Victoria’92s Jubilee
Est_5:3 : ’93What wilt thou, queen Esther?’94
This question, which was asked of a queen thousands of years ago, all civilized nations are this day asking of Queen Victoria. ’93What will thou have of honor, of reward, of reverence, of service, of national and international acclamation? What wilt thou, Queen of the nineteenth century?’94 The seven miles of procession through the streets of London day after to-morrow will be a small part of the congratulatory procession whose multitudinous tramp will encircle the earth. The celebrative anthems that will sound up from Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’92s Cathedral in London will be less than the vibration of one harp-string as compared with the doxologies which this hour roll up from all nations in praise to God for the beautiful life and glorious reign of this oldest Queen amid many centuries. From that June morning in 1837, when the Archbishop of Canterbury addressed the embarrassed and weeping and almost affrighted girl of eighteen years with the startling words, ’93Your Majesty,’94 until this sixtieth anniversary of her accession, the prayer of all good people on all sides of the seas’97whether that prayer be offered by the three hundred million of her subjects, or the larger number of millions who are not her subjects; whether that prayer be solemnized in church, or rolled from great orchestras, or poured forth by military bands from forts and battlements and in front of triumphant armies all around the world’97has been and is now, ’93God save the Queen!’94
Amid the innumerable columns that have been printed in eulogy of this Queen at this anniversary’97columns which, put together, would be literally miles long’97it seems to me that the chief cause of congratulation to her and of praise to Gad has not yet been properly emphasized, and in many cases the chief keynote has not been struck at all. We have been told over and over again what has occurred in the Victorian era. The mightiest thing she has done has been almost ignored, while she has been honored by having her name attached to individuals and events for whom and for which she has had no responsibility. We have put before us the names of potent and grandly useful men and women who have lived during her reign, but I do not suppose that she at all helped Thomas Carlyle in twisting his involved and mighty satires, or helped Disraeli in issuance of his epigrammatic wit, or helped Cardinal Newman in his crossing over from religion to religion, or helped to inspire the enchanted sentiments of George Eliot and Harriet Martineau and Mrs. Browning, or helped to invent any of George Cruikshank’92s healthful cartoons, or helped George Grey in founding a British South African empire, or kindled the patriotic fervor with which John Bright stirred the masses, or had anything to do with the invention of the telephone or photograph, or the building up of the science of bacteriology, or the directing of the Roentgen rays which have revolutionized surgery, or helped in the inventions for facilitating printing and railroading and ocean voyaging. One is not to be credited or discredited for the virtue or the vice, the brilliance or the stupidity of his or her contemporaries.
While Queen Victoria has been the friend of all art, all literature, all science, all invention, all reform, her reign will be most remembered for all time and all eternity as the reign of Christianity. Beginning with that scene at five o’92clock in the morning at Kensington Palace, when she asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to pray for her, and they knelt down, imploring Divine guidance, until this hour, not only in the sublime liturgy of her Established Church, but on all occasions, she has directly or indirectly declared, ’93I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son.’94 I declare it, fearless of contradiction, that the mightiest champion of Christianity today is the throne of England. The Queen’92s book, so much criticised at the time of its appearance, some saying it was not skilfully done, and some saying that the private affairs of a household ought not so to have been exposed, was nevertheless a book of vast usefulness from the fact that it showed that God was acknowledged in all her life, and that the ’93Rock of Ages’94 was not an unusual song in Windsor Castle. Was there ever an explosion of fire-damp in the mines of Sheffield or Wales and her telegram was not the first to arrive with help and Christian sympathy? Is not President Garfield dying at Long Branch, and is not the cable under the sea, reaching to Balmoral Castle, kept busy in announcing the symptoms of the sufferer? Not a great movement for reform or peace or religion in America but has had the sympathy of England’92s palaces.
I believe that no throne since the throne of David and the throne of Hezekiah and the throne of Esther has been in such constant touch with the throne of heaven as the throne of Victoria. From what I know of her habits, she reads the Bible more than she does Shakespeare. She admires the hymns of Horatio Bonar more than she does Byron’92s ’93Corsair.’94 She has not knowingly admitted into her presence a corrupt man or dissolute woman. All the coming centuries of time cannot revoke the advantages of having had sixty years of Christian womanhood enthroned in the palaces of England. Compare her court surroundings with what were the court surroundings in the time of Henry VIII., or what were the court surroundings in the time of Louis XVI., in the times of men and women whose names may not be mentioned in decent society. Alas! for the revelries, and the more than Herodian dances, and scenes from which the veil must not be lifted. You. need, however, in order to appreciate the purity and virtuous splendor of Victoria’92s reign to contrast it somewhat with the gehennas and the pandemoniums of many of the throne-rooms of the past, and some of the throne-rooms of the present. I call the roll of the queens of the earth, not that I would have them come up or come back, but I may make them the background of a picture in which I can better present the present septenarian, so soon to be an octogenarian, now on the throne of England; her example so thoroughly on the right side that all the scandal-mongers in all the nations in six decades have not been able to manufacture an evil suspicion in regard to her that could be made to stick: Maria of Portugal, Isabella and Eleanor and Joanna of Spain, Catharine of Russia, Mary of Scotland, Maria Teresa of Germany, Marie Antoinette of France, and all the queens of England, as Mrs. Strickland has put them before us in her charming twelve volumes; and while some queen may surpass this modern queen in learning, and another in attractiveness of feature, and another in gracefulness of form, and another in romance of history, Victoria surpasses them all in nobility and grandeur and thoroughness of Christian character. I hail her! the Christian daughter, the Christian wife, the Christian mother, the Christian Queen! And let the Church of God and all benign and gracious institutions the world over cry out, as they come with music and bannered host and million-voiced huzza and the benedictions of earth and heaven, ’93What wilt thou, Queen Esther?’94
Another thing I call to your attention in this illustrious woman’92s career, is that she is a specimen of high life uncorrupted. Would she have lived to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of her coronation and the seventy-eighth anniversary of her birthday, had she not been an example of good principles and good habits? While there have been bad men and women in exalted station and humble station who have carried their vices clear on into the seventies and eighties of their lifetime, such persons are very rare. The majority of the vicious die in their thirties, and fewer reach the forties, and they are exceedingly scarce in the fifties. Longevity has not been the characteristic of most of those who have reached high places in that or this country. In many cases their wealth leads them into indulgences, or their honors make them reckless, or their opportunities of doing wrong are multiplied into the overwhelming, and it is as true now as when the Bible first presented it’97’94The wicked live not out half their days.’94 Longevity is not a positive proof of goodness, but it is prima facie evidence in that direction. A loose life has killed hundreds of eminent Americans. A loose life is now killing hundreds of eminent Americans and Europeans. Look! all ye who are in high places of the earth, and see one who has been plied by all the temptations which wealth and honor and the secret place of palaces could produce, and yet next Tuesday she will ride along in the presence of seven million people, if they can get within sight of her chariot, in a vigorous old age, no more hurt by the splendors that have surrounded her for seventy-eight years than is the plain country-woman, come down from her mountain home in an ox-cart to attend the Saturday marketing. The temptations of social life among the opulent classes have been so great that every winter is a holocaust of human nerves, and the beaches of the tossing sea of this high life are constantly strewn with physical and mental and moral shipwreck. Beware! all ye successful ones. Take a good look at the venerable Queen as she rides through Regent Street and along the Strand and through Trafalgar Square and by the Nelson Monument. What is the use of your dying at forty, when you may just as well live to be eighty? If you are doing nothing for God or the race, the sooner you quit the better; but if you are worth anything for the world’92s betterment, in the strength of God and through good habits, lay out a plan for a life that will reach through most of a century. How many people are practically suicides from the fact that their gormandizing or their recklessness or their defiance of dietetics and plain sanitary law cuts short their days! Indeed, so great is the temptation of those who have bountiful tables and full wine closets, that Solomon suggests that instead of putting the knife into the meat on their plate they direct the edge of it across their throat. Pro_23:1 : ’93When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before thee, and put a knife to thy throat if thou be a man given to appetite.’94 I believe more people die of improper eating than die of strong drink. The former causes no delirium or violence and works more gradually, but none the less fatally. Queen Victoria’92s habits, self-denying and almost ascetic, under a good Providence, account for her magnificent longevity. It may be a homely lesson for a sexagesimal anniversary in British palaces, but it is worth all the millions of dollars the celebration will cost, and worth all the laborious convocation of the representatives from all the zones of the planet, if the nations will learn the sanitary lesson of good hours, plain food, outdoor exercise, reasonable abstinence, and common-sense habits. That which Paul said to the jailer is just as appropriate for you and for me’97’94Do thyself no harm.’94
And here let me say, no people outside of Great Britain ought to be more interested in this Queen’92s jubilee than our nation. The cradles of most of our ancestors were rocked in Great Britain. They played in childhood on the banks of the Thames or the Clyde or the Shannon. Take from my veins the Welsh blood and the Scotch blood, and the streams of my life would be a shallow. Great Britain is our grandmother. We have read in the family records that without our grandmother’92s consent, her daughter, our mother, left home and married the genius of American Independence, and for a while there was bitter estrangement; but the family quarrel has ended and all has been forgiven, and we shake hands every day across the sea. At this royal anniversary, our authorized representatives will offer greeting in Buckingham Palace, and our warships will thunder congratulation in English waters. They are over there, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It is our John Bunyan, our Wilberforce, our Coleridge, our DeQuincey, our John Milton, our John Wesley, our John Knox, our Thomas Chalmers, our Bishop Char-nock, our Latimer, our Ridley, our Walter Scott, our Daniel O’92Connell, our Robert Emmet, our Havelock, our Henry Lawrence, our Tennyson, our William E. Gladstone, our Queen Victoria! Long live the daughter of the Duchess of Kent!
Again, this international celebration impresses me with the fact that woman is competent for political government, when God calls her to it. Great fears have been experienced in this country that woman would get the right of suffrage; and, as a consequence, after a while, woman might get into Congressional chair, and perhaps, after a while, reach the Chief Magistracy. Awful! Well, better quiet your perturbations, as you look across the sea, in this anniversary time, and behold a woman who for sixty years has ruled over the mightiest empire of all time, and ruled well. In approval of her government, the hands of all nations are clapping, the flags of all nations waving, the batteries of all nations booming. Look here! Men have not made such a wonderful success of government that they need be afraid that women should ever take a turn at power. The fact is that men have made a bad mess of it. The most abominably corrupt thing on earth is American politics, after men have had it all their own way in this country for one hundred and twenty-one years. Other things being equal’97for there are fools among women as well as among men’97I say, other things being equal, woman has generally a keener sense of what is right and what is wrong than has man, has naturally more faith in God, and knows better how to make self-sacrifices, and would more boldly act against intemperance and the social evil, and worse things might come to this country than a Supreme Court-room and a Senate Chamber and a House of Representatives in which feminine voices were sometimes heard. We men had better drop some of the strut out of our pompous gait, and with a little less of superciliousness thrust the thumbs into the sleeves of our vests, and be less apprehensive of the other sex, who seem to be the Lord’92s favorites from the fact that he has made more of them. If woman had possessed an influential and controlling vote on Capitol Hill at Washington and in the English Parliament, do you think that the two ruffian and murderous nations of the earth could have gone on with the butcheries in Armenia and Cuba? No! The Christian nations would have gone forth with bread and medicine, and bandages and military relief, until Abdul Hamid would have had no throne to sit on, and Weyler, the commanding assassin in Cuba, would have been thrust into a prison as dark as that in which they murdered Dr. Ruiz. I am no advocate for female suffrage and I do not know whether it would be best to have it; but I point you to the Queen of Great Britain and the nation over which she rules as proof that woman may be politically dominant and prosperity reign. God save the Queen! whether now, on the throne in Buckingham Palace, or in some time to come, in American White House.
And now I pray God that, day after to-morrow, the uncertain skies of England, so economic of sunshine, may pour golden light upon all the scene; and that, since the day when, in Westminster Abbey, the girlish Queen took in one hand the sceptre and in the other the orb of empire, there may have been no day so happy as that one in which she shall this week receive the plaudits of Christendom. May she be strengthened in her aged body to ride the whirlwind of international excitement, and her failing vision be illumined with bright memories of the past and brighter visions of the future; and when she quits the throne of earth may she have a throne in heaven; and as the doors of the Eternal Palace are swung open, may the question of the text sound in her enraptured ears, ’93What wilt thou, Queen Esther?’94
But as all of us will be denied attendance on that sixtieth anniversary celebration, I invite you, not to the anniversary of a coronation, but to a coronation itself’97ay, to two coronations. Brought up as we are, to love as no other form of government that which is republican and democratic, we, living on this side of the sea, cannot so easily as those living on the other side of the sea appreciate the two coronations to which all up and down the Bible you and I are urgently invited. Some of you have such morbid ideas of religion that you think of it as going down into a dark cellar, or out on a barren commons, or as a flagellation; when, so far from a dark cellar, it is a palace, and instead of a barren commons, it is a garden a-toss with the brightest fountains that-were ever rainbowed, and instead of flagellation it is coronation, but a coronation utterly eclipsing the one transatlantic. It was a great day when David, the little king who was large enough to thrash Goliath, took the crown at Rabbah’97a crown weighing a talent of gold and encircled with precious stones’97and the people shouted, ’93Long live the King!’94 It was a great day when Petrarch, surrounded by twelve patrician youths clothed in scarlet, received from a Senator the laurel crown, and the people shouted, ’93Long live the poet!’94 It was a great day when Mark Antony put upon C’e6sar the mightiest tiara of all the earth, and in honor of divine authority, C’e6sar had it placed afterward on the head of the statue of Jupiter Olympus. It was a great day when the greatest of Frenchmen took the diadem of Charlemagne and put it on his own brow. It was a great day when, about an eighth of a mile from the gate of Jerusalem, under a sky veiled with thickest darkness, and on a mountain trampled of earthquake, and the air on fire with the blasphemies of a mob, a crown of spikes was put upon the pallid and agonized brow of our Jesus. But that particular coronation, amid tears and blood and groans and shivering cataclysms, made your own coronation possible. Paul was not a man to lose his equilibrium, but when that old missionary, with crooked back and inflamed eyes, got a glimpse of the crown coming to him’97and coming to you, if you will by repentance and faith accept it’97he went into ecstasies, and his poor eyes flashed and his crooked back straightened as he cried to Timothy, ’93There is laid up for me a crown of righteousness,’94 and to the Corinthians, ’93These athletes run to ’91obtain a corruptible, we an incorruptible’92 crown.’94 And to the Thessalonians he speaks of ’93the crown of glory,’94 and to the Philippians he says, ’93My joy and crown.’94 The Apostle Peter catches the inspiration and cries out, ’93Ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away,’94 and St. John joins in the rapture and says, ’93Faithful to death, and I will give thee a crown of life,’94 and elsewhere exclaims, ’93Hold fast, that no man take thy crown.’94 Crowns! crowns! crowns!
You did not expect, in coming here today, to be invited to a coronation. You can scarcely believe your own ears; but in the name of a pardoning God and a sacrificing Christ and an omnipotent Holy Spirit and a triumphant heaven, I offer each one a crown for the asking. Crowns! crowns! How to get the crown? The way Victoria got her crown, on her knees. Although eight duchesses and marquises, all in cloth of silver, carried her train, and the windows and arches and roof of the Abbey shook with the Te Deum of the organ in full diapason, she had to kneel, she had to come down. To get the crown of pardon and eternal life, you will have to kneel, you will have to come down. History says that at her coronation, not only the entire assembly wept with profound emotion, but Victoria was in tears. So you must have your dry eyes moistened with tears, in your case tears of repentance, tears of joy, tears of coronation, and you will feel like crying out with Jeremiah, ’93Oh, that my head were waters and mine eyes fountains of tears.’94 Yes, she was during the ceremony seated for a while on a lowly stone called the Lia Fail’97the stone which, according to the well-preserved tradition, is the same that served Jacob for a pillow at Luz, when in his dream he saw the vision of angels on the heavenly ladder; and this stone, as I remember it, as I have seen it again and again, was rough and not a foot high, a lowly and humble place on which to be seated, and if you are to be crowned king or queen to God forever, you must be seated on the Lia Fail of profound humiliation. After all that, she was ready for the throne, and let me say that God is not going to leave your exaltation half done. There are thrones as well as crowns awaiting you. St. John shouted, ’93I saw thrones!’94 and again he said, ’93They shall reign forever and ever.’94 Thrones! Thrones! Get ready for the coronation.
But I invite you not only to your own coronation, but to a mightier and the mightiest. In all the ages of time no one ever had such a hard time as Christ while he was on earth. Brambles for his brow, expectoration for his cheek, whips for his back, spears for his side, spikes for his feet, contumely for his name; and even in our time, how many say he is no Christ at all, and there are tens of thousands of hands trying to push him back and keep him down. But, oh! the human and satanic impotency! Can a spider stop an albatross? Can the hole which the toy shovel of a child digs in the sand at Cape May swallow the Atlantic? Can the breath of a summer fan drive back the Mediterranean Euroclydon? Yes, when all the combined forces of earth and hell can keep Christ from ascending the throne of universal dominion. The Psalmist foresaw that coronation, and cried out in regard to the Messiah, ’93Upon himself shall his crown flourish.’94 From the cave of black basalt, St. John foresaw it, and cried, ’93On his head were many crowns.’94 Now do not miss the beauty of that figure. There is no room on any head for more than one crown of silver, gold, or diamond. Then what does the Book mean when it says, ’93On his head were many crowns’94? Well, it means twisted and enwreathed flowers. To prepare a crown for your child and make her the ’93Queen of the May,’94 you might take the white flowers out of one parterre, and the crimson flowers out of another parterre, and the blue flowers out of another parterre, and the pink flowers out of another parterre, and gracefully and skilfully work these four or five crowns into one crown of beauty. So all the splendors of earth and heaven are to be enwreathed into one coronal for our Lord’92s forehead’97one blazing glory, one dazzling brightness, one overpowering perfume, one down-flashing, up-rolling, out-spreading magnificence’97and so on his head shall be many crowns.
The world’92s best music will yet be sounded in his praise, the world’92s best architecture built for his worship, the world’92s best paintings descriptive of his triumphs, the world’92s best sculpture perpetuate the memory of his heroes and heroines. Already the crown woven out of many crowns is being put upon his brow. His scarred feet are already ascending the throne. The grandest throne of all time and eternity is the one that Christ is now mounting. The most of us will not see the consummation in this world. But we will gaze on it from the high heavens. The morning of that consummation will arrive and what a stir in the holy city. All the towers of gold will ring its arrival. All the chariots will roll into line, the armies of heaven which John saw seated on white horses passing in infinite cavalcade. The inhabitants of Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, and of all islands of the sea, and perhaps of other worlds will join in a procession compared with which that of Victoria’92s jubilee will not make one battalion, the Conqueror ahead, having on his vesture and on his thigh written, ’93King of Kings and Lord of Lords’94; and when he passes through the chief of the twelve uplifted gates, all nations following, may you and I be there to hear the combined shout of Church militant and Church triumphant.
Until the mightiest Musician of heaven shall compose an anthem worthy of that coronation, an anthem chanted by choirs standing on ’93sea of glass mingled with fire,’94 accompanied by harpers with their harps, and trumpeters with their trumpets, the hundred and forty and four thousand joining in the chorus, I say until that ’93Grand March’94 is composed, we had better stick to Isaac Watt’92s old hymn, which the five thousand natives of Tonga and Fiji and Samoa sang when giving up their idolatries for Christianity:
Jesus shall reign where’92er the sun
Does his successive journeys run.
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till suns shall rise and set no more.
Let every creature rise and bring
Peculiar honors to our King.
Angels descend with songs again,
And earth repeat the loud Amen.
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage