016. A Fearful Conflagration

A Fearful Conflagration

Gen_15:17 : ’93And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.’94

When the ancients wanted to take an oath they would slay an animal, divide it lengthwise, and lay the pieces opposite to each other. Then the parties would advance from opposite points, and midway between the pieces take the oath. God wished to take an oath. He ordered a heifer and some birds slain and divided, and the pieces placed opposite to each other; then between the pieces passed first a furnace, typical of suffering, and then a lamp, emblem of deliverance.

So it is in the history of individuals, cities, and nations. First the awful furnace, then the cheerful lamp. The furnace of conviction, the lamp of pardon. The furnace of trial, the lamp of consolation. The furnace of want, the lamp of prosperity. The furnace of death, the lamp of glory. ’93And it came to pass that when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.’94

It is the duty of the ministry to interpret solemn providences. Shall a ship founder, carrying down hundreds of passengers; or a gunpowder plot be discovered; or a revolution break forth; or a pestilence put its leprous bandage over the white lips of an empire; or a great city crouch down at the nation’92s gate, beggared, while the long tongues of the flame lick its sores, and the ministry be dumb? No; God’92s writings, by the hand of apostle or prophet, are no more divine than are the capitals of alarm and warning written by plume of fire in the ruins of the great and beautiful Chicago.

In that city the Sabbath had closed. The ministers of Christ had declared their message of peace and good will to men. The doxologies had been sung, and the people had gone to their dwellings. Children had folded their hands in evening prayer, and all over the city the ’93good-night’94 had been given. God looked down upon a great city asleep. But destruction broke forth. At the kerosene lamp of a poor woman a torch was lighted that made the earth shudder. The two coursers, Hurricane and Conflagration, yoked together, drew on the chariot in which white Want and cursing Despair and shrieking Terror were mounted. Under the red-hot hoofs the broken hearts of one hundred and fifty thousand people were flung like a shower of cinders. Storehouses that had been the pride of the continent, surrendered their bolts and bars and iron safes, at the first touch of this irresistible burglary. Churches of God, that had been reared with a self-denial worthy of an angel’92s eulogy, dropped their organs, galleries, vestments, and consecrated plate into the ashes. And, worse than all, the homes took fire, and away went sacred relics, and the last pillow on which to sleep, and the last loaf of bread, and millionaire and pauper trudged down the street, the flaming sword swung at the gate of their paradise, forbidding them ever again to enter. Hark to that explosion of blocks, that fail to stop the ravages; to the shrieking of that family, gathered on the house-top, begging for help, until the wife falls, and the children faint, and the father staggers, and all die; and to the cry of those men and women who go down the street hatless, raving mad, wringing their hands and tearing their hair! This child cries: ’93Where is father and mother? I wonder if they are burned up?’94 And this man, seizing hold of another, cries: ’93I wonder if this is the Day of Judgment?’94 and another exclaims: ’93This is hell!’94 and an infidel, standing at the street corner, cries out: ’93Where is your God now?’94 Carry out these sick children in your arms and fly! Wrap up that corpse and get it away from this funeral pyre! Lift that sick woman, with the child just born, opening its eyes in torment! Get out this lifelong invalid, and do not stop for medicines or blankets, for the stairs are crumbling away’97they are gone now! Quick! leap from the window! No use in flying to the water’92s edge, for the army of horrors have crossed, and pulled up the bridges after them. With carts and drays, off to the prairies! The night may be cold, and the prospect hopeless, but anything is better than the sting of these cinders, and the falling of these walls, and the wailing of this dying city. But how shall they get out? To the north’97fire! to the south’97fire! to the east’97fire! to the west’97fire!

Alas for our beautiful sister! She stands looking down into the mirror of the lake, at her scorched brow, and her bleeding cheek, and shivering with the horror of her own disfigurement. Oh! bitter night of October the eighth! It was a furnace’97an awful furnace’97a furnace which was five miles long and one mile wide’97a furnace not seven times heated, but seven hundred times heated. Yet deliverance came. Telegrams from London, from Edinburgh, from Vienna, from New York, from Brooklyn’97from two continents, promising help. The Cincinnati and St. Louis freight trains come with the speed of an express, bearing food and blankets; and he who, when things looked dark in the Shenandoah Valley, got into lightning stirrups, has just in time ridden into the scene to spread tents for the shelterless, to scatter rations for the hungry, and to proclaim, in behalf of our national government, that a people who have barns full of corn, and tables full of bread, will not let Chicago suffer. Lift up your head, O City of the Lakes! With bread enough and to spare, you shall not perish with hunger.

It was an awful furnace! But it has passed, and now I see a light that gets brighter and brighter as it is fed by the alms and sympathies and prayers of a world. It is the glowing lamp, the cheerful lamp, the glorious lamp of God’92s deliverance!

From all this you learn, without any preacher telling you, that we are all one. The thrill of sympathy that went through all of this country, and through all of Europe, shows that we belong to one family. No more discussion between New York and Chicago as to which has the most swift-footed enterprise; no more contention between St. Louis and Chicago as to which is the more prominent city, but all the people, white, black, and copper-colored, Protestant and Catholic, find their hearts thrilled with the impulse of one common brotherhood. There are those who do not like this idea. They say that God made the Indian, and set him down this side of the Atlantic, and the Spaniard on the other side, and the African, and placed him in the snaky jungles, and so on, and that then from these different representative men the human family descended. But Paul knocks down that idea when, standing in the presence of one of the most aristocratic audiences of the world, he proclaims, in the name of God, this democratic doctrine: ’93God hath made of one blood all the nations of men.’94 They started from one garden, and they fell in one transgression; they are redeemed by the same almighty grace, and are to shine forever in the same heavenly kingdom.

This feeling of consanguinity is constantly illustrated. A mine in England falls upon the workmen, and all nations feel the suffocation. Prince Albert dies, and Victoria has the sympathy of all Christendom. A plague falls upon London, and all the cities of the world weep at her agonies. An earthquake rocks down a Mexican city, and both hemispheres feel the shock. Famine stalks through Ireland or Russia or India and distant nations send their cargoes of bread.

In 1863 a fire occurred in Santiago, Chili, that wrought worse damages than this Chicago fire, so far as the destruction of human life is considered. The Conception of the Virgin Mary was being celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church at Santiago. Great preparations had been made for the occasion, and perhaps the most wonderful scene ever witnessed in any church was about to be enacted. The wealth and pomp and intellect of that Chilian capital poured into the cathedral, and knelt beside the poorest devotee with cross and beads. Images, statues, transparencies, swaying festoons, and twenty thousand lamps, among which swung costly gauze and delicate draperies, like mists staggering, sunstruck, up the mountain. A camphene lamp explodes, and the flame leaps from point to point, and in fifteen minutes twenty-five hundred souls have passed up through the fire to meet their God. What of that? Why need we care about it? They were of a different nation and of a different religion. Ah! the groan of that dying multitude mounted the Cordilleras, and the sorrow came sobbing across the Caribbean, and all civilized nations felt a thrill of sympathy and an impulse to help.

I know that this idea of a common origin is distasteful to some of high pretension; but the most lordly man’92s ancestry, like ours, was in Eden built out of red mud. What then? Will you bring all men down to a dead level! No. If you did, they would not stay there fifteen minutes. How then? Let every man have just what he achieves. There ought to be an aristocracy’97not one built upon the accidents of wealth or celebrated ancestry, but an aristocracy of industry and of large-hearted deeds. Meanwhile, let it be understood that sceptre and shovel are brothers. The epaulet has no right to overlay the blacksmith’92s apron. Brocades must not despise calicoes. With your extravagant viands you have no right to cover up my plain bread. Cathedral must not look down upon sailor’92s bethel. The whole Gospel tendency is to bring together what are called the higher and lower classes. Christ came from a throne to a manger to bridge the distance between the two; and this idea of the nineteenth century, which would put the rich in churches by themselves, and the poor in churches by themselves, is an erroneous, unevangelical, heathenish, God-defying, and inhuman plan, which I shall war against to my dying day.

This doctrine of universal brotherhood will not make all alike. Differences in soil and climate will make differences in men. As with plants and animals, so with men. The torrid zone will yield the yams and tamarinds, and the best culture will only make better yams and tamarinds. The wintry regions will yield the barley and berries; and culture will only make this difference, that they will produce better barley and larger berries. You will not expect to find the same vegetable products in Paraguay as in Lapland. Cloves and cherries cannot well drink the same air. Nutmegs and currants will not grow side by side. When God made one part of the earth, he said: ’93You yield bananas’94; and to another, ’93You yield plums and pears’94; and that portion thrives best which attempts to produce and export that which God ordained it to raise. So, in the animal kingdom, you will not expect to find the ichneumon where you hunt for the otter and walrus. As with plants and animals, so with man. The tropical regions will make passionate natures, and Arctic severities will form temperaments, cold and stolid and sullen. In the region of the Gospel there will be the same great national characteristics as now, although somewhat moderated and modified. The Frenchman will be characteristically polite; the German, persistent and plodding; the English, self-reliant; the American, restless and enterprising; the Indian, aesthetic; the Spaniard, quick and impulsive. Gospel triumphs will not steal the Scotchman’92s plaid, or break the German’92s pipe, or dash down the Italian’92s easel. Differences forever, but no quarrel. Christ spreading his treaty of peace over all monarchies and republics, the potentates, presidents, and princes of the earth will come up and sign it. Vessels of war, anchored at the shipyards, and changed into merchantmen, or swung into the navy-yard, to be kept as relics of a barbarous age, to be looked upon as in our museums we now examine scalping-knives and thumb-screws. The masterly treatises on military tactics will be sold for wrapping-paper, or kept for curious examination, as we now have in our libraries an old Koran or a Chinese almanac. The surgical discoveries made in the treatment of gun-shot fractures will be employed in alleviating the accidents to laborer, farmer, and mechanic. The hammer of the shipwright, as it beats against the spikes in the ship’92s beam, will sound ’93Life!’94 ’93Life!’94 instead of, as now rattling ’93Death!’94 ’93Death!’94

What! is the Gospel going to take all the spirit and pluck out of the race? Shall our mariners be impressed, and the government seek no indemnity? Shall our merchant ships be damaged on the high seas, and no reparation be demanded? Shall privateers be fitted out in foreign ports, and there be no requisition for the loss suffered? Shall nations repudiate, and there be no force of armies to compel the payment of the national debt? Shall oppressed men suffer forever, when they might seize the sword and hew out their own deliverance? My answer to all these questions is, there will be no wrong, no imposition, no outrage, and consequently, no collision. Oh, day of universal brotherhood, begin! It comes skipping upon the mountains, and singing through the vales. I hear its footsteps in the tread of the multitudes of the devout, on their way to church. I hear its voice in the billowing up of that great song of praise that rises from all the churches of God, illuminated for worship. I see its banner lifted upon the fallen ramparts of great iniquities, the folds of light streaming with the stars of promise and good cheer. This wave of Gospel influence dashes higher up toward full tide. This song of joy, now tremulous and faint, will burst into million-voiced acclaim. The towers that have so long been tolling the sorrows of the world shall peal another sound’97Scotch kirk and American church and mission chapel and great St. Paul’92s, chiming the clear, sweet, silvery song of the Millennium. The Church of God, no more a barrack for fighting Christians, shall become a great temple, on whose walls shall be hung olive-branches of peace. The flags of all nations, once carried in front of hostile armies, shall hang in graceful festoons above those who once were full of hate. The ’93Marseillaise Hymn’94 and ’93Bonny Doon’94 and ’93Hail Columbia’94 and ’93God save the Queen,’94 shall mingle in one great song; but, touched into resurrection, it shall mount into a harmony of unimagined sweetness and power, that shall soar and melt and pour into the hallelujah that, like the voice of many waters, and the voice of mighty thunders, comes surging up to the feet of Jesus.

Again: I learn from this Chicago disaster what a poor place the earth is to put our treasures in. Two hundred and fifty million dollars of property destroyed in a day and a night! How much toil of brain and hand and foot represented in that property! All the anxiety and sweat of twenty years gone in one day of destruction. We have been accustomed to think that if property were insured, all was well. But even insurance companies have gone down. Set not your affections on anything you can build, for it is perishable. Do not worship your fine reputation or your handsome store or your large house, or your swift ship, but build up in your soul a temple of Christian character. Disasters cannot crush it nor fire consume it nor iconoclast deface its altars nor time chisel down its walls. Yet politicians have worshiped their office, and merchants their business and painters their pictures and musicians their attainments and architects their buildings and historians their books; and how often have they seen their works perish! Audubon, after fifteen years of working in making sketches of birds, leaves the sketches in a trunk, goes off, comes back, and finds that the rats have devoured them. Isaac Newton’92s dog, ’93Spot,’94 tore to pieces a manuscript that represented the work of a quarter of a lifetime. A worm has sunk the ship that was the pride of its builder. A child’92s hand has spoiled a painting intended to be immortal. A horse’92s hoof dashed out the brain of a most accomplished philosopher. The marble statue that came out, under the stroke of an ingenious sculptor, drops on the sidewalk and is broken by a careless drayman. Time will break down grandest arch and stanchest pyramid and mightiest city. The day will come when reconstructed Chicago and New York and Brooklyn and Boston and Savannah and Charleston and New Orleans and Cincinnati and St. Louis and San Francisco and London and Paris and Vienna and Rome and Constantinople and St. Petersburg and Madras and Canton and Pekin will be wrapped in flame of awful conflagration. Yea, the earth itself shall perish! What a poor place to put one’92s treasure in! A painter, busy in making the fresco of a building, standing high up on the scaffolding, was entranced with his own work, and stepped back to admire it, and in his excitement forgot that he stood upon a high scaffolding, stepped back too far, and fell’97his life dashed out, far beneath, on the pavement. So men admire their worldly achievements, and in their enchantment step back to look, and step back too far, and fall’97ruined for life and lost for eternity.

Again, learn from this calamity the beauty of heroism and self-denial. You have read how those firemen fought the flames until they fell dead in the fire; of how men, while their own dwellings were burning, helped the neighbors out of their dwellings. Scene after scene of self-denying heroism. How grand it is, amid the selfishness of the world, to find such generous deeds! The Moravian missionaries were told that they could not enter the lazaretto where the lepers were dying unless they staid there. ’93Then,’94 they said, ’93we will go and stay there.’94 They went in to nurse the sick, and perished. You have read the life of pure-hearted Elizabeth Fry, toiling among the degraded. But the full biographies of the world’92s martyrs will never be written. The firemen in all our cities who have rescued people from blazing buildings; the sailors who have helped the passengers off the wreck, themselves perishing; the nurses who have waited upon the sick in yellow-fever and cholera hospitals, and sunk down to death from exhaustion; the Christian men who, on the battle-field, have administered to the fallen amid rattling canister and bursting shell; the Christian women who have gone down through haunts of shame on errands of mercy, defended by no human arm, but looked after by that God who, with his lightnings, would have struck down any who dared to do them harm.

Christian heroism has ever been ready to face the fire and swim the flood and dare the storm, if good might be done. And in that day when men who sat in places of power shall go down to shame and contempt, these humble ones shall have their names written high on the pillars of heaven. Better than to have been commemorated in poetry or song will it be for them who hear the good cheer from Christ, ’93I was hungry, and ye fed me; I was sick, and ye visited me. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!’94

Again, learn from this disaster the importance of being prepared for the great future. Five hundred people were known to have perished; I fear there were many more. They had no time for preparation. The poorest time for the last twenty years, in Chicago, to pray was that Sunday night. How can one pray when his children are burning or his house being consumed? Many of you are daily exposed to perils. You walk on scaffoldings; you drive fractious animals; you fly over the country on swift wheels; you work among dangerous chemicals. The voice that comes on the west wind says, ’93Prepare to meet thy God.’94 By the revolutions of the days and nights you are hurried on to your last hour of earth and your first hour of eternity. Sleeping and waking, your heart beats the double quickstep of an immortal spirit. See you not, through the fogs and mists of earth, in the distance, the looming up of the heavenly shore, over which white-robed inhabitants walk, forever free from toil and pain, and sin and tears? Hark to the cry that comes over the waters from castles of the blessed, from the lips of princes, robed and garlanded, from harps that never felt the rough twang of woe, and from trumpets that peal forth the victory of many conquerors. The trees of God bend with immortal fruitage, and under them rest the toil-worn of earth, looking down toward you, ready at your coming up to shout, amid the rustle of palms and the clang of celestial towers, ’93Hail! hail!’94

But there is an obligation growing out of this service, and that is the duty of giving prompt relief to the houseless, homeless, exhausted, and dying sufferers of Chicago. They want something besides ’93God bless yous’94’97namely, cloaks and sacques and shoes and hats and coats and dresses’97yea, all the articles of a winter’92s wardrobe. Out of the charred and smoking ruins there are stretched up the hands of more than one hundred and fifty thousand people begging for help, and from blistered and bleeding lips they cry out, ’93We are hungry; give us bread! We are freezing; give us clothes! We are homeless; give us shelter! We are sick; give us cordials!’94 Forever blasted will be that ear that refuses to listen! Forever palsied will be that hand that refuses to help! I plead in behalf of cripples by the flames robbed of their crutch; in behalf of toiling women, whose sewing-machines have been burned up; in behalf of the orphans whose fathers were crushed under the falling walls; in behalf of women whose hour of anguish has come, and there is no pillow, and there is no roof; in behalf of brave firemen, whose legs were shattered when the ladders broke’97yea, in behalf of him who said, ’93Inasmuch as ye did it unto these my brethren, ye did it unto me.’94

You will not turn your back on this suffering. Your bed to-night will be softer if you feel that you have provided some sufferer with a mattress to lie on. Your own food will be sweeter if you make provision for the hunger-struck. Your own children will seem brighter-faced if you provide stockings for the little bare feet. Get ready for a grand contribution of money and clothes. When the box comes around, let it seem like the wasted hand of suffering stretched out for help. Let the church officials move slowly down the aisles they gather the alms, remembering that the amount they gather will decide whether some groaning man or woman shall live or perish. As in the last day we hope to find mercy of the Lord, let us to-night show mercy to others. O thou self-denying one of Gethsemane and the cross, drop upon us thy spirit.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage