Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 May 1895 — TALMAGE’S SERMON. [ARTICLE]

TALMAGE’S SERMON.

THE PREACHER CHOOSES A CURIOUSLY UNIQUE TEXT. "The Likeness of the Hands of a Man Was Under Their Wingrs”—A Powerful Hortatory Discourse by the World’s Great Preacher. With Hand and' Winjr. Rev. Dr. Tnlmnge’s sermon in the New York Academy of Music Sunday afternoon was a powerful and eloquent plea for practical Christianity. The subject as,- announced was, "Wing and Hand,” the text being Ezekiel x„ 21, “The likeness of the hands of a man was under their wings.” While tossed on the sea between Australia and Ceylon I first particularly noticed this text,' of which then and there I nmdo memorandum. This chapter is all a-flut-ter - with cherubim. Who are the cherubim? An order of angels, radiant, mighty, alt knowing, adoring, worshipful. When painteror sculptor tried in temple at Jerusalem or in marble of Egypt to represent the cherubim, be made them,part Hog, or part ox, or part eagle. But much of that is an unintended burlesque of the cherubim whose majesty and speed and splendor we will never-know until, lifted into their presence, we behold them for ourselves, as I pray by the pardoning grace .as God we all may.. But all the accounts Biblical, and aH the suppositions human, represent ;tho cherubim with wings, each wing about seven feet long, vaster, more imposing than any plumage that ever floated in earthly atmosphere. Condor in flight above Chimborazo, or Rocky Mountain eagle aiming for the noonday sun, of albatross in play with ocean tempest, presents i»6 such glory. We can get an imperfect idea of the wing of cherubim by the only wing we see —the bird’s jfiuion—which is the arm of the bird, but in some respects more wondrous than the human arm; with power of making itself more light or more heavy; of expansion and contraction, defying all altitudes and all abysms; the bird looking down with pity upon boasting than as lie toils up the sides of the while the wing, with a few strokes, puts the highest crags far beneath daw and beak. But the bird’s wing is only a feeble suggestion of eherubim’s wing. The greatness of that, the rapidity of that, the radiance of tliqt the Bible again and again sets forth. The Wing of Inspiration. My attention is not more attracted by those wings than by- what they reveal when lifted. In two places in Ezekiel we are told there were hands under the wings, human hands, hands like ours, “The likeness of the hands of a man was under the wings.” We have all noticed the wing of the cherubim, but no one seems yet to have noticed the human hand under the wing. There are whole sermons, whole nuthems. whole doxologies, whole millenniums in that combination of hand and wing. If this world is ever brought to God, it will be by appreciation of the fact that supernatiwal and human agencies are to go together; that which soars and that which practically works; that which ascends the heavens and that which reaches forth to earth; the joining of the terrestrial and the celestial; the hand and the wing. We see this union in the construction of the Bible. The .wing pf inspiration is in every chapter. What realms of the ransomed earth did Isaiah fly over! Over what battlefields for righteousness, what coronations, what dominions of gladness, what rainbows around the throne did St. John hover! But in every book of the Bible you just ns certainly see the human hand that wrote it. Moses, the lawyer, showing his hand in the Ten Commandments, the foundation of all good legislation; Amos, the herdsman, showing his hand in similes drawn from fields and flocks; the fishermen apostles showing their hand when writing about gospel nets; Luke, the physician, showing his hand by giving especial attention to diseases cured; Paul showing his scholarly hand by quoting from heathen poets and making arguments about the resurrection that stand as firmly as on the day he planted them, and St. John shows his hand by taking his imagery from the appearance of the bright waters spread around the island of Patinos nt hour of sunset, when he speaks the sea of glass mingled with fire. Scores of hands writing the parables, the miracles, the promises, the hosannas, the raptures, the consolations, the woes of ages. Oh, the Bible is so human, so full of heartbeats, so sympathetic, so wet with tears, so triumphant with palm branches, that it takes hold of the human race ns nothing else ever can take hold of it —each writer in his own style—Job, the scientific; Solomon, the royal blooded; Jeremiah, the despondent; Daniel, the abstemious and heroic —why, we know their style so well 'that we need not look to the top of the page to see who is the author. No more ■conspicuous the uplifting wing of inspiration than the hand, the warm hand, the flexible hand, the skillful hand of human instrumentality. “The likeness of the Sands of n man was under the wings.” Quality of Prayer. Again, behold this combination of my text in all successful Christian work. We stand or kneel in our pulpits and social meetings and reformatory associations, offering prayer. Now, if anything has wings, it is prayer. It can fly farther and faster than anything I can how think of. In one second of time from where you sit it enn fly to the throne of God and alight in England. In one second of time from where you sit it can fly to the throne of God and alight in India. It can girdle the earth in a shorter time thnn you can seal a letter, or clasp a belt, or hook an eye. Wings, whether that prayer starts from an infant’s tongue, or the trembling lip of a centenarian, rising from the heart of a farmer’s wife standing nt the dashing \hurn, or before the hot breath of n country oven, they soar away nnd pick out of Queen Victoria was dying, he asked that the infant Vietorin might be brought while he sat np in bed, and the babe was brought, and the father prayed, “If this child should live to become queen of England, may she rule in the,fear of God!” Having ended his prayer, he said, “Take the child away.” But all who know the history of England for the Inst fifty years know that the prayer for that infant more than seventy years ago has been answered, and with what emphasis and affection millions of the queen’s subjects have this day in chapels and cathedrals, on land and sen, supplicated, “God save the jucen!” Prayer Hiss not only across

continents, but across centuries. If prayer had only feet, if might run here and there and do wonders. But it has wings, and they are as radiant of plnme and as swift to rise or swoop or dart or circle as the’ cherubrnl’s Wings which swept througk Ezekiel’s vision. But, oh, my friends, the prayer must have the hand under the wing, or it may amount to nothing. Tlje mother’s hand or the father’s hand must writerto the wayward boy as soon as you can hear how to address him. Christian souls must contribute to the evangelism of that far-off land for which they hate been praying. Stop singing, “Fly abroad, thou mighty gospel,” unless you are tvilling to give something of your own means to make ft fly. Have you been praying for the salvation of a young man’s soul ? That is right, but also extend the hand of invitation to come to a religions meeting. —It atwayy excites our sympathy to see a man with his hand in a sling. We ask him: “What is the matter? Hope it is not a felon,” or, “Have your fingers been crushed?” But nine out of ten of all Christians are going their lifelong with their hand in a sling. They have been hurt by indifference or wrong ideas of what is best, or it is injured of conventionalities, and they never put forth that hand to lift or help or rescue any one. They pray, and their prayer has wings, but there is no hand under the wings. From the very structure of the hand we might make up our mind ■.as to Some of the things if.wna iund(> for—to hold fast, to lift, to push, to pull, to help and to rescue, and endowed with two hands we might tnke the broad hint that for others as well as for ourselves we were to hold fast, to lift, to push, to pull, to help, to rescue. Wondrous hand! Yon" know something of the “Bridgewater Treatises.” When Rev. Francis Henry Bridgewater, in his will, left $40,000 for - essay's otr “The Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation," and Davies’Gilbert, the president of the Royal Society, chose eight persons to write eight books, Sir Charles Bell, the scientist, chose as the subject of his groat book, “The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design.” Oh, the hand! Its machinery beginning at the shoulder, and working through shafts of bone, upper arm and forearm down to the eight bones of the wrist, and the five hones of the palm, and the fourteen bones of the fingers and thumb, and composed of a labyrinth of muscle and nerve and arteryand flesh, which no one but Almighty God could have planned or executed. But how suggestive when it reached down to us from under the wings of the cherubim! “The likeness of the hands of a man was under the wings.” Another Application. This idea is combined in Christ*, When he rose from Mount Olivet, he took wing. All up and down his life you see the uplifting divinity. It glowed in his forehead. It flashed in his eye. Its cadences were heard in his voice. But he was also very human. It was the hand under the wing that touched the woes of the world and took hold of the sympathies of the centuries. Watch his hand before it was spiked. There was a dead girl in a governor’s house, and Christ comes into the room and takes her pale, cold hands in his warm grasp, and she opens her eyes on the weeping household and says: “Father, what are you crying about? Mother, what are you crying about?” The book says, “He took her by the hand, and the maid rose.” A follower, angered at an insult offered Christ, drew the sword 'from sheath and stnrrk nt ft man with the sharp edge, aiming, I think, at his forehead. But the weapon glanced aside and took off the right ear at its roots, Christ with hi a hand reconstructed that wonderful organ of sound, that whispering gallery of the soul, that collector of vibrations, that arched way to the auditory nerve, that tunnel without which all the musical instruments of earth would be of no avail. The book says, “He touched his ear and healed him.” Meeting a full grown'man who had never seen a sunrise or a sunset, or a flower, or the face of his own father or mother, Christ moistens the dust from his own tongue and stirs the dust into an eye salve, and with his own hands applies the strange medicament, and suddenly all the colors of earth and sky rush in upon the newly created optic nerve, and the instantaneous noon drove out the long night. A Hand Under the Wing. While Thomas Chalmers occupied the chair of moral philosophy in St. Andrew’s University he had at the same time a Sabbath school class of poor boys down in the slums of Edinburgh. While Lord Fitzgerald was traveling in Canada he saw a poor Indian squaw carrying a crushing load, and he took the burden on his own shoulders. That was Christlike. That was “a hand under the wing.” The highest type of religion says little about itself, but is busy for God and in helping to the heavenly shore the crew and passengers of this shipwrecked planet. Such people are busy now up the dark lanes of this city, and all through the mouutain glens, and down in the quarries where the sunlight has never visited, and amid the rigging helping to take in nnother reef before the Caribbean whirlwind. A friend was telling me of an exquisite thiug about Seattle, then of Washington territory, now of Washington State. The people of Seattle had raised a generous sum of money for the Johnstown sufferers from the flood. A few days after Seattle was destroyed by fire. 1 saw it while the whole city was living in tents. In a public meeting some one proposed that the money raised for Johnstown be used for the relief of their own city, and the cry was No! No! No! Send the money to Johnstown, and by acclamation the money was so sent. Nothing more beautiful or sublime than that. Under the wing of fire that smote Seattle the sympathetic hand, the helping hand, the mighty hand of Cliristian relief (pr people thousands of miles away. Why, there are a hundred thousand men add women whose one business is to help others. Helping hands, inspiring hands, lifting hands, emancipating the wings.” There was much sense in that which the robust boatman said when three were in a boat off the coast in a sudden storm that threatened to sink the l»oat, nnd one suggested that they all kneel down in the boat to pray, and the robust man took hold of the oar and began to pull, saying, “Let yon, the strong, stout fellow, lay hold the other oar, and let the weak one who cannot pull give himself up to prayer.” Fray, by all means, but at tfie same time pull with ull your might for the world’ll rescue. An arctic traveler hunting beaver while the lee was breaking np, nnd supposing tLai there was no human being within IUP miles, heard the

ice crackle, and, 10, a lost man,''insane with hunger and cold, was wading in the ice water. The explorer .took the man into his canoe and made for land, and the people gathered on the shore. All the islanders had been looking for the lost man, and finding him, according to qwearrangement, all the bells rang and all the guns fired. Oh, you can make a gladder time among the towers and hilltops of heaven if you fetch home a wanderer.’ A Word for the Cities. ho onr time it is the habit to denounce the cities and to speak of them as the perdition of all wickedness. Is it not time for some one to tell the other side of the story and to say that the city is the heaven of practical helpfulness? Look at the embowered and fountaiued parks, where the invalids may come and be refreshed; the Bowery mission, through which annually over It JO,t»O0 come so gef breaiTfbi this life and bread for the life to come, all the pillows of that institution under the blessing of him who had not where to lay his head; the free sehgols, where the most impoverished are educated; the hospitals for broken hones; the homes for the restoration of intellects astray; the orphan house, father and mother to all who come under its benediction; the midnight missions, which pour midnoon upon the darkened; the Prison Reform Association; the houses of mercy; the Infirmaries; the sheltering arms; the aid societies; the industrial schools; the Sailors’ Snug harbor; the foundling asylums; the free dispensaries, where greatest scientific skill feels the pulse of wan pauper; the ambulance, the startling stroke of its bell clearing the^way to-the place of casualty, and good souls like the mother who came to the Howard mission, with its crowfiof friendless boys picked up from the streets, and saying: “If yon have a crippled boy, give him to me. My dear boy died with the spltial complaint.” And such a one she found and took him home and nursed him till he was well. It would take a sermon three weeks long to do justice to the mighty things which our cities arc doing for the unfortunate and the lost. Do not say that Christianity in our cities is all show and talk and genuflexion and sacred noise. You have been so long looking at the hand of cruelty, and the hand of theft, and the hand of fraud, and the hand of outrage that -you have not sufficiently appreciated the hand of help stretched forth from the doors and windows of churches and from merciful in~Tstltutions, the Christlike - hand, the cheru” hie hand, “the hand under the wings.” Bound for the Palace. There is also in my subject the suggestion of rewarded work for God and righteousness. When the wing went, the hand went. When the wing ascended, the hand ascended, and for every useful and Christian hand there will be deration celestial and eternal. Expect no human gratitude, for it will not come. That was a wise thing Fenelon wrote to his friend: “I ant very glad, my dear, good fellow, that you are pleased with one of my letters which has been shown you. You are right in saying and believing that I ask little of men in general. I try to do much for them nnd to expect nothing in return. I find a decided advantage in these terms. On these terms I defy them to disappoint me.” But, my hearers, the day cometij when your work, which perhaps no one has noticed or rewarded or honored, will rise to heavenly recognition. While I have been telling you that the hand was wing of the cherubim I want you to realize that the wing was over the hand. Perhaps reward may not come to ’ you right away. Washington lost more battles than he won, blit he triumphed at the last. Walter Seott in boyhood was called the “Greek Blockhead,” but what height of renown did he not afterward tread? And I promise you victory further on and higher up, if not in this world, then in the next. Oh, the heavenly day when your lifted hand shall be gloved with what honors, its lingers enringed with what jewels, its wrist clasped with what splendors! Come up and take it, you Christian woman who served at the washtub. Come up and take it, you Christian shoemaker who pounded the shoe last. Come up and take it, you professional nurse whose compensation never fully paid for broken nights and the whims and struggles of delirious sick 'rooms. Como up and take it, you firemen, besweated, far down amid the greasy machinery of ocean steamers, and ye conductors and engineers on railroads that knew no Sunday nnd whose ringing bells and loud whistle never warned off your own anxieties. Come up and take it, you mothers, who rocked and lullabicd the family brood until they took wing for other nests and never appreciated what you had done and suffered for them. Your hand was well favored when you were young, and it was a beautiful hand, so well rounded, so graceful that many admired and eulogized it, but hard work calloused it and twisted it, and self-sacrificing toil for others paled it, and rnauy household griefs thinned it, and the ring which went on only with a push at the marriage altar now is too large ancl falls off, and again and again you have lost it. Poor hand! Weary hand! Wornout hand! But God will reconstruct it, reanimate it, readorn it, and all heaven will know the story of that hand. What fallen ones it lifted up! What tears it wiped away! What wounds it bandaged! What lighthouses it kindled! What storm tossed ships it brought into the pearl beached harbor! Oh, I am so glad that in the vision of my text Ezekiel saw the wing above the hand. Roll on that everlasting rest for all the toiling and misunderstood and suffering and weary children of God, nnd know right well that to join your hand, at last emancipated from the struggle, will be the soft hand, the gentle hand, the triumphant hand of him Who wipetb away all tears from all faces. That will be the palace of the King of which the poet sang in Scotch dialect: “It’s a bonnie, bonnie warl that we’re livin’ in the noo, An’ sunny is the lan’ we aften traive) ,• thro’. But in vain we look for something to which oor hearts enn cling. at his gate. Then let us a’ bo ready, for, yo ken, it’s gettin’ late. Let oor lamps beclmehtly bnrnin’; let’s raise oor voice an’ sing, Soon we’ll meet, to part nae mnir, 1’ the palace o’ the King.” A man feels drowsy after a hearty dinner because a large part of the blood In the Bystem goes to the rtomach to aid In digestion and leaves the brain poorly supplied. There is no grievance that Is a fit object for redrew by mob law. —Lincoln.