Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 April 1889 — STRANGE THINGS [ARTICLE]

STRANGE THINGS

WHICH HAVE HAPPENED TO EARTH, SEA AND SKY. Disasters Volcanic, Oceanic, Cyclonic, Which Have i„Come Up Through the Centuries, and the Lessons to be Learned Therefrom. Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at Kansas City last Sunday. Subject: “Wonders of Disaster and Blessing.” Text- Joel it, 30. He said: I propose to show you that the time in which we live is wonderfm for disaster and wonderful for blessing, for there must be lights and shades in this picture as in all others. Need I argue this day that our time is wonderful for disaster? Onr world has had a rough time since by the hand of God it was bowled out into space. It is an epileptic earth; convulsion alter convulsion; frosts pounding it with sledge hammer of iceberg, ano fires melting it with furnaces seven times heated. It is a wonder to me that it has lasted so long. Meteors shooting by on this side and grazing it, and meteors shooting by on the other.side and grazing it, none of them slowing up for safety. Whole fleets and navies and argosies and flotillas of. worlds sweeping about us. Our earth like a fishing smack ofl the banks of Newfoundland, while the Etruria and Germanic and the Arizona and the City of New York rush by. Besides that, onr world has by sin been damaged in its internal machinery, and ever and anon the furnaces have burst, and the walking beams of the mountain have broken, and the islands have shipped a sea, and the great hulk of the world has been jarred with accidents that ever and anon have threatened immediate demolition. But it teems to us as if onr country were especially characterized by disaster, volcanic, cyclonic, oceanic, epidemic. I say volcanic, because an earthquake is only a volcano hushed up. When iStromboli and Cotopaxi and Vesuvius stop breathing, let the foundations of the earth beware. Seven thousand earthquakes in two centuries recorded in the catalogue Qf the British Association. Trajan, the Emperor, goes to ancient Anitocb, and fiunid the splendors of his reception is met by an earthquake that nearly destroys the Emperor’s life. Libson, fair and beautiful at one o’clock on the Ist of November, 1755, in six minutes 6 »,GOO have perished, and Voltaire writes of them: “For teat region it was the last judgment, nothing wanting but a trumpet!” Europe and feeling the throb; 1,500 chimneys in Boston partly or fully destroyed. But the disasters of other centuries have had their counterpart in our own. In 1312, Caraccas was caught in the grip of the earthquake; m 1822, in Chili, 100.000 square miles of land by volcanic force upheaved to four and seven feet of permanent elevation; in 1854 Japan felt the geological agony; Naples shaken in 1857; Mexico in 1858; Medosa, the Capital of the Argentine Republic, in 1861; Manilla terrorized in 1863; the Hawaiian Islands by such force uplifted and let down in 1871; Nevada shaken in 1871; Anitoch in 1872; California in 1872, San Salvador in 1873; while in 1883 what subteranean excitement! Ischia, au island of the Mediterranean, a bdautiful Italian watering place, vineyard clad, surrounded by all natural charm and historical reminiscence; yonder, Capri, the summer resort of the Roman Emperors; yonder Naples, the paradise of art—t: is beautiful island suddenly -toppled into the trough of the earth, eight thousand merry-makers perishing, and some of them so far down beneath the reach of human obsequies that it might be said of many a one of them as it was said of

Moses: “The Lord buried him.” Italy weeping, all Europe weeping, all Christendom weeping. where there were hearts to syifipathize and Christians to pray. But while the Nations “were measuring that magnitude of measuring it not with the golden rod like that with which the angel measured heaven, but with the black rod of death, Java, of the Indian Archipelago, the most fertile island of. all the earth, is caught in the grip of the earthquake, and mountain after mountain goes down, and city after city, until that island, which produces the healthiest beverage of all the world, has produced the ghastliest accident of the century. One hundred thousand people dying, dead, dead. a But look at the disaster cyclonic. At the mouth of the Ganges are three islands -the Hattiah, the Sundeep and the Dakin Shabazpore. In the midnight of October, 1877, on all those islands the cry was: “The waters! the waters!” A cyclone arose and rolled the sea over those three islands, and of a population of 340,000, 215,000 were drowned. Only those saved who had climbed to the top of the highest trees. Did you ever see a clyclone? No? Then I pray God you may never see one. I saw one on the ocean, and it swept us eijffit- hundred miles back from our coutee, and for thirty-six hours during the Cyclone and after it we expected every moment to go to the bottom. .They told us before we retired at nine o’clock that the barometer had fallen, but,, at eleven at night We were awakened with the shock of the waves. All the lights

out! Crash! went all the life-boats. Waters rushing through the skylights down into the cabin and down on the furnaces until they hissed and smoked in the deluge. Seven hundred people praying, blaspheming, shrieking. Our great ship poised a moment on the top of a mountain of phosphorescent fire, jjnd then plunged down, down, down, until it seemed as if she never would again be righted. Ah! you never want to see acyclone at sea. But I was in Minnesota, where there was one of those cyclones on land that swept the city of Rochester from its foundations, an took dwelling-houses, barns, men, women, children, horses, cattle, and tossed them into indiscriminatq’-'min, and lifted a rail train and dasheaTt down, a mightier hand than thatjot the engineer on the air-brake. Cyclone in Kansas, cyclone in Missouri, cyclone in Wisconsin, cyclone in Illinois, cyclone in lowa. Satan, prince of the power of the air, never made such cyclone disturbances as he has in our day. And am I not right in saying that one of the characteristics of the time in which we live is disaster cyclonic? - But look at the disasters oceanic. Shall I call the roll of the dead shipping? Ye monsters of the-deep, answer when I call your names. Ville de Havre, the Schiller, City of Boston, the Melville, the President, the Cimbria. B*t whA

should I go on calling the roll when noneof theimanswer, and the roll is gs long as the white scroti of the Atlantic surf at Cape 11 iittras breaker*? If the oceanic cables could report all the scatt&red life and all the b'eaehed hones that they rub against in the dephts of the ocean what a mekaage of pathos and tragedy for both beaches! In one storm eighty fishermen perished oil the coast of Newfoundland, and whole fleets of them off the coast of England. Gpd help the poor fellows at sea, and aive high seats in heaven to the Grace Darlings and the Ida Lewises acd the lifeboat men noveriug around Goodwin’s Sands and the fekerries. The tea, owning three fourths of the ♦ arth, proposes to capture tjhe other fourth, ami is bombarding the land all around the earth. The moving of our hotels at Brighton . Beach backward, one hundred yards from where they once stood, a type of what is going on all around the world and on every coast. The den-1 sea rolls to-day where ancient cities stood. "Pillars of temples that stood on hills geologists now find three-quarters Under tliq water or altogether submerged. The sea having wrecked so many merchantmen and flotillas wants to wreck the continents, and hence disasters oceanic. Look at the disasters epidemic. I speak not of the plague in the fourth century that ravaged Europe, and in Moscow and the Neapolitan dominions and Marseilles which wrought such terror in the eighteenth century; but I Lok at the yellow feversand the choleras and thediptherias and the scarlet fevers and the typhoids of our own time. Hear the wailing of Memphis and bhreveport and New Orleans and Jacksonville, of the last few decades. From Hu rd war. India, where evenrtwelfth year three million devotees congregate, the caravans brought the cholera, and that one disease slew eighteen thousand in eighteen days in Bossorah. Twelve thousand in one summer slain by it in India, and twenty-five thousand Jn Egypt. Disasters epidemic. Some of the finest monuments in Greenwiod and I aural Hill and Mount Auburn are to doctors who lost their ivee in battling with Southern epidemic. But now I turn the leaf in my subject, and I platjb the white lilies and the palm trees amid the night shade and the myrtle. This age is no more characterized by wonders of disaster than by wonders of blessing. Blessing of longevity; the average of human life rapidly increasing. Forty years now worth four hundred vears once. Now I can travel from Manitoba to New York in three days and three nights. In other times ifel would have taken three months. In other words, three days and three nights now are worth three months of other days. The average of human life practically greater now than when lived bis 950 years. Blessings of intelligence: The Salmon P. Chases and the Abraham Lincolns and the Henry Wilsons of the coming time will not be required to learn to read by pine-knot lights or seated on shoemaker’s bench, nor will the Fergusons have to study astronomy while watching the cattle.’ Knowledge rolls its tides alopg every poor man’s door, and his children may go down and bathe in them. If the philosophers of the last century were called up to recite in a class with our boys at the Polytechnic, or our girls at the Packer, those old-philos-ophers would be sent down to the foot of the class because they failed to answer the questions! Free libraries in all the important towns and cities of the land! Historical alcoves and poetical shelves and magazine tables for all that desire to walk through them or sit down at them! Blessings of quick information: Newspapers failingall around us thick as leaves in a September equinoctial! News three days old rancid and stale. We see the whole world twice a daythrough the newspaper at breakfast ta ble and the newspaper at the tea table, with an “ extra ” here and there between. Blessings of gospel proclamation: Do you not know that nearly all the missionary societies have been born in this country? and nearly all the Bible societies, and nearly all the great philanthropic movements? A’ secretary of one of the denominations said to me the other day in Dakota: “You were wrong when you said our denomination averaged a new church every day of the year; they established nine in . one day, you are far within the truth.” A clergyman of our denomination said: “I have just been out establishing five mission stations.” I tell you Christianity is ,on the march, while infidelity is dwindling into imbecility. While infidelity is thus dwindling and dropping down into imbecility and indecency, the wheel of Christianity is making about a thousand revolutions in a minute. All ,the copies of Sbakspere and Tennyson and Disneli and of any of the most popular writers of the day, less in number than the copigs of tue Bible going out from our printing presses. A few years ago, in six weeks, more than two million copies of the New Testiment purchased, not given away, but? purchased because the world will nave it More Christian men in higlh official position to-day in Great Britain and the United States than ever before. Stojrthat falsehood going through the newspapers .—I have seen it in twenty—that the Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States are infidels, except one. Bv personal acquaintance I know three of them to be old-fashioned evangelical Christians, sitting at the holy sacrament of our Lord Jesus Christ, smd I suppose that the majority of them believers in our Christian religion. And then hear the dying words of Judge Black, a man who had been AttorneyGeneral of the United States, and who had been Secretary of the United States; no stronger lawyer of the century than Judge Blaek—dying, his aged wife knebling by his side, and he uttering that sublime and tender prayers: “O Lord God, from whom I derived my existence and in whom I have always'trusted, take my spirit to thyself, and let thy richest blessing come down upon my Mary.” The most popular book to-day is the Bible, and mightiest institution is the church, and the greatest name among the nations, amLirnro honored ‘han any other, is the name ui Where is there any other being that will raliy such enthusiasm? Motheis sewing their fingers ofl' to educate their boys tor the Gosnel ministry. For nine y ears no luxury of the table until the course through grammar school and college and theological seminary be completed. Poor widow putting her mite into the Lord’s treasury, the fate of Emperor or President impressed upon the coin not so conspicuous as the blood with which she earned it. Millions of •ocj men and women, but more women

and men, to whom Christ is very thing. - Christ first and Christ last, and Christ forever. Why, this age is not so characterized by invention and scientific exploration as it is by" Gospel proclamation. You can get no idea of it unless you can ring all the church bells in one chime, and sound all the organs in one diapason, and gather all the congregations of Christendom in one Gloria in Excelsis. Mighty camp-meetings. Mighty Ocean Groves. Mighty Chautauqnas. Mighty conventions of Christian workers, general assemblies of the Presbyterian Church. Mighty conferences of the Methodist Church.- Mighty associations of the Baptist Chprch. Mighty conventions of the Episcopal Church. I think before long the best investments will not be in railroad stock or Western Union, but in trumpets and cymbals and festal decorations, for we are'on the eve of victories wide and world-upliiting. There may be many years oi hard worn yet before the consummation, buttlie signs are to me so encouraging that I would not be unbelieving if I saw the wing of the apocalyptic angel spread for its last triumphal fight in this day’seunset; or if to-morrow morning the ocean cables should thrill us with the news that Christ the Lord had alighted on Mount Olivet or Mount Calvary to proclaim universal dominion. Oh, you dead churches, wake up! Throw back the shutters of stiff ecclesiasticism and let the light the ot spring morning come in. Morning for the land. Morning for the sea. .Morning*oi emancipation. Morning of light" and love and peace. Morning of a day in which there shall be no chains to break, no sorrows to assuage, no despotism to shatter, no woes to compassionate. Oh, Christ, descend! Scarred temple, take the crown! Biuised hand, take the scepter! Wounded foot, step the throne! “Thine is the kingdom.” These things 1 say because I want you to be alert; I want you to be watching all these wonders unrolling from the heavens and the earth. God has classified them, whether calamitous or pleasing. The Divine purposes are harnessed in traces that can not break, and in girths that qan not slip, and in buckles that can not loosen, and are driven by reins they must answer. I preach no fatalism.

Those of us who are in midlife may. well thank God that we have’ seen so many wondrous things; but there are people here to-day who will see the twentieth century. Things obscure to us will be plain to you yet. The twentieth century will be as far ahead of the nineteenth as the nineteenth is ahead of the eighteenth, and as you caricature the habits and customs and ignorance of the past, others will caricature this age. Some of you may live to eee the snimmering veil between the material and spiritual world lifted. .Magnetism, a word with whibh we cover up our ignorance, will yet be an explored realm. Electricity, the fiery courser of the sky, that Benjamin Franklin lassqed and Morse and Bell and Edison have tried to control, will become completely manageable, and locomotion will be swiftened. and a world of practical knowledge thrown in upon the race. Whether we depart in this century, or whether we see the open gates of a more wonderful century, we will see these things. Itdoesnot make much difference where we stand, but the higher the stand-point the larger the prospect. We will see them from heaven if we do not'see them from earth. I was at Fire Island, Long Island,and I went up in the cupola from which thqy telegraph to New York the approach of vessels hours before they come into port. There is an opening in the wal l , and the operator puts Lit telescope through that opening and sees vessels far out at s-a. While 1 was ‘dlkjig with him he went, up and looked out. rfs said: “We are expecting the Arizona tb-nignt.” lean;: ‘ Js it oossible that yon i:aow all tht* e veaeeh? Do you know them as you know a man’s face?” He said: “Yes. 1 nfever made a mibtake; bvfoie I see the hulks I often know them by the masts; I know them all; IJnave watched thedrso long.” Oh, whataFgrand thing it is to have ships telegraphed and heralded long before they tome to port, that friends may come down to the wharf and welcome their Jong absent loved ones. So to-day we take our stand in the watch tower and we look off and through the glass of inspiration or Providence, we look off and see a whole fleet of ships coming in. That is the ship of peace, flag with one star of Bethlehem floating above the top gallants. That is the ship of the church, mark of salt wave high up on the smoke stack, showing she has had rough weather, but the Captain of salvation commands her, and all is well with her. The ship of heaven, mightiest craft ever launched, millions of passengers waiting for milliens more, prophets and apostles and martyrs in the' cabin, conquerors at the foot of the mast, while from the rigging hands are waving this way as they know us, and we wave back again for they are ours; they went out from our own households. Ours! Hail! Hail! Put off the black and put on the white. Stop tolling the funeral bell and ring the wedding anthem. Shut up the hearse and take the chariot. Now, the ship comes around the great headland. Soon she will strike the wharf and we will go aboard her. Tears for ships going out. Laughter for ships coming in. Now she touches the wharf. Throw on the planks. Block not up that gangway with embracing long-lost friends, for you will have an eternity of reunion. Stand b ck and give way until other millions come on. Farewell to sin. Farewell to struggle. Farewell to sickness. Farewell io dea'ir. All aboard for heaven! , ' -