Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1888 — THE EXPLOITS OF LIFE. [ARTICLE]

THE EXPLOITS OF LIFE.

THREE OPPORTUNITIES OPEN TO CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR. Snv» the Hiring Father, the Mother and the Chilli, anil Then the World W 1 1 He Better and More Coo tented. J a . JkY. P.r. Talmage preached at the Brooklyn Tabernacle last Sunday. Subject: “Three Great Things to Do,” Text, Daniel xi., 3.. He said: An exploit I would define to be a heroic act. a brave feat, a great achievement. “Well,” you say, “I admire such things, but there is no chance for me; mine is a sort of a humdrum, life. If I had an Antiochus Epiphanes to fight I could also do exploits.’ 1 You ais. right so far as great wars are conefernedi There will probably be no opportunity to distinguish yourself in battle. The most of the Brigadier-Generals of this country would never have been heard of trad it not been for the war. General Grant would have remained in the useful work of tanning hides at Galena, and Stonewall Jackson would have continued the quiet college professor in Virginia. Ami whatever military talents you have will probably lie dormant forever. Neither will you probably become a great inventor. Nineteen hundred and ninety-nine out of every two thousand inventions found in the Patent Office at Washington never yielded

their authors enough money to pay for the expenses of securing the patent. So you will probably never be a Morse or an Edison, or a Humphrey Davy or an Eli Whitney. There is not much probability that you will be the one out of the hundred that achieves extraordinary success in commercial of legal or medical or literary spheres. What then? Can you have no opportunity to do exploits? I am going to show* you to-day that there are opportunities open that are grand, thrilling, far-reaching, stupendous and overwhelming. They are before you now. In one, if not all three of them, you may do exploits. The three greatest things on earth to do are to save a man, or save a woman, or save a child. During the course* of his life almost every man gets into an exigency, is qaeght between two fires, is ground between two mill-stones, site on the edge of some precipice, or in some way comes near demolition. It may be a financial or a moral or a domestic or a social or irpolitical vxexigency. You sometimes see it in Court-rooms. A _young man has got into bad company, and he has offended the law and be is arraigned. All blushing and confused, he is.in the presence of Judge and jury and lawyers. He can be sent right on in the wrong direction. He is feeling disgraced, and he is almost desperate. Let the District Attorney overhaul lnm as though he were an old offender; let the ablest attorneys at the bar refuse to say a word for him,- because he can not afford a considerable fee; let the Judge give no opportunity for presenting the mitigating circumstances, hurry up the case and hustle him off to Auburn or Sing Sing. If he live seventy years, for seventy years he will be a criminal, and each decade of his life will be blacker than its predecessor. In the interregnums of prison life he can get no work, and he is glad to break a windowglass, or blow up a safe, or play the highwayman, so as to get back again within the walls when' He can get something to eat and hide himself from the cruel gaze of the world. Why don’t his father come and help him? His father is dead. Why don’t his mother come and help him? She is dead. Where are all the ameliorating and salutary influences of society? They do not touch him. Why'did not some one long ago in the case understand that there was an opportunity for the exploits which would be famous to heaven a quadrillion of years after the earth had become scattered ashes in the last whirlwind? Why did not the District Attorney take that young man into his private office and say: “My son, I see that you is your first crime. You are sorry. I will bring the person you -wronged’ into your presence and you will apologize and make all the reparation you can, and I will give you another chance?” Or that young man is presented in the Court room, and he has no friends present, and the Judge says: “Who is your counsel?’ And he answers:. “I have none.” And the Judge^ays: “Who will take this young man’s case?” And there is a dead halt, and no one offers, and after a while the Judge turns to some attorney who never had a good case in all his life, and never will, and whose advocacy would be enough to secure the condemnation of innocence itself. And the professional incompetent crawls up beside the prisoner, helplessness to rescue despair, when there ought to be a struggle among all the best .men of the profession as to who should have the honor of trying to help that unfortunate. How much would such an attorney have re ceired as his fee for such an advocacy? Nothing in dollars, but much every way in a happy consciousness that would make his own life brighter, and his own dying pillow greeter, and his own heaven consciousness that he had saved a man! So there are commercial exigencies. A very late spring obliterates the demand for spring overcoats and spring hats and spring apparel of all sorts. Hundreds of thousands of people say: “It seems we are going to have no spring and we shall go straight out of winter into warm weather, and we can get along without the usual spring attire.” Or there is no autumn weather, the heat plunging into the cold, and the usual clothing, which is a compromise between summer andwinter, is not required. It makes a difference in- the sale of millions and millions of dollars of goods, and some oversanguine young merchant is caught with a vast amount of unsaleable goods that will never be, saleable again except at prices ruinously reduced. That young merchant with a somewhat limited capital is in a predicament. What shall the old merchants do as they see. that young man in this awful crlsiß? Rub their hands and langh and say, “Good for him. He might have known better. When he has been in business as long as we have he will not load his shelves in that way. Ha! ha! He will burst up before long. He had no business to open his store so near to ours, anyhow.” Sheriff's sale; red flag in the window: “How mpeh is bid for thess out-of-the-fashion spring overcoats and spring hats, or fall clothing out of date? What do I hear in the way of a bid?” “Four dollars.” Absurd, I can not take that bid of $4 apiece. Why, these coats when first

put upon the market .were offered at sls . each, and now I am offered only four dolhrs. Is that all? Five dollars do I f'bear? Going at that! Gone’ at $5.” !< AndJm takes the whole lot. The young I morcWant goes Rome that night and says ?to his ftWe: “Well, Mary, we will haye Ito move b'nt of this house and sell our ! piano. That merchant who has had an evil eye on mq* ever since I started 1 has bought out all that clothing, ,and he ! will have it rejuvenated .and next year J put it on the market as while we j will do well if we keep out di the poor house.” The young man, brokenspirited, goes to hard drinking. The young wife, with her baby, goes to her father’s house, and not only Is hip store j wiped out, but his home, his morals and ! his prospects for two worlds-this and the nCxt. And devils make a banquet of fire and fill their cups of gall and drink deep to the health of the old merchant who swallowed up thq,young merchant who got stuck on the Bpring goods and went down. That is one way, and some of you have tried it.

But there is another Way. That young merchant who found that iie had miscalculated in laying in too many goods'bUorie kind and been flung off the unusual season, is standing behind the counter feeling very blue and biting his finger nails, or looking over his account-books, which read daiker and v or.-e every time he looks at them, and thinks how his young wife will have to be.put in a plainer house than she ever expected to live in, or gc to a third-rate boarding house, where they have liver and sour bread five mornings out of the seven. An old merchant comes in and says: “Well, Joe, this has beeii a hard season for young merchants, and this prolonged cool weather has put many in the doldrums, and I have been thinking of you a good deal of late, for just after I started in business I once got into the same scrape. Now, if there is any thing I can do to help you out I will gladly do it. Better just put those goods out of sight for the present, and next season we

will plan something about them: I will help you to some goods that you can sell for me on commission, and I will go down to one of the wholesale houses and tell them that I know you and will back you up, and if you want a few dollars to bridge over the present I can let you have them. Be as economical as you can, keep a stiff upper lip, and remember that you have two friends, God and myself. Good morning!” The old merchant goes away and the y oung man goes behind his desk and the tears roll down his cheeks. It is the first time he had cried. Disaster made him mad at everything, mad at man and mad at God. But this kindness melts him, and the tears seem to relieve his brain, and his spirits rise from ten below zero to eighty in the shade, and he comes out of the crisis. And about three years after this young merchant goes into the old merchant’s store and says: “Well, my old friend, I was this morning thinking over what you did for me three years ago. You helped me out of the awful crisis in my commercial history. I learned wisdom, and prosperity has come, and the pallor has gone out of my wife’s cheeks, ana the roses that were there when I courted her in her father’s house have bloomed again, and my business is splendid, and I thought that I ought to let you know that you saved a man!” In a short time after the old man, who had been a good while shaky in his limbs and had poor spells, is called to leave the world and one morning after he had read the twenty-third Psalm about “The Lord is my Shepherd,” he closes his eyes on this world, and an angel who had been for manv years appointed to watch the old man's dwelling cries upward the news that thejpatriarch's spirit is about ascending. And the twelve angels who keep the twelve gates of heaven unite in crying down to this approaching spirit of the old man: “Come in at any of the twelve gatesyou choose! Come in and welcome, for it has been told all over these Celestial neighborhoods that you saved a man.” the life of a woman. One morning -about two years ago I saw. in the newspaper that tnere was a young woman in New Yoj-k whose pocket-book containing 137.33 had been stolen, and she had been left without a farthing at the beginning of winter in a strange city and no work, And although she was a stranger, I did notallow the nine o’olock mail to leave the lamp-post on our corner without carrying the $37.33: and the case’was proved genuine. Now I have read all of Shakespere’s tragedies and all Victor Hugo’s tragedies and all of Alexander Smith’s tragedies, but I have never reaa a tragedy more thrilling than that’ease, and similar cases by the hundreds rand thousands in all our large cities, young women without money and without home and without work in the great maelstorms of metropolitan life. When such a case comes under your observation how do you treat it? “Get out of my way; we have no room in our establishment for any more hands. I don’t believe in women any way.;They are a lazy,idle, worthless set. John, please show this person out of the door.” Or do you commenting her personal .appearance and say things to her which, if any man said to your sister, you would kill him on the spot? That is one way, and it is tried every day in these large cities, and many of those who advertise for female hands in factories and for governesses in families have proved themselves unfit to be in any place outside of hell. But there is another way, and I saw it the other day in the Methodist Book Concern in New York, where a young woman applied for work, and the gentleman in tone and manner said in substance: “My daughter, we employ women here, but Ido not know of any vacant place in our department. You had better inquire at such and such a place, and I hope yon will be successful in getting something to do.” The embarrassed and humiliated woman seemed to give'way to Christian confidence. She started oat with a hopeful look that I think must have won for her a place in which to earn her bread. I rather think that condsiderate and Christian gentleman saved a woman. New York and Brooklyn ground up last year about thirty thousand young women, and would like to grind up about as manymore as this year. Out of all that long procession of women who march on w ith no hope for this world or the next, battered and bruised and scoffed at and flung, off tbe precipice, not one tut might have been saved for home and God and heaven. But good men and good women are not in that kind of business. Alas for that poor thing! nothing bnt the thread s os that sewing-girl’s needle held her, and the thread broke. I have heard; men

tell in public discourse what a man is, but what is a woman? Until some one shall give a better definition, I will tell you what a woman is. Direct from fiod, a sacred and delicate gift with affections so great that no measuring line short of that of the infinite God can tell their bound. ‘Fashioned to refine and shothe and lift and irradiate home and society and the world.. jQf such value that no one can appreciate it, unless his mother lived long enough to let.liim understand it, or who in some great crisis of life, when all else failed him, had a wife to reinforce him with a faith in God that nothing could disturb. Speak out, ye cradles, and tell of the feet that rocked you and the anxious faces that hovered over you! Speak out. ye nurseries of all Christendom, and ye homes, whether desolate or still in full bloom with the faces of wife, mother and daughter, apd help me to define what Woman is. If a man during all his life accomplish nothing else except to win the love and confidence and help and companionship of a good woman, he is a garlanded victor and ought to have the hands of all people between here and the grave stretched out to him in congratulation.

But, as geographers tell us that the depths of the sea .'correspond to the heights of the mountains, 1 have to tell you that good womanhood is not higher up than bad womanhood is deep down. The grander the palace, the more awful the conflagration w hich destroys it. The grander the steamer Oregon, the more terrible her going down just off the coast. Now I should not wonder if you trembled a little with a sense of responsibility when I say that there is hardly a person in this house but mky have an opportunity to save a woman. It may in your case be done by good advice, or by financial help, or by trying to bring to bear some one of a thousand Christian influences. You would not have to go far. If, for instance, you know among your acquaintances a young woman who is apt' to appear on the streets about the hour when gentlemen return from business and you find her responding to the smile of entire strangers, hogs that lift their hate, go to her and plainly tell her that all the destroyed womanhood of the world began the downward path with that very kind of behavior. Or if, for instance, you find a woman in financial distress, and breaking down in health and spirits trying to support her children now that her husband is dead or an invalid, doing that very important and honorable work, but which is little appreciated, keeping a boarding house, where all the guests, according as they pay small board, or propose, without paying any board at all, to decamp, are critical of everything and hard to please, busy yourself in trying to get her more patrons,and tell her of Divine sympathy. Yes, if you see a woman favored of fortune, and with all kindly surroundings finding in the hollow flatteries of the world her chief regalement, living for herself and for time as if there were no eternity, strive to bring her into the kingdom of God. There is another exploit that you can do, and that iB to save a child. A child does not seem to amount to much. It is nearly a year old before it can walk at all. For the first year afid a half it can not speak a word. For the first ten years it would starve if it had to earn its own food. For the first fifteen years, its opinion on any subject is absolutely valueless. And then there are so many of them. My! what lots of children!, Ayd some people have contempt for children. They are good for nothing but to wear out the carpets and break things and keep you awake of nights crying. Well, your estimate of a child is quite different from that mother’s estimate who lost her child this summer. They took it to the salt air of the seashore, and to the tonic air of the mountains, but no help came, and the brief paragraph of its life is ended. Suppose that little life could be restored by purchase, how. much would that bereaved mother give? She would take all the jewels from her fingers and neck and bureau aud put them down. And if told that that was not enough, she would take her house and were not enough she would call in all her investments and put down all her mortgages and bonds; and' if told' That that were not enough she would say: “I have made over all my property, and if I can have that child back I will now pledge that I will toil with my own hands and carry with my own shoulders in any kind of hard work, and live in a cellar* and die in a garret. Only give me back that lost darling.” lam glad that there are those who know something of the value of a child. Its possibilities are tremendous. What will those hands yet do? Where will those feet yet walk? Toward what destiny will that neverdying soul betake itself? Shall those lips be the throne of blasphemy or benediction? Come, all ye surveyors of the earth, and bring link and chain, and measure, if you can, its possible possessions. ~Come, all ye astronomers of the earth, with your telescopes, and tell us if you can see the range of its 'eternal flight. Come, all ye chronologists, and calculate the decades on decades, ■the cycles on cycles, the eternities on eternities of its lifetime.. Oh, to save a child! Am I not right in putting that among the great exploits. Yea, it beats the other two; for, if. you save the child, you save the man or you save the woman. Get the first twenty years of that boy or that girl all right, and I guess vou have got manhood or womanhood all right, and their entire earthly and eternal career all right But what are you going to do with those children, who are worse off than if their father or mother had died the day they were bom? There are tens of- thousands of such. Their parentage was against them. Their name is against Ahem. The structure of their skulls against them. Their nerves and muscles contaminated by the inebriety or dissoluteness of their parents, they dte practically at their birth laid out on a plank in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in an equinoctieal gale and told to make for Bhore. The first greeting they get from the world is to be called a brat or a ragamuffin or a wharfrat. What to do with them is the quesf tion often asked. There is another question quite as pertinent, and that is, what are they going to do with us? They will ten or eleven years from now have as many votes as the same number of well-bom children, and they will hand this land over to Anarchy and political damnation, just 88 fftl© a? we neglect them. Suppose we each one of us save a boy or save a girl. .. You can do it. Will you? I will. Take a cake of perfumed soap and a fine toothed comb,' and a New Testament, and a little candy, and a prayer book, and a piece of cake, and faith in God and common sense, and .begin this afternoon.

But how shaft: we get ready for one or all of these exploits? We shall make a dead failurelf in ouUown strength we try to save a man, women or child. But my text suggests where we are id get equipment. “The people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits.”- , We must know Him through Jesus Christ in our own salvation, then we shall have His help in the salvation of others. And while you are saving strangers yon may save some of your own kin. You think your brothers and sistejrs and children* and grandchildren are safe, bnt they are 1 not dead,, and no is safe till he is dead. My friends, let us start out to save some one for time and for eternity—some man, some woman, some child. Afad who knows but it may,* directly or indirectly, be the salvation of one of our own kindred, and that will be an exploit worthy of celebration when the world itself is shipwrecked and the sun has gone out like a spark from a smitten anvil and all the stars are dead.