Rensselaer Republican, Volume 20, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 December 1887 — GNAT AND CAMEL. [ARTICLE]

GNAT AND CAMEL.

The World Make* too Mnoh Noise Over Small Things. ■< “ Triers Slionld Wot be MegoiCed to ths n Negleetof Things of Cr«»4r Jiomsnl— The future Should be More Thonghlof: Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at the Brooklyn Tabernacle last Sunday on "Too Much Ado About Small Things.” His text was: “Ye blind guides which ■train at a gnat and swallow a camel.” —Matthew 28 24. Hesaid: There arq in our day a great many gnats strained at and a great many camels swallowed, and it is the object of this sermon to Sketch a few persons who are extensively engaged in that business. First: I remark, that all those ministers of the Gospel are photographed in the text who are very scrupulous about the conventionalities of religion, but put no particular stress upon the matters of vaster importance. Cnurch services ought to be grave and solemn. There is no room for frivdlity in religious convocation. But there are illustrations and there are hyperboles, like that of Christ in the text, that will irradiate with smiles any intelligent auditory. There are men like those blind guides of the text who advocate only those, things in religions services which draw the corners of the mouth down, and denounce all those things which have a tendency to draw the corners of the mouth up, and these men will go to installations and to presoyteries and to conferences and to associations, their pockets full of fine sieves to strain out the gnats, while in their every Bunday there are fifty people sound asleep. They make their churches a great dormitory, and their somniferous sermons are a cradle and the drawled out hymns a lullaby, while some wakeful soul in a pew with her fan keeps the flies off unconscious persons approximate. Now, I say it is worse to Bleep in chureh than to smile

in[church, for the latter implies at least attention, while the former implies the indifference of the hearers and the stu pidityof the speaker. In old age, or from physical infirmity, or from long watching with the sick, drowsiness will sometimes overpower one; but when a minister of the Gospel looks off upon an audience and finds „ healthy and intelligent people struggling with drowsiness, it is time for him to give cut the doxology or pronounce the benediction. The great fault of church services to day is not too much vivacity, but too much somnolence. The one is an irritating gnat that may be easily strained out; the other is a great, sprawling and sleepy eyed camel of the dry desert. In all our Sabbath schools, in all our Bible classes, in all our pulpits, we need to brighten up our religious message with Bach Christ like vivacity as we find in the text. I take down from my library the biographies of ministers and writers of the past ages, inspired and uninspired, who have done the most to bring souls to Jesus Christ. and I find that without a single exception they consecrated their wit and their humor to Christ. Elijah used it when he advised the Baalites, as they could not make their god respond, telling them to call louder. as their god might be sound asleep or gone a hnnting. Job used it when he earn to his self conceited comforters, “Wisdom will die with you.” Christ not only used it in the text, but when He frolically complimented the putrefied Pharisees, saying, “The whole need not a physician,” and when hv one word He described the cunningness of Herod, saying, “Go. ye. and tell that fox.” Mathew Henry’s Commentaries, from the first page to the last, corusca ted with humor as summer clouds with heat lightning. John Bunyan’s writings arenas full of humor as they are of saving truth, and there is not an aged man here who hag ever read “Pilgrim’s Progress” that does not renumber that while reading it he smiled as often as he wept. Chrysostom, George Herbert, Robert South, John Wesley, George Whitefield, Jerimy Taylor, lowland Hill, Nettleton, George G. Finney, and all the men of the past who greatly advanced the kingdom of God, consecrated their wit and their humor to the cause of Chri t. So it has b£en in ali the ages, and I say to these young theo logical students, who cluster in these services Sabbath after Sabbath, sharpen your wits as keen as cimeters, and then take them iq,o this holy war. It is a very short bridge between a smile and a tear—a suspension bridge from eye to lip, and it is soon crossed over, and a smile is sometimes just as sacred as a tear. There is as much religion, and I think a little more, in a spring morning than in a starless mid night. Religious work without any humor or wit in it is a banquet, with a side of beef, and that raw, and no condiments, and no desert succeeding. People will not sit down at suen a banbuet. By all means remove all frivolty and all pathos and all lightness and ail vulgarity; strain them out through the sieve of holy discrimination; but, on the other hand, Vie ware cf that monster which overshadows the Christian Church to-day—conventionality, coming up from the great Sahara Dessert of Exilesiastieism, having on its back a hump (f sanctimonious gloom, and vehemently refuse to swallow that camel. Oh, how particular a great many people are about the indnitessimais While they are quite reckless about the mngnitudes. What did Christ say?. Did He not excoriate the people in His time who were so careful to wash the’r hands before a meal but did not wash their hearts! It is a bad thing to have unclean hands; it is a worse tljing ,o have an unclean heart. How many people' ; there are. in our time, who" are very [anxious that alter their death thev j shall he busied wi h their feet toward ( the East, and not -at ait anxious I that during their whole life they should : lacs in the right, direction so that they (snail come up in the resurrection of the just whichever way thev are buried \ HojsMasny there are chit fly anxious that minister of the Gospel shall come in the line of Apostouc succession, not t earing so much whether he comes from; i Apostle Paul or Apostle Judas. Thev f havtra wy of measuring a gnat until ft. is larger tbajra camel, j- Again.— my subject protographs atT i those who are abhorrent of small sins i whi e they arereckleis in regard to magnificent thefts. You will find a merchant who, while he is so careful that he would not take a yard of silk 'hr a stool of cotton from the counter with-

oat paying for it, and who, if a bank cashier should make a mistake and send ; in a roll of bills 86 too much, would dis patch a messenger in hot haste to return ! the surplus, yet who will go into a stock j company, in which after awhile he gen \ control of the stock, and 'hen waters the stock, and makes 8100,000 appear like ! 8200,000. He only stole fIOO.OOo by the j operation. Many of the men of fortune I made their wealth in that way. One of i those men engaged in such unrighteous j acts that evening, the evening of the very day when he watered the stock, 1 will find a wharfrat stealing a newspaper from the basement doorway, and will go out and catch the nrchin by the collar and twist the collar so tightly the poor fellow can not sav that it was thirsr for knowledge that led him to the dishonest act, but grip the collar tighter and tighter, saying, “I have been looking tor you a long while; yon stole mv paper fonr or five times, haven’t you? yon miserable wretch.” And then the old stock gambler, with a voice they can hear three blocks, will cry out,“Police! police!" That same man, the evening of the day in which he watered the stock, will kneel with his family in prayers and thank God for the prosperity of the day, then kies his children good-night with an air which seem to say, "I hope yon will all grow up to be as good as your father.” Prisons for sin insectile in Bize, but palaces Tor crimes dromedarian. No mercy for sins, animalcule in proportion,but great leniency for mastodon iniquity. A poor boy slyly takes from the basket of a market woman a choke-pear—saving some one eise from the cholera—and you smother him in the horrible atmosphere of Raymond street jail or New York Tombs, while his cousin, who has been skillful enough to steal $50,000 from the city, you will make him a candidate for the New York Legislature! There is a great deal of uneasiness and nervousness now among some peo pie in our time who have got unrighteous fortunes—a great deal of nervousness about dynamite. I tell them that God will pnt under their unrighteous fortunes something more explosive than dynamite— the earthquake of Hiß omnipotent indignation. It is time that we learn in America that sins not excusable in proportion as it declares

large dividends and has outriders in equipage. Many a man is riding to perdition postilion ahead and lackey behind. To steal one copy of a newspaper is a gnat ; to steal many thousands of dollars is a camel. There is many a fruit dealer who would not consent to steal a basketof peaches from a neighbor’s stall, but who would not scruple to depress the frnit market; and as long as I can remember we have heard every summer the peach crop of Maryland is a failure, and by the time the crop comes in the misrepresentation makes a dis ference of millions of dollars. A man who would not steal one peach basket steals fifty thousands peach baskets. Go down in the summer time into the Mercantile Library, in the read-ing-room, and see the newspaper reports of the crops from all parts of the country, and their phraseology is very omen the same, and the same men wrote them, methodically and infamously carrying out the huge lying about the grain crop from year to year, and for a score of years. After a while there will be a “corner” in the wheat market, and men who had a contempt for a petty Jhe ft will burglarize the wheatbin of a nation and commit larceny upon the Amercan corn-crib. And some men will sit in churches and in reformatory institutions trying to strain out the small gnats of scoundrelism, while in their grain elevators and their store-houses they are fattening huge camels, which they expect after a while to swallow. Society has to be entirely reconstructed on this subject. We are to find that a sin is inexcusable in prpportion as it is great. I known in our time the tendency is to charge religious frauds upon good men. They say, “Oh, what a class of frauds you have in the Church of God in this day,” and when an elder of a church, or a deacon, or a minister of the Gospel, or a superintendent of Sabbathschools turns out a defaulter, what display heads there are in many of the newspapers! Great primer type. Fiveline pica. “Another Absconder.” “Clevi.al Scoundrelism ” “Religion at a Discount,” “Shame on the Churches,” while there are a thousand scoundrels outside the church to where there is one inside the church, and the misbehavior pf those who never see the inside of a church is so great it is enough to tempt a man to beeotnea Christian to get out ot their company. This subject does not give the picture of one or two persons, but is a gallery in which thousands of people may see their likeness. For instance, all those people who, while they would not rob theirjneighbor of a farthing, appropriate tbe money anil she treasure of the public.

A man has a house to sell, and he tells his customer it is woith $20,000. Next day the assessor comes around, the owner says it is worth sls 000. The Government of the United States took oft the tax from personal income, among other reasons ■ because So few people would tell the truth, and many a man with an income of hundreds of dollars a day made statements which seemed to imply he was about to be handed over to the overseer of the poor. Careful to pay their passage from Liverpool to New York, yet smuggling in 'heir Saratoga trurk ten silk dresses from Paris and a half dozen watches from Geneva, Swi zerland, telling the Custom-house officer on the wharf: “There is nothing in that trunk but wearing apoarel,” and putting a five-dollar gotd-piece in his hand to punctuate the statement. Described in the text are all those who are particular never to break the law of grammar, and who want all their language an elegant specimen, nf ayniar, straining ont all the .inaccuracies of speech with a fine sieve of literary criticism, while through their conve -sation go slander and innuendo, and profanity and falsehood larger than a whole caravan of camels, when they might better fracture every law of the language and shock intellectual taste, and better let every verb seek in vain for its nominative, and every noun for its government, and every preposi ion lose its way in the sentence, and adjectives and participles and prenouns get into a grand riot worthy of the fourth-ward On election day, that to commit a moral inacenraev.- Better swallow a thousand gnats than one camel. Such persons are also described in the text who are very much alarmed about, the email fsuits of others, and have no alarm about their own great transgressions. There are in every community

and in *-verv church watch drgs who : feel callted upon to keep th«»r eyes on I others ami growl. They are full < f sns i picionn. They wonder if that man is I dishonest, it that man is not andean, if I there is not some hing wrong shout the other maD. They are always the first to hear of anything wrong Vultnreß j are always the first to smell <• s-* I They Hre eelf-appoin'ed detect iv . I I lay l his down as a rn'e, without anv , r j ceptim , that those people who have the j rmmt faults themselves are most merci--1 less in their watching of others. From scalp of head to sole of foot they are full of jealousies and They spend their life in bunting for muskrats and mud-turtles, instead of hunting hr Rocky Mountain eagles, always for Bomethiog mean instead of something grand. They look at their neighbors’ imperfections through a microscope, and look at. their own imperfections through a telescope nps de down. Twenty faults of their own do not hurt them so much as one fault of -somebody else. Their neighbors’ imperfections are like gnats, and they strain them out; their own. imperfections are like camels, and they swallow them. But lest some might think they escape the scrunity of the text, ,1 have to tell you that we all -come under the Divine satire when we make the questions of time more prominent than the questions of eternity. Come, now, let us go into the confessional. Are not all tempted to make the question, Where shall I live now? greater than theques tion, Where shall I live forever? How shall I get more dollars here? greater than the question, How shall I lay up treasures in heaven? the question, How shall I pay mv debts to man? greater than the question, How shall I meet my obligations to God? the question, How shall I gain the world? greater than the question, What if I lose my soul? the question, Whv did God let si ft come into the world? greater than the question, How shall I see it extirpated from my nature? the question, What shall I do with the twenty, or forty, or seventy years of my sublunar existence? greater than the question, What shall I do with the millions of cvcles of my post-ten tstrial existence? Time, how small it Is! Eternity, how vast it is! The former more insigrificant in comparison with the latter than a gnat is insignificant when compared with a camel. We dodged the text. We said, ‘‘That doesn’t mean me;” and with a ruinous benevolence we are giving the whole sermon away. But let us all surrender to the charge. What an ado about things here! What poor preparation for a great eternity! As though a minnow were larger than a behemoth, as though a Bwallow took wider circuit than an albatross, as though a needle were taller than a Lebanon cedar, as though a gnat were greater tnan a camel, as though a minute were longer than a century, as though time were higher,,deeper, broader than eternity. So the text which flashed with lightening of wit as Christ uttered it, is followed by the clashing thunders of awful Catastrophe to those who make the questions of time greater than the questions of the future. O eternity! eternity! eternity.