People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 December 1892 — THE MOTHER OF ALL. [ARTICLE]

THE MOTHER OF ALL.

lUv. T. DeWitt Talmage Talks Upon the Divine Character, fceriewlnjf It From * Beldom-Con«tder»d Standpoint—The Bible a Latter of Affection aa From a « Parent.to a Child. The following discourse by Rev. T. iDeWitt Ta Image was delivered in the Brooklyn tabernacle* on the subject of God as “The Mother of AIL” He took tor his text: As one whom his mother comforUth, so will 1 comfort yon.—lsaiah lxvt, 13. The Bible is a warm letter of affection from a parent to a child, and yet there are many who see chiefly the severe passages. As there may be fifty or sixty nights of gentle dew in'One summer, that will not cause as much remark as one hailstorm of half an hour, so there are those who are more struck by those passages of the Bible that announce the indignation of God than by those that announed"'Jis affection. There may come to a household twenty or fifty letters of affection during the year, and they will not make as much excitement in that home as one sheriff’s writ; and so there are people who are more attentive to those passages which announce the judgments of God than to those which announce his mercy and his favor. God is a lion, John says in the Book of Revelation. God is a breaker, Micah announces in his prophecy. God Is a rock. God is a king. But hear also that God is love. A father and his child are walking out in the fields on a summer’s day, and there is a flash of lightning that startles the child, and the father says: “My dear, that is God’s eye.” There comes a peal of thunder, and the father says: “My dear, that is God’s voice.” But the clouds go off the sky, and the storm is gone, and light floods the heavens and floods the landscape, and the father forgets to say: “That is God’s smile.” The text of this morning bends with great gentleness and love over all who are prostrate in sin and trouble. It lights up with compassion. It melts with tenderness. It breathes upon us the hush of an eternal lullaby, for it announces that God is our mother. “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will 1 comfort you.” I remark, in the first place, that God has a mother’s simplicity of instruction. A father does not know how to teach a child the A, B, C. Men are not skillful in the primary department; but a mother has so much patience that she will tell a child for the hundredth time the difference between F and G, and between I and J. Sometimes it is by blpcks; sometimes by the worstedwork; sometimes by the slate; sometimes by the book. She thus teaches the chilcj, and has no awkwardness of condescension in so doing. So God, our Mother, stoops down in our infantile minds. Though We are told a thing a thousand times, and we do not understand it, our Heavenly Mother goes on, line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little. God has been teaching some of us thirty years, and some of us sixty years, one word of one syllable, and we do not know it yet—faith, faith. When we come to that word we stum-

ble, we halt, we lose our place, we pro- ' nounce it wrong. Still, God’s patience is not exhausted. God, our Mother, puts us in the school of prosperity, and the letters are in sunshine, and we can not spell them. God puts us in the school of adversity, and the letters are black, and we can not spell the m. If God were merely a king, he would punish us; if He were rimply a father, He would whip us; but God is a mother, and so we are borne with and helped all the way through. A mother teaches her child chiefly by pictures. If she wants to set forth the hideousness of a quarrelsome spirit, instead of giving a lecture upon the subject, she turns over a leaf and shows the child two boys in a wrangle, and says: “Does not that look horrible?” If she wants to teach the childtheiawfulness of war, she turns over Sb picturebook and show's the w’ar-charger, the headless trunks of the butchered men, the wild, blood-shot eye of battle rolling under lids of fiaine, and she says: “That is war!” The child understands it. In a great many books the best part are the pictures. The style may be insipid, the type poor, but a picture always attracts a child’s attention. Now, God, our mother, teaches us almost everything by pictures. Is the divine goodness to be set forth? How does God, our Mother, teach us? By an autumnal picture. The barns are full. The wheat stacks are rounded. The cattle are chewing the cud lazily in the sun. The orchards are dropping the ripe pippins into the lap of the farmer. The natural world, that has been busy all summer, seems now to be resting in great abundance. We look at the picture and say, “Thou crownest the year with Thy goodness, and Thy paths drop fatness.” Our family comes around the breakfast table. It has been a very cold night, but the children are all bright, because-they slept under thick coverlids, and they are now in the warm blast of the open register, and their appetites makeJluxuries out of the plainest fare, and we look at the picture and say, “Bless the Lord, O my soul!”

God wishes to set forth the fact that in the judgment the good will be divided from the wicked. How is itdone? By a picture; by a parable—a fishing scene. A group of hardy men, longbearded, geared for standing to the waist in water, sleeves rolled up. Long oar, sun-gilt; boat battered as though it had been a playmate of the storm. A full net, thumping about with the fish, which have just discovered their captivity, the worthless moss-bunkers and the useful flounders all in the same net. The fisherman puts his hand down and amid the squirming fins, takes out the moss-bunkers and throws them into the water and gathers the good fish into the pail. So, says Christ, it shall be at the end of the world. The bad He will cast away and

the good He will keep. Another pielire: God, onr Mother, wanted to set forth the duty of neighborly love, and it is done by a picture. A heap of wounds on the road to Jericho. A traveler has been fighting a robber. The robber stabbed him and knocked him down. Two ministers come along. They look at the poor fellow, but do not help him. A traveler comes along—a Samaritan. He says: “Whoa,” to the beast he is riding, and dismounts. He examines the wounds; he takes out some wine, and with it washes the wounds, and then he takes some oil, and puts that in to make the wound stop smarting; and then he tears off a piece of his own garment for a bandage. - 'Then he helps the wounded man upon the beast, and walks by the side, holding him on until they come to a tavern. He says to the landlord: “Here is money to pay the man’s board for two days; take care of him; if it costs anything more, charge it to me, and I will pay it” Picture—The Good Samaritan, or Who is Your Neighbor? I remark again, that God has a mother’s favoritism. A father sometimes shows a sort of favoritism. Here is a boy—strong, well, of high forehead and quick intellect The father says: “I will take that boy into my firm yet;” or, “I will give him the very best possible education.” There are instances where, for the culture of one boy, all the others have been robbed. A sad favoritism; but that is not the mother’s favorite. I will tell yon her favorite. There is a child who at two years of age had a fall. He has never got over it. The scarlet fever muffled his hearing. He is not what he once was. That child has caused the mother more anxious nights than all the other children. If he coughs in the night, she springs out of a sound sleep and goes to him. The last thing she does when going out of the house is to give a charge in regard to him. The first thing on coming in is to ask in regard to him. Why, the children of the family all know that he is the favorite, and say: “Mother, you let him do just as he pleases, and when you "give him a great many things which yon do not give us. He is your favorite.” The mother smiles; she knows it is so. So he ought to be; for if there is anyone in the world that needs sympathy more than another, it is an invalid child, weary on the first mile of life’s journey; carrying an aching head, a weak side, an irritated lung. So the mother ought to make him a favorite. God, our Mother, has favorites. “Whom the Lord loveth He ch as tenet h.” Thai? is, one whom He especially loves He chasteneth. God loves us but is there one weak, and sick, ana sore, and wounded, and suffering, and faint? that is the one nearest and more perpetually on the great heart of God. Why, it never coughs but our Mother, God, hears it There is no such a watcher as God. The best nurse may be overborne by fatigue and fall asleep in the chair; but God, our Mother, after being up a year of nights with a suffering child, never slumbers nor sleeps. “Oh!” says one, “1 can not understand all that about affliction.” A refiner of silver once explained it to a Christian lady: “I put the silver in the fire, and I keep refining it and trying it till I can see my face in it, and then I take it out.” Just so it is that God keeps his dear children in the furnace till the Divine Image may be seen in . them; they are taken out of the fire. When I see God especially busy in troubling and trying a Christian, I know that qut of .that Christian’s character there is to come some especial good. A quarryman goes down into the excavation, and with strong-handed machinery bores into the rock. The rock says: “What do yon do that for?” He puts powder in; he lights a fuse. There is a thundering crash. The rock says: “Why, the mountain is going to pieces.” The crowbar is plunged; the rock is dragged out. Af>er a while it is taken into the artist’s studio. It says: “Well, now I have got to a good, warm, comfortable place at last.” But the sculptor takes the chisel and mallet, and he digs for the eyes, and cuts for the mouth, and he bores for tho ear, and he rubs it with sand-paper, until the rock says: “When will this torture be ended?” A sheet is thrown over it. It stands in darkness. After a while it is taken out. The covering is removed. It stands in the sunlight, in the presence of ten thousand applauding people, as they greet the statute of the poet, or the prince, or the conqueror. “Ah!” says the stone, “now I understand it. I am a great deal better off now standing as a statue of a conqueror than I would have been down in the quarry.” So God finds a man down in the quarry of ignorance and sin. How to get him up? He must be bored, and blasted, and chiseled, and scoured, and stand sometimes in the darkness. But after a while the mantle of affliction will fall off, and his soul will be greeted by the one hundred and fortyfour thousand, and the thousands of thousands, as more than conqueror. Oh, my friends, God, our Mother is just as kind in our afflictions as in our prosperities. God never touches us but for our good. If a field clean and cultured is better off than a barren field, and if a stone that has become a statue is better off than the marble in the quarry, then that soul that God chastens may be his favorite. Oh, the rocking of the soul is not the rocking of an earthquake, but the rocking of God’s cradle. “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” I have been told that the pearl in ap oyster is-merely the result of a wound, or a sickness inflicted upon it, and I do not know bnt that the brightest gems of Heaven will be found to have been the wounds of earth kindled into the jeweled brightness of eternhl glory. I remark that God has a mother’s car pacity for attending to little hurts. The father is shocked at the broken -bone of the child, or at the sickness j that sets the cradle on fire with ieveifl but it takes the mother to sympathize with all the little ailments and little

bruises of the cjiild. If the shfld has a splinter in .its hand, ft wants the mother bo take it out, and not the father. The father says, “Oh, that is nothing,” but the mother knows It is something, and that a little hurt Sometimes is very great. So with God, onr Mother; all onr annoyances are important enough to look at and sympathize with. Nothing with God is something. There are no ciphers in God’s arithmetic. And If we were only good enough of sight we could see as much through a microscope as through a telescope. Those things that may be impalpable and infinitesimal to us, may be pronounced and infinite to God. A mathematical point is defined as having no parts, no magnitude. It is so small that yon can not imagine it, and yet a mathematical point may be a starting point for a great eternity. God’s surveyors carry a very long chain. A scale must be very delicate that can weigh a grain, but God’s scale is so delicate that He can weigh with it that which is so small that a grain is a million times heavier. When John Kitto, a poor boy on a back street of Plymouth, cut bis foot with a piece of glass, God bound it up so successfully that he became the great Christian geographer, and a commentator known among all nations. So every wound of the sopl, however insignificant, God is willing to bind up. Aa at the first cry of the child the mother rushes to kiss the wound, so God, our Mother, takeß the smallest wound of the heart, and presses it to the lips of Divine sympathy. “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” I remark further that God has a mother’s patience for the erring. If one does wrong, first his associates in life east him off; if he goes on in the wrong way, his business partner casts him off; if he goes on his best friends cast him off —his father casts him off. But after all others have cast him off, where does he go? Who holds no grudge, and forgives the last time as well as the first? Who sits by the murderer’s counsel all through the long trial? Who tarries the longest at the windows of a culprit’s cell? Who, when all others think ill of a man, keeps on thinking well of him? It is his mother. God bless her gray hairs, if she be still alive; and bless her grave if she be gone! And bless the rocking chair in which she used to sit, and bless the cradle that she used to rock, and bless the Bible she used to read! So God, our Mother, has patience for all the erring.

The Bible often talks about God’s hand. I wonder how it looks. Yon remember distinctly how your mother’s hand looked, though thirty years ago it withered away. It was different from your father’s hand. When you were to be chastised you had rather have mother punish you than father. It did not hurt so much. And father’s hand was different from mother’s, partly because it had outdoor toil, and partly because God intended it to be different The knuckles were more firmly set and the palm was calloused. But the mother’s hand was more delicate. There were blue veins running through the back of it Though the fingers, some of them, were pricked with a needle, the palm of it was soft Oh! it was very soft Was there ever any poultice like that to take pain out of a wound. So God’s hand is a mother’s hand, what it touches it heals. If it smite you it does not hurt as if it were another hand. Oh, you poor, wandering soul in sin, it is not a bailiff’s hand that seizes you to-day. It is not a hard hand. It is not an unsympathetic hand. It is not a cold hand. It is not an enemy’s hand. No, it is a gentle hand, a loving hand, a sympathetic hand, a soft hand, a mother’s hand. “As one whom his mother comforteth, •o will I comfort you.” I want to say, finally, that God has a mother’s way of putting a child to sleep. You know there is no cradle song like a mother’s. After the excitement of the evening it is almost impossible to get the child to sleep. If the rocking chair stop a moment, the eyes are wide open; but the mother’s patience and the mother’s soothing manner keep on until, after awhile, the angel of slumber puts his wing over the pillow. Well, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the time will come when we will be wanting to be put to sleep. The day of our life will be ddfne, and the shadows of the night of death will be gathering around us. Then we want God to soothe us, to hush us to sleep. Let the music of our going not be the dirge of the organ, or the knell of the church tower or the drumming of a “dead march,” but let it be the hush of a mother’s lullaby. Oh! the cradle of the grave will be soft with the pillow of all the promises. When we are being rocked into that last slumber I want this to be the cradle song: “As one whom a mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.”

Asleep in Jesus 1 Far from thee , Thy kindred and their graves may be; Bnt thine is still a blessed sleep From which none ever wake to weep. A Scotchman was dying. His daughter Nellie sat by the bedside. It was Sunday evening, and the bell of the church was ringing, calling the people to church. The good old man, in his dying dream, thought that he was on the way to church, as he used to be when he went in the sleigh across the river; and as the evetung bell struck up, in his dying dream, he thought it was the call to church. He said: “Hark, children, the bells are ringing; we shall be late; we roust make the mare step out quick!” He shivered, and then said: “Pull the buffalo robes up closer, Wy lass 1 It is cold crossing the river; but we wiU soon be there, Nellie, we will soon be there!” And he smiled and said: “Just there how.” No wonder he smiled. The good old man had got to church. Not the old country church, but the temple lin the skies. Just across the river. ; How,comfortably did God bush that oM man to sleep! As one whom his mother comforteth, so God pomforted him.

After the second battle of Bull Run, Lincoln is said to have exclaimed: “Well, I’ve heard of being knocked into the middle of next week, but I never heard of being pitched into the middle of last year.” “Quicksilver Is firm,” is a recent announcement. The mercurial metal must have strangely changed character in these piping times. Brace—“l make it a point to give the devil iiie due.” Baglay—“Yes? Would you mind handing him thst five you owe me?” -N. Y. Herald. < “I am inclined to think/’ said the pig which hnd been taken i* off the pasture, “that the pen is far better than the sward.” —lndianapolis Journal. “I’m somewhat disfigured,” said the torn legligee shift, as the washerwoman iqueezed the water out of it, “but I'm still in the wring.”—Buffalo Express. For Coughs and Throat troubles use Brown’s Bronchial Troches.— “They stop an attack of my usthmucough very promptly.”— C. Faleh, Miamiville , Ohio. A thiee is generally distant in his manner if he suspects un officer Is after him.— Binghamton Republican. The Grip of Pneumonia maybe warded off with Halo’s Honey of Horehouud and Tar. Pike’s Toothache Drops Cure in one minute. “Well,” snid the telephone that had been thrown away, “I’m not ihe first to be talked to death.”—Philadelphia Ledger. Write to the Kansas Trust and Banking Co., of Atchison, Kan., for their descriptive price lists of improved farms in Kansas. The dog who chases his tail is like many debaters—he never reaches his conclusion. / • For indigestion, constipation, sick headache, weak stomach, disordered liver—take Beecham’s Pills. For sale by ull druggists. It is not against the game laws to eat a poached egg. 8. K. Coburn, Mgr., Clarie Scott, writes: “I find Hall’s Catarrh Cure a valuable remedy.” Druggists sell it, 75c. An adder's bite—the bank clerk’s lunoh. —Lampoon.

Mr. Hobbs— “ You weren’t so gray as vou axe now when I married you, Marla.” Mrs. Hobbs (with acidity)— ‘You ought to have foreseen that I would, if I had known you better.” It's hard to say what the politics of the man in the moon are. Sometimes the moon Is wet and sometimes it’s dry. Then, again, It la periodically full -N. Y. World. “Brar traders," so often spoken of in flnanoial reports, do not trade in bears, as might he sup osed, bnt In lambs.—Lowell Courier.