336. Plumb-Line Religion

Plumb-Line Religion

Amo_7:8 : ’93And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? and I said, a plumb-line.’94

The solid masonry of the world has to me a fascination. Walk about some of the triumphal arches and the cathedrals, four or six hundred years old, and see them stand as erect as when they were builded, walls of great height, for centuries not bending a quarter of an inch this way or that. So greatly honored were the masons who builded these walls that they were free from taxation and called ’93free’94 masons. The trowel gets most of the credit for these buildings, and its clear ringing on stone and brick has sounded across the ages. But there is another implement of just as much importance as the trowel, and my text recognizes it. Bricklayers and stone masons and carpenters, in the building of walls, use an instrument made of a cord, at the end of which a lump of lead is fastened. They drop it over the side of the wall, and, as the plummet naturally seeks the centre of gravity in the earth, the workman discovers where the wall recedes and where it bulges out and just what is the perpendicular. Our text represents God as standing on the wall of character, which the Israelites had built, and, in that way, testing it. ’93And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? and I said, a plumb-line.’94

What the world wants is a straight up-and-down religion. Much of the so-called piety of the day bends this way and that, to suit the times. It is oblique, with a low state of sentiment and morals. We have all been building a wall of character, and it is glaringly imperfect and needs reconstruction. How shall it be brought into perpendicular? Only by the divine measurement. ’93And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? and I said, a plumb-line.’94

The whole tendency of the times is to make us act by the standard of what others do. If they play cards, we play cards. If they dance, we dance. If they read books of certain kinds, we read them. We throw Over the wall of our character the tangled plumb-line of other lives and reject the infallible test which Amos saw. The question for me should not be what you think is right, but what God thinks is right. This perpetual reference to the behavior of others, as though it decided anything but human fallibility, is a mistake as wide as the world. There are ten thousand plumb-lines in use, but only one is true and exact, and that is the line of God’92s eternal right. There is a mighty attempt being made to reconstruct and fix up the Ten Commandments. To many they seem too rigid. The tower of Pisa leans over about thirteen feet from the perpendicular, and people go thousands of miles to see its graceful inclination and to learn how, by extra braces and various architectural contrivances, it is kept leaning from century to century. Why not have the ten granite blocks of Sinai set a little aslant? Why not have the pillar of truth a leaning tower? Why is not an ellipse as good as a square? Why is not an oblique as good as straight up-and-down? My friends, we must have a standard; shall it be God’92s or man’92s?

The divine plumb-line needs to be thrown over all merchandise. Thousands of years ago Solomon discovered the tendency of buyers to depreciate goods. He saw a man beating down an article lower and lower, and saying it was not worth the price asked, and when he has purchased at the lowest point he told everybody what a sharp bargain he had struck, and how he had outwitted the merchant. ’93It is naught, saith the buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.’94 Pro_20:14. Society is so utterly askew in this matter that you seldom find a seller asking the price that he expects to get; he puts on a higher value than he expects to receive, knowing that he will have to drop. And if he wants fifty, he asks seventy-five. And if he wants two thousand, he asks twenty-five hundred. ’93It is naught,’94 saith the buyer. ’93The fabric is defective; the style of goods is poor; I can get elsewhere a better article at a smaller price. It is out of fashion; it is damaged; it will fade; it will not wear well.’94 After a while the merchant, from over-persuasion or from desire to dispose of that particular stock of goods, says: ’93Well, take it at your own price,’94 and the purchaser goes home with light step and calls into his private office his confidential friends and chuckles while he tells how for half price he got the goods. In other words, he lied, and was proud of it.

Nothing would make times so good, and the earning of a livelihood so easy, as the universal adoption of the law of right. Suspicion strikes through all bargain-making. Men who sell know not whether they will ever get the money. Purchasers know not whether the goods shipped will be according to the sample. And what, with the large number of clerks who are making false entries and then absconding, and the explosion of firms that fail for millions of dollars, honest men are at their wits’92 end to make a living. He who stands up amid all the pressure and does right, is accomplishing something toward the establishment of a high commercial prosperity. I have deep sympathy for the laboring classes who toil with hand and foot. But we must not forget the business men, who, without any complaint or bannered procession through the street, are enduring a stress of circumstances terrific. The fortunate people of today are those who are receiving daily wages or regular salaries. And the men most to be pitied are those who conduct a business while prices are falling and yet try to pay their clerks and employees and are in such fearful straits that they would quit business tomorrow, if it were not for the wreck and ruin of others. When people tell me at what a ruinously low price they purchased an article, it gives me more dismay than satisfaction. I know it means the bankruptcy and defalcation of men in many departments. The men who toil with the brain need full as much sympathy as those who toil with the hand. All business life is struck through with suspicion, and panics are the result of want of confidence. The pressure to do wrong is stronger from the fact that in our day the large business houses are swallowing up the smaller, the whales dining on blue-fish and minnows. The large houses undersell the small ones, because they buy in greater quantities and at lower figures from the producer. They can afford to make nothing, or actually lose, on some styles of goods, assured they can make it up on others. So, a great drygoods house goes outside of its regular line and sells books at cost or less than cost, and that swamps the booksellers; or the drygoods house sells bric-a-brac at lowest figures, and that swamps the small dealer in bric-a-brac. And the same thing goes on in other styles of merchandise and the consequence is that all along the business streets of all our cities there are merchants of small capital who are in terrific struggle to keep their heads above water. The ocean liners run down the Newfoundland fishing smacks. This is nothing against the man who has the big store, for every man has as large a store and as great a business as he can manage.

To feel right and do right under all this pressure requires martyr grace, requires divine support, requires celestial re-enforcement. Yet there are tens of thousands of such men getting splendidly through. They see others going up and themselves going down, but they keep their patience and their courage and their Christian consistency, and after a while their turn of success will come. There is generally retribution in some form for greediness. The owners of the big business will die and their boys will get possession of the business and with a cigar in their mouths and full to the chins with the best liquor and behind a pair of spanking bays, they will pass everything on the turnpike road to temporal and eternal perdition. Then the business will break up and the smaller dealers will have fair opportunity. Or the spirit of contentment and right feeling will take possession of the large firm, as recently with a famous business house, and the firm will say: ’93We have enough money for all our needs and the needs of our children; now let us dissolve business and make way for other men in the same line.’94 Instead of being startled at a solitary instance of magnanimity, it will become a common thing. I know of scores of great business houses that have had their opportunity of vast accumulation and who ought to quit But perhaps for all the days of this generation the struggle of small houses to keep alive under the over-shadowing pressure of great houses will continue; therefore, taking things as they are, you will be wise to preserve your equilibrium and your honesty and your faith, and throw over all the counters and shelves and casks the measuring line of divine light. ’93And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? and I said, a plumb-line.’94

In the same way we need to rectify our theologies. All sorts of religions are putting forth their pretensions. Some have a spiritualistic religion and their chief work is with ghosts, and others a religion of political economy, proposing to put an end to human misery by a new style of taxation, and there is a humanitarian religion that looks after the bodies of men and lets the soul look after itself, and there is legislative religion that proposes to rectify all wrongs by enactment of better laws, and there is an ‘e6sthetic religion that by rules of exquisite taste would lift the heart out of its deformities, and religions of all sorts, religions by the peck, religions by the square foot, and religions by the ton’97all of them devices of the devil that would take the heart away from the only religion that will ever effect anything for the human race, and that is the straight up-and-down religion written in the book which begins with Genesis and ends with Revelation, the religion of the skies, the old religion, the God-given religion, the everlasting religion, which says, ’93Love God above all and your neighbor as yourself.’94 All religions but one begin at the wrong end and in the wrong place. The Bible religion demands that we first get right with God. It begins at the top and measures down, while the other religions begin at the bottom and try to measure up. They stand at the foot of the wall, up to their knees in the mud of human theory and speculation, and have a plummet and a string tied fast to it; and they throw the plummet this way and break a head here and throw the plummet another way and break a head there and then they throw it up and it comes down upon their own pate. Fools! Why stand at the foot of the wall rectifying up when you ought to stand at the top rectifying down? On a recent occasion, I was in the country, thirsty after a long walk. And I came in, and my child was blowing soap bubbles, and they rolled out of the cup, blue and gold and green and sparkling and beautiful and orbicular, and in so small a space I never saw more splendor concentrated. But she blew once too often and all the glory vanished into suds. Then I turned and took a glass of water and was refreshed. And so far as soul thirst is concerned, I put against all the blowing, glittering soap-bubbles of worldly reform and human speculation, one draught from the fountain from under the throne of God, clear as crystal. Glory be to God for the religion that drops from above, not coming up from beneath! ’93And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? and I said a plumb-line.’94

I want you to notice this fact, that when a man gives up the straight up-and-down religion of the Bible for any new-fangled religion, it is generally to suit his sins. You first hear of his change of religion, and then you hear of some swindle he has practised in a special mining stock, telling some one if he will put in ten thousand dollars he can take out a hundred thousand; or he has sacrificed his integrity or plunged into irremediable worldliness. His sins are so broad he has to broaden to his religion and he becomes as broad as temptation, as broad as the soul’92s darkness, as broad as hell. They want a religion that will allow them to keep their sins, and then at death say to them: ’93Well done, good and faithful servant,’94 and that tells them: ’93All is well, for there is no hell.’94 What a glorious heaven they hold before us! Come, let us go in and see it. There are Herod and all the babes he massacred. There are Charles Guiteau and Jim Fiske and Robespierre, the feeder of the French guillotine, and all the liars, thieves, house-burners, gar-roters, pickpockets, and libertines of all the centuries. They have all got crowns and thrones and harps and sceptres, and when they chant they sing: ’93Thanksgiving and honor and glory and power to the Broad Religion that lets us all into heaven without repentance and without faith in those humiliating dogmas of ecclesiastical old-fogyism.’94

My text gives me a grand opportunity of saying a useful word to all young men who are now forming habits for a lifetime. Of what use to a stone mason or a bricklayer is a plumb-line? Why not build the wall by the unaided eye and hand? Because they are insufficient, because if there be a deflection in the wall it cannot further on be corrected. Because by the law of gravitation a wall must be straight in order to be symmetrical and safe. A young man is in danger of getting a defect in his wall of character that may never be corrected. One of the best friends I ever had died of delirium tremens at sixty years of age, though he had not since twenty-one years of age’97before which he had been dissipated’97touched intoxicating liquor until that particular carousal that took him off. Not feeling well in the street on a hot summer day, he stepped into a drug-store, just as you and I would have done, and asked for a dose of something to make him feel better. And there was alcohol in the dose and that one drop aroused the old appetite and he entered the first liquor store and stayed there until thoroughly under the power of rum. He entered his home a raving maniac, his wife and daughters fleeing from his presence, and at last he was taken to the city hospital to die. The combustible material of early habit had lain quiet nearly forty years, and that one spark ignited it.

Remember that the wall may be one hundred feet high, and yet a deflection one foot from the foundation affects the entire structure. And if you live a hundred years and do right the last eighty years, you may nevertheless do something at twenty years of age that will damage all your earthly existence. All you who have built houses for yourselves or for others, am I not right in saying to these young men, you cannot build a wall so high as to be independent of the character of its foundation? A man before thirty years of age may commit enough sin to last him a lifetime. Now, John or George or Henry or whatever be your Christian name or surname, say here and now: ’93No wild oats for me, no cigars or cigarettes for me, no wine or beer for me, no nasty stories for me, no Sunday sprees for me; I am going to start right and keep on right. God help me, for I am very weak. From the throne of eternal righteousness, let down to me the principles by which I can be guided in building everything from foundation to capstone. Lord God, by the wounded hand of Christ, throw me a plumb-line.’94

’93But,’94 you say, ’93you shut us young folks out from all fun.’94 Oh, no! I like fun. I believe in fun. I have had lots of it in my time. But I have not had to go into paths of sin to find it. No credit to me, but because of an extraordinary parental example and influence, I was kept from outward transgressions, though my heart was bad enough and desperately wicked. I have had fun illimitable, though I never swore one oath and never gambled for so much as the value of a pin and never saw the inside of a haunt of sin save as when several years ago, with a commissioner of police and a detective and two elders of my church, I explored New York and Brooklyn by midnight, not out of curiosity, but that I might in pulpit discourse set before the people the poverty and the horrors of underground city life. Yet, though I was never intoxicated for an instant, and never committed one act of dissoluteness’97restrained only by the grace of God, without which restraint I would have gone headlong to the bottom of infamy’97I have had so much fun that I don’92t believe there is a man on the planet at the present time who has had more. Hear it, men and boys, women and girls, all the fun is on the side of right. Sin may seem attractive, but it is deathful, and like the manchineel, a tree whose dews are poisonous. The only genuine happiness is in a Christian life.

There they go’97two brothers. The one was converted a year ago in church one Sunday morning, during prayer or sermon or hymn. No one knew it at the time. The persons on either side of him suspected nothing, but in that young man’92s soul this process went on: ’93Lord, here I am, a young man amid the temptations of city life, and I am afraid to risk them alone; come and be my pardon and my help; save me from making the mistake that some of my comrades are making and save me now.’94 And quicker than a flash God rolled heaven into his soul. He is just as jolly as he used to be, is just as brilliant as he used to be. He can strike a ball or catch one as easily as before he was converted. With gun or fishing-rod in this summer vacation, he was just as skilful as before. The world is brighter to him than ever. He appreciates pictures, music, innocent hilarity, social life, good jokes, and has plenty of fun, glorious fun. But his brother is going down hill. In the morning his head aches from the champagne debauch. Everybody sees he is in rapid descent. What cares he for right or decency or the honor of his family name? Turned out of employment, depleted in health, cast down in spirits, the typhoid fever strikes him in the smallest room on the fourth story of a fifth-rate boarding-house, cursing God and calling for his mother and fighting back demons from his dying pillow, which is besweated and torn to rags. He plunges out of this world with the shriek of a destroyed spirit. Alas for that kind of fun! It is remorse. It is despair. It is blackness of darkness. It is woe unending and long reverberating and crushing as though all the mountains of all continents rolled on him in one avalanche. My soul, stand back from such fun. Young man, there is no fun in shipwrecking your character, no fun in disgracing your father’92s name. There is no fun in breaking your mother’92s heart. There is no fun in the physical pangs of the dissolute. There is no fun in the profligate’92s deathbed. There is no fun in an undone eternity. Paracelsus, out of the ashes of a burnt rose, said he could recreate the rose, but he failed in the alchemic undertaking, and roseate life, once burned down in sin, can never again be made to blossom.

Oh, this plumb-line of the everlasting right! God will throw it over all our lives to show us our moral deflections. God will throw it over all churches to show whether they are doing useful work or are instances of idleness and pretense. He will throw that plumb-line over all nations to demonstrate whether their laws are just or cruel, their rulers good or bad, their ambitions holy or infamous. He threw that plumb-line over the Spanish monarchy of other days, and what became of her? Ask the splintered hulks of her overthrown Armada. He threw that plumb-line over French imperialism, and what was the result? Ask the ruins of the Tuileries and the fallen column of the Place Vendome and the grave trenches of Sedan and the blood of revolutions at different times rolling through the Champs Elys’e9es. He threw that plumb-line over ancient Rome, and what became of the realm of the ancient C’e6sars? Ask her war-eagles, with beak dulled and wings broken, flung helpless into the Tiber. He threw it over the Assyrian Empire of a thousand years, the thrones of Semiramis and Sardanapalus and Shalmaneser, of twenty-seven victorious expeditions, the cities of Phoenicia kneeling to the sceptre, and all the world blanched in the presence. What became of all the grandeur? Ask the fallen palaces of Khorsabad and the corpses of her one hundred and eighty-five thousand soldiery slain by the angel of the Lord in one night and the Assyrian sculptures of the world’92s museums, all that now remains of that splendor before which nations staggered and crouched. God is now throwing that plumb-line over this republic and it is a solemn time with this nation, and whether we keep his Sabbaths or dishonor them, whether righteousness or iniquity dominate, whether we are Christian or infidel, whether we fulfil our mission or refuse, whether we are for God or against him, will decide whether we shall as a nation go on in higher and higher career or go down in the same grave where Babylon and Nineveh and Thebes are sepulchred.

’93But,’94 say you, ’93if there be nothing but a plumb-line, what can any of us do, for there is an old proverb which truthfully declares: ’91If the best man’92s faults were written on his forehead it would make him pull his hat over his eyes.’92 What shall we do when, according to Isaiah, ’91God shall lay judgment to the line and righteousness to the plummet?’92’93 Ah, here is where the Gospel comes in with a Saviour’92s righteousness to make up for our deficits. And while I see hanging on the wall a plumb-line, I see also hanging there a Cross. And while the one condemns us, the other saves us, if only we will hold to it. And here and now you may be set free with a more glorious liberty than Hampden or Sidney or Kosciusko ever fought for. Not out yonder or down there or up here, but just where you are, you may get it.

The invalid proprietress of a wealthy estate in Scotland visited the continent of Europe to get rid of her maladies, and she went to Baden Baden and tried those waters and went to Carlsbad and tried those waters and went to Homburg and tried those waters, and instead of getting better she got worse and in despair she said to a physician: ’93What shall I do?’94 His reply was: ’93Medicine can do nothing for you. You have only one chance and that is in the waters of Pit Keathly, Scotland.’94 ’93Is it possible?’94 she replied, ’93why, those waters are on my own estate!’94 She returned and drank of the fountain at her own gate and in two months completely recovered. Oh, sick and diseased and sinning and dying, why go trudging all the world over and seeking here an3 there relief for your discouraged spirit, when close by and at your very feet and at the door of your heart, ay, within the very estate of your own consciousness, the healing waters of eternal life may be had and had this very hour, this very minute? Blessed be God that over against the plumb-line that Amos saw is the Cross, through the emancipating power of which you and I may live and live forever!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage