371. Contrary Winds

Contrary Winds

Mat_14:24. ’93The wind was contrary.’94

As I well know by experience on Lake Galilee, one hour all may be calm, and the next hour the winds and waves will be so boisterous that you are in doubt as to whether you will land on the shore or on the bottom of the deep. The disciples in the text were caught in such a stress of weather and the sails bent, and the ship plunged, for ’93the wind was contrary.’94 There is in one of the European straits a place, whichever way you sail, the winds are opposing. There are people who all their life seem sailing in the teeth of the wind. All things seem against them. It may be said of their condition as of that of the disciples in my text: ’93The wind was contrary.’94

A great multitude of people are under seeming disadvantage, and I will today, in the plainest Anglo-Saxon that I can command, treat their cases; not as a nurse counts out eight or ten drops of a prescription, and stirs them in a half-glass of water, but as when a man has by mistake taken a large amount of strychnine or Paris green or belladonna, and the patient is walked rapidly round the room, and shaken up, until he gets wide awake. Many of you have taken a large draught of the poison of discouragement, and I come out by the order of the Divine Physician to rouse you out of that lethargy.

First, many people are under the disadvantage of an unfortunate name given them by parents who thought they were doing a good thing. It is outrageous to afflict children with an undesirable name because it happened to be possessed by a parent or a rich uncle from whom favors are expected, or some prominent man of the day who may end his life in disgrace.

Sometimes at the baptism of children, while I have held up one hand in prayer, I have held up the other in amazement that the parents should have weighted the babe with such a dissonant and repulsive nomenclature. I have not so much wondered that some children should cry out at the Christening font, as that others with such smiling faces should take a title that will be the burden of their lifetime. It is no excuse because they are Scriptural names to call a child Jehoikim, or Tiglath Pileser. I baptized one by the name of Bathsheba. Why, under all the circumambient heaven, any parent should want to give a child the name of that loose creature of Scripture times, I cannot imagine. I have often felt at the baptismal altar when names were announced somewhat like saying, as did the Rev. Dr. Richards, of Morristown, New Jersey, when a child was handed to him for baptism, and the name given, ’93Hadn’92t you better call it something else?’94 Impose not upon that babe a name suggestive of flippancy or meanness. There is no excuse for such assault and battery on the cradle when our language is opulent with names musical and suggestive in meaning, such as John, meaning ’93the gracious gift of God’94; or Henry, meaning ’93the chief of a household’94; or Alfred, meaning ’93good counselor’94; or Joshua, meaning ’93God, our salvation’94; or Ambrose, meaning ’93immortal’94; or Andrew, meaning ’93manly’94; or Esther, meaning ’93star’94; or Abigail, meaning ’93my father’92s joy’94; or Anna, meaning ’93grace’94; or Victoria, meaning ’93victory’94; or Rosalie, meaning ’93beautiful as a rose’94; or Margaret, meaning ’93a pearl’94; or Ida, meaning ’93godlike’94; or Clara, meaning ’93illustrious’94; or Amelia, meaning ’93busy’94; or Bertha, meaning ’93beautiful,’94 and hundreds of other names just as good, that are a help rather than a hindrance.

But sometimes the great hindrance in life is not in the given name, but in the family name. While legislatures are willing to lift such incubus, there are families that keep a name which mortgages all the generations with a great disadvantage. You say: ’93I wonder if he is any relation to So-and-so,’94 mentioning some family celebrated for crime. The city directory has hundreds of names the mere pronunciation of which has been a lifelong obstacle. We have in America, and I suppose it is so in all countries, names which ought to be abolished, and can be and will be abolished for the reason that they are a libel and a slander. But if for any reason you are submerged either by a given name or by a family name that you must bear, God will help you to overcome the outrage by a life consecrated to the good and useful. You may erase the stain from the name. If it once stood for meanness, you can make it stand for generosity. If once it stood for pride, you can make it stand for humility. If it once stood for fraud, you can make it stand for honesty. If once it stood for wickedness, you can make it stand for purity. There have been multitudes of instances where men and women have magnificently conquered the disasters of the name inflicted upon them.

Again, many people labor under the misfortune of incomplete physical equipment. We are by our Creator so economically built that we cannot afford the deprivation of any physical faculty. We want our two eyes, our two ears, our two hands, our two feet, our eight fingers and two thumbs. Yet what multitudes of people have but one eye or but one foot! The ordinary casualties of life have been quadrupled, quintupled, sextupled, ay, centupled, in out time by the Civil War, and at the North and South a great multitude are fighting the battle of life with half, or less than half, the needed physical armaments. I do not wonder at the pathos of a soldier during the war, who, when told that he must have his hand amputated, said: ’93Doctor, can’92t you save it?’94 and when told that it was impossible, said, with tears rolling down his cheeks: ’93Well, then, good-by, old hand; I hate to part with you. You have done me good service for many years, but it seems you must go. Goodby.’94 The way the battle of Crecy was decided against the French was by the Welshmen killing the French horses, and that brought their riders to the ground. And when you cripple this body, which is merely the animal on which the soul rides, you may sometimes defeat the soul. Yet how many suffer from this physical taking off! Good cheer, my brother! God will make it up to you somehow. The grace, the sympathy of God, will be more to you than anything you have lost. If God allows part of your resources to be cut off in one place, he will add it on somewhere else. As Augustus, the emperor, took off a day from February, making it the shortest month in the year, and added it to August, the month named after himself, so advantages taken from one part of your nature will be added on to another.

But it is amazing how much of the world’92s work has been done by men of defective physical organization. S. S. Preston, the great orator of the Southwest, went limping all his life, but there was no foot put down upon any platform of his day that resounded so far as his club foot. Beethoven was so deaf that he could not hear the crash of the orchestra rendering his oratorios. Thomas Carlyle, the dyspeptic martyr, was honored with the commission to drive cant out of the world’92s literature. The Rev. Thomas Stockton, of Philadelphia, with one lung raised his audience nearer heaven than most ministers can raise them with two lungs. In the banks, the insurance companies, the commercial establishments, the reformatory associations, the churches, there are tens of thousands of men and women today doubled up with rheumatism or subject to the neuralgias or with only fragments of limbs, the rest of which they left at Chattanooga or South Mountain or the Wilderness, and they are worth more to the world and more to the Church and more to God than those of us who have never so much as had a finger-joint stiffened by a felon.

The skilled horsemen stood around Bucephalus, unable to mount or manage him, so wild was the steed. But Alexander noticed that the sight of his own shadow seemed to disturb the horse. So Alexander clutched him by the bridle, and turned his head away from the shadow, and toward the sun, and the horse’92s agitation was gone, and Alexander mounted him and rode off, to the astonishment of all who stood by. And what you people need is to have your sight turned away from the shadows of your earthly lot over which you have so long pondered, and your head turned toward the sun’97the glorious sun of Gospel consolation and Christian hope and spiritual triumph.

And then remember that all physical disadvantages will after awhile vanish. Let those who have been rheumatismed out of a foot, or cataracted out of an eye, or by the perpetual roar of our cities thundered out of an ear, look forward to the day when this old tenement-house of flesh will come down and a better one shall be builded. Just what it means by corruption putting on incorruption we do not know, save that it will be glory ineffable; no limping in heaven, no straining of the eyesight to see things a little way off; no putting of the hand behind the ear to double the capacity of the tympanum; but faculties perfect, all the keys of the instrument attuned for the sweep of the fingers of ecstasy. But until that day of resumption comes, let us bear each other’92s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

Another form of disadvantage under which many labor is lack of early education. There will be no excuse for ignorance in the next generation. Free schools and illimitable opportunity of education will make ignorance a crime. I believe in compulsory education, and those parents who neglect to put their children under educational advantages have but one right left, and that is the penitentiary. But there are multitudes of men and women in mid-life who have had no opportunity. Free schools had not yet been established, and vast multitudes had little or no school at all. They feel it when as Christian men they come to speak or pray in religious assemblies or public occasions, patriotic or political or educational. They are silent because they do not feel competent. They owe nothing to English grammar or geography or belles-lettres. They would not know a participle from a pronoun if they met it many times a day. Many of the most successful merchants of America and men in high political places cannot write an accurate letter on any theme. They are completely dependent upon clerks and deputies and stenographers to make things right. I knew a literary man who, in other years in this city made his fortune by writing speeches for Congressmen or fixing them up for the Congressional Record after they were delivered. The millionaire illiteracy of this country is beyond measurement.

Now, suppose a man finds himself in mid-life without education, what is he to do? Do the best he can. The most effective layman in a former pastoral charge that I ever heard speak on religious themes could, within five minutes of exhortation, break all the laws of English grammar, and if he left any law unfractured he would complete the work of lingual devastation in the prayer with which he followed it. But I would rather have him pray for me, if I were sick or in trouble, than any Christian man I know of, and in that church all the people preferred him in exhortation and prayer to all others. Why?’97because he was so thoroughly pious and had such power with God he was irresistible; and as he went on in his prayer sinners repented and saints shouted for joy, and the bereaved seemed to get back their dead in celestial companionship. And when he had stopped praying and as soon as I could wipe out of my eyes enough tears to see the closing hymn, I ended the meeting, fearful that some long-winded prayer-meeting bore would pull us down from the seventh heaven.

Not a word have I to say against accuracy of speech, or fine elocution or high mental culture. Get all these you can. But I do say to those who were brought up in the day of poor schoolhouses and ignorant schoolmasters, and no opportunity: you may have so much of good in your soul and so much of heaven in your every-day life that you will be mightier for good than any who went through the curriculum of Harvard or Yale or Oxford, yet never graduated in the school of Christ. When you get up to the gate of heaven no one will ask you whether you can parse the first chapter of Genesis, but whether you have learned the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom; nor whether you know how to square the circle, but whether you have lived a square life in a round world. Mount Zion is higher than Mount Parnassus.

But what other multitudes there are under other disadvantages! Here is a Christian woman whose husband thinks religion a sham, and while the wife prays the children one way, the husband swears them another. Or here is a Christian man who is trying to do his best for God and the Church, and his wife holds him back and says on the way home from prayer-meeting, where he gave testimony for Christ: ’93What a fool you made of yourself! I hope hereafter you will keep still.’94 And when he would be benevolent and give fifty dollars, she criticises him for not giving fifty cents. What a withering curse such a woman must be to a good man!

There are others under the great disadvantage of poverty. Who ought to get things cheapest? You say those who have little means. But they pay more. You buy coal by the ton, they buy it by the bucket. You buy flour by the barrel, they buy it by the pound. You get apparel cheap, because you pay cash. They pay dear because they have to get trusted. And the Bible was right when it said: ’93The destruction of the poor is their poverty.’94

Then there are those who made a mistake in early life, and that overshadows all their days. ’93Do you not know that that man was once in prison,’94 is whispered. Or, ’93Do you know that that man once attempted suicide?’94 Or, ’93Do you know that that man once absconded?’94 Or, ’93Do you know that that man was once discharged for dishonesty? ’93Perhaps there was only one wrong deed in the man’92s life, and that one act haunts the subsequent half-century of his existence.

Others have unfortunate predominance of some mental faculty, and their rashness throws them into wild enterprises or their trepidation makes them decline great opportunity or there is a vein of melancholy in their disposition that defeats them or they have an endowment of over-mirth that causes the impression of insincerity.

Others have a mighty obstacle in their personal appearance, for which they are not responsible. They forget that God fashioned their features and their complexion and their stature, the size of their nose and mouth and hands and feet and gave them their gait and their general appearance; and they forget that much of the world’92s best work and the Church’92s best work has been done by homely people; and that Paul the Apostle is said to have been hump-backed, and his eyesight weakened by ophthalmia, while many of the finest in appearance have passed their time before flattering looking-glasses, or in studying killing attitudes, and in displaying the richness of wardrobes’97not one ribbon or vest or sack or glove or button or shoestring of which they have had brains to earn for themselves.

Others had wrong proclivities from the start. They were born wrong, and that sticks to one even after he is born again. They have a natural crankiness that is two hundred and seventy-five years old. It came over with their great-grandfathers from Scotland or Wales or France. It was born on the banks of the Thames or the Clyde or the Tiber or the Rhine, and has survived all the plagues and epidemics of many generations, and is living today on the banks of the Potomac or the Hudson or the Andrascoggin or the Savannah or the La Plata. And when a man tries to stop this evil ancestral proclivity he is like a man on a rock in the rapids of Niagara holding on with a grip from which the swift currents are trying to sweep him into the abyss beyond.

Oh, this world is an overburdened world, an overworked world. It is an awfully tired world. Scientists are trying to find out the cause of these earthquakes in all lands, cisatlantic and transatlantic. Some say this and some say that. I have taken the diagnosis of what is the matter with the earth. It has so many burdens on it and so many fires within it’97it has a fit. It cannot stand such a circumference and such a diameter. Some new Cotopaxi or Stromboli or Vesuvius will open, and then all will be at peace for the natural world; but what about the moral woes of the world, that have rocked all nations and for six thousand years science proposes nothing but knowledge, and many people that know the most are the most un-comforted.

In the way of practical relief for all disadvantages and all woes, the only voice that is worth listening to on this subject is the voice of Christianity, which is the voice of Almighty God. Whether I have mentioned the particular disadvantage under which you labor or not, I distinctly declare, in the name of my God, that there is a way out and a way up for all of you. Take good courage from that Bible, all of whose promises are for those in bad predicament. There are better days for you, either on earth or in heaven. I put my hand under your chin, and lift your face into the light of the coming dawn. Have God on your side, and then you have for reserve troops all the armies of heaven, the smallest company of which is twenty thousand chariots, and the smallest brigade one hundred and forty-four thousand, the lightnings of heaven their drawn sword. An ancient warrior saw an overpowering host come down upon his small company of armed men, and mounting his horse he threw a handful of sand in the air, crying, ’93Let their faces be covered with confusion!’94 And both armies heard his voice, and history says it seemed as though the dust thrown in the air had become so many angels of supernatural deliverance, and the weak overcame the mighty and the immense host fell back and the small number marched on. Have faith in God, and though all the allied forces of discouragement seem to come against you in battle array, and their laugh of defiance and contempt resounds through all the valleys and mountains, you might, by faith in God and importunate prayer, pick up a handful of the very dust of your humiliation, and throw it into the air, and it shall become angels of victory over all the armies of earth and hell. The voices of your adversaries, human and satanic, shall be covered with confusion, while you shall be not only conqueror, but more than conquerer, through that grace which has so often made the fallen helmet of an overthrown antagonist the footstool of a Christian victory.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage