Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 April 1891 — PLAGUE OF INFIDELITY. [ARTICLE]

PLAGUE OF INFIDELITY.

"LET Gdb BE TRUE BUT EVERY MAN A LIAR.** Men Have David Arraign the Almighty for Falsehood—The Bible a Noble Book —Dr. Talmage's Sermon. Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at Brooklyn and New York Sunday and Sunday night. Text; Roman s. 111, V. He said: ~ That is, if God says one thing and the whole human race says the opposite, Paul would accept the Divine veracity. But there are many in our time who have dared arraign the Almighty for falsehood. Infidelity is not only a plague, but it is the mother of plagues. It seems from what we hear on all sides, that the Christian religion is a huge blunder; that the Mosaic account of the creation is an absurdity large enough to throw all nations into rollicking guffaw; that Adam and Eve never existed; that the ancient flood and Noah's ark were impossibilities; that there never was a miracle; that tfie Bible is the friend of cruelty, of murder, of polygamy, of all forms of base crime; that the Christian religion is woman’s tyrant arid man's stultification; that the Bible from lid to lid is a fable, a cruelty, a humbug, a sham, a lie; that the martyrs who died for its truth were miserable dupes ;that the Church of Jesus Christ is properly gazetted as a fool; that when Thomas Carlyle, the skeptic, said: “The Bible is a ■noble book, ”he was dropping into imbecility; that when Theodore Parker declared in Music Hail, Boston, ‘ ‘Never a boy or girl in all Christendom but was profited by that great book, ” he was becoming very weakminded; that is something to bring a blush to the cheek of every patriot; that John Adams, the father of American independence, declared: “The Bible is the best book in all the world, ’ ’ and that lion-hearted Andrew Jackson turned into a sniveling coward when he said: “That, book, sir, is the rock on which our Republic rests. ” and that it is wisest for us to take , that book from the throne in the afi'ections of uncounted mult it tides,and put it under our feet to be trampled upon by hatred and hissing contempt; and that your old father was hoodwinked, and cajoled, and cheated, and befooled when he leaned on this as a staff after his hair grew gray, and his hands tremulous, and his steps shortened as he came up to the verge of the grave; and that your mother sat with a pack of lies on her lap while reading of the better country, and of the ending of all her aches and pains, and reunion riot only with those of you who stood around her, but with the children she had buried with infinite heartache, so that

she could read no more until she took off her spectacles and wiped from them the heavy mist of many tears. Alas! that for forty arid fifty years they should have walked under this delusion and had it under their pillow when they lay dying in the back room, and asked that some words from the old book might be cut upon the tombstone under the shadow of the old country meeting house, where they sleep to-day. waiting for a resurrection that will never come. This book, having deceived them,and having deceived the mighty intellects of the past, must not be allowed to deceive our larger, mightier, vaster, more stupendous intellects. And so out with the book from the court room, where it is used in the solemnization of testimony. Out with it from under the foundation of church and asylum. Out with it from the domestic circle. \ “Gather together all the Bibles—the children’s Bibles, the family Bibles, those newly bound, and those with lid nearly worn out and pages almost obliterated by the fingers long ago turned to dust —bring them all together, and let us make a bonfire of them, and by it warm our cold criticisms, and after that turn under with the plowshare of public indignation the polluted ashes of that loathsome, adulterous, obscene, cruel and deathful book which is so antagonistic to man’s liberty, and woman’s honor, and the world's happiness. Now that is the substance of what infidelity proposes and declares, and the attack on the Bible is accompanied by great jocosity, and there is hardly any subject about which more mirth is kindled than about the Bible. I like fun: no man was ever built with a keener appreciatian of it. There is health in laughter instead of harm —physical health, mental health, moral health, spiritual health —provided you laugh at the right thing. The morning is jocund. The Indian with its own mist baptizes the cataract Minnehaha, or laughing water. You have not kept your eyes open, or your ears alert, if you have not seen the sea smile, or heard the forests clap their hands, or the orchards in blossdm-week aglee with wedolence.

But there is a laughter which is deathful, jthere is a laughter which has the rebound of despair.. It is npt healty to giggle about God, or chuckle about eternity, or smirk about the things of the immortal soul. Now in this sentiment of infidel thinkers I can not join, and I propose to give you some reasons why I can not be an infidel, and so I will try to help out of this condition any who may have been struck with the awful plague of skepticism. First I can not be an infidel because infidelity has no good substitute for the consolation it proposes to take away. You know there are millions of people who get their chief consolation rrom this book. What would you think of a crusade of. this sort? Suppose a man should resolve that he would organize a conspiracy to destroy all the medicines from ail

the apothecaries and from all the hospitals of the earth. The work is The medicines are taken and they are thrown into the river, or the lake, or the sea. A patient wakes up at midnight in a paroxysm of distress, and wants an anodyne. “Oh,” says the nurse, “theanodynes are all destroyed; we have no drops to give you, but instead of that I'll -read you a book on the absurdities of morphine, and upon the absurdities of all remedies.” But the man continues to writhe in pain, and the nurse says: “I’ll continue to read you some discourses on anodynes, the indecencies of anodynes, the absurdities of anodynes. For yourjgroan I’ll give you a laugh. ” Lie down, all ye patients in Bellevue Hospital, and stop your groaning, all ye broken hearted of all the cities, and quit your crying; we have the catholican at last, here is a dose of wit, here is a strengthening plaster of sarcasm, here is a bottle of ribaldry that you are to keep well shaken up and take a spoonful of it after each meal, and if that does not cure you here is a solution of blasphemy in which you may bathe, and here is a tincture of derision. Tickle the skeleton of death with a repartee. Make the King of Terrors cackle. For all the agonies of all the ages, a joke. Millions of people willing with uplifted hand toward heaven to affirm that the gospel of Jesus Christ is full of consolation for them, and yet infidelity proposes to take it away giving nothing, absolutely nothing, except fun. Is there any greater height, or depth, or length, or breadth, or immensity of meanness in all God’s universe?

Infidelity is a .religion of “Don't know.” Is there a God? Don't know! Is the soul immortal? Don’t know! If we should meet each other in the future world will we recognize each other? Don’-t know! A religion of “don’t know” for the religion of “I know. “I know in whom I- have believed. ” “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” Infidelity proposes to substitute a religion of awful negatives for our religion of glorious positives? showing right before us a world of reunion and ecstac-y, and high companionship, and glorious worship, and stupenduous victory, the mightiest joy of earth not high enough to reach the base of the Himalaya of uplifted splendor awaiting all those who on wing of Christian faith will soar toward it.

Have you heard of the conspiracy to put out all the light-houses on the coast? The extinguishment of lighthouses, the breaking up of life-boats, the dismissal of all the pilots, the turning of the inscription on your childs grave into a farce and a lie. Walter Scott’s “Old Mortality,’’.chisel in hand, went through the land to cut out into plainer letters the halfobliterated inscriptions on the tombstones, and it was a beautiful mission. But infidelity spends its time with hammer and chisel trying to cut out from the tombstones of our dead all the story of resurrection and heaven. It is the iconoclast of every village graveyard, and of every city cemetery, and of Westminster Abbey. Instead of .Christian consolation for the dying, a freezing sneer. Instead of prayer, a grimace. Instead of Paul’s triumphant defiance of death, a going out you know not where, to stop you know not when, to do you know not what. That is infidelity. Furthermore: I can not be an infidel because of the false charges infidelity is all the time making against the Bible.. Perhaps the slander that has made the most impression and that some Christians have not been intelligent enough to deny, is that the Bible favors polygamy. Does the God of the Bible uphold polygamy, or did He? How many wives did God make for Adam? He made one wife. Does not your common sense tell you when God started the marriage institution He Started it as He wanted it to continue? If God had favored polygamy He could have created for Adam five wives, or ten wives, or twenty wives just as easily as he made one. At the very first of the Bible God plainly favors mongamy and antagonizes polygamyAnother false charge which infidelity has made against the Bible is that it is antagonistic to woman, that it enjoins her degredation and belittles her mission. Under this impression many woman have been overcome of this plague of infidelity. Is the Bible the enemy of woman? Come into the picture gallery, the Louvre, the Luxembourg of the Bible, and see which pictures are the more honored. Here is Eve, a perfect woman, as perfect a woman as could be made by a perfect God. Here is Deborah, with her womanly arm hurling a host into the battle. Here is Miriam, leading the Israelitish orchestra ori the banks of the Red Sea. Here is motherly Hannah, with her

own loving hand replenishing the wardrobe of her son Samnel, the prophet. Here is Abigail, kneeling at the foot of the mountain until the 400 wrathful men, at the sight of her beauty and prowess halt, halt —a hurricane stopped at the sight of a water lily, a dewarop dashing back Niagara, Here is Ruth, putting to shame all the modern slang about mothers - in-law, as she turns her back on her home and her country, and faces wild beast and exile and death, that she may be with Naomi, her husband’s mother. Ruth, the queen of the harvest fields. Ruth, the grandmother of David. Ruth, the ancestress of Jesus Christ. The story of her virtues and her life-sacrifice the most beautiful pastoral ever written. Here is Vashti, defying the bacohanal of a thousand drunken lords, and Esther, willing to throw her life away that she may deliver her peo-

{>l® And here is Dorcas, the sunightof eternal fame gilding her philantropic needle, aftd -ihe woman with perfume in a box made frofir the hills of Alabastron, pouring the holy chrism on the' head of Christ, the aroma lingering all down the corridor of the centuries. Here is Lydia, the merehantess of Tyrian , purple immortalized lor "her Christian behavior. Here is the widow with two mites, more famous than the Peabodys and the Lenoxes of all the ages, while here comes in with slow of gait and with careful attendants and with especial honor and high favor leaning on the arm of inspiration, one which is the joy and pride of any home so rarely fortunate as to have one, an old (Christian grandmother, Grandjaother Lois. Who has more worshipers to-day than any being that ever lived on earth, except Jesus Christ? Mary. For what purpose did Christ perform his first miracle upon earth? To relieve the embarrassment of a womanly housekeeper at the falling short of a beverage. Why did Christ break up the silence of the tomb, and tear off the shroud and rip up the rocks? It was to stop the bereavement of the two Bethany sisters. For whose comfort was Christ most anxious in the hour of dying Excruciation? For a woman, an old woman, a wrinkle-faced woman, awoman who in other days had held him in her arms, his first friend, his last friend, as it is very apt to be, his mother. All the pathos of the ages compressed into one utterance, “Behold thy mother. ” Does the Bible antagonize woman? -- - - If the Bible is so antagonistic to woman, how do you account for the difference in woman’s condition in China and Central- Africa and- her condition in England and America? There is nd difference except that which the Bible makes. In lands where there is no Bible, she is hitched like a beast of burden to the plows/ she carries the hod, she submits to

indescribableindignities. She must be kept in a private apartment, and if she come forth she must be carefully hooded and religiously veiled, as though it were a shame to be a woman. Do you .know that the very first thing the Bible does when it comes into a new country is to strike off the shackles of .wopan’s serfdom. O woman, where are your chains today? Hold up both your arms and let us see the handcuffs; they are bracelets of gold bestowed by husbandly, or fatherly, or brotherly, or sisterly, or loverly affection. Unloosen the warm robe from your neck, O woman, and let us see the yoke of your bondage. O, I find the yoke a carcanet of silver, or a string of cornelians, or a cluster of pearls that must gall you very much. How bad you must all have it! ij There stands Christianity, there stands infidelity. Compare what they have done. Compare their resources. There is Christianity, a prayer on her lip, a benediction on her brow; both hands full of help for all who want help; the mother of thousands of asylums for the oppressed, the blind, the sick, the lame, the imbecile; the mother of missions for the bringing back of the outcast; the mother of thousands of reformatory institutions for the saving of the lost; the mother of innumerable Sabbath schools, bringing millions of children under a drill to prepare them for respectability and usefulness, to say nothing of the great future. This is Christianity. Here is infidelity: no prayer on her lips, no benediction on her brow, both hands clenched —for what? To fight Christianity. That is the .entire business. The complete mission of infidelity is to fight Christianity. Where are her schools, her colleges, her asylums of mercy? 1 Where arethe asylums and merciful institutions founded by infidelity, and supported by infidelity. Pronounced against God and the Bible,and yet doing work for alleviation of suffering? Infidelity is so very loud in its braggadocia it must have some to mention. Certainly, if you come to speak of educational institutions it is not Yale, it is not Harvard, it is not Princeton, it is not Middleton, It is not Cambridge or Oxford, it is not any institution from which a diploma would not be a disgrace. Do you point to the German universities as exceptions? I have to tell you that all the German universities to-day are under positive Christian influences, except the university of Heidleberg, where the ruffianly students cut and maul and mangle and murder each other as a matter of pride instead of infamy. Do you mention Girard College, Philadelphia, as an exception, that college established by the will of Mr. Girard, which forbids religious instruction and the entrance of clerymen within its gates? My reply is that I lived for seven years near that college and knew many of its professsors to be Christian instructors, and no better Christian influences are to be found in any college than the Girard College. What will be the use of the evangelistic or Pauline description of Jesus Christ when we see Him face to face? What will be the use of his photograph wheii\we have met Him in glory? What will be the use of the Book of Revelation, standing as you will with your foot on the glassy sea, your hand on the ringing harp, and your forehead chapletod with eternal coronation, amid the amethystine and twelve-gated glories of heaven? The emerald dashing its green against the beryl, and the beyrl dashing its blue against the sapphire, and the sapphire throwing its light on the jacinth, and the jacinth dashing its fire against thd ckrosoprassus, and you and I standing in the glories of ten thousand sunset.