Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 December 1888 — GOSPEL FRAGRANCE. [ARTICLE]

GOSPEL FRAGRANCE.

“AH Thy Garment*Smell of Myrrh.’ ' J, v M Cl»W»t V»m> •to K*tt« t • tor ofii Wort t on* l end It Upward to the P»l----avaaol Ha«T». . Rev. Dr. Tshnage preached at the Brooklyn Tabernacle last Sunday. Sub jart- “Tbo Eryttmo Text: Psalms xlv., 8. He said: Your first curiosity is to know why the robes of Christ are odorous with myrrh. Tliis was a bright-leaved Abyseinialp plant. It was trifoliated. The Greeks, Romans and Jews bought and sold it at a h ! gh price. The first present that was ever given to Christ waa a sprig of myrrh, thrown on His infantile bed in Bethlehem, and the last gift that Christ ever had was myrrh pressed info the cup of His crucifixion. The natives would take a stone and bruise the tree, and then it would exu le a oum that would saturate all the ground beneath. This gum was used tor purposes of merchandise. One piece of it. no larger than a chestnut, would whelin a w hole room with odors. It was put in closets, in chests, in drawers, in rooms, and its perfume adhered almost interminably to anything that was any where near it. Sowhen in my text I read that Christ’s garments smell of myrrh. I immediately conclude the exquisite s« eetness of Jesus. I know that to many He is only like any historical person; another John Howard; another philanthropic Oberlin; another Confucius; a grand subject for painting; h heroic theme for a poem; a beautiful form for a statue; but to those who have heard His voice, and felt His pardon, and received His benediction, lie is music, and light, and warmth,and thrill, and eternal fragrance. Sweet as a friend, sticking to you when all else betray. Lifting you up while others try to push you down. Not so much like morningglories, that bloom only when the sun is coming uo, nor like ‘‘four o’clocks,” that bioom only when the sun is going down, but like myrrh, perpetually aromatic—the same morping, noon and night—yesterday, to-day, forever. It seems as if we cannot wear Him out. We put on Him all our burdens, and iT. Him with ail our griefs, and set Him foremost in all our battles, and yet Heisreadyto lift and to sympathize, and to help." We have so imposed upon Him that one would think in eternal affront He would quit our soul; and vet today He addresses us with the same tenderness, dawns upon us with the same smile, pities us c> with the same compassion. There is no name like His for us. It is more imperial than Casar’S, more musical than Beethoven’s, more conquering than Charlemagne’s more eloquent than Cicero’s. It throbs with all life. It weeps with all pathos. It groans with all pain. It stoops with all condescension. It breathes with all perfume, like Jesus to set a broken bone, to pity a homeless orphan, to nurse a sick man, to take a prodigal back without any scolding to illuminate a cemetery all plowed with graves, to make a qneen unto God out of the lost woman of the street, to catch the tears of human sorrow in a lachrymatory’ that shall never be broken? Who has snch an eye to see our need, such a lip to kiss .away our sorrow, such a hand to snatch us out of the fire, such a foot to trample our enemies, such a hea't to embrace all our necessities? I struggle for some metaphor witn which to express Him. He is not like the bursting forth of a full orchestra; that is too loud. He is not like the sea when lashed to rage by the tempest; that is too boisterous. He is not like the mountain, its brow wreathed with the lightning; that is too solitary. Give us a softer type, a gentler comparison. We have seemed to see Him with our eyes, and to hear Him with our ears, and to touch him with our hands Oh, that today He might appear to some other one of our five senses! Ay, the nostril shall discover His presence. He comes upon us like spice gales from Heaven. Yea, His garments smell of pungent, lasting and all-pervasive myrrh. Oh, that you all knew His sweetness. How soon you would turn from your novels. If the philosopher leaped out of his path in a frenay of joy, and clapped his hands, and rushed through the streets, because he had found the solution of a mathematical problem.how will you feel leaning from the fountain of a Savior’s mercy and pardon, washed, clean, and made white as snow, when the question has been solved: “How can my soul be saved?” Naked, frost--bitten, storm-lashed soul, let Je us , this houfthrow around thee the c garments that smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces.” Your second curiosity is to know why the robes of Jesus are odorous with aloes. There is some difference of opinion about wjiere these aloes grow, what is the color < f the flower, what is the particular appearance of the herb. Suffice it for you and me to know that aloes mean bitterness the world over, and when Christ comes with garments bearing that particular odor, they suggest to me the bitterness of a Savior’s sufferings. Was there ever such nights as Jesus lived through—nights on the mountains, nights on the sea, nights in the desert? Who ever had such a reception as Jesus had? A hostelry the first, an unjust trial in over’ and terminer another, a foul-mouthed yelifeg mob the last. Was there | a space on His back asMrwte as your two fingers where He was not whipped? Was there a space on His brow an inch square where He waa not cut of the briers? When the spike struckat the.instep did it not go clear through Kollo wof the foot? Oh, long, deep, bitter nilgimage. Aloes! Aloes! John Iganed Ki? b ea d on Christ, but who fid Christ : tear£cs WAthousand Men fed*bv the £wior;j fed Jesus? *Ehe sympathy of a Savior’s heart going but to the leper and the adulteress; but who soothed Christ? De-

nied both cradle and death-bed. He had a fit place neither to be born nor to die. A poor babe! A poor lad! A poor young man! MpSt.hy cheer his dying hour& 1 candle Of the sun snuffedout not all aloes? All our sins, sorro’SfSr bereavements, losses, and all the agonies of earth and hell. Picked up as in one cluster and Fqueezed into one cup, and that pressed to His li pa until the acrid, nauseating, bitter draught was swallowed with a distorted cßuntenanee and a shudder from head to foot and a gurgling strangulation. Aloes! Aloes! Nothing but aloes. All this for Himself? AM this to get the fame in the world of baing a martyr? AU this in a ■* . . ■ ~<’* .

spirit of stubbornness, because He did not !ik«* Caesar? No! No! All this beckuse He wanted to pluck you and me from hell. Because He wanted to raise you and me to heaven. Becaiise we were lost and He wanted ns found. Because we were blind and He wanted us to see. Because we were serfs and He wanted us manumitted. Oh, ye in whose cup of life the saccharine has predominated; oh, ye who have had bright and sparkling beverages, how do vou feel toward Him who in your stead, and to purchase your disinthrallment, took the aloes, the unsavory aloes, the bitter aloes? Your third curiosity is to know why these garments of. Christ are odorous with cassia This was a plant that grew in India and the adjoining islands. You do not care to hear what kind of a flower it had or what kind of a stalk. It is enough for me to tell’you that it was used medicinally. In that land and in that age, where they knew but little about pharmacy, c-ssia was used to arrest many forms of disease. So when in my text we find Christ coming with garments that smell of cassia, it suggests to me the healing and curative power of the Son of God. ’ None of you can be better in physical health than I am„and yet 1 .must say we are all sick. I have taken the diagnosis of your case and have examined all th 3 best authorities on the subject, and I have come now toi to tell you that you are full of wounds and bruises and putrefying sores which have no’ been bound up or molified with ointment. The marasmus of sin is on us—the palsy, the dropsy, the leprosy. The man that is expiring to-night on Fnltou street—the allopathic and homeopathic doctors having given him up, and his friendsnow standing aronnd to take his last words —is no more certainly dying as to his body than you and 1 are dying unless we have taken the medicine from God’s apothecary. All the leaves from this bible are only so many prescriptions from the divine physician, written not in Latin like the prescriptions of earth ly physicians, but written in plain English, so that a man, although a fool, need not err therein, Thank God that the Savior’s garments smell of cassia. You know; or it yon do not know I will tell you now, that some of the, palaces of olden time were adorned with ivory. Ahab and Solomon had their homes furnished with it. The tusks of African’ afid Asiatic elephants were twisted into all manners of shapes. There were stairs of ivory and chairs of ivory, and tables of ivory, and floprs of ivory, and pillars of ivory, and windows of ivory,and fountains that dropped into basins of ivory. Oh white and overmastering beauty. Green tree branches sweeping the white curbs. Tapestry trailing the snowy floors. Brackets of light Hashing on tbe lustrious surroundings. Silvery music rippling to the beach oft the arches. The mere thought of it almost stuns my brain, say: “Ob! if I could on y have walked over such floors! If I could have thrown myself in such a chair! If I could have heard the dip and dash of those fountains!” You shall have something better than that, if you only let Christ introduce you. From that place He came, and to that pl ice He proposes to transport you, for His garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces.” • To day it seems to me as if the windows of those palaces were illuminated for some great victory, and ! look and see climbing the stairs of ivory, and walking on floors of ivory, and looking from the windows of ivory, some.whom we knew and loved on earth. Yes, I know them. „ There are father and mother, not eighty-two years and sev-enty-nine years as when they left us,but blithe and young as when on their marriage day. And there are brothers and sistere, merrier than when we used to romp across tlp-ineadows together. Tbe cough gone. The cancer cured. The erysipelas healed. The heart-breakover. Oh, how fair they are in the ivory palaces! And your dear little children that went out from you—Christ did not let one of them drop as be lifted them. He did not wrench one of them from you. No. They went as from one they loved too well to One whom they loved better. If I should take your little child and press its soft face against my rough cheek, I might keep it a little while; but when you, the mother, came along, it would struggle to go with you. And so you stood holding your dying child when Jesus passed by in the room ahd the little one sprang out to greet Him. That is all. Your Christian dead did not go do yn into the dust and the grave and the mud. Though it rained all that funeral day. and the water came up to the wheel’s hub as you drove out to the cemetery, it made no difference to them, for they stepped from the home here to the home there, right into the itory palaces. All is well with them. All is well. It is not a dead weight that you lift when you carry a Christian out. Jesus makes tbe bed up soft with velvet promises, and He says: “Put her down here very gently. Putthat head, which will never ache again, on this pillow of hallelujahs. Send up word that, the S recession is coming. Ring the bells. ling! Open your gates, ye ivory palaces!” And so your loved ones are there. They are just as certainly there, having died in Christ, as that you are here. There is only one thing more they want. Indeed, there is one thing in heaven they have not got. They want it. What is it? Your company. But, oh, my brother, unless you change your tack you can not reach that harbor. You might as well take'the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, expecting in that direction to reach Toronto, as to go on in the way some of you are going and, yet expect'to reach the ivory palaces. Your loved ones are looking -out of the windows of heaven now,and yet you seem to turn your back upon them. You do not seem to know the sound of their voices, as well as you. used to, or to be moved by the sight of their, dear faces, Call louder, ye departed ones: Call louder from the ivory palaces. When I think of that place, and think of my entering it. feel awkward, I feel as sometimes

when I have been to the weather, and my shoes have be?n bemire J, is soiled, and my hair is I stop in front of some fine [ have an errand. iTYeei not Wt" to gb ’iti as lam and sit among polished guests. So some of us feel about heaven. We need to be washed—we need to be rehabilitated before we go into the ivory palaces, Eternal God, let 1 the surges of Thy pardoning mercy roll over us. I want not only to wash my hands and my feet, but, like some skilled diver standing on the pierhead, who leaps into the waves and comes up ata far-distant point from where he went in, so I want to come

' up. 0, Jesus, wash me in the waves cf Thy salvation. And here I ask you to solve a mystery that has been oppressing me for t’hirty- ' years. I have asked it of doctors of divinity wlio have been studying theology for half a century, and they have given me no satisfactory answer. I have turned over all the’ books in my library, but got no solution to the and today I come and ask you for an explanation,- By w bat logic was Christ ind need to exchange the ivory palaces of Heaven for the crucifixion agonies of earth? I shall.take the first thousand million years in Heaven to study out that problem. Meanwhile and now, taking it as the tenderest and mightiest of all facts that Christ did come: that He came with spikes in His feet; came with thorns in His brow; with spears in Ilis heart, to save y ( bu and to save me. O sinner, fling every thing else away and take Christ. Take Him now, not to mofrow. During the night following this very day there may be ap excitement jn your dwelling, and a tremulous pouring out of drops from an unsteady and atfrightened hand, and before tomorrow morning your chance may be gone.’ h .