The Cloudless Morning
2Sa_23:4 : ’93A morning without clouds.’94
Pulpit and printing press for the most part in our day are busy in discussing the condition of the cities at this time; but would it not be healthfully encouraging to all Christian workers and to all who are toiling to make the world better, if we should this morning, for a little while, look forward to the time when our cities shall be revolutionized by the Gospel of the Son of God, and all the darkness of sin and trouble and crime and suffering shall be gone from the sky, and it shall be ’93a morning without clouds?’94
Every man has pride in the city of his nativity or residence, if it be a city distinguished for any dignity or prowess. Caesar boasted of his native Rome, Virgil of Mantua, Lycurgus of Sparta, Demosthenes of Athens, Archimedes of Syracuse, and Paul of Tarsus. I should have suspicion of base-heartedness in a man who had no especial interest in the city of his birth or residence’97no exhilaration at the evidence of its prosperity, or its artistic embellishments, or its scientific advancement. I have noticed that a man never likes a city where he has not behaved well! He has enacted for himself discomfort whatever the surroundings. Swartout did not like New York, nor did Parkman like Boston, and people who have a free ride in the prison-van never like the city that furnishes the vehicle. When I find Argos and Rhodes and Smyrna trying to prove themselves the birthplace of Homer, I conclude right away that Homer behaved well. He liked them and they liked him. We must not war on laudable city pride, or with the idea of building ourselves up at any time try to pull others down. Boston must continue to point to its Faneuil Hall and to its superior educational advantages. Philadelphia must continue to point to its Independence Hall and its Mint and its Girard College. If I should find a man coming from any city, having no pride in that city, that city having been the place of his nativity, or now being the place of his residence, I would feel like asking him right away: ’93What mean thing have you been doing there? what outrageous thing have you been guilty of that you do not like the place?’94 New York is a goodly city. It is on both sides the river, the East River only the main artery of its great throbbing life. We or our children will live to see three or four bridges spanning that river, and more and more as the years go by will we be one; so when I say in my sermon New York, I mean well on to two million of population, and everything from Spuyten Duyvil Creek to Gowanus. That which helps one city will help the other; that which blasts one city will blast the other. Sin is a giant and when it comes to the Hudson or the East River it steps across it as easily as you step across a figure in a carpet. God’92s angel of blessing has two wings and one wing hovers over that city and the other wing hovers over this city.
In infancy our metropolis was put down by the banks of the Hudson. It was as feeble as Moses in the ark of bulrushes by the Nile, and like Miriam, there our fathers stood and watched it. The royal spirit of American commerce came down to bathe. She took it up in her arms and it waxed strong, and foreign ships brought silver and gold to its feet, and it has stretched itself up into a great metropolis, looking up to the mountains and off upon the sea, the mightiest energy in American civilization.
Every city is influenced by the character of the men who founded it. Romulus impressed his life upon Rome. The Pilgrim Fathers will never relax their grasp from New England. William Penn left a legacy of fair dealing and integrity to Philadelphia, and you can now, any day, on the streets of that city, see his customs, his manners, his morals, his hat, his wife’92s bonnet, and his meeting house. So the Hollanders, founding New York, left their impression on all the following generations.
What southern thoroughfare was ever smitten with pestilence and our physicians did not throw themselves on the sacrifice? What foreign nation was ever struck with famine and our ships did not put out laden with breadstuffs? What national struggle and our citizens did not pour their blood into the trenches? What street of Damascus or Beyrout or Madras has not resounded with the step of our missionaries? What gallery of art and our painters have not hung in it their pictures? What department of science or literature and our scholars have not made to it contributions?
I need not talk to you of our public schools, where the children of the cordwainer and the mechanic and the glassblower sit side by side with the favored sons of millionaires and merchant princes. Nor need I tell you of the asylums for the insane on these islands, where those who cut themselves among the tombs, come forth clothed and in their right mind. Nor need I tell you of the asylums for the blind and the deaf and the dumb and the orphans, the widows, the outcast, or of a thousand-armed machinery, streaming down from our great reservoirs the pure, bright, sparkling water rushing through the aqueducts and dashing out of the hydrants and hissing in the steam engines and tossing in the fountains and showering out the conflagrations and dripping from the baptismal fonts in our churches, and, with silvery tone and golden sparkle and crystalline shine, saying to the hundreds of thousands of our population in the words of him who made it: ’93I will, be thou clean!’94
I thank God for the place of our residence, and while there are a thousand things that ought to be corrected, and many wrongs that ought to be remedied, while I thank God for the past, I look forward this morning to a glorious future. I think we ought’97and I take it for granted you are all interested in this great work of evangelizing the cities and saving the world’97we ought to toil with the sunlight in our faces. We are not fighting in a miserable Bull Run of defeat. We are on the way to final victory. We are not following the rider on the black horse, leading us down to death and darkness and doom, but the rider on the white horse with the moon under his feet and the stars of heaven for his tiara. Hail, conqueror, hail!
I know there are sorrows and there are sins and there are sufferings all around about us; but as in some bitter, cold winter day when we are threshing our arms around us to keep our thumbs from freezing, we think of the warm spring day that will after a while come, or in the dark winter night we look up and we see the northern lights, the windows of heaven illumined by some great victory’97just so we look up from the night of suffering and sorrow and wretchedness in our cities and we see a light streaming through from the other side, and we know we are on the way to morning’97more than that, on the way to ’93a morning without clouds.’94 I want you to understand, all you who are toiling for Christ, that the castles of sin are all going to be captured. The victory for Christ in these great towns is going to be so complete that not a man on earth or an angel in heaven or a devil in hell will dispute it. How do I know? I know just as certainly as God lives and that this is holy truth. The old Bible is full of it. If the nation is to be saved, of course, all the cities are to be saved. It makes a great difference with you and with me whether we are toiling on toward a defeat or toiling on toward a victory.
Now, in this municipal elevation of which I speak I have to remark there will be greater financial prosperity than our cities have ever seen. Some people seem to have a morbid idea of the millennium, and they think when the better time comes to our cities and the world, people will give their time up to psalm singing and the relating of their religious experience, and as all social life will be purified there will be no hilarity, and as all business will be purified there will be no enterprise. There is no ground for such an absurd anticipation. In the time of which I speak where now one fortune is made there will be a hundred fortunes made. We all know business prosperity depends upon confidence between man and man. Now, when that time comes of which I speak, and all double dealing, all dishonesty, and all fraud are gone out of commercial circles, thorough confidence will be established and there will be better business done and larger fortunes gathered and mightier successes achieved.
The great business disasters of this country have come from the work of godless speculators and infamous stock gamblers. The great foe to business in New York and Brooklyn is crime. When the right has hurled back the wrong and shall have purified the commercial code and shall have beaten down fraudulent establishments and shall have put into the hands of honest men the keys of business, blessed time for the bargain makers. I am not talking an abstrac-tion; I am not making a guess. I am telling you God’92s eternal truth.
In that day of which I speak taxes will be a mere nothing. Now, our business men are taxed for everything. City taxes, county taxes, State taxes, United States taxes, stamp taxes, license taxes, manufacturing taxes’97taxes, taxes, taxes! Our business men have to make a small fortune every year to pay their taxes. What fastens on our great industries this awful load? Crime, individual and official. We have to pay the board of the villains who are incarcerated in our prisons; we have to take care of the orphans of those who plunged into their graves through beastly indulgence; we have to support the municipal governments, which are vast and expensive just in proportion as the criminal proclivities are vast and tremendous. Who supports the almshouses, and police stations, and all the machinery of municipal government? The taxpayers.
After every election in which there is an overturning of political parties, the politicians try to cipher out what was the cause of the revolution in American politics. Well, in some cities it meant one thing, perhaps, and in some States another thing; but I will tell you what it meant all over. It meant that the people of the United States are infuriate at the fact that the officers of government and those who have the arrangement of these things, keep taxes up when they might go down. A hundred million dollars more than necessary taxed out of the hard-working population of this country, and stored up as a temptation to public officials. The only way to keep the Congress of the United States from misappropriating fifty million dollars out of the national treasury is have no surplus in the treasury to steal.
In this coming Congress the dominant party will have another opportunity of putting down taxes, and if they do not put down taxes, the revolution made in certain States this autumn will be only as a snow-flake compared with the avalanche of popular indignation that shall come down. And I tell you Republicans, and you Democrats, that if you do not let down the taxes and let the people up, we will form a new party, anti-excessive taxation, anti-rum, anti-monopoly, anti-abomination, and you who have been fattening on the public spoils and reckless of the public virtue will not have so much as the wages of a street sweeper.
But in the glorious time of which I speak, grievous taxation will all have ceased. There will be no need of supporting criminals; there will be no criminals. Virtue will have taken the place of vice. There will be no orphan asylums, for parents will be able to leave a competency to their children; there will be no voting of large sums of moneys for some municipal improvement, which moneys, before they get to the improvement, drop into the pockets of those who voted them; no Oyer and Terminer kept up at vast expense to the people; no empaneling of juries to try theft and arson and murder and slander and blackmail; better factories; grander architecture; finer equipage; larger fortunes; richer opulence. ’93A morning without clouds.’94
In that better time, also, coming to these cities, the churches of Christ will be more numerous, and they will be larger, and they will be more devoted to the service of Jesus Christ, and they will exert greater influences for good. Now, it is often the case that churches are envious of each other, and denominations collide with each other, and even ministers of Christ sometimes forget the bond of brotherhood. But in the time of which I speak, while there will be just as many differences of opinion as there are now, there will be no acerbity, no hypercriticism, no exclusiveness.
In our great cities the churches are not to-day large enough to hold more than a fourth of the population. The churches that are built, comparatively few of them are fully occupied. The average attendance in the churches of the United States to-day is not four hundred. Now, in the glorious time of which I speak, there are going to be vast churches, and they are going to be all thronged with worshipers. Oh, what rousing songs they will sing! What earnest sermons they will preach! What fervent prayers they will offer! Now, in our time, what is called a fashionable church is a place where a few people, having attended very carefully to their toilet, come and sit down; they do not want to be crowded; they like a whole seat to themselves; and then, if they have any time left from thinking of their store, and from examining the style of the hat in front of them, they sit and listen to a sermon warranted to hit no man’92s sins, and listen to music which is rendered by a choir warranted to sing tunes that nobody knows! And then, after an hour and a half of indolent yawning, they go home refreshed. Every man feels better after he has had a sleep!
In many of the churches of Christ in our day, the music is simply a mockery. I have not a cultivated ear nor a cultivated voice, yet no man can do my singing for me. I have nothing to say against artistic music. The two or five dollars I pay to hear Miss Thursby or Miss Abbott or any of the other great queens of song is a good investment. But when the people assemble in religious convocation, and the hymn is read, and the angels of God step from their throne to catch the music on their wings, do not let us drive them away by our indifference. I have preached in churches where vast sums of money were employed to keep up the music, and it was as exquisite as any heard on earth, but I thought at the same time, for all matters practical, I would prefer the hearty, outbreaking song of a backwoods Methodist camp-meeting. Let one of these starveling fancy songs sung in church get up before the throne of God, how would it look standing amid the great doxologies of the redeemed? Let the finest operatic air that ever went up from the church of Christ get many hours the start, it will be caught and passed by the hosanna of the Sabbath-school children. I know a church where the choir did all the singing, save one Christian man who, through perseverance of the saints, went right on, and afterward a committee was appointed to wait on him and ask him if he would not please to stop singing, as he bothered the choir.
Let Those Refuse to Sing
Who Never Knew Our God;
But Children of the Heavenly King
Should Speak Their Joys Abroad.
’93Praise ye the Lord; let everything with breath praise the Lord.’94 In the glorious time coming in our cities and in the world, hosanna will meet hosanna; and hallelujah, hallelujah.
In that time, also, of which I speak, all the haunts of iniquity and crime and squalor will be cleansed and will be illumined. How is it to be done? You say perhaps by one influence; perhaps I say by another. I will tell you what is my idea, and I know I am right in it. The Gospel of the Son of Man is the only agency that will ever accomplish this. Mr. Ecsler, of England, had a theory that if the natural forces of wind and tide and sunshine and wave were rightly applied and rightly developed, it would make this whole earth a paradise. In a book of great genius, and which rushed from edition to edition, he said: ’93Fellowmen, I promise to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life may be had by every man, in superabundance, without labor and without pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful farms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, and in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish without labor in one year more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years, and may level a continent, sink valleys, create lakes, drain lakes and swamps, and intersect the land everywhere with beautiful canals and roads for transporting heavy loads of many thousand tons and for traveling a thousand miles in twenty-four hours. From the houses to be built will be afforded the most cultured views to be fancied. From the galleries, from the roof and from the turrets may be seen gardens as far as the eye can see, full of fruits and flowers, arranged in the most beautiful order, with walks, colonnades, aqueducts, canals, ponds, plains, amphitheatres, terraces, fountains, sculptured works, pavilions, gondolas, places of popular amusement to tire the eye and fancy. All this to be done by urging the water, the wind and the sunshine to their full development.’94
He goes on and gives plates of the machinery by which this work is to be done, and he says he only needs at the start a company in which the shares shall be twenty dollars each, and a hundred or two hundred thousand shall be raised just to make a specimen community, and then this being done, the world will see its practicability and very soon two or three million dollars can be obtained, and in ten years the whole posterous as some I have heard of! But I will take no stock in that company. I do not believe it will ever be done in that way, by any mechanical force, or by any machinery that the human mind can put into play. It is to be done by the Gospel of the Son of God’97the omnipotent machinery of love and grace and pardon and salvation. That is to emparadise the nations. Archimedes destroyed a fleet of ships coming up the harbor. You know how he did it? He lifted a great sun-glass, history tells us, and when the fleet of ships came up the harbor of Syracuse he brought to bear this sun-glass and he converged the sun’92s rays upon those ships. Now, the sails are wings of fire, the masts fall, the vessels sink. Oh! my friends, by the sun-glass of the Gospel converging the rays of the Sun of Righteousness upon the sins, the wickedness of the world, we will make them blaze and expire.
In that day of which I speak, do you believe there will be any midnight carousal? Will there be any kicking off from marble steps, of shivering mendicants? Will there be any unwashed, unfed, uncombed children? Will there be any blasphemies in the street? Will there be any inebriates staggering past? No. No wine stores; no lager beer saloons; no distilleries, where they make the three Xs; no bloodshot eye; no bloated cheek; no instruments of ruin and destruction; no fist-pounded forehead. The grandchildren of that woman who goes down the street with a curse, stoned by the boys that follow her, will be the reformers and the philanthropists and the Christian men and the honest merchants of New York and Brooklyn.
Then, what municipal governments, too, we will have in all the cities. Some cities are worse than others, but in many of our cities you need only walk by the city halls and look in at some of the rooms occupied by politicians, to see to what a sensual, loathsome, ignorant, besotted crew city politics is often abandoned. Or they stand around the City Hall picking their teeth, waiting for some emoluments of crumbs to fall to their feet, waiting all day long, and waiting all night long.
Who are those wretched women taken up for drunkenness and carried up to the courts, and put in prison of course? What will you do with the grogshops that made them drink? Nothing. Who are those prisoners in jail? One of them stole a pair of shoes. That boy stole a dollar. This girl snatched a purse. All of them crimes damaging society less than twenty or thirty dollars. But what will you do with the gambler who last night robbed the young man of a thousand dollars? Nothing. What shall be done with that one who breaks through and destroys the purity of a Christian home, and with an adroitness and perfidy that beats the strategy of hell, flings a shrinking, shrieking soul into a bottomless perdition? Nothing. What will you do with those who fleece that young man, getting him to purloin large sums of money from his employer’97the young man who came to an officer of my church and told the story and frantically asked what he might do? Nothing. Ah! we do well to punish small crimes, but I have sometimes thought it would be better in some of our cities if the officials would only turn out from the jails the petty criminals, the little offenders, the ten-dollar desperadoes, and put in their places some of the monsters of iniquity who drive their roan span through the streets so swiftly, that honest men have to leap to get out of the way of being run over. Oh, the damnable schemes that professed Christian men will sometimes engage in until God puts the finger of his retribution earth will be emparadised. The plan is not so pre-into the collar of their robe of hypocrisy and rips it clear to the bottom.
But all these wrongs are going to be righted. I expect to live to see the day. I think I hear in the distance the rumbling of the King’92s chariot. Not always in the minority is the church of God going to be, or are good men going to be. The streets are going to be filled with regenerated populations. Three hundred and sixty bells rang in Moscow when one prince was married; but when Righteousness and Peace kiss each other in all the earth, ten thousand times ten thousand bells shall strike the jubilee. Poverty enriched; hunger fed; crime purified; ignorance enlightened; all the cities saved. Is not this a cause worth working in? Perhaps you think sometimes it does not amount to much. You toil on in your different spheres, sometimes with great discouragement. People have no faith and say: ’93It does not amount to anything; you might as well quit that.’94 Why, when Moses stretched his hand over the Red Sea, it did not seem to mean anything especial. People came out, I suppose, and said: ’93Aha!’94 Some of them found out what he wanted to do. He wanted the sea parted. It did not amount to anything, this stretching out of his hand over the sea! But after a while the wind blew all night from the east, and the waters were gathered into a glittering palisade on each side, and the billows reared as God pulled back on their crystal bits. Wheel into line, O Israel! march, march! Pearls crashed under feet. Flying spray gathers into rainbow arch of victory for the conquerors to march under. Shout of hosts on the beach answering the shout of hosts amid sea. And when the last line of the Israelites reach the beach, the cymbals clap and the shields clang, and the waters rush over the pursuers, and the swift-fingered winds on the white keys of the foam play the grand march of Israel delivered and the awful dirge of Egyptian overthrow. So you and I go forth, and all the people of God go forth, and they stretch their hand over the sea’97the boiling sea of crime and sin and wretchedness. ’93It does not amount to anything,’94 people say. Does it not? God’92s winds of help will after a while begin to blow. A path will be cleared for the army of Christian philanthropists. The path will be lined with the treasures of Christian beneficence, and we will be greeted to the other beach by the clapping of all heaven’92s cymbals, while those who pursued us and derided us and tried to destroy us will go down under the sea, and all that will be left of them will be cast high and dry upon the beach, the splintered wheel of a chariot; or thrust out from the foam, the breathless nostrils of a riderless charger.
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage