Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 December 1897 — GOD AMID THE CORAL. [ARTICLE]

GOD AMID THE CORAL.

DR. TAMAGEON THE SCULPTURE OF THE DEEP. Picking Up a Coral, He Says He Feels Like Crying Out, “There Is a God, and I Adore Him!”—Comfort for Faithful Christian Workers. Our Weekly Sermon. This picturesque discourse of Dr. Talmage~Te«d«i hi« ~~ESargriii ~ wtnl ■- through unwonted regions of contemplation and is full of practical gospel; text, Job xxviii., 18, “No mention shall be made of coral.” Why do you say that, inspired dramatist? When you wanted to set forth'Thesuperior value of our religion, you tossed aside the onyx, which is used for making exquisite cameos, and the sapphire, sky blue, and topaz of rhombic prism, and the ruby of frozen blood, and here you say that the coral, which is a miracle of shape and a transport of color to those who have studied it, is not worthy of mention in comparison with our holy religion. “No mention shall he made of coral.” At St. Jolmsbury, Vt., in a museum built by the chief citizen, as I examined a specimen on the shelf, I first realized what a holy of holies God can build and has built in the temple of one piece of coral. Ido not wonder that Ernst Ileckel, the great scientist, while in Ceylon, was so entranced with the specimens which some Cingalese divers lmd brought up for his inspection that lie himself plunged into the sea and went clear under the waves at the risk of his life, again and again and again, that he might know more of the coral, the beauty of which he indicates cannot even be guessed by those who have only seen it above water, and after the polyps, which are its sculptors and architects, have died and the chief glories of these submarine flowers have expired. Job in my text did not mean to depreciate this divine sculpture in the coral reefs along the seacoasts. ,

No one can afford to depreciate these white palaces of the deep, built under God’s direction. He never changes his plans for the building of the islands and shores, and for uncounted thousands of years the coral gardens and the coral castles .and the coral battlements go on and up. The Algerian reefs in one year (1873) had at work amid the coral 311 vessels, with 3,150 sailors, yielding in profit $565,000. But the secular and worldly value of the coral is nothing as compared with the moral and religious, as when, in my text. Job employs it in comparison. I do not know how any one can examine a coral the size of the thumb nail without bethinking himself of God and worshiping him, and feeling the opposite Of the great infidel surgeon lecturing to the medical students in the dissecting room upon a human eye which he held in his hand, showing its wonders of architecture and adaptation, when the idea of God flashed upon him so powerfully ho cried out to the students, “Gentlemen, there is a God, but I hate him!” Picking up a coral, I feel like crying out, “There is a God, and I adore hint!” God and the Beautiful. Nothing so impresses me with the fact that our God loves the beautiful. The most beautiful coral of the world never comes to human observation. Sunrises and sunsets he hangs, up for nations to look at; he may green the grass and round the dew into pearl and set on fire autumnal foliage to please mortal sight, but those thousands of miles of coral achievement I think he has had built for his own ■delight. In those galleries he ahme can walk. The music of those keys, played on by the fingers of the wave, lie only can hear. The snow of that white and the bloom of that crimson he alone can see. Having garnitured this world to please the human race and lifted a glorious heaven to please the angelic intelligences, I am glad that he has planted these gardens of the deep to please himself. Job, who understood all kinds of precious stones, declares that the beauty and value of the coral are nothing compared with our holy religion, and* he picks up this coralline formation and looks at it and flings it aside with all the other beautiful things he has ever heard of and cries out in ecstasy of admiration for the superior qualities of our religion, “No mention shall be made of coral.” Take my hand and we will walk through this bower of the sea while I show you that even exquisite coral is not worthy of being compared with the richer jewels of a Christian soul. The first thing that strikes me in looking at the coral is its long continued accumulation. It is not turned up like Cotopaxi, but is an outbidding aud an outbranching of ages. In Polynesia there are reefs hundreds of feet deep and 1,000 miles long. Who built these reefs, these islands? The zoophytes, the corallines. They were not such workers who built the pyramids as were these masons, these creatures of the sea. What small creations amounting to what vast aggregation! Who can estimate the ages between the time when the madrepores laid the foundations of the islands and the time when the madrepores put on the capstone of a completed work? It puzzles all the scientists to guess through how many years the corallines were building the Sandwich and Society islands and the Marshall and Gilbert groups. But more slowly and wonderfully accumulative is grace in the heart. You sometimes get discouraged because the upbuilding by the soul does not go on more rapidly. Why, you have all eternity to build in. The little annoyances of life are zoophyte builders, and there will be small layer on top of small layer and fossilized grief on the top of fossilized grief. Grace does not go up rapidly in your soul, but, blessed be God, it goes up. Ten thousand million ages will not finish you. You will never be finished. On forever! Up forever! Out of the sea of earthly disquietude will gradually rise the reefs, the islands, the continents, the hemispheres of grandeur and glory. Men talk as though in this life we only had time to build. But what we build in this life as compared with what we shall build in the next life is as a striped shell to Australia. You tell me we do not amount to much now, but try us after a thousand million ages of hallelujah. Let us hear the angels chant for a million centuries. Give us an eternity with God and then see if we do not amount to something. More slowly and marvelously accumulative is the grace in the soul than anything I can think of. “No mention shall be made of coral.” The Virtue of Patience. Lord, help us to learn that which most of ns are deficient in—patience! If thou const take, through the sea anemones,

millions of years to build one bank of coral, ought we not to be willing to do work through ten years or fifty year? without complaint, without restlessness, without chafing of spirit? Patience .with the erring; patience that we cannot have the millennium in a few weeks; patience with assault of antagonists; patience at what seems a slow fulfillment of Bible promises; patience with physical ailments; patience under delays of Providence; grand, glorious, all enduring, all conquering patience! ■■ X',

Christian Hope. Take my hand again, and we will go a little farther into this garden of the sea, and we shall find that in proportion as the climate is hot the coral is wealthy. Draw two isothermal lines at 60 degrees north and smith of the equator, and you find the favorite home of the coral. Go to the hottest part of the Pacific seas and you find the finest specimens of coral. Coral is a child of the fire.' But more wonderfully do the heats and fires of trouble bring out the jewels of the Christian soul. Those are not the stalwart men who are asleep on the shaded lawn, but those who are pounding amid the furnaces. I do not know of any other way of getting a thorough Christian character. I Will show you a picture; Here are a father and a mother HO or 35 years of age, their family around them. It is Sabbath morning. They have prayers. They hear the children’s catechism. They have prayers every day of the week. They are in humble circumstances. But, after awhile the wheel of fortune turns up and the man gets liis $20,000. Now he has prayers on Sabbath and every day of the week, but he has dropped the catechism. The wheel of fortune turns up again, and he gets his SBO,OOO. Now he has prayers on Sabbath morning alone. The wheel of fortune keeps turning up, and he has $200,000, and now he has prayers on Sabbath morning when he feels like it and there is no company. The wheel of fortune keeps on turning up, and he has Ids $300,000 and no prayers at all. Four leaf clover in a pasture field is not so rare as family prayers in the houses of people who have more than $300,000. But now the wheel of fortune turns down, and the man loses $200,000 out of the $300,000. Now on Sabbath morning he is on a stepladder looking for a Bible under the old newspapers on the bookcase. He is going to have prayers. His affairs are more and more complicated, and after awhile crash goes his last dollar. Now he has prayers every morning and lie hears his grandchildren the catechism. Prosperity took him away from God; adversity drove him hack to God. Hot climate to make the coral; hot and scalding trouble to make the jewels of grace in the soul. We all hate trouble and yet it does a great deal for us.

Coral Specimens. Again, I tflle your hand, and we walk on through this garden of the sea and look more particularly than we did at the beauty of the coral. One specimen of coral is called the dendrophilia because it is like a tree; another is called the astrara because it is like a star; another is called the brain coral because it is like the convolutions of the human brain; another is called fan coral because it is like the instrument With which you cool yourself on a hot day; unotlier specimen is called the organ pipe coral because it resembles the king of musical instruments. All the flowers and all the shrubs in the gardens of the land have their correspondencies in this garden of the sea. Corallum! It is a synonym for beauty. And yet there is no beauty in the coral compared with pur religion. It gives physiognomic beauty. It does not change the features. It does not give features with which the person was not originally endowed, but it sets behind the features of the homeliest person a heaven that shines clear through. Bo that often on first acquaintance you said of a man, “He is the homeliest person I ever saw,” when, after you came to understand him and his nobility of soul shining through his countenance, you said, “He is the loveliest person I ever saw.” No one ever had a homely Christian mother. Whatever the world may have thought of her, tliero were two who thought well—your father, who had admired her for fifty years, and you, over whom she bent with so many tender ministrations. When you think of the angels of God and your mother among them, she outshines them all. Oh, that our young people could understand that there is nothing that so much beautifies the human countenance as the religion of Jesus Chrits. It makes everything beautiful. Trouble beautiful. Sickness beautiful. Disappointment beautiful. Everything beautiful.

Work that Kndures. The durability of the coral’s work is not at all to be compared with the durability of our work for God. The coral is going to crumble in the fires of the last day, but our work for God will endure forever. No more discouraged man ever lived than Beethoven, the great musical composer. Unmercifully criticised by brother artists and his music sometimes rejected. Deaf for twenty-five years, and forced on his way to Vienna to beg food and lodging at a very plain house by the roadside. In the evening the family opened a musical and played and sang with great enthusiasm, and one of the numbers they rendered was so emotional that tears ran down their cheeks while they sang nnd plwed- Beethoven, sitting in the room, tefo deaf to hear the singing, was curious to know what was the music that so overpowered them, and when they got through he reached up and took the folio in his hand and found it was his own music—Beethoven’s “Symphony in A”—and he cried out, “I wrote that!” The household sat and stood abashed to find that their poor looking guest was the great composer. But he never left that house alive. A fever seized him that night, and no relief could be afforded, and in a few days he died. But just before expiring he took the hand of his nephew, who had been sent for nnd had arrived, saying, “After all, Hummel, I must have had some talent.” Poor Beethoven! His work still lives, and in the twentieth century will be better appreciated than it was in the nineteenth, and as long as there is on earth an orchestra to play or an oratorio to sing, Beethoven’s nine symphonies will be the enchantment of nations. But you arc not a composer, and you say that there is nothing remarkable about you—only a mother trying to rear your family for usefulness and heaven. Yet the song with which you sing your child to sleep will never cease its mission. You will grow old and die. That son will pass out into the world. The song with which you sang him to Bleep last night will go with him while he lives, a conscious or unconscious restraint and inspiration here and may help open to him the gate of a glorious and triumphant hereafter. The lullabies off this century will sing through all the centuries. The humblest good accomplished in time will last

through eternity. I sometimes get discouraged, as I suppose you do, at the vastness of the Work and at how little we are doing. Little things decide great things. All that tremendous career of the last Napoleon hanging on the hand of a brakeman who, on one of our American railways, caught him as he was falling between the cars of a flying train. The battle of Dunbar was decided against the Scotch because their matches had given out. Aggregations of little things that pull down or build up. When an army or a regiment come to a bridge, they are always commanded to break ranks, for their simultaneous tread will destroy the strongest bridge. A bridge at Angiers, “France, 'and a bridge at Broughton, England,' went" down- the regiment kept step while crossing. Aggregations of temptation, aggregations of sorrow, aggregations of assaults, aggregations of Christian effort, aggregations of self-sacri-fiees—tlrese make the-irresistible power to demolish or to uplift, to destroy or.to save. Little causes and great results. Christianity was introduced into Japan by the falling overboard of a pocket Bible from a ship in the harbor of Tokyo. Oh, be encouraged! Do not any man say, “My work is so small.” Do not any woman say, “My work is so insignificant. I cannot do anything for the upbuilding of God’s kingdom.” You can, Remember the corallines. A Christian mother sat sewing a garment, and her little girl wanted to help her, and so she sewed on another piece of the same garment*nd brought it to her mother, and the work was corrected. It was imperfect and had to be all taken out again. But did the mother chide the child. Oh, no. She said, “She wanted to help me, and she did as well as she could.” And so the mother blessed the child, and while she blessed the child she thought of herself and said: “Perhaps it may be so with my poor work at the last. God will look at it. It may be very imperfect, and I know it is very crooked. He may have to take it all out. But he knows that I want to serve him, and he knows it is the best that I can do.” So be comforted in your Christian work. Five thousand million corallines made one coralhim. And then they passed away and otL i- millions came, and the work is wonderful. But on the day when the world’s redemption shall be consummated, and the names of all the millions of Christians who in all the ages have toiled on this structure shall be read, the work will appear so grand and the achievement so glorious and the durability so everlasting that “no mention shall be made of coral.”