Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 September 1890 — POWER OF KINDNESS. [ARTICLE]

POWER OF KINDNESS.

6NBMIEB CONQUERED BY ITS CONTROLLING FORCE. Baals of Men Are Not Saved Through Their M Pwdi Dr. Talmage’a Sunday Sermon. s ' ... 5 Subject: “The Power of Kindness.” Text: Proverbs xxv. He said: When Solomon said this he drove a whole volume into one phrase. You, of course, will not be so eiliy as to take the words of the text in a literal 'sense. They simply mean to set forth the fact that there is a tremendous power in a kind word, Although it ’may seem to be very insignificant, its force is indescribable and illimitable. Pungent and all-conquering utterance: “A soft tongue breakeththe bone.” ' If I had time I would show' you kindness as a means of defense; kindness as a means of usefulness; kindness as a means of domestic harmony; kindness as beßt employed by governments for the taming and curing of criminals, and kindness as best adapted, for the settling’ and adjusting of international quarrels; but I shall call your attention only to two of these thoughts. ... -r—: ~ J • AntLfiret. I speak to you of kindness as a means of defense. Almost" every man, in the course of his life, is set upon and assaulted. Your motives are misinterpreted or your religfous or political principles are What to do under such circumstances is the question. The first impulse of the natural heart says: 1 'Strike back. Give as much as he sent. Trip him into the ditch which ; he dug for your feet. Gash him with as severe a wound as that which he indicted on your soul. Shot for shot. Sarcasm for sarcasm. An eye for an eye. A (both for a tooth." But the better spirit in a man's soul rises up and says. “You ought to reconsider that matter.” You look up into the face of Christ and say: “My Master, how ought I to act under these difficult circumstances?” And Christ instantly answers: 1 ‘Bless them that curse you, ,a*td pray for them which despitefully \ use you.” Then the old nature rises rup again and says: “You had better not forgive him until first you have chastized him. You will never get him in so tight a corner again, You will never have such an opportunity of inflicting the right kind of punishment upon him again. First chastise him and then let him go.” “No,” says the better nature, “hush thou foul heart! Try the soft tongue that breaketh the bone.” Have you ever in all yaur life known acerbity and acrimonious dispute to settle a quarrel P Did they not always make matters worse and worse, and worse P

Many years ago there was a great quarrel in the Presbyterian, family. Ministers of Christ were thought orthodox in proportion as they had measured lances with other clergymen of tho same denomination. The most outrageous personalities were abroad. As, in the autumn, a hunter comes -home with a string of game,; partridge es and wild ducks, 6lung over his shoulder, @o there ware many ministers who came back from the ecclesiastical Courts with long strings of doctors of divinity whom they had shot with their own rifle. The division became wider, the animosity greater, until after a while, some good men resolved upon another tack. They befcan to explain away tho difficulties; they bejgan to forgive each other’s fault, and. “ ilol the great Church quarrel was settled, and the New School Presbyterian Church and the Old School Presbyterian Church became one. The different parts of the Presbyterian order,welded >by a hammer, a little hammer,a Christian hammer that the Scripture calls '••a soft tongue.” You have a dispute with your neighbor. You say to him, “I despise you. ” He replies, "I can’t A oar the sight of you.” You say to Tilm, “Never enter my house Again.” He says,. “If you come on my door sill I’ll kick you off.” You say to him, “I’ll put you down.” He says to you, “You are mistaken; I’ll put you down.” And bo the contest rages; and year after year you act the unchristian part, and he acts the unchristian part. After a while the better spirit seizes you, and you go over to the neighbor and say, “Give me your hand-; we have fought long enough. Time is so short and eternity is so near that we can not afford any longer to quarrel. I feel you have wronged me very much, but let us settle all now in one great handshaking and be good friends for the rest of our lives.” You have risen to a higher, platform than that on which before you stood. You win his admiration, and you get his apology. But if you have not conquered, him in that way, at any rate you have won the applause of your own conscience, the Ihigh estimation of good men, and the (honor of your Lord who died for His 'armed enemies. . But, you say, “what are we to do | when slanderers assault vis, and there cdme acrimonious sayings all around About. and we are abused and spit jupon?” My reply is: Do not go and Attempt to chase down the slanderers, {Lies are prolific, and while you are (killing one fifty are born. All our of indignation only exhaust yourself. You might as well, on some summer night when the swarms of insects are coming up from the meadowß and disturbing you, and disturbing your family bring up some great “swamp angel" like that which jlhunjjered over Charleston, and try to •hoot them down;' Tho game is too •mall for the gun. ■you to do with upon you in life? Sown. mt to get back a iad wandered off he moved amid nd his hands and

killed one of them they would have stung him to death. But he moved among them in perfect placidity until he had captured the swarm of wandering bees. And so I have seen men moving amid the annoyances and the vexations and the. assaults of life in such calm, Christian deliberation that all the buziing around about their soul amounted to nothing./ They conquered them, and. above all, they, conquered themselves. “Oh,” you Bay, “that’s a very good theory to preach on a hot day, but it won’t work.” It will work. It has worked. I believe it is the last Christian grace we win. You’know there are fruits which we gather in June and others in July, and others in August, and others in September, and still others in October; and I.have to admit that this grace of Christian forgiveness is about the last fruit of the Christian soul.

We hear a great deal about the bitter tongue and the sarcastic tongue, and the quick tongue, and the singing tongue- but we know very little about “the soft tongue that breaketh the bone.” We read Hudibras, and Sterne, and Dean Swift, and the other apostles of acrimony, but give little time to studying the example of Him who was reviled, and yet reviled not again. 0, that the Lord, by His spirit, would endow us all with “the soft tongue that breaketh the bone."

I pass now to the other thought that I desire to present, and that is, kindness as a-means of usefulness. In all communities you find skeptical men. Through early education or through the maltreatment of professed Christian people; or through prying curiosity about the other world, there are a great many people who become skeptical in religious things. How shall you capture them for God?. Sharia argument and sarcastic retort never won a single skepticism to the Christian region. While powerful books on the “Evidences of Christianity” have their mission m confirming Christian nrniple to the faith they have already aJßted. I have noticed that when people are brought into the it is through the genial soul, and not by through the head; the A It its isl J ust rouse up all tfl Brmakes a great bluster: succeed. Part of the sea —perhaps one-half of it or one-founE of it. After a while the calm moon, placid and beautiful, looks down, and the ocean Ijegina to rise, It comes up to high-water mark. It embraces the great headlands. It submerges the beaches of all the continents. It is the heart-throb of one world against the heart-throb of another world. And I have to tell you, that while all your storms of ridicule and storms of sarcasm may rouse up the passion of an immortal nature, nothing less than the attractive power of Christian kindness can ever raise the deathless spirit to happiness and to God. I have more faith in the prayer of a child five years oLd, in the way of bringing an infidel back to Christ and to heaven, than I have in all the hissing thunderbolts of ecclesiastical controversy.

You can not overcome men with religious argumentation. If you oome at a skeptical man with an argument on behalf of the Christian religion, you put the man on his mettle. He says: “I see that man hag a carbine. I’ll use my carbine. I’ll answer his argument with my argument.” But if you come to that man persuading him that desire his happiness on earth, and his eternal welfare in the world to come he oan not answer it. What I have said is just as true in the reclamation of the openly vicious. Did you ever know a drunkard to be saved through the caricature of a drunkard?

YourTOimicry of the staggering step and the thick tongue, and the disgusting hic-cough, only worse maddens his brain. But if you come to him in kindness and sympathy; if you show him that you appreciate the awful grip of a depraved appetite; if you persuade him of the fact that thousands who had the grappling hooks of evil inclination clutched in the soul as firmly as in his have been delivered, then a ray of light will flash across his vision, and it will seem as if a surernatural hand were steadying bis staggering gait. A good many years ago there lay in the streets a man dead drunk, his face exposed to the blistering noonday sun. A Christian woman passed along .looked at him, and said: “Poor fellow.” She took her handkerchief and spread it bver his face, and passed on. The man roused himself up from his debauch and began to look at the handkerchief, and, lo! on it was the name of a highly respectable Christian woman of the city. He went to her, he thanked her for her kindness, and that one littffi deed saved him for this life, and saved him for the life that is (o come. He was afterward AttorneyGeneral of, the United States, but higher than all, he became the consecrated disciple of Jesus Christ Kind words are so cheap it is a wonder we do not use themoftener. There are tens of thousands of people who are dying for the lack of one kind word. Taere is a business man who has fought against trouble until he is perfectly exhausted. He has been thinking about forgery, about robbery, about suicide. Go to that business mac. Tell him that better times are o jming, and tell him that you yourself were in a light business pass, and that the Lord delivered you. Tell him to put his trust in God. Tell him that Jesus Christ stands beside every business man in his perplexities. Tell him of the sweet promises of God's comforting grace. That man is dying for the lack of just one kind word. 1 Go tomotrow and utter that one kind saying, omnipotent, kind word. Here is a soul that has been swamped in sin 1

He wants to find the light of the Goopel. He feels like a shipwrecked mariner looking out over the .beach, watching for a sail against the sky. O, bear down oil him. Tell him that the Lord wants to be gracious to him, and, though he has been a great sinner, there is a great Savior provided. Tell him that though his sins are as scarlet, they shall be as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall 'be as wool. That man is dying for ever for the lack of one kind word. There used to be sung at a great many of the pianos all through the country a song that has almost died out. I wish somebody would start it again in our social circle. They may not have been very exquisite art in the music, but there was a grand and glorious sentiment:

“Kind words nerer die, never die: Cherished and b esßed.” O, that we might in our families and in our churches try the force of kindness. You can never drive men, women or children into the Mngdom of God. A March northeaster will bring out more honeysuckles that fretfulness and scolding will bring oul Christian grace. I wish that in all our religious work we might be saturated with the spirit of kindness. Missing that, we miss a great deal of usefulness. There is no need of coming out before men and thundering to them -the law unless at the same time you preach to them the Gospel. Do you not know that this simple story of a Savior’s kindness is to redeem all nations?

• The hard heart of this world’s obduracy is to be broken before that story. There is in Antwerp? Belgium, one of the most remarkable pictures I ever saw. It is ' * ‘The Descent of Christ from the Cross.” It is one of Ruben's pictures. No man can stand and look at that ‘ ‘Descent from the Cross” as Ruben pictured it, without having bis eyes flooded with tears, if he have any sensibility at all. It is an overmastering picture—one that stuns you, and staggers you, and haunts your dreams. One afternoon a man stood in that cathedral looking at Ruben’s “Descent from the Cross.” He was all absorbed in that scene of a Savior’s sufferings when the janitor came in and said: “It is time to close up the cathedral for the night. I wish you would depart. ” The pilgrim looking at that “Descent from the Cross” turned around to the janitor and said: “No, no; not yet Wait until they get Him down.” Oh, it is the story of a Savior’s suf-' sering kindness that is to captivate the world.

When the bones of that great Behemoth of iniquity which has trampled all nations shall be broken and shattered, it will be found out that the work was not done bv the hammer of the iconoclast, or by the sword of the conqueror, or by the torch of persecution. but by the plain, simple, overwhelming force of • 'the soft tongue that breaketh thebone.”

And now I ask the blessing of God to come down upon you in matters of health, in matters of business; that the Lord will deliver you from all your financial perplexities; that He will give you a good livelihood, large sa j aries, healthful wages, sufficient income. I pray God that He may give you the opportunity of educating your childred for this world, and, through the rich grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, of seeing them prepared for tiAworld that is to come. Above all, I look for the mercy of God upon your immortal souls; and lest I stand before some who have not yet attended to the things of their eternal interest. in this, the closing part of my discourse. I implore them here now to seek after God and be in peace with Him. O, we want to be gathered together at last in the bright and blessed assemblage of the skies, our work all done, our sorrows -all ended. God bless you and your children, and your children’s children. And now I command you to God and to the word of His grace which is able to build you up and give you an inheritance among all them that are sane tilled.