People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 February 1897 — TALM AGE'S SERMON. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

TALM AGE'S SERMON.

A SHATTERED FAITH LAST SUNDAY’S SUBJECT. From the Text: “And Some Are Broken Pieces from the Ship” Acts, Chap, ter ' XLVII, Verse 44 Saving the Wrecked on Life’s Tempestuous Sea-

Life’s Ten

H* EVER off Goodwin Sands, or the Skerries, or Cape Hatteras, was a ship in worse predicament j than, in the MediA t e r r a n ean hurriSiiiuj I cane, was the grain ifUffi! ship on which two hundred and sev- £ y eLty-six passengers were driven on the

coast of Malta, five miles from the metropolis of that island, called Citta Vecchia. After a two-weeks’ tempest, when the ship was entirely disabled, and captain and crew had become completely demoralized, an old missionary took command of the vessel. He was small, crooked-backed and sore-eyed, according to tradition. It was Paul, the Only unscared man aboard. He was no mors afraid of a Euroclydon tossing the Mediterranean sea, now up to the gates of heaven and now sinking it to the gates of hell, than he was afraid of a kitten playing with a string. He ordered them all down to take thfir rations, first asking for them a blessing. Then hs insured all their lives, telling them thsy would be rescued, and, so far from losing their heads, they would not lose so much of their hair as you could.cut off with one click of the scissors: nay, not a thread of it, whether it were gray with age or golden with youth. “There shall not a hair fall from the head of any of you.’’ .Knowing that they can never get to tho desired port, they make the sea on the fourteenth night black with overthrown cargo, so that when the ship strikes it will not strike so heavily. At daybreak they saw a creek, and in itheir exigency resolved to make for it. And so .they cut the cables, took in the two paddles they had on those old boats, and hoisted the mainsail so that they might come with such force as to be driven high up on the beach by some fortunate billow. There 6he goes—tumbling toward the rocks, now prow foremost, now stern foremost, now rolling over to the starhoard, now over to the larboard, now a wave dashes clear over the deck, and it seems as if the old craft has gone forever. But up she comes again. Paul’s arms around a mast, he cries: “All is well, God has given me all those that sail with me.” Crash! went the prow, with such force that it broke off the mast. Crash! went, the timbers, till the seas rushed through from side to side of the vessel. She parts amidships, and into a thousand fragments the vessel goes, and into the waves two hundred and seventy-six immortals are precipitated. Some of them had been brought up on the seashore, and had learned to swim and with their chins just above the waves and by the strokes of both arms and propulsion of both feet, they put out for the beach, and reach it. But alas for those others! They have never learned to swim, or they were wounded, by the falling of the mast, or the nervous shock was too great for them. And others had been weakened by long sea-sickness. Oh, what will become of them? “Take that piece of a rudder,” says Paul to one. “Take that fragment of a spar,” says Pa,ul to another. “Take that image of Castor and Pollux.” “Take that plank from the lifeboat.” “Take anything, and head for the beach.” What a struggle for life in the breakers! Oh, the merciless waters, how they sweep over the heads of men! women and children! Hold on there! Almost ashore; keep up your courage. Remember what Paul told you. There, the receding wave on the beach leaves in the sand a whole family. There crawls up out of the surf t'he centurion. There, another plank comes in, with a life clinging fast to it: There, another. piece of the shattered vessel, with its freightage of an immortal soul! They must- by this time all be saved. Yes; there comes in last of all, for he had been overseeing the rest, the old missionary, who wrings the water from his gray beard and cries out: “Thank God, all are here!” I believe in both the He'delberg and Westminster Catechisms, and I wish you all did; but you may believe in nothing they contain except the one idea, that Christ came to save sinners and that you are one of them, and you are instantly rescued. If you can come ,in on the grand old ship, I would rather have you get aboard, but if you can only find a piece of wood as long as the human body, or a piece as wide as the outspread human arms, and either of them is a piece of the cross, come in on that piece. Tens of thousands of people are today kept out of the kingdom of God because they cannot believe everything. I am talking with a man thoughtful about his soul who has lately traveled through New England and passed the night at Andover. He says to me: “I cannot believe that in this life the destiny is irrevocably fixed; I think there will be another opportunity of repentance after death.” I say to him: “My brother, what has that to do with you? Don’t you realize that the man who waits for another chance after death when he has a good chance before death is a stark fool? Had not you better take the plank that is thrown to you now and head for shore, rather than wait for a plank that may by invisible hands be thrown to you after you are dead? Do as you please, but as for myself, with pardon for all my sins offered me now, and all the Joys of time and eternity offered me bow, I instantly taka them, rather than

run the risk of such other chance as wise men think they can peel off or twist out of a Scripture passage that hAs for all the Christian centuries been interpreted another way.” You say: “I do not like Princeton theology, or New Haven theology, or Andover theology.” I do not ask you on board either of these great men-of-war, their portholes filled with the great siegeguns of ecclesiastical battle. But I do ask you to take the one plank of the Gospel that you do believe in and strike out for the pearl-strung beach of heaven. Says some other man: “I would attend to religion if I was quite sure about the doctrine of election and free agency, but that mixes me all up.” Those things used to bother me, but I have no more perplexity about them; for I say to myself: “If I love Christ and live a good, honest, useful life, I am elected to be saved; and if I do not love Christ, and live a bad life, I will be damned, and all the the theological seminaries of the universe cannot make it any different.” I floundered along wh'le in the sea of sin and doubt, and it was as rough as the Mediterranean on th’e fourteenth night, when they threw the grain overboard, but I saw there was mercy for a sinner, and that plank I took, and I have beezi warming myself by the bright fire on the shore ever since. While I am talking to another man about his soul 'he tells me: “I do not become a Christian because I do not believe there is any hell at all.” Ah! don’t you? Do all the people of all beliefs and no belief at all, of good morals and bad morals go straight to a happy heaven? Do the holy and t'he debauched have the same destination? At midnight, in a hallway, the owner of a house and a burglar meet; they both fire, and both are wounded, but the burglar dies in five minutes and the owner of the house lives a week after; will the burglar be at the gate of heaven, waiting, when the houseowner comes in? Will the debauchee and the libertine go right in among the families of heaven? I wonder if Herod is playing on the banks of the river of life with the children he massacred: I wonder if Charles Guiteau and John Wilkes Booth are up there shooting at a mark. Ido not now controvert it, although I must say that for such a miserable heaven I have no admiration. But the Bible does not say: “Believe in perdition and be saved.” Because all are saved, according to your theory, that ought not to keep you from loving and serving Christ. Do not refuse to come ashore because all the others, according to your theory, are going to get ashore. You may have a different theory about chemistry, about astronomy, about the atmosphere from that which others adopt, but you are not, therefore, hindered from action. Because your theory of light is different from others, do not refuse to open your eyes. Because your theory of air is different you do not refuse to breathe. Because your theory about the stellar system is different, you do not refuse to acknowledge the north star. Why should the fact that your theological theories are different hinder you from acting upon what you know? If you have not a whole ship fastened in the theological drydocks to bring you to wharfage, you have at least a plank. “Some on broken pieces of the ship.”

“But I don’t believe In revivals!” Then go to your room, and all alone, with your door locked, give your heart to God, and join some.church where the ..thermometer never gets higher than fifty in the shade. “But I do not believe in baptism!" Come in without it and settle that matter afterward. “But there are so many inconsistent Christians!” Then come in and show them by a good example how professors should act. “But I don’t believe in the Old Testament!” Then come in on the New. “But I don’t like the Book of Romans.” Then come in on Matthew or Luke. Refusing to come to Christ, whom you admit to he the Savior of the lost, because you cannot admit other things, .you are like a man out there in that Mediterranean tempest, and tossed in the Melita breakers, refusing to come ashore until he can mend the pieces of the broken ship. I hear him say: “I won’t go in on any of these planks until I know in what part of the ship they belong. When I can get the windlass in the right place, and the sails set, and that keel-piece where it belongs, and that floor-timber right, and these ropes untangled, I will go ashore. lam an old sailor, and know all about ships for forty years, and as soon as I can get the vessel afloat in good shape I will come in.” A man drifting by on a piece of wood overhears him and says: “You will drown before you get that ship reconstructed. Better do as lam doing. I know nothing about ships, and never saw one before I came on board this, and I cannot swim a stroke, but I am going ashore on this shivered timber.” The man in, the offing, while trying to mend his ship goes down. The man who trusted to the plank is saved. O my brother, let your smashed up system of theology go to the bottom, while you oome in on a splintered spar! “Some on broken pieces of the ship." You may get all your difficulties settled as Garibaldi, the magnetic Italian, got his gardens made. When the war between Austria and Sardinia broke out he was living at Caprera, a very rough and uncultivated island home. But he went forth with his sword to achieve the liberation of Naples and Sicily, and gave nine million people free government, under Victor Emmanuel. Garibaldi, after being absent two years from Caprera, returned, and, when he approached it, he found that his home had, by Victor Emmanuel, as a surprise, been Edenized. Trimmed shrubbery had taken the place of thorny thickets, gardens the place of barrenness, and the old rookery in which he once lived had given

way to a pictured mansion. And I tell you if you will come and enlist under the banner of our Victor Emmanuel, and follow him through thick and thin, and fight his battles, and endure his sacrifices, you will find after awhile that he has changed your heart from a jungle of thorny scepticisms into a garden all abloom with luxuriant Joy that you have never dreamt of. Prom a tangled Cap rera of sadness into a paradise of God. I do not know how your theological system went to pieces. It may be that your parents started you with only one plank, and you believe little or nothing. Or they may have been too rigid and severe in religious discipline, and cracked you over the head with a psalm book. It may be that some partner in business who was a member of an evangelical church played on you a trick that disgusted you with religion. It may be that you have associates who have talked against Christianity in your presence until you are “all at sea,” and you dwell more on things that you do not belief than on things you do believe. You are in one respect like Lord Nelson, when a signal was lifted that he wished to disregard, and he put his sea-glass to his blind eye and Bald: “I really do not see the signal." Oh, my hearer, put this field-glass of the Gospel no longer to your blind eye, and say, I cannot see, but put it to your other eye, the eye of faith, and you will see Christ, and he is all you need to see. If you can believe nothing else, you certainly believe in vicarious suffering, for you se it almost every day in some shape. The steamship Knickerbocker, of the Cromwell line, running between New Orleans and New York, was in great storms, and the captain and crew saw the schooner Mary D. Cranmer, of Philadelphia, in distress. The weather cold, the waves mountain high, the first officer of the steamship and four men put out in a lifeboat to save the crew of the schooner, and reached the vessel and towed it out of danger, the wind shifting so that the schooner was- saved. But the five men of the steamship coming back, their boat capsized, yet righted again and came on, the sailors coated with ice. The boat capsized again, and three times upset and was righted, and a line thrown the poor fellows, but their hands were frozen so they could not grasp it, and a great wave rolled over them, and they went down, never to rise again till the sea gives up its -dead. Appreciate that heroism and self-sacrifice of the brave fellows all who can, and can we not appreciate the Christ who put out • into a more biting cold and into a more overwhelming surge, to bring us out of infinite peril into everlasting safety? The wave of human hate rolled over him from one side and the wave of hellish fury rolled over him on the other side. Oh, the thickness of the night and the thunder of ke tempest into which Christ plunged for our rescue!

You’admit you are all broken up, one decade of your life gone by, two decades, three decades, four decades, a half-century, perhaps three-quarters of a century gone. The hour hand and the minute hand of your clock of life are almost parallel, and soon it will be twelve and your day ended. Clear discouraged are you? I admit it is a sad thing to give all our lives that are worth anything to sin and the devil, and then at last make God a present of a first-rate corpse. But the past you cannot recover. Get on board that old ship you never will. Have you only one more year left, one more month, one more week, one more day, one more hour —come in on that. Perhaps if you get to heaven God may let you go out on some great mission to some other world, where you can somewhat atone for your lack of service in this. From many a deathbed I have Been the hands thrown up in deploration something like this: "My life has been wasted. I had good mental faculties and fine social position and great opportunity, but through worldliness and neglect all has gone to waste save these few remaining hours. I now accept of Christ and shall enter heaven through his mercy; but alas, alas! that when I might have entered the haven of eternal rest with a full cargo, and been greeted by the waving hands of a multitude in whose salvation I had borne a blessed part, I must confess I now enter the hartor of heaven on broken pieces of the ship.”