Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 January 1894 — DIDN'T HALF TRY. [ARTICLE]

DIDN'T HALF TRY.

“The Bare Arm of God” as a Type of Omnipotent An Ua«y Tawk to Make the World but a , a Stupendous Undertaking to Reform It—Dr. Talmage's Sermon. Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at Brooklyn, last Sunday, from the text: Isaiah iii, 10 “The Lord hath made bare His holy arm.” He said: It almost takes our breath away to read some of the Bible imagery. There is such boldness of metaphor in my text that I have -been for some time getting my courage up to preach from it. Isaiah, the evangelist prophet, is sounding the jubilate of our planet redeemed and cries cut, “The Lord hath made bare His holy arm. ” What overwhelming suggestiveness in that figure of speech, “The bare arm of God!” The people of Palestine to this day wear much hindering appareL and wheri they want to run a special race, or lift a special burden, or fight a special battle, they put off the outside apparel, as in our land when a man proposes a special exertion he puts off his coat and rolls up his sleeves. Walk through our foundries, our machine shops, our mines, our factcries, and you wilLflnd that most of the toilers have their coats off and their sleeves rolled up. Isaiah saw that there must be a tremendous amount of work done before this world becomes what it ought to be, and he foresees it all accomplished, and accomplished by the Almighty, not as we ordinarily think of Him, but by the Almighty, with the sleeve of his robe rolled back to his shoulder. “The 'Lord hath made bare His holy arms.” Nothiug more impresses me in the Bibje than the ease with which God does most things. There is such a reserve of power. He has more thunderbolts than He has ever flung, more light than He has ever distributed, more blue than that with which He has overreached the skv, more green than that with which He has emeralded the grass, more crimson than that with which He has burnished the sunsets. I say it with reverence, from all I can see, God has never half tried.

How many bare arms of human toil—and some of those hare arms are very tired—in the creation of light and its apparatus, and after all the work, the greater part of the continents and hemispheres at night have no light at all, except perhaps the fireflies flashing their small lanterns across the . swamp. But see how easy God made the light! He did not make bare His arm; He difl not even put forth His robed arm; He did not lift so much as a finger. The flint out of which He struck the noonday sun was the word ‘‘Light.” “Let there be light!” Adam did not see the sun until the fourth day, for, though the sun. was created on the first day, it took its rays from the first to the fourth day to work through the dense mass of fluids by which this earth was Compassed. Did you ever hear of anything so easy as that? So unique? Out of a word came the blazing sun, the father of flowers and warmth and light. Out of a word building a fireplace for all nations of the earth to warm themselves by! “But,” savs some one, “do you not think —that in making the machinery of the universe, of which our solar system is comparatively a small wheel working into mightier wheels, it must have caused God some exertion—-the upheaval of an arm. either robed or an arm made bare?” No. We are distinctly told otherwise. The machinery of a uni verse God made simply with His fingers. David, Insnired in a night song, says so--“ When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers.” My text makes it pla ; n that the rectification of this world is a tremendous undertaking. It takes more power to make this world over again than it took to make it at first. A word was only necessary for the first creation, but for the new creation the unsleeved and unhindered forearm of the Almighty. The reason of that 1 can understand. In the shipyards at Liverpool or New York or Glasgow a great vessel is constructed. The architect draws out the plan, the length of the beam, the capacity of tonnage, the rotation of wheel or screw, the masts, the cabins and all the anpointments of this great palace of the deep. The architect finishes his wprk without any perplexity, and the carpenters and artizans toil on the craft so many hours a day, each one doing his part, until with flags flying and thousands of people huzzaing on the docks the vessel is launched. But out on the sea that steamer breaks her shaft and is limping slowly along toward harbor, when Caribbean whirlwinds, those mighty hunters of the deep, looking out for prey of ships, surround that vessel and pitch it on a rocky coast, and she lifts and falls in the breakers until every joint is loose and every spar is down, and every wave swpeps over the hurricane deck as■ she parts amidships. Would it not require more skill and -power to get that splintered vessel off the rocks and reconstruct it than it required originally to build her? Aye! Our world that God built so beautiful and which started out with all the flash of Edenic foliage and with the chaniof paradisaical bowers. has been sgsty centuries pounding in the skerries of sin, and to get her out, and to get her off, and to

get her on the right way again will require more of omnipotence than it required to build her and launch her. So I am not surprised that though in the drydbek of one word our world was made it will take the unseeved arm of God 4o lift her from the rocks and put her on the right course again. Now, just look at the enthroned difficulties in the way, the removal of which, the overthrow of which, seems to require the bare right arm of omnipotence. There stands heathenism with its 860,000,000 victims. Ido not cai e whether you call them Brahmans or Buddhists, Confucians or fetich idolators. At the World's Fair in Chicago, last summer, those monstrosities of religion tried to make themselves respectable, but the long hair and baggy trousers and trinketed robes of their representatives cannot hide from the world the fact that those religions are the authors of funeral pyre, and juggernaut crushin g. and Ganges infanticide, arid Chinese shoe torture, and the aggregated massacre of many centuries. There, too, stands Mohammedism, with its 176,000,000 victims. Its bible is the Koran, a book not quite as large as our new testament, which was revealed to Mohammed when in epileptjc fits,and resuscitated from these fits he dictated it to scribes. Yet it is read to-day by mor; people than any other book ever written. Mohammed, the founder of that religion, a polygamist, .with superfluity of wives, the first step of his religion on the body, mind and soul of woman, and no wonder that the heaven of the Koran is an everlasting Sodom, an infinite seraglio, about which Mohammed promises that each follower shall have in that place seventy-two wives in addition to all the wives he had on earth, but that no old woman shall even enter heaven. There stands, also, the arch demon of alcoholism. Its throne is white and made of bleached human skulls. On ore side of that throne of skulls kneels in obeisance and worship democracy, and on tne other side republicanism, and the one that kisses the cancerous and'gangrened foot of this despot the oftenest gets the most benedictions. There is a Hudson river, an Ohio, a Mississippi of strong drink rolling through this nation, but as the rivers from which I take my figure of speech empty into the Atlantic or the gulf, this mightier flood of sickness and insanity and domestic ruin and crime and bankruptcy and woe empties into the hearts, and the homes, and the churches, and the time and the eternity of a multitude beyond all statistics to number or describe. All nations are mauled and sacrificed with baleful stimulus or killing narcotic. The pulque of Mexico, the cashew of Brazil, the hasheesh of Persia, theopium of China, the guavo of Honduras, the wedro of Russia, the soma of India, the aguardiente of Morocco, the arak of Arabia, the mastic of Syria, the raki of Turkey, the beer of Germany, the whisky of Sc itland, the ale of England, the all drinks of America, are doing theirbest to stupefy, inflame, dement, impoverish, brutalize and slay the human race. Human power, unless reinforced from the heavens, can never extirpate the evils I mention. Much good has been accomplished by the heroism and fidelity of Christian reformers, but the fact remains that there are more splendid men and magnificent women this moment going over the Niagara abysm of inelirlety than at any time since the first grape was turned into wine and the first head of rye began to soak in a brewery. When people touch this subject, they are apt to give statisticts as to how many millions are in drunkard’s graves or with quick tread marching on toward them. The land is full of talk of high tariff and low tariff, but what about the highest of all tariffs in this country, the tariff of $300,000,000 which rum put upon the United States in 1891, for that is what it cost us?

But I have no time to specify the manifold evils that' challenged Christianity. And I think I have seen in some Christians, and read in some newspapers, and hoard from some pulpits a dishearteniiient, as though Christianity were so worsted that it is hardly worth while to attempt to win this world for God.and that all Christian work would collapse,and that it is no use for you to teach a Sabbath class or distribute tracts or exhort in prayer meetings or preach in a pulpit, as Satan is gaining ground. To rebuke that pessimism, the gospel of smashup, I preach this sermon, showing that you are on the winning side. Go ahead! Fight on! Who can doubt the result when, according to my text. Jehovah docs His best, when the last reserve force of omnipotence takes the field, when the last sword of eternal might leaps from its scabbard? Do you know what decided the battle of Sedan? The hills ■ a thousand feet high. Eleven hundred cannon on the hills. Artillerv on the heights of Givonm and twelve German batteries on the heights of La Moncello. The Crown Prince of Saxony watched the scene from the heights of Mairv. Between a quarter to G o’clock in the morning and 1 o’clock in the afternoon of September 2, 1870. the hills dropped the shells that shattered the French host in the valley. The French Emperor and the Bfi,ooo of his army captured by the hills. So in this conflict between holiness and sin “our eyes are unto the hills.” Down here ip the valleys of earth we must be valiant soldiers of the cross, but the Commander of our hosts walks the bights and views the scene far better than

we can in the valleys, and at the right day and the right hour all heaven will open its batteries on our side, and the commander of the hosts of unrighteousness, with all his followers, will surrender, and it will take eternity to, fully celebrate the universal victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. “Our eyes are unto the—hills.” Look! Those continents without a pang! Behold! Those hemispheres without a sin! Why those deserts —Arabian desert. American desert and Great Sahara desert—are all irrigated into gardens where God walks in the cool of the day. The atmosphere that encircles our globe floating not one groan. All the rivers and lakes and oceans dimpled with not one falling tear. The climates of the earth have cropped out of them the rigors of the cold and the blasts of the heat, and it is universal spring. Let us change the old world’s name. Let it no more be called the earth, as when . it was reeking with every thing pestiferous and malevolent, scarleted with battlefields and gashed with graves, but now so changed, so aromatic with gardens and so resonant with song and so rubescent with beauty, let us call it Immanual's land or Beulah or millenial gardens or paradise regained or heaven! And to God, the only wise, the only good, the only great, be glory forever. Amen!