Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 June 1893 — “FAIR CANAAN.” [ARTICLE]

“FAIR CANAAN.”

Grapes From Beyond the Brook of Eschol. Typical of t*»e Hopes and Prospects of the Gospel Plan-Dr. Talmage's Sermon. Dr. Talmage preached at Brook- - lyn last Sunday. Subject: “Grapes From Canaan,” and the text, Numbers xiii, 23, “And they came unto the brook of Eschol and cut down from thence a branch with one cl us ter of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.” He said: The long trudge of the Iraelitos across the wilderness was almost ended. They had come to the borders of the promised land. Of the 600,000 adults who started from Egypt for Canaan, how many do you suppose got there? Five hundred thousand/-- Oh, no. Not 200,000, pot 100,000, nor fifty, nor twenty, nor ten, but only .two. men. Oh, it was a ruinous march that God’s people made, but their children were; they were on the inarch. and now that they had come up to the borders of the promised land they were very curious to know wha t kind of a place it was, and whether it would be safe to go over. So a scouting party is sent out to reconnoiter, and they examine the land, and they come back bringing specimens of its growth. Strabo states that in Bible times and in Bible lands there were grapevines so large that it took two men with outstretched ~ arms‘to reachround them, and he says there were clusters two cubics in length, or twice the length from the elbow to the tip of the long linger. And Achaicus. dwelling in those lands, tells us that during the time he was smitten with fever would slake his thirst for the whole day. But this morning I bring you a larger cluster from the heavenly Eschol—a cluster of hopes, a cluster of prospects, a cluster of Christian consolations, and" I am expecting that one taste of it will rouse up your appetite for the the heavenly Canaan. First, I console you with the divinely sanctioned idea that your departed friends are as much yours now as they ever were. I know you sometimes get the idea in your mind, when you have this kind of trouble, that yoiir friends are cut off from you and they are no longer yours. Oh, it is a consolation to feel that when men come and with solemn tread carry you out to your resting place they will open the gate through which some of your friends have already gone and through which many of your friends will follow. Sleeping under the same roof, at last sleeping under the same sod. The autumnal leaves that drift across your grave will drift across theirs, the bird songs that drop on their mound will drop on yours, and then in the starless winter nights, when the wind comes howling through the gorge, you will be company for each other. The. child close up to the bosom of its mother; the husband and wife remarried; on their lips the sacrament of-the dust.

Brothers and sisters who used in sport to fling themselves on the grass now" again reclining side by side in the grave, in flecks of sunlight sifting through the long, lithe’ willows. Then at the trumpet of the archangel to rise side by side, shaking themselves fi-om the dust of ages. The faces that were ghastly and fixed when you saw them last ail aflush with the light of in corruption. The father looking around on his children and saying, “Come, come, my darlings, this is the morning of the resurrection.” But I console you again with the fact of your present acquaintanceship and communication with vour departed friends. I have no sympathy, I need not say, with the ideas of modern spiritualism, but what I mean is the theory set forth by the apostle, when he says, “We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.” Justus in the ancient amphitheater there were 80,000 or 100, - 000 people looking down from the galleries upon the combatants in the center, so, says Paul, there is a great host of your friends in all the galleries of the skv looking down upon our earthly straggles. Perhaps during the last war you had a boy in the army, and you got a pass, and you went through the lines, and found him, and the regiment coming from your neighborhood you knew most of the boys there. One day you started for home. You said: “Well, now, have you any letters to send? Any message to send?” And they filled your pockets with letters and you started home. Arriving home the neighbors came in, and one said,

“Did you see my John?” and others, “Did you see George?” “Do you know anything about my Frank?” And then you brought out the letters: and gave them the messages of which you had been the bearer. Do you suppose that angels of God, coming down to this awful battlefield of sin and sorrow and death and meeting us and seeing us and finding out all about us, carry back no Message to the skies? You ask me a great many questions I cannot answer about this resurrection. You say, for instance, “If a man’s bpdy is ' constantly changing, and every seventh year he has an entirely new body, and he lives on to seventy years of age, and so has had ten different bodies, and at the hour of his death there is not a particle of flesh on him that was there in the days of his childhood—in tho resurrection which of the ten bodies will come up, or will they all rise?" • ‘ . You say, “Suppose a man dies, and his body is scattered in the dust,

and out of that dust vegetables grow, and men eat the vegetables, and ean nibals slay these men and eat them, anA cannibals fight with cannibals Until at last there shall lie 100 men who shall have within them some particles that started from the dead body first named, coming up through the vegetable through the first man who ate it, and through the cannibals who afterward ate him, and there be more than 100 men who have rights in the -particles of that body—in the resurrection how can they be assorted when these particles helnagtothemaU?'’ You say, “There is a missionary buried in Greenwood, and when he was in China he had his arm amputated—in the resurrection will that fragment of the body fly 10,000 miles to join the rest of the body-?” You sav, “Will it not be a very difficult thing for a spirit coming back in that- day to find the myriad particles of its own body when they may have been scattered by the winds or overlaid by whole generations of the dead —looking for the myriad particles of its own body, while there a thousand million other spirits doing the same thing, and all the assortment to be made within one day?” You say, “If a hundred and fifty men go into a place of evening en-, tertainment and leave their hats and ; overcoats in the tjall, when they come back it is almost impossible for them to get the right ones, or to get them without a great deal of perplexity, and yet you tell me that -myriads of spirits in the last day will come and find myriads of bodies. Have you any more questions to ask. any more difficulties to -any more mysteries? Bring them on! Against a whole regiment of skepticism I will march these two champions: “Marvel not at this, for the hour Is coining when all who are in their graves shall home forth.” “The Lord shall descend from heaven with a shout, and the voice of the archangel, and the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first.” You sec I stick to these two passages. Who art thou, O fool, that thou repliest against God? Hath he promised, and shall he not do it? Hath he commanded, and shall he not bring it to pass? Have you not confidence in his omnipotence? If he could in the first place build my body, after it is torn down can he not build it again? Before the resurrection takes place everything will be silent. The mausoleums and the labyrinths silent. The graveyards silent, the cemetery dlent, save from the clashing of hoofs and the grinding of wheels as the last funeral procession comes in. No breath of air disturbing the dust where Pcrsepolis stood, and Thebes, and Babylon. No winking of the eyelids long closed in darkness. No stirring of the feet that once bounded, the hillside, . No opening of the hand that once plucked the flowers out of the edge of the wildwood. No clutching of swords by the men who went down when Persia battled and Rome fell. Silenee from ocean beach to mountain cliff, from river to river.

While I present these thoughts this morning does it not seem that heaven comes very near to us, as though our friends, whom we thought a great way off, are not in the distance, but close bv? You have sometimes come down to a river at nightfall and you have been surprised how easily you could hear voices across that river. You have shouted over to the other side of the river and they have shouted back. It is said that when George Whitefield preached in Third street, Philadelphia, one evening time, his-voice was heard clear across to the New Jersey shore. When I was a little while chaplain in the army, I remember how at eventide we could easily hear the voices of the pickets across the Potomac just when they were using ordinary tones. As we come to-day and stand by the river of Jordan that separates us from our friends who are gone it seems to me we stand on one bank and they stand on the other, and it is only a narrow stream, and our voices go, and their voices come. Hark! Hush! I hear distinctly what they say: “These are they who came out of great tribulation and had their robes washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb.” Still the voice comes aci'oss the water, and I hear: “We hunger no more; we thirst no more; neither shall the sun light on us, nor any heat, for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne leads*us to living fountains of water, and God wipeth away all tears from our eyes.”