331. Wonders of Disaster and Blessing

Wonders of Disaster and Blessing

Joe_2:30 : ’93I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth.’94

Dr. Cumming’97great and good man!’97would have told us the exact time of the fulfillment of this prophecy. As I stepped into his study in London on my arrival from Paris just after the French had surrendered at Sedan, the good doctor said to me: ’93It is just as I told you about France: people laughed at me because I talked about the seven horns and the vials, but I foresaw all this from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation.’94 Not taking any such responsibility in the interpretation of the passage, I simply assert that there is in it suggestions of many things in our time.

Our eyes dilate and our heart quickens in its pulsations as we read of events in the third century, the sixth century, the eighth century, the fourteenth century, but there are more far-reaching events crowded into the nineteenth century than into any other, and the last quarter bids fair to eclipse the preceding three quarters. We read in the daily newspapers of events announced in one paragraph, and without any special emphasis’97of events which a Herodotus, a Josephus, a Xenophon, a Gibbon, would have taken whole chapters or whole volumes to elaborate. Looking out upon our time, we must cry out, in the words of the text: ’93Wonders in the heavens and in the earth.’94

I propose to show you that the time in which we live is wonderful for disaster and wonderful for blessing, for there must be lights and shades in this picture as in all others. Need I argue that our time is wonderful for disaster? Our world has had a rough time since by the hand of God it was bowled out into space. It is an epileptic earth; convulsion after convulsion; frosts pounding it with sledgehammer of iceberg, and fires melting it with furnaces seven hundred times heated. It is a wonder to me it has lasted so long. Meteors shooting by on this side and grazing it, and meteors shooting by on the other side and grazing it, none of them slowing up for safety. Whole fleets and navies and argosies and flotillas of worlds sweeping all about us. Our earth like a fishing smack off the banks of Newfoundland, while the Etruria and the Germanic and the Arizona and the New York rush by. Besides that, our world has by sin been damaged in its internal machinery, and ever and anon the furnaces have burst, and the walking-beams of the mountains have broken, and the islands have shipped a sea, and the great hulk of the world has been jarred with accidents that ever and anon threatened immediate demolition. But it seems to us as if our century were especially characterized by disaster’97volcanic, oceanic, epidemic. I say volcanic, because an earthquake is only a volcano hushed up. When Stromboli and Cotopaxi and Vesuvius stop breathing, let the foundations of the earth beware! Seven thousand earthquakes in two centuries recorded in the catalogue of the British Association! Trajan, the emperor, goes to ancient Antioch, and amid the splendors of his reception is met by an earthquake that nearly destroys the emperor’92s life. Lisbon, fair and beautiful at one o’92clock on the 1st of November, 1755, in six minutes sixty thousand have perished; and Voltaire writes of them: ’93For that re-gion it was the last judgment, nothing wanting but a trumpet!’94 Europe and America feeling the throb; one thousand five hundred chimneys in Boston partly or fully destroyed!

But the disasters of other centuries have had their counterpart in our own. In 1812 Caracas was caught in the grip of an earthquake; in 1882, in Chili, one hundred thousand square miles of land by volcanic force upheaved to four and seven feet of permanent elevation; in 1854 Japan felt the geological agony; Naples shaken in 1857; Mexico in 1858; Mendoza, the capital of the Argentine Republic, in 1861; Manila terrorized in 1863; the Hawaiian islands by such force uplifted and let down in 1871: Nevada shaken in 1871; Antioch in 1872; California in 1872; San Salvador in 1873; while in 1883 what subterranean excitement! Ischia, an island of the Mediterranean, a beautiful Italian watering-place, vineyard-clad, surrounded by all natural charm and historical reminiscence; yonder, Capri, the summer resort of the Roman emperors; yonder, Naples, the paradise of art’97this beautiful island suddenly toppled into the trough of the earth, eight thousand merry-makers perishing, and some of them so far down beneath the reach of human obsequies that it may be said of many a one of them, as it was said of Moses, ’93The Lord buried him.’94 Italy, all Europe weeping, all Christendom weeping where there were hearts to sympathize and Christians to pray. But while the nations were measuring that magnitude of disaster, measuring it not with golden rod like that with which the angel measured heaven, but with the black rule of death, Java, of the Indian archipelago, the most fertile island of all the earth, is caught in the grip of the earthquake, and mountain after mountain goes down, and city after city, until that island, which produces the healthiest beverage of all the world, has produced the ghastliest catastrophe of the century. One hundred thousand people dying, dying, dead, dead! Coming nearer home on August 31, 1886, the great earthquake which prostrated one-half of Charleston, South Carolina.

But look at the disasters cyclonic. At the mouth of the Ganges are three islands’97the Hattiah, the Sundeep and the Dakin Shabazpore. In the midnight of October, 1877, on all those three islands, the cry was: ’93The waters!’94 A cyclone arose and rolled the sea over those three islands, and of a population of three hundred and forty thousand, two hundred and fifteen thousand were drowned. Only those saved who had climbed to the top of the highest trees! Did you ever see a cyclone? No? Then I pray God you may never see one. I saw a cyclone on the ocean, and it swept us eight hundred miles back from our course, and for thirty-six hours during the cyclone and after it, we expected every moment to go to the bottom. They told us before we retired at nine o’92clock that the barometer had fallen, but at eleven o’92clock at night we were awakened with the shock of the waves. All the lights out! Crash! went all the lifeboats. Waters rushing through the skylights down into the cabin, and down on the furnaces until they hissed and smoked in the deluge. Seven hundred people praying, blaspheming, shrieking. Our great ship poised a moment on the top of a mountain of phosphorescent fire, and then plunged down, down, down, until it seemed as if she never would again be righted. Ah! you never want to see a cyclone at sea.

But I was in Minnesota, where there was one of those cyclones on land that swept the city of Rochester from its foundations, and took dwelling-houses, barns, men, women, children, horses, cattle, and tossed them into indiscriminate ruin, and lifted a rail-train and dashed it down, a mightier hand than that of engineer on the airbrake. Cyclone in Kansas, cyclone in Missouri, cyclone in Wisconsin, cyclone in Illinois, cyclone in Iowa! Satan, prince of the power of the air, never made such cyclonic disturbances as he has in our day. And am I not right in saying that one of the characteristics of the time in which we live is disaster cyclonic?

But look at the. disasters oceanic. Shall I call the roll of the dead shipping? Ye monsters of the deep, answer when I call your names. The Ville de Havre, the Schiller, the City of Boston, the Melville, the President, the Cimbria, the Oregon, the Mohegan. But why should I go on calling the roll when none of them answer, and the roll is as long as the white scroll of the Atlantic surf at Cape Hatteras breakers! If the oceanic cables could report all the scattered life and all the bleached bones that they rub against in the ocean, what a message of pathos and tragedy for both beaches! In one storm eighty fishermen perished off the coast of Newfoundland, and whole fleets of them off the coast of England. God help the poor fellows at sea, and give high seats in heaven to the Grace Darlings and the Ida Lewises and the lifeboat men hovering around Goodwin Sands and the Skerries! The sea, owning three-fourths of the earth, proposes to capture the other fourth, and is bombarding the land all around the earth. The moving of our hotels at Brighton Beach backward one hundred yards from where they once stood, a type of what is going on all around the world and on every coast. The Dead Sea rolls to-day where ancient cities stood. Pillars of temples that stood on hills, geologists now find three-quarters under the water or altogether submerged. The sea, having wrecked so many merchantmen and flotillas, wants to wreck the continents, and hence disasters oceanic.

Look at the disasters epidemic. I speak not of the plague in the fourth century that ravaged Europe, and in Moscow and the Neapolitan dominions and Marseilles wrought such terror in the eighteenth century, but I look at the yellow fevers, and the choleras, and the diphtherias, and the scarlet fevers, and the typhoids of our time. Hear the wailing of Memphis and Shreveport and New Orleans and Jacksonville of the last few decades. From Hurdwar, India, where every twelfth year three million devotees congregate, the caravans brought the cholera, and that one disease slew eighteen thousand in eighteen days in Bossorah. Twelve thousand in one summer slain by it in India, and twenty-five thousand in Egypt. Disasters epidemic! Some of the finest monuments in Greenwood and Laurel Hill and Mount Auburn are to doctors who lost their lives battling with Southern epidemic.

But now I turn the leaf in my subject, and I plant the white lilies and the palm-tree amid the night-shade and the myrtle. This age no more characterized by wonders of disaster than by wonders of blessing. Blessing of longevity; the average of human life rapidly increasing. Forty years now worth four hundred years once. Now I can travel from Manitoba to New York in three days and three nights. In other times it would have taken three months. In other words, three days and three nights now are worth three months of other days. The average of human life practically greater now than when Noah lived his nine hundred and fifty years and Methuselah lived his nine hundred and sixty-nine years.

Blessings of intelligence: The Salmon P. Chases and the Abraham Lincolns and the Henry Wilsons of the coming time will not be required to learn to read by pine-knot lights, or seated on shoemaker’92s bench, nor will the Fergusons have to study astronomy while watching the cattle. Knowledge rolls its tides along every poor man’92s door, and his children may go down and bathe in them. If the philosophers of the last century were called up to recite in a class with our boys at the Polytechnic, or our girls at the Packer, those old philosophers would be sent down to the foot of the class, because they failed to answer the questions! Free libraries in all the important towns and cities of the land. Historical alcoves and poetical shelves and magazine tables for all that desire to walk through them, or sit down at them.

Blessings of quick information: Newspapers falling all around us thick as leaves in a September equinoctial. News three days old, rancid and stale. We see the whole world twice a day’97through the newspaper at the breakfast-table, and through the newspaper at the tea-table, with an ’93extra’94 here and there between.

Blessing of Gospel proclamation: Do you not know that nearly all the missionary societies have been born in this century? and nearly all the Bible societies, and nearly all the great philanthropic movements? A secretary of one of the denominations said to me the other day in Dakota: ’93You were wrong when you said our denomination averaged a new church every day of the year; they have established nine in one week, so you are far within the truth.’94 A clergyman of our denomination said: ’93I have just been out establishing five mission stations.’94

Christianity is on the march, while infidelity is dwindling into imbecility. While infidelity is thus dwindling and dropping down into imbecility and indecency, the wheel of Christianity is making about a thousand revolutions in a minute. All the copies of Shakespeare and Tennyson and Disraeli, and of any ten of the most popular writers of the day, less in number than the copies of the Bible going out from our printing presses. A few years ago, in six weeks, more than two million copies of the New Testament purchased, not given away, but purchased because the world will have it. More Christian men in high official position to-day in Great Britain and in the United States than ever before. Stop that falsehood going through the newspapers’97I have seen it in twenty’97that the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States are all infidels except one. By personal acquaintance I know three of them to be old-fashioned evangelical Christians, sitting at the holy sacrament of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I suppose that the majority of them are staunch believers in our Christian religion. And then hear the dying words of Judge Black, a man who had been attorney-general of the United States, and who had been secretary of the United States’97no stronger lawyer of the century than Judge Black’97dying, his aged wife kneeling by his side, and he uttering that sublime and tender prayer: ’93O Lord God, from whom I derived my existence, and in whom I have always trusted, take my spirit to thyself, and let thy richest blessing come down upon my Mary.’94 The most popular book to-day is the Bible, and the mightiest institution is the Church, and the greatest name among the nations, and more honored than any, is the name of Jesus.

Wonders of self-sacrifice: A clergyman told me in the Northwest that for six years he was a mission-ary at the extreme north, living four hundred miles from a post-office, and sometimes he slept out of doors in winter, the thermometer sixty and sixty-five degrees below zero, wrapped in rabbit-skins woven together. I said: ’93Is it possible? You do not mean sixty and sixty-five degrees below zero?’94 He said, ’93I do, and I was happy.’94 All for Christ! Where is there any other being that will rally such enthusiasm? Mothers sewing their fingers off to educate their boys for the Gospel ministry. For nine years no luxury on the table until the course through grammar school and college and theological seminary be completed. Poor widow putting her mite into the Lord’92s treasury, the face of emperor or president impressed upon the coin not so conspicuous as the blood with which she earned it. Millions of good men and women, but more women than men, to whom Christ is everything. Christ first, and Christ last, and Christ forever.

Why, this age is not so characterized by invention and scientific exploration as it is by Gospel proclamation. You can get no idea of it unless you can ring all the church bells in one chime, and sound all the organs in one diapason, and gather all the congregations of Christendom in one Gloria in Excelsis. Mighty camp meetings! Mighty Ocean Groves! Mighty Chautauquas! Mighty conventions of Christian workers! Mighty general assemblies of the Presbyterian Church! Mighty conferences of the Methodist Church! Mighty associations of the Baptist Church! Mighty conventions of the Episcopal Church! I think, before long, the best investments will not be in railroad stock or Western Union, but in trumpets and cymbals and festal decorations, for we are on the eve of victories wide and world-uplifting. There may be many years of hard work yet before the consummation, but the signs are to me so encouraging that I would not be unbelieving if I saw the wing of the apocalyptic angel spread for its last triumphal flight in this day’92s sunset, or if tomorrow morning the ocean cables should thrill us with the news that Christ the Lord had alighted on Mount Olivet to proclaim universal dominion.

O you dead churches, wake up! Throw back the shutters of stiff ecclesiasticism, and let the light of the spring morning come in! Morning for the land! Morning for the sea! Morning of emancipation! Morning of light and love and peace! Morning of a day in which there shall be no chains to break, no sorrows to assuage, no despotism to shatter, no woes to compassionate. O Christ, descend! Scarred temple, take the crown! Bruised hand, take the sceptre! Wounded foot, step the throne! ’93Thine is the kingdom.’94

These things I say because I want you to be alert. I want you to be watching all these wonders unrolling from the heavens and the earth. God has classified, whether calamitous or pleasing. The divine purposes are harnessed in traces that cannot break, and in girths that cannot slip, and in buckles that cannot loosen, and are driven by reins they must answer. I preach no fatalism. A swarthy engineer at one of the depots in Dakota said: ’93When will you get on the locomotive, and take a ride with us?’94 ’93Well,’94 I said, ’93now, if that suits you?’94 So I got on one side of the locomotive, and a Methodist minister, who was also invited, got on the other side, and between us were the engineer and the stoker. The train started. The engineer had his hand on the agitated pulse of the great engine. The stoker shoveled in the coal, and shut the door with a loud clang. A vast plain slipped under us, and the hills swept by, and that great monster on which we rode trembled and bounded and snorted and raged as it hurled us on. I said to the Methodist minister on the other side of the locomotive: ’93My brother, why should Presbyterians and Methodists quarrel about the decrees and free agency? You see that track, that firm track, that iron track; that is the decree. You see this engineer’92s arm; that is free agency. How beautifully they work together. They are going to take us through. We could not do without the track, and we could not do without the engineer.’94 So I rejoice day by day. Work for all to do, and we may turn the crank of the Christian machinery this way or that, for we are free agents; but there is the track laid so long ago no one remembers it, laid by the hand of Almighty God in sockets that no terrestrial or satanic pressure can ever affect. And along that track the car of the world’92s redemption will roll and roll to the Grand Central depot of the millennium. I have no anxiety about the track. I am only afraid that for our indolence God will discharge us and get some other stoker and some other engineer. The train is going through with us or without us. So, my brethren, watch all the events that are going by. If things seem to turn out right, give wings to your joy. If things seem to turn out wrong, throw out the anchor of faith, and hold fast.

There is a house in London where Peter the Great of Russia lived a while when he was moving through the land incognito and in workman’92s dress, that he might learn the ship-carpentry by which he could supply the needs of his people. A stranger was visiting at that house recently, and saw in a dark attic an old box, and he said to the owner of the house: ’93What’92s in the box?’94 The owner said: ’93I don’92t know; that box was there when I got the house, and it was there when my father got it. We haven’92t had any curiosity to look at it; I guess there’92s nothing in it.’94 ’93Well,’94 said the stranger, ’93I’92ll give you two pounds for it.’94 ’93Well, done.’94 The two pounds are paid, and recently the contents of that box were sold to the Czar of Russia for fifty thousand dollars. In it the lathing machine of Peter the Great, his private letters, and documents of value beyond all monetary consideration. And here are the events that seem very insignificant and unimportant, but they incase treasures of Divine Providence and eternities of meaning which after a while God will demonstrate before the ages as being of stupendous value.

When Titans play quoits they pitch mountains; but who owns these gigantic forces you have been reading about the last two months? Whose hand is on the throttle-valve of the volcanoes? Whose foot, suddenly planted on the footstool, makes the continents quiver? God! God! He looked upon the mountains, and they tremble. He toucheth the hills, and they smoke. God! God! I must be at peace with him. Through the Lord Jesus Christ this God is mine and he is yours. I put the earthquake that shook Palestine at the crucifixion against all the down rockings of the centuries. This God on our side, we may challenge all the centuries of time and all the cycles of eternity.

Those of us who are in mid-life may well thank God that we have seen so many wondrous things; but there are people alive to-day who may live to see the shimmering veil between the material and the spiritual world lifted. Magnetism, a word with which we cover up our ignorance, will yet be an explored realm. Electricity, the fiery courser of the sky, that Benjamin Franklin lassoed, and Morse and Bell and Edison have tried to control, will become completely manageable, and locomotion will be swiftened, and a world of practical knowledge thrown in upon the race. Whether we depart in this century, or whether we see the open gates of a more wonderful century, we will see these things. It does not make much difference where we stand, but the higher the standpoint the larger the prospect. We will see them from heaven if we do not see them from earth.

I was at Fire Island, Long Island, and I went up in the cupola from which they telegraph to New York the approach of vessels hours before they come into port. There is an opening in the wall, and the operator puts his telescope through that opening and looks out and sees vessels far out at sea. While I was talking with him, he went up and looked out. He said: ’93We are expecting the Arizona to-night.’94 I said: ’93Is it possible you know all those vessels? Do you know them as you know a man’92s face’94 He said: ’93Yes; I never make a mistake; before I see the hulls, I often know them by the masts; I know them all; I have watched them so long.’94 Oh, what a grand thing it is to have ships telegraphed and heralded long before they come to port, that friends may come down to the wharf and welcome their long-absent loved ones! So to-day we take our stand in the watch-tower, and we look off, and through the glass of inspiration we look off and see a whole fleet of ships coming in. That is the ship of peace, flag with one star of Bethlehem floating above the top-gallants. That is the ship of the Church, mark of salt wave high up on the smokestack, showing she has had rough weather, but the Captain of salvation commands her and all is well with her. The ship of Heaven, mightiest craft ever launched, millions of passengers waiting for millions more, prophets and apostles and martyrs in the cabin, conquerors at the foot of the mast, while from the rigging hands are waving this way as if they knew us, and we wave back again, for they are ours; they went out from our own households. Ours! Hail! Hail! Put off the black, and put on the white. Stop tolling the funeral bell and ring the wedding anthem. Shut up the hearse and take the chariot. Now, the ship comes around the great headland. Soon she will strike the wharf and we will go aboard her. Tears for ships going out. Laughter for ships coming in. Now she touches the wharf. Throw on the planks. Block not up that gangway with embracing long-lost friends, for you will have eternity of reunion. Stand back and give way until other millions come on! Farewell to sin! Farewell to struggle! Farewell to sickness! Farewell to death! All aboard for Heaven!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage