Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 May 1890 — OPEN WIDE THE GATES. [ARTICLE]

OPEN WIDE THE GATES.

Talmage Appeals for a Welcome to ths King of Glory. The Celebrated Brooklyn Preach** Talka Eloquently About Gue of the Most Beautiful of the Imperishable Songs of the Divine Poet, David. In his sermon of last Sunday Rev. T. De Witt .Talmage preached to a large congregation in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, taking his text from David’s song: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.” Psa 24:7. In olden times when a great conqueror returned from victorious war, the people in wild transport would take hold of the gates of the city and lift them from their hinges, as much as to say: “This city needs no more gates to defend it since the conqueror has got home. Oft from the hinges with the gates!” David, who was the poet of poets, foretells in his own way the triumphal entrance of Christ into heaven, after His victory over sin and death and belt It was as it the celestial inhabitants had said: “Here He comes! Make way for Him 1 Push back the bolts of diamond! Take hold of the doors of pearl and hoist them from their h nges of gold 1 Lift up your heads, Oye gates; and be ye lifted up ye everlasting doors; and the King of Glory shall come in.

Among the mountains of Palestine no one is more uplifting than Mount Olivet. It was the peroration of oar Lord’s ministry. On the roof of a house in Jerusalem I asked, “Which is Olivetl” and the first glance transfixed me. But how shall I describe my emotions, when, near the close of a journey, in vvhicb we had for two nights encamped amid the shattered masonry of old Jericho, and tasted of the acrid waters Ot the Dead Sea, that crystal sarcophagus of tho buried cities of the plain, and waded down into the deep and swift Jordan to baptize a man, and visit d the ruins of the house of Mary and Martha and Lazarus, we found ourselves in stirrups and on, horse, lathered with the long and difficult wa ascending Mount Olivet. Oh, that solemn and suggestive ridge! It is a limestone hill a mile in length, and three hundred feet high, and twenty-seven hundred feet above the level of the sea. Over it King David fled with a broken heart. Over it Pompey led his devastating hosts. , Here the famous Tenth Legion built their batteries in besiegement. The Garden of Gethsemane weeps at the foot of it. Along the base of this hill flashed the lanterns and torches of those who came to arrest Jesus. From the trees on this hill the boughs were torn off and thrown into the path of Christ’s triumphal procession. Up and down that road Jesus had walked twice a day from Bethany to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem to Bethany. There, again and again, He had taught His disciples. Half way up this mount He uttered His lamentation, “ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem 1” From its heights Jesus took flight homeward when He had finished His earthly mission. There is nothing more for Him to do. A sacrifice was needed to make peace between the recreant earth and the outraged heaven, and He had offered it Death needed to be conquered, and He had put His resurrection foot upon it ihe thirty-three years of voluntary exile had ended. The grandest, tenderest, mightiest Good-bye ever hoard was now to be uttered.

On Mount Olivet Jesus stands in a group oi Galilee fishermen. They had been together in many scenes of sadness and had been the more endeared by that brotherhood of suffering. They had expected Him to stay until the day of coronation when He would take the earthly throne and wave a scepter mightier, and rule a dominion wider, than any Pharoah, than any David, than any Caesar. But now all these anticipations collapse. Christ has given His lust advice, he has offered His last sympathy. He has spoken His last word, his hands are spread apart as one is apt to do when he pronounces a benediction, when suddenly the strongest and most stupendous law of all worlds is shattered. It is the law vzhich, since the worlds were created, holds them together. It is the law which holds everything to the earth or, temporarily hurled from earth, returns it; the law which keeps the planets whirling arouud our sun, and our solar system whirling around other systems, end all the systems whirling around the throne of Go I—the law of gravitation. That lawis suspended, or relaxed, or troken, to let the body of Jesus go. That law had laid hold of him thirtythree years before, when he descended. It had relaxed its grip of Him but once, and that when it declined to eink Him from the top of the waves on Galilee, on which he walked, to th > bottom of the lake. That law of gravitut on must now give way to Him who made the law. It may hold the the other stars, but it cannot longer hold the Morning Star of Redemption. It may hold the noonday sun, but it cannot hold the Sun of Righteousness. The fingers of that law are about to open to let go the must illustrious Being the world bad ever seen, and whom it had worst maltreated. The strongest law of nature which philosophers ever weigh d or measured must at lust give way. It will break between the rock of Olivet and the heel of Christ’s foot. Watch it, il ye disciples! Watch it, all the earth! Watch it, all the heavens! Christ about to leave tb's planet Howl His friends will not consent to have Him go. His enemies catching Him would only attempt by another Calvary, to put Him into some other tomb. I will tell you how. Tue chain of the most tremendous natural law is unlinked. The sacred foot of our Cord and the limestone rock part and part forever. Leaning back, and with pallid cheek and uplifted eyes, the disciples see their I.ord rising from the solid earth. Then, rushing forward they would grasp his feet to hold Him fast, but they are out of reach, and it Is too late to detain Him. Higher than the tops of the fig-trees from which they had plucked the fruit. Higher than the olivetrees that shaded the mount Higher, until He is within sight of the Bethlehem where lie wus born, and the Jordon where He was babllzed, and the Golgotha where He was slain. Higher, until on stairs oi flee-j cloud He stops. Higher, until, into a sky bluer than the lake that could not sink Him, He disappears into a aea of giory ' hose billowing sp.endors hide Him. The fishermen watch and watch, wondering 1 tue law of nature will not reassert itaelf, and He shall in a few momenta come back again, and they shall see Him descending; first His scarred feet coming in sight, then the s arred side, then the scarred brow, and they may take again His scarred hand. But the moments pass by, and the hours, and no reappearance. Gone out of sight of earth, but come within sight of heaven. And rising still, not welcom .*d by one angelic choir like those who one Christmas night escorted Him down, but all heaven turns out to gre:t Him home, and *ho temples have especial anthem, and the palaces especial banquet, and tho street especial throngs; and all along the line to tho foot of the throne, for years vacated but now again to be taken, there are arches lifted, and banners

waved, and trumpets sounded, and doxologies chanted, and coronets cast down. “Tne angels throng’d His char ot wheels, And bore Him to His throne; Then swept their golden harps and sung f "The glorious w-rk is done.’ ” L-_ It was the greatest day in heaven! Aa He goes up the steps .of the throne that thirty-three years before He abdicated for dur advantage, there rises from all the hosts of heaven a shout, saintly, cherubic, seraphic, archxngelic, "Hallelujah! Amen!" “O garden of olives, thou dear honored spot, Tne fame of thy c lory shall ne’er be forgot” No wonder that for at least fourteen hundred years the churches have, forty days after Raster, kept Ascension-Day; for the lessons are most inspiring and glorious It takes much of the uncertainty, out of the idea of heaven, when from Olivet we see human nature ascending. The same body that rose from Joseph’s tomb ascended from Mount Olivet Our human nature is In heaven to-day. Just as they had seen Christ for forty days, He ascended, head, face, shoulders, hands, feet and the entire human organism. Humanity ascended! Ah, how dos ly that ke-pe Christ in sympathy with those who are still in the struggle! Ascended scars, face _ scars, hand scars, feet scars, shoulder scars! That will keep Him in accord with all the suffering, with all the weary, with all the imposed-upon. No more is he a spirit now than a body, no more of heaven than earth. Those of the celestial inhabitants who never saw our

world, now walk around Him and learn from His physical contour something of what our race Will be when, in the resurrection, heaven will have uncounted bodies as well as uncounted spirits. On Ascen-sion-Day He lifted Himself through the atmosphere of Palestine until, amid the immensities, He disappeared. He ■’"as the only being the world ever saw who could lift Himself. Surely, if He does-lift Himself, He can do the lesser deed, ot lifting us. “No star goes down but climbs another sky, No sun sets here except to rise on high.” Christ leads us all the way:. Through the birth hour, lor he was born in Bethehem; through boyhood, for He passed it in Nazareth ;through injustices,for he endured the outrages of • ilate’s court-room; through death, for he suffered it on Calvary; through the sepulchre, for He lay three da/s within its darkened walls; through resurrection for the solid masonry gave way on the first Easter morning; through assension, for Mount Olivet watched Him as He dimed the skies: through the shining gates, for He entered them amid magnificent acclaim. And here is a gratifying consideration that you never thought of: We will see our Lord Justus He looked on earth. As He arose from the tomb He ascended from Mount Olivet. We shall see him as He looked on the road to Emmaus, as He appeared in the upper room in Jerusalem, as He was that day of valedictory on the ridgo from which He swung into the skies. How much we will want to see him. I was reading of a man born blind. He was married to one who took care of him all those years of darkness. A surgeon said to him, “I can remove that blindness, ” and so he did. His sight given him, a rose was handed to the man who never before had seen a rose and he was in admiration

of it, and his family whom he had never seen before now appeared to him, and he was iu tears of rapture, when he suddenly cried out: “I outfit first to have asked to see the one who cured me; show me the doctor.” When from our eyes the scales of earth shall fall, and we have our first vision of heaven, our first cry ought not to be, “Where are our loved ones!” Our first cry ought to be, “Where is Christ, who made all this possible? Show me the Doctori” Glory .be to God for ascended humanity! Could we realize it, and that it is all in sympathy for us, we would have as cool a courage in the conflict of this life as had Charles the Twelfth when he was dictating dispatches to his secretary, and a bombshell fell into the room, and the secretary dropped his pen and attempted flight Charles said to him: “Go on with your writing! what has the bombshell to do with the letter lam dictating!” If the ascended Christ be on our side, nothing should disturb us. - “Our fellow-Sufferer yet retains A fellow-feeling in our pains, And still remembers, in the skies. His tears, His agonies, and cries.”

I am so glad that Christ broke the natural law of gravitation wh3n He shook off from His feet the clutch of Mount Olivet. People talk as though cold, iron, unsympathetic, natural law controlled everything. The reign of law is a majestic thing, but the God who made it has a right to break it, and again and again has broken it, and again and again will break it. A law is only God’s way of doing things, and if He chooses to do them some other way, He has a right to do so. A law is not strong enough to shackle the Almighty. Christ broke botanical law when, one Monday morning in March, on the way from Bethany to Jerusalem, by a few words turned a full-leaved fig-tree into a lifeless stick. He broke ichthyological law when, without any natural inducement, He ‘swung a great school of fish into a part of Lake Tiberias, where the fishermen had cast their nets for eight or ten hours without the capture of a minnow; and by making a fish help pay the tax by yielding from its mouth a Roman stater. Christ broke the law of storms by compelling, with a word, the angered sea to hush its frenzy, and the winds to quit their bellowing. He broke zoological law when He made the devils possess the swine of Gadara. He broke the law of economics when He made enough bread for five thousand people out of five biscuits that would not ordinarily have been enough for ten of the hungry. He broke intellectual Jaw when, by a word, He silenced a maniac into placidity. He broke physiological law when, by a touch, He straightened a woman who, for eighteen years had been bent almost double, and when he pu. spring into the foot of inhumated Lazarus, and when, without medicine, He gave the dying girl back in health to the Syro-Pfaceniclan mother, and when He made the palatial borne of the noblemen resound again with the laughter of his restored boy, and when, without knife or battery, He set cataracted eyes to seeing again, and the drum of deaf ears to vibrating again, and nerves of paralyzed arms to thrilling again, and then when in leaving the earth He defied all atmospherlo law and physiological law, and that law which has in it withes and cables and girders enough to hold tho universe, the law of gravitation. Ths Curlst who proved Himself on so many occasions, and especially the last, superior to law, still lives; and every day, in answer to prayer for the good of the world. He is overriding the law. Blessed be God that we are not the subjects of blind fatality, but of a sympathizing divinity. Have you never seen a typhoid fever break, or a storm suddenly quiet, or a ship a-besm’s-end right itse f, or a fog lift, or a parched sky break in showers, er a perplexity disentanglad, or the inconsolable take j solace, or the wayward reform at the call of prayer? I have seen it; multitudes have i seen it. You have. If you have been willI ing to see it ; Deride not the faith-cure, i Because impostors attempt it, is nothing against good men whom God hath honored with marvelous ret to rations. Pronounce nothing impossible to prayer and trust < Because you and I cannot effect it, is no reason why others may not By the same

argnmort I could prove that Raphael nevet painted a Madonna, and that Mendelsshon never wrote an oratorio, and that Phidias never chiselled a statue. Because we cannot accomplish it ourselves, we are not to conclude that others may not There are in---inunen»ity great ranges of mists which have proved, under closer telescopic scrutiny, to be the storehouse of worlds, and I do not know but from that passage in James, which, to some of us, is yet misty and dim, there may roll out a new heaven and a new earth, “The prayer of faith shall save the sick.” The faith- curists may, in this war against disease, be only skirmishing before a general engagement! in which all the ma adies of earth shall le routed. Surely, allopathy and homcepathy and hydropathy and eclecticism need reinforcement from somewhere. Mhy not from the faith and prayer of the consecrated! The mightiest school of medicine may yet be the school of Christ. I do not know but that diseases, now by all schools pronounced incurable, may give way under gospel bombardment 1 do not know but that the day may come when faith and prayer shall raise the dead. Strauss and Vi oolston and Spinoza and Hume and Schleiermacher rejected the miracles of the far past I do not propose to be like them and reject the miracles of the far future. This I know, the Christ of Ascension-Day is mightier than any natural laws, for on ths day of which I speak ha trampled down the strongest of them all Law is mighty, but He who made it is mightier. Drive out fatalism from your theolgy, and give grace the throne. Standing to-day on the Ascension peak of Mount Olivet I am also gladdened at the closing gesture, the last gesture Christ ever made. “He lifted up His hands and blessed them,” says the inspired account of departure. I am so glad He lifted up His hands. Gestures are often more significant than words, attitudes than arguments. Christ had made a gesture of

contempt when with His finger He wrote on the ground; gesture of repulsion when He said, “Get thee beyind me, Satan;” gesture of condemnation when He said, “Woe unto you, Pharisees and hypocrites.” But His last gesture, is a gesture of benedictioa. He lifted up His hands and blessed tuem. His arms are extended, and the palm* of His hands turned downward, and so He dropped benediction upon Olivet, benediction upon Palestine, benediction upon all the earth. The cruel world took Him in at the start cn a cradlii of straw, and at last thrust Him out with the point of the spear; but benediction.! Ascending until Leneath, He saw on one side the Bethlehem where they put Him among the cattle, and Calvary on the other side, where they put Him among the thieves. As far as the excited and intensified vision of the group on Olivet could see Him, and after He was so far up they could no longer hear His words, they saw the gesture of the outspread hands, the benediction. And that is His attitude to-d»y. His benediction upon the world’s climates, and they are changing, and will keep on changing until the atmosphere shall be a commingling of October and June. Benediction upon the deserts till they whiten with lily, and blush with rose, and yellow with cow-

slip, and emerald with grass. Benediction upon governments till they become more just and humane. Benediction upon nations till they kneel in prayer. Benediction upon the wnole earth until every mountain is an Olivet of consecration, and every lake a Galileo on whose mosaic ot crystal, and opal, and sapphire divine splendors shall walk. Qh, take the benediction of His pardon, sinners young, and sinners old, sinners moderate, and sinners abandoned. Take the benediction of His comfort, all ye broken-hearted under bereavement, and privation, and myriad woes. Take His benediction, all ye sick- beds, whether under acute spasms of pain, or in long-protracted-invalidism. For orphanage, and childlessness, and widowhood a benediction. For cradles and trundle-beds,and rocking-ohairs of octogenarians, a benediction. For life and for death, for time and for eternity, for earth and for heaven, a benediction. Sublimest gesture fever made, the last gesture of our ascending Lord. “And He lifted up His hands, and blessed them.” Is our attitude the same? Is it wrath or is it kindness ? Is it diabolism or Christism t God gives us the grace of the open pa>m, open upward to get the benediction, open downward to pronounce a benediction. A lady was passing along a street and suddenly ran against a ragged boy, and she said: “I beg your pardon, my boy, I did not mean to run against you; I am very sorry." And the boy took off the piece of a cap he had upon his head and said: “You have my parding, lady, and you may run agin me and knock me clear down: I won’t care?’ And turning to a comrade he said: “That nearly took me off my feet Nobody ever asked mypardingbefore.” Kindness! Kindness! Fill the world with it. There has always been too much disregard for others. Illustrated in 1630, in England when ninety-five thousand acres of marshes were drained for health and for crop-raising, and the sportsmen destroyed the drainage-works because they wanted to keep the marshes for hunting ground, where they could shoot wild-dusks. Tue same selfishness in ail ages. Oh, for kindness that would make our life a symphony suggestive of one of the ancient banquets where everything was set to music; the plates brought in and removed to the sound of music, the motions ■pf "the carvers keeping time with the music, the conversation liftin’ and dropping with the rising and falling ot the music. But, instead of the music of an I earthly orchestra, it would be the music of I a heavenly charm, our words the music of kind thoughts, our steps the music of helpful deeds, our smile the music Of encouraging looks, our youth and old agd the first and last bars of music conducted by the pierced hand that was opened in love and spread downward in benediction on Olivette heights on Ascension-Day. “By a new way none ever trod, Christ mounted to tho throne of God.”