Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 September 1896 — TALMAGE’S SERMON. [ARTICLE]

TALMAGE’S SERMON.

THE PREytfCHER TALKS OF HUMAN KINDNESS. It Is a Means of Defense as Well as of Usefulness-Enemies Mar Be Conquered with a Soft Tongne—Sympathy Is Potent with Sinners. Help of a Kind Word. In these days, when satire and retort and bitterness till the air the gospel ear<4 of this sermon will do good to all who read and practice it. The text is Proverbs xxv., 15, “A soft tongue breaketh the bone.” When Solomon said this, he drove * whole volume into one phrase. You, cf course, will uot be so silly as to take the words of the text in a literal scuse. They simply mean to set forth the fact that there is a tremendous power in a kind word. Although it may seem to be very insignificant, its force is indescribable and illimitable. Pungent and all conquering utterance, “A soft tongue breaketh the bone.” If I had time, 1 would show you kindness as a means of defense, as * means of usefulness, kindness as a means of domestic harmony, kindness as best employed by governments for the taming and curing of criminals and kindness as best adapted for the settling and adjusting of international quarrel, but 1 shall eall your alfrstion only to two of these thoughts. And, first, I speak to you of kindness as a means of defense. Almost every man, in the course of his life, is set upon and assaulted. Your motives are misrepresented or your religious or political principles are bombarded. What to do under such circumstances is the question. The first impulse of the natural heart says: “Strike back. Give as much as he sent. Trip him into the ditch which he dug for your feet. Gash him with as severe a wound as that which he inflicted on your soul. Shot for shot. Sarcasm for sarcasm. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.” But the better spirit in the man’s soul rises up aud says, "You ought to consider that matter.” You look up into the face of Christ and say, “My Master, how ought I to act under these difficult circumstances?” And Christ instantly answers, “Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you." Then the old nature rises up again and says: “You had better not forgive him until first you have chastised him. You will never get him in so tight a corner again. Y’ou will never have such an opportunity of inflicting the right kind of punishment upon him again. First chastise him and then let him go.” “No," says the better nature, “hush, thou foul heart. Try the soft tongue that breaketh the bone." Have you ever in all your life known acerbity and acrimonious dispute to settle a quarrel? Did they not always make matters worse and worse and worse? About fifty-five years ago there was a great quarrel in the Presbyterian family. Ministers of Christ were thought orthodox in proportion as they had measured lances with other clergymen of the same denomination. The most outrageous personalities were abroad. As. in the autumn, a hunter comes home with a string of game, partridges and wild ducks, slung over his shoulder, so there were many ministers who came back from the ecclesiastical courts with long strings of doctors of divinity whom they had shot with their own rifle. The division became wider, the animosity greater, until after awhile some good men resolved upon another tack. They began to explain, away the difficulties, they began to forgive each other’s faults, and, lo! the great church quarrel was settled, and the new school Presbyterian church and the old school Presbyterian church became one. The different parts of the Presbyterian order, welded by a hammer, a Httle hammer, a Christian hammer that the Scripture calls “a soft tongue.” The Applause of Conscience.

You have a dispute with your neighbor. You say to him, “I despise you." lie replies, “I can’t bear the sight of you." You say to him, “Never enter my house again.” He says, “If you come on my door sill. I'll kick you off.” Yoy say to him, “I'll put you down.” He says to you: “You are mistaken. I'll put you down.” And so the contest rages, and year after year you act the unchristian part, and he acts the unchristian part. After awhile the better spirit seizes you. and one day you go over to the neighbor and say: “Give me your hand. We have fought long enough. Time is so short, and eternity is so near, that we cannot afford any longer to quarrel. I feel you have wronged me very much, but let us setle all now in one great hand-shaking and be good friends for all the rest of our lives.” You have risen to n higher phitfohn than that on which before you stood. You win his admiration, and you get his apology. But if you have not conquered him in that way nt any rate you have won the applause of your own conscience, the high estimation of good men and the honor of your Lord who died for his armed enemies.” “Bnt,” you say, “what are we to do when slanders assault us, and there come acrimonious sayings all around about us, and we are abused and spit upon?" My reply is: Do not go and attempt to chase down the slanders. Lies are prolific, and while you are killing one, fifty are horn. All your demonstrations of indignation only exhaust yourself. You might as well on some summer night, when the swarms of insects are coming up from ths meadows and disturbing you and disturbing your family, bring up some great “swamp angel,’’ like that which thundered over Charleston, and try to shoot them down. The game is too small for the gun. But what, then, are you to do with the abuses that come upon you in life? You are to live them down! I saw a farmer go out to get back a swarm of bees that bad wandered off from the hive. As he moved amid them they buzzed around his head and buzzed around his hands and buzzed around his feet. If he had killed one of them they would have stung him to death. But he moved in their midst in perfect placidity untik-he had captured the swarm of wandering bees. And so I have seen men moving amid the annoyances, and the vexations, and the assaults of life in such calm, Christian deliberation that all the buzzing around about their soul amounted to nothing. They conquered them, and, above all, they conquered themselves. “Oh,” you say, “that’s a very good theory to preach on a hot day, but it won’t work.” It will work. It has worked. I believe it is the last Christian grace we win. You know there are fruits which we gather in June, and others in July, and others in August, and others in September, and still others in October, and I have to admit that this grace of Christian forgiveness is about the last fruit of the Christian soul. We hoar a great deal about the bitter tongue, and the sarcastic tongue, and the quiek tongue, but we know very little about “the soft tougue that breaketh the bone.” We read Hudibras and Sterne and Dean Swift and the other apostles of acrimony, but give little time to studying the example of him who was jeviled, and yet reviled not again. Oh, that the Lord, by his Spirit, would endow us all with “the soft tongue that breaketh the bone.” Kindness Is Useful. I now to the other thought that I

desire to present, and that is kindness as A means of usefulness. In all communities you find skeptical men. Through early education, or through the maltreatment of professed Christian people, or through prying curiosity about the future world, there are a great many people who become skeptical ju .religious things. How shall you capture them for God? Sharp argument and sarcastic retort never won a single soul from skepticism to the Christian religion. While powerful books ou the evidences of Christianity have their mission in confirming Christiin people in the faith they have already adopted, I have noticed that when skeptical people are brought into the kingdom of Christ it is through the charm pf, some genial soul, and not by argument at all. Men are not saved through the head; they are saved through the heart. A storm comes out of its hiding place,, . says, “Now we’ll just rouse up all this sen." and it makes a great bluster, but it does not succeed. Part of the sea is roused up—|>erhgps one-half of it or one-fourth of it. After awhile the calm moon, placid and beautiful. looks down, and the ocean begins to rise. It comes up to high water mark. It embraces the great headlands. It .submerges the beach of all the continents. It is the heart throb of one world against the heart throb of another world. And I have to tell yoq that while all your storms of ridicule and storms of sarcasm may rouse np the passion of an immortal nature, nothing less than the attractive pOtvejj of Christian kindness can ever raise the deathless spirit to happiness and to God. I hare more faith in the prayer of a child 5 years old in the way of bringing nn infidel back to Christ and to heaven than I have in all the hissing thunderbolts of ecclesiastical controversy. You cannot overcome men with religious argumentation. If you come at a skeptical man with an argument on behnlf of the Christian religion, yon put the man on his mettle. He says: “I see that man has a carbine. I’ll use my carbine. I'll answer his argument with my argument.” But if you come to that man, persuading him that you desire his happiness on earth aud his eternal welfare in the world to come, he cannot answer it. A Glorious Sentiment. What I have said is just as true in the reclamation of the openly vicious. Did you ever know a drunkard to be saved through the caricature of a drunkard? Your mimicry of the staggering step, and the thick tongue, and the disguising hiccough, only worse maddens his brain. But if you come to him in kindness and sympathy, if you show him that you appreciate the awful grip of u depraved appetite. if you persuade him of the fact that thousands who had the grappling hooks of evil inclination clutched in their soul as firmly as they now are in his have been rescued, then a ray of light will flash across his vision, and it will seem as if a supernatural hand were steadying his staggering gait. A good many years ago there lay in the streets of Richmond a man dead drunk, his face exposed to the blistering noonday sun. A Christian woman passed along, looked at him and said, “Poor fellow!” She took her handkerchief and spread it over his face and passed on. The man roused himself up from his debauch and began to look at the handkerchief, and lo! oft it was the name of a highly respectable Christian woman of the city of Richmond. He went to her, he thanked her for her kindness, and that one little deed saved him for this life, and saved him for the life that is to come. He was afterward attorney general of the United States; but, higher than all, he became the consecrated disciple of Jesus Christ.

Kind words are so cheap it is a wonder we do not use them oftener. There are tens of thousands of people in these cities who are dying for the lack of one kind word. There is a business man who has fought against trouble until he is perfectly exhausted. He has been thinking about forgery, about robbery, about suicide. Go to that business man. Tell him that better times are coming, and tell him that you yourself were in a tight business pass, and the Lord delivered you. Tell him to put his trust in God. Tell him that Jesus Christ stands beside every business man in his perplexities. Tell him of the sweet promises of God’s comforting grace. That man is dying for the lack of just one kind word. Go to-morrow and utter that one saving, omnipotent, kind word. Here is a soul that has been swamped in sin. He wants to find the light of the gospel. He feels like a shipwrecked mariner looking out over the beach, watching for a sail against the sky. Oh, bear down on him! Tell him that the Lord waits to be gracious to him; that, though he has been a great sinner, there is a great Savior provided. Tell him that, though his sins are as scarlet, they shall be as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool. That man is dying forever for the lack of one kind word. There used to be sung at a great many of the pianos al! through the country a song that has altnost died out. I wish somebody would start it again in,our social circles. There may not have been very exquisite art in the music, but there was a grand and glorious sentiment. Kind words never die, never die, Cherished and blessed. Sympathy’s Loving Grace, Oh, that we might in our families and in our churches try the force of kindness! You can never drive men, women or children into the kingdom of God. A March northeaster will bring out more honeysuckles than fretfulness and scolding will ever bring out Christian grace. 1 wish that in ail our religious work we might be saturated with the spirit of kindness. Missing that, we miss a great deal of usefulness. There is no need of coming out before men and thundering to them the law unless at the same time you preach to them the gospel. The world is dying for lack of kindness. These young people want it just as much as the old. The old people sometimes seem to think they have a monopoly of the rheumatisms, and the neuralgias, and the headaches, 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. Do you know that much of the work is done by the young? Raphael died at 37, Richelieu at 31, Gustavus Adolphus died at 38, Innocent 111. came to his mightiest influence at 37, Cortes conquered Mexico at 30, Don John won Lepanto at 25, Grotius was attorney general at 24, and I have noticed amid all classes of men that some of the severest battles and tile toughest work come before 30., Therefore we must have our sermons and our exhortations 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 abstractions,of religion? What they want is help to bear ties of patients, the browbeatftigjof legal opponents, the unfairness of who have plenty of fault finding for every imperfection of handiwork, but no praise for twenty excellencies. What does that brain racked, hand blisterril man care for Zwingli's “Doctrine of Orhjßaal Sin" or Augustin’s ‘‘Anthropology^*'\\Yon might as well go to a map the pleurisy and, pot on his side a plaster made out of Dr. Barr’s “Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence.” In all out sermons there must 1 be help •for every’bhe Somewhere. YOW ge into an apothecary, stoYe. We' see others being waited on. ’ Wedb ntt complain because we do not inimediately get the medicine. ! ' ’ 'V

We know our tnm will come after awhile. And so while all parts of *Mw;iaotKJuay not be appropriate to our case, If we wait prayerfully before the sermon is through we shall have the divine prescription. I say to these young men who are going to preach the gospel, these theological students, I say to them. We want in our sermons not more metaphysics, nor more imagination, nor more logic, nor more profundity. Lend a Helping Hand. What we want in our sermons and Christian exhortations is more sympathy. When Father Taylor preached in the Sailors’ Bethel at Boston, the jack tars I felt they had help for their duties among the ratlines and the fofecngtles. When Richard Weaver preached to the operatives in Oldham,.England,,all the workingmen felt they had more grace for the spindles. When Dr. Soufh preached to kings and princes and princesses, all ths mighty men gud who heard him felt preparation for their high station Ds you not know that this simple story of a Savior's kiudnes»<is to redeem all nations? The hard heart of this world's obduracy is to be broken before that -story. There is in Antwerp, Belgium, one of the most remarkable pictures I ever saw. It is ’’The Descent of Christ from the Cress.” It is one oMtubens' pictures. No man can stand and look at that “Descent from the Cross,” as Rubens pictured it, without having his eyes flooded with tears, if he have any sensibility at all. It is un overmastering picture—one that stuns you find staggers you and haunts your dreams. Due afternoon a man stood in that cathedral looking at Rubens' “Descent from the Cross.” He was all absorbed in that scene of a Savior's Bufferings, when the janitor came in and said: “It is time to close up the cathedral for the night. I wish you would depart.” The pilgrim, looking at that “Descent from the Cross,” turned around to the janitor and said: "No, no; not yet. Wait until they get him down." Oh, it is the story of a Savior’s suffering kindness that is to capture the world. When the bones of that great behemoth of iniquity which has trampled nil nations shall be broken and shattered, it will be found out that the work wns not done by the hammer of the iconoclast, or by the sword of the conqueror, or by the torch of persecution, but by the plain, simple, overwhelming force of "the soft tongue that breaketh the bone.” Our Eternal Heritnnce. Kindness'! We all need more of it in our hearts, bur words and our behavior. The chief characteristic of our Lord was kindness. A gentleman in England died leaving his fortune by will to two sons. The son than st aid at home destroyed the father's will ajqt pretended that the brother who was absent wns dead and buried. The absent brother after awhile returned and claimed his part of the property. Judges and jurors were to be bribed to any that the returned brother and son was no son at all, but only an imposter. The trial came on. Sir Matthew Hale, the pride of the English courtroom ami for twenty years the pride of jurisprudence, heard that that injustice was about tq bo practiced. He put off his official robe, lie put on the garb of a miller. Ho want fa the village where that trial was to takq place. He entered the courtroom. He somehow got impaneled as one of the jurors. The bribes enine nround, and the num gave ten pieces of gold to the other jurors, but ns this wns only a poor miller the briber gave to him only five pieces of gold. A verdict was brought in rejecting the right of this returned brother. He was to have no share in the inheritance. “Hold, my lord!” said the miller. “Hold!We are not all agreed on this verdict These other men have received ten pieces of gold in bribery and I have received only five." "Who are you? Where do you come from?” said Judge on the bench. The response was: "I atn from Westminster Hail. My name is Matthew Hale, lord chief justice of the king’s bench. Off of that place, thou villain!” And so the injustice was balked, and so the young man got his inheritance. It was all for another that Sir Matthew Hale took off his robe and put on the garb of a miller. And so Christ took off his robe of royalty and put on the nttire of our humanity, and in that disguise he won our eternal portion. Ndw are we the sons of God—joint' heirs. We w'ent off from home sure enough, but we got back in time to receive our eternal inheritance. And if Christ whs so kind to Utt, stirdly we can afford tb be kind to each other.