Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 60, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1898 — TIMAGE'S SERMON [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

TIMAGE'S SERMON

IF the spirit of this sermon of Dr. Talmage were carried out, the world would be a' better place to live in, and the fallen would find it easier to recover themselves; text, Matthew vii, 2, “With what measure you mete it shall be measured to you again.” In the greatest sermon ever preached — a sermon about fifteen minutes long according to the ordinary rate of speech—a sermon juLthe Mount of Olives, the preacher sitting while he spoke, according to the ancient mode of oratory, the people were given to understand that the same yardstick that they employed upon others would be employed upon themselves. Measure others by a harsh rule, and you will be measured by a harsh rule. Measure others by a charitable rule, and you will be measured by a charitable rule. Give no mercy to others, and no mercy will be given to you. “With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again.”

1 Inhere is a great deal of unfairness in criticism in human conduct. It was to smite that unfairness that Christ uttered the words of the text, and my sermon will be a re-echo of the divine sentiment. In estimating the misbehavior of others we must take into consideration the pressure of circumstances. It is never right to do wrong, but there are degrees of culpability. When men misbehave or commit some atrocious wickedness, we are disposed indiscriminately to tumble them all over the bank of condemnation. Suffer they ought, and suffer they must, but in a difference of degree. In the first place, in estimating the misdoing of others we must take into calculation the hereditary tendency. There is ■such a thing as good blood, and there is such a thing as bad blood. There are families that have had a moral twist in them'for a hundred years back. They have not been careful to keep the family record in that regard. There have been escapades and maraudings and scoundrelisms and moral deficits all the way back, whether you call it kleptomania or pyrotnania or dipsomania or whether it be in « milder form and amount to no mania at all. The strong probability is that the present criminal started life with .nerve, muscle and bone contaminated. As some' start life with a natural tendency to nobility and generosity and kindness and truthfulness, there are Others who start life with just the opposite tendency, and they are born liar 3 or born malcontents or born outlaws or born swindlers. We all know that it is more difficult for children of bad parentage to do right than for children of good parentage. All Born Kqual. In this country we are taught by the Declaration of American Independence that all people are born equal. There never was a greater misrepresentation put in one senteuce than in that sentence which implies that we are all born equal. Yon may as well say that flowers are born equal or trees are born equal or animals are born equal. Why does one horse cost SIOO and another horse cost $5,000? Why does one sheep cost $lO and another sheep cost $500? Difference in blood. We are wise enough to recognize it in horses, in cattle, in sheep, but we are not wise enough to make allowance for the difference in the human blood. Now, I demand by the law of eternal fairness that you be more lenient in your criticism of those who were born wrong, in whose ancestral line there was a hangman’s knot, or who came from a tree the fruit of which for centuries has been gnarled and worm eaten. Dr. Harris, a reformer, gave some marvelous statistics in his story of a woman he called “Margaret, -the mother of criminals.” Ninety years ago she lived in a village in upper New York State. She was not only poor, but she was vicious. She was not well provided for. There were no almshouses there. The public, however, somewhat looked after her, but chiefly scoffed at her and derided her and pushed her further down in her crime. That was ninety years ago. There have been G 23 persons in that ancestral line, 200 of them briminals. In one branch of that family there were twenty, and nine of them have been iu State prison, and nearly all of the others hpve turned out badly. It.is estimated that that family cost the county and State SIOO,OOO, to say nothing of the property they. destroyed. Are you not willing, as sensible, fair people, to acknowledge that it is a fearful disaster to be born in such an ancestral line? Does it not make a great difference whether one descends from Margaret, the mother of criminals, *or from some mother in Israel; whether you are the son of Ahnb or the son of Joshua? Against tlic Current. It is a very different thing to swim with the current from what it is to swim against the current, as some of you hnve no doubt found in your summer recreation. If a man find himself in an ancestral current where there is good blood flowing smoothly from generation to generation, it is not a very great credit to him if he turn out good and honest and pure and noble. 116 could hardly help it. But suppose he is born in an ancestral line, iu a hereditary line, where the influences have been bad and there hns been a coming down over a moral declivity, if the man (Surrender to the influences he will go down under the over mastering gravitation unless some supernatural aid be afforded him. Now, such a person deserves not your excoriation; but your pity. Do not sit with the lie curled in scorn and with an assumed air of angelic innocence looking down uiMjn such moral precipitation. You had better get down on your knees and'first pray Almighty God for their rescue, and next thank the Lord that you have not been thrown under the wheels of that Juggernaut. In Great Britain and ia the United

States in every generation there are tens of thousands of persons who are fully developed criminals and incarcerated. I say in every generation. Then I suppose thereare tens of thousands of persons not found out in their criminality. In addition to these there are tons of thousands of persons who not positively becoming criminals nevertheless have a criminal tendency. Any one of all those thousands, by the grace of God, may become Christian and resist the ancestral influence and open a new chapter of behavior, but the vast majority of them will not, and it becomes all men, professional, unprofessional, ministers of religion, judges of courts, philanthropists and Christian workers, to recognize the fact that there are these Atlantic and Pacific surges of hereditary evil rolling on through the centuries. I shy, of course, a man can resist this tendency, just as in the ancestral line mentioned in the first chapter of Matthew. You see in the same line in which there was a wicked Rehoboam and n desperate Manasses there afterward came a" pious Josiah and a glorious Christ. But, my friends, you must recognize the fact that these influences go on from generation to generation. I am glad to know, however, that a river which has produced nothing but miasma for a hundred miles may after awhile turn the wheels' of factories and help support industrious and virtuous populations, and there are family lines which were poisoned that are a benediction now. .At the last day it will be found out that there are men who have gone clear over into all forms of iniquity and plunged into utter abandonment who before they yielded to the first temptation resisted more evil than many a man who has been moral and upright all his life. The Best Man Before God. But supposing now that in this age, when there are so many good people, that I come down into this audience and select the very best man in it. Ido not mean the man who would style himself the best, for probably he is a hypocrite, but I mean the man who before God is really the best. I will take you out from all your Christian surroundings. I will take you back to boyhood. I will put you in a depraved home. I will put you in a cradle of iniquity. 'Who is bending over that cradle? An intoxicated mother. Who is that swearing in the next room? Y'our father. The neighbors come in to talk, and their jokes are unclean. There is not in the house a Bible moral treatise, but only a few scraps of an old pictorial. After awhile you are old enough to get out of the cradle, and you are struck across the head for naughtiness, but never iu any kindly manner reprimanded. After awhile you are old enough to go abroad, and you are sent out with a basket to steal. If you come home without any spoil, you are whipped until the blood comes. At 15 years of age you go out to fight your own battles in this world, which seems to care no more for you than the dog that has died of a fit under the fence. You are kicked and cuffed and Some day, rallying your courage, you resent some wrong. A man says: “Who are you? I know who you are. Your father had free lodgings at Sing Sing. Y'our mother, she was up for drunkenness at the criminal court. Get out of my way, you low lived wretch!” My brother, suppose that had been the history of your advent and the history of your earlier surroundings. Would you have been the Christian man you are to-day, seated in this Christian assembly? I tell you nay. You would have been a vagabond, an outlaw, a murderer on the scaffold atoning for your crime. All these considerations ought to make us merciful in our dealings with the wandering and the lost. Swayed by Circumstances. Again, I have to remark that in our estimation the misdoing of people who have fallen from high respectability and usefulness we must take into consideration the conjunction of circumstances. In nine cases out of ten a man who goes astray does not intend any positive wrong. He has trust funds. He risks a part of these funds in investment. He says: “Now, if I should lose that investment 1 have of my own property five times as much, and if this investment should go wrong I could easily make it up. I could five times make it up.” With that wrong reasoning he goes On and makes the investment, and it does not turn out quite as well as he expected, and he makes another investment, and strange to say at the same time all his other affairs get entangled, and all his other resources fail, and his hands are tied. Now he wants to extricate himself. He goes a little further on in the wrong investment. He takes a plunge further ahead, for he wants to save his home, he wants to save his membership in the church. He takes one more plunge, and all is lost. Some morning at 10 o’clock the bank door is not opened, and there is a card on the door signed by an officer of the bank, indicating there is trouble, and the name of the defaulter or the defrauder heads the newspaper column, and hundreds of men say, “Good for him!” Hundreds of other men say, “I'm glad he’s found out at last.” Hundreds of other men say, “Just as I told you.” Hundreds of other men say, “We couldn't possibly have been tempted to do that —no conjunction of circumstances could ever have overthrown me.” And there is a superabundance of indignation, but no pity. The heavens full of lightniwf, but not one drop of dew. If God treated us 0.% society treats that man, we all have been in hell long ago. Temper Wrath with Mercy. Wait for the alleviating circumstances. Perhaps he may have been the dupe of others. Before you let nil the hounds out from their kennel to maul and tear that man find out if lie Infs not been brought up in a commercial establishment where there was a wrong system of ethics taught; find out whether that man has not an extravagant wife who is not satisfied with his honest earnings and in the temptation to please her he has gone into that ruin into which enough men have fallen, and by the same temptation, to make r a procession of many miles. Perhaps some sudden sickness may hnve touched his brain, and his judgment may lie unbalanced. He is wrong, he is awfully wrong, anu he must be condemned, but there may Ik* mitigating circumstances. Perhaps un<jer the same temptation you might have fallen. The reason some men do not steal $200,000 is because they do not get a chance. Have righteous indignation you must

about that man’s conduct, but temper It with mercy. But, you say, “I am sorry that the innocent should suffer.” Yes, I am, too—sorry for the widows and orphans who lost their all by that defalcation. I am sorry also for the business men, the honest business men, who have had their affairs all crippled by that defalcation. I am sorry for the venerabib bank president, to whom the credit of that bank was a matter of pride. Yes, I am sorry also for that man who brought all the distress —sorry that he sacrificed body, mind, soul, reputation, heaven, and went into the blackness of darkness forever. You defiantly say, “I could not be tempted in that way.” Perhaps you may be tested after awhile. God has a very good memory, and he sometimes seems to say: “This man feels so strong in his innate power and goodness he shall be tested. He is so full of bitter invective against that unfortunate it shall be shown now whether he has the power to stand.” Fifteen years go by. The wheel of fortune turns several times, and you are in a crisis that you never could Jiave anticipated. Now all the powers of darktiess come around, and they chuckle and they chatter and they say: “Aha, here is the old fellow who was so proud of his integrity and who bragged he couldn’t be overthrown by temptation and was so uproarious iu his demonstrations of indignation at the defalcation fifteen years ago! Let us see!” A Glance Backward. God lets the man go. God, who had kept that man under his protecting care, lets the m«n> go and try for himself the majesty of his integrityu. God letting the man go, the powers of darkness pounce upon him. I see you some day in your office in great excitement. One of two things you can do—be honest and be pauperized and have your children brought home from school, your family dethroned in social influence; the other thing is you can step a little aside from that which is right, you can only just go half an inch out of the proper path, you can only take a little risk, and then you have all your finances fair and right. You will have a large property. You can leave a fortune for your children and endow a college and build a public library in your native town. Y'ou halt and wait and halt and wait until your lips get white. You decide to risk it. Only a few strokes of the pen now. But, oh, how your hand trembles, how dreadfully it trembles! The die is cast. By the strangest and most awful conjunction of circumstances any one could have imagined you are prostrated. Bankruptcy, commercial annihilation, exposure, crime. Good men mourn and devils hold carnival, and you see your own name at the head of the newspaper column in a whole congress of exclamation points, and while you are reading the anathema in the reportorial and editorial paragraph it occurs to you how much this story is like that of the defalcation fifteen years ago, and a clap of thunder shakes the window sill, saying: “With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you .again.” —— Y’ou look in another direction. There is nothing like ebullitions of temper to put a man ,to disadvantage. You, a man with calm pulses and a fine digestion and perfect health, cannot understand how anybody should be capsized in temper by an infinitesimal annoyance. You say, “I couldn’t be unbalanced in that way.” Perhaps you smile at a provocation that makes .another man swear. You pride yourself on your imperturbability. You say with your manner, though you have too much good taste to say it with your words: “I have a great deal more sense than that man has. I have a great deal more equipoise of temper than that man has. I never could make such a puerile exhibition of myself as that man has made.”

Fold at Last. Let me see. Did you'not say that you could not be tempted to an ebullition of temper? Some September you come home from your summer watering place, and you have inside away back in your liver or spleen what we call in our day malaria, but what the old folks called chills and fever. Y'ou take quiniue until your ears are first buzzing beehives and then roaring Niagaras. You take roots and herbs; you take everything. You get well. But the next day you feel uncomfortable, and you yawn, and you stretch, and you shiver, and you consume, and you suffer. Vexed more than you can tell, you cannot sleep, you cannot eat, you cannot bear to see anything that looks happy. You go out to kick the eat that is asleep in the sun. Your children’s mirth was once music to you. Now it is deafening. You say,’ “Boys, stop that racket!” You turn back from June to March. In the family and iu the neighborhood your popularity is 95 per cent off. The world says: “What is tho matter with that disagreeable man? What a woebegone countenance! I can’t boar the sight pf him.” You hnve got your pay at last —got your pay. You feel just as the man felt, that man for whom yon had no mercy, and my text comes in with marvelous appositeness, “With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again.” In the study of society I have come to this conclusion —that tho most of the people want to he good, but they do not exactly know how to make it oift-. They make enough good resolutions to lift them into angelhood. The vast majority of people who fall are the victims of circumstances. They are captured h.v ambuscade. If their temptations should come out in a regiment and tight them in a fair field, they would go out in the strength and the triumph of David against Goliath. But they do not see the giants, and they do not see the regiment. Temptation comes and says, “Take these bitters, take this nervine, take this aid to digestion, take this nightcap.” The vast majority of men and women who are destroyed by opium and b.v rum first take them as' medicines. In making up your dish of criticism in regard to them tuke from the caster and the cruet of sweet oh and not the cruet of cayenne pepper. Oh, my friends, let us be resolved to scold less and pray more! Wlint headway will we make in the judgment if in this world wo have been hard on those who have gone ustray? What headway will you and I make in the lost great judgment, when we must have mercy or perish? The Bible says, “They shall have judgment without mercy that showed no mercy.” Copyright. 1808. For a short distance a lion or n tiger can outrun a man and can equal -the speed of a fast horse; but the animals lose their wind at the end bf about half a mile. They have little endurance and are remarkably weak In lung power. Nothing—A thing that Isn't a thing because It’s no-thlng.