Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 August 1887 — INSURANCE. [ARTICLE]

INSURANCE.

liook Beyond,the Mere Fact of Existence. ' ,i ■ The Chrl»tl«nPrinclpl*>. Involved In U(« nnd Fire Inna ranee Apptte. Alike to the Inaurerand the Insured—Dr. Talmage’s Bermo».'.'*' : s s ? - Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at “The Hamptons” last Sunday. “Life and- Fire Insurance.’’ Text: Genesis xii., 34. He said: About ten or twelve years ago there was a great panic in life insurance which did good. Under the storm the untrustworthy and bogus institutions were scattered, while the genuine were tested and firmly established and where does the life insuranceinstitution stand to-day? What amount of comfort, of education, of iporal and spiritual advantage is represented in the simple statistics that in this country the life insurance companies in one year paid S7,QOQ,OOQto the families of the bereft; and in five years they psid $300,000,000 to the families of the bereft; and are promising to pay—and hold themselves in readiness to pay —$2,000,000,000 to families of the bereft! They have actuallypaid out more in dividends and death claims thar^ f they have ever received in premiums. I know of what 1 speak. The life insurance companies of this country paid more than $7,000,000 of taxes to the Government in five years. So. instead of these companies being indebted to the land, the land is indebted to them. To cry out against life insurance because here and there one company has behaved badly is as absurd as it would be for a man to born down a thousand acres of harvest-field in order to kill the moles and potato-bugs —as preposterous as a man who should blow up a crowded steamer in mid-Atlantic for the purpose of destroying the barnacles on the bottom of the hulk. But what dees the Bible say in regard 10 this subject? If the Bible favors it, j will favor it; if the Bible denounces it, I will denounce it. In addition to the forecast of Joseph in the text, I call to your attention Paul’s comparison. Here is gne man who, through neglect, fails to support his family while he lives, or after he dies. Here is another man, who abhors the Sciiptures and rejects God. Which of those men is the worse? Well, yon say. the latter. Paul says the former. Paul says that a man w T ho neglects to care for his household is more obnoxious than a man w ho rejects the Scriptures: “He that provideth not for his own, and especially those of his own household, is worse than an infidel.” Life insurance companies help most of us to provide for our families after we are gone; hut if we have the. money to pay the premiums and do not pay them, we have no right to expect mprev at the hand of God in the Judgment. We are worse than Tom Paine, worse than Voltaire and worse than Shaftesbury. The Bible declares it—we are worse than an infidel. After the certificate of death has been made out, rind thirty or sixty days have passed, and the officer of a life insurance company comes into the bereft household and pays down the hard cash on an insurance policy, that officer of the company is performing apositively religious rite, according to the Apostle James, who says. “True religion and undefiled before God and th' Father is this: To visit the fatherless and the widow’ in their affliction,” and so on. The religion of Christ proposes to take care of the temporal wants of the people as well as the spiritual. When Hezekiah was dying the injunction came to him: “Set thy house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.” That injunction in our day would mean; “Make your will; settle up your accounts; make things plain; don't* deceive your heirs with rolls of worthless mining stock; don’t deceive them, with deeds for Western lands that will never yield any crop but chills and fever; don’t leave for them notes that have been outlawed, and second mortgages on property that will not pay the first.” “Set thy house in order;” that is, fix up things, so your going out of the world may make as little consternation as possible. See the lean cattle devouring the fat cattle, and in the time of plenty prepare for the time of want, The difficulty is, when men think of their death they are afraid to think of it only in connection with their spiritual welfare, and not of the devastation in the household which will come because of their emigration from it. It is meanly selfish for you to be so absorbed in the. heaven to which you are going that you forget what is to become of your wife and children after you are dead. You can go out of this world without having a dollar and yet die happy if you could not provide for them; you can trust them in the hands of the God who owns all the harvests, and the herds, and the flocks; but if yon conld pay the premiums on a poliev and neglect them it is a mean thing for you to go up to heaven while they go into the poor-house. Y ou, at death, move into a mansion, river front, and they move into two rooms on the fourth 6torv qf a tenement- 1 house in a back street When they are out at the elbows and knees the thought of your splendid robe in heaven will not keep them warm. The minister may preach- a splendid sermon over your remains, and the quartet may sing like four angels in the organ-loft; but your death will be a swindle. You had the means to provide for the comfort of your household when you left it, and yon wickedly neglected it. “Oh,” says some one, “I bare more faith than you; I believe when I go out of this world the Lord will provide for them.” Go to Blackwell's Island, go through all the poor-houses of the country, and I will show you how often God provides for the neglected children of neglected parents. That is, He provides for them through public charity. As for myself, I would rather have the Lord provide for family in a private home, and through mv* own industry, and paternal and conjugal faithfulness. But says some man: “I mean in the next ten or twenty years to make £ great fortune, and so I will leave my family when I go out of this world; very comfortable. How do you know youare golive ten or twenty years? If we could look up the highway of the future, we would see it crossed by pneumonias, and pleurisies, and consumptions, and colliding rail-trains, and run-awav horses, and breaking bridges, and funeral processions. ■ -Areyeuse certain youuregoing to kW

ten or twenty years you can warrant your household any comfort after yon go away from them? Besides that the vast majority of men die poor! Two only oat of a hundred succeed in business. Are you very certain yon are going to be one of the two? Rich one day, poor the next. A man in New York got two millions of dollars, and the money turned his brain, and he died in the lunatic asylum. All his property was left with the business firm, and they swamped it; andthen the 1 " family of theiusanC man wefe left without a dollar. Ip eighteen months the prosperity, the insanity,'the insolvency and the complete domestic ruin. Besides that there are men who die solvent, who are insolvent before they get under the ground, or before their estate is settled up, How soon the auctioneer’s mallet can knock the life out of an estate! A man thinks the property is worth sls 000: under forced sale it brings $7,000. The business man takes advantage of the crisis and he compels the widow of his deceased partner to se'l out to him at a ruinous price, or lose all. The Stock was supposed to be verv valuable, but it has been so. “watered” that when the executor tries to sell it he is laughed out of Wall street, or the administrator is ordered by the Surrogate t<> wind up the whole affair. The estate was supposed at the man’s death to be worth $60,000, but after the indebtedness had been met and the bills of the doctor and the undertaker ana the tombstone-cutter have been paid there is nothing left. That means the children are to come home from school and go to work. That means the complete hardship of the wife, turned out with nothing but a needle to fight the great battle of the world. Tear down the lambrequins, close the piano, rip up the Axminster, seli out the wardrobe and let the mother take a child in each hand and trudge out into the desert of the world. A life insurance would have hindered all that.

But, says some one: “I am a man of small means, and can’t afford to pay the premium.” That is sometimes a lawful and genuine exeuse, and there is no answer to it; but in nine cases out of ten when a man says that, he smokes up in cigars, and drinks down in wine, and expends in luxuries, enough money to have paid the premium on a life insurance policy which would have kept his family from beggary when he is dead. A man ought to put himself down on the strictest economy until he can meet this Christian necessity. You have no right to the luxuries of life until you have made such provision. The utter indifference of many people on this important subject accounts for much of the crime and the pauperism of this day. Who are these children sweeping the crossings with broken broom and begging of you a penny as you go by? Who are these lost souls gliding under the gaslight in thin shawls? Oh! they are the victims of want; in many o f the cases the forecast of parents and grandparents might have prohibited it, God only knows how they struggled to do right. They praved until the tears froze on their cheeks; they sewed on the sack until the breaking of the day; but they could not get enough money to pay the rent; they could not get enough money to decently clothe themselves; and one day in that wretched home the angel of purity and the angel of crime fought a great fight between the empty bread-tray and the tireless hearth, and the black-wmbed angel shrieked; “Aha! I have won the day.” Says some man: “I believe what you say; it is right, and Christian, and I mean sometime to attend to this matter.” My friend, you are going to lose the comfort your household in the same way the sinner loses heaven by procrastination. I see all around me the destitute and suffering families of parents who meant some day to attend to thiß Christian duty. During the process of adjournment the man gets his feet wet; then comes a chill and delirium and the doleful shake of the doctor’s head and the obsequies. If there be any thing more pitiable than a woman delicately brought up, and on her marriage day by an indulgent father given to a man to whom she is the chief joy and pride of life until the moment of his death, and then that same woman going out with helpless children at her back to struggle for bread in a world where brawny muscle and rugged soul are necessary T say, if there be any thing more pitiable than that, Ido not know what it is. And yet there are good women who are indifferent in regard to the their husbands’duty in this respect, and there are those positively hostile, as though a life insurance subjected a man to some fatality. There is in Brooklyn to-day a very poor woman keeping a small candy shop, who vehemently protestul against the insurance of ner husband's life, and when applicationhad been made for a policy of #lO 000 she frustrated it. She would never haye a document in the house tnat inc plied it was impossible for. Her husband, ever to die. One day, 4 in quick revolution of machinery, his life was instantly dashed out. What is the sequel? She is, with annoying tug, making the half of a miserable living. Her two children have been taken away from her in order that they may be clothed and schooled, and her life is to be a prolonged hardship. Oh, man, bgfore forty-eight hours have passed away, appear at the desk of some of our great life insurance companies, have the stethescope of the physician put to your heart and lungs, and by the seal of some honest company decree that your children shall not be subjected to the humiliation of financial struggle in the days of your demise. But I must ask the men engaged in life 'insurance business whether they feel the importance of their trust and charge them I trust that they need Divine grace to help them in their work. In this day, when there are so many rivalries in your line of business, you will be tempted to overstate the amount of assets and the extent of the surplus, and you will be tempted to abuse the franchise of the company and make up the deficits of one year by adding some of the receipts of another year; and vou will be tempted to send out mean, anonymous circulars derogatory to other Companies, forgetful of the fact that anonymous communcation means only two things: the cowardice of the author and the inefficiency of the police iu allowing sueh a thing to be dated any-where save inside of a penitentiary. Under the mighty pressure many have gone down and you will follow them if you have too much confidence in yourself and do hot appeal to the Lord for positive help. But if any of you 1 belong to that miscreant class of people; •who, without anv financial ability, organize themselves* into what they call a fife insurance company, with a pretended caoital of $200,000 or $600,-

000, then vote yourself into the lucrative I position, and then take all the"premiums for ycurself, and then, at the approach 1 of the State Superintendent, drop all into the hands of those lif* j insurance undertakers whose busineis j it is to gather nr> the remains of <l«» fiinctorganisations and bury ;.hem in their own vault —then, T say, you had j hotter get out of the business and disgorge the vyidoWs’ houses yon havesWaflowed. But my word is to all those who are legitimately engaged in the business. You ought to be better than other men, not only because of the responsibilities that rest upon you, but because the truth is ever comfronting you" that your stay on earth is uncertain, and your life a matter of a few days or years. Do not those black-edged letters that come into your office make you think? Does not the doctor’s certificate on the death claim give you a thrill? But I have words of encouragement and comfort for those of my hearers who are engaged in the fire insurance business. You are ordained bv God to stand between us and the most, raging element of nature. We are indebted to vou for what the National Board of Underwriters and the Convention of Chiefs of the Fire Dapartments have effected through your suggestions and through your encouragement. We are indebted to you for what vou have effected in the construction of buildings, and in the change in the habits of our cities, so that by scientific principles orderly companies extinguish the fire,, instead of the old-time riots which used to extinguish the citizens! And we are indebted to you for the successful demands you have made for there peal of unjust laws—for the battle you have waged against incendiarism and arson—for the fatal blow you have given to the theory that corporations have no souls, by the cheerfulness and promptitude with which you have met losses, from which you might have escaped through the technicality of the law. Ido not know any class of men in our midst more high-toned and worthy of confidence than these men, and yet. 1 have sometimes feared that while your chief business is to calculate about losses on earthly property you might without sufficient thought go into that which, in regard to your soul, in your own parlance might be called “hazards,” “extra hazards,” “special hazards.” An unforgiven sin in the soul is more inflamable and explosive than camphine or nitro-glvcerine. However the rates may be —yea, though the whole, earth were paid down to you in one solid premium—you can not afford to lose your soul. ,Do not take that risk lest it be said hereafter that, while in this world you had keen business faculty, when you went out of the world you went out everlastingly insolvent, The scientific Hitchcocks and Sillimans and Mithels of the world have united with the sacred writers to make us believe that there is coming a conflagration to sweep ‘across the earth, compared with which that of Chicago in 1871, and that of Boston in 1872, and that of New York in 1835, were mere nothing. Brooklyn on fire! New York on fire! Charleston on fire! San Francisco on fire! Canton on fire! St. Petersburg on fire! Paris on fire! London on fire! The Andes on fire! The Appenines on fire! The Himalayas on fire! What will be peculiar about the day will be that the water with which we put out great fires will itself take flame; and the Mississippi and the Ohio and the St. Lawrence and Lake Erie and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and tumbling Niagara shall with red tongues lick the heavens. The geological heats of the center of the world will burn out toward the circumference, and the heat of the outside will burn down from the circumference to the center, and this world will become, not only according to the Bible, but acording to science, a living coal—the living coal afterward whitening into ashes, the ashes scattered by the breath of the last hurricane, and all that will be left of this glorious planet will be the flakps of ashes fallen on other worlds. Oh! on that day will you be fire proof, or will you be a total loss? Will you be rescued or will you be consumed? When this great cathedral of the world, with its pillars of rocks, and its pinnacles of mountains, and its cellar of golden mine, and its upholstery of morning cloud, and its babtismal font of the sea, shall blaze, will you get out on the fire-escape of the Lord’s deliverance? Oh! on that day, for which all other days were made, may it be found that these life insurance men had a paid-up policy, and these file insurance men had given them, instead of the debris of a consumed worldly estate, a house not made with bands, eternal in the heavens!

Mi B ack Slieep. Rev. Giles G. Rhodes, a Free Methodist preacher of near Lapeer, Mich.,was taTred and feathered last week for the aliened preaching of free love doctrines. He is an old man and has caused the arrest of the parties who committed the outrage. Rev. J. P. Farmer, pastor of the Baptist Church at Hudson Mich., has disappeared with 10,000 of the building fund of the church. Rev. D. Seymour, pastor oi the M. E. Church at Jamesville Wis., eloped Saturdav with Mrs. Fanny J. Henry, wife of the editor of the Jamesville Argus. She was the organist and a lending member of the church. Both the parties leave families. A Notable Conversion. Billy McGlorv, who has attained notoriety through keeping one of the worst dives in New York, has professed conversion and proposes to use his “Armory Hall,” as a gospel tent, and he himself is to be the missionary to conduct the services. If this should prove true it will be one of the biggest transformation scenes ever witnessed York. , - Kentucky Election. The official majority of Buckner, Democratic, over Bradley, Republican, in ninety-nine counties heard from is 17,039. Buckner’s estiriiated majority, from these figures, is 17,500. , A Ten Year Old Murderer. Herson Smith, a farmer near Fulton, Mo., was murdered by his eon Mentor, ten years! qld, because his father whipped him ferstaying out all night. .