People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1893 — GOD AMONG THE SHELLS. [ARTICLE]

GOD AMONG THE SHELLS.

Dr. Tnlmasre’a Discourses on “The r Conchology of the Bible.” The Part Shells Have Played In tha World's History—The Care of God for the Host Insignificant of His Creations. Tbe following discourse in continuation of his series on “God «Every where” was delivered by Rev. T. DeWitt Talm»ge in the Brooklyn tabernacle, from the text: And the Lord said unto Moses. Take unto thee sweet spices, stacle and onycha.—Exodus xxx.. 34. You may not have noticed the shells of the Bible, although in this early part of the sacred book God calls you to consider and employ them, as He called Moses to consider and employ them. The onveha of my text is a shell found on the banks of the Red sea, and Moses and his army must have crushed many of them under foot as they crossed the bisected waters, onycha on the beach and onycha in the unfolded bed of the deep. I shall speak of this shell as a beautiful and practical revelation of God, and as true as the first chapter of Genesis and the last chapter of Revelations, or everything between. Not only is this shell, the onycha, found at 'the Red sea, but in the waters of India. It not only delectates the eye with its convolutions of beauty, white and lustrous and seriated, but blesses the nostril with a pungent aroma. The shell-fish, accustomed to feed on spikenard, is redolent with that odorous plant, redolent when alive and redolent when dead. Its shells, when burnt, bewitch the air with fragrance. In my text God commands Moses to mix this onycha with the perfumes of the altar in the ancient tabernacle, and I propose to mix some of the perfumes at the cal tar of Brooklyn tabernacle, for having spoken to you on “The Astronomy of the Bible, or Uod Among the Stars;” “The Chronology of the Bible, or God Among the Centuries; “The Ornithology of the Bible, or God Among the Birds;” “The Mineralogy of the Bible, or God Among the Amethysts;” “The Ichthyology of the Bible, or God Among the Fishes,” I now come to speak of “The Conchology of the Bible, or God Among the Shells." It is a secret that you may keep for me, for I have never before told it to anyone that in all the realms of the natural world there is nothing to me so fascinating, co completely absorbing, so full of suggestiveness as a shell. What? More entertaining than a bird, which can sing, when a shell can not sing? Well, there you have made a great mistake. Pick up the onycha from the hanks of the Red sea, or pick up a bivalve from the beach of the Atlantic ocean, and listen, and you hear a whole choir of marine voices—bass, alto, soprano—in an unknown tongue, but seeming to chant, as I put it to my ear: “The sea is His and He made it;” others singing: “Thy way, oh, God, is in the sea;” others hymning: “lie ruleth the raging of the sea.” “What,” says some one else, does the shell impress you more than the star?” In some respects, yes, because I can handle the shell and closely study the shell, while I can not handle the star, and if I study it, must study it at a distance of millions and millions of miles. “What,” says some one else, “are you more impressed by tbe shell thun the flower?” Yes, for it has far greater varieties and far greater richness of color, as I could show you in thousands of specimens, and because the shell does not fade, as does the rose leaf, but maintains its beauty century after century, so that the onycha which the hoof of Pharaoh’s horse knocked aside in the chase of the Isrealites across the Red sea may have kept its luster to this hour. Yes, they are parti-colored and many colored that you might pile them up until you have a wall with all the colors of Heaven, from the jasper at the bottom to the amethyst at the top. Thank God for the wealth of mollusks all up and down the earth, whether feeding the Israelites on their way to the land flowing with milk and honey, or, as we are better acquainted with the mollusks, when flung to the beach of lake or sea. There are three great families of them. If I should ask you to name three of the great royal families of the earth, perhaps you would respond, the House of Stuant, the House of Hapsburg, tbe House of Bourbon, but the three royal families of mollusks are the univalve or shell of one part, the bivalve, or shell of two parts, and the multivalve, or shell in many parts, and I see God in their every hinge, in their every tooth, in their every cartilage, in their every ligament, in their every spiral ridge, and in their every color, prism on prism, and their adaptation of thin shell for still ponds and thick ooatings for boisterous seas. They all dash upon me the thought that providential care of God. What is the use of all this architecture of the shell, and why is it pictured from the outside lip clear down into its labyrinths of construction? Why the infinity of skill and radiance in a shell? What is the use of the color and exquisite curve of a thing so significant as a shell-fish? Why, when the conchologist, by dredge or rake fetches the crustaceous specimens to the shore, does he find at his feet whole Alhambras and Colloseums and Parthenons and crystal palaces of beauty in miniature, and these bring to light only an infinitesimal part of the opulence in the great subaqueous world. Linnaeus counted two thousand live hundred species of shells, but conchology had then only begun its achievements. . Whilo,exploring the bed of the Atlantic ocean in preparation for laying the cable, shelled animals were brought up from depths of .one thousand nine, hundred fathoms. When lifting the telegraph wire from the Mediterranean and Red seas shelled creatures were brought up from depths of two thousand fathoms. The English afitttnOty, exploring in behalf of atkmm found moII—IM at * depth of

j two thousand four hundred and thirty- : five fathoms, or fourteen thousand two hundred and ten feet deep. What a realm awful for vastness! As the shell is the only house and wardrobe of insignificant animals of the deep, why ail that wonder and beauty of construction? God’s care for them is the only reason. And if God provide so munificently for them, will He not see that you have wardrobe and shelter? Wardrobe and shelter for a periwinkle; shall there not be wardrobe and shelter for a man? Would God give a coat of mail for the defense of a nautilus and leave you no defense against the storm? Does He build a stone house for a creature that lasts a season and leave without home a soul that takes hold on centuries and aeons? Hugh Miller found “The Footprints of the Creator in the Old Red Sandstone,” and I hear the harmonies of God in the tinkle of the sea shells when the tide comes in. The same Christ who drew a les6qn of providential care from the fact that God clothes the grass of the field instructs me to draw the same lesson from the shells. But while you get this pointed lesson of providential care from the shelled creatures of the deep, notice in their construction that God helps them to help themselves. This house of stone in which they live is not dropped on them and is not built around them. The material for it exudes from their own bodies and is adorned with a colored fluid from the pores of their own neck. It is a most interesting thing to see these crustacean animals fashisn their own homes out of carbonate of lime and membrane. And all of this is almighty lesson to those who are waiting for others to build their fortunes, when they ought to go to wonk and, like the mollusks, build their own fortunes out of their own brain, out of their own sweat, out of their own industries. Not a mollusk on all the beaches of all the seas would have a house of shell if it had not itself built one. Do not wait for others to shelter you or prosper you. All the crustaceous creatures of the earth, from every flake of their covering and from every ridge of their tiny castles on Atlantic and Pacific and Mediterranean coasts, say: “Help yourself while God helps you to help yourself.” Those people who are waiting for their father or rich old uncle to die and leave them a fortune are as silly as a mollusk would be to wait for some other mollusk to drop on it a shell equipment. It would kill the mollusk, as in most cases it destroys a man. Not one person out of a hundred ever was strong enough to stand a large estate by inheritance dropped on him in a chunk. Have great expectations from only two persons—God and yourself. Let the onycha of my text become your preceptor.

But the more I examine the shells, the more I am impressed that God is a God of emotion. Many scoff at emotion, and seem to think that God is a God of cold geometry and iron laws and eternal apathy and enthroned stoicism. No! No! The shells with overpowering emphasis deny it While law and order reign in the universe, you have but to see the lavishness f>f color on the Crustacea, all shades of crimson from faintest blush to blood of battle-field, all shades of blue, all shades of green, all shades of ail colors from deepest black to whitest light, just called out on the shells with no more order than a mother premeditates or calculates how many kisses and hugs she shall give her babe waking up in the morning sunlight Yes. My God is an emotional God, and He says: “We must have colors and let the sun paint all of them on the scroll of that shell, and we must have music, and here is a carol for the robin, and a psalm for man, and a - doxology J for the seraphim and a resurrection call for the archangel.” Aye, He showed Himself a God of sublime emotion when He flung Himself on this world in the personality of Christ to save it, without regard to the tears it would take, or the blood it would exhaust, or the agonies it would crush out. When I see the Louvres and the Luxemborgs and the vaticans of Divine painting strewn along the eight thousand miles of coast, and I hear in a forest, on a summer morning, musical academies and Handel’s societies of full orchestras, I say God is a God of emotion, and if he observes mathematics, it is mathematics set to music, and His figures are written, not in white ehalk on blackboards, but written by a finger of sunlight on walls of jasmin and trumpet-creeper. In my study of the conchology of the Bible, this onycha of the text also impresses me with the fact that religion is perfumed. What else could God have meant when He said to Moses: “Take unto cthee sweet spices, stacte and onycha?” Moses took that shell of the onycha, put it over the fire, an'd as it crumbled into ashes it exhaled an odor that hung in every curtain and filled the ancient tabernacle, and its sweet smoke escaped from the sacred preeincts and saturated the outside air. Perfume! That is what religion is! But, instead of that, some make it a mal-odor. They serve God in a rough and acerb wajr. They box the child’s ears because he does not -properly keep Sunday, instead of making Sunday so attractive the child could not help to keep it They make him learn by heart a difficult chapter in the Book of | Exodus, with all the hard names, -beI cause he has been naughty. How many disagreeable good people there are. No one doubts their piety, and they will reach Heaven, but they will have to get fixed up before they go there, or they will make trouble by calling out to us: “Keep off that grass!” “What do you mean by plucking that flower?” “Show your tickets!” Oh, how many Christian people need to obey my text and take into their Worship and their behavior and their consociations and presbyteries and general assemblies and conferences more onycha. I have sometimes gone in a very gale of spirit into the presence of some disagreeable Christians, and in five minutes felt wretched; and at some other time I -have gone depreatod into the company of suave and

|Jt Us» / V - genial souls, and in a few momenta I j felt exhilarant What was the difference? It was the difference in what they burnt on their censors. The one burnt onycha; the other burnt aaafoetida. In this conchologicai study of the Bible, I also notice that the mollusks or shelled animals furnish the purple that yon see richly darkening so many Scripture chapters. The purple stuff in the ancient tabernacle, the purple girdle of the priests, the purple mantle of Roman emperors, the apparel of Dives in purple and fine linen, aye, the purple robe which, in mockery, was thrown upon Christ, were oob ored by the purple of the shells on the shores of the Mediterranean. It was discovered by a shepherd’s dog having stained his mouth by breaking one of the shells, and the purple aroused admiration. Costly purple. Six pounds of the purple liquor extracted from the shell-fishes was used to prepare one pound of wool. Purple was also used on the pages of books. Bibles and prayer books appeared in purple vellum, which may still be found in some of the national libraries of Europe. Plutarch speaks of some purple which kept its beauty for one hundred and ninety years. But, after awhile, the purple became easier to get, and that which had been a sign of imperial authority, when worn in robes, was ! adopted by many people, and so an em- j peror, jealous of this appropriation of j the purple, made a law that anyone except royalty wearing purple should j be put to death. Then, as if to punish the world tor that outrage of ex- j elusiveness, God obliterated the color j from the earth, as much as to say: ■ “If alt can not have it, none shall have it.” But, though God has deprived the race of that shell-fish which afforded the purple, there are shells enough left to make us glad and worshipful. Oh, the entrancement of hue and shape still left all up and down the beaches of all the continents! These creatures of the sea have what roofs of enameled porcelain! They dwell under what pavilions, blue as the sky and fiery as a sunset and mysterious as an aurora! And am I not right in leading you, for a few moments, through this mighty realm of God so neglected by human eye and human footstep! It is said that the harp and lute were invented from the fact that in Egypt the Nile overflowed its banks, and when the waters retreated tortoises were left ' by the million on all the lands, and these tortoises died, and soon nothing •va9 left but the cartilages and gristle of these creatures, which tightened under the heat into musical strings that, when touched bv the wind or the foot of man vibrated, making sweet sounds, and so the world took the hint and fashioned the harp; and am I not right in trying to make music out of the shells, and lifting them as a harp, from which to thrum the jubilant praises of lhe Lord and the pathetic strains of human condolence.

But I find the climax of this conchology of the Bible in the pearl, which has this distinction above all other gems that it requires no human hand to bring out its beauties. Job speaks of it and its sheen is in Christ’s sermon, and the Bible, which opens with the onycha of my text, closes with the pearl. Of such value is this eruataeeous product, I do not wonder that, for the exclusive right of fishing for it on the shores of Ceylon, a man paid to the English government six hundred thousand dollars for one season. So exquisite is the pearl I do not wonder that Pliny thought it made out of a drop of dew, the creature rising to the surface to take it, and the chemistry of nature turning the liquid into solid. You will see why the Bible makes so much of the pearl in its similitudes if you know how much its costs to get it. Boats with divers sail out I from the island of Ceylon, ten divers to each boat. Thirteen men guide and manage the boat. Down into the dan--gerous depths, amid sharks that swirl around them, plunge the divers, while sixty thousand people anxiously gaze on. After three or four minutes’ absence from the air, the diver ascends, nine-tenth's strangulated and blood rushing from ears and nostrils, and flinging his pearly treasure on the sand, falls into unconsciousness. Oh, it is an awfdl an strain exposure and peril to fish for pearls, and yet they do so, and is it not a wonder that to get that which the Bible calls the pearl of great price, worth more than all the other pearls put together, there should be so little anxiety, so little struggle, so little enthusiam. Would God that we were all as wise as the merchantman Christ commended, “who, when He had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that He had and bought it.” But what thrills me with suggestivepess is the material out of which all pearls are made. They are fashioned from the wound of the shell-fish. The exudation from that wound is fixed and hardened and enlarged into a pearl. The ruptured vessels of the water animal fashioned the gem that now adorns finger or ear-ring or sword hilt or king’s crown. So, out of the wounds of earth will come the pearls of Heaven. Out of the wound of conviction the pearl of pardon. Out of the wound of bereavement the pearl of solace. Out of the wound of loss the pearl of gain. Out of the deep wound of the grave the pearl of resurrection joy. Out of the wounds of a Saviour’s life and a Saviour’s death, -the rich, the radiant, the everlasting pearl of Heavenly gladness. “And the twelve gates were twelve pearls.” Take the consolation all ye who have been hurt, whether hurt in body, or hurt in mind, or hurt in soul. Get your troubles santisfied. If you suffer with Christ on earth, you will reign with Him in glory. The tears of earth are the crystals of Heaven. “Every several gate was one pearl.” —ln the five Swiss universities of Basel, Berne, Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich, during the past summe^semister, the number of women students was ! 224, of whom 157 were in the medical ! departments, 62 in tha philosophical 1 and 5 in tha law. ‘