Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 May 1891 — HUMDRUM ABOLISHED. [ARTICLE]

HUMDRUM ABOLISHED.

Type of Christ and Type of the , Truth Seekefs. Solomon and Qneen of Sheba—More Spice in the Daily Life of MankindDr,Talmage's Sermon, Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at the Brooklyn Tabernacle last Sunday, Subject, “Humdrum Abolished.’ Text, II Chronicles, ix., 9. He reviewed the relations and circumstances of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and then said : '“ Well. my friends; you know that all theologians agree in making Solomon a type of Christ, and making the Queen of Sheha a type of every truth-seeker; and I shall take the responsibility of saying that all the spikenard and cassia, and frankincense which the Queen of Sheba brought to King Solomon is mighty suggestive of the sweet spices of our holy religion. Christianity is not a collection qf sharp technicalities, and angular facts, and chronological tables, and dry statistics. Our religion is compared to frankincense and to cassia, but never to nightshade. It is a bundle of myrrh. It is a dash of holy light.. It is a .sparkle of cool fountains. It is an opening opaline gates. It is a collection of spices. Would God that we were as wise in taking spices to our Divine King as Queen Balkis was wise in taking the spices to the earthly Solomon. What many of us most need is to have the humdrum driven out of our life and the humdrum out of our religion; The American and English and Scottish church will die of humdrum unless there be a change. An editor from Sah Francisco a Tew’ weeks ago wrote me saying he was getting up for his paper a symposium from many i clergymen, discussing among other things: ‘Why do not people go to church?" and he wanted my opinion, and I gave it one sentence: People do not go to church because they can not stand the humdrum. The fact is that most people have so much' humdrum in their worldly calling that they do not want to have added the humdrum of religion. We need in all our sermons and exhortations and songs and prayers more of what Queen Balkis brought to Solomon. ; The fact is that the duties and cares of this life, coming to us from time to time, are stupid often, and inane, and intolerable. Here are men who have been bartering and negoti--aUng^climbing,—pounding, hammer--tng for twenty yeare, forty years, > fifty years. One great, long drudgery has their life been, their faces anxious, their feelings benumbed, their days monotonous. What is necessary to brighten up that man’s life, and to sweeten that acid disposition, ■and to. put sparkle into the man’s spirits? The spicery of our holy religion. Why, if between the losses of life there dashed a gleam of eternal gain, if between the betrayals of life there came the gleam of the undying friendship of Christ, if in dull times in business are found ministering spirits flying to and fro in our office, and store, and shop, every-day life, instead of being a stupid monotone, would be a glorious inspiration, penduluming between calm satisfaction and high rapture. How any woman keeps house without the religion of Christ to help her is .a mystery to me. To have to spend the greater part of one’s life, as many women do, in planning for the meals, in stitching garments that will soon be rent again, and deploring breakages, and supervising tardy subordinates, and driving off dust that soon again will settle, and doing -the-same- thing "day- inand- dayont/and year in and year out, until their hair silvers, and the back stoops, and the spectacles crawl to the eyes, and the grave breaks open under the thin sole of the shoe —oh, it is a long mo- 1 notony! w hen Christ comes to the drawing-rooS, and comes to the kitchen, and comes to the nursery, and comes to the dwelling, then how cheery become all womanly duties. She is never alone now. Martha gets through fretting and joins Mary at the foot of Jesus. All day long Deborah is happy because she can help Lepidoth; Hannah, because she can make a coat for young Samuel; Miriam, because she can watch her infant brother; Rachel, because she can help her father water the stock; the widow of Sarepta because the cruse of oil is being replenished. O woman, having in your pantry a nest of boxes containing all kinds of condiments, why have you not tried in your heart and life the spicery of our holy religion? “Martha! Martha! thou art careful and troubled about many things; but one thing is needful, and Mary hath chosen that good part which shall not be taken awav from her.” I must confess that a great deal of the religion of this day is utterly insipid. There is nothing piquant or elevating about it. Men and women go around humming psalms in a .minor key and culturing melancholy, and their worship has in it more sighs than rapture. We do not doubt their piety. Oh, no! But they are sitting at a feast where the cook has forgotten to season the food. Everything is flat in their experience and in their conversation. Emancipated from sin, and death, and hell, and on their way to a magnificent heaven, they act as though they were trudging on toward an everlasting Botany Bay. Religion does not seem ‘to agree with them. It seems to catch in the windpipe and become'a tight strangulation instead of an exhilaration. AU the infidel books that have been writen, from Voltaire down to {Herbert Spencer, have not done so

much damage to our Christianity as lugubrious Christians. Who wants a religion woven out of the shadows of a night?. Why go growling on your way to celestial enthronement? Come out of that cave and sit down in the warm light of the Sun of Righteousness. Away with your odes to melancholy and Hervey’s “Meditations Among the Tombs.’ I have to say, also, that we need to put more spice and enlivenment in our religious teaching, whether it be in the prayer-meeting, or in the Sabbath-school, or in the church. We ministers need more fresh air and sunshine in our lungs, and our heart, and our head. Do you wonder that the world is so far from being converted when you find so little vivacity in the pulpit and in the pew? We want, like the Lord, to plant in our sermons and exhorta-i tions more lilies of the field. We want fewer rhetorical elaborations and fewer sesquipedalian words; arid when we talk about shadows we do not want to say adumbration; and when we mean queerness we do not want to talk about idiosyncrasies; or if a stitch in the back we do not want to talk of lumbago; but in the plain venacular preach that gospel which proposes to make all men happy, honest, victorious and free. In other words, we want more cinnamon and less gistric. Let this 'be So in all the different departments of the work to winch Lord calls us. Let us be plain. Let us be earnest. Let us be commonsensical. When we talk to the people in a vernacular they can understand, they will be very glad to receive the truth we present. Would to God that Queen Balkis would drive her spice-laden dromedaries, into all our.sermons and praper-meet-ing exhortations. More than that, we want more life and spice in our Christian work. The poor do not want so much to be groaned over as sung to. With the bread and medicines ‘ and the garments you give them, let there bean accompaniment of smiles and brisk en(-ouragerrieht7 Do not stand and talk to them about the wretchedness of their abode, and the hunger of their looks, and the hardness of their lot. Ah! they know it better than you can tell them. Show them the bright side of the thing, if there be any bright side, Tell them that for the children of God there is immortal rescue. Wake them up out of their stolidity by an inspiring laugh, and' while you send in help, like the Queen of Sheba/ also send in the spices. There are two ways of meeting the poor. to come intotheir house with a nose elevated in disgust, as much as to say: “I don’t see how you live here in this neighborhood. It actually makes me sick. There is that bundle —take it, you poor, miserable wretch, and make tne most of it.” Another way is to go into the abode of the poor in a manner which seems to say: “The blessed Lord sent me. He was poor himself. It is not more for the good I am going to try to do you than it is for the good you can db me.” Coming in that spirit, the gift will be as aromatic as the spikenard on the feet of Christy and all the hovels in that alley will be fragrant with the spice. We need more spice and enlivenment in our church music. Churches Slit discussing whether they shall have choirs, or precentors, or organs, or bass-viols, or coronets: I say, take that which will bring out the most inspiring music. If we had half as much zeal and spirit in our churches as we have in the songs of our Sabbath schools, it would not be long before the whole earth would quake with the coming God. Why, in most churches, nine-tenths of the people do not sing; or thgy_.slnjJ.jiQ_ reebly Thatthe’people at their elbows do not know they are singing. People mouth and mumble the praises of God; but there is not more than one out of a hundred who makes ‘ ; a joyful poise” unto the Rock of our Salvation. Sometimes when the congregation forgets itself, and is all absorbed in the goodness of God, or the glories of heaven, I get an intimation of what church music will be a hundred years from now, when the coming generation shall wake up to its duty. I promise a high spiritual blessing toany one who will sing in church, and who will sing so heartily that the people all around can not help but sing. Wake up! all the churches from Bangor to San Francisco, and across Christiandom. It is not a matter of preference; it is a matter of religious duty. Oh, what a mistake you have made my brother. The religion of Christ is a present and everlasting redolence. It counteracts all* trouble. Just put it on the stand by the pillow of sickness. It .catches in the curtains, and perfumes the stifling air. It sweetens the cup of bitter medicine, and throws a glow on the gloom of the turned lattice. It is a balm for the aching side, and a soft bandage for the temple stung with pain. It lifted Samuel Rutherford into a revelry of spiritual delight while he was in physical agonies. It helped Richard Baxter until, in the midst of such a complication of diseases as perhaps no other man suffered, he wrote “The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, ” Audit poured light upon John Bunyan’s dungeon—the light of the shining gate of the shining city. And it is good for rheumatism, and for neuralgia, and for low spirits, and for consumption; It is the catholicon for all disorders. Yes, it will heal all your sorrows. Why did you look so sad to-day when you came in? Alas! for the loneliness and the heart-break, and the load that is never lifted from your soul. Some of you go about feeling like Macaulay when he wrote:

“If I had another month of such days as I have been spending I would be impatient to get down insp my little narrow crib in the ground - like a weary factory child.”’ And there have been times inu your life when you wished you could get out of this, life. You have said: “Oh. how sweet, tdmy lips would be the dust of the valley,” and wished you could pull over yqu in your last slumber the coverlet of green grass and daisies. You have said? ‘‘Oh, how beautifully quiet it must be in the tomb. I wish I was there.” I see all around me widowhood, and orphanage, and childlessness; sadness, disappointment, perplexity. If I could ask all those to rise in this audience who have felt no sorrow, and been buffeted by no disappointment—ls I could ask all such to rise, how many would rise? Not one. Across the couches of your sick tand across the graves of your dead I fling this shower of sweet spices. Queen Balkis, driving up to the pillared portico of the house of cedar, Carried no such pungency of perfume as expales to-day from the Lord.’! garden. It is peace. It is sweetness. It is comfort. It is infinite satisfaction this Gospel I commend to you. Some one could not under- . Stand why an old German Christian scholar used to be always so calm and happy and hopeful when he had so many trials and sicknesses and ailments. A man secreted himself in the house. He said: “I mean to watch this old scholar and Christian. ’’ And he saw the old Christian man go to his room and sit down on the chafe beside the stand, and open the Bible and began to read. He read on and on, chapter after chapter, hour, after hour until his face was all aglow with the_tidings from heaven, and when the clock struck twelve he arose, and shut his Bible, and said, ‘‘Blessed Lord, we are on the same old terms yet. Good-night, goodnight. Oh; you sin-parched and you trouble-pounded here is comfort, here is satisfaction. Will you come and get it? I can Ho? tell you what the Lord offers you hereafter so well as I can tell you now. ‘ ‘lt doth not yet appear what we shall be.” Have you read of the Taj Mahal in India, in some respects the mostmajestic building on earth? Twenty thousand men were twenty years in building it. It cost about $16,000,000. The walls are of marble, inlaid with carnelian from Bagdad, and turquois from Thibet, and Jasper from the Punjaub, and amethyst from Persia, and all manner of precious stones. A traveler says that- it -seems to him like the shining of an enchanted castle of burnished silver. The walls are 245 feet high, and from the top of these springs a dome thirty more feet high, that dome containing the most wonderful echo the world has ever known; so that ever and anon travelers standing below with flutes, and drums, and harps, are testing that echo, and the sounds from below strike up and then come down as it were the voice of angels all around about the building. There is around it a gardep of tamarind, arid banyan, ana palm, and all the floral glories of the ransacked earth. But that is only a tomb of a dead empress, and it is tame compared with the grandeurs which, God has builded for your living and immortal spirit. Oh, home of the blessed! Foundations of gold! Arches of victory! Cap-stones of praise! And a dome in which there are echoing and re-echo-ing the hallelujahs of the ages. And around about that mansion is a garden —the garden of God—and all the springing fountains are the bottled tears of the Church in the wilderness, and all the crimson of the flowers is the deep hue that was caught up front the-carnage of 'earthly m arty rdoms.and the fragrance is the prayer of all the saints, and the aroma puts into utter forgetfulness the cassia and the spikenard, and the frankincehso, and the world-renowned spices which the Queen Balkis, of Abyssinia, flung at the feet of King Solomon.

Through obduracy on our part, and through the rejection of that Christwho makes heaven possible, I wonder if any of us will miss that spectacle? I fear! I fear! The. Queen of the South will rise up in judgment against this generation and condemn it, because she came from the utter most parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, a greater than Solomon is here! May God grant that through your own practical experience you may find that religion’s ways are ways of pleasantness, and that all her paths are paths of peace—that it is perfume now and perfume forever. And there was an abundance of spice: “neither was there any such spice as the Queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.”