Rensselaer Republican, Volume 20, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 May 1888 — OBSCURATIONS. [ARTICLE]

OBSCURATIONS.

Darkness Against the Light of Christians. Whet th* World Would bo Without Light —Stand Back from th* Chaom and Cling to That Whioh Bonder* Life Happy. Dr. Talmage preached at the Brooklyn Tabernacle last Sunday. Subject, “Obturation.” Text: “The sun shall be turned into darkness.”—Acts ii., 20. He said: Solar eclipse is here prophesied to take place about tne time of the destruction of ancient Jerusalem. Josephus, the historian, says that the prophecy was literally fulfilled, and that at about that time there were strange appearances in the heavens. The sun was not destroyed but was for a little while hidden. Christianity is the rising sun of our time, and men have tried with the uprolling vapors of skepticism and the smoke of tneir blasphemy to turn the snu into dardness. Suppose the archangels of malice and horror should be let loose a little while and be allowed to extinguish and destroy the sun in the natural heavens. They would take the oceans from other worldsand pour them on this luminary of the planetary system. and the waters go hissing ' down amid the ravines and the caverns, and there is explosion after explosion, until there are only a few peaks of fire lett in the sun, and these are cooling down and going out until the vast continents of flame are reduced to a small acreage of fire, and that whitens and ccols off until there are only 5 few coals left, and these are whitening and going out until there is not a spark left inall the mountains of ashes, and the valleys of ashes, and the chasms of ashes. An extinguished run! a dead sun! a buried sun! Let all the worlds wail at the stupendous obsequies. Of course this withdrawal of the solar light and heat throws our earth into a universal chill, and the tropics become the temperate, and the temperate becomes the arctic, and there are frozen rivers, and frozen lakes, and frozen oceans. From arctic and antarctic regions the inhabitants gather in toward the center and find the equator as the poles- The slain forests are piled up into a great bonfire, and around them gather the shivering villages and cities. The wealth of the coal mines is hastily poured into the furnacesand stirred into range of combustion, but soon the bon fires begin to lower, and the furnaces begin to go out. and the nations begin to die. Cotopaxi, Vesuvius, AEtns, Btromboli, California geysers cease to smoke, and the ice es hail-storms remains nnmelted in their craters. All the flowers have breathed their last breath. Ships with sailors frozen at the mast, and helmsmen frozen at the wheel, and passengers frazen in thecabin; all nations dying, first at the north end then at the south. Child frozen and dead in the cradle. Octogenarian frozen and dead at the hearth. Workmen with frozen hand on the hammer and frozen foot on the shuttle. Winter from sea to sea. Allcongealing winter. Perpetual winter. Globe of frigidity. Hemisphere shackled to hemisphere by chains of ice. Univenal Nova Zembla. The earth an ice-floe grinding against other ice-floes. The arctiangels of malice and horror have done their work and now they may take thefr thrones of glacier ana look down upon the ruin they have wrought. What the destruction of the sun in the natural heavens wonld be to our physical earth the destraction of Christianity would be to the moral world. The sun turned into darkness. Infidelity in our rime is considered a great joke. There are people who rejoice to hear Christianity caricatured, and to hear Christ assailed with quibble and quirk and misrepresentation and bandinage and harlequinade. I propose this morning to take Infidelity and Atheism out of the realm o' jocularity into one of tragedy, and show you what they propose, and what, if they are sneceestul, they will accomplish. There are those in all our com munities, who would like to see the Christian religion overthrown, and who say the world would be better without it. I want to show you what is the end of this road, and what is the terminus of this crusade, and what this world will be wben Atheism and Infidelity have triumphed over it, if they can. I say, if they can. I reiterate it, if they can.

In the first plans, it will be the complete and unutterable degradation of womanhood. I will prove it by facts and arguments which no honest man will dispute. In all communities and cities and States and Nations where the Christian religion has been dominant woman’s condition has been ameliorated and improved, and she is deferred to and honored in a thousand things, and every gentleman tales off his hat before her. If your assoo’ations have been good, yon know that the name of wife, mother, daughter, suggest gracious surroundings You know there are no better schools and seminaries in Brooklyn, or in any ether c ty of this country, than the schools and seminaries for our young ladies. You know that while woman may suffer injustice in England and the United States, she has more of her rights in Christendom than she has anywhere els?. Now, compare this with woman’s condition in lands where Christianity has made little or no advance—in China, in Barbary, in Borneo, in Ta-tarv. in Egypt, in Hindustan. The Burmese sell their wives and daughters as so m»ny sheep. The Hindoo bible makes it oiegraceml and an outrage for a woman to listen to music, or look out of the window in the absence of her husband, and gives as a lawful ground for divorce a woman’s beginning to eat before her husband has finished his meal. What mean those white bundles on the ponds and rivers in China in the morning? Infanticide following infanticide. Female children destroyed simply because they are female. Woman harnessed to a plow as an ox. Woman veiled and barricaded, and in all styles of cruel seclusion? Her birth a misfortune. Her life a torture. Her death a horror. The mirsionary Of the cross to-day in heathen lands preaches generally to two groups—a group oi men who do as they please and sit they please; the other group, women, hidden and carefully secluded in a side apartment, where they hear the voice of the preacher, but may not be seen. No refinement. No liberty. No hope for this life. No hope for the life to come. Ringed nose. Clamped foot Disfigured face. EmbrutedsouL Now compare those two conditions.

How far toward thia latter condition that I speak of would wesnaa go if Christian influences were withdrawn and Christianity were withdrawn? It ia only a question of dynamics. If an object be lilted to a certain point and not fastened there, and the lifting power be withdrawn, howlong before that object' will fall down to the point from which it started? It will fall down, and it will go still further than the point from which it started. Christianity has lifted woman up from the very depth of degradation almost t) the skies. If that lifting power be withdrawn she falls clear back to the depth from which she was resurrected, not going any lower because there is no lower depth. And yet, notwithstanding the fact that the only salvation of woman from degradation and woe is the Christian religion, and the only influence that has ever lifted her in the social scale is Christianity—l have read that there are woman who reject Christianity. I make no remkrk in regard to them. In the silence of your ownsonl make your observations. If infidelity triumph and Christianity be overthrown, it means the demoralisation of society. The one idea in the Bible that the atheists and infidels most hate is the idea of retribution. Take away the idea of retribution and punishment from society and it will brgin very soon to di»integrate, and takeaway from the minds of men the fear of hell and there are a great many of them who would very soon turn this world into a hell. The majority of those who are indignant against the Bible because of the idea of punishment are men whose lives are bad or whose hearts are impure, and who hate the Bible because of the idea of future punishment for the same reason that criminals hate the penitentiary. Oh! I have heard this brave talk about people fearing nothing of the consequences.of sin in the next world, and I have made up my mind, it is merely a coward’s whistling to keep hiscouiage up. I have seen men flatint their immoralities in the face of the community, and I have heard them defy the judg ment day and scoff at the idea of anv future consequence of their sins, but when they came to die they shrieked until you could hear them for nearly two blocks, and in the summer night the neighbors got up to put the windows down because they could not endure the horror. I would not want to see a rail-train with five hundred Christian people on board go down through a draw-bridge to a watery grave. I would not want to see five hundred Christian people go into such a disaster; but I tell you plainly that I could more easily see that than I could for any protracted time stand and see an infidel die, though his pillow were of eider-down and under a canopy of vermilion. I have never been able to brace up my nerves for such a spectacle. There is something at suoh a time so indescribable upon the countenance. I just looked in upon it for a minute or two, but the clutch of his fist was so diabolic, and the strength of voice was so unnatural, I could not epdnre it. “There is no hell, there is no hell, there is no hell!” the man had said for sixty years; but that night when I looked in the dying room of my infidel neighbor, there was something in his countenance which seemed to say: “There is, there is, there is, there fa!”

The mightiest restraint to-day against theft, against immorality, against libertinism, against crime of all sorts—the mightiest restraints are the retributions of. eternity. Men know that they can er cape the law, but down in the offender’s soul is the realization of the fact that they can not escape God, He stands at the end of the road of profligacy, and He will not clear the guilty. Take all idea of retribution and punishment out of the hearts and minds of men, and it would not be long before Brooklyn and New York and Boston and Charleston and Chicago became Sodoms. The only restraints against the evtl passions of the world to-day are Bible restraints. Suppose now these Generals of Atheism and Infidelity got the victory, and suppose they marshaled a great army made up of the majority of the world. They are-in companies, in regiments, in brigades—the whole army. Forward, march! ye hosts of infidels and atheists, banners flying before, banners flying behind, banners inscribed with the words: “No God! No Christ! No punishment! No restraints! Down with theßiblel Do as you please!’’ The sun turned into darkners. Forward, march! ye great army of infidels and atheists. And first of all you will attack the churches. Away with those houses of. worship! Tney have been standing there co long deluding the people with consolation in their bereavements and sorrow. All those churches ought to be extirpated; they have done so much to relieve the Icet and bring home the wandering, and they have so long held up the idea of eternal rest after the paroxysm of this life is over. Turn the St Peters and St. Pauisand the temples and tabernacles into club-houses. Away with those churches! w Forward, march! ye great army of infidels and atheists, and* next of all they will attack Christian asylums—the institutions of mercy supported by Christian philanthropies. Never mind the blind eyes and the deaf ears and the crippled limbs and the weakened intellect*. Let paralyzed old age pick up its own food and orphans fight their own way, and the half reformed go back to their evil habits. Forward, march! ye great army of infidels and atheists, and with your battle-axes hew down the cross and -plit up the manger of Bethlehem. But on, ye great army of infidels and atheists, on! They will attempt to scale heaven. There are heights to be taken. Pile hill on hill and Pelion upon Ossa, and then they hoist the ladders against the walls of heaven. On and on until they blow up the foundations of jasper and the gates of pearl. They charge upon the steep. Now they aim for the throne of Him who liveth forever and ever. They would take down from their high place the Father, the Bon, the Holy Ghoat.' “Down with them!” they Bay: “Down with Him from the throne!” they say. “Down forever! Down out of sight! He is not God. He bas no right to sit there. Down with Him! i. Down with Christ! ’ A world without a head, a universe without a King. Orphan constellations. Fatber'ees galaxies. Anarchy supreme, A dethroned Jehovah. An arsasunated God. Patricide, regicide, deicide. That is what they mean. That is what they will have, if they can, if they can, if they can. Civilixatirn hurled’ back into semi barbarism, acd semi-barbar-ism driven tack into Hottenton savagery. The wheel of progress turned the other way and turned toward the

dark qges. The dock of the centuries put back two thousand years. Go back, you Sandwich Islands, from your schools and from your colleges and from your reformed condition to what you were in 1820, when the miaqioiiaiies flrit came. Call home the five hundred misslonariei from India and overthrow their two thousand schools, where they are trying to educate the heathen, and scatter the one hundred and forty thousand little children that they have gathered out of barbarism into dvilizavon. Obliterate all the work of Dr. Buff in India, of David Abeel in China, of Dr. Kingin Greece, of Judson in Burmab, of David Brainard amid the Americiu aborigines, and send home the three thocsand missionaries of the Cross wbo are toiling in foreign lands, toiling for Ciuisi’s sake, toiling themselves intoihe grave. Tell these three thousand men of God that they are of no use. Send home the med'cal missionaries who are doctoring the bodies as well as the souls of the dying nations. Go home, London Missionary Society. Go home, American Board of Foreign Missions. Go home, ye Moravians, and relinquish back into darkness and squalor and filth and death the (nations whom ye have begun to lift. Ob! my friends, there never has been such a nefarious plot on earth as that which infidelity and atheism have planned. We were shocked a few years ago, because of the attempt to blow up the Parliament House in London; but if infidelity and atheism succeed in their attempt they will dynamite the world. Let them have their full sway and this world will be a habitation of three rooms—a habitation of just three rooms —the one a mad-home, another a lazzaretto, the other a pandemonium. These infidel bands of music have only just begun their concert—yea, they have only been stringing their instruments. I to-day put before you their whole programme from beginning unto clcse. In the theater the tragedy comes first and the farce afterward; but in this infidel drama of death the farce comes first and the tragedy after ward. And in the former atheists and infidels laugh and mock, but in the latter God Himself will laugh and mojk. He says so. “I will laugh at their calamity and mock when their fear cometh.”

From such a chasm of individual, national, world-wide ruin stand back. Ob! young men,stand back from that chasm! You see the practical drift of my sermon. I want yon to know where that road leads. Stand back from that chasm of rain. The time is going to come (you and I may not live to see it, but it will come, just as certainly as there is a God, it will come when the infidels and the atheists who openly and out and above board preach and practice infidelity and atheism will beconsidered as criminals against society as they are now criminals against God. Society will push out the leper, and the wretch with soul gangrened and ichorous and vermin-covered and rotting apart with his bestinlity, will be left to die in the ditch, and be denied decent burial, and men will come with spades and cover up the carcass, where it falls, that it poison not the air, and the only text in all the Bible appropriate for the funeral sermon will be Jeremiah xxii., 19 “Be shall be buried with the burial of an ass ”

Christianity is rolling on, and it is going to warm all nations, and all nations are to bask in its light. Men may shut the window blinds so they cannot see it or they may smoke the pipe of speculation until they are shadowed under their own vaporing, but the Lord God ie 8 sun! This white light of the gospel made up of all the beautiful colors of of earth and heaven—violet plucked from amid the spring grass, and the indigo of the Southern jungles, and the blue of the skies, and the green of the foliage, and the yellow of the autumnal woods, and the orange of the Southern groves, and the red of the sunsets "Who art thou, oh great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.” The month of the Lord hath spoken it. Hallelujah, amen.