350. Storming the Heights

Storming the Heights

Zec_4:7 : ’93Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.’94

Zerubbabel! Who owned that difficult name, in which three times the letter ’93b’94 occurs, disposing most people to stammer in the pronunciation? Zerubbabel was the splendid man called to rebuild the destroyed temple at Jerusalem. Stone for the building had been quarried, and the trowel had rung at the laying of the corner-stone, and all went well, when the Cuth’e6ans offered to help in the work. They were a bad lot of people, and Zerubbabel declined their help, and then the trouble began. The Cuth’e6ans prejudiced the Secretary of the Treasury against Zerubbabel, so that the wages of the carpenters and masons could not be paid, and the heavy cedar timbers which had been dragged from Mount Lebanon to the Mediterranean and floated in rafts from Beyrout to Joppa, and were to be drawn by ox team from Joppa to Jerusalem, had halted, and as a result of the work of those jealous Cuth’e6ans for sixteen years the building of the temple was stopped. But after sixteen years, Zerubbabel, the mighty soul, got a new call from God to go ahead with the temple building, and the Angel of the Lord in substance said: ’93They have piled up obstacles in the way of Zerubbabel until they have become as a mountain, height above height, crag above crag; but it shall all be thundered down and made flat and smooth as the floor of a house. ’91Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.’92’93

Well, the Cuth’e6ans are not all dead yet. They are busy in every neighborhood and every city and every nation of every age, heaping obstacles in the way of the cause of God. They have piled up hindrances above hindrances until they have become a hill, and the hill has become a mountain, and the mountain has become an Alp, and there it stands, right in the way of all movements for the world’92s salvation. Some people are so discouraged about the height and breadth of this mountain in front of them that they have done nothing for sixteen years, and many of those who are at work trying to do something toward removing the mountain toil in such a way that I can see they have not much faith that the mountain of hindrances will ever be removed. They feel they must do their duty, but they feel all the time’97I can hear it in their prayers and exhortations’97that they are striking their pickaxes and shovels into the side of the Rocky Mountains. If the good Lord will help me while I preach I will give you the names of some of the high mountains which are really in the way, and then show you that those mountains are to be prostrated, torn down, ground up, leveled, put out of sight forever. ’93Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.’94

First, there is the Mountain of Prejudice, as long as a range of the Pyrenees. Prejudice against the Bible as a dull book, an inconsistent book, a cruel book, an unclean book, and in every way an unfit book. The most of those who entertain such prejudices have never read it. They think the strata of the rocks contradict the account in Genesis. The poor souls do not know that the Mosaic account agrees exactly with the geological account. No violin and flute ever were in better accord. By crowbar and pickaxe and shovel and blasting powder the geologist goes down in the earth and says, ’93The first thing created in the furnishing of the earth was the plants. Moses says, ’93Ay! I told you that in the Book of Genesis: ’91The earth brought forth grass and herb, yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit.’92’93 The geologist goes on digging in the earth, and says, ’93The next thing in the furnishing of the earth was the making of the creatures of the sea.’94 Moses says, ’93Ay! I told you that was next in the Book of Genesis: ’91God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that have life; and God created great whales.’92’93 The geologist goes on digging, and says, ’93The next thing in the furnishing of the earth was the creation of the cattle and the reptiles and the beasts of the field.’94 ’93Ay!’94 says Moses, ’93I told you that was next in the first chapter of Genesis: ’91And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind.’92’93 The geologist goes on digging in the earth, and says, ’93The next creature was the human family. ’93Ay!’94 says Moses, ’93I told you that was next in the Book of Genesis: ’91So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female, created he them.’92’93 Those prejudiced against the Bible do not know that the explorations in Egypt and Palestine and Syria are confirming the Scriptures’97the same facts written on monuments and on the walls of exhumed cities as those written in the Bible. The city of Pithom has been unburied, and its bricks are found to have been made without straw, exactly corresponding with the Bible story of the persecuted Hebrews. On terra cotta cylinder recently brought up from thousands of years of burial, the capture of Babylon by Cyrus is told. On a Babylonian gem recently found are the figures of a tree, a man, a woman, and a serpent, and the hands of the man and woman are stretched up toward the tree as if to pluck the fruit. Thus the Bible story of the fall is confirmed.

In a museum at Constantinople you see a piece of the wall that once in the ancient temple of Jerusalem separated the court of the Gentiles and the court of the Israelites, to which Paul refers when he says of Christ, ’93He is our peace, who hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.’94 On tablets recently discovered have been found the names of prominent men of the Bible, spelled a little different, according to the demands of ancient language. ’93Adamu’94 for Adam, ’93Abramn’94 for Abraham, ’93Ablu’94 for Abel, and so on. Twenty-two feet under ground has been found a seal inscribed with the words ’93Haggai, son of Shebaniah,’94 cut thousands of years ago, showing that the Prophet Haggai, who wrote a part of the Bible, was not a myth. The Royal Engineers have found, eighty feet below the surface of the ground at Jerusalem, Phoenician pottery and hewn stones with inscriptions showing that they were furnished by Hiram, King of Tyre, just as the Bible says they were. The great names of Bible history, that many suppose are names of imaginary beings, are found cut into imperishable stones which have within a few years been rolled up from their entombment of ages, such as Sennacherib and Tiglath-Pileser. On the edge of a bronzed step, and on burned brick has been found the name of Nebuchadnezzar. Henry Rawlinson and Oppert and Hincks, and Palestine exploration societies, and Assyriologists, and Egyptologists, have rolled another Bible up from the depths of the earth, and lo! it corresponds exactly with our Bible, the rock Bible just like the printed Bible, inscriptions on cylinders and brick-work cut thirty-eight hundred years before Christ, testifying to the truth of what we read more than eighteen hundred years after Christ. The story of the Tower of Babel has been confirmed by the fact that recently at the site of Babel an oblong pile of brick one hundred and ten feet high evidences the remains of a fallen tower. In the inspired book of Ezra we read of the great and noble Asnapper, a name that meant nothing especial, until recently, in pried-up Egyptian sculpture, we have the story there told of him as a great hunter as well as a great warrior. What I say now is news to those prejudiced against the Bible. They are so far behind the times that they know not that the Old Book is being proved true by the prying eye of the antiquarian and the ringing hammer of the archaeologist and the plunging crowbar of the geologist. Not more is infidelity characterized by its blasphemy than by its ignorance, but oh! what a high mountain of prejudice against the Bible, against Christianity, against churches, against all evangelizing enterprises’97a mountain that casts its long, black shadows over this continent and over all continents. Geographers tell us that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world. Oh, no! The Mountain of Prejudice against Christianity is higher than the highest crags that dare the lightnings of heaven. Before our Zerubbabel can it ever become a plain?

Another mountain of hindrance is that of positive and outspoken immorals. There is the Mountain of Inebriacy. It is piled high with kegs and demijohns and decanters and hogsheads, on which sit the victims of that traffic whose one business is to rob earth and heaven of the most generous and large-hearted and splendid of the human race. If their business was to take only the mean and stingy and contemptible and useless, we would not say much against the work, for there are tens of thousands of men and women who are a nuisance to the world, and their obliteration from human society would be an advantage to all that is good. The removal of these moral deficits would not arouse in us much of a protest. But insobriety takes the best. The Mountain of Inebriacy stands in the way of the Kingdom of God, and hundreds of thousands of men, but for that hindrance, would step right into the ranks of the Lord’92s host and march heavenward, each one taking a regiment with him. This mountain is not an ordinary one; for it is armed. It is a line of fortresses continually blazing away its destructive forces upon all our neighborhood, towns, and cities, their volleys of death poured down upon the homes and churches. Under this power more than one hundred thousand men and women are in this country every year imprisoned, and an army of six hundred thousand drunkards almost shake the earth with their staggering tread. It causes in this country three hundred murders and four hundred suicides a year. This Mountain of Inebriacy has not only assaulted the land, but bombarded the shipping of the sea, and some of the most appalling shipwrecks on Atlantic and Pacific coast have been the result. What sank the steamer Rothe-say Castle, on the way from Liverpool to Dublin, destroying one hundred human lives? A drunken sea captain. What blew up the Ben Sherrod on the Mississippi and sent one hundred and fifty to horrible death? A drunken crew. What drove on the breakers a steamer making its way from New York to Charleston, and sent whole families, on the way home from summer watering-places to the merciless depths of the sea? A drunken sea captain. Gather up from the depths of the rivers, and lakes, and oceans, the bones of those shipwrecked by intoxicated captains and crews, and you could build out of them a temple of horrors, all the pillars and altars and floors and ceilings fashioned of human skulls. Is it possible that such a Mountain of Inebriacy can ever be made a plain?

Yonder also is the Mountain of Crime, with its strata of fraud, and malpractice, and malfeasance, and blackmail, and burglary, and piracy, and embezzlement, and libertinism, and theft, all its heights manned with the desperadoes, the cut-throats, the pickpockets, the thimble-riggers, the plunderers, the marauders, the pillagers, the corsairs, the wreckers, the bandits, the tricksters, the forgers, the thugs, the garotters, the fire-fiends, the dynamiters, the shoplifters, the kleptomaniacs, the pyromaniacs, the dipsomaniacs, the smugglers, the kidnappers, the Jack Sheppards, the Robert Macaires, and the Macbeths of villainy. The crimes of the world! Am I not right in calling them, when piled up together, a mountain? But we cannot bring ourselves to appreciate great heights except by comparison. You think of Mount Washington as high, especially those of you who ascended as of old, on muleback, or more recently by rail-train, to the Tip Top House. Oh, no! That is not high! For it is only about six thousand feet, whereas, rising on this western hemisphere are Chimborazo, twenty-one thousand feet high, and Mount Sahama, twenty-three thousand feet high, and Mount Sarota, twenty-four thousand eight hundred feet high. But that is not the highest mountain on the western hemisphere. The highest mountain is the Mountain of Crime, and is it possible that this mountain, before our Zerubbabel, can ever be made a plain?

There is also the Mountain of War, the most volcanic of all mountains’97the Vesuvius which, not content, like the Vesuvius of Italy, with whelming two cities, Herculan’e6um and Pompeii, has covered with its fiery scoria thousands of cities and would like to whelm all the cities of both hemispheres. Give this mountain full utterance, and it would cover up Washington and New York and London as easily as a householder, with his shovel, at ten o’92clock at night, banks a grate fire with ashes. This mountain is a pile of fortresses, barricades, and armories, the world’92s artillery heaped, wheels above wheels, columbiads above columbiads, seventy-four pounders above seventy-four pounders, wrecked nations above wrecked nations. This Mountain of War is not only loaded to cannonade the earth, but it is also a huge catacomb, holding the corpses of thirty million slain in the wars of Alexander and Cyrus, sixty million slain in Roman wars, one hundred and eighty million slain in war with Turks and Saracens, and holding about thirty-five billion corpses, not million but billion, according to the estimate made by Edmund Burke more than a hundred years ago, of those who had been destroyed by war, so that you would have to add several more millions now. Twenty odd years ago a careful author estimated that about fourteen times the then population of the world had gone down in battle or in hospital after battle. Ah! This Mountain of War is not like an ordinary mountain. It is like Kilauea, one of the Sandwich Islands, which holds the greatest volcano in all the earth, and concerning which I wrote from the Sandwich Islands a few years ago:

’93What a hissing, bellowing, tumbling, soaring force is Kilauea! Lake of unquenchable fire: convolutions and paroxysms of flame; elements of nature in torture; torridity and luridity; congregation of dreads; molten horrors; sulphurous abysms; swirling mystery of all time; infinite turbulence; chimney of perdition; wallowing terrors; fifteen acres of threats; glooms insufferable and Dantesque; cauldron stirred by the champion witch of Pandemonium; camp-fire of the armies of Diabolus; wrath of the mountains in full bloom; shimmering incandescence; pyrotechnics of the planet; furnace-blast of the ages; Kilauea!’94 But, my friends, mightier, higher, vaster, hotter, more raging is the volcanic Mountain of War. It has been blazing for hundreds of years, and will keep on blazing until, until’97but I dare not hazard a prophecy. Can it be that peace will ever reign? Can it be that its fires will ever be put out? Can it be that its roar will ever be silenced? Can it be that before our Zerubbabel that blazing mountain will ever become a plain?

There is also the long range of mountain, longer than Appalachian range, longer than Caucasian range, longer than Sierra Nevada range’97the piled-up opposition of bad literature, bad homes, bad institutions, bad amusements, bad centuries, bad religions; Paganism, Hindooism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and buttressed and enthroned Godlessness, devoted to ambition and lust and hydra-headed, argus-eyed abomination, as it stands with lifted fist and mocking lips, challenging Jehovah upon the throne of the universe to strike if he dare. Oh, it is a great mountain, as my text declares. There is no use in denying it. The most authentic statistics declare it. The signs of the times prove it. All Christian workers realize it. It is a mountain. ’93The mountain can never be brought down,’94 says worldly speculation. ’93The mountain can never be made a plain,’94 says small faith in the churches. Well, let us see. Let us look about for the implements we can lay our hands on. Let us count the number on our side who are willing to dig with a shovel, or bore a tunnel, or blast a rock. Let us see if there is any foreign help that will come in to reinforce us. I do not want to make myself absurd by attempting an impossibility. If it is only one spade at the foot of Mount Blanc; if it is only one arm, capable of lifting but a few pounds, against a mountain that weighs a hundred million tons, let us quit before we make ourselves the travesty and caricature of the universe. If we are to undertake this job, first of all we must have a competent Engineer, one who knows all about excavations, about embankments, about tunnels, about mountains. I know engineers who have carved up mountains, cut down mountains, removed mountains. I will do nothing unless I know who is to be our Engineer. Zerubbabel led at the rebuilding of the ancient temple, and Matthew Henry, the greatest of commentators, declares that our Zerubbabel is the Lord Jesus Christ. The Zerubbabel of my text was only a type of the glorious and omnipotent Jesus, and as I look up into the face of this Divine Engineer and see it glow with all the splendors of the Godhead, and see that in his arm is the almightiness that flung out all the worlds that glitter in the midnight heaven, and that to lift the Himalayas would cost him no more effort than for me to lift an ounce, my courage begins to rally, and my faith begins to mount, and my enthusiasm is all aflame, and the words of my text this moment just fit my lips and express the triumph of my soul as I cry out, ’93Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.’94

My experiences with the shovel are that you cannot do much by one push of that implement, and that after you have been digging with it an hour what you have accomplished seems very little; but just go along by the place where they are building a railroad through a mountain and see what a great work a thousand shovels can do, and know that while there are a thousand shovels at work on this side of the mountain there are a thousand shovels busy on the other side, and all I have to do is to manage my own particular shovel. It cheers me to think that against this old Mountain of Sin there are hundreds of thousands and millions of shovels this moment busy, and we are all at work under the one Engineer who came down from his throne in heaven to oversee and help the removal of that mountain, and who has contracted to have it done. I have seen the contract, and He is well paid for it. The compensation promised by the Throne of heaven is, ’93I will give thee the heathen for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.’94 The reason so many of us are idle is that we want a bigger shovel or we would like to manage some great hydraulic engine. No, brother. Stick to your shovel. Dig away in your Sabbath classes. Dig away in your missions. Dig away in your homes. Dig away in your pulpits. Do the work next to you. Do not spend too much time looking at the great size of the mountains or at the way others use their shovels. All that you can accomplish toward the removing of that mountain will be with your own particular shovel. Remember little David, with Saul’92s helmet on him, dropping clear down over his ears, even unto his shoulders. But when he got in his hand the boy’92s sling, how well he used it! If you do not understand Greek, do not attempt to tell the people what the text is in the original. If you do not understand Latin, attempt no drafts upon Latinity. You who want to help in the removal of the mountain, hold on to your shovel.

Much time has been lost by the fact that many of the sharpest shovels, instead of being used for the removal of the mountain, have been used in fighting each other. The great Presbyterian Church was mightily hindered by the fight that for years went on between Old School shovels and New School shovels, and it was not until the meeting of the General Assembly at Pittsburg, thirty or forty years ago that many good men made up their minds that shovels are not made to fight with but to dig with. Many of the old theologians went around with bandaged foreheads which had not been struck by the swords in the battle for God, but by the shovels in ecclesiastical embroglio. They had a special admiration for that Psalm of David which said, ’93Blessed be the Lord which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.’94 The Methodist Church had a battle of shovels over lay delegation and female representation. I am glad to say that most of the ecclesiastical pugilists, in all denominations, are dead, and that they had big funerals. But there are so many shovels now rightly engaged that no statistician can count them. I tell you the mountain is coming down. It is coming down rapidly. It will all come down. There are those who hear or read these words who will gaze upon its complete prostration; for what is the use of my keeping back any longer the full statement of the fact, which I have somewhat delayed through lawful sermonic strategy, the fact that the Lord God Almighty, in the full play of his omnipotence, will accomplish this supernal work. If God can build a mountain, I guess He can remove a mountain. After God has given full opportunity for the shovels, He will come in with His thunderbolts.

We have amplified the idea of the Lamb of God. I tell you now of the Lion. Here is a thought that I have never seen projected, and yet it is the most cheering of all considerations and plainly Scriptural; the thought that as, at the opening of the Gospel dispensation in the Christly and Johanian and Pauline days the machinery of the natural world was brought into service amid the shadow of eclipses and the agitation of earthquakes, that tempests were put to sleep under the divine lullaby, iron bolts of prisons were shoved back by invisible muscle, blasted vision was given full eyesight, and the dead returned from the eternal world mingling amid earthly scenes’97so it will be again. As I construe my Bible, these super-naturals are to return. Again the eclipses, as at the destruction of Jerusalem, will put red wing over the moon and black wing over the sun, and the mountain will shake with ague of excitement, hospital cots will be emptied as their patients bound into sudden health, and the Gospel of Mercy will be emphasized by most tremendous spectacles. ’93And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo! there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.’94 There you have it. The shovels now digging away at the mountains are to be reinforced by thunderbolts. The Gospel is only partially successful because we preach it amid all placidities, the hearers having heard the invitation a hundred times before and expecting to hear it a hundred times more, but in coming times to be preached amid pulverized rocks and stellar panics and shattered masonry of cemeteries, from which the pallid dead will spring into roseate life. I say then the Gospel will be universally accepted. There is the programme. First the shovels, then the thunderbolts. Ours the shovels, God’92s the thunderbolts. The text, which before we uttered with something of trepidation, now we utter in laugh of triumph, ’93Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.’94

Sometimes a general begins a battle before he is ready, because the enemy forces it on him. The general says, ’93The enemy are pushing us, and so I open battle. We are not sufficient to cope with them, but I hope the reserve forces will come up in time.’94 The battle rages, and the general looks through his field-glass at the troops, but ever and anon he sweeps his field-glass backward and upward toward the hill, to see if the reserve forces are coming. ’93Hard pushed are we!’94 says the general. ’93I do wish those reinforcements would come up.’94 After awhile the plumes of the advancing cavalry are seen tossing on the ridge of the hill, and then the flash of swords, and then the long lines of mounted troops, their horses in full gallop, and the general says, ’93All is well. Hold out, my men, a little longer. Let the sergeants ride along the lines and cheer the men and tell them reinforcements are coming.’94 And now the rumbling of the batteries and gun-carriages is distinctly heard, and soon they are in line, and at the first roar of the newly-arrived artillery the enemy, a little while before so jubilant, fall back in wild retreat, their way strewn with canteens and knapsacks and ammunition, that the defeated may be unhindered in their flight. That is just the way now. In this great battle against sin and crime and moral death the enemy seem too much for us. More grogshops than churches. More bad men than good men, and they come up with bravado and the force of great numbers. They have opened battle upon us before we are, in our own strength, ready to meet them, and great are the discouragements. But steady, there! Hold on! Reinforcements are coming. Through the glass of inspiration I look, and see the flash of the sword of ’93Him who hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.’94 All heaven is on our side and is coming to the rescue. I hear the rumbling of the King’92s artillery, louder than any thunder that ever shook the earth, and with every roll of the ponderous wheels our courage augments. When these reinforcements from heaven get into line with the forces of God already on earth, all the armies of unrighteousness will see that their hour of doom has come, and will waver and fall back and take flight and nothing be left of them save here and there, strewn by the wayside, an agnostic’92s pen, or a broken decanter, or a torn playbill of a debasing amusement, or a blasphemous paragraph, or a leper’92s scale, or a dragon’92s tooth, to show they ever existed. Let there be cheering all along the lines of Christian workers, over the fact that what the shovels fail to do will be accomplished by the thunderbolts. ’93Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain.’94

The mountains look on Marathon,

And Marathon looks on the sea,

Shrine of the mighty can it be

That this is all remains of thee!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage