Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 April 1894 — THE FAMILY ALTAR. [ARTICLE]

THE FAMILY ALTAR.

The Great Importance of Home ■ ' DevotionsAn 'SEloqnent Flea foe a Home Religion—- ; Dr. Talmage’s Sermon. At tho Brooklyn Tabernacle, Sunday, a great audience assembled. The Rev, Dr. Talmage chose for the subject of his sermon “Home Religion,” taking his text from Luke viii. 39: “Return to thine own house and show bow great things God bath done unto thee.” He said: After a fierce and shipwrecking night, Christ and his disciples are climbing up the slaty shelving of the beach. How pleasant it is to stand on solid ground after having been tossed so long on the billows! While the disciples are congratulating each other on their marine escape, out from a dark, deep cavern on the Gadarene hills there is something swiftly and terribly advancing. Is it an apparition? Is it a man? Is it a wild beast? It is a maniac who has broken away from his keepers, perhaps a few rags on his person and fragments of stout shackles, which he has wrenched off in terrible paroxysm. With wild yell and bleeding wounds of his-own laceration he flies down the hill.

Back to the boats, ye fishermen, and put out to sea and escape assasination. But Christ stands his ground; so do the disciples, and as this flying fury, with gnashing teeth and uplifted fists, dashes at Christ, Christ says: “Hands off! Down at my feet, thou poor sufferer,” and the demoniac, drops harmless, exhausted, worshipful. “Away, ye devils!” commanded Christ, and the 2,000 fiends which had been tormenting the poor man are transferred to the 2,000 swine, which go to sea with their accursed cargo. - The restored demoniac sits down at Christ’s feet and wants to stay there. Christ says to him practically: “Do, not stop. You have a mission to execute. "Wash off the filth and ’the wounds in the sea, smooth your disheveled locks, put on decent apparel, and go-straight to your desolated home and tell your wife and children that you will no more affright them, and no more do them harm; that you are restored to reason, and that I, the omnipotent Son of God, am entitled hereafter to the worship of your household. Return to thine own house and show how great things God hath done unto thee.”

W T hile I speak this morning there is knocking at your door, if he be not already admitted, one whose locks are wet with the dews of the night, who would take your children into his arms and wtjuld throw upon your nursery, and? your sleeping apartments, and vour drawing room, and your entire house a blessing that will make you rich while you live and be an inheritance to your children after you have done the last day’s work for their support and made for them the last prayer. It is the illustrious one who said to the man of my text, “Return to thine own house and show how great things God hath done unto thee,” Now, in the first place, we want religion in our domestic duties. ”

You need the religion of Christ in the discipline of your children. The rod which in other homes may be the first means used in yours will be the last. There will be no harsh epithets —“you knave, you villain, you scoundrel. I’ll thrash the life out of you; you are the worst child l ever knew.” All that kind of chastisement makes thieves, pickpockets, murderers and outlaws of society. That parent who in anger strikes his child across the head deserves the penitentiary. And yet this work of discipline must be attended to. God’s grace can direct us. Alas, for those who come to the work with fierce passion and recklessness of consequences. Between severity and laxativeness there is no choice. Both ruinous and both destructive. But there is a healthful medium which the grace of God will show to us. Your children are apt to think that what you do is right. They have no ideal of truth or righeousness but yourself. Things which you do, knowing at the time to be wrong, they take to be right. They reason this wav: “Father always does right. Father did this. Therefore this is right. That is good logic, but bad premises. No one ever gets over having a bad example set him. Your conduct more than your teaching makes impression. Your laugh, your frown, your dress, your walk, your greetings,your good-bys, your comings, your goings, yopr habits at the table, the tones of your voice, are making an impression which will last a million' years after you are dead, and thesun will be extinguished, and the \ mountains will crumble, and the woirld will die, and eternity will roll on m perpetual cycles, but there will be ho diminution of the force of youh conduct upon the young eyes that saw it or the young ears that heard ( it. Aristotle said that a boy should begin to study at seventeen years of age. Before that "his time should be given to recreation. I cannot adopt that theory. But this suggests a truth in the right direction. Childhood is too brief,and we hfcve not enough sympathy with its sportfulness. Wc want divine grace to help us in the adjustment of all these matters. Besides that, how are your childeren ever to become Christians if you yourself are not a Christian? I have noticed that, however worldly and sinful parents jnay be, they want their children good. When

young people have presented themselves for admission into our membership, I have said to them, “Are your father and mother willing you shall come?” and they have said, “Oh, yes; they are delighted to have us come. They have not been in church for ten or fifteen years, but they will be here next Sabbath to see me baptized.” I have noticed that parents, however worldly, want their children good. However worldly and sinful people are they want their children good. How are you going to have them good? Buy them a few good books? Teach them a few excellent catechisms? Bring them to church? That is all very well, but of little final result unless you do it with the grace of God in your heart. Do you realize that your children are started , for eternity? Are they on the right road? Those little forms that are now so bright and beautiful —when they have scattered in the dust, there will be an immortal spirit living on in a mighty theater of action, and your faithfulness or your neglect now is deciding that destiny. You say it is too early to bring them. Too early to bring them to God? Do you know how early children were taken to the ancient passover? The rule was just as soon as they could take hold of the father’s hand and walk up Mount Moriah they should be taken to the passover. Your children are not too young to come to God. While you sit here and think of theth ’ perhaps their forms now so bright and beautiful vanish from you, and their disembodied spirit rises, and you see it after the life of virtue or crime is past, and the judgment is gone, and eternity is here. Again, I remark, we want religion in all our home sorrows. There are 10,000 questions that come up in the best regulated household that must be settled. Perhaps the father has one favorite in tho family, the mother another favorite in the family, and there are many questions that need delicate treatment. But then there will be sorrows that will come, to the householdThere are but few families that escape the stroke of financial misfortune. Financial misfortune comes to a house where there is no religion. They kick against divine allotments, they withdraw from the world because they cannot hold as high a position in society as they once did. and they fret, and they scowl, and they sorrow and they die. During the past few years there have been tens of thousands of men destroyed by their financial distresses.

Sorer troubles come —sickness and death. Loved ones sleep the last sleep, A child is buried out of sight. You say: “Alas, for this bitter day I God has dealt very severely with me; I can never look up. O God, I cannot bear it!” Christ comes in, and He says: “Hush, O troubled soul; it is well with the child! I will strengthen thee in all thv troubles. My grace is sufficient. When thou passeth through the waters, I will be with thee.” But there are bund reds of families represented here this morning where religion has been a great comfort. There are in your homes the pictures of your departed and things that have no wonderful value of themselves, but you keep them preciously and carefully because hands now still once touched them. A father has gone out of this household, a mother has gone out of this, a daughter just after her graduation day, a son just as he was entering on the duties of life. -• And to other homes trouble will come. I say it not that you may be foreboding, not that you may do the unwise thing of taking trouble by the forelock, but that you may be ready. We must go one by one. There will be partings in all our households. We must say farewell. We must die. And yet there are triumphant strains that drown their tremulous accents; there are anthems that whelm the dirge. Heaven is full of the shout of delivered captives, and to the great wide field of human sorrow there come now the reaper angels with keen sickles to harvest the sheaves of heaven. Go home this day and ask the blessing on your noonday meal. Tonight set up the-family altar. Do not wait until you become a Christian yourself. This day unite Christ to your household, for the Bible distinctly says that God will pour out his fury upon the families that call not upon his name. Open the Bible and read a chapter; that will mako you strong. Kneel down and offer the first prayer in your household. It may be a broken petition; it may be oniv, “God be merciful to me, a sinner,” but God will stoop, and spirits will listen, apd angels will chant, “Behold, he prays!” Do not retire from this house this you have resolved upon this matter. You will be gone. I will be gone, many years will pass and perhaps your younger children inav forget almost everything about you, but forty years from now, in some Sabbath twilight, our daughter will be sitticig with the family, when she will stop, and peculiar sob emnity will come to her face, and a tear will start, and the children will say, “Mother, what makes you cry?” and she will say, “Nothing, only I was thinking that this is the very Bible out of which my father and mother used uo read at morning and evening prayer.” All other things about you they may forget, but train them up for God and heaven. They will not forget* that. May the Lord God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, tho God of our fathers, be our God and the God of our children forever!