Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1893 — REMINISCENT. [ARTICLE]

REMINISCENT.

Twenty - Fourth Anniversary of Dr.Talmage’s PaatorateThe Brooklyn Pastor Explains the Financial Standing of the , . ■' ■———. Tabernacle. Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, last Sunday. The occasion was an unusually interesting one, .and the great audience waft- visibly impressed during the services. Over the pulpit in flowers were the figures “1869” and “1893.” The text was Revelation iv, 4, “And round about the throne were four and twenty seats, and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders.” This text I choose chiefly for the numerals it mentions—namely, four and twenty. That was the number of elders seated around the throne of God. — But that is the number of

years seated around my Brooklyn ministry, and every pulpit is' a throne of blessing or blasting, a fchrone of good or evil. And to-day, in this, my twenty-fourth anniversary sermon, twenty-four years come and sit around me, and they speak qut in a reminiscence of gladness and tears. Twenty-four years ago I arrived in this city to shepherd such a flock as might cane, ana that day I carried in on my arms the infant son who, in two weeks from to-day, I will help ordain to the gospel ministry, hoping that he will be preaching iong after my poor work is done. We have received into our membership over 5,000 souls, but they, I think, are only a small-portion of the multitudes who, coming from all parts of the earth, have in our house ■>f God been blest and saved. Although we have as a church raised $1,100,000 for religious purposes, yet we are in the strange position of not knowing whether in two or three months we shall have any church at ill, and with audiences of 6.000 or 7,000 people crowded into this room >r the adjoining rooms we are conronted with the question whether I shall go on with my work here or go to some other field. What an Mwfnl necessity that we should have been obliged to build three immense churches, two of them destroyed by are!

A misapprehension is abroad that the financial exigency of this church s past. Through journalistic and personal friends a breathing spell has been afforded us. but before us yet are financial obligations which must promptly be met, or speedily this house of God will go into worldly uses and become a theater or a concert hall. The $12,000 raised cannot •ancel a floating debt of $140,000. Through the kindness of those to whom we are indebted $60,000 would set us forever free. I am glad to say that the case is not hopeless. We are daiiy in receipt of touching evidences of practical sympathy Torn all classes of the community ind from all sections of the country, and it was but yesterday that by my own hand I sent, for. contributions gratefully reoe ved, nearly fifty acknowledgments east, west, north and south. In this city I have been permitted to have twenty-fc ur years of pastorate. During these years how many heartbreaks, how many losses, how many bereavements! Hardly a family of the church that has not been struck with sorrow, but God has sustained you in the past, and he will sustain you in the future. I exhort you to be of good cheer, G thou of the broken heart. “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy Cometh in the morning.” I wish over every door of this church we might have written the word “Sympathy” —sympathy for all the young. We must crowd them in here by thousands and propose a., radiant gospel that will take on the spot. We must make this place so attractive for the young that a young man will come here on Sabbath morning, put down his hat, brush his hair back from his forehead, unbutton his overcoat and l<sok around wondering if he is not, by mistaice got into heaven. He will see in the faces of the old people, not the gloom which some people take for religion, but the sunshine of celestial peace, and he will say, “Why I wonder if that isn’t the same peace that shone out on the face of my father and mother when they lav dying?” And then there "will come a dampness in his eyes through which he can hardly see, and he will close his eyes to imprison the emotion, but tn& hot tear will break through the fringes of eyelashes and drop upon the coat sleeve. He will put his head on the back of the pew in front and sob, “Lord God of the old people, help me 1" We ought to lay a plot here for the religious capture of all the young people in Brooklyn. Yes, sympathy for the old. They have their aches and pains and distresses. They cannot hear or walk or see as well as thev used to. We must be reverential ih their presence. On dark days we must help them through the aisle and help them find the place in thehymnbook. Some Sabbath morning we shall miss them from their place, and we shall say, “Where is Father So-and-so to-day r" and the answer will be: “What, haven’t you heard? The King’s wagons have taken Jacob up to the palace where Joseph is yet alive.” Sympathy for business, men. Twenty-four years of commercial life in New York and Brooklyn are enough to tear one's nerves to Eieces. We want to make our Sabath service here a rescue for all these martyrs of traffic, a foretaste

of that land where they have no rents to pay, and there are no business rivalries, and where riches, instead of taking wings to fly away, brood over other riches. Sympathy for the fallen, remembenng that they ought to"‘be ‘pitied" as much as a man rim over with a rail train. The fact is that in the temptations and misfortunes of life they get run over. You and I in the same circumstances would have done as badly; we should have done worse perhaps. If vou and I had the same evil surroundings and the same evil parentage that they had and the same native born proclivities to evil that they had, you and I should have been in the penitentiary or outcasts., of society. “No,” says some seif righteous man, “I couldn’t have been overthrown in that way.” You old hypocrite, you would have been the first to fall! We want in this church to have sympathy for the worst man, remembering he is a brother; sympathy 4qr -the worst woman, remembering she is a sister. If that is not the gospel, I do not know what the gospel is. Let it thrill in every sermorn -Let it tremble in every song. * Let it gleam in every tear and in every light. Sympathy! Men and women are sighing for sympathy, groaning for sympathy, dying for sympathy, tumbling off into uncleanliness and crime and perdition for lack of sympathy. May God give it to us! Fill all this pulpit with it from step to step. Let the sweep of these galleries suggest its encircling arms. Fill all the house with it from door to door and from floor to ceiling, until there is no more room for it, and it shall overflow into the street, and passersby on foot and in carriage shall feel the throb of its magnificent benediction. I must, in gratitude to God, also mention the multitudes to whom I have been permitted to preach. It is simply miraculous, the attendance morning by morning, night by night and year by year and long after it has got to be an old story. I know some people are dainty and exclusive in their tastes. As for myself I like a big crowd. I would like to see an audience large enough to scare me. If this gospel is good, the more that get it the better. : —— — During these twenty-four years there is hardly a family that has not been invaded by sorrow or death. Where are those grand old men, those glorious Christian women, who used to worship with us? Why, they went away into the next world so gradually that they had concluded the second stanza or the third stanza in heaven before you knew they were gone. They had on the crown before you thought they had dropped the staff of the earthly pilgrimage. And then the dear children! Oh, how many have gone out of this church! You could not keep them. You folded them in your arms and said, “O God, I cannot give them up; take all else —take my property, take my reputation —but let me keep this treasure. Lord, I cannot bear this. ” Oh, if we could all die together; if we could keep all the sheep and the lambs of the family fold together until some bright spring day, the birds a-chant and the waters a-glitter, and then we could altogether hear the voice of the good Shepherd and hand in hand pass through the flood. No, no, no, no! Oh, if we only had notice that we are all to depart together, and we could say to our families: “The time has come. The Lord bids away.” And then we could take our little children to their limbs and say: “Now, sleep the last sleep. Good night, until it is good morning.” And then we could go to our own couches and say: “Now, altogether we are ready to go. Our children are gone; now let us depart.” No no! It is one by one. It may be in the midnight. It may be in the winter, and in the snow coming down twenty inches deep over our grave. It may be in the strange hotel and our arm too weak to pull the bell for help. It may be so suddenly we have no time even to say good-by. Death is a bitter, crushing tremendous curse. When a woman was dying, she said, “Call them back.” They did not know what she meant. She had been a disciple of the world. She said, “Oh, call them back!” They said, “Who do you want us to call back?” “Oh,” she said, “call them back, the days, the months, the years, I have wasted. Call them back!” But you cannot call them back. You cannot call a year back, or a month, or a week back, or an hour back, or a second back. Gone once, it is gone forever. Roll on, sweet day of the world’s emancipation, when “the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the wood shall clap their hands, and instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier will come up the myrtle tree, and it shall be unto the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that cannot be cut off. ’’