Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 March 1890 — INDIANA STATE NEWS. DR TALMAGE’S SERMON, [ARTICLE]

INDIANA STATE NEWS.

DR TALMAGE’S SERMON,

LET NO STAIN COME UPON YOUR NAME. A Foolish Son the Heaviness of His Parents—Depravity Add to their Sorrows Mother’s Prayers and Father’s Anxiety. Text: Prov. xi., In his sermon Sunday Dr. Talmage said: All parents want tneir children to turn out well. However poorly father and mother may have done themselves, they want their sons and daughters to do splendidly. Up to forty years of age parents may have ambitions for themselves, after that their chief ambitions are for their children. Because people are old they have no right to be either ungentlemanly or uncanny. There are old people so disagreeable that they , have nearly broken up some homes. The young' married man with whom the aged one lives stands it because he has been used to it all his life, but the young wife,coming in from another household, can hardly endure it, and sometimes, almost cries her eyes out. And when little children gather in the house, they are afraid of the venerable patriarch, who has forgotten that he ever was a child himself, and cannot understand why children should ever want to play 1 ‘hide and seek, ” or roll hoop, or fly kite, and he becomes impatient at the sound from the nursery, and shouts with an expenditure of voice that keeps Jhim coughing fifteen minutes after, “Boys! stop that racket!” as though any boy that ever amounted to any thing in the world did not begin life by making a racket! Indeed, there are children who owe nothing to their parents, for those parents have been profligates. My lamented friend, good and .Christian and lovely Henry Wilson, Vice-President of the United States, in early life changod his name. Henry Wilson was not his original name. He dropped his father’s name because that father was a drunkard and a disgrace, aru' the son did not feel called upon to carry such a carcass all his life. While children must always be dutiful, I sympathize with all young people who have disagreeable or unprincipled old folks around the house. Carrying out the idea of my text, I remark that a reckless or dissipated son makes a heavy-hearted parent because it hurts the family pride. It is not the given name, or the name which you received at the christening, that is injured by you prodigality. You can not hurt your name of John or George or Henry or Mary or Frances or Rachel, because there have been thousands of people, good and bad, having those names, and you can not improve or depreciate the respectability of those given names. But it is your last name, your family name, that is at your mercy. All who bear that name are bound, before God and man, not to damage its happy significance. You are charged by all the generations of the past and all the generations to come, to do your share for the protection and the honor and the integrity of that name. YOU HAVE NO BIGHT, My dear young friend, by a bad life to blot the old family Bible containing the story of the marriages and hirtha and deaths of the years gone by, or to cast a blot upon the family bibles whose records are yet to be opened. There are in our American city directories names that always suggest commercial dishonesty or libertinism or cruelty or meanness, just because one man or woman bearing that name cursed it forever by miscreancy. Look out how you stab the family name! It is especially dear to your mother. She was not born under that name. She was born under another name, but the years passed on and she came to young womanhood, and she Saw some one with whom she could trust her happiness, her life, and her immortal destiny; and she took his name, took it while the orange-blossoms were filling the air with fragrance, took it with joined hands, took it while the heavens witnessed. She chose it out of all the family names since the world stood, chose it for better or worse, through sickness and through health, by cradles and by graves. Yes, she put off her old family name to take the family name you now wear, and

BHE HAS DONE HER PART To make it an honorable name. How heavy a trouble you put on her when, by misdeeds, you wrench that name from its high significance! To haul it down from your mother’s forehead and trample it in the dust would be criminal. Your father’s name may not be a distinguished name, but I hope it stands for something good. It may not be famous, like that of Homer, the father of epic poetry, or Izaak Watton, the father of angling, or JSschylus, the father of tragedy, or Ethelwoid, the father of monks, or Herodotus, the father of history, or Thomas Aquinas, the father of moral philosophy, or Abraham, the father of the faithful, but your father has a name in a small circle as precious to him as theirs in a larger circle, booh bow you tarniah it! - Further, the recklessness and dissipation of a young nfan are a cause pf parental distress at a time when a parent Is less a\>ie to bear it. The vicissitudes of life have left their impreosion upon those parents. The eye is not as clear as once, northe hearing as acute, nor the nerves as steady, nor the step as steady, and witirtire tide of incoming years comes the weight of unfilial behavior. You take yous parents at a great disadvantage, for they can not stand as much as they once could. They have not tire elasticity of feeling with which they once could throw off trouble. That shoulder, now some-

what bent, can net bear as heavy a burden ae once it could. 1 At the time when the machinery is getting worn out you put upon it the most terrific strain. At sixty and seventy years the vitality is not so Btrong as at thirty or forty. Surely they are descending the down grade of life swiftly enough without your increasing the momentum. They will be gone soon enough without your pushing them away. Call in all the doctors who ever lived since Hippocrates raised medicine from a superstition to a science, and they could not cure the heartbreak of a mother over her ruined boy. There may be, as some suppose, enough herbs, if discovered, to cure ail the ailments of the body, but nothing save a leaf from the tree of the heavenly paradise can cure a wound made by a foolish son who is the heaviness of his mother. Perhaps it is a good thing that cruel treatment by a child abbreviates a parent’s life, for what is there desirable ina father’s life nr-a- mother’s life if it’s peace is gone ? Do you not think that death is something beneficent if it stops the mother’s heart from aching and her eyes from weeping, and says: “You need not bear the excruciation any longer. Go and sleep. I will put the defense of a marble slab' between you and that boy’s outrages. Go, now, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.” At the departure of such mothers let the music be an anthom instead of a dirge. While you and I hear no sound, yet there are at this moment tens of thousands of parental hearts breaking. All care was taken with the boy’s schooling, all good counsels given and tho equipment for a sober and earnest and useful life was provided, but it has all gone, and the foolish son has become the heaviness of his mother.

Much of the poignancy of the parental grief arises from the ingratitude of such behavior. What an undertaking it is to conduct a family through the ailments and exposures of early life! Talk about the skiH demanded of a sea captain commanding a ship across the ocean! That requires les% skill than to navigate a young soul in safety across the infantile and boyhood years. The sicknesses that assault, the temptations that entrap, the anxieties that are excited! ’Young man, you will never know what your mother has suffered for you. You will never know how your father “has toiled for you. You have been in all their thoughts, in all their plans, and in all their prayers, from the time your first breath was drawn to this moment’s respiration. What they could do for your health, what they could do for your happiness, what they could do for your mind, what they could do for your soul, have been absorbing questions. To earn a livelihood for you has not always been an easy thing for your father. By what fatigues of body and what disturbances of mind, and long years of struggle, in which sometimes the losses were greater than the gains, he got bread for you, paying for it in the sweat of his own brow and the red drops of his own heart’s blood!

And your mother—l warrant she has never told you much about the nights you were down with scarlet fever or dipththeria, and she slept not a wink, or, falling into drowsiness, your first cry awakened her, and brought the words; "What is it, my dear?” Oh, if the old rocking-chair could speak! Oh if the cradle could only tell its story of years! And when you got better, and were fretful and hard to please, as is usual in convalescence, she kept her patience 80 well, and was as kind as you were unreasonable and cross. Oh, midnights of motherly watching, how can you keep silence? Speak out and tell that wandering young man the story he so much needs to hear. By the by, I wonder what has become of our old cradle in which all of us children were rocked! I must ask my sister when I see her next time. We were a large family, and that old cradle was going a great many years. I remember just how it looked, it was old-fashioned and had no tapestry. Its two sideband canopy all of plain wood, but there was a great deal of sleeping in that old cradle, and many aches and pains were soothed by it as it moved to and fro by day and night. Most vividly I remember that the rockers, which came out from under the cradle, were on the top and sides very smooth, so smooth that they actually glistened. They must have been worn smooth by a foot that long ago ceased its journey. How tired the foot that pressed it must sometimes have got! But it did not stop for that. It went right on, and rocked for Phebe the first and for DeWitt the last. And it was a cradle like that, or perhaps of modern make and richly upholstered, in which your mother rocked you. Can it be that for all that care and devotion you are paying her back with harsh words, or neglect, or a wicked life? Then I must tell you that you are the "foolish son who is the heaviness of his mother.” Better go home and kiss her and ask her forgiveness. Kiss her on the lips that have so often prayed for you, kiss her on the forehead-, that so often ached for you. Kiss her on the •eyes that have so often wept over you. Better go right away for she will be dead before long. And how will you feel then after you realize It is yotir waywardness that killed her? Romulus made no law against patricide, or the slaying of a father, matriTmierarthe Blaying of a mother. bscause ho considered such crimes impossible, and for 600 years there was not a crime of that sort in Rome. But then came Lucius Ostius and slew his father, proving the crime possible. Now, do you not think that the child who by wrong behavior sends his father to a premature grave is a patri-

dde, or who by misconduct hastens a mother into the, tomb is a matricide? Go to the Christ who pardoned me, and He will pardon you. My heaves will not be complete till I hear of yoo changing. But I will hear of it right away, for there is joy up here when ©no sinner repeeteth; and oh, If the next news of that kind comes up hers might come up regarding you, oh my child of many tears and anxieties and prayers! Come, my boy, do you not hear your mother’s voice? Omy son, my son, would God that I could die for thee! O my son, my son! Young man! What news for heaven would be your conversion. Swifter than telegraphic wire ever carried congratulations to a wedding or coronation would fly heavenward the news of your deliverance; and whether the one most interested in your salvation were oh river bank, or in temple, or On the battlements, or in the great tower, the message would instantly be received, and before this service is closed angel would cry to angel: “Have you heard the news? Out yonder is a mother who has just heard of her wayward boy’s redemption. Another prodigal has got home. The dead is alive again, and the lost is found. Hallelujah! Amen!”

TRICKS OF A TRAPPER. " - ~ i In Which He Was Vory Ably Assisted by There were thirty of ns in camp on a spur of the Black Hills mining for gold, says a writer in the N. Y. Sun, when one afternoon we looked down upon the level plain and saw four mounted redskins chasing a white man on a mule. He was making for us, bat they were rapidly overhauling him, and it was plain enough that we could render no assistance. The foremost Indian fired a shot, and man and mule fell in a heap. The Indians pressed forward, yelling and exulting, but the faint reports of a revolver reached our ears, and we saw redskins -and ponies tumbling over at every report. Some of our men slid down the steep mountainside to take a hand in, but it was not needed. When they reached the man he sat on the ground laughing as if he would split. “To think!” he shouted, as soon as he could control his voice, “that these ’ere Sioux, who are rated sharp as razors, could be fooled by that old trick—ha! ha! ha!" And he laughed until he had to wipe away the tears. On the ground near by were three dead Indians and another about to die, while two of the ponies were dead and the other two badly wounded. It bod all been done with an old-fashioncdj Colt’s revolver, loaded with powderand ball and carrying a percussion cap, but the work had been rapid and sure, The Indians had closed in on him, supposing him to be dead or badly wounded, while neither man nor mule had been touched. After a bit the man, who was an old trapper, went over tothe wounded warrior and said to him in the Sioux dialect, and chuckling between the words: “Say, did any of you fellers ever sec a white man before?” “Many of them,” gasped the rior. “Didn’t yon ever hear of that old trick before?” “Isn’t the white man wounded?” “Not by a dozen, Nancy Jane. That ballet didn’t come within a rod of me. I gave my old mule the signal to squat, and down we tumbled to draw you on. The other three are dead, and you are about to go. Say, I don’t want to hurt a dyin’ injun’s feelings, but—ha, ha, ha-—but it was ’nuff to kill a fellow to see how yon four opened your—ha, ha, —eyes when I began to pop. Funniest thing I have seen in a year. Durn iL I won’t need any qui’neen for a month. I’m just sweating the chills off with laughing.” The Indian gazed at him in a troubled way for a moment, seemed to realize that he had been duped, and he closed his eyes and died witbout ever raising the lids again. Trusted Too Much In the Youngster. In seme parts of Texas the people live to be very old. An old man of 90, living quite a distance from the nearest town, requiring some family groceries, sent his son, a man of 70 odd years of age. When the son failed to show up with the provisions on time his father reproached himself by saying: ■ ‘That’s what comes from sending a kid.” Justice Lamar, who never accepts a pass or present of any kind, tells of himself this one: “Down in the locality I call my home lives old John Dilliard. Some years ago John presented me with a very fine Alderney cow. I said: ‘John, I never receive presents.’ •Well,’ he replied, ‘Lamar, just give me your note, and, as yon will never pay it anyway, you will be nothing out and a cow ahead.’ ” A physician of New York at a little gathering there recently told of one of the first professional calls made by a fellow practicioner. He was sent for by a rich but avaricious man, who had dislocated his jaw. The young surgeon promptly put'tho member in place. * ‘What is your bill, doctor?” asked the patient. “Fifty dollars, sir.” “Great Heavens!” and the man opened his mouth so wide as to dislocate his jaw a second time. The physician again put things to rights. “What did you say your bill was?” again asked the patient. “I said it was SSO; now it is $100.” The man grumbled, but paid it She Evidently Knew. West Shore. He—Truly, I have never loved with the whole heart before. She—Ah, you don’t know what you have missed. ~ " The Right Man In the Right Place. Captain—Where are you from? Recruit—Niagara, sir. Captain—Used to rapid shooting. Recruit—Yes, sir. Captain—Report at onoe to the officer in charge of the Gatling gun.