Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 April 1895 — QUEEN OF SABBATHS. [ARTICLE]

QUEEN OF SABBATHS.

Easter Holds the Key to All the Cemeteries of the Earth. The Resurrectlqa Morn—Victory Oyer Dr.x»iniage’sSerin.ou. - - ' * I ' - - : ~ ■' ' Dr. Talmage preached twice in New York, last Sunday—at the Academy of Music at the West Presbyterian Church. One of the sermons was on the subject of “Easter Jubilee,” the text being taken from Corinthians xv, 54, “Death is swallowed up in victory.” About 1,861 Easter mornings have wakened the earth. In France for three centuries the almanacs made the year begin at Easter until Charles IX made the year begin at Jau. 1. In the tower of London there is a royal pay-roll of Edward” I, on which there is an entry of eighteen pence for 400 colored and pictured Easter eggs.- with —which the. people sported. In Russia slaves were fed and alms were distributed on Easter. Ecclesiastical rnnncils AL Pontus, at Gaul, at Rome, at Achaia to decide the particular day, and after a controversy more animated than gracious decided it, and now through all Christendom in some way the first Sunday after the full moon which happens upon or next after March 21 is filled with Easter rejoicing. My text is an ejaculation. It is spun out of hallelujahs. Paul wrote right on and observed all the laws of logic, but when he came to write the words of the text his fingers and his pen and the parchment on- which he wrote took fire, and he cried out, ‘ Death is swallowed up in victory!" It is a dreadful sight to see an army routed and flying. They scatter everything valuable on the track. Un wheeled artillery. Hoof of horse on breast of wounded and dying man. You have read of the French falling back from Sedan, or Napoleon’s track of 90,000 corpses in the snowbanks of Russia, or of the five kings tumbling over the rocks of Bethoran with their armies, while the hailstorms of heaven and the swords of Joshua’s hpsts struck them with their fury. But in my text is worse discomfiture. It seems that a black giant proposed to conquer the earth. lie gathered for his host all the aches and painsand maladies and distempers and epidemics of the ages. He marched them down drilling them in the northeast wind amid the slush of tempests. He threw up barricades of grave mound. He pitched tent of charnel house. Some of the troops marched with slow tread, commanded by consumptions; some in doublequick, commanded by ' pneumonias. Some he took by long besiegement of evil habit and some | by stroke of the battleax of casualty, j With bony hand he pounded at the [ floors of hospitals and sick rooms and won all the-victories in all the threat battlefields of all thejive continents. Forward, march, the conqueror of conquerors, and all the ; generals and commanders-in-chief, and all presidents and kings and Sultans and czars drop under the teet of his war charger. But one Christmas night his antagonist was born. As most of the plagues and sicknesses and despotisms came out of the east it was appropriate that the new conqueror should come out of the same quarter. Power is given him to awaken all the fallen of all the centuries and of all lands and marshal them against the black giant. Fields have been won, but the last day will see the decisive battle. When Christ shall lead forth his two brigades, the brigade of the risen dead and the brigade of the celestial host, the black giant will fall back and the brigade from the riven sepulchers will take Him from beneath and the brigade of descending mortals will take Him from above, and “death shall be Swallowed up in victory.” I proclaim the abolition of death. The old antagonist is driven back into mythology with all the lore about Stygian ferry and Charon with oar and boat. We shall have no more to do with death than we have with the cloak-room at a Governor’s and President’s levee. We stop at Buch a cloak-room and leave in charge of the servant our overcoat, our overshoes, our outward apparel, that we may not be impeded in the brilliant round of the drawing-room. Well, my friends, when we go out of this world we are going to a king’s banquet and to a reception of monarchs, and at the door of the tomb we leave the cloak of flesh and the wrappings with which we meet the storms of the world. But as to our soul, we will cross right over, not waiting forobsequies, independent of obituary, into a state every way better, with wider room and velocities beyond computation, the dullest of us into companionship with the very best spirits in their very best moods, in the very best room of the universe, the four walls furnished and paneled and pictured and glorified with all the splendors that the infinite God in all ages has been abTe'to invent. Victor v! . That far-up cloud, higher tpan the hawk flies, .higher than the eagle flies, what is it made of? Drops of water from the Hudson, other drops from East river, other drops from a stagnant pool out on’the Newark flats. Up yonder there, embodied in a cloud, and the sun kindles it. If God can make such a lustrous cloud out of water drops, many of Ih'm soiled and impure and fetched from miles awav, cun he not transport the fragments of a human bodv from the earth, and out of them build a radiant body? Cannot God, who

owns all the material out of whicl bones and muscles and flesh an made, set thein up again if they havf fallen? If a manufacturer of telescopes drops a telescope on the floor, and it oreaks, cannot he mend 11 I again so you can see througfi~itl ■ And if God drops the human eye into th e dust, the eye which he orig> in ally fashioned'ream he not- res tor< it? Aye, if the manufacturer of tlu telescope, by a change of the glasj and a change of focus, can make 8 better glass'‘than that which was originally constructed, and actuallj improve it, do you think the fashioner of the human eye may improve its sight and multiply the natural eye by the thousandfold additional forces of the resurrection eye? “Why should it be thought with you an incredible thing that God should raise the dead?” Things all around us suggest it- Out of what grew all these flowers? Out of the mold and earth. Resurrected. Resurrected. The radiant butterfly, where did it come from? The loathsome caterpillar. That albatross that smites the tempest with its wing, where did it come from? A senseless shell. Near Bergerac, France, in a Celtic tomb, under a block, were found flower seeds, that had been buried 2,000 years. The. explorer tool: the flower seed and planted it and it came up, it bloomed in bluebell and heliotrope. Two thousand years ago buried, yet resurrected. A traveler says be found inn mummy pit in Egypt garden peas that had been buried there 3,000 years ago. He brought them out, and on June 4, 1844, he planted them, and in thirty days they sprang up. Buried 3,000 years, yet resurrected.

“Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead?” The insects flew and the worms crawled last autumn feebler and feebler, and then stopped. They have taken no food; they want none. They lie dormant and insensible, but soon the south wind will biow the resurrection trumpet and the air and the earth will be full of them. Do you not think that God can do as much for our bodies as he does for the wasps, and the spiders, and the snails? This morning at 4:30 there was a resurrection. Out of the night the day. In a few weeks there will be a resurrection in ail our gardens. Why not some day a resurrection in all the graves? Ever and anon there are instances of men and women entranced. A trance is death, followed by resurrection after a few days. Total suspension pf mental power and voluntary action. Do not this waking up of men from trances and this waking up of grains buried three thousand years ago make it easier for you to believe that your body and mine, after the vacation of the grave, shall rouse and rally, though there be three i thousand years between our last j breath and the sounding of the archangelic reveille? Physiologists tell ..us thad., .while the most of our bodies are built with such wonderful economy that we can spare nothing, and [ the loss of a finger is a hindrance, 1 and the injury of a toe joint makes us lame, still we have two or three apparently useless physical apparati, and no anatomist or physiologist has ever been able to tell what they are good for. Perhaps they are the foundation of the resurrection body, worth nothing to us in this state, to be indispensably valuable in the next state. The Jewish rabbis appear to have had a hint of this suggestion when they said that in the human frame there was a small bone which was to be the basis of the resurrection body. That may have been a delusion. But this thing is certain the Christian scientists of our day have found out that there are two or three superfluities of the body that are something gloriously suggestive of another state. Only the bad disapprove of the resurrection. A cruel heathen warrior heard Mr. Moffat, the missionary, preach about the resurrection, and he said to the missionary, “Will my father rise in the last day?” “Yes,” said the missionary. “Will all the dead in battle rise?” said the cruel chieftain. “Yes,” said the missionary. “Then,” said the warrior, “let me hear no more about the resurrection. I have slain thousands in battle. Will they rise?” Ah, there will be more to rise on that day than those want to see, whose crimes have never been repented of. But for all others who allowed Christ to be their pardon and life and resurrection it will be a day of victory. The thunders of the last day will be the salvo that greets you into harbor. The lightnings will be only the torches of triumphal procession marching down to escort you home. The burning worlds flashing through immensity will be the rockets celebrating your coronation on thrones, where you will reign forever and forever and forever. Where is death? What have we to do with death? As your reunited body and soul swing off from this planet on that last day you will see deep gashes all up and dow n the hills, deep gashes all through the valleys, and they will be the emptied graves, they- will be the abandoned sepulchers, with rough ground tossed on either side of them, and slabs will lie uneven on the rent hillocks, and there will be fallen monuments and cenotaphs, and then for the first time you will appreciate the full exhilaration of the text, “He will swallow up death in victory." , Hall the Lord of earth and heaven! Praise to The ■ bv both begiven; Then we greet triumphant now, Hail the resurrection Thou! Leonard Jacobs, of Ansonia,Conn., has a horse that is fed regularly on pies, the animal prefers pies txj l oats, eats plenty of that kind ol pastry, and is fat and sleek.

Who are the pupils at the colleges for women today? The dowdy, sexless, unattractive, masculine-minded beings who have served to typjjfy for nine men out of tenjtbe crowning joke of the age—the emancipation of women 9 No; but lovely, graceful, sympathetic, earnest, pure-minded girls in the flow r of attractive maidenhood. And that is why the well-to-do American mother is asking hersel f whether sb e would be doing the best thing for her daughter if she were to encourage her to become merely a new-world old-world young, lady of the ancient order of things. For centuries the women of civilization have worshipped chastity, suffering, resignation and elegance as the ideals of femininity; row we mean, to be intelligent besides, or, at least, as nearly so as possible. _____ Bishop Williams, of Connecticut, the oldest member of the American House of Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Chur ch, is known to this country and to England as one of the wittiest men of the century. He is a great raconteur, and his supply of good stories is inexhaustible. He has a Yankee humor that, combined with great scholarship, makes his conversation peculiarly interesting.