Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 August 1893 — “AULD LANG SYNE.” [ARTICLE]

“AULD LANG SYNE.”

; j I- I | fffbf .. . “Turn Backward. Turn Backward, O Time in Thy Flight.” The Brooklyn Divine Indulges in Reminiscence In a Spirit of Gratitude— Dr. T«linage’s Sermon. Ret 7 Dr. Talmage preached at Brooklyn, last Sunday, the text being Psalm xxxix. 3 —‘‘While I was musing the fire burned. ’ He said: Here is David, the psalmist, with the forefinger of Ips right hand against his temple, the door shut against the world, engaged in contemplation. —And it woukV well for us to take the same posture often, closing the door against the world, while we sit in sweet solitude to contemplate. Youth is apt too much to spend ail of its time in looking backward. People in midlife and on the apex look both ways. It would be well for us, I think, however, to spend more time in reminiscence. It is a useful thing sometimes to look back and see the dangers we liave escaped, and to see the sorrows we have suffered, and the trials and wanderings of our earthly pilgrimage, and to sum up our eujoyments. I mean to-day, so far as God will help me, to stir up your memory of the past so that in the review you may be encouraged -and humbled and urged to pray. 1 want to bind iu one sheaf all your past advantages, and I want to bind in another sheaf all your past adversities. It is a precious harvest, and i must be careful how I swing the scythe. Among the, great advantages of your past life was an early home and its surroundings. The bad men of the day, for the most part, dip their passions out of the boiling spring of an unhappy home. We are not surprised that Byron's heart wm- a concentration of sin when wagpear his mother was abandoned. Uhwfhat-she made sport, of his infirmity, and often called him ’‘the lame brat.” He who has vicious parents has to fight*'every inch of his way if he would maintain his integrity and at last reach the home of the good in heaven. Perhaps your early home was in the city. It may have been in the days when Canal street, New York, was far up town. That oid house in the city may have been demolished or changed into stores, and it seemed like sacrilege to you, for there was more meaning in that plain house, in that small house, than there is in a granite mansion or turreted cathedral. Looking back this morning you see it as though it were yesterday —the sitting-room, where the loved oaes sat by the plain lamplight, the mother at the evening stand, the brothers and sisters—perhaps long ago gathered into the skies —then plotting mischief on the floor pr under the table; your father, with a firm vofee, commanding silence that lasted half a minute. . Oh, those were good days! If you had your foot hurt, your mother always had a soothing salve to heal it. If you were wronged in the street your father was always ready to protect you. The year was one round of frolic and mirth. Your greatest trouble was an April shower, more sunshine than shower. The heart had not been ransacked by trouble, nor had sickness broken in, and no lamb had a warmer sheepfold than Hie -home hi -whTch -t-h nestled. Perhaps you were brought up in the country. You stand now to-day in memory under the old tree. You clubbed it for fruit that was not quite ripe, because you could not wait any longer. You hear the brook rumbling along the pebbles. You step again into the furrow where your father in his shirt sleeves shouted to the lazy oxen. You frighten the swallows from the rafters of the barn and take just one egg and silence your conscience by saying they will not miss it. You take a drink again out of the very bucket that the old well fetched up. You go for the cows at night and find them waging their heads through the bars. Oftimes in the dusty and busy streets you wish you were home again on that cool grass, or in the hall of the farm house, through which there was the breath of new mown hay or the blossom of buckwheat. You may have in your window now beautiful plants and flowers brought from across the seas, but not one of them stirs in your soul so much charm and memory as the old ivy and the yellow sunflower that stood sentinel along the garden walk and ' the forgetmenots playing hide and seek mid the long grass. The father who used to come in sunburned from the fields ’and sit dowh on the doorsill and wipe the sweat from his brow may have gone to his everlasting rest. The mother who used to sit at the door a little bent over, cap and spectacles on her face, mellowing with the vicissitudes of many years, may have put down her gray bead on the pillow in the valley, but forget that home you never will. But I must not spend any more of my time in going over the advantages of your life. I just put them all in one great sheaf, and I bind them up in your memory with one loud harvest song, isuch as reapers sing, Praise the Lord, Ve bloodbought mortals on earth! Praise the Lord, ye crowned spirits of heaven! Have you forgotten to thank God for your days of prosperity, and -‘that through* your trials some of you have made investments which will continue after the last bank of this world has exploded ahd the silver

and gold ate molten in hrgs of a burning world? Have you, amid all your losses* and discouragements. forgot that, there was bread on your tabic this morning, ar.d that there shall be a shelter for your head from the storm, and there is air foi your lungs, and blood for your heart, and light for your eye, and a glad and glorious and triumphant religion for your soul? —7 —r~ 7Perhaps your last trouble was a bereavement. That which in childhood was vour refuge. the parental heart, and which has been a source of the quickest sympathy ever since, has suddenly become silent forever. And now sometimes, whenever in sudden amroyqneeand without desperation you say. *‘l will go' and tell mother,** the thought fiaslaFP on you. “I have no mother.’” Or the father, yvith voice less tender, but heart as earnest and loving—watchful of all your ways, exultant over your success without saving much. although the old people do talk it over among themselves—is taken away forever. Or there was your companion in life, sharer of your joys and sorrows, taken, leaving the heart an old ruin, where the ill wiuds blow over a wild wilderness of desolation, the sands of the desert driving across the place which once bloomed like the garden of God. And Abraham mourns for Sarah at the. cave of Machpelah. Going along your path in life) suddgnly right before you was an open grave. • ' People looked down, and they saw it was only a few feet-deep and a few feet wide, but to you it was a chasm down which went all your hopes and all your expectations. But cheer up in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Comforter. He is not going to forsake you. Did the Lord take that child out of your arms? Why, He is going to shelter, it better than you could. He is going to array it in a white robe and give it a palm branch and have it all ready to greet you at your coming home. Blessed the broken heart that Jesu£ heals. Blessed the importunate cry that Jesus compassionates. Blessed the weeping eye from which the soft hand of Jesus wipes away the tear. But these reminiscences reach only to this morning. There is sne more point of tremendous reminiscence, and that is the last hours of life when we have to look over all our past existence. What a moment that will be! I place Napoleon’s dying reminiscences on St. Helena besides Mrs. Judson’s dying reminiscence in the harbor of St. Helena, the same island, twenty years after. Napoleon’s dying reminiscence was one of delirium as he exclaimed: ‘‘Head of the army!” Mrs. Judson’s dying reminiscence, as she came home from her missionary toil and her life of self sacrifice for God,dying in the cabin of the ship in the harbor of St. Helena, was: “I always did love the Lord Jesus Christ.” And then the historian says she fell into a sound sleep for an hour and woke up amid the songs of angels. I place the dying reminiscence ofAugustus Caesar against the dying reminiscence of Apostle Paul. The dying reminiscence of Augustus' Caesar was, addressing his attendants: "Have I played my part well on the stage of life?” and they answered in the affirmative, and then he saidy “Why, then, don’t you applaud me?” The dying reminiscence of Paul the Apostle was: “I have fought a good fight. 1 have finished nvy course. I have kept the faith. Heiiccfortli there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me in that day, and not to me only, but to all them that love His appearing.'’ Augustus C;esar died among pomp and great surroundings. Paul uttered his dying reminiscence looking up through the roof of a duugcon. God grant that our dying pillow may be the closiug of a useful life and ‘ the opening of a glorious eternity.