Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1893 — HELPFUL CHURCHES. [ARTICLE]

HELPFUL CHURCHES.

Various Definitions of Religious Organizations. The Essential* of Successful WorshipMusic. Preselling and Prayer—Dr, Talmage’s Sorruon. Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at Brooklyn, last Sunday. Subject: “Helpful Churches.” Text: Psalm xx, 111 “Send thee help from the sancuary.” He said: If you should ask fifty men what the church is they would give you fifty different answers. One man ’would say “It is an assembly of people who feel themselves a great deal better than others.” Another, “It is a place for gossip, where wolverine dispositions devour each other.” Another, “It is a place for the cultivation of superstition and cant. “Another, “It is an arsenal where theologians go to get pikes and muskets and shot.” Another, “It is an art gallery, where men go to admire., grand arches, and exquisite fresco, and musical warble, and the Dantesque in gloomy imagery.” Another man would say: “It is the best place on earth except my own home. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning?’ —_— Now, my friends, whatever the church in, my text tells you what it ought to be, agreat, practical, homely, omnipotent-help. “Send thee help from the sanctuary ” The pew ought to yield restfulhess to the body. The color of the upholstery ought to yield pleasure to the eye. The entire service ought to yield strength for the moil and struggle of everyday life. The Sabbath ought to be harnessed to all the six days of the week; drawing them in the right direction.

The church ought to be a magnet, visibly and mightily affecting all the homes of the worshippers. Every man gets roughly jostled, gets abused, gets cut, gets insulted, gets slighted, gets exasperated. By the time the Sabbath comes he has an accumulation of six days of annoyance, and that is a starveling church service which' has not strength enough to take that accumulated annoyance and hurl it into perdition. The business man sits down in church headachey from the week’s engagements. Perhaps he wishes he had tarried at home on the lounge with the newspapers and the slippers. That man wan ts to be cooled off and graciously diverted. The first wave of the religious service ought to dash clear over the hurricane decks and leave him dripping with holy and glad and heavenly emotion.

In the first place sanctuary help ought to come from the music. A woman dying in England persisted in singing to the last moment. The attendants tried to persuade her to stop, saying it would exhaust her and make her disease worse. She answered “I must sing. lam only practicing for the heavenly choir.” Music on earth is a rehearsal for music in heaven If you and I are going to take part in that great orchestra it is high time that we were stringing and thrumming our harps. Now, I am no worshiper of noise, but I believe that if our Ameican churches would with full heartiness of soul and full emphasis of voice sing the songs of Zion this part of sacred worship would have tenfold more power than it has now Why not take, this part of the sacred service and lift it where it ought to be? All the annoyances of life.might.he. drowned out of that sacred song.

Do you tell me that it is not fashionable to sing very loudly? Then, I say, away with the fashion. We dam back the Mississippi of Congregational singing and let a few drops of melody trickle through the dam. I say take away the dam and let the billows roar on their way to the oceanic heart of God. Whether it is fashionable to sing loudly or not, let us sing with all possible emphasis. We hear a great deal of the art of singing, of music as an entertainment, of music as a recreation It is is high time we heard something of music as a help, a practical help In order to do this we must only have a few hymns. New tunes and new hymns every Sunday make poor congregational singing. Fifty hymns are enough for fifty years. The Episcopal church prays the same prayers every Sabbath and year after year and century after century. For that reason they have the hearty responses. Let us take a hint from that fact and let us sing the same songs Sabbath after Sabbath. Only in tliat way can we come to the full force of that exercise. Twenty thousand years will not wear out the hymns of William Cowper, Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts. Suppose now each person of this audience has brought all the annoyances of the last 365 days. Fill this room to the veiling with sacred song and you would drown out all those annoyances of the 365 days, and you would drown them out forever. Organ and cornet are only to marshal the voice. Let the voice fall into line, and in companies and in bi i gades by storm take the obduracy and sin of the world. If you cannot sing for yourself, sing for others. By trying to give others good cheer you will bring good cheer to your own heart. , Mv friends, it was intended that all the lesser sounds of the world should be drowned out in the mighty tongue of congregational song beating against the gates of heaven. Do you know hew they mark the hours in heaven? They nave no clocks, as they haye no candles, but a £reat pendulum of hallelujah swinging

across heaven from eternity to eternity.' Again, I remark that sanctuary help ought to come from the sermon. Of 1,000 people in this or any other audience how many want sympathetic help? Do you guess 100? Do you guess 500? You have guessed wrong. I will tell you just the pro-1 portion. Out of 1.000 people in this audience there are just 1,000 who need sympathetic help. These young people want it just as much as the old. The old people sometimes seem to think they have a monopoly of rheumatisms, and the neuralgias, and the headaches, and the physical disorders of the world, but I tell you there are no worse heartaches than are felt by some of these young people. Do you know that much of the work is done by the you»g? Raphael died at thirty-seven; Richard 111 at thirty-three; Gustavus Adolfhus died at thirty-eight; Innocent II came to his mightiest influence at thirty-seven; Cortez conquered Mexico at thirty; Don John won Lepanto at twenty-five; Grotius was attorney-general at twenty-four, and I have noticed amid all classes of men that some of the severest battles and the toughest work comes before thirty. Therefore, we must have our sermons and opr exhortation in prayer meeting all sympathetic with the young. And so with these people further on in life. What do these doctors and lawyers and merchants and mechanics care about the abstractions of religion? What they want is help to bear the whimsicalities of patients, the browbeating of leading occupants, the unfairness of (customers, who have plenty of fault-finding for every imperfection of handiwork, but no praise for twenty excellencies. What does that brainracked, hand-blistered man care for Zwingle’s k ‘Doctrine of Original Sin” or Augustine’s “Anthropology?” You might as well go to a man who has the pleurisy and put on a plaster made out of Dr. Parr’s “Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence.” While all of a sermon may not bo helpful alike.to all, if it be a Christian sermon preachy by a Christian man, there will be help for every one somewhere. We go into an apothecary store. We see others being waited on. We do not complain because we do not immediately get the medicine. We know our turn will come after awhile. And so while all parts of a sermon may not be appropriate to our case if we wait prayerfully before the sermon is through we shall have the divine prescription. I say to these young men who come here Sabbath by Sabbath, and who are going to preach the gospel, these theological students —I say to them, we want in our sermons not more metaphysics, nor more imagination, nor more logic, nor more profundity.

What we want in our sermons and Christian exhortations is more sympathy. When Father Taylor preached in the Sailors’ Bethel at Boston, the Jack Tars felt that they had help for their duties among the ratlines and the forecastles. When Richard Weaver preached to the operatives in Oldham, England, all the workingmen felt they had more grace for the spindles. When Dr. South preached to kings and princes and princesses, all the mighty men and women who heard him felt preparation for their high station. Again I remark that sanctuary help ought to come through the prayers of all the people. The door of the eternal storehouse is hung on one hinge, a gold hinge, the hinge of prayer—and when the whole audience lays hold of that door it must come open. There are here many people spending their first Sabbath after some great bereavement. What will your prayer do for them? How will it help the tomb in that man’s heart? Here are people who have not been in a church before for ten years; what will your prayer do for them by rolling over their soul holy memories? Here are people in crises of awful temptation. They are on the verge of despair or wild blundering or theft or suicide. What will your prayer do for them this morning in the way of giving strength to resist? Will you be chiefly anxious about the fit of the glove that you put to your forehead while you pray ? Will you be chiefly critical of the rhetoric of the pastor’s petition? Nm No. A thousand people will feel “that prayer is forme,” and at every step of the prayer chains ought to drop off and temples of sin ought to crush into dust, and jubilees of deliverance ought to brandish their trumpets. In most of our churches we nave three prayers—the opening prayer, what fe called the "long prayer" and the closing prayer. There ,are many people who spend the first prayer in arranging their apparel after entrance and spend the second prayer, the “long prayer.” in wishing it were through and spend the last prayer in preparing to start for home. The most insignificant part of every religious service is the sermon. The more important parts are the scripture lesson and the prayer. The sermon is only a man talking to a man. The scripture lesson is God talking to man Prayer is man talking to God. Oh, if we understood the grandeur and the,pathos of this exercise of prayer, instead of being a dull exercise, we would imagine that the room was full of divine and angelic appearances. But, my friends, the old style of church will not do the work. We might as well now try to take allihe passengers from New York to tpffalo by stage coach, or all the pas-

sengers from Albany to Buffalo by canalboat, or do all the battling of the world with bow and arrow, as with the old style of church to meet the exigencies of this day. Unless the church in our day will adapt itself to the time it will become extinct. The people reading newspapers and books all the week, in alert, picturesque and resounding style, will have no patience with Sabbath humdrum. 'We have no objections to bands and surplice and all the paraphernalia of clerical life, but these things make no impression—make no more impression on the great masses of the people than the ordinary business suit that you wear in Wall street. A tailor cannot make a minister. Some of the poorest preachers wear the best clothes, and many a backwoodsman has dismounted from the saddlebags, and in his linen duster preached a sermon that shook earth and heaven with its Christian eloquence. No new gospel, only the old gospel in a way suited to the time No new church, but a church to be the asyitim, the inspiration, the practical sympathy and the eternal help of the people. But while half of the doors of the church are to be set open toward this world the other half of the doors of the church must be set open toward the next. You and I tarry here only a brief space. We want somebody to teach us how to get out of this life at the right time and in the right- way. Some fall- out of life, some go stumbling out, some go groaning out of life, some go cursing out of life. We want to go singing, rising, rejoicing, triumphing. We want half the doors of the church set in that direction. We want half the prayers that way, half the sermons that way. We want to know how to get ashore from the tumult of this world into the land of everlasting peace. We do not want to stand doubting and shivering when we go away from this world. We want our anticipations aroused to the highest pitch. My hearer, when you have fought your last battle with sin and death and hell, and they have been routed in the conflict, it will be a joy worthy of celebration. You will fly to the city and cry “Victory!” and drop at the feet of the great king. Then the palm branch of the earthly race will be planted to become the outbranching tree of everlasting rejoicing.

The Arabs tell a story to show how a mean man’s philosophy overshoots itself. Under the reign of the Caliph there was a merchant in Bagdad equally rich and avaricious. One day he had bargained with a carrier to carry home for him a basket of porcelain vases for ten patas. As they went along the road he said to the man: “My friend, you are young and I am old; you can still earn plenty; strike a para from your hire.” “Willingly,” replied the porter. This request was repeated again and again until they reached the housel when the porter had but one single para to receive. As they went up the stairs the merchant said: “If you will resign the last para I will give you three pieces of advice.” “Be it so,” said the porter. “Well, then,” said the merchant, “if any one tells you it is better to be fasting than feasting do not believe him. If any one tells you it is better to be poor than rich, do not believe him. If any one tells you it is better to walk than to ride, do not believe him.”

“My dear sir,” replied the astonished porter, “I knew these things before; but if you will listen to me, I will give you such advice as you never heard.” The merchant turned around, and tho porter, throwing the basket down the staircase, said to him: “If anyone tells you that one of your vases is unbroken, do not believe him.” Before the merchant could reply the porter made his escape, thus punishing his employer for his miserly greediness. All persons believing that Professor Totten knows his business should expect to wind up their earthly affairs in less than six years, He begins his latest deliverance as follows: “In the name of the God of Heaven, amen: I the undersigned, a servant of the household of faith, in the calm exercise of human reason, in the full realization of my responsibility to God and man, in a spirit of anxiety not to be scorned by any who call themselves Christians (and supported by solid facts that no man on earth can successfully dispute, and which any scholar may verify—aye, and which every honest scholar is now in bounden duty to indorse), and in the furtherance* of due and orderly but special preparation therefore, do hereby announce the twelfth stroke of ‘the midnight hour' of the Christian dispensation." Several wild turkeys, that had a love for swallowing shining particles, that had been shot by a hunter on one of the branches near San Diego, Tex., netted him quite a handsome sum in gold, which he found in their craws, which they had picked up. In South Africa ostriches have been successfully employed in finding gold deposits. A drove of the birds are turned loose to feed in the territory where the precious metal is- supposed to exist. They are then given an emetic and the ejecta carefully examined for nuggets and if any are found the trail of the bird is followed, until the diggings are discovered.