care of the orphans of
those who plunged into their graves through
sensual indulgences. We have to support
the municipal governments, which are vast
and expensive, just in proportion as the
criminal proclivities are fast and tremendous.
Who support the almshouses and police
stations, and all the machinery of municipal
government? The tax payers.
NO MORE CRIME.
But in the glorious time of which I speak,
grievous taxation will all have ceased. There
will be no need of supporting criminals;
there will be no criminals. Virtue will have
taken the place of vice. There will be no or
phan asylums, for parents will be able to
leave a competency to their children. There
will be no voting of large sums of money
for some municipal improvement, which
money, before it gets to the improvements,
drops into the pockets of those who voted it.
No oyer and terminer kept up at vast expense
to the people. No impanelling of juries to
try theft and arson and murder and slander
and blackmail. Better factories. Grander
architecture. Finer equipage. Larger for
tunes. Richer opulence. Better churches.
In that better time, also, coming to those
cities, Christ’s churches will be more numer
ous, and they will be larger, and they will be
more devoted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
and they will accomplish greater influences
for good. Now, it is often the case that
churches are envious of each other, and de
nominations collide with each other, and
even ministers of Christ sometimes forget
the bond of brotherhood. But in the time of
which I speak, while there will be just as
many differences of opinion as there are now,
there will be no acerbity, no hypercriticism,
no exclusiveness.
In our great cities the churches are not to
day large enough to hold more than a fourth
of the population. The churches that are
built—comparatively few of them are fully
occupied. The average attendance in the
churches of the United States to-day is not
four hundred. Now, in the glorious time of
which I speak, there are going to be vast
churches, and they are going to be all
thronged with worshippers. Oh what rous
ing songs they will sing! Oh, what earnest
sermons they will preach ! Oh, what fervent
prayers they will offer! Now, in our time,
what is called a fashionable church is a place
where a few people, having attended very
carefully to their toilet, come and sit down
—they do not want to be crowded; they like
a whole seat to themselves—and then, if they
have any time left from thinking of their
store and from examining the style of the
hat in front of them, they sit and listen to a
sermon warranted to hit no man’s sins and
listen to music which is rendered by a choir
warranted to sing tunes that nobody knows.
And then, after an hour and a half of indo
lent yawning, they go home refreshed. Every
man feels better after he has had a sleep.
In many of the churches of Christ in our
day the music is simply a mockery. I have
not a cultivated ear nor a cultivated voice,
yet no man can do my singing for me. I
have nothing to say against artistic music.
The $2 or .$5 [ pay to hear any of the great
queens of song are a good investment. But
when the people assemble in religious con
vocation, and the hymn is read, and the
angels of God step from their throne to catch
the music on their wings, do not let us drive
them away by our indifference. I have
preached in churches where vast sums of
money were employed to keep up the music,
and it was as exquisite as any heard on earth,
but I thought, at the same time, for all mat
ters practical I would prefer the hearty, out
breaking song of a back-woods Methodist
camp-meeting
Let one of these starveling fancy songs
sung in church get up before the throne of
God, how would it seem standing amid the
great doxologies of the redeemed? Let the
finest operatic air that ever went up from the
church of Christ get many hours the start, it
will be caught and passed by the hosanna of
the Sabbath school children. I know a
church where the choir did all the singing,
save one Christian man, who, through “per
severance of the saints,” went right on, and
afterward a committee was appointed to wait
on him and ask him if he would not please
stop singing, as he bothered the choir.
“Let those refuse to sing
Who never knew our God,
But children of the heavenly King
Should speak their joys abroad.”
“Praise ye the Lord. Let everything with
breath praise the Lord.” In the glorious time
coming in our cities and in the world hosan
na will meet hosanna, and halleluiah, halle
luiah.
HOW IT WILL BE DONE.
In that time also of which I speak all the
haunts of iniquity and crime and squalor will
be cleansed and will be illuminated. How is
it to be done? You say, perhaps, by one in
fluence. Perhaps I say by another. I will
tell you what is my idea, and I know I am
right in it: The gospel of the Son of God
is the only agency that will ever accomplish
this.
A gentleman in England had a theory that
if the natural forces of wind and tide and
sunshine and wave were rightly applied and
rightly developed it would make this whole
earth a paradise. In a book of great genius,
and which rushed from edition to edition, he
said: “Fellow men, I promise to show the
means of creating a paradise within ten years,
where everything desirable for human life
may be had by every man in superabundance
without labor and without pay—where the
whole face of nature shall be changed into
the most beautiful farms, and man may live
in the most magnificent palaces, in all imag
inable refinements of luxury, and in the most
delighful gardens—where he may accomplish,
without labor, in one year more than hitherto
could be done in thousands of years. From
the houses to be built will be afforded the
most cultured views that can be fancied.
From the galleries, from the roof, and from
the tuirets may be seen gardens as far as the
eye can see, full of fruits and flowers, ar
ranged in the most beautiful order, with
walks, colonnades, aqueducts, canals, ponds,
plains, amphitheaters, terraces, fountains,
sculptured works, pavilions, gondolas, places
of popular amusement, to lure the eye and
fancy. All this to be done by urging the
water, the wind and the sunshine to their full
development.”
He goes on and gives plates of the machin-
ery by which this work is to be done, and he
says he only needs at the start a company in
which the shares shall be $20 each and $100,-
000 or $200,000 shall be raised just to make
a specimen community, and then, this being
formed, the world will see its practicability
and very soon $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 can
be obtained, and in ten years the whole earth
will be emparadised. The plan is not so pre
posterous as some I have heard of. But I will
take no stock in that company. I do not be
lieve that it will be done in that way by any
mechanical force or by any machinery that
the human mind can put into play. It is to
be done by the gospel of the Son of God—the
omnipotent machinery of love and grace and
pardon and salvation. This is to emparadise
the nations. Archimedes destroyed a fleet of
ships coming up the harbor. You know how
he did it? He lifted a great sunglass, history
tells us, and, when the fleet of ships came up
the harbor of Syracuse, he brought to bear
this sunglass, and he focused the sun’s rays
upon those ships. Now, the sails are wings of
fire, the masts fall, the vessels sink. Oh, my
friends, by the sunglass of the gospel con
verging the rays of the sun of righteousness
upon the sins, the wickedness of the world,
we will make them blaze and expire.
THE CLEANSED CITIES.
In that day of which I speak do you believe
there will be any midnight carousal? Will
there be any kicking off from the marble steps
of shivering mendicants? Will there be any
unwashed, unfed, uncombed children? Will
there be any blasphemies in the streets?
Will there be any inebriates staggering past?
No. No wine stores. No lager beer saloons. No
distilleries, where they make the three X’s.
No bloodshot eye. No bloated cheek. No
instruments of ruin and destruction. No fist
pounded forehead. The grandchildren of
that woman who goes down the street with
curse, stoned by the boys that follow her,
will be the reformers and philanthropists and
the Christian men and the honest merchants
of our cities. Then what municipal govern
ments, too, we will have in all the cities.
Some cities are worse than others, but in
many of our cities you just walk down by the
city halls and look in at some of the rooms
occupied by politicians, and see to what a
sensual, loathsome, ignorant, besotted crew
city politics is often abandoned. Or they
stand around the city hall picking their teeth,
waiting for some emoluments of crumbs to
fall to their feet, waiting all day long, and
waiting all night long.
Who are those wretched women taken up
for drunkenness, and carried up to the courts,
and put in prison, of course? What will
you do with the grog shops that make them
drink? Nothing. Who are those prisoners in
jail ? One of them stole a pair of shoes.
That boy stole a dollar. This girl snatched a
purse. All of them crimes damaging society
less than $20 or $30. But what will you do
with the gambler who, last night, robbed
the young man of $1,000? Nothing. What
shall be done with that one who breaks
through and destroys the purity of a Christian
home, and with an adroitness and perfidy that
beats the strategy of hell, flings a shrinking,
shrieking soul into ruin? Nothing. What
will you do with those who fleeced that
young, man, getting him to purloin large
sums of money his employers—the
young mar. who came' tPtLr* officer of
church and told the story and "fraifiicSu^ 8 ^
asked what he should do? Nothing. Ah,
we do well to punish small crimes, but I
have sometimes thought it would be better in
some of our cities if the officials would only
turn out from the jails the petty criminals,
the little offenders, $jo desperadoes, and put
in their places some of the monsters of in
iquity who drive their roan span through the
streets so swiftly that honest men have to
leap to get out of the way of being run over !
Oh, the damnable schsmes that professed
Christian men will sometimes engage in
until God puts the finger of his retribution
into the collar of their robe of hypocrisy and
rips it clear to the bottom ! But all these
wrongs will be righted. I expect to live to
see the day. I think I hear in the distance
the rumbling of the King’s chariot. Not
always in the minority is the church of God
going to be, or are good men going to be.
The streets are going to be filled with regen
erated populations. Three hundred and sixty
bells rang in Moscow when one prince was
married, but when righteousness and peace
kiss each other in all the earth, 10,000 times
10,000 bells shall strike the jubilee. Poverty
enriched. Hunger fed. Crime banished.
Ignorance enlightened. All the cities saved.
Is not this a cause worth working in ?
Oh, you think sometimes it does not
amount to much! You toil on in your
Tourists, Camping Parties, Summer Visitors to the
country, will find Radway's Ready Relief a valuable
accession to their outfits. It takes up but little room—
is not expensive— and saves often a world of trouble.
CURES and PREVENTS all
SUMMER COMPLAINTS
DYSENTERY. DIARRHOEA,
CHOLERA MORBUS.
Internally—A half to a teaspoonful in a half tambler
of water will in a few minutes, cure Cramps, Spasms,
Sour Stomach, Nausea, Vomiting. Heartburn, Nervous
ness, Sleeplessness, Sick Headache, Flatulency, and all'
internal pains. Externally, for all Pains, Bruises, Bites,
of Insects, Sun Burns. Sore Throat, Congestions and.
Inflammations.
Malaria in its Various Forms Cured and
Prevented.
There is not a remedial agent in the world_ that will
cure fever and a^ue and all other malarious, bilious and
other fevers, aided by I1ADW AY’S PILLS, so quickly
as RADWAY’S READY RELIEF.
Price, 50 cents per bottle. Sold by all druggists.