276. Crooked Things
Crooked Things
Isa_40:4 : ’93The crooked shall be made straight.’94
Geometry, from the time it was discovered on the banks of the Nile, which, by its overflow annually obliterated the landmarks, and the restoration of these landmarks made such a science necessary’97I say geometry, ever since then has been busy with lines, straight lines, curved lines, lines in angles and cones and spheres, but has never been able to evolve any beauty from a line that is merely crooked. The circle and the square were always considered admirable. Isaiah recognizes the circle and says: ’93The Lord sits upon the circle of earth.’94 The altar of the ancient tabernacle was ’93four square,’94 and the breastplate of the priests ’93four square,’94 and heaven, according to St. John is ’93four square.’94 But the Bible has no admiration for lines that are merely crooked. Indeed, my text in prophesying the world’92s complete rectification declares: ’93The crooked shall be made straight.’94
There have been so many moral earthquakes that many things have got into a terrible twist’97crooked laws, crooked governments, crooked fortunes, crooked dispositions’97and many of the efforts to straighten things have only made them more crooked. And some good people sit down in despair and become pessimistic and give up life and the Church and the world as dead failures. With such lachrymose behavior I have no sympathy. It is a promise of the Lord Almighty, ’93The crooked shall be straight.’94 I propose, as I may be divinely helped, to mention some of the crooked things that are going to be straightened.
Much of the wealth of the world is in the hands of the profligate, while many of the best people are subjected to distressing privation; and there is going to be a redistribution of property. If it were possible, it would be a bad thing to have things divided equally. Some men are able to endure more success than others, and prosperity that might not unbalance you might destroy me. The Declaration of American Independence declares that all men are born equal, but the opposite is the truth, for they are born unequal. In no respect is this more evident than in their capacity to endure success, financial or social. I have seen men by the acquisition of fifty thousand dollars made arrogant and overbearing, and I have known others with their millions of dollars childlike and unassuming and Christian. We would all be affluent but the Lord cannot trust us. I am glad there are those he can trust. Much is said against capitalists, but the world would be a very shaky world without them. Who built the great railroads which, while they give facilities of travel, employ tens of thousands of laborers, supporting them and their families? Capitalists. Who built great ships that stir the rivers and bridge the ocean? Capitalists. Who reared the thousands of factories all over the land in which hundreds of thousands of employees earn their daily bread? Capitalists. Who endowed your colleges and opened free libraries and built asylums for the orphan, the crippled, and the insane? Capitalists. But for them there would not be an Academy of Music or a picture-gallery or a free library or a steamboat or a railroad in America. Who put the world on seventy-five years beyond what it would have been in enterprise, in comforts, in educational advantage, in good things without number?
Capitalists. The more money a man gets the better, if it come honestly and is employed righteously. Nevertheless we all see that there needs to be a redistribution of property. Communism proposes to make that distribution by torch and dagger and dynamite. Throw the midnight express off the track and put the factory into conflagration. Disrupt society. Burglarize. Assassinate. Such people believe neither in God nor man nor woman and they know how to make things worse, but never have made and never can make anything better.
I tell you how there will come a redistribution of property. Under the divine blessing good people will get more alertness and acumen and assiduity. Many good people are kept in straitened circumstances because they have been indolent, or lacked courage to take honest advantage of circumstances, and were too stupid to get on. With the very same surroundings others went on to competency. In the better days to come good men will have their faculties awakened, and will in consequence rise to larger share of prosperity. On the other hand, estates wrongfully accumulated will dissolve. If not the sons, then the grandsons will make the money fly, and it will gradually scatter in their hands, and become a part of the general wealth. Then, as to vast properties righteously gathered’97and there are thousands of them’97such estate will contribute toward helping the unfortunate, not more by charities than by helping struggling people into lucrative business, and the man who has amassed a surplus will say: ’93There is a young merchant without any capital, I will start him in an eligible business block,’94 and ’93There is a young mechanic who has no means of his own, and I will put him on the career of prosperity,’94 and ’93There is a farmer with too big a mortgage on his land, and I will help him to lift the encumbrance.’94 The fact is that if the kindliness and generosity manifested by moneyed men toward the struggling during the last fifty years, increases in the same ratio for the next fifty years, there will be a condition of society paradisaic. We are going to have a multiplication of William E. Dodges and Peter Coopers and James Lenoxes and George Peabodys. So will come redistribution, and the crooked will be made straight.
Mind this: God never undertook a failure. The Old Book which is worth all other books put together, makes it plain that God has undertaken to regulate this world by Gospel influences, and if he has the power he will do what he says he will, and no one who amounts to anything will deny his power. God has said a hundred times ’93I will,’94 but never once has said ’93I cannot.’94 We may with our tack-hammers pound away, trying to mend and improve and straighten the financial condition of the world, and be disappointed in the result, because our arm is too weak and the hammer we wield too small; but the most defiant difficulty will flatten and disappear when God with a hammer made of summer thunderbolts strikes it, saying, ’93The crooked shall be made straight.’94
In your business concerns there are influences perplexing. Your affairs may seem all right to outsiders, for business firms do not advertise their private troubles, but where one firm has everything just as they want it, there are a hundred firms at their wit’92s end, what to do with that partner who draws more than his share of the profits or with that stockholder who comes in just often enough to upset things or with that disappearance of funds which you cannot account for, although you have suspicions you cannot mention, or with that investment which was made contrary to your judgment because there was a determination to push it through or because you are going behind month by month without any prospect of extrication. The trouble is putting a wrinkle on your forehead that ought not to appear there for ten years yet, and you will be forty years old when you ought to be only thirty or sixty when you ought to be fifty or seventy when you ought to be only sixty. Either by the dissolution of that firm or by readjusting matters you will be brought safely through if you put your trust in God. When commercial houses fail the suspension is advertised, but of the tens of thousands of men who are every day extricated no public mention is made. Yesterday was Saturday and I warrant that at the windows of banks, and in the counting-rooms of stores and on every street of every city, God appeared for the deliverance of good men, as certainly as when with his right foot he trod Lake Galilee into placidity and made Daniel as safe among the lions as though they had been house-dogs asleep on a rug before a winter’92s fire. Throw yourself on the promise of the text, or a hundred other texts meaning about the same thing.
I never yet asked God to do anything but he did it, if it were best, and in all the cases where my prayer has not been answered, I have found out afterward that it was best not to have been answered in my way. But none of us have tested the full power of prayer. It is a force very like some of the forces of nature, that were in existence but not employed. For ages electricity was thought good for nothing but to burn barns and kill people with one fell stroke. The lightning-rod on the top of houses was the spear with which the world charged on the thunderstorm, as much as to say: ’93If you dare to come this way I will hurl you into the ground.’94 But now electricity lightens homes and churches and cities and Christendom, and moves rail-cars; and he is a rash man who mentions anything as impossible to this natural energy. So the power of prayer was to the world rather a frightful power, if it was any power at all. But that has been changed, and men begin to use it in some things, and the time will come when it will be used in all things and there will be a Bible in every counting-room and supplication will ascend from every commercial establishment, and when business firms are formed the question will not only be asked as to how much this one and that one put in of capital, but the question will be asked ’93Do you know how to pray?’94 Mightier agent than any natural force yet developed will be this Gospel electricty, flashing heavenward for help, flashing earthward with divine response. God in business life. God in agricultural life. God in mechanical life. God in artistic life. God in every kind of life. Your religion for the most part is hung up so high you cannot reach it. It is hung up on the cloudy rafters of the sky where you expect to snatch it up as you finally go through for heavenly residence. Oh, have your religion within easy reach now! Religion is not for heaven, but for this world. Once in heaven, we will need no prayer for we shall have everything we want. We will need no repentance for we shall have forever gotten rid of our sins. We shall have no need of comfort, for there will be no trouble. The Christian religion is not for heaven where everything is all right, but for this world where so many things are all wrong.
Washington Allston, whose name you recognize as that of a great American painter, was reduced to extreme poverty, and one day got on his knees and asked for a loaf of bread for himself and his starving family. While he was bowed in that prayer there was a knock at the door and a man came in and said: ’93How about your painting, the ’91Angel Uriel,’92 that received the prize at the Royal Academy? Has it been sold?’94 ’93No;’94 said Allston. ’93How much do you want for it?’94 Allston replied: ’93I am done fixing a price, for I cannot get it.’94 ’93Will four hundred pounds be enough?’94 asked the stranger. ’93Why, that is more than I asked,’94 said Allston. The four hundred pounds (two thousand dollars), were paid and the purchaser introduced himself as the Marquis of Stafford, who thereafter was one of the most liberal patrons of the rescued artist. ’93Oh, that all just happened so!’94 Did it? Tell that to some ignorant man, some benighted woman, who has never read the promise: ’93Call upon me in the day of trouble, I will deliver thee,’94 or that other promise: ’93The crooked shall be made straight.’94
’93Well,’94 says one, ’93you don’92t apply this in every direction.’94 Yes, I do. Take the most uncertain thing on earth, the weather. The Bible distinctly says that prayer controls the weather. Jas_5:17 th and 18th verses: ’93Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it rained not on the earth for the space of three years and six months; and he prayed again and the heavens gave rain.’94 Do you say that was the weather of olden time? There have been instances in modern times just as marvelous. There is not a Christian ship-captain but could give you instances of Divine interference with the weather in answer to prayer. It has been my good fortune to know many ship-captains. They are in all our services. They leave their vessels on Sunday mornings and join us in worship. I warrant there are enough of them present this morning to take a whole fleet in safety across the Atlantic. Whenever I have heard them testify, it has mightily confirmed me in what I knew before, that God answers prayer concerning the weather. And there have been cyclones that started up from the Caribbean sea, sweeping down every sail and every smokestack and every mast in their course, which in answer to specific petition have been diverted and made to curve around some particular ship, leaving that in calm waters, and then resuming their original path of destruction. The weather probabilities again and again have announced a tempest and we were all ready for it, but, to the surprise of most people, the next day we saw the announcement that the atmospheric fury had changed its course. The probability is it struck a prayer and glanced off. If Elijah’92s prayer affected the weather of Palestine for forty-two months I should think somebody now might have a prayer that would affect it for a couple of days.
John Easter was many years ago an evangelist in Virginia. A large out-door meeting was being held in that State. Many thousands had assembled in the open air and heavy storm-clouds began to gather. There was no shelter to which the multitudes could retreat. The rain had already reached the adjoining fields when John Easter cried out: ’93Brethren, be still while I call upon God to stay the storm till the Gospel is preached to this multitude.’94 Then he knelt and prayed that the audience might be spared from the rain and that after they had gone to their homes there might come refreshing showers. Behold the clouds parted as they came near and passed to either side of the crowd and then closed again, leaving the place dry where the audience had assembled, and the next day the postponed showers came upon the ground that had been the day before omitted. Do you say it only happened so? I cannot see what you keep your Bibles for, and the God you worship is not my God. Your God is an autocrat, and he is so far off and so far up that the world cannot touch him, and his throne is an eternal iceberg. My God is a father, here and now, and a father will give his child what he asks for, if it is best for him to have it. Pray about everything that concerns you, secularities as well as spiritualities. Take to God all your annoyances and perplexities. The crooked shall be made straight. Some people talk as though God controlled things in general but not in particular; that he started everything under certain laws and then let it take care of itself, as an engineer might start his locomotive on an iron railroad track and then jump off. What would happen to such a locomotive is what would long ago have happened to our world if God had started it and afterward allowed it to look out for itself. There is no such thing as a general Providence. It is a particular Providence. God has no general care for a forest. It is a care for every cell of every leaf and root in that forest. God has no general care of the ocean. It is a care for every drop of water in the liquid magnitude. God has no general care for the human race. It is a care for every individual of that race and of every item of individual history. I preach him, a God in infinitesimals, an every-day God, a God responsive; and one breath of earnest prayer, though that breath should not be strong enough to make a candle flicker, will absorb more of the divine attention than if the archangel standing at the foot of the throne should flap both wings.
It is remarkable how many crooked things are in the providence of God being made straight. About thirty years ago our national affairs were as crooked as depraved American politics and bad men and Satan could make them. From the top of Maine to the foot of Florida, the nation was red with wrath. It was wrangle and fight all the way through, and one of the mildest things that the North and South promised each other was assassination. During this summer I have traveled through New York and Ohio and Illinois and Indiana and Minnesota and Kansas and Nebraska and Missouri and Texas and Louisiana and Georgia and North and South Carolina and Virginia and Pennsylvania and I have shaken hands with tens of thousands of people, and talked with men of all sections and degrees, and I have to tell you it is all peace; and in all the States of the Union you could not now marshal a military company of one hundred soldiers to fight against the United States Government, unless you got your men out of the penitentiary. Did the corrupt and gangrened political parties do this work of rectification and pacification? No! It was by Divine interposition that the crooked has been made straight.
On the second of December, 1851, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte rode down the Champs Elys’e8es of Paris, and under the hoofs of his horse a republic was trampled as the rider went to take a throne. It was the outrage of the century. For nineteen long years the wrong triumphed. The will of one man who wanted to remain emperor kept down a nation who wanted a republic. But September, 1870, arrived, and Sedan unrolled its crimson scroll. The Emperor surrenders with eighty-three thousand troops, four hundred and nineteen field guns, six thousand horses, and sixty thousand muskets. From that day the ballot-box was up and the throne was down. Free institutions have been substituted for an infamous monarchy. Thank God! The crooked has been made straight.
But why go so far to find fulfilment of my text. In all our lives there are crooked things that need to be made straight, and each hearer or reader will enumerate for himself or herself. With one it is dilapidated physical health and you are saying: ’93Why cannot I be in good health when I have such opportunities and such responsibilities?’94 Alas for the sick headaches and the rheumatic joints and the neuralgic thrusts and the lame foot! But you will be well soon. Life at the longest is an abbreviated durance. There is a black doctor that will cure you. Some people call him Death. No disease was ever able to stand before his touch. Use all the means afforded for physical recuperation but if they fail the hour of release is not far away. There need be no incurables. There is no sorrow that heaven cannot cure. Those who in this world have always been well will not get the best part of heaven. They will not have the advantage of contrast. They were well before they left this world and why should they be so gratulated at being well in the next world. But to those who on earth were hindered or broken down in health, what a contrast as they step into that domain where there has never been an aching brow or lame foot or inflamed muscle or disordered nerve! For forty years there may have been a stooping in the back or a twisted muscle or a curved spine or a crooked limb, but the promise has been fulfilled ’93The crooked shall be made straight.’94
In many a domestic life are difficulties to be removed. There are thousands of matches that were not made in heaven. Some of the loveliest women have been united to some of the meanest men and some of the grandest men to the most worthless women. There may be no sufficient cause of divorcement, but there has never been any accord. For them the wedding march ought never to have been played. The twain divergent in sentiment, the north pole and the south pole might just as well have been married. A twist of nettles would have been more appropriate than a garland of orange blossoms. The unutterable mistake was made to please parents or for the acquisition of estate or for heightening of social position or through thoughtlessness. I call the attention of such to the rapid dissolution of families. This thought, which is a sadness to a happy marital state, might be consolatory to those unequally yoked. A very short path is the path of this life. The rolling years will give quick emancipation. Everybody, for discipline, must have some kind of trouble and that is your trouble. Put in a song now and then to cheer your spirit. Make the best of things. Find in God that peace which no one else can bestow. The days and months and years are crowding past and the last of the procession so far as you are concerned will soon have gone by. Remember that some of the best men and women who ever lived have had the same lifetime of misfortune. They bore up under it and so can you. The expiration of the life of one of you will, after a while, remove the affliction. Let the one that remains make no hypocritical mourning at the obsequies of the one that goes, or imitate those whom we have all noticed who fought like cats and dogs all their married state and then could not get organs to sound dirges doleful enough, or furnishing stores to prepare weeds black enough, or tombstone cutters to chisel epitaphs eulogistic enough. It is a matter of congratulation that the unhappiest conjugal relation will terminate. The crooked shall be made straight. In the ages of the world when people lived five or six or eight or nine hundred years, such consolation for any kind of trouble would have been inapt. It would have brought no relief to some of those old patriarchs to say ’93You will have only seven hundred years more of this.’94 But life has been abbreviated by the cutting off of century after century until we can console people, whether their trouble be financial or social or domestic, by saying it will not be long before the crooked shall be made straight.
But to those who were once happily united on earth, and are now separated, the same thought comes, in a good cheer. Not long separated! Tradition says that two bells were molded and sent from Spain for a distant land to chime in a church tower. But while in a storm at sea one of these bells was wrecked and only one reached the shore and was hung in the church tower. And some people thought that, when standing on the land, they heard that bell ringing for worship or in a wedding peal, they could at the same time hear from the sea the lost bell ringing as if in response. Some of our friends and kindred have crossed the stormy sea and are in the tower of God on high. But we are still in the tempest, and sometimes the surges beat over us, but our souls are still in accord with those who are gone, and they ring down to us and we ring up to them and a sympathy is between us that can never die.
’93Oh,’94 says some one, ’93the crook in my lot you have not mentioned, and I sit clear outside of all the consolations you have offered.’94 Well, I will take after you with Gospel comfort and reach you before I close. Do you think your wound is so deep the Divine Surgeon cannot treat it? Have you a trouble that overmasters God? Is your annoyance of such a nature that you must suppress it? Ah, that is what is killing you. Trouble must be told or it stings to death the one who carries it. If there is no man or woman that you can trust with the secret, you can trust God. Hie away to him. Tell him all about it. Lock your door and tell him aloud, and if you do not get relief you will be the first soul in the six thousand years of the world’92s existence, and the only one of the hundreds of millions of the human race who ever called on God for help and did not get it. In all the universe, in all eternity there is not an exception. Stop brooding and commence praying. I bless my God that, while there are so many crooked things in life, there are some things so straight God himself could not make them straighter. Divine help comes straight to those who will have it. The angels of mercy fly straight when they undertake a rescue. The hour of your final deliverance marches straight out of the eternities. And as the carpenter puts down his rule on a piece of timber, and with his ax hews away until the last inequality and irregularity disappears, so when God in the last great day shall put down his unfailing measuring-rule beside that event which seemed the most twisted in our lives or in the world, it will be found out that the last discrepancy has vanished and the last wrong has been righted and the last crooked thing has been made straight.
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage