People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 December 1892 — THE STORY OF RIZPAH. [ARTICLE]

THE STORY OF RIZPAH.

Bev. T. DeWit Talmage Pays a Tribute to Female Heroism. The Greater- the Need the Greater the Courage Displayed by Woman— Every Age H»« Produced Its Notable Heroines. The following sermon was delivered by Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage in the Brooklyn Tabernacle from the text: And Rizpah, the daughter of Alah, took Backcloth and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of Heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the dr to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field at night—ll Samuel axl.W. Tragedy that beats anything Shakepearean. or Victor Hugoian. After returning from the Holy Land I briefly touched upon it, but I must have a wjhole sermon for that scene. The explosion and flash of gunpowder have driven nearly all the beasts and birds of prey from those regions, and now the shriek of the locomotive whistle which is daily heard at Jerusalem will for many miles around clear Palestine of cruel claw and beak. But in the time of the text those regions were populous with multitudes of jackals and lions. Seven sons of Sanl had been crucified on a hill. Rizpah was mother to two, and relative to five of the boys. What had these boys done that they should be crucified? Nothing except to have a bad father, and grandfather. But now that the boys were dead why not take them down from the gibbets. No. They are sentenced to hang there. So Rizpah takes the sackcloth, a rough shawl with which in mourning for her dead she had wrapped herself, and spreads the sackcloth upon the rocks near the gibbets, and acts the part of a sentinel watching and defending the dead. Yet every other sen tinal is relieved, and after being on guard for a few hours someone else takes his place. But Rizpah is on guard both day and night-and for half a year. One hundred and eighty days and nights of obsequies. What nerves she must have had to stand that Ah! do you not know that a mother can stand anything, Oh! if she might be allowed to hollow a place in the side of the hill and lay the bodies of hefr children to quiet rest! If in some cavern of the mountains she might find for them Christian sepulture. Oh! if she might take them from the gibbet of disgrace and carry them still further away from the haunts of men and then lie beside them in the last long sleep! Exhausted nature ever and anon falls into slumber, but in a moment she breaks the snare, and chides herself as though she had been cruel and leaps up on the rock shouting at wild beast glaring from the thicket and at vulturous brood wheeling in the sky. The thrilling story of Rizpah reaches David and he comes forth to hide the indecency. The corpses had been chained to the trees. The chains are unlocked with horrid clank and the skeletons are let down. All the seven are buried. And the story ends.

But it hardly ends before you cry out: What a hard thing that those seven boys should suffer for the crimes of a father and grandfather! Yes. But it is always so. Let everyone who does wrong know that he wars not only as in this use against two generations, Children and grandchildren, but against all the generations of coming time. That is what makes dissipation and uncleanness so awfuL It reverberates in other times. It may skip one geenration, but it is apt to come up in the third generation, as is suggested in the ten commandments, which say: “Visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” Mind you, it says nothing about the second generation but mentions the third and the fourth. That accounts for what you sometimes see, very good parents with very bad children. Go far enough back in the ancestral line and you find the source of all the turpitude. “Visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation.” If when Saul died, the consequences of his iniquity could have died with him, it would not have been so sad. Alas, no! Look on that hiM a tew miles out from Jerusalem and see the ghastly burdens of those seven gibbets, and the wan and wasted Rizpah watching them. Go to-day through the wards and alms-houses, and the reformatory institutions where unfortunate children are kept, and yoh will find that nine out of ten had drunken or vicious parents. Yea, day by day on the streets of our cities you find men and women wrecked of evil parentage. They are moral corpses. Like the seven sons of Sr.ul, though dead, unburied. Alas for Rizpah, who, not fer six months, but for years and years has watched them. She can not keep the vultures and the jackals off. Furthermore, this strange incident in Bible story shows that attractiveness of person an'd elevation of position are no security against trouble. Who is this Rizpah sitting in desolation? One of Saul’s favorites. Her personal attractions had won his heart She had been caressed of fortune. With a mother’s pride she looked on her princely children. But the scene changes. Behold her in banishment and bereavement Rizpah on the rock. Some of the worst distresses have come to scenes of royalty and wealth. What porter at the mansion’s gate has not let in champing and lathered steed bringing evil dispatch? On what tesselated hall has there not stood the solemn bier? Under what exquisite fresco has there not been enacted a tragedy of disaster? What curtained couch hath heard no cry of pain? What’ harp hath never trilled with sorrow? What lordly nature hath never leaned against carved pillar and made utterance of woe? Gall is not less bitter when quaffed from a golden chalice than when taken from a pewter mug. Sorrow is often attended by running footmen, and laced lackeys mounted behind. Queen Anne Boleyn la

desolate in the palace of Henry VIIT Adolphus wept in German castles over the hypocrisy of friends. Pedro L, among Brazilian diamonds, shivered with fear of massacre. Stephen, of England, sat on a rocking throne. And every mast of pride has. bent in the storm, and the highest of honor and fame are covered with perpetual snow. Sickness will frost the rosiest cheek, wrinkle the smoothest brow and stiffen the sprightliest step. Rizpah quits the courtly circle and sits on the rock. * Perhaps you look back upon scenes different from those in which now from day to day you mingle. You have exchanged the plenty and luxuriance of your father’s house for privation and trials known to God and your own heart. The morning of life is flushed with promise. 'Troops of calamities since then have made desperate charge upon you. Darkness has come Sorrows have swooped like carrion birds from the sky, and barked like jackals from the thicket. You stand amid your slain, anguished and woe-struck. Rizpah one the rock. So it has been in all ages. Vashti must doff the spangled robes of the Persian court, and go forth blasted from the palace gate. Hagar exchanges oriental comfort for the wilderness of Beersheba. Mary Queen of Scots must pass out from flattery and pomp to suffer ignominious death in the eastle of Fotheringay. The wheel of fortune keeps turning, and mansions and huts exchange, and he who rode the chariot pushes the barrow, and instead of the glare of festal lights is the simmering of the peatfire, and in place of Saul’s palace is the rock. The cold rock, the desolate rock. But that is the place to which God cornea Jacob with his head on a stone saw the shining ladder. Israel in the desert beheld the marshalling of the fiery baton. John on barren Patmos heard trumpeting and the clapping of wings, and the stroke of seraphic fingers on golden harps, and nothing but Heavenly strength nerved Rizpah for her appalling mission amid the scream of wild birds and the stealthy tread of hungry monsters. The grandest visions of glory, the most rapturous experiences of Christian love, the greatest triumphs of grace have come to the tried and the hard-pressed and the betrayed and the crushed. God stooping down from Heaven to comfort Rizpah on the rock. Again the tragedy of the text displays the courage of woman amid great emergencies. What mother or sister or daughter would dare to go out to fight the cormorant and jackel? Rizpah did it. And so would you if an emergency demanded. Woman is naturally timid, and shrinks from exposure and depends on stronger arms for the achievement of great enterprises. And she is often troubled lest there might be occasions demanding fortitude when she would fail. Not so. Some of those who are afraid to look out of door after nightfall, and who quake in the darkness at the least uncertain sound, and whojstart at the slam of the door, and turn pale in a thunder storm, if the day of trial came would be heroic and invulnerable. * God has arranged it it so that woman needs the trumpet of some great contest of principle or affection to rouse up her slumbering courage. Then she will stand under the cross fire of opposing hosts at Chalons to give wine to the wounded. Then she will carry into prison and dark lane the message of salvation. Then she will brave the pestilence. Deborah goes out to sound terror into the heart of God’s enemies. Abigail throws herself between a raiding party, of infuriated men, and her husband’s vineyards. Rizpah fights back the vultures from the rock.

Among the Orkney islands an eagle swooped and lifted a child to its eyrie far up in the mountains. With the spring of a panther the mother mounts hill above hill, craig above craig, height above height; the fire of her own eye Autflashing the glare of the eagle’s, and with unmailed hand, stronger than the iron beak and the terrible claw, she hurled the wild bird down the rocks. In the French revolution Cazore was brought out to be executed when his daughter threw herself on the body of her father and said: ‘Strike, barbarians! You can not reach my fatner but through my heart!” The crowd parted, and, linking arms, father and daughter walked out free. During the siege of Saragossa, Augustina carried refreshments to the gates. Arriving at the battery of Portillo she-found that all the garrison had been killed. She snatched a match from the hand of a dead artilleryman and fired a twenty-six pounder, then leaped on it and vowed she would not leave it alive. The soldiers looked in and sawher daring, and rushed up and opened another tremendous fire on the enemy. The life of James I. of Scotland was threatened. Poets have sung those times, and able pens have lingered upon the story of manly endurance, but how few to tell the story of Catherine Douglas, one of the queen’s maids, who ran to bolt the door, but found the bar had been taken away so as to facilitate the entrance of the assassin. She thrust her arm into the staple. The murderers rushing against it, her arm was shattered. Yet how many have since lived and died, who never heard the touching, selfsacrificing heroic story of Catherine Douglas and her poor, shattered arm You know how calmly Mme. Upland went to execution and how cheerfully Joanna of Naples walked to the castle of Muro, an*’ how fearlessly Mme. Grimaldi listened to her condemnation, and how Charlotte Corday smiled upon the frantic mob that pursued her to the guillotine. And there would be no end to the recital if I attempted to present all the historical incidents which show that woman’s courage will rouse itself for great emergency. But I need not go so far. You have known some one who was considered a mere butterfly in society. Her hand had known no toil. Her eye had wept no tear over misfortune. She moved among obsequious admirers as careless as an insect in a field of blossoming buckwheat But in 18T6 financial tempest struck the husband’s estate.

Before he had time to reef saH and make things snug the ship capsized and went down. Enemies cheered at the misfortune and wondered what would become of the butterfly. Good m*» pitied and said she would die of • broken heart. “She will not work,” they say, “and she is too proud to beg." But the prophecies have failed. Disaster has transformed the shining sluggard into a practical worker. Happy as a princess, though compeled to hush her own child to sleep and spread her own table and answer the ringing of her own doer belt Her arm had been muscled for the conflict against misfortune, hunger and poverty and want and all the other jackals Riz* pah scares from the rock. I saw one in a desolate home. Hex merciless companion had pawned even the children’s shoes for rum. From honorable ancestry she had come down to this. The cruse of oil was empty and the last candle gone out Her faded frock was patched with fragments of antique silk that she bad worn on the bright marriage day. Cott' fident in God she had a strong heart, te which her children ran when they trembled at the staggering step and quailed under a father’s curse. Though the heavens were filled with fierce wings and the thickets gnashed with rage, Rizpah watched faithfully day after day and year after year, and wolf and cormorant by her God-strengthened arm were hurled down the rock. You pass day by day along streets where there are heroines greater than Joan of Arc. Upon that cellar floor there are conflicts as fierce as Sedan, and Heaven and hell mingle in the fight. Lifted in that garret there are tribunals where more fortitude is demanded than was exhibited by Lady Jane Gray or Mary, Queen of Scotts. Oh, despise not a mother’s loveL. If heretofore you have been negligent of isucb an one, and you have still an opportunity for reparation, make haste. If you could only just look in for an hour’s visit to iier you would rouse up in the aged one a whole world of blissful memories. What if she does it without talking much; she watched you for many months when you knew* not how to talk at alt What if she has many ailments to tell about. During fifteen years you ran to her with every little scratch and bruise, and she doctored your little finger as carefully as a surgeon would bind the worst fracture. You say that she is childish now; I wonder if she ever saw you when you were childish. You have no patience to walk with her on the street, she moves so slowly. I wonder if she remembers the time when you were glad enough to go slowly. You complain at the expense of providing for her now. I wonder what your financial income was from one to ten years of age. Do not begrudge what you do for the old folks. 1 care not how much you did for them, they have done more for you. But from this weird text of the morning comes rushing in upon my soul a thought that overpowers me. This watching by Rizpah was an after-death watching. I wonder if now there is an after-death watching. I think there is. There are Rizpahs who have passed death, and jvho are still watching. They look down frpm their supernal and glorified state upon us, and is not that an after-death watching? I can not believe that those who before their death were interested in us have since their death become indifferent as to what happens to us. Not one hour of the six months during which Rizpah watched, seated upon the rocks, was she more alert or diligent, or armed for us, than our mother, if glorified, is alert and diligent and armed for us. It is not now Rizpah upon a rock, but Rizpah upon a throne. How long has your mother been dead? Do you think she*” has been dead long enough to forget you? My mother has been dead twentyline years. I believe she knows more about me now than she did when I stood in her presence, and I am no Spiritualist either. The Bible says: “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to minister to them that shall be heirs to salvation.” Youngman! Better look out what you do and where you go, for your gloried mother is looking at you. You sometimes say to yourself: “What would mother say if she knew this?” She does know. You might cheat her once, but you can not cheat her now. Does it embarrass us to think she knows all about uS? If she had put up much when she wks here, surely she will not be the less patient or excusatory now.

Oh, this tremendous thought of my text, this after-death watching! What an uplifting consideration. And what a comforting thought Young mother, you who have just lost your babe, and who feels the need of a nearer solace than that which comes from ordinary sympathy, your mother knows all about it You can not run in and talk it all over with her as you would if she were still a terrestrial resident, *but' it will comfort you some, I '’think, yea, it will comfort you a good deal, tc know that she understands it all You see that the velocities of the heaw enly conditions are so great that it would not take her a half second to come to your bereft heart. Oh, these mothers in Heaven!» They can do more for us now than before they went away. The bridge between this world and the next is not broken down. They approach the bridge from both ways, departing spirits, and coming spirits, disimprisoned spirits, and sympathizing spirits. And so let us walk m to be worthy of the supernal companion ships, and if to any of us life on earth is a hard grind, let us understand that if we watch faithfully and trust fully our blessed Lord, there will be a corresponding reward in the Land of Peace, and that Rizpah who once wept on a rock now reigns on a throne. —When a man loses his positive conviction of the existence of God, his belief in the immortality of the soul can not survive, nor can he hold on to hi* conception of the absoluteness of morality. There can be no absolute morality without a Gos and a soul