Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 January 1893 — DIVINE ORNITHOLOGY. [ARTICLE]

DIVINE ORNITHOLOGY.

“0a the "Wings of the Horning.” “Behold the Fowls of the Air” and the teooni They Teach—Bird* In the \ n Scriptures—Dr. Talmage* Bery DOB. y. ‘Talmage preached at Brooklyn last Sunday. Subject: “Ornithology of the Bible; or God Among the Birds.” Text; Matt, vi; 26“Behold the fowls of the air.” He said: There is silence now in all our January forests, except as the winds whistle through the bare branches. Our northern woods are deserted concert halls. The organ lofts in the temple of nature are hymnless. Trees which were full of carol and chirp and chant are now waiting for the coming baek of rich plumes and warbling voices, solos, duets, quartets, cantatas and Te Deums. But the Bible is full of birds at all seasons, and prophets and patriachs and apostles and evangelists and Christ himself employ them for moral and religious purposes. Most of the other sciences you may study or not study as you please. Use your own judgment; exercise your own taste. But about this science of ornithology we have no option. The divine command is positive when it says in my text, “Behold the fowls of the air!” Their nests have been to me a fasination, and my satisfaction - is that I never robbed one of thpm, any more than I would steal a child from a cradle, for a bird is a child of the sky, and its nest is the cradle. They are almost human, for they have their loves and hates, affinities and antipathies, understand joy and jjrief, have conjugal and maternal | instinct, wage wars and entertian I jealousies, have a language of their I own, and powers of association. The i dove, the robin, the eagle, the cormorant, or plunging bird, hurling itself from sky to wave s and with long beak clutching its prey; the thrush, which especially dislikes a crowd; the partridge; the hawk, bold and ruthless, hoverirtg head to windward while watching for prey; the swan, at home among the marshes and with feet so constructed It can walk on' the leaves ’of water plants; the raven, the lap wing, malodorous, and in the Bible denounced os inedible, though it has extraordinary headdress; the stork, the ossit.hn.t. aJwfliYS had a habit- of dropping on a stone the turtle it had lifted and so killing it for food, and Dn one occasion mistook the bald head of iEchylus, the Greek poet, for a white stone and dropped a turtle upon it, killing the famous Greek;

r —; ——— the cuckoo, with crested head and crimson throat and wings snow tipped, but too lazy to build its own aest and so having the habit of depositing its eggs m nests belonging ,to other birds; the blue jay, the : grouse, the plover, the magpie, the Kingfisher, the pelican, which is the caricature of all the featherd creation; the owl, the goldfinch, the bittern, the harrier, the bulbul, the Dsprey, the vulture, that king of Scavengers, with neck covered with repulsive down instead of attractive feathers; the quarrelsome starling, the swallow, flying a mile a minute and sometimes ten hours in succession; the heron, the quail, the peacock, the ostrich, the lark, the crow, the kite, the bat, the blackbird and many others, with all colors, all sounds, all styles of flight, all habits, all architecture of. nests, leaving nothing wanting in suggestiveness. David, with Saul after him and Hying from cavern to cavern, compares himself to a desert partridge, a bird which especially haunts rocky places, and boys and hunters to this Hay take after it with sticks, for the partridge runs rather than flies. Hezekiah, in the emaciation of his sickness, compares himself to a crane, thin and wasted. Job had so much trouble he could not sleep nights, and he describes his insomnia by saying, “I am a companion to owls. ’ Isaiah compares the desolations of banished Israel to an owl and bittern and cormorant among a city’s ruins. Jeremiah, describing the cruelty of parents toward children, compares them to the ostrich, who leaves its eggs in the sand uncared for, crying, “The daughter of my people is become like the ostriches of the wilderness.” Among the provisions piled on Solomon’s bountiful table the Bible speaks of “fatted fowl.” The Israelites in the desert got tired of manna and they had quails quails for breakfast, quails for dinner, quails for supper, and they died of quails. Would the prophet illustrate the fate of the fraud, he points to a failure at incubation and says, “As a partridge sitteth on eggs and natcheth them not, so he that gettetb riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days and at his end shall be a fool.” But from the top of the Bible fir tree I hear the shnll cry of the stork. Job, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, speak of it David cries out, “As for the stork, the fir tree is her house.” This large white Bible bird is supposed, without alighting, sometimes to wing its way from the region of the Rhine to Africa. But yonder in this Bible sky flies a bird that is speckled. The prophet describing the church, cries out, “Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird; The birds round about are against her.” So it was then; so it is now. Holiness picked at. Consecration picked at. Benevolence picked at. Usefulness picked at. A speckled bird is a peculiar blriL and that arouses the antipathy of all the beaks of the forest. The church of God is a peculiar institution, and that is enough to evoke at-

tack of the world, for it l speckled bird to be picked at The inconsistencies of Christians an a btaquet on which multitedes get fat They ascribed everything you do to wrong motives. In migrating, the old storks lean their necks on the young storks, and when the old ones give dnt the young ones carry them on their backs. God forbid that a dumb stork should have more heart than we. 7 But we cannot stop tore. From a tall cliff, hanging over the sea, I hear the eagle calling unto the tempest and lifting its wing to smite the whirlwind, Moses, Jeremiah. Hosea and Habakkuk at times in tbeir writings take their pen from the eagle’s wing. God compares his treatment of his people to the eagle's care of the eaglets. Deuteronomy xxxii, 11, “As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreading abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings, wr the Lord alone did lead.” You whb are complaining that you have no faith or courage oil. Christian seal have had it too easy. You never will learn to fly in that comfortable nest. jLiiKe tin GftP* - ried us on his back. At times we have been shaken off, and we were about to fall he came under us again, and brought us out of the gloomy valley to the sunny mountain. Never an eagle brooded with such love and care over her young as God’s wings have been over us. When our time on earth is closed, on these great wings of God we shall speed with infinite quickness from earth’s mountains to heaven’s hills, and as from the eagle’s circuit under tne sun men on the ground seem small and insignificant as lizards on a rock, so all earthly things shall dwindle into a speck, and tne raging river of death so far beneath will seem smooth and glassy as a Swiss lake. The speed of a hungry eagle when it saw its prey a score of miles distant was unimaginable. It went like a thunderbolt for speed and bower. So fly our days. Sixty minutes, each worth a heaven, since we assembled in this place, have shot like lightning into eternity. The old earth is rent and cracked under tne swift rush of days and months and years and ages. “Swift as an eagle that hasteth to its prey.” Over flffy times does the old Book allude to the wing—“ Wings of a dove,” “Wings of the morning,” “Wings of the wind,’’“Son of righteousness with healing in wings,” of every wing.” rniat does it all mean? It suggests uplifting. It tells you of flight upward. It reminds you that you yourself have wings. David cried out, *‘Oh, that I had wings like a dove that I might fly away and be at rest!” Thank God that you have better wings than any dove of longest of swiftest flight. Caged now in bars as flesh are those wings, but the day comes when they will be liberated. Get ready for as-, tension.

Up out of these lowlands into the heavens of higher experience and wider prospect. But how shall we rise?, .Only as God’s holy spirit gives us strength. But that is Coming now. Not as a condor from a Chimborazo peak, swooping upon the affrighted valley, but as a dove like that which put its soft brown wings over the wet locks of Christ at the baptism in Jordan. Dove of gentleness! Dove of peace! But what a senseless passage of Scripture that is until you know the fact, which says, “The sparrow hath found a house and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my king and my God.” What has the swallow to do with the altars of the temple at Jerusalem? Ah,you know that swallows are all the world over very tame, and in summer time used to fly into the windows and doors of the temple at Jerusalem and build a nest on the altar where the priests were offering sacrifices. Yes, m this ornithology of the Bible I find that God is determined to imEress upon us the architecture of a ird’s nest and the anatomy of a bird’s wing. Twenty times does the Bible refer to a bird’s nest: “Where the birds make their -nest,” “As a bird that wandereth from her nest” —“Though thou set the nest among the stars,” “The birds of the air have their nests,” and so on. What carpenters, what masons, what weavers, what spinners the birds are! Out of what small resources they make so exquisite a home,curved, pillared, wreathed. Out of mosses, out of sticks, out of Hciens, out of horsehair, out of spiders' wed, out. of threads swept from the door by the housewife, out of the wool of the sheep in the pasture field. Upholstered by leaves actually sewed together by its own sharp bill. Cushioned with feathers from its own breast. Mortared together with the gum of tress and the saliva of its own tiny bill. Such symmetry, such adaptation, such such geometry of structure. Yea, Christian geology for you know there is a Christian geology as well as an infidel geology-—Christian geology comes in and helps the Bible show what we owe to the bird creation. Before the human race came into this world the world was occupied by reptiles and by all styles of destructive monsters millions of creatures loathsome and hideous. God sent huge birds to clear the earth of these creatures before Adam and Eve were created. The remains of these birds have been found imbedded in the rocks. How should Noah, the old ship carpenter, find out when the world was fit again for human residence after, the universal freshet? A bird will tell, and nothing else can. „ 0 •; -v*