Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 April 1892 — AN EASTER SERMON. [ARTICLE]

AN EASTER SERMON.

A PBorosrrroN to pay English members of Parliament, an annual salary of SI,BOO was defeated by a ' vote of 227 to 162. Members of the American Houseof Representatives . Mraw SS»OQOa year salary, 20 cents permtie to and from Washington each session, and $125 per year for stationary, but their brethren in the British Rouse of Coimnons serve their country and their constituents for glory.

Ir appears from a statement by " Secretary Baxter that since August 13, 1890, when the last silver law took effect, 84,500,363 ounces of silver have been purchased by the Govcrnaentat an expense of >85,467,892, and notwithstanding this huge investment by the Government, silver is tower now than ever before. It was worth >1.33 an-ounce in 1873, it has gradually declined to 90 cents art ounce- The stock of silver purchased since 1890 is now worth $9,417,566 less than the Government paid for it

The Durham coal miners’ strike has already proven the most disas trous in the history of England, and hundreds of business houses are yet expected to fail as one of its resultsOf course, the miners and thos* 1 de. pendent on mining and associated industries are destitute and on the verge of starvation. All of which points to the necessity for some equitable plan of arbitration which can be relied upon to settle wage disputes between capital and labor be fore they reach the disastrous striking stage. There is a right and a wrong to all these questions, and it should be the duty of a court of arbitration to ascertain which is which. Then it ought to be the province of the law to step in and insist that the right be observed. —Indianapolis Sen- * tin el. '■ ,

—The other day the cable brought news that about six hundred Africans were besieging the Portugese port of Qttilimane, and that Portugese troops and war ships had been summoned in hot haste to keep this important town near the mouth of the Zambesi from falling into the hands of the savages. There is no reason to doubt the stories that are told of the terrible maltreatment of the natives by the Portuguese. If one of their chief towns were to fall into the hands of the outraged aborigines, it would seem to be righteous retribution. Sir John Willoughby, who recently went up the Zam besi river with the Portugese expe- ' dition under Senor Coutinho, says he saw chained gang* of slaves, mostly women, conveying goods or .working in the fields or herded in stockades, guarded by armed sentries. This was the least painful ZZ part of the picture, for Sir John saw on one occasion an unarmed native clubbed and then set up as a target and shot by the men of the Coutinho expedition without any excuse whatever. He says the Portugese were burning villages in all directions. When stories of such atrocities come ton*, the fact that the natives are besieging Quilimane needs no fur tber explanation.—N. Y. Sun.

The fraternal relations between this country and Italy are to be resumed, and these will become stronger with the events of the next two years in the celebration of an event in which the two countries have a common pride. Italy is as proud of havinggiven Columbus to the world as is America of having been discovad by the intrepid mariner. While America will celebrate the anniver. ■ary of the discovery by a World's Fair, Italy will celebrate the anniversary with an Italia-American ex. position, which will open the first day of next June and close the last day of November. It will be an appropriate forerunner to the World’s Fair, and it will help to arouse the interest of Europe in the Chicago : JEspoHtton. -It will be held in Genoa, the earliest krjqpn home of Columtaii* and presumably his birthplace. Bus exposition will be divided into two •eettous, Italians and Americsas. and its object will be to show <rf the products of the two There will also be a ■WMesNB of relics in theolh itOMW ooee owned by the father of will ad doubt be ■ B : tostore the exit so possible that a fas farouwiit to Chicaoo

Death Not Half So Bad as He's . Y,. Painted. . WKy As W FrithtrvU Only at Hi* Name?—Why Call Him the King of Terrors? Rev. Dr. Turnage preached at Brooklyn last Sunday. Text, 1 Samuel, xv, 35: ‘‘Surely the bitterness of death is past.” The Dbctor refuted the allegory of misery death, and then said: • In that allegory some one has set forth the truth that I mean to present on this Easter morning, which celebrates the resurrection of Christ and our coming resurrection—that one of the grandest and mightiest mercies of the earth is our divine permission to quit it. Sixty-four persons every minute off this planet. Thirty foUlidn people every year board tms' planet. As , a steamer must unload before it takes another cargo, and as the passengers of a rail train must leave it in order to have another company of passengers enter it, so whh this world. What would happen to an ocean steamer if a man, taking a stateroom. should stay in it forever? What wpuld happen to a tail train if oue who purchases a ticket should always occupy the seat assigned to him? And what would happen to this world if all who came into it never departed from it? The grave is as much a benediction as the cradle. What sunk that shin in the Black Sea a few days ago? Too many passengers. What was the matterwith that steamer on the Thames which a few years ago went down with 600 lives? Too many passengers. Now, this world is only a ship, which was launched some six thousand years, ago. It is.’sailing at the rate of many thousand miles an hour. It is freighted with moun tains anfj eities, and has in its staterooms and steerage about sixteen hundred million passengers. So many are coming aboard it is necessary that a good many disembark. Suppose that all the people that have livea since the days of Adam and Eve were still alive —what a cluttered up place this would be—no elbow room, no place to walk, no privacy, nothing to eat or wear, or if anything were left the human race would, like a shipwrecked crew, have to be put on short rations,each of us having perhaps only a biscuit a day. And what chance would there be for the rising generations? The men and women who started when the world started would keep the modern people back and down, saying: “We are 6,000 years old. Bow down. History is nothing, for we are older than history.” What a mercy for the man race was death. Within a few years you can get from this world all there is in it. After you have had fifty or sixty or seventy spring times you have seen enough blossoms. After fifty or sixty or seventy autumns you have seen enough of gorgeous foliage. After fifty or sixty or seventy winters you have seen enough snow storms and felt enough chills and wrapped yourself in enough blankets. In the ordinary length of human life you have carried enough burdens, and shed enough tears, and suffered enough injustices, and felt enough pangs, and been clouded by enough doubts, and surrounded by enough mysteries. We talk about the shortness of life, but if we exercised good sense we would - realize that life is quite long enough. If we are tlje children of God. we are at a banquet, and this world is only the first course of the food, and we ought to be glad that there are other and better and richer courses of food to be handed on. We are here in one room of our Father’s house, but there are rooms upstairs. They are better pictured, better upholstered, better furnished. Why do we want to stay in the ante-rc?m forever, when there are better apartments waiting for our .occupancy ? What a mercy that there is a limitation to earthly environments? Death also makes room for improved physical machinery. Our bodies have wondrous powers, Jbut they are very limited. There are beasts that can outrun us, outlift us, eutcarry us. The birds have both the earth and the air for travel, yet wc must stick to the one. In this world, which the human race takes for its own, there are creatures of God dia| can far surpass us in some things. Death removes this slower and Tess adroit machineryand makes rooiq for something better. These eyes that can see half a mile will be removed for those that can see from world to world. These ears that can hear a sound a few feet off will be removed for ears that can hear from zone to zone. These feetVill be removed for powers of locomotion swifter than the reindeer’s hoof, or the eagle’s plume, or the lightning's flash. Then we have only five Senses, and to these we are shut up. Why only five senses? Why not fifty, why not a hundred, why not a thousand? We can have, and we will have them, but not until this present physical machinery is put out ofthe way. not think that this body is the best that God can do fpr us. God did not half try when He contrived your bodily mechanism. Mind you, I believe with all anatomists and all physiologists and all scientists and with the Psalmist that “we are wonderfully and fearfully made.” But I believe and know that God can and trill get us better physical equipment. Is it possible tor man to make improvements in almost anything ana God not be able to make improvements in man’s physical machinery. Shall a canal boat gtv.

way to a limited express train? Shall slow letters give place to telegraphy, thatplaces San Francisco and New York within a minute .pf communication? Shall the telephone take the sound of a voice sixty miles and instantly bring back another voice* and God who made the man who ddes these things not be able to improve the man himself with infinite velocities and infinite multiplication? Beneficient death comes in and makes the removal to make way for these supernatural improvements. So also our slow process of getting information must have a substitute. Through prolonged study we learned the alphabet, and then we ‘ learned to spell, and then we learned to read. Then the book is put before us, and the eye travels from word to word and • from page to page, and we take whole days to read the book, and, if from that book of 400 or 500 pages we have gained one or two profitable ideas,, we feel we have done well. There must be some swifter way and more satisfactory way of taking in God’s universe of thoughts and facts and emotions and information. But this can not be done with your brain in its present state. Many a brain gives way under the present facility. This whitish mass in the upper cavity of the skull and at the extremity of the nervops system —this center of perception and sensation can not endure more than it now endures. But God can make better brains, and he sends death to remove this inferior brain that he may put in a superior brain. •‘Well,” you say, “does that not destroy the idea of the resurrection of the present body?” Oh, no.' It will be the old factory with new machinery, new driving wheels, new bands, new levers and new powers. Doit’t you see? *So I suppose the dullest human brain after the resurrectipnary process will have more knowledge, more acuteness, more brilliancy, more breadth of swing than any" Sir William Hamilton or Herchel or Isaac Newton or Agassiz ever had in the-mortal state or all their intellectual powers combined. You see God has only just begun to build you. The palace of your nature has only the foundation laid, and part of the lower story,and only part of one window but the architect has made his draft of what you will be when the Alhambra is completed. John wss right when he said: “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” Blessed be death! for it removes all hindrances. And who has not all his life run against hindrances? Wc can not go far up or far down. If we go far up we get dizzy, and if we go far down we get suffocated. If men would go high up they ascend the Matterhorn or Mont Blanc or Himalaya, but what disasters have been reported as they came tumbling down, Or f if they went do wit’too far, hark to the explosion of the fire damps, and see the disfigured bodies of the poor miners' at the bottom of the coal shaft. Then there are the climatological hindrances. We run against unpropitious weather of all sorts. Winter blizzard and summer scorch, and each season seems to hatch a brood of its own disorders. The summer spreads its wings and hatches out fevers and sun strokes, and spring and autumn spread their wings and hatch out malarias, and winter spreads its wings and hatches out pneumonia and Russian grips, and the climate of this world is a hindrance which every man and woman and child has felt. Death is to the good transference to superior weather; weather never fickle, and nevei' too cold and never too hot and never too light and never too dark. Have you any doubt that God can make better weather than is characteristic of this planet? Blessed is death! for it prepares the way for change of zones. Yea, it clears the path to a semi-omnipresence. Now, if death clears the way for all this, why paint him as a hobgoblin? Why call him the King of Terrors? Why think of him as a great spook? Why sketch him with skeleton and arrows, and standing on a bank of dark waters? Why are children so frightened at his name that they dare not go to bed alose, and old men have their teeth chatter lest some shortness of breath hand them over to the monster? All the ages have been busy in maligning death, hurling repulsive metaphors at death, slandering death. Oh, for the sweet breath of Easter to come down on the earth! Right after the vernal equinox, and when the flowers are beginning to bloom, well may all Nations with song and congratulation and garlands celebrate the resurrection of Christ and our own resurrection when the time has gone by, and the trumpets pour through the flying clouds the harmonies that shall wake the dead. By the empty niche of Joseph’s mausoleum, by the rocks that parted to let/the Rord come through, let our ideas of changing worlds be forever revolutionized. If what I have been saying is true, how differenily we ought to think of our friends departed. The body th.ey have put off is only as when entering a hall lighted and resounding with music you leave your hat and cloak in the oloak-room. What would a banqueter do if he had to carry these incumbrances Of apparel with him into the brilliant reception? What would your departed do with their bodies if they had to be encumbered with them in the King’s drawingroom? Gone into the light! Gono into the mnsicl Gone in to the festival! Gone among kings and queens and conquerors! Oh, bow many of them have got together again! - Your father and mother went years apsrt, but they have got together* and their childrep that went years ago got together again. Gone where they have more .... A r \ ~.u

room! Gone where they have more jubilant society! Gone where they have mightier capacity to love ypu than when they were here! Gone ouj of hindrances intounbounded liberty! Gone out of January into Jutfe! Gone where they talk about you as we always talk about absent friends. Further,if what I have been saying is true, we should trust the Lord and be thrilled with the fact that our own day of escape cometh. If our lives were going to end when our heart ceased to pulsate and our lungs to breathe, T would want to take 10,000,000 years of life here for the first installment. 1 BuL: my Christian friends, we can not afford always to stay down in the cellar of our Father s house. We cannot always be postponing the best things. We cannoj; always be tuning our violins for the celestial orchestra. We must get our wings out. We jnust mount. We cannot afford always to stand out here in the vestibule of the house of many mansions, while the windows are illuminated with the levee- angelic and we can hear the laughter of those forever free, and the ground quakes with the bounding feet of those who have entered upon eternal play. Ushers of heaven! Open the gates! Swing them clear back on their pearly hinges! Let the celestial music,rain on us its cadences. Let the hanging gardens of the King breathe on us their aromas. Let our redeemed ones just look out and give us one glance of their glorified faces. All these thoughts are suggested as we stand this Easter morn among the broken rocks of the Savior’s tomb. Indeed, I know that tomb has not been rebuilt, for 1 stood in December of 1889 amid the ruins of that, the most famous sepulcher of all time. .- -

There are thousands of tombs in our Greenwood and Laurel Hill and Mount Auburn with more polished stone and more elaborate masonry and more foliaged surroundings, but' as I went down the steps of the sup posed tomb of Christ on my return from Mount Calvary I said to myself, “This is the tomb of all tombs. Around this stand more stupendous incidents than around any grave of all the wdrld since death entered it.” I could not breathe easily for overmastering emotion as I walked down the four crumbling steps till we came abreast of the niche -in which I think Christ was buried. I measured the sepulcher and found it was fourteen and a half feet long, eight feet high, nine feet wide. It is a family tomb, and seems to have been built to hold five bodies. But I rejoice to say that the tomb" was empty, and thedoor of the rock was gone, and the light streamed in. The day that Christ rose and came forth the sepulcher was demolished forever, and no trowel of earthly rriasonry can ever rebuild it. And the rupture of those rocks, and tbo snap of that government seal, ar I the crash pf those walls of lime§t. ie,and the step of the lacerated bui t riumphant foot of the risen Jesus we to day celebrate with acclaim of -worshipping thou-' sands? while, with all the nations of Chr is tendom and all the sb ining hosts of heaven, we chant; “Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the fi rs t fru its ofthem that slept.”