177. The Horse and His Rider

The Horse and His Rider

Job_39:19; Job_39:21; Job_39:25 : ’93Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.’94

At this season of the year, when there come long columns of intelligence from the race-course, and multitudes are flocking to the watering-places to witness equine competition, and there is lively discussion in all households about the right and wrong of such exhibitions of mettle and speed, and when there is a heresy abroad that the cultivation of a horse’92s fleetness is an iniquity instead of a commendable virtue’97at such a time a sermon is demanded of every minister who would like to defend public morals on the one hand, and who is not willing to see an unrighteous abridgment of innocent amusement on the other. In this discussion I shall follow no sermonic precedent, but will give independently what I consider the Christian and common-sense view of this potent, all absorbing and agitating question of the turf.

There needs to be a redistribution of coronets among the brute creation. For ages the lion has been called the king of beasts. I knock off its coronet and put the crown upon the horse, in every way nobler, whether in shape or spirit or sagacity or intelligence or affection or usefulness. He is semi-human and knows how to reason on a small scale. The Centaur of olden times, part horse and part man, seems to be a suggestion of the fact that the horse is something more than a beast. Job in my text sets forth his strength, his beauty, his majesty, the panting of his nostril, the pawing of his hoof, and his enthusiasm for the battle. What Rosa Bonheur did for the cattle, and what Landseer did for the dog, Job with mightier pencil does for the horse. Eighty-eight times does the Bible speak of him. He comes into every kingly procession, and into every great occasion and into every triumph. It is very evident that Job and David and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and John were found of the horse. He comes into much of their imagery. A red horse’97that meant war. A black horse’97that meant famine. A pale horse’97that meant death. A white horse’97that meant victory. Good Mordecai mounts him while Haman holds the bit. The church’92s advance in the Bible is compared to a company of horses of Pharaoh’92s chariot. Jeremiah cries out, ’93How canst thou contend with horses?’94 Isaiah says, ’93The horse’92s hoofs shall be counted as flint.’94 Miriam claps her cymbals and sings, ’93The horse and the rider hath he thrown into the sea.’94 St. John, describing Christ as coming forth from conquest to conquest, represents him as seated on a white horse. In the parade of heaven the Bible makes us hear the clicking of hoofs on the golden pavement as it says: ’93The armies which were in heaven followed him on white horses.’94 I should not wonder if the horse, so banged and bruised and beaten and outraged on earth, should have some other place where his wrongs shall be righted. I do not assert it, but I say I should not be surprised if, after all, St. John’92s descriptions of the horses in heaven turned out not altogether to be figurative, but somewhat literal.

As the Bible makes a favorite of the horse by the hand of patriarch and prophet and evangelist; and the apostle stroking his sleek hide and patting his rounded neck and tenderly lifting his exquisitely formed hoof and listening with a thrill to the champ of his bit, so all great natures in all ages have spoken of him in encomiastic terms. Virgil in his Georgics almost seems to plagiarize from this description in the text, so much are the descriptions alike’97the descriptions of Virgil and the description of Job. The Duke of Wellington would not allow any one irreverently to touch his old warhorse Copenhagen, on whom he had ridden fifteen hours without dismounting at Waterloo, and when old Copenhagen died, his master ordered a military salute fired over his grave. John Howard showed that he did not exhaust all his sympathies in pitying the human race, for when sick he writes home: ’93Has my old chaise horse become sick or spoiled?’94 There is hardly any passage of French literature more pathetic than the lamentation over the death of the war charger Marchegay. Walter Scott has so much admiration for this divinely honored creature of God that in St. Ronan’92s Well, he orders the girth slackened and the blanket thrown over the smoking flanks. Edmund Burke, walking in the park at Baconsfield, musing over the past, throws his arms around the worn-out horse of his dead son Richard, and weeps upon the horse’92s neck, the horse seeming to sympathize in the memories. Rowland Hill, the great English preacher, was caricatured because in his family prayers he supplicated for the recovery of a sick horse, but when the horse got well, contrary to all the prophecies of the farriers, the prayer did not seem quite so much of an absurdity.

But what shall I say of the maltreatment of this beautiful and wonderful creature of God? If Thomas Chalmers in his day felt called upon to preach a sermon against cruelty to animals, how much more in this day is there a need of reprehensive discourse. All honor to Professor Bergh, the chief apostle for the brute creation, for the mercy he has demanded and achieved for this king of beasts. A man who owned four thousand horses, and some say forty thousand, wrote in the Bible: ’93A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.’94 Sir Henry Lawrence’92s care of the horse was beautifully Christian. He says: ’93I expect we shall lose Conrad, though I have taken so much care of him that he may come in cool. I always walk him the last four or five miles, and as I walk myself the first hour it is only in the middle of the journey we get over the ground.’94 Christopher North in his matchless Ambrosial Nights speaks of the maltreatment of the horse as a practical blasphemy.

I do not believe in the transmigration of souls, but I cannot very severely denounce the idea, for when I see men who cut and bruise and whack and welt and strike and maul and outrage and insult the horse, that beautiful servant of the human race, who carries our burdens and pulls our plows, and turns our threshers and our mills, and runs for our doctors’97when I see men thus beating and abusing and outraging that creature, it seems to me that it would be only fair that the doctrine of transmigration of souls should prove true, and that for their punishment they should pass over into some poor, miserable brute and be beaten and whacked and cruelly treated and frozen and heated and overdriven; into an everlasting stage-horse, an eternal traveler on a towpath, or tied to an eternal post, in an eternal winter, smitten with eternal epizooties!

Oh! is it not a shame that the brute creation, which had the first possession of our world, should be so maltreated by the race that came in last’97the fowl and the fish created on the fifth day, the horse and the cattle created on the morning of the sixth day, and the human race not created until the evening of the sixth day. It ought to be that if any man overdrives a horse or feeds him when hot or recklessly drives a nail into the quick of his hoof or rowels him to see him prance or so shoes him that his fetlocks drop blood or puts a collar on a raw neck or unnecessarily clutches his tongue with a twisted bit or cuts off his hair until he has no defense against the cold or unmercifully abbreviates the natural defense against insectile annoyances’97that such a man as that himself ought to be made to pull and let his horse ride!

But not only do our humanity and our Christian principle and the dictates of God demand that we kindly treat the brute creation and especially the horse; but I go further and say that whatever can be done for the development of his fleetness and his strength and his majesty ought to be done. We need to study his anatomy and his adaptations. I am glad that large books have been written to show how he can be best managed, and how his ailments can be cured, and what his usefulness is and what his capacities are. It would be a shame if in this age of the world, when the florist has turned the thin flower of the wood into a gorgeous rose, and the pomologist has changed the acrid and gnarled fruit of the ancients into the very poetry of pear and peach and plum and grape and apple, and the snarling cur of the Orient has become the great mastiff, and the miserable creature of the olden times barnyard has become the Devonshire and the Alderney and the short-horned; that the horse, grander than them all, should get no advantage from our science or our civilization or our Christianity. Groomed to the last point of soft brilliance, his flowing mane a billow of beauty, his arched neck in utmost rhythm of curve, let him be harnessed in graceful trappings and then driven to the furthest goal of excellence, and then fed at luxuriant oat-bins and blanketed in comfortable stall. The long-tried and faithful servant of the human race deserves all kindness, all care, all reward, all succulent forage and soft litter and paradisaical pasture field. Those farms in Kentucky and in different parts of the North, where the horse is trained to perfection in fleetness and in beauty and in majesty, are well set apart.

There is no more virtue in driving slow than in driving fast, any more than a freight train going ten miles the hour is better than an express train going fifty. There is a delusion abroad in the world that a thing must be necessarily good and Christian if it is slow and dull and plodding. There are very good people who seem to imagine it is humbly pious to drive a spavined, galled, glandered, springhalted, blind, staggered jade. There is not so much virtue in a Rosinante as there is in a Bucephalus. At the way some people drive, Elijah with his horses of fire would have taken three weeks to get into heaven. We want swifter horses and swifter men and swifter enterprises, and the Church of God needs to get off its jog trot. Quick tempests, quick lightnings, quick streams; why not quick horses? In time of war the cavalry service does the most execution, and as the battles of the world are probably not all past, our Christian patriotism demands that we be interested in equinal velocity. We might as well have poorer guns in our arsenals and clumsier ships in our navy yards than other nations, as to have under our cavalry saddles and before our parks of artillery slower horses. From the battle of Granicus, where the Persian horses drove the Macedonian infantry into the river, clear down to the horses on which Philip Sheridan and Stonewall Jackson rode into the fray, this arm of the military service has been recognized. Hamilcar, Hannibal, Gustavus Adolphus, Marshal Ney were cavalrymen. In this arm of the service, Charles Martel at the battle of Poictiers beat back the Arab invasion. The Carthaginian cavalry with the loss of only seven hundred men overthrew the Roman army with the loss of seventy thousand. In the same way the Spanish chivalry drove back the Moorish hordes.

The best way to keep peace in this country and in all countries is to be prepared for war, and there is no success in such a contest unless there be plenty of light-footed chargers. Our Christian patriotism and our instruction from the Word of God demand that first of all we kindly treat the horse, and then after that, that we develop his fleetness and his grandeur and his majesty and his strength.

But what shall I say of the effort being made in this day on a large scale to make this splendid creature of God, this divinely honored being, an instrument of atrocious evil? I make no indiscriminate assault against the turf. I believe in the turf if it can be conducted on right principles and with no betting. There is no more harm in offering a prize for the swiftest racer than there is harm at an agricultural fair in offering a prize to the farmer who has the best wheat or to the fruit grower who has the largest pear or to the machinist who presents the best corn thresher or in a school offering a prize of a copy of Shakespeare to the best reader or in a household giving a lump of sugar to the best behaved youngster.

Prizes by all means, rewards by all means. That is the way God develops the race. Rewards for all kinds of welldoing. Heaven itself is called a prize: ’93The prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.’94 So what is right in one direction is right in another direction. And without the prizes the horse’92s fleetness and beauty and strength will never be fully developed. If it cost one thousand dollars or five thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars, and the result be achieved, it is cheap.

But the sin begins where the betting begins, for that is gambling, or the effort to get that for which you give no equivalent; and gambling, whether on a large scale or a small scale, ought to be denounced of men as it will be accursed of God. If you have won fifty cents or five thousand dollars as a wager, you had better get rid of it. Get rid of it right away. Give it to some one who lost in a bet or give it to some great reformatory institution or if you do not like that, go down to the river and pitch it off the docks. You cannot afford to keep it. It will burn a hole in your purse, it will burn a hole in your estate, and you will lose all that, perhaps ten thousand times more’97perhaps you will lose all. Gambling blasts a man or it blasts his children. Generally both and all.

There is at this time a horse-betting craze. There is great danger that our beautiful Coney Island beach, the finest watering place on the American continent, the benediction of God upon Brooklyn and New York, should become a place distinguished for the gathering of gamblers and scoundrels and pickpockets. I say there is great danger in that direction. There are thousands of young men who have already taken a long stride on the down-grade through the Brighton Beach races and the Sheepshead Bay races. There have been stores in New York and Brooklyn robbed of small sums of money by boys who wanted to get the money to buy betting tickets.

One summer, on Barclay street, New York, there were three pool-rooms for betting on the horse-races at Coney Island and other points, and those three pool-rooms were crowded and surrounded by boys and men, and the police had to stand and keep the way clear. Hear it, you citizens, the police of New York aware of the betting pools and doing nothing! I hear there is now one such place on Willoughby street, Brooklyn. I call the attention of the public authorities to it for investigation in that direction. Hunter’92s Point also is the headquarters of much of this infamy.

But what a spectacle when at Saratoga or at Long Branch or at Brighton Beach or at Sheepshead Bay the horses start, and in a flash fifty or a hundred thousand dollars change hands! Multitudes ruined by losing the bet, others worse ruined by gaining the bet; for if a man lose in a bet at a horse-race, he may be discouraged and quit, but if he win the bet he is very apt to go straight on to hell. An intimate friend, a journalist, who, in the line of his profession, investigated this evil, tells me that there are three different kinds of betting at horse-races, and they are about equally leprous: by ’93auction pools,’94 by ’93French mutuals,’94 by what is called ’93bookmaking’94’97all gambling, all bad, all rotten with iniquity. There is one word that needs to be written on the brow of every pool-seller as he sits deducting his three or five per cent., and slyly ’93ringing up’94 more tickets than were sold on the winning horse’97a word to be written also on the brow of every book-keeper who at extra inducement scratches a horse off the race, and on the brow of every jockey who slackens pace that, according to agreement, another may win, and written over every judge’92s stand, and written on every board of the surrounding fences. That word is, ’93Swindle!’94

Yet thousands bet. Lawyers bet. Judges of courts bet. Members of the Legislature bet. Members of Congress bet. Professors of religion bet. Teachers and superintendents of Sunday-schools, I am told, bet. Ladies bet, not directly, but through agents. Yesterday and every day they bet, they gain, they lose, and this summer while the parasols swing and the hands clap and the huzzas deafen, there will be a multitude of people cajoled and deceived and cheated who will at the races go neck and neck, neck and neck to perdition.

Cultivate the horse, by all means, drive him as fast as you desire, provided you do not injure him or endanger yourself or others; but be careful and do not harness the horse to the chariot of sin. Do not throw your jewels of morality under the flying hoof. Do not under the pretext of improving the horse destroy a man. Do not have your name put down in the ever-increasing catalogue of those who are ruined for both worlds by the dissipations of the American race-course.

They say that an honest race-course is a ’93straight’94 track, and that a dishonest race-course is a ’93crooked’94 track’97that is the parlance abroad; but I tell you that every race track, surrounded by betting men and betting women and betting customs, is a straight track’97I mean straight down! Christ asked in one of his Gospels: ’93Is not a man better than a sheep?’94 I say, yes, and he is better than all the Dexters and the Luke Blackburns and the Hindus and the Glen-mores and the old Paroles that with lathered flanks ever shot around the ring at a race-course. That is a very poor job by which a man in order to get a horse to come out a full length ahead of some other racer, so lames his own morals that he comes out a whole length behind in the race set before him.

I preach this sermon on square, old-fashioned honesty. I have said nothing against the horse, I have said nothing against the turf. I have said everything against their prostitution. Young men, you go into straightforward industries and you will have better livelihood, and you will have larger permanent success than you can ever get by a wager; but you get in with some of the whisky, rum-blotched crew which I see going down on the ocean boulevards, though I never bet, I will risk this wager, five million to nothing, you will be debauched and damned.

Cultivate the horse, own him if you can afford to own him, test all the speed he has, if he have any speed in him; but be careful which way you drive. You cannot always tell what direction a man is driving by the way his horses head. Forty years ago we rode three miles every Sabbath morning to the country church. We were drawn by two fine horses. My father drove. He knew them and they knew him. They were friends. Sometimes they loved to go rapidly and he did not interfere with their happiness. He had all of us in the wagon with him. He drove to the country church. The fact is, that for eighty-two years he drove in the same direction. The roan span that I speak of was long ago unhitched and the driver put up his whip in the wagon-house never again to take it down; but in those good old times I learned something that I never forgot, that a man may admire a horse and love a horse and be proud of a horse and not always be willing to take the dust of the preceding vehicle, and yet be a Christian, an earnest Christian, an humble Christian, a consecrated Christian, useful until the last; so that at his death the Church of God cries out as Elisha exclaimed when Elijah went up with galloping horses of fire: ’93My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof!’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage