Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 February 1889 — WRITING IN THE DUST. [ARTICLE]

WRITING IN THE DUST.

lI’.sUS STOOPED AND WROTE ON THE GROUND. ■ Telling of Nations Destroyed and Cities Engulfed—Forgiveness and Hypocrisy Penned by the Great Master's Hand. Rev. Dr. Talmage preached in the Brooklyn tabernacle last Sunday/ Subject: “yhe Literature of the Dust” Text: John viii., 6. He said: I have always wondered what Christ wr< t; on the ground. •Do you realize that is the only time that Heever wrote at all? I know that Eusebius says that < hrist once wrotealetter to Abgarus, the King of‘Edessa; but there is no gobd evidence of such a correspondence. The wisest being the world ever saw and the one who had more to say than any who ever lived, never writing a book or a chapter, or a page, or a paragraph, or a word on parchment. Nothing but the literature of the dnst, and one sweep of a brush or one breath of a wind obliterated that forever, all the rolls of the volumes of the first library founded at Thebes there was not one scroll of Christ. Among the seven-hundred thousand books of the Alexandrian library, which by the infamous decree of Caliph Omar were used as fuel to heat the four thousand baths of the city, pot one sentence had Christ penned. Among all the infinitude of volumes now standing in the libraries of Edinburgh, the British Museum, or Berlin hr Vienna, or the learned .repositories of all nations, not one word written directly by the finger of Christ. All that He ever wrote He wrote in dust, uncertain, shiftjpg, vanishing dust. My text says He:stooped down and wrote on the ground.' Standing straight up a man might y&rite- on the ground with a staff, but if\wi£h his lingers he would write in the dust, he must bend clear over. Aye. he must get at least on one knee or he I cannot write on the ground. Be not surprised that He stooped aown, His whble life was a stooping down. Stopping down from castle to barn. Stooping down from celestial homage to mobocratic jeer. From residence above the stars to where a star had to fall to designate His landing place. From heaven’s front door to the world’s back gate. From writing in round and silvered letters of constellation and galaxy on the bl ue scroll of heaven, to writing on the ground in the dust, which the feet of the crowd had left in Herod’s tempie. Whether the words He was writing were in Greek or Latin, or B ebrew, 1 cannot say, for he knew all languages. But He is still stooping down and with His finger writing on the ground: in the winter in letters of crystal, in the spring in letters of flowers, in the summer in golden letters of harvest, in autumn in letters of fire on fallen leaves. How it would sweeten up and enrich and, emblazon this world could we see Christ’s caligraphy all over it. This world was not flhng out into Space thousands of years ago and then left to look out for itself. It is still under the divine care. ChrisLnever for half a second takes His hand off of it, or it would soon be a ship-wrecked world, a defunct world, an obsol-te world, an abandoned world, a dead world. Let us wake up from our stupidity and take the whole world as a par.ble. Then if, with gun and pack of bounds, we start off before dawn and see the morning coming down off the hills to meet us we would cry out with' the evangelist. “The day spring fion on high hath visited us:” or caught in a snow storm, while struggling Lome, eyebrows, beard and apparel all covered with the whirling flakes, we would cry out with David: “Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.” In a picture gallery of Europe there is ou the ceiling an exquisite fresco, but people having to look straight nn to it wearied and dizzied them and bent their necks almost beyond endurance, so a great; lookingglass was put near the fluor'and n w visitors only need to look easily down into this mirror and they see the fresco at their feet. » And so much of all the heaven of God’s truth is reflected in this world as in a mirror, and the things that are above us are copied by things all around us. What right have we to throw away one of God’s Bibles, aye, the first bible he ever gave the race? We talk about the Old Testament and the New Testament, but the oldest Testament contains the lessons of the natural world. Some people like the New Testatment. Shall we like the New Testament and the Old Testament so well as to depreciate the oldest, namely; that which Was written before Moses was put afloat on the boat of leaves, which was calked with asphaltum, or reject the Genesis and the Revelation that were written cei turies before Adatp lost a rib and gained a wife? No, no. W’hen Deity stoops down and writes on the ground let us read iU I would have no less appreciation of the Bible on paper that comes out of the paper-mill, but I would urge tion of-the Bible! in the grass, the Bible in the sahd bill, the Bible in the geranium, the Bible in the asphodel, the Bible in the dust. I have no fear that natural religion will ever contradict what we call revealed religion. I have no j, sympathy with the followers of Aristotle, who. after the telescope was invented, would not look through it lest it contradict some of the theories of their great master. I shall be glad to put against one lid of the Bible the microscope, and against the other lid of the Bible the telescope. But when Christ stooped down and ? wrote on the ground, what did he write? The Pharisees did not stop to examine. The cowards, whipped of their own consciences, fled pell-mell. Nothing will flay a man like an aroused conscience*. Dr. Stevens, in his “History of Methodism,” says that, when Rev. Behjamin Abbott, of olden times, was preaching he exclaimed: “For aught I know there may be be a murder in this I house,” and a man rose in the assemblage and started for the door and bawled aloud, confessing to a murder he had committed fifteen years before. And n» wonder these Pharisees, reminded of their sins, took to their heels. But what did Christ write on the ground? The Bible does not state. Yet, as Christ never wrote anything except that once, you can not blame us for not wanting to /now what,He really did write. But I am certain he wrote nothing trivial, or, 1 nothing uniin iortant .And will you alI low me to say that I think I know what he wrote on the ground? I judge from the circumstances. He bright have written other things, but kneelin * therein the temple, surrounded by a pack of hypocrites, who

I were a self-appointed constabulary, and havjng in bis presence a persecuted woman, who evidently was very penitent for I her sins. I am sure be wrote , two words. | both of them graphicand tremendous and reverberating. And the one word was Hypocrisy and the other word was Forgi venees. From the way these Pharisees i’and Scribes vacated the premises and got Out into the fresn air, As Christ, I wilh just one 'irbnical sentence, unmasked them, I know they were firstclass hypocrites. It ' was then as it is now. The more faults and inconsistenI cies people have of their own, the more | severe and censprious are they about the faults of others. Here they are—i twenty stout men arresting and arraigning one weak woman. Magnificentbusi- [ uess to be engaged in. They wanted the fun of seeing her faint away‘Under a heavy judicial senterp e from Christ, and then aft r being taken_ outside the city and fastened at the foot of a preci pica, the Scribes and Pharisees wanted the satisfaction of each coming and dropping a big stone on her head, tor that was the style of capital punishment they asked for. Some people have taken the responsibility of saying that Christ never laughed. But I thipk as die saw those men drop everything, chagrined, mortified, exposed, and go out quicker 'than they came in, he must have laughed. At any rate, it makes me laugh to'read of-it. All of these lioertiues, dramatizing indignation «gainst impurity. Blind bate lecturing on op]tics. A flock of crows on their way up from .a carcass, denouncing carrion. Yes, I /think that one word written on the ground that day by the finger of Christ was the awful word Hypocrisy.

But lam sure there was another word in that dust. From her entire manner I am sure that. arraigned woman was repentant. She made no apology, and Christ in no wise belittled her sin. But her supplicatory behavior and her tears moved him, and, when he stooped down on the ground, he wrote that mighty, thatimperial word, Forgiveness. I must not forget to say that as < hrist, stooping down, with His finger wrote on the ground, it is evident that His sympathies are with this penitent woman, and tlat He has no sympathy with her hypocritical pursuers- Just opposite to that is the world’s habit. Why didn’t these unclean Pharisees bring one of their own number to Christ for excoriation and capital punishment? No. no; they overlook that in a man which they damnate in a woman. And so the world has had for < Sending

women scourges and "objurgation, and for just one offense she becomes an outcast, while for men whose lives have been. sod'omic for twenty years, the world swines open its doors of brilliant welcome,and they may sit in Legislatures and Senates and parliaments or on thrones. Unlike the Christ of mv text, the world writes a man’s misdemeanor in dust, but chisels a woman’s offense with great capitals upon ineffaceable marble. For foreign lords and princes, whose names can not even be mentioned in respectable circles abroad because they are walking lazarettos of abomination, our American princess of fortune wait, and •u the fi r st beck sail out with them into the blackm ss of dark tss forever. And in what are called bight r cucles of society there is now not only the imitation of foreign dress and foreign manners, but also an imitation of foreign dissoluteness. I I’ke an Englishman and I like an American, but the sickest creature on earth is an American playing the Engl Bhutan. Society needs to be recom-ti ucted on this subject. Treat them alike.., masculine crime and feminine crime. If you cut the one in granite, cut them both in granite. If you write the one in dust, write the other in dust. No, no, says the world, let woman go down and let man go up. What is that I hear plashing into the East River at midnight and then there is a gurgle as of strangulation, and ail is still. Never mind, it is only a woman too discouraged to live. Let the mills of the cruel world grind right on. Bin while I speak of Christ of the text, His stooping down writing in the du?t, do nut thiuk I underrate the literature of the dust. It is the most solemn and tremendous of all literature. It is the greatest of all libraries. When La’vard exhumed Nineveh he was only opening the door of its mighty excavations of Pompeii have only .Been the unclasping of the lids of a volume of a nation’s dust. It is not so wonderful after all that Christ chose, instead of an inkstand, the impressionab’e sand on the floor of an ancient temple, and. ins ead of a hard pen, put forth his forefinger with the same kind of nerve and muscle and bone and flesh as that which makes up our own forefinger, and wrote the awful doom of hypocrisy, and full and complete forgiveness for repentant sinners, even the worst. And now I can believe that which I read, how that a mother kept burning a candie in the window every night for ten vears, and one night very late a poor waif of the street entered. The aged woman said to her, “Sit down by the fire.” And the stranger said, “Why. do vou keep that light ip the window?” The aged woman said,“That is to light my wayward daughter when she returns. Since she went away ten years ago my hair has turned white. Folks blame me for worrying about her, but you see I am her mother.and sometimes half a dozen times in a night I open the door and look out into the darkness and ery ‘Lizzie!’ Lizzie!’ But I must not tell you any more about my trouble for I guess, from the way you cry, you have trouble enough of your own. Why, how cold and seem! Oh, my! can it be? Yes, vou are Lizzie, my • own lost child. Thank God that you are home again!” And what a time of rejoicing there was in that house that night! Christ again stooped down and in the ashes of that hearth, now lighted up not more bv the great’blazing logs than by the joy of a reunited household, and wrote the same liberating words that He had written more than eighteen hundred years ago in the dust of the Jerusalem temple, Forgiveness! A word broad enough and high enough to let pa4s through it all the armies of heaven, a million abreast, on white horses,nostril to nostril, flank to 11 i’-k.