People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 February 1897 — TALMAGE’S SERMON. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

TALMAGE’S SERMON.

''HARBOR OP HOME,” LAST SUNDAY'S SUBJECT. A ext: “Go Home to Thy Friends, and Tell Them How Great Things the Lord Hath Done for Thee” —From Book of Hark, Chapter 6, Terse 19.

HERE are a great many people longing for some grand sphere in which to serve God. They admire Luther at the Diet of Worms, and only wish that they had some such great opportunity in which to display their Christian

prowess. They admire Paul making Felix tremble and 'they only wish that they had some such grand occasion in which to preach righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come. All they want is an opportunity to exhibit their Christian heroism. Now the apostle comes to us and he practically says: “I will show you a place where you can exhibit all that is grand and beautiful and- glorious in Christian character, and that is the domestic circle.” If one is not faithful m an insignificant sphere he will not be faithful in a resounding sphere. If Peter will not help the cripple at the gate of the Temple, he will never be able to preach three thousand souls into the kingdom at the Pentecost. If Paul will not take pains to instruct in the way of salvation the sheriff of the Philippian dungeon, he will never make Felix tremble. He who is not faithful in a skirmish would not be faithful in an Armageddon. The fact is, we are all placed in Ju3t the position in which we can most grandly serve God, and we ought not to be chiefly thoughtful about some sphere of usefulness which we may after awhile gain, but the allabsorbing question with you and with me ought to be: “Lord, what wilt thou have me (now and here) to do?” There is one word in my text around which the most of our thoughts will to-day revolve. The word is HOME. Ask ten different men the meaning of that word and they will give you ten different definitions. To one it means love at the hearth, it means plenty at the table, industry at the workstand, intelligence at the books, devotion at the altar. To him it means a greeting at the door and a smile at the chair. Peace hovering like wings. Joy clapping its hands with laughter. Life a tranquil lake. Pillowed on the ripples sleep the shadows. Ask another man what home is, and he will tell you it is want, looking out of a cheerless fire-grate and kneading hunger in an emp’ty bread-tray. The damp air shivering with curses. No Bible on the shelf. Children, robbers and murderers in embryo. Vile songs their lullaby. Every face a picture of ruin. Want in the background and sin staring from the front. No Sabbath wave rolling over that doorsill. Vestibule of the pit. Shadow of * infernal walls. Furnace for forging everlasting chains. Faggots for an unending funeral pile. Awful word! It is spelled with curses, it weeps with ruin, it chokes with woe, it sweats with the death-agony of despair. The' word “Home” in the one case means everything bright. The word “Home” in the other case means everything terrific. I shall speak to you of. home as a test of character, home as a refuge, home as a political safeguard, home as a school, and home as a type of heaven.

And in the first place I remark that home is a powerful test of character The disposition in public may be in gay costume, while in private it is in dishabille. As play-actors may appear in one way on the stage and may appear in another way behind the scenes, so private character may be very different from public character. Private character is often public character burned wrong side out. A man may receive you into his parlor as though he were a distillation of smiles, and yet his heart may be a swamp of nettles. There are business men who all day long are mild and courteous and genial and good-natured in commercial life, keeping back their irritability and their petulance and their discontent; but at nightfall the dam breaks, and scolding pours forth in floods and freshets. Reputation is only the shadow of character, and a very small house sometimes will cast a very long shadow. The lips may seem to drop myrrh and cassia, and the disposition to be as bright and warm as a sheaf of sunbeams, and yet they may only be a magnificent show window to a wretched stock of goods. There is many a man who is affable in public life and amid commercial spheres, who, in a cowardly way, takes his anger and his petulance home and drops them in the domestic circle. The reason men do not display their bad temper in public is because they do not want to be knocked down. There are men who hide their petulance and their irritability just for the same reason that they do not let their notes go to protest; it does not pay. Or for the same reason that they do not want a man in their stock company to sell his stock at less than the right price, lest it depreciate the value. As at sunset the wind rises, so after a sunshiny day there may be a tempestuous night. There are people who in publio act the philanthropist, who at home act the Nero, with respect to tAeir slippers and their gown. Audubon, the great ornithologist, with gun and pencil, went through the forests of America to bring down and to sketch the beautiful birds, and after years of toil and exposure completed

his manuscript and put it in a trunk in Philadelphia for a few days of recreation and rest, and came back and found that the rats had utterly de- , stroyed the manuscript; but without any discomposure and without any fret or bad temper, he again picked up his gain and pencil and visited again all the great forests of America and reproduced his immortal work. And yet j there are people with the ten-thous-I andth part of that loss who are utterly irreconcilable, who, at the loss of a pen- | cil or an article of raiment, will blow as long and sharp as a northeast storm. Now, that man who is affable in pub- ; lie and who is irritable in private is ! making a fraudulent overissue of stock, | and he is as bad as a bank that might | have four or five hundred thousand dollars of bills in circulation with no specie in the vault. Let us learn “to 6how piety at home.” If we have it not there we have it not anywhere. If we have not genuine grace in the family circle, all our outward and public plausibility merely springs from a fear of the world or from the slimy, putrid pool of our own selfishness. I tell you the home is a mighty test of character. What you are at home you are everywhere, whether you demonstrate it or not. Again, I remark that home is a refuge. Life is the United States army on the national road to Mexico, a long march with ever and anon a skirmish and a battle. At eventide we pitch our tent and stack our arms; we hang up the war cap and lay our head on the knapsack; we sleep until the morning bugle calls us to marching and action. How pleasant it is to rehearse the victories and tho surprises and the attacks of the day, seated by the still oamp-flre of the home circle! Yea, life is a stormy sea. With shivered masts and torn sails and hulk aleak, we put into the harbor of home. Blessed harbor! there we go for repajrs in the dry dock of quiet life. The candle in the window is to the toiling man the lighthouse guiding him into port. Children go forth to meet their fathers as pilots at the Narrows take the hand of ships. The door-sill of the home is the wharf where heavy life is unladen. There is the place where we may talk of what we have done without being charged with self-adulation. There is the place where we may lounge without being thought ungraceful. There is the place where we may express affection without being thought silly. There is the place where we may forget our annoyances and exasperations and troubles. Forlorn earth-pilgrim! no home? Then die. That is better. The grave is brighter and grander and more glorious than this world with no tent from marchings, with no harbor from the storm, with no place to rest from this scene of greed and gouge and loss and gain. God pity the man or woman who has no home! Get you no hint of cheerfulness from grasshopper’s leap and lamb’s frisk, and quail’s whistle, and garrulous streamlet, which, from the rock at the mountain-top clear down to the meadow ferns under the shadow of the steep, comes looking for the steepest place to leap off at, and talking just to hear itself talk? If all the skies hurtled with tempest, and everlasting storm wandered over the sea, and every mountain stream went raving mad, frothing at the mouth with mad foam, and there were nothing but simoons blowing among the hills, and there were neither lark’s carol nor humming bird’s trill, nor waterfall’s dash; only bear’s bark, and panther’s scream, and wolf’s howl, then you might well gather Into your homes only the shadows. But when God has strewn the ear.th and the heavens with beauty and with gladness, let us take unto our home circles all innocent hilarity, all brightness, and all good cheer. A dark home makes bad boys and bad girls, in preparation for bad men and bad women. Above all, my friends, take into your homes Christian principle. Can it be that in any of the comfortable homes of my congregation the voice of prayer is never lifted ? What! No supplication at night for protection? What! No thanksgiving in the morning for care? How, my brother, my sister, will you answer God in the day of judgment with reference to your children? It Is a plain question, and therefore I ask it. In the tenth chapter of Jeremiah God says he will pour out his fury upon the families that call not upon His name. O, parents, when you are dead and gone, and the moss is covering the inscription of the tombstone, will your children look back and think of father and mother at family prayer? Will they take the old family Bible and open it and see the mark of tears of contrition and tears of consoling promise, wept by eyes long before gone out into darkness? Oh, if you do not inculcate Christian principles in the hearts of your children, and do not warn them against evil, and do not invite them to holiness and to God, and they wander off into dissipation and into infidelity, and at last make shipwreck of their immortal souls, on their deathbed and in the day of judgment they will curse you! Seated by the register or the stove, what if on the wall should come out the history of your children? What a history—the mortal and the immortal life of your loved ones! Every parent is Writing the history of his child. He is writing it, composing it into a song or tuning it into a groan. Again, i remarK that home is a type of heaven. To bring us to that home Christ left his home. Far up and far back in the history of heaven there came a period when its most illustrious citizen was about to absent himself. He was not going to sail from beach to beach; we have often done that. He was not going to put out from one hemisphere to another hemisphere; many of us have done that. But he was to sail from world to world, the spaces unexplored and immensities un-

traveled. No world had ever hailed heaven, and heaven had never hailed any other world. I think that the windows and the balconies are thronged, and that the pearly beach was crowded with those who had come to see him sail out of the harbor of light into the oceans beyond. Out and out and out,and on and on and on, and down and down and down he sped, until one night, with only one to greet him, he arrived. His disembarkation so unpretending, so quiet that it was not known on earth until the excitement in the cloud gave intimation that something grand and glorious had happened. Who comes there? From what port did He sail? Why was this the place of His destination? I question the shepherds. I question the camel drivers, I question the angels. I have found out He was an exile. But the world has had plenty of exiles. Abraham, an exile from Ur of the Chaldees; John, an exile from Ephesus; Kosciu&ko, an exile from Poland; Mazzini, an exile from Rome; Emmet, an exile from Ireland; Victor Hugo, an exile from France; Kossuth, an exile from Hungary. But this one of whom I speak today had such resounding farewell and came into such chilling reception—for not even an hostler went out with his lantern to help him in—that He is more to be celebrated than any other expatriated one of earth or heaven. At our best estate we are only pilgrims and strangers here. “Heaven is our home.” Death will never knock at the door of that mansion, and in all that country there is not a single grave. How glad parents are in holiday time to gather th&ir children home again! But I have noticed that almost always there is a son or daughter absent —absent from home, perhaps absent from the country, perhaps absent from the world. Oh, how glad our heavenly Father will be when He gets all His children home with Him in heaven! And how delightful it will be for brothers and sisters to meet after long separation! Once they parted at ths door of the tomb; now they meet at the door of immortality. Once they saw only “through a glass, darkly;’ now it U “face to face,” corruption, incorruption; mortality, immortality. Where are now all their sins and sorrows and troubles? Overwhelmed in the Red Sea of death while they passed through dryshod. Gates of. pearl, capstones of amethyst, thrones of dominion do not stir my soul so much as the thought of home. Once there, let earthly sorrows howl like storms and roll like seas. Home! Let thrones rot and empires wither. Home! Let the world die in an earthquake struggle and be buried amid procession of planets and dirge of spheres. Home! Let everlasting ages roll in irresistible sweep. Home! No sorrow, no crying. No tears. No death. But home, sweet home; home, beautiful home, everlasting home, home with each other, home .with’ angels, home with God. One night, lying on my lounge, when very tired, my children all around about me in full romp and hilarity and laughter—on the lourrge, half awaks and half asleep, I dreamed this dream: I was in a far country. It was not Persia, although more than Oriental luxuriance crowned the cities. It was not the tropics, although more than tropical fruitfulness filled the gardens. It was not Italy, although more than Italian softness filled the air. And I wandered around looking for thorns and nettles, but I found that none of them grew there, and I saw the sun rise, and I watched to see it set, but it sank not And I saw th« people In holiday attire, and I said: “When will they put off this and put on workmen’s garb and again delve in the mine or swelter at the forge?” But they never put off their holiday attire. And I wandered in the suburbs of the city to find the place where the dead sleep, and I looked all along the line of the beautiful hills, the place where the dead might most blissfully sleep, and I saw towers and castles, but not a mausoleum or a monument or a white slab could I see. And I went into the chapel of the great town and I said: “Whex-e do the poor worship and where are the hard benches on which tley sit?” And the answer was made me: “We have no poor in this country." And then I wandered out to find the hovels of the destitute, and I fouad mansions of amber and ivory and gold, but not a tear could I see, not a sigh could I hear, and I was bewildered aid I sat down under the branches of a great tree and I said: “Where am I? And whence comes all this scene!" And then out from among the leaves,, and up the flowery paths, and across the bright streams there came a beautiful group, thronging all about me, and as I saw them come I thought I knew their step, and as they shouted I thought I knew their voices; but then they were so gloriously arrayed in apparel, such as I had never before witnessed, that I bowed as stranger to stranger. But when they agqjc clapped their hands and shouted, “Welcome, welcome!” the mystery all vanished, and I found that time had gone and eternity had come, and we were all together again in bur new home in heaven. And I looked around and I said: "Are we all hece?” and the voices of many generations responded, “All here!" And while tears of gladness were raining down our cheeks, and tfie branches of the Lebanon cedars were clapping their hands, and the towers of the great city were chiming their welcome, w.e all together began to leap and shout and sing: “Home, home, home!”