021. Expansion

Expansion

Gen_28:14 : ’93Thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east.’94

Since the Americano-Hispanic War is concluded and a United States ambassador is again stationed at Madrid, and a Spanish ambassador at Washington, the people of our country are divided into expansionists and anti-expansionists. From a different standpoint than that usually taken, I discuss this all-absorbing theme. I leave the political aspect of this subject to statesmen and warriors, and pray Almighty God that they may be enabled rightly to settle the question whether the islands in controversy shall be finally annexed, or held under protectorate, or resigned to themselves, while I call attention to the fact that a campaign of moral and religious expansion ought to be immediately opened on widest and grandest scale.

At the close of this war God put into the hands of this country the key to the world’92s redemption. Heretofore the religious movement in lands where Christ is unknown had to precede the educational. After in China and India and the islands of the sea the missionaries had labored over fifty or seventy-five years, the printing-press and the secular school came in. Now, to better advantage than ever before, religious and secular enlightenment may go side by side, and so the work be accomplished in short time and more thoroughly. Starting with the fact that in Cuba and Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands at least three-fourths of the people can neither read nor write, what an opportunity for school and printing-press! Within five years every man in those islands may be taught to read not only the Bible but the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States and the biography of George Washington and of Abraham Lincoln.

It seems to me that the Government of the United States ought by vote of Congress to afford common schools and printing-presses to those benighted regions. Our national legislature by one vote appropriated fifty million dollars to give bread and medicine to Cuba. Why not by a similar generosity give fifty million dollars for feeding and healing the minds and souls of those ignorant and besotted archipelagoes. In the name of God, I nominate a school for every neighborhood of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. As soon as the gavel falls at twelve o’92clock of next December fourth on the table of Senate and House of Representatives, and the roll has been called and the preliminaries are observed let some member of our national Legislature, with mind and soul and voice strong enough to be heard not only through those halls, but through Christendom, propose a measure for the mental and moral disenthralment of the islands whose future status is in controversy.

What has made American civilization the highest civilization the world has ever seen? Next to the Bible and the church, schools, common schools, schools reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from British America to Gulf of Mexico. Five years under such educational advantage and this whole subject that keeps our public men agitated, some of them to frothing at the mouth, will settle itself. Give those islands readers, spellers, arithmetics, histories, blackboards, maps, geographies, globes. Let the State Legislatures at their next meeting take parts of those islands under their especial educational patronage. What is needed is State and national action in this matter of schools.

Then let the editorial associations of the United States, as many of such organizations as there are States, resolve at the next convocation to establish in every region of those islands a printing-press, to be supported by people of this country until it can become self-supporting. Each of these State editorial associations sending out to those islands at least one editor and two reporters and enough typesetters, down will go the ignorance and superstition of those islands as certainly as the Spanish fleet under Cervera sank under the pounding of our American battleships, and into their every port will go intelligence and love of free institutions as certainly as into the harbor of Manila went Admiral Dewey on that famous night when he was not expected. The printing-press! Nothing can stand before its bombardment. Editors of American newspapers and publishers of American books! Take the ordination for such a magnificent service. Eloquence on Capitol Hill cannot meet the exigency. Epigrams on political platforms or in State Legislatures will not hasten the desired consummation one week or one hour or one moment.

When Cubans and Porto Ricans and Filipinos see the morning and evening newspapers thrown into the doorways and hawked along the streets of Havana and Santiago and Manila, those who cannot read, by the force of curiosity will learn to read, so that they may know what information is being scattered; and that which may be missionary effort at the start, and carried on by Americans sent forth to do the work, will soon be done by educated natives. Porto Rican editors! Porto Rican reporters! Porto Rican typesetters! Porto Rican publishers! It was a great mercy to take those islands from under the heels of despotism, but it will be a mightier mercy to emancipate them from ignorance and degradation. The expansion of the knowledge and intellectual qualification of all those insular regions is the desire of all intelligent Americans. Awake, all you schools and colleges and universities and printing-presses, to your opportunity!

Still further here is a wide-open door for Christianity. First of all, we have the attention of those people. The heathen nations are for the most part soporific. The American missionaries heretofore had great difficulty in getting heathendom to listen. They excited some comment by their attire, so different was the parting of the hair and the shape of the hat and the cut of the coat and the formation of the shoe of the evangelizers; but the questions constantly arose in regard to the missionary: ’93Who is he?’94 ’93What is he here for?’94 And then the interrogator would relax into the previous stupid indifference. But that condition of things has passed. The guns of our American navy have awakened those populations. They do not ask who we are. They have found out. They are now listening to what American civilization and our Christian religion have to say on any subject. Now is the time, while their ears and eyes are wide open, to tell them of the rescuing and saving and inspiriting power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world. The steam printing-press which secular education plants there may be used and will be used to print religious newspapers and tracts and sermons and mighty discussions of questions temporal and eternal.

The comfortable homes of those populations, when Christianized, standing side by side with the degraded huts of those who remain unchristianized, will be revolutionary for good. The Porto Rican and the Filipino will come out from his uncleansed and low-roofed and uninviting kennel, and say to his neighbor of beautiful household: ’93Why cannot I have things as you have them?’94 And when he finds that it is the Bible, with its teachings on family life and personal purity and exalted principle, and the Church of God that proposes the rectification of all evil and the implantation of all good, he will cry out: ’93Give me the Bible and the Church and the earthly alleviations and the eternal hope which have wrought for you such transfiguration.’94

Now, Church of God; now, all Christian philanthropists, is your opportunity! Nothing like it has occurred since Christ came. Perhaps there may be nothing like it till his second coming. Here is a definiteness of aim that is most helpful and inspiring. The millions of dollars given for the redemption of the world and the thousands of glorious missionaries who have, as volunteers, gone forth among barbaric nations, were given and enlisted under a great and immeasurable idea; but when they come to add to the great and immeasurable idea the idea of definiteness we will infinitely augment the work. More than three hundred million of heathen in India, more than four hundred million of people in China, and more millions of heathen than can be guessed outside of those countries, sometimes stagger and confound and defeat our faith; but here in these islands of present controversy we can farm out the work among the churches, and in five years, under the blessing of God, not only fit the people for the right of suffrage, but prepare them for usefulness and heaven.

The difference between the general idea of the ‘b0 world’92s evangelization and some particularized field of evangelization is the difference between the improvement of agriculture among all nations and the improvement of seventy-five acres put under one’92s especial care and industry. By all means let the general work go on; but here is the specified field for religious concentration and development. This is not chimerical or impractical. The American Missionary Association of the Congregational church has already begun the work at San Juan, Utuado, and Albonito, and all denominations of Christians will soon be in those insular fields, and we all need, with our prayers and contributions, to cheer them on to take for God and righteousness those regions which our navy has captured from Spanish oppression.

It has been estimated that this Americo-Spanish war cost us three hundred million dollars. It would not cost half of that to proclaim and carry on and consummate a holy war that will rescue those archipelagoes from satanic domination. Who will volunteer? I beat the drum of a recruiting station. Who will enlist under the one-starred, blood-striped banner of Immanuel? Cuba and Porto Rico and the Philippines are stepping-stones for our American Christianity to cross over and take the round world for God. We need a new evangelical alliance organized for this one purpose. In all denominations there are those with large enough hearts and who have been thoroughly enough converted to join in such an advanced movement; men, who, putting aside all minor differences of opinion, ’93believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son,’94 and who would march shoulder to shoulder in such a Gospel campaign. The result would be that those islanders, after such a scene of Gospelization, would assort themselves into denominations to suit themselves, and some would be sprinkled in holy baptism, and others would be immersed in those warm rivers, and some would worship in religious assemblage silent as the Quaker meetinghouse, and others would have as many jubilant ejaculations as a backwoods camp-meeting; and some of those who preached would be gowned and surpliced for the work, and others would stand in citizens’92 apparel or in their shirt-sleeves preaching that Gospel which is to save the world.

Mark you well that statesmanship, however grand it is, and wise men of the world, however noble, cannot do this work. Mere secular education does not moralize. Some of the most thoroughly educated men in all the world have been the worst men. Quicken a man’92s intellect, while at the same time you do not make his morals good, and you only augment his power for evil. Geography and mathematics and metaphysics and philosophy will never qualify a people to govern themselves. A corrupt printing-press is worse than no printing-press at all, but let loose an open Bible upon those islands, and let the apocalyptic angel once fly over them, and you will prepare them to become either colonies of the United States Government, or, as I hope will be the case, independent republics.

God did not exhaust himself when he built this nation. Those islands will yet have their Thomas Jeffersons, qualified to write for them Declarations of Independence; and George Washingtons, capable of achieving their liberties; and Abraham Lincolns, strong enough to emancipate their serfdoms; and Longfellows and Bryants, capable of putting their hills and their rivers and their landscapes into poems; and their Bancrofts and Prescotts, to make their histories; and their Irvings, to write their ’93Sketch Books;’94 and their Charles O’92Conors and Rufus Choates, to plead in the court-rooms; and their Daniel Websters and John J. Crittendens, to move their senates.

The day cometh’97hear it all ye who have no hope for those islands of bedwarfed and diseased illiterates’97the day cometh when those regions will have a Christian civilization equal to that which this country now enjoys, while I hope by that time this country will be as superior to what it now is, as today Washington and New York are better than Manila and Santiago. Do you see by this process of Gospelized intelligence, those archipelagoes will, as a nation, be protected from the two woes prophesied in regard to this country, the one woe prophesied by the expansionists, and the other woe prophesied by the anti-expansionists? It is said by those who would have us take all we can lay our hands on as a nation, that unless we enter the door now open for the enlargement of our national domain, we will decline the mission which God, in his providence, has assigned us. But surely no woe will come upon us, or upon them, if we Christianize them as we now have the opportunity of doing. The political technicalities are nothing as compared with the importance of this movement. I implore all political expansionists to augment us in this work of moral and religious expansion, for unless those islands are moralized and elevated in intelligence and habits, we do not want them, and their annexation would be political damnation. On the other hand, I implore all anti-expansionists to take a hand in the Gospelization of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. The only way to prepare them to take care of themselves is to give them the Ten Commandments that were published on Mount Sinai, and let them hear the groan of sacrifice that was breathed out on the heights of Golgotha. What they most want is the Gospel, the pure Gospel, the omnipotent Gospel, the Gospel that helps heal the wounds of the body, and irradiates the darkness of the mind, and achieves the ransom of the soul.

But on this platform the so-called expansionists and so-called anti-expansionists will yet stand side by side. Though I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, within five years, if this religio-educational work is properly attended to, there will be a Cuban republic, a Porto Rican republic and a Philippine republic, none of them on a large scale; but they will all have their schools and printing-presses and evangelical churches, their presidents, their senates and house of representatives, their mayors and their constabularies; and as good order will be observed in their cities as now reigns on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, or Broadway, New York.

Christ has started for the conquest of the nations, and nothing on earth or in hell can stop it. The continents are rapidly rolling into his dominion, and why not these islands, which for the most part, are only fragments broken off from continents, the interval lands having been sunk by earthquakes, allowing the ocean to take mastery over them? Each mother continent has around it a whole family of little continents. If the continents are being so rapidly evangelized, why not the islands? If America, why not Cuba and the Bahamas? If Asia, why not the Philippines and the Moluccas? If Europe, why not the Azores and the Orkneys? If Africa, why not Madagascar and St. Helena? The same power that broke them off the mainland, can lift them into evangelization.

In the old Book, which has become a new Book by reason of modern discoveries, special attention is called to the islands. ’93Declare the Lord’92s praise in the islands,’94 commands Isaiah. ’93Let the multitudes of the islands be glad thereof,’94 says the Psalmist. ’93All the islands of the heathen shall worship him,’94 writes Zephaniah. ’93He shall turn his face to the islands,’94 prophesies Daniel. ’93The inhabitants of the isles shall be astonished at thee,’94 foretells Ezekiel. ’93Hear it and declare it to the islands afar off,’94 exclaims Jeremiah. You see from this the islands are not to be neglected. Perhaps they are the Lord’92s favorites, as in households if there be any favoritism at all it is for the weakest. The islands, too small to take care of themselves, have the eternal God to take care of them. Let nations look out how they tread on the islands, however small and weak, for they are omnipotently defended. They may not be able to marshal large armies, or to send out navies to sweep the sea, but better than that, they have the chariots of heaven on their side and the drawn sword of the Almighty. I have as much faith in the salvation of the smallest island of the Philippines, of the Falklands, of the Canaries, of the Ladrones, of the Carolines, of the Fijis, of the Barbadoes, of the Cape Verdes, of the Society Islands, as I have in the salvation of America.

The continents themselves are only larger islands, and the world in which we live is only a still larger island, and the solar system is a group of islands, and the universe is an archipelago studded with islands of worlds, surrounded by the great ocean of infinitude and immensity. So you see when God planned the universe he diagrammed it into islands, and he will look after the interest of each of those islands, however small, and England and Holland and France and Germany and America must not treat the smallest and weakest island that comes under their sway any different from the way they treat the strongest nation of all the earth. God may chiefly deal with individuals in the next world, but he deals with nations in this world only, and when persistently a nation practises injustice against other people, it is only a question of time when the offender will find his doom. The path of time is strewn with the carcasses of nations that because of their maltreatment of other nations perished. The higher such offending empires rise, the harder will be their fall.

I believe the United States Government will last as long as the world lasts. I believe the fires of the Judgment Day will leap on the domes of our State and National capitals, while yet they are in their full power. I believe the last earthquake will put its explosion under our national foundations while yet they stand firm. I believe that republican and democratic form of government will be the universal form of government for all nations when they have been evangelized, for then the nations will be capable of self-government and will have demanded and secured that form of government as a right. It will be either that or a theocracy, which will be the direct government of Christ in his personal reign on earth, as many Bible students believe. Yet that jubilant expectation is founded not on the skill of human statesmanship or human legislation, but upon the belief that this nation will submit to divine guidance, and obey the divine law, and carry out its divinely-imposed mission. But if we defy the God of nations, our doom is fixed.

It required the pen of an Edward Gibbon, through four great volumes of more than five hundred pages each, to tell the story of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, concluding his monumental work with the words: ’93It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candor of the public.’94 What! the Roman empire dead. Did she lack warriors? No. Behold her Pompey and her Julius Caesar. Did she lack lawmakers and lawgivers? No. Think of the masters of Roman jurisprudence, our American attorneys today quoting those laws in our court-rooms more than fifteen centuries after they were enacted. In poetry did she not have her Virgil and Ovid? In history did she not have her Sallust and her Livy? In eloquence did she not have her Scipio and Cicero? In satire did she not have a Juvenal and a Horace? What pens were wielded by her Cato and her Terence and her Pliny! All nations heard the cry of her war eagles, the voices of her oratory, and the chime of her cantos. But the day of judgment came for that nation, and Hannibal crossed the Apennines, and the Goths and Vandals swooped, and the Carthaginian fleet assailed, and Numidian horsemen galloped, and nations combined, and Rome sank. The tourist now on the banks of the Tiber sees the ruins of her Forum, the ruins of her Colosseum, the ruins of her art, the ruins of her aqueducts, the ruins of her catacombs, the ruins of her palaces.

If our nation forgets its duty to other nations and practices injustice against other people, however insignificant, it will not take another Edward Gibbon twenty years, and through four great volumes, to tell the story of the decline and fall of American institutions. By so much as our opportunities have been greater than any nation that ever lived, and the mission to which she has been ordained is more stupendous than any bestowed by the Almighty upon any people, if we forget our God and commit wickedness our overthrow will be quicker and more tremendous; and yonder Capitoline hill, with its architectural magnificence will become a heap of gigantic ruins, to be visited by the people of other times and other nations, who will read in letters of crushed and crumbled marble that which David wrote many hundred years ago upon parchment: ’93The way of the wicked he turneth upside down.’94

Three years ago, at this season, in memorial sermon, I proposed the twisting of two garlands, one to be put upon the grave of the Northern soldier, and the other to be put on the grave of the Southern soldier; but this year we need three garlands, the third to be put upon the graves of those who fell in this Americo-Hispanic conflict. The third garland needs to be quite as fragrant and as radiant as the other two. These last heroes braved more than bayonets and bombshell; they braved the pestiferous breath of the tropics’97whole battalions, whole regiments, whole brigades, whole armies of deathful malaria. They confronted those oppositions of the torrid climes which no sword can pierce, no agility climb, no stratagem flank, no torpedo explode, no courage conquer. Under the awful charge of visible and invisible hosts about six thousand men went down, some to instant death, and others through lingering pangs in hospital.

If in this third wreath you twist the crimson rose, suggestive of sanguinary sacrifice, and the white calla-lily, suggestive of glorious resurrection, put in also a few forget-me-nots, suggestive of remembrance, and a few passion flowers, suggestive of the love that mourns the slain, and a few heliotropes, suggestive of the fragrance of their memory. Then let the night’92s dew put the tears into the blue eyes of the violets, and all the soldiers’92 cemeteries be so many censers burning incense before the throne of that God who has been the friend of this nation from the time of Lexington to the time of San Juan Hill, from the guns of the United States warships Constitution and Constellation, at the beginning of this century, to the guns of the United States warships Olympia, Oregon, Brooklyn, and other loaded thunders at the close of this century.

Remember, here and now, that those brave boys opened up the way for a kind of expansion we all believe in. They swung open the gates for the speedy Gospelization of islands stupid with the superstition of ages. They cleared the way for missionaries and Bibles. They set those islands free. Leaving to the United States Government to decide what shall be the political destiny of those peoples, let us all join in a campaign of religious expansion’97expansion of affection that can take all the world in, expansion of our theologies until none shall reject their broad invitation, expansion of hope that embraces eternity as well as time, expansion of effort that will not cease till the whole earth is saved, and the time arrives when the prophecy shall be fulfilled and ’93they shall come from the north and the south and the east and the west and sit down in the kingdom of God, and the last shall be first and the first last.’94

Week before last, in this capital of the nation, we set three nights on fire in celebration of naval and soldierly heroics, and there were rockets of fire and wheels of fire and sheaves of fire and spouting fountains of fire and bombardments of fire and ships of fire sank in billows of fire, and those three nights were three garlands of fire; but now we are in softer and quieter mood, and the three garlands of today are woven of blossoms and corollas of all colors and all pungencies of aroma, and we bethink ourselves that this third garland was needed to chain together the Northern garland of other decorative times to the Southern garland of other decorative times. Floral chain of three links! For the first time in sixty years the North and South stand in complete brotherhood. Heroes of Vermont and Alabama, of Massachusetts and South Carolina, of Maine and Louisiana, shoulder to shoulder! May that alliance remain until the last oppression is extirpated from the earth and all nations stand in the liberty with which Christ would make all people free!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage