Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 March 1896 — IN TRUMPET SOUNDS. [ARTICLE]

IN TRUMPET SOUNDS.

fIEV. DR. TALMAGE PREACHES A SERMON FULL OF HOPE. tfelp for the Hopeless Through the .Name of Christ-The Need of Sympathy—Fulfillment of a Great Promfae—A Mighty Gathering. Capital City Sermon. This sermon sounds the note of triumph, • note that all will be glad to hear in these, times, when so many are uttering and writing jeremiads of discouragement. Dr. Tainiage took as his text Genesis, xlix.. 10, "Unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” Through a supernatural lens, or what I might call a prophescope, dying Jacob looks down through the corridors of the centuries until he sees Christ the center of all popular attraction and the greatest being in all the world, so everywhere acknowledged. It was not always so. The world tried hard to put him down and to put him out. In the year 1200, while excavating for antiquities fifty-three miles northeast of Rome, a copper plate tablet was found containing the death warrant of the Lord Jesus Christ, reading in this wise: “In the year 17 of the empire of Tiberius Caesar, and on the 25th day of March, I, Pontius Pilate, governor of the Praetore. condemn Jesus of Nazareth to die between two thieves, Quintius Cornelius to lead him forth to the place of execution.” Scoffers as Worshipers. The death warrant was signed by several names. First, by Daniel, rabbi, Pharisee; secondly, by Johannes, rabbi; thirdly, by Raphael; fourthly, by Capet, a private citizen. This capital punishment was executed according to law. The nttme as the thief crucified on the right hand side of Christ was Dismae; tne name of the thief crucified on the left hand side of Christ was Gestus. Pontius Pilate, describing the tragedy, says the whole world lighted candles from noon until night. Thirty-three years of maltreatment. They ascribe his birth to-bastardy and his death to excruciation. A wall of the city, built about those times and recently exposed by archaeologists, shows a caricature of Jesus Christ, evidencing the contempt in which he was held by many in his day—that caricature on the wall representing a cross and a donkey nailed to it, and under it the inscription, “This is the Christ whom the people worship.” But I rejoice that that day is gone by. Our Christ is coming out from under the world's abuse. The most popular name on. earth to-day is the name of Christ. M here he had one friend Christ has a thousand friends. The scoffers have become worshipers. Of the twenty most celebrated infidels in Great Britain in our day sixteen have come back to Christ, trying to undo the blatant mischief of their lives—sixteen out of the twenty. Every man who writes a letter or signs a document, wittingly or unwittingly, honors Jesus Christ. We date evervthing as B. C. or A. D.—B. C., before Christ; A. D.. Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord. All the ages of history on the pivot of the upright beam of the crc#:s of the Son of God, B. C., A. D. Ido not care what you call him—whether Conqueror, or King, or Morning Star, or Sun of Righteousness, or Balm of Gilead, or Lebanon Cedar, or Brother or Friend, or take the name used in the verse from which I take my text, and call him Shiloh, which means his Son, or the Trnnquilator, or the Peacemaker, Shiloh. I only want to tell you that “unto him shall the gathering of the people be.”

In the first place, the people are gathered around Christ for pardon. No sensible man or healthfully ambitious man is satisfied with his past life. A fool may think he is all right. A sensible man knows he is not. Ido not care who the thoughtful man is, the review of his lifetime behavior before God and man gives to him no especial satisfaction. “Oh,” he says, “there have been so many things I have done I ought not to have done, there have been so many things I have said I ought never to have said, there have been so many things I have written I ought never to have written, there have been so many things I have thought I ought never to have thought. I must somehow get things readjusted, I must somehow have the past reconstructed; there are days and months and years which cry out against me in horrible vociferation.” Ah, my brother, Christ adjusts the past by obliterating it. He does not erase the record of our misdoing with a dash of ink from a register’s pen, but lifting his right hand crushed, red at the palm, he puts it against his bleeding brow, and then against his pierced side, and with the crimson accumulation of all those wounds he rubs out the accusatory chapter. He blots out our iniquities. Oh, never be anxious about the future; better be anxious about the past. I put it not at the end of my sermon; I put it at the front—mercy and pardon through Shiloh, the sin pardoning Christ. “Unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” “Oh!” says some man, “I have for forty years been as bad as I could be, and is there any mercy for me?” Mercy for you. “Oh!” says some one here, “I had a grand ancestry, the holiest of fathers and the tsnderest of mothers, and for my perfidy there is no excuse. Do you think there is any mercy forme?” Mercy for you. “But,” says another man, “I fear I have committed what they call the unpardonable sin, and the Bible says if a man commit that sin, he is neither tp be forgiven in this world nor the world to come. Do you think there is any mercy for me?” The fact that you have any solicitfide about the matter at all proves positively that you have not committed the unpardonable sin. Mercy for you? Oh, the grace of God Which bringeth salvation! For the Worst Sinners.

The grace of God! Let us take the surveyor’s chain and try to measure God’s mercy through Jesus Christ. Let one surveyor take that chain and go to the north, and another surveyor take that chain and go to the south, and another surveyor take that chain and go to the east, and another surveyor take that chain and go to thq west, and then make a report of the square miles of that vast kingdom of God’s mercy. Aye, you will have to wait to all eternity for the report of that measurement* It cannot be measured. Paul tried to climb the height of it, and be went height over height, altitude above altitude, mount tain above mountain, then sank down in discouragement and gave it up. for hd saw Sierra Nevadas beyond and Matter l horns beyond, and waving his hands back to us in the plains he says, “Past finding out; unsearchable, that in all things he might have the pre-eminence.” You no* tice that nearly all the sinners mentioned as pardoned in the Bible were great sinners—David a great sinner, Paul a great sinner, Rahab a great sinner, Magdalene a great sinner, the Prodigal Son a great sinner. The world easily understood how Christ could pardon a half and half sinner, but what the world wants to be persuaded of is that Christ will forgive the worst sinner, the hardest sinner, the oldest sinner, the most inexcusable sinner. To the sin pardoning Shiloh let all the gathering of the people be. But, I remark again, the people, .will gather around Christ as a sympathizer. Oh. we all want sympathy. I hear people

talk as though they were imdependent of it. None of us could live without sympathy. When parts of our family are away, how lonely the house seems until they all get home! But, alas! for those who never come home. Sometimes it seems as if it most be impossible. What, will their feet never again come over the threshold ? Will they never again sit with us at the table? Will they never again kneel with us at family prayer? Shall we never again look into their snnny faces? Shall we never again on earth take counsel with them for oar work? Alas me, who can stand under* these griefs! OS, Christ, thou eanst do more for a bereft soul than any one else. It is he who stands beside us to tell of the resurrection. It is he that comes to bid peace. It is he that comes to us and breathes into ns the spirit of submission until we can look up from the wreck and ruin of our brightest expectations and say, “Father, not my will, but thine, be done.” Oh, ye who are bereft, ye anguish bitten, come into this refuge. The roll of those who came for relief to Christ is larger and larger. Unto this Shiloh of omnipotent sympathy the gathering of the people shall be. Oh, that Christ would stand by all these empty cradles, and all these desolated homesteads, and all these broken hearts, and persuade us it is well. Need for Sympathy. The world cannot offer you any help at such a time. Suppose the World comes and offers you money. You would rather live on a crust in a cellar and hav* your departed loved with you than live in palatial surroundings and they away. Suppose the world offers you its honors to console you. What is the presidency to Abraham Lincoln when little Willie lies dead in the White House? Perhaps the world comes and says, “Time will cure it all.” Ah, there are griefs that have raged on for thirty years and are raging yet. And yet hundreds have been comforted, thousands have been comforted, millions have been comforted, and Christ had done the work. Oh, what you want is sympathy. The world’s heart of sympathy beats very irregularly. Plenty of sympathy when we do not want it, and often, when we are in appalling need of it, no sympathy. There are multitudes of people dying for sympathy—sympathy in their work, sympathy in their fatigues, sympathy in their bereavements, sympathy in their financial losses, sympathy in their physical ailments, sympathy in their spiritual anxieties, sympathy in the time of declining years—wide, deep, high, everlasting, almighty sympathy. We must have it, and Christ gives it. That is the cord with which he is going to draw all nations to him.

At the story of punishment a man’s eye flashes, and his teeth set and his fist clinches, and he prepares to do battle even though it be against the heavens; yet what heart so hard but it will succumb to i the story of compassion! Even a man’s sympathy is pleasant and helpful. When we have been in some hour of weakness, to have a brawny man stand beside us and promise to see us through—what courage it gives to our heart and what strength it gives to our ami.' Still mightier is a woman’s sympathy. Let him tell the story, who, when all his fortunes were gone and all the world was against him, came home and found in that home a wife who could write on the top of the empty flour barrel, “The Lord will provide,” or write on the door of the empty wardrobe, “Consider the lilies of the field; if God so clothed the grass of the field, will he not clothe us and ours?” Or let that young man tell the" story who has gone the whole round, of dissipation. The shadow of the penitentiary is upon him, and even his father says: “Be off! Never come home ajjain!” The young man finds still his mother’s arm outstretched for him, and how she will stand at the wicket of the prison to whisper consolation, or get down on her knees before the Governor, begging for pardon, hoping on for her wayward boy after all others are hopeless. Or let her tell the story who, under villainous alluremeut and impatient of parental restraint, has wandered off from a home of which she was the idol into the murky and thunderous midnight of abandonment, nway from God, and further away, until some timosne is tossed on the beach of that early home a mere splinter of a wreck. Who will pity her now? Who will gather these dishonored locks into her lap? Who will wash off the blood from the gashed forehead? Who will tell her of that Christ who came to save the lost? Who will put that weary head upon the clean white pillow and watch 'by day and watch by night until the hoarse voice of the sufferer becomes the whisper, and the whisper becomes only a faint motion of the lips, and the faint motion of the lips is exchanged for a silent look, and the cut feet are still, and the. weary eyes are still, and the frenzied heart is still, and all is still? Who will have compassion on her when no others have compassion? Mother! Mother! A Variety of Demons.

Oh, there is something beautiful in sympathy—in manly sympathy, wifely sympathy, motherly sympathy; yea, and neighborly sympathy! Why was it that a city was aroused when a little child was kidnaped from one of the streets? Why were whole columns of the newspapers filled with the story of a little child? It was because we are all one in sympathy, and every parent said: “How if it had been my Lizzie? How if it had been my Mary? How if it had been my Maud? How if it had been my child? How if there had been one unoccupied pillow in our trundle bed to-night? How if my little one—bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh—were to-night carried captive into some den of vagabonds, never to come back to me? How if it had been my sorrow looking out of the window, watching and waiting—that sorrow worse than death?” Then, when they found her, fvhy did we declare the news all through the households, and everybody that knew how to pray say, “Thank God ?*’ Because we are all one, bound by one great golden chain of sympathy. Oh, yes, but I have to tell you that if you will aggregate all neighborly, manly, wifely, motherly sympathy, it will be found only a poor starving thing compared with the sympathy of our great Shiloh, who has ‘held in his lap the sorrows of the ages, and who is ready to nurse on his holy heart the woes of all who will come to him. 6h, what a God, what a Saviour we have!

But in larger vision see the nations in some kind of trouble ever since the world was derailed and hurled down the embankments. The demon of sin came to this world, but other demons have gone through other worlds. The demon of conflagration, the demon of volcanic disturbance, the demon of destruction. La Place says he saw one world in the northern hemisphere sixteen months burning. Tycho Brahe said he saw another world burning. A French astronomer says that in 300 years 1,500 worlds have disappeared. Ido not see why infidels find it so hard to believe that two worlds stopped in Joshua’s time, when the astronomers tell us that 1,500 worlds have stopped. Even the moon is a world in ruins. Stellar, lunar, solar catastrophes innumerable. But it seems as if the most sorrows have been reserved for our world. By one toss of the world at Ticuboro, of 12,000 inhabitants only 26 people escaped. By one shake of the world at Lisbon in five minutes 60,000 perished and 200,000 before the earth stopped rocking. A mountain falls in Switzerland, burying the village of Goldau. A mountain falls in Italy in the night, when 2,000 people

are asleep, and they never a route. By a convulsion of the earth Japan broken off from China. By a convulsion of the earth the Caribbean islands broken off from America. Three M&nds near the mouth of the Ganges, with 340,000 inhabitants—a great surge of the sea breaks over them, and 214,000 perish that.day. Alas, alas, for our poor world. It has been recently discovered that a whole continent has sunk, a continent that connected Europe and America, part of the inhabitants of that continent going to Europe, part coming to America over the tablelands of Mexico, up through the valleys of the Mississippi, and we ate finding now the remains of their mounds and their cities in Mexico, in Colorado and the tablelands of the West. It is a matter of demonstration that a whole continent has gone down, the Azores off the coast of Spain only the highest mountain of that sunken continent. I’lato described that continent, its grandeur, the multitude of its inhabitants, its splendor and its awful destruction, and the world thought it was a romance, but archaeologists have found out it was history, and the Euglish and the German and the American fleets have gone forth with archaeologists, and the Challenger and the Dolphin and the Gazelle have dropped anchor, and in deep sea soundings they have found the contour of that sunken continent. All to Christ. Oh, there is trouble marked on the rocks, on the sky, on the sea, on the flora and the fauna—astronomical trouble, geological trouble, oceanic trouble, political trouble, domestic trouble —and standing in the presence of all those stupendous devastations, I ask if I am not right in saying that the great want of this age and all ages is divine sympathy and omnipotent comfort, and they are found not in the Brahma of the Hindoo or the Allah of the Mohammedan, but in the Christ unto whom shall the gathering of the people be. Other worlds may fall, but this morning star will never be blotted from the heavens. The earth may quake, but this rock of ages will never be shaken from its foundations. The same Christ who fed the 5,000 will feed all the world’s hunger. The same Christ who cured Barfimeus will illumine all blindness. The same Christ who faiade the dumb speak will put on every tongue a hosanna. The same Christ who awoke Lazarus from the sarcophagus will yet rally all the pious dead in glorious resurrection. “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” and that “to him shall the gathering of the people be.” Ah, my friends, when Christ starts thoroughly and quickly to lift this miserable wreck of a sunken world, it will not take him long to lift it.

I have thought that this particular age in which we live may be given up to discoveries and inventions by which through quick and instantaneous communication all cities and all communities and all lands will be brought together, and then in another period perhaps these inventions which have been used for worldly purposes will be brought out for gospel invitation, and some great prophet of the Lord will come and snatch the mysterious, sublime and miraculous telephone from rite hand of commerce, and, all lands and kingdoms, connected by a wondrous wire, this prophet of the Lord may, through telephonic communication, in an instant announce to *t.he nations pardon and sympathy and life through Jesus Christ, and then, putting the wondrous tube to the ear of the Lord’s prophet, the response shall come back, “I believe in God, the Father ■Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son.” You and I may not live to see the day. I think those of us wlho are over 40 years of age can scarcely expect to see the day. I expect before that time our bodies will be sound asleep in the hammocks of the old gospel ship as it goes sailing on. But Christ will wake us up in time to see the achievement. We who have sweated in the hot harvest fields will be at the door of the garner when the sheaves come in. That work for which in this world wo toiled and wept and struggled and wore ourselves out shall not come to consummation and we be oblivious of the achievement. We will be allowed to come out and shake hands with the victors. The Great Victory. We who fought in the earlier battles will have just as much right to rejoice as those who reddened their feet in the last Armageddon. Ah, yea, those who could only give a cupful of cold water in the name of a disciple, those who could only scrape a handful of lint for a wounded soldier, those who could only administer to old age in its decrepitude, those who could only coax a -poor waif of the street to go back home to her God, those who could only lift a little child in the arms of Christ, will have as much right to take part in the ovation to the Lord Jesus Christ as a Chrysostom. It will be your victory and mine, as well as Christ’s. He the conqueror, we shouting in his train. Oh, what a glorious time it would be on earth if Christ would break through the heavens, and right here where he has suffered and died have this prophecy fulfilled —“Unto him shall the gathering of the ■ people be.” But failing in that, I bargain to meet you at the ponderous gate of heav<en on the day when our Lord comes back. Garlands of all nations on his brow—of the bronzed nations of the south and the pallid nations 6f the north—Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, and the other continents that may arise meantime from the sea to take the places of their sunken predecessors—arch of Trajan, arch of Titus, arch of Triumph in the Champs Elysees, all too poor to welcome this king of kings and lord of lords and conqueror of conquerors in his august arrival. Turn out all heaven to meet him. Hang all along the route the flags of earthly dominion, whether decorated with •crescent, or star, or eagle, or lio«, or coronet. Hang out heaven’s brightest banker, with its one star of Bethlehem and blood striped of the cross. I hear the procession now. Hark! The tramp of the feet, the rumbling of the wheels, the clattering of the hoofs and the shout of the riders! Ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands. Put up in heaven’s library, right beside the completed volume of the world’s ruin, the completed volume of Shiloh’s triumph. The old promise struggling through the ages fulfilled at last, “Unto him shall the gath. ering of the people be.** While everlasting ages roll Eternal love shall feast their soul And scenes of bliss forever new Rise in succession to their view.