Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 October 1893 — A BOUT LIFE BOATS. [ARTICLE]

A BOUT LIFE BOATS.

With Incidental Remarks on Theosophy and Other Subjects. The Only Ark of Safety in the Gospel Ship—Dr. Talmage's Sermon. < Dr. Talmage preached at Brooklyn last Sunday. He chose for his subject ‘ Unsafe Life Boats,” the text being Acts xxvii, 32. “Then the soldiers cut off the ropes of the boat and let her fall off.” While your faces are yet somewhat bronzed by attendance on the international boat contest between the Vigilant and the Valkyrie I address you Good things when there is no betting or dissipation, those outdoor sports. We want more fresh air and breeziness in our temperaments and our religion. A stale and slow and lugubrious religion may have done for other times, yet will not do for these. But my text calls our attention to a boat of a different sort, and instead of the Atlantic it is the Mediterranean, and instead of not wind enough, as the crews of the Vigilant and Valkyrie the other day complained, there is too much wind and the swoop of a Euroclydon. I am not calling your attention so much to the famous ship on which Paul was the distinguished passenger, but to the lifeboat of that ship which no one seems to notice. For a fortnight the main vessel had been tossed and driven. For that two weeks, the account says, the passengers had “continued fasting.” I suppose the salt water, dashing over, had spoiled the sea biscuit and the passengers were seasick anyhow. ‘ The sailors said, “It is no use; this ship must go down," and they proposed among themselves to lower the lifeboat and get into it and take the chances for reaching shore, although they pretended they were going to get over the sides of the big ship and down into the lifeboat only to do sailor’s duty. That was not sailorlike, for the sailors that I have known were all intrepid fellows and would rather go down with the ship than do such a mean thing as those- Jack Tars’bf my text attempted. My subject is “Unsafe Lifeboats.” We can not exaggerate the importance of the lifeboat. All honor to the memory of Lionel Lukin, the coach builder of Long Acre, London, who invented the first lifeboat, and I do not blame him for ordering put upon his tombstone in Kent, the inscription that you may still read there: “This Lionel Lukin was the first who built a lifeboat, and was the original inventor of that principle of safety by which many Jives and much property have been preserved from shipwreck, and he obtained for it the king’s patent in the year 1785." But do we feel the importance of a lifeboat in the matter of the soul’s rescue? There are times when we all feel that we are out at sea, and as many disturbing and anxious questions strike us as waves struck that vessel against the sides of which the lifeboat of my text dangled. Questions about the church. Questions about the world. Questions about God. Questions about our eternal destiny. .Every thinking man and woman has these questions, and in proportion as they are thinking people do these questions arise. There is no wrong in thinking. If God had not intended us to think, and keep on thinking, he would not have built under this wheelhouse of the skull this thinking machine, which halts not in its revolution cradle to grave. Even the midiiot stop the thinking machine, for when we are in dreams we are thinking, although we do not think as well. There is a splendid new lifeboat called Theosophy. It has only a little while been launched, although some of the planks are really several thousand years old and from a wormeaten ship, but they are painted over and look new. They are really fatalism and pantheism of olden time. But we must forget that and call them Theosophy The Grace Darling of this lifeboat was an oarswoman by the name of Mme. Blavatsky; but the oarswoman now is Anna Besant. So many are getting aboard the boat it is worthy of examination, both because'of the<safety of those who have entered it anjl because we ourselves are invited to get in. Its theory is that everything is God. Horse and star and tree and man are parts of God. We have three souls—an animal soul, a human soul, a spiritual soul. The animal soul becomes after a while a wandering thing, trying to express itself through mediums. It enters beasts or enters a human being, and when you find an effeminate man it is because a woman's soul has got into tl e n an. and when you find a mascu in ? woman it is because a man's so il has taken possession of a woman’s I ody. If you find a woman has become a platform speaker and likes politics she is possessed by a dead politician, who forty years ago made the platform quake. The soul keeps wandering on and on, and may have fifty or innumerable different forms, and finally is absorbed in God. It was God at the start and will be God at the last. But who gives the authority for the truth of such a religion? Some beings living in a cave in central Asia- They are invisible to the naked eye, but they cross continents and seas in a flash. My Baptist brother/ Dr. Haldeman, says that a theosophist in New York was visited by one of these

mysterious beings from central Asia. The gentleman knew it from the fact that the mysterious being left his pocket handkerchief, embroidered with his name and Asiatic residence. The most wonderful achievement of the theosophists is that they keep out of the insane asylum. They prove the truth of the statement that no religion ever announced was so absurd but it 'gained disciples. Instead of heeding the revelation of a bible, you can have these spirits from a cave in central Asia to tell you all you ought to know, and after you leave this life you may become aprima donna, or a robin," or a gazelle, or a sot, or a prize fighter, or a Herod, or a Jezebel, and so be enabled to have agreat variety of experience, rotating through the universe, now rising, now falling, now shot out in a straight line and now describing a parabola, and on andon and up and up, and down and down, ’ and round and round. Don’t you see? Now, that theosophic lifeboat has been launched. It proposes to take you off the rough sea of doubt into everlasting quietude. How do you like that lifeboat? My opinion is you had better imitate the mariners of my text and cut off the ropes of that boat and let her fall off.

Another lifeboat tempting us to enter is made up of many planks of good works. It is really a beautiful boat —almsgiving, practical sympathies for human suffering, righteous words and righteous deeds. I must admit I like the looks of the prow, and of the rowlocks, and of the paddles, and of the steering gear, and of many who are thinking to trust themselves to her benches. But the trouble about the lifeboat is it leaks. I never knew a mam yet good enough to earn heaven by his virtues or generosities. If there be one person here present on this blessed Sabbath all of whose thoughts have been always right, and all of whose words have always been right, let him stand up; or if already standing let him lift his hand, and I will know that he lies. Another lifeboat is Christian inconsistencies. The planks of this boat'are composed of the split planks of shipwrecks. That prow is made out of hypocrisy from the life of a man who professed one thing and really was another. One oar of this lifeboat was the falsehood of a church member and the other oar was the wickedness of some minister of the gospel whose iniquities were not for a long while found out. Not one plank from the oak of God’s eternal truth in all that lifeboat. All the planks, by universal admission, are decayed and crumbling and fallen apart and rotten and ready to sink. “Well, well!” you say. “No one will want to get into that lifeboat.” Oh, my friend, you are mistaken. That is the most popular lifeboat ever constructed. That is the most popular Ufeboat ever launched. Millions of people want to get in it. They jostle each other to get the best seat in the boat.

“Well," says someone, ‘this subject is very discouraging, for we must have a lifeboat if we are ever to get ashore, and you have already condemned three ” Ah, it is because I want to persuade you to take the only safe lifeboat. I will not allow you to be deceived and get on to the wild waves and then capsize or sink. Thank God, there is a lifeboat that will take you ashore in safety, as sure as God is God and heaven is heaven. The keel and ribs of this boat are made out of a tree that was set up on a bluff back of Jerusalem a good many years ago. Both of the oars are made out of the same tree. The rowlocks are made out of the same tree. The steering gear is made out of the same tree. The planks of it were hammered together by the hammers of executioners who thought they were only killing a Christ, but were really pounding together an escape for all -imperiled souls of all ages. But while in my text we stand watching the marines with their cutlasses, preparing to sever the ropes of the lifeboat and let fyer fall off, notice the poor equipment. Only one lifeboat. Two hundred and seventy-six passengers, as Paul counted them, and only one lifeboat. My text uses the singular and not the plural. “Cut off the ropes of the boat," Ido not suppose it would have held more than thirty people, though loaded to the water’s edge. I think by marine law all our modern vessels have enough lifeboats to hold all the crew and all the passengers in case of emergency, but the marines of my text were standing by the only boat, and that a small boat, and yet 276 passengers. But what thrills me through and through is the fact that though we are wrecked by sin and trouble, and there is only one lifeboat, that boat is large enough to hold all who are willing to get into it. , And be my remaining days on earth many or few I am going to spend my time in recommending the lifeboat which fetched me here, a poor sinner saved by grace, and in swinging the cutlasses to sever the ropes of my unsafe lifeboat and let her fall off. My hearer, without asking any questions, get into the gospel lifeboat. Room! and yet there is room! The biggest boat on earth is the gospel lifeboat. You must remember the proportion of things, and that the shipwrecked craft is the whole earth, and the life boat must be in proportion. You talk about your Companiars, and your Lucanias, and your Majesties, and your City of New Yorks, but ail of them put together are smaller than an Indian’s canoe of Schroon lake compared with this gospel lifeboat, that is large enough to take

in all nations. Room for one and room for all. Get in! “Qow? How?” you ask. Well, I know how you feel, for summer before last, on the sea of Finland, I had the same experience. The ship in which we sailed could not venture nearer than a mile from shore, where stood the Russian palace of Peterhof, and we had to get ipto a small boat and be rowed ashore. The water was rough, and as we went down the ladder at the side of the ship we held firmly on to the railidg, but in order to get into the boat we had at last to let go. How did I know that the boat was good and that the oarsmen were sufficient? How did I know that the Finland sea would not swallow us with one opening of its crystal jaws? We had to trust, and we did trust, and our trust was well rewarded. In the same way get into this gospel lifeboat. Let go! As long as you hold on to any other hope you are imperiled, and you get no advantage from the lifeboat. Let go! Does some one here say, “I guess I will hold on a little to my good works, or to a pious parentage, or to something I can do in the way of achieving my own salvation. No, no; let go! Trust the Captain, who would not put you into a rickety or uncertain craft.

For the sake of your present and everlasting welfare, with all the urgency of an immortal addressing immortals, I cry from the depths of my soul and at the top of my voice, “Let go!” Last summer the life saving crew at East Hampton invited me to come up to the life station and see the crew practice, for twice a week they are drilled in the important work assigned them by the United States government, and they go through all the routine of saving the shipwrecked. But that would give little idea of what they would have to do if some midnight next winter, the wind driving beachward, a vessel should get in the grasp of a hurricane.

See the lights flare from the ship in the breakers, and then responding lights flaring from the beach, and hear the rockets buzs as they rise, and the lifeboat rumbles out, and the gun booms, and the lifeline rises and falls across the splintered decks, and the hawser tightens and the hfe car goes to and fro, carrying the exhausted mariners, and the ocean, as if angered by the snatching of the human prey from the white teeth of its surf and the stroke of its billowing paw, rises with increased fury to assail the land. So now I am engaged in no light drill, practicing for what may come over some of your souls. It is with some of you wintry midnights, and your hopes for this world and the next are wrecked. But see! See! The lights kindled on the beach. I throw out the life line. Haul in, hand over hand! Ah, there is a lifeboat in the surf which all the wrath of earth and hell can not swamp, and its captain, with scarred hand puts the trumpet to to his lips and cries, “Oh, Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself, but in me is thy help.” But what is the use of all this if you decline to get into it. You might as well have been a sailor on board that foundering ship of the Mediterranean when the mariners cut the ropes .of ,the boat and let her fall off. He Happened to Knew Her. Detroit Free Press “Well, by George!” he said to a fellow-passenger on the rear platform of a Baker street car, “but of all the outlandish hats I ever saw on a woman that takes the cake! I mean that woman near the front door to the right.” “Yes, she lookt like a fool!” replied tne "other. “The idea of a woman forty years old getting such a hat as that must make all her relatives tired.”

“Yes, it probably does.” “I wonder if she has any idea how homely she is?” continued the first, who seemed greatly put out. “Not a bit of it. She imagines she's real pretty and stylish. That sort always does.” “Pretty! Stylish! Why, you might travel for a month and not find another such homely woman, and as for her style she looks as if she had come out of the woods!” “Yes, you are right.” “If my wife was such a chromo as that I’d leave her. Even the children grin as they look at her.” “Her husband has threatened to leave her, but it did no good,” quietly replied No. 2. “Oh! then you know him?” “Yes.” Here occurred a painful pause, lasting a full minute, during which the two men avoided looking at each other. Finally No. 1 made a great effort, and said: “May be you are the husband himself?” “Yes, I am the one,” answered No. 2, “and if it won't make no great difference to you we’ll change the subject and talk about the weather. Do you think we’ve had rain enough for corn and potatoes?” But No. 1 saw a man on the corner who owed him 12 or something or other, and hurriedly jumped off to collect it and get down the side street.