Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 November 1888 — HOW TO LIVE. [ARTICLE]

HOW TO LIVE.

Man's Moral Nature Auggcwtcd by What, He Kata. - A DIM 8. »•«■*» M-r* Kfflca clou* Than Prayer— B« SiraJgh>forward aud Active in the C««*« of ClirUt. .* Rev. I)r. Talmage preached at the Brooklyn Tabernacle last Sunday. Text : Leviticus xi., 19, B**-. He soldi I take the suggestion of the text and say one of the first unclean things the Christian needs to drive out of his soul is the owl. The owl is the melancholy bird 01-nighL It hatches out whole broods of superstitions. It is doleful and hideous. When it sings it sings through its nose. It loves the gloom of night better than the brightness of the day. Who has not slept in the cabin near the woods and been awakened in the night by the dismal “too hoo” of the owl? Melancholy is the owl that is perched in many a Christian soul. It is an unclean bird and needs tri be driven away. A man whose sins are pardoned, and who is on the road to heaven, has no right to be gloomy. He gays: “I have so many doubts." That is because “you are lazy.” Go actively to work in Christ’s cause, and your doubts will vanish. You say. “I have lost mv property;” but I reply: “Yon have infinite treasures laid up in heaven.” You say: “I am weak and sickly, and going to die.” Then be congratulated that you are so near eternal health and perpetual gladness. Catch a few morning larks for your soul and stone this owl off your premises. As a little girl was eating the sun

dashed upon her spoon, and she cried. “Oh, mamma. I have swallowed a spoonful of sunsbinel” Would God that we might all indulge in the same beverage! Cheerfulness; it makes the homeliest face handsomest makes the hardest mattress soft; it runs the loom that weaves buttercups, and rainbows, and auroras. God made the grass black? No, that would hr too somber. God made the grass red? No, that would he too gaudy. God made the grass green, that by this parable, all the world might be led to a subdued,cheerfulness. Read your Bible in the sunshine. Remember that your physical health is closely allied to your spiritual. The heart and the liver are only a few inches apart, and what affects one affects the other. A historian records that by the sound of great laughter in Rome Hannibal’s assaulting army was frightened away in retreat. And there is in the general outbursting joy of a Christian soul that which can drive back any infernal besiegement. Rats love dark closets, and Satan loves to ourrow in a gloomy soul. Hoist the window of your soul in this the twelve o’clock of yourspiritual night. Put the gun to your shoulder, aDd aim attbe black jungle from which the hooting comes, pull the trigger and drop that croaking, loathsome, hidden owl of religious melancholy into the bushes. * Again: taking the suggestion of the text, drive out the vulture from your sonl. C>d would not allow the Jews to eat it. it lives oh carcasses, it fattens among the dead; with leaden wings it circles about battle fields. Wilson, the American ornithologist, counted 37 vultures around one carcass. If crossing the desert there is no sign of wing in the air, a camel perish out of the caravan, immediately the air begins to darken with vultures. There are many professed Christians who have a vulture in tfyeir souls. They prey upon the character and feelings of others, « A doubtful reputation is a banquet for them. Some rival in trad! or profession falls, and the vulture puts out its head. These people revel in the details of a man’s ruin. They say: “I told you so.” Thev rush into some store and say: “Have you heard the n*-ws? Just as I expected! Got neighbor has gone all to pieces! Good for him!’' That professedly Christian woman, having heard—as—the-- wrong-doing of somp sister in the church, instead of biding the sin with a mantle of charity, nedd 1 esit al 1 along tbe streefs. She takes the afternoon to make her lone-neglect--ed-ealls.—She tells the sior-v—tan—t+mes-before sundown, and every time tells it ten times larger. She rushes into the parlors to tell it., and into the nursery to telHt,and into the kitchens to tell it. She save: “Would yffft have thoughtit? Well, T always said there was something wrong about her. Why, I should not. speak to her if T saw her in the street. Is it not horrible? But better not sav

anything about it, because there may he some mistake. Tdo want my name involved in the matter. I guess I will just go over and ask them at No. 268 whether they have heard it Guess if must, be so. for Marv Ann says that her husband saw a man who beard from his business partner that his blind old grandmother had seen something that looked very suspicions!” The most loathsome, miserable. Godforsaken wretch on earth is a o«sin. I can tell her oh the street., though I have never seen her before. She walks fast, and ha« her bonnet-strings loose; for she hashot bad time.to tie them sinee she beard the last scandal. She looks both w avs as she passes hoping to see new evidences of depravity in the windows. I think that when’ Satan has a : job so infinite! mean that in. all tliei pit lu- can not find a devil mean enough j t‘> -do it. and all ,the bribes and j threats have failed to g>t one willing; for the infernal ct n«ade. he savsdo'oiiel of Ms serveAnb: ‘ Go tip to Tiro k'vn, j and in.such a street, on such a Orrier, • woman, amt ahe will be glad to do it- And sure enough. 1 j like a hungry fish she takes-the hook in > ■ hey month and Satan slackens the line j and let iier run out fpriher and further until after a while he sav*: ‘ It is time ; to hap! in that dine.” and with a few] si rong.pt#!)* he brings her to the beach i of fire. What dd von; sav? That she i was a member o tb-church? I can hot: help that. When Satan goes; a fishing ’ ,he doe* not cire what school the fish i bg-hnig to; whether it is a Presbyterian I -4wado-re' or an Episcopalian salmon.! Amidst the thunder*crash of Sinai God -sand: "Thou shAlfnot b>-ar ness again t. thy neighbor.” And in Leviticus He says: - "Thou shah not.-go up and down as f> tale-bearer.” Take • not inM your ear that *cnm of heil that, people call * tittle-tattle; Whosoever willingly listens to a slander ; h equally guilty with the one who tells’ an otd writer says they ought both to be hung the one by the tongue and the other hv the ear. Do n>t smile noon ? such a Sivyniel, lest, like a - pleased d“g, bdpur his dirty paw noon von. Throw hack the shutter of vonr soul, oh Christian men and women, and see if there be within you a vulture with filthy tal-

*ns and crael beak- Let pot this unclean thing roost in your sonl, for my text says: *' Ye shall bold in" abomination among the fowls the vulture.” Agair; taking the suggestion of the text, drive out the bat from your son). No wonder Godrfet thie b rd among tne andean. It is an offense to every one. Let it flv into the window of a summer night, and ail the hands, young and old are against it. It is half bird and brilf lunousp. It seems made partly to fly and partly |Q walk, and does neitjier yell: and becomes an emblem of those Christians who try to cling to earth and heaven at the same time. They want to walk on earth in worldliness and yet fly toward heaven in spirituality; and their soul, between feet and wings, is driristantly perplexed. Ob, my brethren be one thing or the other! Choose the world if you prefer it. and see how many dollars you can win, and how much apSlause you can gain, and how large a usiness you can establish, and how grand a house you can build, and how fast a span of horses you can drive. You may be prospered until you can fail for $5<)0,000 instead of having the disgrace of failing for only SH',O 0 as some unenterprising people do. It is quite a reward to be able for ten or twenty years to be called one of the solid men of Brooklyn or Boston; and then to make your fortune last as long as possible, we will give you a splendid fqneral, and you shall have twenty-five carriages following you with somebody in the most of them, and your coffin shall have silver handles on the sides, and we will mourn for you in splendid pocket-handkerchiefs bound with crape, and with bombazine twenty full yards long trailing half across the parlor, so that all the company may stand upon it; and we will write our etters for the next six months on paper edged with

black. But, my friends, your worldly fortunes will not last. I will buy out now at that you will be worth in world-ly-estate seventy-five years from now. I have the money in my pocket with which to do it. Here it is! Two cents! It is a large sum to offer for all you will possess all the close of seventy-five years. Choose the world if you want to; but if not then choose heaven. That estate lies partly on this side of the river, but ino-tly on the other. It is ever accumulating. The prospect of it makes one independent of earthly misfortunes, so that Rogers, the martyr, slept so soundly the night before bis burning, they violantly shook him in order to get him awake in time for the execution] and Paul exults at the thought of the ‘‘joy unspeakable aDd full of glory.” Oh, choose earth or heaven! Make up your mind whether you will walk in earthly joys or fly with heavenly expectations: Be not a bat, fit neither to walk nor fly, having just enough of heaven to spoil the world and so much of the world as to spoil heaven. Christ says that vuur present condition nauseates him to positive sickness: “Because thou art neither cold nor hot I will spew thee out of my month!” In the ruins of Pqmpeii there was found a petrified woman, who, instead of trying to fly from the destroyed city, had spent her time in gathering up her jewels. She had saved neither Her life nor her jewels. There are multitudes making the same mistake. In trying to get. earth and heaven they lose both. “Ye can not serve God and Mammon.” Be one thing or the other. Tread the earth like a lion or mount the air like the eagle; for my text says: “Ye shall have in abomination among the fowls the bat.” Again, taking the suggestion' of the text, drive out the chameleon from your soul, fhereis some difference among good men as to the name of this creeping thing which God pronounced unclean, but I shall take the opinion which seems bestsuited to my purpose. The chameleon is a reptile chiefly known by its changeableness of cofbr, taking the color of the thing next to it, sometimes brown, sometimes 'red, and sometimes gray, blit al ways the color of its surroundings, a jype of that class of Christians, who are now one thing in religious faith and now another, just toguit circumstances, always taking their color o f religious belief from the man they are taking to. They go to one place and are first-rate

-Uniiuriana.—--Jesos-was a good man hut nothing more.” They go td Princeton, ai d they are Trinitarians. aliifoaL,willing to die for the divinity of Jesus. Afarewig. the Universalists they refuse the idea of future punishment, —and aTiiong the opposite announce that there is a hell with a s gusto that makes you think they are glad of it; Driveoutthat unelea" chameleon from your soul. The time will come when we shall have to believe something. We can not afford to be on the fence in religion. Truth and error are set opposite to each other. The ope is infinitely right and the other ikfinitely wrong. In the judgment day we must give an account of what we believe as well as for bow we acted. The difference between believing truth and believing eiror is the difference between Paradise and perdifto . I beg you, in the light of the Bible, and on your knees before God, to form your religious opinion and then stick to i , though busiufces companions scoff and w its caricature ami the air crackles with the tires of martyrdom. Surely truths in behalf of whicti Christ di»-d, and angels of God dropped forth, and the is marshalled, are worth living for arid worth 'riving for. Amidst the most uneleau things is t he, ever changing chameleon of religions tin toy. Awav wiih the reptile! God ’ abbo s it with an all-conbumirig abhorrence

Once more; Take the suggestion of the test ami drive out the snail from your 'soul. Gxt has declared it .unclean. Iris an :ta uiai to liH fi iinul eVery where bet ween the coldest north and tne hottest South. There are fifteen hundred spec- : jes of the snail. They have no baek--1 bone and they are so slowMhat their , movement is almost imperceptible. You S see a snail in one place to-dav;. go tomorrow and you will find it lias advancjed only a tew inches*lt becomes an emblem of that lajye class of Christian peoI pie who goto Slowness and sluggishness . that is wonderful. l They artf.stopped bv j every little obstacle, because, like the ' mo nt upon eagle’s wings, but thev go at a snaij’s pace. O child of God, Arouse! We Tiave 1 apotl tcoslzed Prudence and ■Caution Iqng .enough. Prudence ip a beautiful grace, but of all the family of Christian graces I like htrthe least, tor slit has been "married so often to La zincs.* -fuoth and Stupidity. -We have a million idlers in ; the. Lord’s vineyard' who pride thernthen prudence. “Be "prudent/f "kmi the oi-c’plvsto Christ, "aud risy . away from Jerusalem;” hut He went, "Be prudent,” said Paul’s friends, “and j look out for what you say ter Felix/ 4 but

I ' I ' he thundered awa® until the ruler’s knees knocked together. In the eyes of the world, the most imprudent menth at ever lived were Martin Lather, and John Oidcastie, and Wesley,and Knox. My -op nion is that the most imprudent and reckless thing is to stand still. It is well to hear our commander’s voice when Jle savg “Ha t,” but quite as important to hear it when He says “Forward!” This Gospel ship, made to plow the sea at fifteen knots an hour, is not making three. Sometimes it is most prudent to ride our hors! slowly and pick out the lay for bis feet, and not strike him with the spurs; but when a band of Shoshohe Indians are after you in full tilt the most p udent thing for you to do is to plunge in the rowels and put your horse to a full run. shouting, “Go long!” irntil the Rocky Mountains echo it The foes of God are pursuing us. The world, the flesh and the devil are after us; and our wisest course is to go ahead at swiftest speed. Wtoen the Church of God gets to advancing too fast it will be time enough to use caution. No need • f putting on the brakes while going up hill. Do not let us sit down waiting for something “to turn up,” but go ahead in the name of G r d and turn it up. The great danger to the Church now is not sensation, hut stagnation Oh, that the Lord God would send a host of aroused and. consecrated tnen to set the Church on ’ fire, and to turn the world upside down. Let us go to work and cajtch the last snail in our souls. With Divine vehemence let us stamp its life out; for my text declares; “These also shall be unclean to you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the chameleon and the snail.” I have thus tried to prejudice these Christian men and women against gloominess, and slander, and balf-and-balf experiences, and changeableness, and slotn. Our opportunities for getting better are being rapidly swallowed up in the remorseless past. This goldqn Sabbath is about to drop out of the calender. This moment may we drive out all the unclean things from our fouls — the vulture, and the bat, and the owl, and the chameleon, and the snail; and in pi ce thereof bring in the Lamb of God and the Dove of the Spirit! The caseTs urgent. Arousfj before it be eternally too late! “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it!” «