Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 October 1892 — HALF A PLANEI. [ARTICLE]

HALF A PLANEI.

Memorial Sermon by tbe Rev. Dr. Talmage. Dl*ro»»ry of America a Remarkable •ad RaUgioaa Dlic«r«rf. Fraught With Lwwnt of Lullat Boaeßt. Rev. Dr. Talmage's discourse Sunday was occasioned by tbe Columbus observance now taking place. The subject was “Half a Planet,” the text being Deuteronomy iii, 27, Lift up thine eyes westward.” He said: - \ So God said to Moses in Bible times, and so he said to Christofpro Columbo, the 6on of a wool comber ofGenoa, more than four hundred years ago. The nations bad been looking chieffy toward the east. The sculpture of the world the architecture of the world, the laws of the world, the philosophy of the world, the civilization of the world, the religion of the world came from the east.

But while Columbus, as his name was called after it was Latinized, stood studying maps and examining globes and reading cosmography, God said to big). “Lift up thine eyes toward the west.” The fact vriis it must have, seemed -to Columbus u very lopsided world—like a cart with one wheel, like a scissors with one blade, like a sack on one side of a camel, needing a sack on the other side to balance it. Here was a bride of a world with no bridegroom. When God makq6 a half of anything he does not stop there. He makes the other half. We are all obliged sometimes to leave things only half done. But God never stops half way, because he has tho time and tbe power to go all the way. I do’ not wonder that Columbus was not satisfied with half a world* aud so went to work to find the other half. The pieces of carved wood that was floated to the shores of Europe by a westerly gale, and two dead human faces, unlike anything he had seen before;;' likewise floated from the west, were to him the voice of God saying, “Lift up thine eves toward the west.” But the world then as now, had plenty of Can’t-be-dones. That is what keeps individuals back, and enterprise^back, and ti»e church back, and nations back—ignominious and disgusting and disheartening Can’tibe-dones. Old navigators said to young Columbus, “It can’t be done. ” AlphOnso V said, “It can't be done.” A committee on maratime affairs, to whom the subject was submitted, declared, “It can’t be done.” Venetians said, “It can't be done." But the father of Columbus' wife died, leaving his widow a large number of sea charts and maps, and as if to condemn the slur that different ages put upon motbers-in-law, the mother-in-law of Columbus gave him the navigator’s materials out of which he ciphered America. After awhile the story of this poor but ambitious Columbus reaches the ear of Queen Isabella, and she pays eightydollars to buy him a decent suit of clothes, so that he may be fit to appear before royalty. The interview in the palace was successful. Money enough was borrowed to fit out the expedion. There they are, the three ships, in the Guif of Cadiz, Spain. If you ask me which have been the most famous boats of the world, I would say, first, Noah’s ship, that wharfed on Mt. Ararrat; second, the boat of bulrushes in which Moses floated on the Nile; third, the Mayflower, that put out from Plymouth with the Pilgrim Fathers, and now these three vessels that on this Friday morning, Aug. 3, 1492, are rocking on the ripples.

For sixteen days the wind is dead cast, and that pleases the captaiu because it blows them farther and farther away from the European coast and nearer to the shores of another country, if there is any. Friday morning, Oct. 12, 1492, a gun from the Pinta signalled “land ahead." Then the ships lav to and the boats were lowered, and Christopher Columbus first stepped upon the shore amid the song of birds and the air a surge of redolence and took possession in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost. So the voyage that began with the sacrament ended with “Gloria iu Excelsis Deo." From that day onward you say these can be nothing for Columbus but honors, rewards, rhapsodies, palaces and world wide applause. No! no! Honors awaited him on the beach, but he undertook a second voyage, and with it came all malingning and persecution and denunciation and poverty.

He was called a land grabber, a liar, a cheat, a fraud, a deceiver of nations. Speculators robbed him of his good name, courtiers depreciat ed his discoveries, and there came to him ruined health and imprisonment and chains, of which he saidwhile he rattled them on his wrists, “I will wear them os a memento of the gratitude of princes." Amid keen appreciation of the world’s, abuse and cruelty, and with l>ody writhing in the tortures of goitt, he groaned out his last words, “Iu munus tuas Domino commcndo spiritum meutn"—“lnto thy hands, O Lord. I commend my spirit." But death, that brings quiet to the body of others, did not bring quiet to his. First buried in the church of Santa Maria. Seven years afterward removed to Seville. Twenty-three years afterward removed to San Domingo. Finally removed to Cuba. Four postmortem jouruevs from sepulcher to sepulcher. I wish his bones might be moved just once more aud now that they have come so near to America as Cuba they might during the great Columbian year be transported to our own shores, where they belong, and that in the fifth ceutury after his decease the Americau continent might build a mausoleum worthy of him who pick ed this jewel of a hemisphere out of the sea and set it in the crown of the world's geography. What most impresses me in all that wondrous life, which for the next twelve months we will be commemorating by sermon and song and military parade, and World's Fair, and congress of nations, is sonae'wi***'*•■• ngv-Tif- 4

] thine I have never heard stated, and } that ts that the discover? of America was a religious discovery **£ in the name of God. Columbus, by the study of the prophecies/and by what Zechariah and Mieah and David and Isaiah had said about the ‘‘ends of the earth, ” was persuaded to go out and find the “ends of the.earth, ” and he felt himself culled by God to carry Christianity to the “ ends of the earth. " Then the administration of the last supper before they left the Gulf of Cadiz, and the evening pray ere during the voyage, add the devout ascription as soon as they saw the New World, and the doxologies with which they landed, confirm me iu skying that the discovery of America was a' religious discovery, ■» . Atheism has no right here: infidelitv has no right here ; vagabondism iias no right here. A divine influence will yet sweep the continent that will make iniquity drop like slacked lime, and make the most blatant infidelity declare it was only joking when it said the Bible was not true, and the worst atheism announce that it always did believe in the God of nations. The great Italian navigator also impresses me with the idea that when one does a good thing he can not appreciate its ramifications. To the moment of his death Columbus never knew that he had discovered America, but thought that Cuba was a part of Asia. He thought the islaud Hispaniola was the Ophir of Solomon. He thought he had only opened a new way to old Asia. He had no idea that the time would come when a nation of sixty million people on this side of the sea would be joined by all the intelligent nations on the other side of the sea for the most part of a year reciting his wonderful deeds. It took centuries to reveal the result of that one transatlantic voyage- So it has always been. Could Paul on that June day when he was decapitated have had any idea of what effect his letters uu account of his life would have on Christendom? Could Martin Luther have had any idea of the echoes that would ring through the ages from the bang of his hammer nailing the Latin theses agulnst a church door at. Wittenberg? Could Eli Whitney have realised the continents of wealth that would be added to the South by the invention of his c6ttdtt- ii gin? Could John Gutenberg, toiling year after year making type and laboriously setting them side by side, with the presses changed now this way and now that, and sued by John Faust for money loaned, and many of the people trying bo cheat Gutenberg out of his invention, and he toiling on until he produced what is known as the Mazariu Bible, have any idea that as a result of his invention there would be libraries that placed side by side would again and again encircle the earth, or the showers of newspapers that snow the world under? . When Manhattan Island was sold to the Dutch for twenty-four dollars neither those who sold or bought could have foreseen New York, the commercial metropolis of America, that now stands on it. Can a man who preaches a sermon, or aAvoman who distributes tracts, or a teacher who instructs a class, or a passerby who utters encouraging words realize the infinitudes of useful result.? The teacher ut Harrow school who toiled with William Jones, the most stupid bo3 r iu the school and at the foot of the class, did not know that lie ;was fitting f or his work the greatest oriental scholar of modern times, his statue now in St Pauls cathedral, London. Every move vou make for God, however insignificient in your own eyes or in the eves of others, touches worlds larger than the one Columbus discovered. Why talk about unimportant things? There aye no unimportant things. Infinity is made up of infinitesma's. Ou a clear night the smallest dewdrop holds a star. Each one of you is at the center of a universe in all directions. I promise everlasting renown to those who will go forth with Christian and sympathetic words.

Another look at the career of the admiral of the Santa Maria persuades me that it is not expected that this will dp its world bard justice, If any man ought to have been treated well from first to last it was Columbus, lie bad his faults. Let others depict them. But a greater soul the centuries have not produced. This continent ought to have been named Columbus, after the hero who discovered it, or Isabclliaua, the queen who furnished the means for the expedition. No. The world did not do him justice while he was aliveand why should it be expected to do him justice after he is dead? Columbus in a dungeon! What a thought! Columbus in irons! What a spectacle! CD In one of the last lettters which Columbus sent to his son, lie wrote this lamentation: “I receive nothing of the revenue due me. I live by

borrowing. Little have I profited by twenty years of service with such toils and perils, since at present I do uot own a roof in Spain. ' If I desire to eat or sleep. I nave no recourse but the inn, and for the most times have uot therewithal to pay my bill." Be not surprised, my hearer, if you suffer injustice. You are in the best of company—the men and women who wrought mightily for God and the world's improvement, and got for it chiefly misrepeSentatiou and nbuse while they lived, although afterward they may have had a long row of carriages at the obsequies and a gilt edged set of resolutions unanimously luiopted for the consolation of the bereft household. Do your full duty, expecting no appreciation in this world, but full reward in the world to come. Let us be sure that we have the right pilot, the right chart, and the 1 right captain and that we start in the right direction. It will be to each of us who love the Lord a voyage more wonderful for discovery than that which Columbus took, for after all we htfve heard about that other world we know not where it ir or how it looks and it will be as new as San Salvador was to the glorious captain of the Santa Maria. “Eye