Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 September 1893 — RELIGIOUS EXPOSITION [ARTICLE]

RELIGIOUS EXPOSITION

Observance of the Nineteenth Century oi Christ's Birth. The Brooklyn Divine's Great Scheme—A - fnhine Celebration—Dr. TU- “ mage's Sermon. At the Brooklyn tabernacle, Sunday afternoon, the Rev. Dr. Talmage preached a sermon of unusual interest to a vast audience, the subject Oeing “The Nineteen Hundredth Anniversary—A Proposition Concerning It.” The text was taken from Isaiah ix, 6, “To us a child is born.” That is a tremendous hour in the history of any family when animmortal spirit is incarnated. Out of a very dark cloud there descends a very bright morning. One life spared and another given. All the bells of gladness ring over the cradle. I know not why any one should doubt that of old a star pointed down to the Savior’s birthplace, for a star of ioy points down to every honorable nativity. Protestant and Catholic and Greek churches, with all the power of music and garland and procession and doxology, put the words of my text into national and continental and hemispheric chorous. “To us a child is born.” On the 25th of December each year that is the theme in St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s and St. Mark’s and St. Isaac's and all the dedicated cathedrals, chapels, meeting houses and churches clear round the world. We shall soon reach the nineteen hundreth anniversary of that happiest event of all time. I pray God that there may be no sickness or casualty to hinder your arrival at that goal, or to hinder your taking part in the valedictory of the departing century and the salutation of'the new. But as that season will be the nineteen hundredth anniversary of a- Savior’s birth I now nominate that a great international jubilee or exposition be opened in this cluster of cities by the seacoast on Christmas Day, the 25th day of December, 1900, to be continued for at least one month into the year 1901. The three or four questions that would be asked me concerning this nomination of time and place I proceed to answer. What practical use would come of such international celebration? Answer—The biggest stride the world ever took toward the evangelication of all nations. That is a grand and wonderful convocation, the religious congress at Chicago. It will put intelligently before the world the nature of false religions which have been brutalizing the nations, trampling womanhood into the dust, enacting the horrors of infanticide, kindling funeral pyres for shrieking victims and rolling juggernauts across the mangled bodies of their worshipers. The difference of Christ’s religion f rom all others is that its way of dissemination is by simple “telling”— not argument, not skillful exegesis, polemics or the science of theological fisticuffs, but “telling.” “Tell ye the daughter of Zion behold thy king cometh!” “Go quickly and tell his disciples that he lias risen from the dead.” “Go home to thy friends and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee.” “When he is Come he will tell us all things.” A religion of “telling. u

And in what way could all nations so well be told that Christ had come as by such an international emphasizing of his nativity? All India would cry out about such an affair, for you know they have their railroads and telegraphs, “What is going on in America?” All China would cry out, “What is that great excitement in America?” All the islands of the sea would come down to the gang plank of the arriving ships and ask, “What is that they are celebrating in America?” It would be the mightiest missionary movement the world has ever seen. It would be the turning point in the world’s destiny. It would waken the slumbering nations with one touch. Question the Second —How would you have such an international jubilee conducted? Answer —All arts should be marshaled, and art in its most attractive and impressive shape. First, architecture. While all academics of music and all churches and all great halls would be needed, there should be one great auditorium erected to hold such an audience as has never been seen on any sacred occasion in America. If ' Scribonious Curio at the cost of a kingdom could built the first two amphitheaters, placing them back to back, holding great audiences for dramatic representation, and then by wonderful machinery could turn them round with all their audiences in them, making the two auditoriums one amphitheater, to witness a gladiatorial contest, and Vespasian could construct the Coliseum with its eighty columns and its triumphs in three orders of Greek architecture and a capacity to hold 87.000 people and 15,000 standing and all for purposes of cruelty and sin, can not our glorious Christianity rear in honor of our glorious Christ a structure large enough to hold 50,000 of its worshipers? The time is near at hand when in theological seminaries, where our young men ace being trained for the ministry, (h,e vqicc will be developed, and instead'of the tnumblihg minis ters, fchb. speak with <aou.bir a tone forward and hold.your hand behkid yburesr/aiidthen ahe iftld 'the general drift of the subject and 1 i Mui' Moses,or Paul.or some one els ?—inp «f that you will' hW .orih* from the theologteto aMM(nteties aIF

over me m ’.u young ministers with voice enough to command the attention of an audience of 50,000 people. That is the reason that the Lord gives us two lungs instead of one. It is the divine way of saying physiologically, “Be heard!” That is the reason that the New Testament, in beginning the account of Christ’s sermon on the mount, describes our Lord’s plain articulation and resounding utterance by saying, “He opened his mouth.” In that mighty concert hall and preaching place which I suggest for this nineteen hundredth anniversary let music crown our Lord. Bring all the orchestras, all the oratorios, all the Philharmonic and Handel and Hayden societies. Yea. let painting do its best. The foreign galleries will loan for such a jubilee their Madonnas, their AngeloS, their Rubens, their Raphaels, - their “Christ at the Jordan,” or “Christ at the Last Supper,” or “Christ Coming to Judgment,” or “Christ on the Throne of Universal Dominion,” and our own Morans will nit their pencils into the nineteen lundredth anniversary, and our lierstadts from sketching “The Domes of the Yosemite” will come to present the ’domes of the world conquered for Immanuel. Added to this I would have a floral decoration on a scale never equaled. The fields and open gardens could not furnish it, for it will be winter, and that season is appropriately chosen, for it was into the frosts and desolations of winter that Christ immigrated when he came to our world. But’while the fields will be bare, the conservatories and bath houses within 200 miles would g>adly keep the sacred coliseum radiant and aromatic during the convocations. Added to all, let there be banquets, not like the drunken bout at the Metropolitan opera house, New York, celebrating the centennial of Washington’s inauguration, where rivers of wine drowned the sobriety of so many Senators and Governors and Generals, but a banquet for the poor, the feeding of scores of thousands of people of a world in which the majority of the inhabitantshave never yet had enough to eat. Not a banquet at which a few favored men and women of social or political fortune shall sit, but such a banquet as Christ ordered when he told his servants to “go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in.” Let the Mayors of cities and the Governors of States and the President of the United States proclaim a whole week of legal holiday, at least from Christmas day to New Year’s day. Why do I propose America as the country for the convocation? Because most other lands have a state religion, and while all forms of religion may be tolerated in many lands, America is the only country on earth where evangelical denominations stand on an even footing, and all would have equal hearing in such an international exposition. Wny do I select this cluster of seacoast cities? Answer—By that time, Dec. 25, 1900, these four cities of New York' Brooklyn, Jersey City and Hoboken, by bridges and tunnels, will be practically one, and with an aggregate population of about six million. Consequently no other part of America will have such immensity of population. Why do I now make this nomination of time and place? Answer — Because such a stupendous movement can not be extemporized. It will take seven years to get ready for such an overtowering celebration, and the work ought to begin speedily in the churches, in colleges, in legislatures, in congresses, in parliaments, in all styles of national assemblages, and we have no time to lose. It would take three years to make a program worthy of such a coming together. Why do I take it upon myself to make such a nomination of time and place? Answer —Because it so happens that in the mysterious province of God, born in a farmhouse and of no royal or princely descent, the doors "of communication are open to me every week by the secular and religious printing presses and have been open to me every week for many years, with all the cities and towns and neighborhoods of Christendom, where printing presses have been establisaed, and f feel that if there is anything worthy in this proposition it will be heeded and adopted.

Aye! Aye! I bethink myself such a vast procedure as that might hasten our Lord’s coming, and that the expectation of many millions of Christians, who believe in the second advent, might realize then at that conjunction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I do not say it would be, yet who knows but that our blessed and adored Master, pleased with such a plan of worldwide observance, might say concerning this wandering and rebelious Slanet: “That world at last shows a isposition to appreciate what I have done for it, ana with one wave of my scarred hand I will bless and reclaim and save it.” That such a of our Lord’s birth, kept up for days and months, would please all the good of the earth and mightily speed on the gospel chariot and please all the heavens, saintly, cherubic, seraphic, archangelic and divine, is beyond question. Oh, get ready for the .qrarld's greatest festivity! Tune ‘your voices for the world';# greatest anthem 1 ~ Litt the arches ifor the Ix}t jJhei&civuuciug.standard ofi/tne army of years, which has insortbwpon one ’Aide 6T It “1900” ahd.iOß other haveaho tesenbed on r^tßeihostcharming name of all the *4fffvbrse—the name of JHtfS.