Superfluities a Hindrance
1Ch_20:6-7 : ’93A man of great stature, whose fingers and toes were four and twenty, six on each hand, and six on each foot; and he also was the son of a giant. But when he defied Israel, Jonathan, the son of Shimea, David’92s brother, slew him.’94
Malformation photographed, and for what reason? Did not this passage slip in by mistake into the sacred Scriptures, as sometimes a paragraph utterly obnoxious to the editor gets into his newspaper during his absence? Is not this Scriptural errata? No, no; there is nothing haphazard about the Bible. This passage of Scripture was as certainly intended to be put in the Bible as the passage, ’93In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,’94 or, ’93God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.’94 And I select it for my text today because it is charged with practical and tremendous meaning.
By the people of God the Philistines had been conquered, with the exception of a few giants. The race of giants is mostly extinct, I am glad to say. There is no use for giants now, except to enlarge the income of museums. But there were many of them in olden times. Goliath was, according to the Bible, eleven feet, four and a half inches high. Or, if you do not believe the Bible, the famous Pliny, a secular writer, declares that at Crete, by an earthquake, a monument was broken open, discovering the remains of a giant forty-six cubits long, or sixty-nine feet high. So, whether you prefer sacred or profane history, you must come to the conclusion that there were in those olden times cases of human altitude monstrous and terrifying.
David had smashed the skull of one of these giants, but there were other giants that the Davidean wars had not yet subdued, and one of them stands in my text. He was not only of Alpine stature, but had a surplus of digits. To the ordinary fingers was annexed an additional finger, and the foot had also a superfluous addendum. He had twenty-four terminations to hands and feet, where others have twenty. It was not the only instance of the kind. Tavernier, the learned writer, says that the Emperor of Java had a son endowed with the same number of extremities. Volcatius, the poet, had six fingers on each hand. Maupertuis in his celebrated letters, speaks of two families near Berlin, similarly equipped of hand and foot. All of which I can believe, for I have seen two cases of the same physical superabundance. But this giant of the text is in battle, and as David, the young warrior, had despatched one giant, the nephew of David slays this monster of my text, and there he lies after the battle in Gath, a dead giant. His stature did not save him, and his superfluous appendices of hand and foot did not save him. The probability was that in the battle his sixth finger on his hand made him clumsy in the use of his weapon, and his sixth toe crippled his gait. Behold the prostrate and malformed giant of the text: ’93A man great of stature, whose fingers and toes were four and twenty, six on each hand, and six on each foot: and he also was the son of a giant. But when he defied Israel, Jonathan, the son of Shimea, David’92s brother, slew him.’94
Behold how superfluities are a hindrance rather than a help! In all the battle at Gath that day there was not a man with ordinary hand and ordinary foot and ordinary stature that was not better off than this physical curiosity of my text. As physical size is apt to run in families, the probability is that this brother of David, who did the work, was of an abbreviated stature. A dwarf on the right side is stronger than a giant on the wrong side, and all the body and mind and estate and opportunity that you cannot use for God and the betterment of the world is a sixth finger and a sixth toe, and a terrific hindrance. The most of the good done in the world, and the most of those who win the battles for the right, are ordinary people. Count the fingers of their right hand, and they have just five, no more and no less. One Doctor Duff among missionaries, but three thousand missionaries that would tell you they have only common endowment. One Florence Nightingale to nurse the sick in conspicuous places, but ten thousand women who are just as good nurses, though never heard of. The Swamp Angel was a big gun that during the war made a big noise, but muskets of ordinary calibre and shells of ordinary heft did the execution. President Tyler and his Cabinet go down the Potomac one day to experiment with the Peacemaker, a great iron gun that was to affright with its thunder foreign navies. The gunner touches it off, and it explodes and leaves Cabinet Ministers dead on the deck, while at that time, all up and down our coasts, were cannon of ordinary bore, able to be the defense of the nation, and ready at the first touch to waken to duty. The curse of the world is big guns. After the politicians, who have made all the noise, go home hoarse from angry discussion on the evening of the first Monday in November, the next day the people, with the silent ballots, will settle everything, and settle it right; a million of the white slips of paper they drop making about as much noise as the fall of an apple-blossom.
Clear back in the country today there are mothers in plain apron, and shoes fashioned on a rough last by the shoemaker at the end of the lane, rocking babies that are to be the Martin Luthers and the Faradays and the Edisons and the Bismarcks and the Gladstones and the Washingtons and the George Whitefields of the year 1938, and who will make the twentieth century so bright that this much-lauded nineteenth in comparison will seem a part of the Dark Ages. The longer I live, the more I like common folks. They do the world’92s work, bearing the world’92s burdens, weeping the world’92s sympathies, carrying the world’92s consolation. Among lawyers, we see rise up a Rufus Choate or a William Wirt or a Samuel L. Southand, but society would go to pieces to-morrow if there were not thousands of common lawyers to see that men and women get their rights. A Valentine Mott or a Willard Parker rises up eminent in the medical profession, but what an unlimited sweep would pneumonia and diphtheria and scarlet fever have in the world if it were not for ten thousand common doctors. The old physician in his gig, rolling up the lane of the farmhouse, or riding on horseback, his medicines in the saddlebags, arriving on the ninth day of the fever, and coming in to take hold of the pulse of the patient, while the family, pale with anxiety, are looking on and waiting for his decision in regard to the patient, and hearing him say, ’93Thank God, I have mastered the case; he is getting well!’94 excites in me an admiration quite equal to the mention of the names of the great metropolitan doctors, Pancoast or Gross or Joseph C. Hutchinson of the past, or the illustrious living men of the present.
Yet what do we see in all departments? People not satisfied with ordinary spheres of work and with the ordinary duties falling to their lot. Instead of trying to see what they can do with a hand of five fingers, they want six. Instead of usual endowment of twenty manual and pedal addenda, they want twenty-four. A certain amount of money for livelihood, and for the supply of those whom we leave behind us after we have departed this life, is important, for we have the best authority for saying, ’93He that provideth not for his own, and especially those of his own household, is worse than an infidel;’94 but the large and fabulous sums for which many struggle, if obtained, would be a hindrance rather than an advantage. The anxieties and annoyances of people whose estates have become plethoric can only be told by those who possess them. It will be a good thing when, through your industry and public prosperities, you can own the house in which you live. But suppose you own fifty houses, and you have all those rents to collect, and all those tenants to please. Suppose you have branched out in business successes until in almost every direction you have investments. The fire-bell rings at night, you rush upstairs to look out of the window, to see if it is any of your mills. Epidemic of crime comes, and there are embezzlements and abscondings in all directions, and you wonder whether any of your bookkeepers will prove recreant. A panic strikest the financial world, and you are like a hen under a sky full of hawks, and trying with anxious cluck to get your overgrown chickens safely under wing. After a certain stage of success has been reached, you have to trust so many important things to others that you are apt to become the prey of others, and you are swindled and defrauded, and the anxiety you had on your brow when you were earning your first thousand dollars is not equal to the anxiety on your brow now that you have won your three hundred thousand.
The trouble with such a one is he is spread out like the unfortunate one in my text. You have more fingers and toes than you know what to do with. Twenty were useful, twenty-four is a hindering superfluity. Disraeli says that a king of Poland abdicated his throne and joined the people, and became a porter to carry burdens. And some one asked him why he did so, and he replied: ’93Upon my honor, gentlemen, the load which I quit was by far heavier than the one you see me carry. The weightiest is but a straw, when compared to that world under which I labored. I have slept more in four nights than I have during all my reign. I begin to live and to be a king myself. Elect whom you choose. As for me, I am so well it would be madness to return to court.’94
’93Well,’94 says somebody, ’93such overloaded persons ought to be pitied, for their worriments are real, and their insomnia and their nervous prostration are genuine.’94 I reply that they could get rid of the bothersome surplus by giving it away. If a man has more houses than he can carry without vexation, let him drop a few of them. If his estate is so great he cannot manage it without getting nervous dyspepsia from having too much, let him divide up with those who have nervous dyspepsia because they cannot get enough. No! they guard their sixth finger with more care than they did the original five. They go limping with what they call gout, and know not that, like the giant of my text, they are lamed by a superfluous toe. A few of them by charities bleed themselves of this financial obesity and monetary plethora, but many of them hang on to the hindering superfluity till death; and then, as they are compelled to give the money up anyhow, in their last will and testament they generously give some of it to the Lord, expecting, no doubt, that he will feel very much obliged to them. Thank God that once in a while we have a Peter Cooper, who, owning an interest in the iron works at Trenton, said to Mr. Lester: ’93I do not feel quite easy about the amount we are making. Working under one of our patents, we have a monopoly which seems to me something wrong. Everybody has to come to us for it, and we are making money too fast.’94 So they reduced the price, and this while our philanthropist was building Cooper Institute, which mothers a hundred institutes of kindness and mercy all over the land. But the world had to wait five thousand eight hundred years for Peter Cooper.
I am glad for the benevolent institutions that get a legacy from men who during their life were as stingy as death, but who in their last will and testament bestowed money on hospitals and missionary societies; but for such testators I have no respect. They would have taken every cent of it with them if they could, and bought up half of heaven and let it out at ruinous rent, or loaned the money to celestial citizens at two per cent. a month, and got a corner on harps and trumpets. They lived in this world fifty or sixty years in the presence of appalling suffering and want, and made no effort for their relief. The charities of such people are for the most part, in the ’93paulo-post-future’94 tense, and they are going to do them. The probability is that if such a one in his last will, by a donation to benevolent societies, tries to atone for his lifetime close-fistedness, the heirs-at-law will try to break the will by proving that the old man was senile or crazy, and the expense of the litigation will about leave in the lawyers’92 hands what was meant for the American Bible Society. O ye overweighted, successful business men, whether this sermon reach your ear or your eyes, let me say that if you are prostrated with anxieties about keeping or investing these tremendous fortunes, I can tell you how you can do more to get your health back and your spirits raised than by drinking gallons of bad-tasting water at Saratoga, Homburg, or Carlsbad’97give to God, humanity, and the Bible ten per cent. of all your income, and it will make a new man of you, and from restless walking of the floor at night you shall have eight hours sleep, without the help of bromide of potassium, and from no appetite you will hardly be able to wait, for your regular meals, and your wan cheek will fill up, and when you die the blessings of those who but for you would have perished will bloom all over your grave, with violets if it be spring, or gladiolus if it be autumn.
Perhaps some of you will take this advice, but the most of you will not. And you will try to cure your swollen hand by getting on it more fingers, and your rheumatic foot by getting on it more toes, and there will be a sigh of relief when you are gone out of the world; and when over your remains the minister recites the words: ’93Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,’94 persons who have keen appreciation of the ludicrous will hardly be able to keep their faces straight.
But whether in that direction my words do good or not, I am anxious that all who have only ordinary equipment be thankful for what they have and rightly employ it. I think you all have, figuratively as well as literally, fingers enough. Do not long for hindering superfluities. Standing in the presence of this fallen giant of my text, and in this postmortem examination of him, let us learn how much better off we are with just the usual hand, the usual foot. You have thanked God for a thousand things, but I warrant you never thanked him for those two implements of work and locomotion, that no one but the Infinite and Omnipotent God could have ever planned or made’97the hand and the foot. Only that soldier or that mechanic who in a battle, or through machinery, has lost them knows anything about their value, and only the Christian scientist can have any appreciation of what divine masterpieces they are.
Sir Charles Bell, the English surgeon, on the battlefield of Waterloo, while engaged in amputations of the wounded, was so impressed with the wondrous construction of the human hand that when the Earl of Bridgewater gave forty thousand dollars for essays on the wisdom and goodness of God, and eight books were written, Sir Charles Bell wrote his entire book on the wisdom and goodness of God as displayed in the human hand. The twenty-seven bones in hand and wrist with cartilages and ligaments and phalanges of the fingers all made just ready to knit, to sew, to build up, to pull down, to weave, to write, to plow, to pound, to wheel, to battle, to give friendly salutation. The tips of its fingers are so many telegraph offices by reason of their sensitiveness of touch. The bridges, the tunnels, the cities of the whole earth are the victories of the hand. The hands are not dumb, but often speak as distinctly as the lips. With our hands we invite, we repel, we invoke, we entreat, we wring them in grief, or clap them in joy, or spread them abroad in benediction. The malformation of the giant’92s hand in the text glorifies the usual hand. Fashioned of God more exquisitely and wondrously than any human mechanism that was ever contrived, I charge you use it for God, and the lifting of the world out of its moral predicament. Employ it in the sublime work of gospel handshaking. You can see the hand is just made for that. Four fingers just set right to touch your neighbor’92s hand on one side, and your thumb set so as to clench it on the other side. By all its bones and joints and muscles and cartilages and ligaments the voice of nature joins with the voice of God commanding you to shake hands. The custom is as old as the Bible, anyhow. Jehu said to Jehonadab: ’93Is thine heart right as my heart is with thine heart? If it be, give me thine hand.’94 When hands join in Christian salutation a gospel electricity thrills across the palm from heart to heart, and from the shoulder of one to the shoulder of the other. Shake hands all around. With the timid and for their encouragement, shake hands. With the troubled and in warm-hearted sympathy, shake hands. With the young man just entering business, and discouraged at the small sales and the large expenses, shake hands. With the child who is new from God and started on unending journey, for which he needs to gather great supply of strength, and who can hardly reach up to you now, because you are so much taller, shake hands. Across cradles and dying beds and graves, shake hands. With your enemies, who have done all to defame and hurt you, but whom you can afford to forgive, shake hands. At the door of churches where people come in, and at the door of churches where people go out, shake hands. Let pulpit shake hands with pew, and Sabbath-day shake hands with weekday, and earth shake hands with heaven. Oh, the strange, the mighty, the undefined, the mysterious, the eternal power of an honest handshaking! The difference between these times and the millennial times is that now some shake hands, but then all will shake hands, throne and footstool, across seas nation with nation, God and man, Church militant and Church triumphant.
Yea; the malformation of this fallen giant’92s foot glorifies the ordinary foot, for which I fear you have never once thanked God. The twenty-six bones of the foot are the admiration of the anatomist. The arch of the foot fashioned with a grace and a poise that Trajan’92s arch at Beneventum, or Constantine’92s arch at Rome, or Arch of Triumph at the end of Champs Elys’e9es could not equal. Those arches stand where they were planted, but this arch of the foot is an adjustable arch, a yielding arch, a flying arch, and ready for movements innumerable. The human foot so fashioned as to enable man to stand upright as no other creature, and leave the hand that would otherwise have to help in balancing the body free for anything it chooses. The foot of the camel fashioned for the sand, the foot of the bird fashioned for the tree-branch, the foot of the hind fashioned for the slippery rock, the foot of the lion fashioned to rend its prey, the foot of the horse fashioned for the solid earth, but the foot of man made to cross the desert or climb the tree or scale the cliff or walk the earth or go anywhere he needs to go. With that divine triumph of anatomy in your possession where do you walk? In what path of righteousness or what path of sin have you set it down? Where have you left the mark of your footsteps? Amid the petrifactions in the rocks have been found the marks of the feet of birds and beasts of thousands of years ago. And God can trace out all the footsteps of your lifetime, and those you made fifty years ago are as plain as those made in the last soft weather, all of them petrified for the Judgment day. Oh, the foot. How divinely honored, not only in its construction, but in the fact that God represents himself in the Bible as having feet. ’93The clouds are the dust of his feet.’94 ’93The earth is my footstool.’94 And representing cyclones and Euroclydons and whirlwinds and hurricanes as winged creatures, he describes himself as putting his foot on these monsters of the air, and walking from pinion to pinion, saying: ’93He walketh upon the wings of the wind.’94 ’93Thou hast put all things under his feet,’94 cries the Psalmist. Oh, the foot! Give me the autobiography of your foot from the time you stepped out of the cradle until today, and I will tell your exact character now and what are your prospects for the world to come.
That there might be no doubt about the fact that both these pieces of divine mechanism, hand and foot, belong to Christ’92s service, both hands of Christ and both feet of Christ were spiked on the cross. Right through the arch of both his feet to the hollow of his instep went the iron of torture, and from the palm of his hand to the back of it, and there is not a muscle or nerve or bone among the twenty-seven bones of hand and wrist, or among the twenty-six bones of the foot, but it belongs to him now and forever.
Charles Reade, the great writer, lost the joint of his forefinger by feeding a bear. Look out that your whole hand gets not into the maw of the old Cerberus of perdition. Sir Thomas Trobridge, at the battle of Inkermann, lost his foot, and when the soldiers would carry him away, he said, ’93No, I do not move until the battle is won.’94 So, if the foot be lamed or lost let it be in the service of our God, our home, or our country.
That is the most beautiful foot which goes about paths of greatest usefulness, and that the most beautiful which does the most to help others. I was reading of three women who were in rivalry about the appearance of the hand. And the one reddened her hand with berries and said the beautiful tinge made hers the most beautiful. And another put her hand in the mountain brook, and said, as the waters dripped off, that her hand was the most beautiful. And another plucked flowers off the bank, and under the bloom contended that her hand was the most attractive. Then a poor old woman appeared, and, looking up in her decrepitude, asked for alms. And a woman who had not taken part in the rivalry gave her alms. And all the women resolved to leave to this beggar the question as to which of all the hands present was the most attractive, and she said: ’93The most beautiful of them all is the one that gave relief to my necessities,’94 and as she so said her wrinkles and rags and her decrepitude and her body disappeared, and in place thereof stood the Christ, who long ago said: ’93Inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these, ye did it to me!’94 and who to purchase the service of our hand and foot here on earth or in resurrection state, had his own hand and foot lacerated.
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage