Sharp County record., 1888-03-15
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
Eighth Sermon Of the Series to-
the Women of America. l.
Tho Influence of Good Grandmother
on a HOusehOld-GOOia and BAD
Influences of Early Train
ing on Children.

Raw, T. Dewitt Talmage, in the eighth
discourse of his series to the women VI
America took for his subject "Ihe Granu'
mother and Her Grandchildren" his
text was:
The unfeigned faith that is in thee Wh'en'
dwelt first in thy grandmother LOIS
The eloquent preacher said:
Tn this love letter which Paul, the OLD
minister, is writing to Timothy tne
Young minis ter, the family record Is
brought out. Paul practically says:
"Timothv, what a good grandmotheryo you
had. You ought to be better than most
folks, because not only was your mothel
good, but your grandmother. Two pre-
ceding generations of piety ought to give
Won a mighty push in the right dlrecy
fion.u The fact was that Timothy needed
encouragement. He was in poor Aeal'n'
having a weak stomach, and was dys-
peptic, and Paul prescribed for him
tonic, "a little wine for thy stomachs
sake',-not much wine, but little wine,
and only as a medicine. And If the wine
then had been as much adulterated with
logwood and strychnine as our modern
wines, he would not have prescribed any
But Timothy, not strong physically, is
encouraged spiritually by the recital OF
grandmotherly excellence, Paul hintlng 10
him, as l hint this day to you, that Uod
sometimes gathers up as in reservoir
awav back of the active generations OF
to-day q godly influence, and then in re-
sponse to prayer lets down the power up
on children and grandchildren and greabr
grandchildren. The world is woefully in
want of a table of statistics in regard to
what is the protractedness and immensely
of influence of one good woman in the
church and world. We have accounts OF
how much evil has been wrought by Mar
paret. the mother of criminals, who
lived near one hundred years ago,
and of how many hundreds
of criminals her descendants fur
nished for the penitentiaries and the
gallows, and how many hundreds OF
thousands of dollars they cost this coun-
try in their arraignment and prison sup
port, as we'll as in the property they burg
larjzed or destroyed. But will not some
one come out with brain comprehensive
enough and heart warm enough and pen
keen enough to give US the facts in regard
to some good woman of one hundred
years ago, and let us know how many
Christian men and women and reformerS
and useful people have been found among
her descendants, and how many asylums
and colleges and churches they built, and
how many millions of dollars they con-
tributed for humanitarian and Christian
purposes?
The good women whose tombstones
were planted in the eighteenth century
are more alive for good in the nineteenth
century than they were before, as the
good women of this nineteenth century
will be more alive for good in the TWEEN
tieth century than now. Mark you,
have no idea that the grandmothers were
any better than their granddaughters.
You can not get very old people to talk
much about how things were when they
EgSRE6e hGEd and "ad ggrs ggbrhstommfEEtasm ThfEEt hfXa
makes mo think they feel themselves to
be the custodians of the regulations of
their early comrades. While our dear
old folks are rehearSing the follies of the
present, if you put them on the witness
stand and eros examine them as to how
things were seventy years ago, the silence
becomes oppressive.
A eel ebrated Frenchman by the name
of Volney visited this country in 1876,
and be says of woman's diet in those
times: "lf premium was offered for a
regimen most destructive to health, none
could be devised more elficacious for these
ends than that in use among these peo-
pe." That eclipses our lobster salad at
midnight. Everybody talks about the
dissipation of modern society and how
womanly health goes down under it. but
It was worse hundred years ago, for the
Chaplain Of French regiment in our
Revolutionary War wrote in 1872, in his
book of American women, saying: "They
are tall and well proportional, their
features are generally regular,
their compilations are general
ly fair and without color. At
twenty years Of age the women have
no longer the freshness Of youth. At
thirty or forty they are decrepit" In 1912
a foreign consul wrote book entitled ga
Sketch of the United States at the Com
mencement of the Present Century," and
he says Of the women of those times: "At
the age of thirty all their charms have
disappeared" One glance at the por.
traits of the women hundred years ago,
and their style of dress makes us wonder
how they ever got their breath. All this
makes me think that the express rail
train is no more an improvement on the
old canal boat, or the telegraph no more
an Improvement on the old-time saddle
bags than the women of our day are an
Improvement on the women of the last
century.
But still, notwithstanding that those
times were so much worse than ours,
there was a glorious race of godly WON.
en-, seventy and hundred years ago, who
held the world back from sin and lifted it
toward virtue, and without their exalted
and sanctifed influence before this the
last good influence would have perished
from the earth. Indeed all over this land
there are seated to.day-not so much in
churches, for many of them are too feeble
to come-a great many aged grara7' "'"-
ers. They sometimes feel that I'll
has gone past them, and they
idea that thev are of little accour
head sometimes gets aching f
racket of the grandchildren do
or in the next room. They steat
selves by the banisters as they
down. When they get a cold 1t
to them longer than 1t used to.
,y,t -, -, 4 L nd