Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 September 1891 — CHRIST OR FAMINE. [ARTICLE]

CHRIST OR FAMINE.

Pine-Struck is the World of Sin. liall Not See My Face Exqept Yonr Irother Be With Yon—Dr. Tal- ; mage's Sermon. Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at Brooklyn last Sunday. Te:%; Gen. xliii, 13. He said: This summer,having crossed eighteen of the United States, North, South, East and West, I have to report the mightiest harvests that this country or any other country ever reaped" If the grain gamblers do not somehow wreck these harvests we are about to enter upon the grandest scene of prosperity that America has ever witnessed. But while this is so in our .own country, on the other side of the Atlantic there are nations threatened with famine, and the most dismal cry that is ever heard will I fear be uttered—the cry for bread. I pray God that the contrast between - our 'inosiJet'iLy and~ their want may not be as sharp as in the lands referred to by my text. There was nothing to eat. Plenty of corn in Egyt, but ghastly famine in Canaan. The cattle moaning in the stall. Men, women and children awfully white with hunger.—Not the failing of one crop for one summer, but the failing of all the crops for seven years. [The preacher then related the story of the visit to Egypt for corn, and continued:] “Well, my friends, this world is famine-struck of sin. If does not yield a single crop of solid satisfaction. It is dying. It is hungerbitten. The world is poor compensation, poor satisfaction, poor solace. Famine in all the earth; not for seven years, but for 6,000. But,blessed be God, there is a great corn crib. The Lord built it. It is in another land, It is a large place. An angel once measured it, ant Pas far as I can calculate in our phrase that corn crib is 1,500 miles long and 1,500 broad and 1,500 high, and it is full, food for all nations. “Oh!” say the people, “we will start right away and get this supply for our soul.” But stop a-mo-ment, for from the keeper of that corn crib there comes this word, saying: “You shall not see my face unless your brother be with you.” In other words there is no such thing as getting from heaven pardon, and comfort, and eternal life, unless we bring with us our Divine Brother, the Lord Jesus Christ. Coming without Him, we shall fall before we reaeh the corn crib, and our bodies shall be a portion for the jackals of (he wilderness; but, coming with the Divine Jesus, all the granaries of Heaven will swing open before our soul, and abundance shall be given as. We shall be invited to sit in the palace of the King and at the table; ind, while |he Lord of Heaven is apportioning from His own table to Other tables, He will not forget us; fnd then and there it will be found that our Benjamin’s mess is larger than all the others, for so it ought to be. “Worthy is the Lamb that, was slain, to receive blessing, and aches, and honor, and glory, and

. power.” I want to make three points. Ev?ry frank and common sense man will acknowledge himself to he a sinner. What are you going to do with your sins? Have them pardoned you Say. How? Through the mercy of Sod?' Is it tfieTetting down of a bar" for the admission of all without respect to character? Be not deceived. I see a soul coming up to the gate of mercy and knocking at the corn-crib of heavenly supply, and a voice from within says: “Are you alone?” The sinner replies: “All alone. ” The voice from within says: “You shall not see my pardoning face unless your Divine Brother, the Lord Jesus, be with you.” O, that is a point at which so many are discomforted. There is no mercy from God except through Jesus Christ. Coming with Him we are accepted. Coming without Him w<j arc rejected. Peter put it right in his great sermon before tne high priests, when he thundered forth: “Neither is there salvation in any other. There is no other name given under heaven amoim men whereby we may be saved;” O, anxious sinner! O, dying sinner! O, lost sinner! all you have got to do is to have this Divine Benjamin along with you. Side by side, coming to the gate, ail the store houses of heaven will swing open before your anxious sdul. Am I right in calling Jesus Benjamin? O, yes. Rachel lived long enough to give a name to that child, and with a dying kiss she called him Benoni. Afterward Jacob changed his name, and he called him Benjamin. The meaning of the name she gave was “Son of my Pain.” The meaning of the name the father gave was “Son of my Right Hand.” And. was not Christ the Son of pain? All the Sorrow of Rachel jn that hour, when she gave her child over into the hands of strangers, wa% nothing compared with the struggle of God when He gave up His only Son. The omnipotent God in a birth throe! And was not Christ appropriately called “Son of the Right Hand?" Did not Stephen look into Heaven and see Him standing at the right hand of God? And does not Paul speak of Him as standing at the right hand of God making intercession for us? O Benjamin! Jesus! Sdn of pain! Son of victory! The deepest emotions of our souls ought to bo stirred at the sound of that nomenclature. In your prayers plead His tears. His sufferings, His sorrows and his death! If you rtefuse w tp do ft all the corn-cribs and palaces

of heaven will be bolted and barred against your soul, and a voice from the throne shallstun, you with the announcement: “You shall not see my face except your brother he with you.”., ' My text also suggests the reason why so many people do not get any real comfort. You meet ten people: nine of them are in need of some kind of condolence. There is something in their health, or in their state, or in their domestic condition that demands sympathy. And yet the most of the world’s sympathy amounts to absolutely nothing. People go to the wrong crib, or they go in the wrong way. When the plague was in Rome a great many years ago there were eighty men who chanted themselves to death With the litanies of Gregory the Great —literally chanted themselves to death, and yet it did not stop the plague. And all the music of this world can not halt the plague of the human heart. I come to some one whose ailments were chronic and I say: “in heaven you will never be fort. What you want is a soothing power for your present distress. Lost children, have you that in ten years perhaps you will meet those loved ones before the throne of God. But there is little condolence in that. One day in a year without them, and ten years is a small eternity. What you want is a sympathy now—present help. I come to those of you who have lost dear friends and say: “Try to forget them. Do not keep the departed always in your mind.” How can you forget them when every figure in the carpet, and every book, and every picture, and every room call out their name. Suppose I come to you and 1 say: “God from all eternity, has arranged this trouble.” “Ah,” you say, “that does me no good. ’ Then I say: “With the swift feet of prayer go direct to the corn-crib for a heavenly supply.” You go. You say: “Lord help me: Lord, comfort me.’ But no help yet. No comfort yet. It is qjl dark." What is the matter? I have found. You ought to go to God and say : “Here, O Lord, are the wounds of my soul, and I bring with me the wounded Jesus. Let His wounds pay for thy wounds, His bereavements for my bereavements, ' His lonHness for my loneliness, His heartbreak for my hear-break. O, God for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ — the God, the man, the Benjamin, the brother —deliver my agonized soul. O, Jesus of the weary foot, ease my fatigue. O, Jesus of the Bethany sisters, roll away the stone from the door as our grave. ” That is the kind of prayer that brings help; and yet how many of you are getting no help at all, for the reason that there is in your soul, perhaps, a secret trouble. You may never have mentioned it to a single human ear, or you may have mentioned it to some one who is now gone away, and that great sorrow is still in your soul. After Washington Irving was dead, they found a little box that contained a braid of hair and a miniature, and the name of Matilda Hogman, and a memorandum of her death, and a re

mark something like this: “The world after that was a blank to me. I went into the country, but found no peace in solitude. I tried to go into society, but I found no peace in society. There has been a horror hanging over me by night and by day, and lam afraid to be alone.” How many imuttered troubles! No human ear has ever heard the sorrow. O, troubled soul, I want to tell you that there is one salve that can cure the wounds of thee heartland that Is the salve made out of the tears of a sympathetic Jesus. And yet solace; and you try chloral, and you try morphine, and you try strong drink, and you try change of scene, and you try new business associations, and anything and everything rather than take the Divine companionship mid sympathy suggested by the words of my text when it says, ‘’You shall not see my face again unless your brother be with you.” Oh, that you might understand something bf the height, and depth, and length, and breadth, and immensity, and infinity of God’k eternal consolations.

I go further, and find in my subject a hint as to the. way heaven opens to the departing spirit. We are told that heaven has twelve gates, and some people infer from that fact that all the people will go in without reference to their past life; but what is the use of having a gate that is not sometimes to be shut? The swinging of a gate implies that our entrance into heaven is conditional. It is not a monetary condition. If we come to the door of an exquisite concert we are not surprised that we must pay a fee,for we know that fine earthly music is expensive; but all the oratorios of heaven cost nothing. Heaven pays nothing for its music. It is all free. There is nothing to be paid at that door for entrance; but | the condition of getting into heaven ! is our bringing our Diviue Benjamin along with us.

D 6 you notice how often dying people call upon Jesus? It is the usual prayer offered —the prayer offered more than all the other prayers to—- “ Lord, Jesus, receive my spirit.” One of qur congregation, when asked in the closing moments of his life. “Do you know us?” said: “O, yes, I know you. God bless you. Good-by. Lord Jesus receive ray spirit: and he was gone. O yes, in the closing moments of our life we must haveChrist to call upon. If Jacobs sons had gone toward Egypt.andhad gone with the very finest equipage, and had not taken Benjamin along with them,and to the question they should have been obliged to answer, “Sir,

we didn’t bring him, as father oould not let him go; we didn’t want to be bothered with him," a voice from within would have said: “Go away from us. You shall not have any of this supply. You shall not see my face because your brother is uot with you.” And if we pome up toward the door of heaven at last, though we come from all luxuriance and brilliancy of surroundings, and knock for admittance, and it is found that Christ is not with us, the police of bread-house, saying. “Depart, I never knew you.” If Jaoob’s sons, coming toward Egypt, had lost everything on the way; if they had expended their last shekel; if they had come up utterly exhausted to the corn-cribs of Egypt, and it had been found that Benjamin was with them, all the store houses would have swung open before them. And so, though by fatal casualty we may be ushered into the eternal world; Though we may be weak and exhausted by protracted sickness —if, in that last moment, we can only just, -stagger, and faint, and fall into thfa gate of heaven—it seems that all the corn-cribs of heaven will open for our need and all the palaces will open for our reception; and the Lord of that place, seated at His table, and the angels of God seatedat their table and the martyrs table, the king shall pass a portion from His table to ours, and then, while we think of the fact that it was Jesus who started us on the road, Jesus who kept us on the way, and, Jesus who at last gained admittance for our soul, we shall feel glad if He has seen the- travail of his soul and been satisfied, and not be at all jealous if he found that our divine Benjamin’s mess is five times larger than all the rest. Hail, annointed of the Lord! Thou art worthy. My friends, you see it is either Christ or famine. If there were two banquets spread, and to only one of them you might go, you might stand and think for a good while as to which invitation you had better accept, but here it is feasting or starvation. If it were a choice between oratorios, you might say: “I prefer the ‘Creation,’ ”, or “I prefer the ‘Messiah,’ ” But here it is a choice between eternal harmony and everlasting discord. Oh! will you live or die? Will you start for the Egyptian corn-crib, or will you perish amid the empty barns of the Canaanitish famine? “Ye shall not see my face except your brother be with you.”