St. Landry democrat. (Opelousas, La.) 1878-1894, 1885-06-27


they come every spring. My Christian
friends, time is going by so rapidly that
we can not afford to be idle.
TIME is so SHORT.
A recent statistician says that human
life now has an average of only thirty two
years. From these thirty two years you
must subtract all the time you take for
sleep and the taking of food and recrea-
ton; that viii leave you about sixteen
years. From those sixteen years you
must subtract all the time that you are
necessarily engaged in the earning OF a
livelihood: that will leave you about eight
years. From those eight years you must
take all the days and weeks and months
all the length of time that is passed in
sickness, leaving you about one year in
which to work for God. Oh, my soul,
wake up! How darest thou sleep in har-
vest time and with so few hours in which
to reap? So that state it as simple fact
that all the time that the vast majority OF
you will have for the exclusive service of
God will be less than one year!
'But," says one man, 81 literally sup
port the Gospel, and the Church is open
and the Gospel is preached; all the spirit
ual advantages are spread before men, and
if they want to be saved let them come to
be saved; have discharged all my re-
sponsibility." All, is that the Masters
spirit? Is there not an old book somewhere
that commands US to go out into the high
ways and the hedges and compel the peo-
pie to come in? What would have become
of you and me- if Christ had not come
down off the hills of Heaven and if he had
not come through the door of the Bethle-
hem caravansary, and if He had not with
the crushed hand of the crucifxion knocked
at the iron gate of the sepulcher OF
our spiritual death, crying: Lazarus,
come forth?" 0, my Christian friends,
this is no time for inertia when
all the forces of darkness seem
to be in full blast, when steam printing
presses are publishing infidel tracts,
when express railroad trains are carrying
messengers of sin, when fast clippers are
| laden with opium and ruin, when the
night air of our cities is polluted with the
| laughter that breaks up from the ten
thousand saloons of dissipation and aban-
donment, when the fires of the second
| death already are kindled in the cheeks Of
| some who only little while ago were in
| corrupt. Oh, never since the curse fell
| upon the earth has there been time when
| it was such an unwise, such a cruel, such
| an awful thing for the Church to sleep.
The great audiences are not gathered IN
the Christian churches; the great audi
ences are gathered in temples of sin
1 : %EnSV+ IoTN
! the blood of cherished hearts the awful
wine of their sacraments, blasphemies
their itany and the groans of the lost
world the organ dirge of their worship.
NOT vAcfLLATIoN, BUT GROWTH.
Again, if you want to be qualified to
meet the duties which this age demands OF
| Won you must, on the one hand, avoid reck-
less iconoclasm, and, on the other hand
not stick too much to things because they
are old. The air is full of new plans, new
projects, new theories of government, new
| theologfes, and am amazed to see how sc
4 many Christians want only novelty in or
| der to recommend thing to their conf
| dence; and so they vacillate and swing tc
and fro, and they are useless and they are
unhappy. New plans = secular, ethical
philosophical, religious, els Atlantic
transatlanic-long enough to make line
reaching from the German universities tc
| great Salt Lake City.
| There was a time when men derided
even Bible societies, and when flew young
men met near hay stack in Massachusetts
and organized the first missionary society
ever organized in this country there went
| laughter and ridicule all around the Chris
| tian Church. They said the undertaking
was preposterous, and SO, also, the work OF
| Jesus Christ was assailed. People cried
out: "Who ever heard of such theories OF
| ethics and government? Who ever noticed
such style of preaching as Jesus has?
Ezekiel had talked of mysterious wings
and wheels. Here came man from
Capernaum and Gennesaret, and he drew
his illustrations from the lakes, from the
sand, from the ravine, from the lilies
from the corn stalks. How the Pharisees
scofPed! How Herod deridedl How Judas
| Kissed. And this Jesus they plucked by
the beard, and they spat in His face, and
they called Him 'sthis fellow.
All the great enterprises in and
out of the Church have al
times thus been scoffed at, and
there have been great multitude who
have thought that the chariot of Gods
truth would fall to pieces if it once got Out
| of the old rut. And so there are those who
have no patience with any thing like i'm
provement in church architecture, or with
any thing like good, hearty, earnest church
singing, and they deride any form of re-
ligious discussion which goes down walk
ing among every day men rather than that
which makes an excursion on rhetorical
stilts Oh, that the Church Of God would
wake up to an adaptability of work! We
must admit the simple fact that the
churches of Jesus Christ in this day do not
| reach the great masses.