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About The Weekly banner-watchman. (Athens, Ga.) 1886-1889 | View Entire Issue (April 9, 1889)
TIIE BANNER-WATCIIMAN, ATHENS, GEORGIA, APRIL 0, 18S9. DR. OF THE B -ON THE- f We will give away another fine lot of Every subscriber who pays up their subscription one year in advance will receive the one year^tnd have their names placed in our Midsum mer Price Drawing. At that time we will give away THE SLAUGHTER. TALMAGE’S DISCOURSE IN ST. LOUIS. A Svmah the latest and most melodious musical instrument—an ornament for any home, and an Elegant B reeoh-Loading Shot-Gun £ rg - % In addition to these elegant prizes we will give away a fine $45 Singer Seving Machine to our lady subscribers. Send in your subscriptions or hand it to your postmaster, who will forward it at our expense. The drawing is conducted by disinter ested gentlemen and is absolutely fair. “Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be." A Loss That Cannot Be Replaced—The Equipment of a Man—Danger, to Young Men In Groat Cities. St. Louis, April 7.—The Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, D. D., of Brooklyn, preached hero this evening to a vast audience. His subject was “The Slaughter,” and his text, Proverbs, vii, 21: “As an ox to the slaughter.” The eloqueut preacher said: There is nothing in the voice or manner.of the butcher to indicate to the ox that there is death ahead. The ox thinks he is going on to a rich pas ture field of clover, where all day long he will revel in the herbaceous luxuriance; but after a while the men and the boys close in upon him with sticks. and stones and shouting, and drive him through bars and into a doorway, where he is fastened, and with a well aimed stroke the ax fells him; and so the anticipation of the redolent pasture field is completely disappointed. So many a young man has been: driven on by temptation to what he thought would be paradisiacal enjoyment; but .after a while inllu- ences with darker hue and swarthier arm close in upon him, and he finds that instead of making au excursion into a garden he has been driven “as an ox to the slaughter.” L We are apt to blame young men for being destroyed when we ought to blame the iniluences that destroy them. Society slaughters *' a great many young men by the behest, “You must keep up appearances; whatever be your salary, you must dress as well as others, you must wine and brandy as many friends, you must smoke as costly cigars, you must give as expen sive entertainments, and you must live in as fashionable a boarding house. If you haven’t the money, borrow. If you can’t borrow make a false cutry, or subtract hero and there a bill from a bundle of bank bills; you will only have to make the deception a little while; in a few months, or in a year or two, you can make all righL Nobody will be hurt by it; nobody will be the wiser.. You yourself will not be damaged.” By that awful pro cess a hundred thousand men have been slaughtered for time and slaugh tered for eternity. THE MISERIES OP GETTING IN DEBT. Suppose you borrow. There is noth ing wrong about borrowing money. There is hardly a man in the house but has sometimes borrowed money. Vast estates have been built on a borrowed dollar. But there are two kinds of borrowed money. Money borrowed for the purpose of starting or keeping up legitimate enterprise and expense, and money borrowed to get that which you can do without. The first is right, the other is wrong. If you have money enough of your own to buy a coat, however plain, and then you borrow money for a dandy’s out fit, you have taken the first revolu tion of the wheel down grade. Bor row for the necessities: that may be well. Borrow for the luxuries; that tip your prospects over in the wrong direction. The Bible distinctly says the bor rower is servant of the lender. It is a bad state of things when you have to go down some other street to escape meeting some one whom you owe. If young men knew what is the despot ism of being in debt more of them would keep out of it What ditl debt do for Lord Bacon, with a mind tow ering above the centuries? It induced him to take bribes and convict himself, as a criminal before all ages. What did debt do for Walter Scott? Broken hearted at Abbotsford. Kept him writ ing until his hand gave out in paraly sis to keep the sheriff away from his lictures and statuary. Better for him if he had minded the maxim which he had chiseled over the fireplace at Ab botsford, “Waste not, want not" The trouble is, my friends, the peo ple do not understand the ethics of going in debt, and that if you pur chase goods with no expectation of paying for them, or go into debts which you cannot meet, you steal just so muen money. If I go into a grocer’s store, and I buy sugars and coffees and meats, with no capacity to pay for them and no intention of paying for them, I am more dishonest than if I f ;o into the store, arid when the grocer’s ace is turned the other way I fill my pockets with the articles of merchan dise and carry off a ham. In the one case 1 take the merchant's time, and I take the time of his messenger to transfer the goods to my house, while in the other case I take none of the time of thb merchant, and I wait upon myself, and I transfer the goods with out any trouble to him. In other words, a sneak thief is not so bad as a man who contracts for debts he never expects to pay. Yet in all our cities there are fam ilies that move every May day to get into proximity to other grocers and meat shops and apothecaries. They owe everybody within half a mile of where they now live, and next May they will move into a distant part of the city, finding a new lot of victims. Meanwhile you, the honest family in the new house, are bothered day by day by the knocking at the door of disappointed bakers, and butchers, and dry goods dealers, and newspaper car riers, and you are asked where your predecessor is. You do not know. It was arranged you should not know. Meanwhile your predecessorTias gone to some distant part of the city, and the people who have anything to sell have sent their wagons and stopped there to solicit the “valuable” custom of the new neighbor, and lie, the new neighbor, witn great complacency ana with an sir of affluence, orders the finest steaks and the highest priced sugars, and the best of the canned fruits, and perhaps, -all the newspa pers. And the debts will keep on ac cumulating until he gets his goods on the 30tb of next April in the furniture cart. /• NpWj let me say, if there are any in and drlre the stake for their enjj_- campmcnL A LOSS THAT CANNOT BE REPLACED. A steamer fifteen hundred miles from shore with broken rudder and lost compass, and hulk leaking fifty gallons the hour, is better off than a young man when you have robbed him of his Bible. Have you ever no ticed bow despicably mean it is to take away the world’s Bible without pro posing a substitute? It is meaner than to come to a sick man and steal his medicine, meaner than to come to a cripple and steal his crutch, meaner than to come to a pauper and steal his crust, meaner than to come to a poor man and burn his house down. It is the worst of all larcenies to steal the Bible, which has been the crutch and medicine aud food and eternal home to so many l What a generous and mag nanimous business infidelity has gone into! This splitting up of life boats and taking away or fire escapes and extinguishing of light houses. I come out and 1 say to such people, “What are you doing all this for?” “Oh,” they say, “just for fun.” It is such fun to see Christians try to hold on to their Bibles! Many of them have lost loved ones, and have been told that there is a resurrection, and it is such fun to tell them there will be no resurrection 1 Many of them have believed that Christ came to carry the burdens and to heal the wounds of the. world, and it is such fun to tell them they will have to be their own saviour! Think of the meanest thing you ever heard of; then go down a thousand feet underneath it, and you will find yourself at the top of a stairs a hun dred miles long; go to the bottom of the stairs, and you will find a ladder a thousand miles long; then go to the foot of the ladder and look off apreci- pice half as far as from here to China, and you will find the headquarters of the meanness that would rob this world of its only comfort in life, its only peace in death and its only hope for immortality. Slaughter a young man’s faith in God, aud there is not much more left to slaughter. Now, what lias become of the slaughtered? Well, some of them are in their father’s or mother’s house broken down in-health, waiting to die; others are in the hospital; others are in Greenwood, or, ratber, their bodies are, for their souls have gone on to retribution. Not much prospect for a young man who started life with good ~ health, and good education, and a solicitous in regard to young men, ■ Christian example set him, and oppor- and I want to make them nervous in j tunity of usefulness, who gathered all regard to the contraction of unpayable j his treasures and put them in one box, debts. 1 give you a paragraph from • and then dropped it into the sea. my own experience. - 1 DR. TALMAGE HAS BEEN THERE HIMSELF. such persons in the house, if y° u have any t'ega-wl *for your ov. n convenience, you had better re move to some greatly distant part of the city. It is too bad that,'waving had all the trouble of consuming the goods, you should also have the trouble of being dunned I And let me say that if you. find that this pictures your own pliotograph, instead of being in church you ought to be in the pen itentiary 1 No wonder that so many of our merchants fail in business. They are swindled into bankruptcy by these wandering Arabs, these no mads of city life. They cheat the grocer out of the green apples which make them sick, the physician who attends their distress, and the under taker who fits them out for departure from the neighborhood' where they owe everybody when they pay the debt of nature, the only debt they ever do payl NEITHER A BORROWER NOR A LEN DER BE.” Now our young men are coming up in this depraved state of commercial ethics, and I am solicitous about them. 1 want to warn them against being slaughtered on the sharp edges of debt You want many things you have not, my young friends. You shall have them if you have patience and honesty and industry. Certain lines of conduct always lead out to certain successes. . There is a law which controls even those things that seem haphazard. I have been told by those who have ob served that it is possible to calculate just how many letters will be sent to the Dead Letter office every year through misdirection; that it is possi ble to calculate just how many letters will be detained for lack of postage stamps through the forgetfulness of the senders, and that. it is possible to tell just how many people will fall in the streets by slipping on an orange peel. In other words, there are no accidents. The most insignificant event you ever heard of is the link be tween two eternities—the eternity of the past and the eternity of the future. Head the right way, young man, and you will come out at the right goal. Bring me a young man and tell me what Ins physical health is, and what his mental caliber, and what his habits, and I will tell you what will be his destiny for this world, aud his destiny for the world to come, and I will not make five inaccurate prophecies out of the five hundred. All this makes me to live on, and al’. the come frbtn that deficit hands to drink, and 1 Vti nervous system seemi, < stimulus. Their g by the most of the c&tJ and most of the opeJ; 1 ton, Tl»e mpidJ’T 1 ™ death rushing against forty miles the hour a .„, boat headed up , but a broken oar to w l Ah! when I told youfc., youreelf you niisundeig thought I meant you a upon human resolution^ be dissolved m the any My first settlement as pastor was in a village. My salary was $800 and a parsonage. The amount seemed enor mous to me. I said to myself, “What! all this for one year?” I was afraid of getting worldly under so much prosperity! I resolved to invite all the congregation to my house in groups of twenty-five each. We be gan, and as they were the best con- kgregation iu all the world,, and we felt nothing was too good for them, wo piled all the luxuries on the table. I never completed the undertaking. At the end of six months I was in financial despair. I found what every young man learns in time to save himself, or too late, that you must measure the size of a man’s body be fore you begin to cut the cloth for his coat. When a young man willfully and of choice, having the comforts of life, S oes into the contraction of unpayable ebts he knows not into what he goes. The creditors get after the debtor, the thick of hounds in full cry, and alas! for the reindeer. They jingle his door bell before ho gets up in the morning, they jingle his doorbell after he has gone to bed at night. They meet him as he comes off his front steps. They send him a postal card, or a letter, in curtest style, telling him to pay up. They attach his goods. They want cash, or a note at thirty days, or a note on demand. They call him a knave. They say he lies. They w ant him dis ciplined at the church. They want hfm turned out of the bank. They come at him from this side, and from that side, anil from before, and from behind, and from above, and from be neath, and he is insulted and gibbeted, and sued, aud dunned, and sworn at, until he gets the nervous dyspepsia, gets neuralgia, gets liver complaint, gets heart disease, gets couvulsive dis order, gets consumption. Now ne is dead, and you say: “Of course they will let him alone.” Oh, nol Now they are watchful to see whether there are any unnecessary ex penses at the obsequies, to see whether there is any useless handle on'the cas ket, to see whether there is any sur plus plait on the shroud, to see wheth er the hearse is costly or cheap, to see whether the flowers sent to the casket have been bought by the family or donated, to see in -whose name the deed to the grave is made out Then they ransack the bereft household, the Now, how is this wholesale slaugh ter to be stopped? There is not a per son in the house but is interested in that question. Young man, arm your self. The object of my sermon is to put a weapon in each of your hands for your own defense. Wait not for Young Men’s Christian associations to protect you, or churches to protect you. Appealing to God for help, take care of yourself. First, have a room somewhere that you can call your own. Whether it be the back parlor of a fashionable boarding house, or a room in the fourth story of a cheap lodging, I care not. Only have that one room your for tress. Let not the dissipator or un clean step over the threshold. If they come up the long flight of stairs and knock at the door, meet them face to face and kindly yet firmly refuse them admittance. Have a few family por traits, on the wall, if you brought them with you from your country home. Have a Bible on tne stand. If you can afford it and you can play on one, have an instrument of music—harp or flute, or comet, or melodoon, or violin, or piano. Every morning before you leave that room, pray. Every night after you come home iu that room, pray. Make that room your Gibral tar, your Sebastopol, your Mount Zion. Let no bad book or newspaper come into that room, any more than you would allow a cobra to coil ou your table. Take care of yourself. Nobody else will take care of you. Your help will not come up two or three or four flights of stairs; your help will come through the roof, down from heaven, from that God who in the six thousand years of the world’s history never be trayed a young man who tried to be good and a Christian. Let me say in regard to your adverse worldly circum stances, in passing, that you are on a level now with those who are finally to succeed. Mark my words, young man, and think of it thirty years from now. You will find that those who thirty years from now are the million aires of this country, who are the ora tors of the country, who arc the poets of the country, who are the strong merchants of the country, who are the great philanthropists of the country— mightiest in church and state—are this morning on a level with you, not an inch above, and you in straitened cir cumstances now. EVERY MAN HAS A NATURAL EQUIPMENT. Herschel earned his living by play- cup, or may be blown™ first gust of temptation helmet, the sword of mighty Clothe yourselrL oply and you shall not W? 1 fusion. Sm pays well work! nor the next, bul l and nght believing and I will take you in safety L, life and in transport throSi I never shall forget a,Si a young man make sonii ago. It was a very short iS it was a tremendous nrav»\!i help us. We find it so vm wrong and so hard Lodori^ help us.” That prayer i, reached the ear of God,, his heart. And there arejTrt a hundred men who have 6* a thousaud young men, pel have found out that verytS so very easy to do wrong , to do right I got a letter, only onei which I shall read: “Ha Vl around somewhat I have many young men of ardent strivers after that v wisp, fortune, and of one < would speak. He was a % lislmmn of twenty-three or|3 who came to New York, wfo. acquaintances, with barely | to keep him a couple of «■ had been tenderly reared;, should say too tenderly, n used to earning his living, it extremely difficult to got, tion that he was capable o| After many vain efforts in| tion he found himselfou£ ing in Brooklyn, near ¥ with about ihree dollars small capital. Providence^ lead him to your door, a termined to go in and hear: “He told me bis goingtoU that night was undoubtedly! ing point in his life, for’ went into your church S erate, but while listen iscourse his better mastery. I truly believe I this young man told me! sounding tne depths of 1 night alone brought him! God whom he was so near! books, the pictures, the carpets, the ing a violin at parties, and °in the in chairs, the sofa, the piano, the mat tresses. the pillow on which lie dies. Cursed be debt 1 For the sake of your own happiness, for the s*ko of your good morals, for the sake of your im mortal soul, for God’s sake, young man, as far as possible, keep out of it. IL But 1 think more young men are slaughtered through irreligion. Take away a young man’s religion and you make him the pray of evil. We all know that the Bible is the only perfect system of morals. Now if you want to destroy the young man’s mor als take his Bible away. How will you do that? Well, you will caricature his reverence for the Scriptures, you will take all those incidents of the Bible which can be made mirth of— Jonah’s whale, Samson’s foxes, Adam’s rib—then you will caricature eccentric Christiaus or inconsistent Christians, then you will pass off as your own all those hackneyed arguments against Christianity which are as old as Tom Paine, as old as Voltaire, as old as sin. Now you have captured his Bible, aiid you have taken his strongest fortress; the way is comparatively clear, and all the gates of his soul are set open in invitation to the sins of earth and the sorrows of death, that they may come terstices of the play he would go out and look up at the midnight heavens, the fields or his immortal couquests. George Stephenson rose from being the foreman iu a colliery to be the most- renowned pf the world’s engineers. No outfit, no capital to start with l Young man, go down to the Mercantile 'li brary and get some books and read of what wonderful mechanism God gave you in your hand, in your foot, in your eye, in your ear, and then ask some doctor to take vou into the dis secting room and illustrate to you what you have read about, and never again commit the blasphemy of say ing you have no capital to start with. Equipped! Why, the poorest young man in this house is equipped as only the God of the whole universe could afford to equip, him. Then his’body —a very poor affair compared with his wonderful soul—oh, that is what makes me solicitous. I am not so much anxious about you, young man, because you have so little to do with, as I am anxious about you because you have much to risk aud lose or gain. There is no class of persons that so stir my sympathies as young men in gi'eat cities. Not quite enough salary TAKE THE RIGHT ROAD ASS The echo, that is, of mi the house. I am not abstraction, but a great friendless young man, i young man, Ohl ,bro young man, discouraged wounded young man, I to Christ this day, the man ever had. Re meets morning. You have come this blessing. Despise not tion rising iu your soul; iti lifted. Look into the f Lift one prayer to your to your mother’s God, am doiltng blessing. Now, wl you are at the forks of u» this is the right road, and wrong road, and I see ja the right road. One Sabbath morning, at of my service, I saw a the world renowned : mented violinist Ole , member he died in hisJsl the coast of Norway, he had wound up day after his illness, ana then he companion, “Now I want- watch as long as I can, I am gone I want you to to up until it gets to my fnej mus, in New York, and \ keep it wound up until andt then I want ti hisyoung son, my The great musician, wao any other artist had speak and sing and wee? and triumph—for it see®* drew the bow across tue all earth and heaven lighted sympathy—the in a room looking on and surrounded by meats of music, closed death. While all i ing at his departure, sn steamers fell into knew . cession to carry his W . land. There were nfty r his countrymen gathers , theatre of the hills wal ^j eulogium, and it was »!“ great orator of the day ffl voice began to spo" * sand people on the tears. , Ohl that was the doj* had done so much to ® happy. But I have to J man, if you live rigs 1 that was a tame scene that which will the galleries of heave draff and forty and JJ shall accord with . “Well done, thou servant.” And the influences* put in motion will go eration to generation, you wound up him® dran, and their and handed to the® watch and-clock are to mark the P r0 £ res ®L self shall be no long® 1. tii« The largest ruby in > to be a-stono weig^-y carats and measuring u and three-quarters oi It is owned injtoouo^ H'-l Paris women now‘-,,1 natural flowers. the shoulder, epaul 1 ,i they are in no <
