306. The Echoes

The Echoes

Eze_7:7 : ’93The sounding again of the mountains.’94

At last I have found it. The Bible has in it a recognition of all phases of the natural world from the aurora of the midnight heavens to the phosphorescence of the tumbled sea. But the well-known sound that we call the echo, I found not until a few days ago I discovered it in my text: ’93The sounding again of the mountains.’94 That is the echo. Ezekiel of the text had heard it again and again. Born among mountains and in his journey to distant exile having passed among mountains, it was natural that all through his writings there should loom up the mountains. Among them he had heard the sound of cataracts and of tempests in wrestle with oak and cedar, and the voices of the wild beasts, but a man of so poetic a nature as Ezekiel could not allow another sound, viz., the echo, to be disregarded, and so he gives us in our text ’93the sounding again of the mountains.’94

Greek mythology represented the Echo as a nymph, the daughter of earth and air, following Narcissus through forests and into grottoes and everywhither, and so strange and weird and startling is the echo I do not wonder that the superstitious have lifted it into the supernatural. You and I in boyhood or girlhood experimented with this responsiveness of sound. Standing half-way between the house and barn, we shouted many a time to hear the reverberations, or out among the mountains back of our home, on some long tramp, we stopped and made exclamation with full lungs just to hear what Ezekiel calls ’93the sounding again of the mountains.’94 The echo has frightened many a child and many a man. It is no tranquillizing thing after you have spoken to hear the same words repeated by the invisible. All the silences are filled with voices ready to answer. Yet, it would not be so startling if they said something else, but why do those lips of the air say just what you say? Do they mean to mock or mean to please? Who are you and where are you, thou wondrous Echo? Sometimes its response is a reiteration. The shot of a gun, the clapping of the hands, the beating of a drum, the voice of a violin are sometimes repeated many times by the echo. Near Coblentz that which is spoken has seventeen echoes. In 1766 a writer says that near Milan, Italy, there were seventy such reflections of sound to one snap of a pistol. Play a bugle near a Lake of Killarney and the tune is played back to you as distinctly as when you played it. There is a well two hundred and ten feet deep at Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight. Drop a pebble into that well, and the sound of its fall comes to the top of the well distinctly. A blast of an Alpine horn comes back from the rocks of Jungfrau in surge after surge of reflected sound, until it seems as if every peak had lifted and blown an Alpine horn. But have you noticed’97and this is the reason for the present discourse’97that this echo in the natural world has its analogy in the moral and religious world? Have you noticed the startling fact that what we say and do come back in recoiled gladness or disaster? About this resonance I preach this sermon.

First, parental teaching and example have their echo in the character of descendants. Exceptions? Oh, yes. So in the natural world there may be no echo, or a distorted echo, by reason of peculiar proximities, but the general rule is that the character of the children is the echo of the character of parents. The general rule is that good parents have good children and bad parents have bad children. If the old man is a crank, his son is apt to be a crank, and the grandchild a crank. The tendency is so mighty in that direction that it will get worse and worse unless some hero or heroine in that line shall rise and say: ’93Here! By the help of God, I will stand this no longer. Against this hereditary tendency to queerness I protest.’94 And he or she will set up an altar and a magnificent life that will reverse things and there will be no more cranks among that posterity. In another family the father and mother are consecrated people. What they do is right; what they teach is right. The boys may for some time be wild and the daughters worldly, but watch! Years pass on, perhaps ten years, twenty years, and you go back to the church where the father and mother used to be consistent members. You have heard nothing about the family for twenty years, and at the door of the church you see the sexton, and you ask him: ’93Where is old Mr. Webster?’94 ’93Oh! he has been dead many years.’94 ’93Where is Mrs. Webster?’94 ’93Oh! she died fifteen years ago.’94 ’93I suppose their son Joe went to the dogs?’94 ’93Oh! no,’94 says the sexton; ’93he is up there in the elders’92 seat. He is one of our best and most important members. You ought to hear him pray and sing. He is not Joe any longer; he is Elder Webster.’94 ’93Well, where is the daughter Mary? I suppose she is the same thoughtless butterfly she used to be?’94 ’93Oh! no,’94 says the sexton, ’93she is the president of our Missionary Society and the directoress in the Orphan Asylum, and when she goes down the street all the ragamuffins take hold of her dress and cry, ’91Auntie, when are you going to bring us some more books and shoes and things?’92 And, when, in times of revival, there is some hard case back in a church pew that no one else can touch, she goes where he is, and in one minute she has him a-crying, and the first thing we know she is leading the hardened man up to the front to be prayed for, and says, ’91Here is a brother who wants to find the way into the kingdom of God.’92 And if nobody seems ready to pray, she kneels down in the aisle beside him and says, ’91O Lord!’92 with a pathos and a power and a triumph that seem instantly to emancipate the hardened sinner. Oh, no! you must not call her a thoughtless butterfly in our presence. You see we would not stand it.’94 The fact is that the son and daughter of that family did not promise much at the start, but they are now an echo, a glorious echo, a prolonged echo, of parental teaching and example.

A Vermont mother, as her boy was about to start for a life on the sea, said: ’93Edward, I have never seen the ocean and know nothing of seafaring life, but I understand the great temptation is strong drink. Promise me you will never touch it.’94 Many years after that, telling of this in a meeting, Edward said: ’93I gave that promise to mother, and have been around the world and at Calcutta, the ports of the Mediterranean, Sari Francisco, Cape of Good Hope, and North and South Poles, and never saw a glass of liquor in all those years that my mother’92s form did not appear before me, and I do not know how liquor tastes. I never have tasted it and all because of the promise I made to my mother.’94 This was the result of that conversation at the gate of the Vermont farmhouse. The statuary of Thorwaldsen was sent from Italy to Germany and the straw in which the statues had been packed was thrown upon the ground. The next spring beautiful Italian flowers sprang up where this stray had been cast, for in it had been some of the seeds of Italian flowers; and, whether conscious of it or not, we are all the time planting for ourselves and planting for others roses or thorns. You thought it only straw, yet among it were anemones.

But, here is a slip-shod home. The parents are a godless pair. They let their children do as they please. No example fit to follow. No lessons of morality or religion. Sunday no better than any other day. The Bible no better than any other book. The house is a sort of inn where the older and younger people of the household stop for a while. The theory acted on, though perhaps not acknowledged, is: ’93The children will have to do as I did, and take their chances. Life is a lottery anyhow, and some draw prizes and some draw blanks, and we will trust to luck.’94 Skip twenty years and come back to the neighborhood where that family used to live. You meet on the street or on the road an old inhabitant of that neighborhood, and you say: ’93Can you tell me anything about the Petersons who used to live here?’94 ’93Yes,’94 says the old inhabitant, ’93I remember them very well. The father and mother have been dead for years.’94 ’93Well, how about the children? What has become of them?’94 The old inhabitant replies: ’93They turned out badly. You know the old man was about half an infidel and the boys were all infidels. The oldest son married, but got into drinking habits, and in a few years his wife was not able to live with him any longer, and his children were taken by relatives, and he died of delirium tremens on Blackwell’92s Island. His other son forged the name of his employer and fled to Canada. One of the daughters of the old folks married an inebriate with the idea of reforming him, and you know how that always ends’97in the ruin of both the experimenter and the one experimented with. The other daughter disappeared mysteriously and has not been heard of. There was a young woman picked out of the East River and put in the Morgue, and some thought it was she, but I cannot say.’94 ’93Is it possible?’94 you cry out. ’93Yes, it is possible. The family is a complete wreck.’94 My hearers, that is just what might have been expected. All this is only the echo, the dismal echo, the awful echo, the dreadful echo of parental obliquity and unfaithfulness. The old folks heaped up a mountain of wrong influences, and this is only what my text calls ’93the sounding of the mountains.’94 Indeed our entire behavior in this world will have a resound. While opportunities fly in a straight line and just touch us once and are gone never to return, the wrongs we practise upon others fly in a circle, and they come back to the place from which they started. Doctor Guillotine thought it smart to introduce the instrument of death, named after him; but did not like it so well when his own head was chopped off with the guillotine.

So, also, the Judgment Day will be an echo of all our other days. The universe needs such a day, for there are so many things in the world that need to be fixed up and explained. If God had not appointed such a day all the nations would cry out: ’93O, God! give us a Judgment Day.’94 But, we are apt to think of it and speak about it as a day away off in the future, having no special connection with this day or any other day. The fact is that we are now making up its voices, its trumpets will only sound back again to us what we now say and do. That is the meaning of all that Scripture which says that Christ will on that day address the soul, saying: ’93I was naked and ye clothed me, I was sick and in prison and ye visited me.’94 All the footsteps in that prison corridor as the Christian reformer walks to the wicket of the incarcerated, yea all the whispers of condolence in the ear of that poor soul dying in that garret, yea all the kindnesses are being caught up and rolled on until they dash against the Judgment Throne and then they will be struck back into the ears of these sons and daughters of mercy. Louder than the crash of Mount Washington falling on its face in the world-wide catastrophe, and the boiling of the sea over the furnaces of universal conflagration will be the echo and re-echo of the good deeds done and the sympathetic words uttered and the mighty benefactions wrought. On that day all the charities, all the self-sacrifices, all the philanthropies, all the beneficent last wills and testaments, all the Christian work of all the ages, will be piled up into mountains, and those who have served God and served the suffering human race will hear what my text styles ’93the sounding of the mountains.’94

My subject advances to tell you that eternity itself is only an echo of time. Mind you, the analogy warrants my saying this. The echo is not always exactly in kind like the sound originally projected. Lord Raleigh says that a woman’92s voice sounding from a grove was returned an octave higher. A scientist playing a flute in Fairfax County, Va., found that all the notes were returned, although some of them came in raised pitch. A trumpet sounded ten times near Glasgow, Scotland, and the ten notes were all repeated, but a third lower. And the spiritual law corresponds with the natural world. What we do of good or bad may not come back to us in just the proportion we expect it, but come back it will; it may be from a higher gladness than we thought or from a deeper woe, from a mightier conqueror or from a worse captive, from a higher throne or deeper dungeon. Our prayer or our blasphemy, our kindness or our cruelty, our faith or our unbelief, our holy life or our dissolute behavior, will come back somehow. Suppose the boss of a factory or the head of a commercial firm, some day comes out among his clerks or employees, and putting his thumbs in the arm-holes of his vest, says, with an air of swagger and jocosity: ’93Well, I don’92t believe in the Bible or the Church. The one is an imposition and the other is full of hypocrites. I declare I would not trust one of those very pious people farther than I could see him.’94 That is all he says, but he has said enough. The young men go back to their counters or their shuttles, and say within themselves: ’93Well, he is a successful man and has probably studied up the whole subject and is probably right.’94 That one lying utterance against Bibles and churches has put five young men on the wrong track, and though the influential man had spoken only in half jest, the echo shall come back to him in five ruined lifetimes, and five destroyed eternities. You see the echoes are an octave lower than he anticipated. On the other hand, some rainy day, when there are hardly any customers, the Christian merchant comes out from his counting-room and stands among the young men, who have nothing to do, and says: ’93Well, boys, this is a dull day, but it will clear off after a while. There are a good many ups and downs in business, but there is an over-ruling Providence. Years ago I made up my mind to trust God and he has always seen me through.’94 About noon the rain ceases and the sun comes out and the clerks go to their places, and they say within themselves: ’93Well, he is a successful merchant, and I guess he knows what he is talking about, and the Christian religion must be a good thing. God knows I want some help in this battle with temptation and sin.’94 The successful merchant who uttered the kind words did not know how much good he was doing, but the echo will come back in five lifetimes of virtue and usefulness, and five Christian death-beds, and five heavens. From all the mountains of rapture and all the mountains of glory and all the mountains of eternity, he will catch what Ezekiel in my text styles ’93the sounding again of the mountains.’94

Yea, I take a step further in this subject, and say that our own eternity will be a reverberation of our own earthly lifetime. What we are here we will be there, only on a larger scale. Dissolution will tear down the body and embank it, but our faculties of mind and soul will go right on without the hesitancy of a moment and without any change except enlargement and intensification. There will be no more difference than between a lion behind the iron bars and a lion escaped into the field, between an eagle in a cage and an eagle in the sky. Good here, good there; bad here, bad there. Time is only a bedwarfed eternity. Eternity is only an enlarged time. In this life our soul is in dry dock. The moment we leave this life we are launched for our great voyage, and we sail on for centuries quintillion, but the ship does not change its fundamental structure after it gets out of the dry dock, it does not pass from brig to schooner, or from schooner to man-of-war. What we are when launched from this world, we will be in the world to come. O God! by thy converting and santifying spirit make us right here and now, that we may be right forever!

’93Well,’94 says some one, ’93this idea of moral, spiritual and eternal echo is new to me. Is there not some way of stopping this echo?’94 My answer is: ’93God can and he only.’94 If it is a cheerful echo, we do not want it stopped; if a baleful echo, we would like to have it stopped. The hardest thing in this world to do is to stop an echo. Many an oration has been spoiled and many an orator confounded by an echo. Costly churches, cathedrals, theatres and music halls have been ruined by an echo. Architects have strung wires across auditoriums to arrest the echo. When our first Brooklyn Tabernacle was being constructed, we were told by architects that it was of such a shape that the human voice could not be heard in it, or, if heard, it would be jangled into echoes. In state of worriment I went to Joseph Henry, the President of the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, and told him of this evil prophecy, and he replied: ’93I have probably experimented more with the laws of sound than any other man, and I have got as far as this; two buildings may seem to be exactly alike and yet in one the acoustics may be good and in the other bad. Go on with your church building and trust that all will be well.’94 And all was well. Oh, this mighty law of sound! oh, this subtle echo! There is only one being in the universe who thoroughly understands it’97’94The sounding again of the mountains.’94

And, if it is so hard to destroy a natural echo, how much harder to stop a moral echo, a spiritual echo, an immortal echo. You know that the echoes are affected by the surfaces, and the shape of rocks, and the depth of ravines, and the relative position of buildings? And, once in heaven, God will so arrange the relative position of mansions and temples and thrones that one of the everlasting charms of heaven will be the rolling, bursting, ascending, descending, chanting echoes. All the songs we ever sang devoutly, all the prayers we have ever uttered earnestly, all the Christian deeds we have ever done will be waiting to spring upon us in echo. The scientists tell us that in this world the roar of artillery and the boom of the thunder are so loud because they are a combination of echoes. All the hillsides and the caverns and the walls furnishing a share of the resonance, and never will we understand the full power and music of an echo until with supernatural faculties able to endure them. We hear all the conjoined sounds of heavenly echoes; harps and trumpets, orchestras and oratories, hosannahs and hallelujahs, east side of heaven answering to the west side, north side to south side, and all the heights and all the depths and all the immensities and all the eternities joining in echo upon echo, echo in wake of echo. In the future state, whether of; rapture or ruin, we will listen for reverberations of earthly things and doings. Voltaire standing amid the shadows will listen, and from the millions whose godlessness and libertinism and debauchery were a consequence of his brilliant blasphemies will come back a weeping, wailing, despairing, agonizing, million-voiced echo. Paul will, while standing in the light, listen, and from all the circles of the ransomed, and from all the many mansions which he helped to people, and from all the thrones he helped to occupants, and from all the gates he helped throng with arrivals, and from all the temples he helped fill with worshipers, there shall come back to him a glorious ever-accumulating, transporting and triumphant echo. Oh, what will the tyrants and oppressors of the earth do with the echoes? Those who are responsible for the wars of the world will have come back to them all the groans, the shrieks, the cannonades, the bursting shells, the crackle of burning cities, and the crash of a nation’92s homes; Hohenlinden and Salamanca, Wag-ram and Sedan, Marathon and Thermopyl’e6; Bunker Hill and Lexington, South Mountain and Gettysburg. Sennacherib listen! Semiramis listen! Alexander and Napoleon listen! But to the righteous will come back the blissful echoes. Composers of Gospel hymns and singers will listen for the return of Antioch and Brattle Street, Ariel and Dundee, Harwell and Woodstock, Mount Pisgah and Coronation, Homeward Bound and Shining Shore, and all the melodies they ever started. Bishop Heber, and Charles Wesley, and Isaac Watts, and Thomas Hastings, and Bradbury, and Horatius Bonar, and Frances Havergal, listen!

But you know as well as I do that there are some places where the reverberations seem to meet, and standing there they rush upon you, they rain upon you, all at once they capture your ear. And at the point where all heavenly reverberations meet Christ will stand, and listen for the resound of all his sighs and groans, and sacrifices, and they shall come back in an echo in which shall mingle the acclaim of a redeemed world, and the ’93Jubilate Deo’94 of a full heaven. Echo saintly, cherubic, archangelic! Echo of thrones! Echo of palaces! Echo of temples! Omnipotent Echo! Everlasting Echo!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage