The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1888-02-27
OBSERVATION-DISCLOSURES
TALMAGE ON WOMAN'S IN
FLUENCE IN THE FUTURE.

b01Oro-GOOQ or BAD influence sure
to be Handed Down by Inheritance.
BROOKLYN, Feb. 26.-The Rev 4. De
Witt Talmage, D. D., preached in the
Brooklyn Tabernacle to-day the eighth of
his series of Sermons to the Women of
America, with Important Hints to Men,"
His subject was 1.-The Grandmother and
Her Grandchildren" A vast congrega-
tion was present. The opening hymn be-
gins:
"Give to the wind thy fears
Hope and be undiSmayed;
God hears thy sghs and counts thy tears,
God shall lift up thy head"
DR.. Talmage's text was from II. Timo-
thy j. ): ''The unfeigned faith that is i'll
thee which dwelt first in thy grandmother
Lois" The eloquent preacher said
In this love letter which Paul, the old
minister is writing to Timothy, the young
minister, the family record is brought out.
Paul practically says: "Timothy, what a
good grandmother you had. y on ought to
be better than most folks, because not only
was your mother good but your grandmoth-
er. Two preceding generations of piety
| ought TO give you a mighty push in the
right direction The fact was that Timo-
thy needed encouragement. He was in poor
health, having a weak stomach, and was
dyspeptic, and Paul prescribed for him a
tonic, "a little wine for thy stomach's
sake"-not much wine, but a 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 limiting to
him, as | hint this day TO you, that God
sometimes gathers up as in a reservoir away
back of the active generations of to-day
godly influence, and then in response to
prayer lets down the power upon children
and grandchildren and great grandchildren.
The world is woefully in want of table of
statistics in regard to what is the Drotract-
edness and immensity of influence of one
good woman i'll the church and world. We
have accounts of how much evil has
been wrought by Margaret, the mother
of criminals, who lived near
hundred years ago, aud of how many hun
dreds of criminals her descendants furnished
| for the penitentiary and gallOws, and how
many hundreds of thousands of dollars they
| cost this country in their arraignment and
prison support as well as in the property
| they burglarized or destroyed. But will
not some one come out with brain compre-
|
pen keen enough to give us the facts in
regard to some good woman of a 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 contrib
uted for humanitarian and Christian pur-
poses!
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 twentieth century than
now. Mark you, / have no idea that the
grandmothers We're any better than their
| granddaughters You cannot get very old
people to talk much about how things were
when they were boys and girls. They have
a reticence and a non-commitalism which
makes me 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
cross-examine them as to how things were
seventy years ago the silence becomes op-
pressive.
A celebrated Frenchman by the name of
| Volney visited this country i'll 1896, and he
says of woman's diet in those times: "If a
premium was offered for regimen most
| destructive to health, none could be devised
more efficacious for these ends than that in
use among these people," That eclipses our
lobster salad at midnight. Everybody talks
about the dissipations 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 1882, in his
| book Of American women, saying: "They
are tall and well proportioned, their features
are generally regular, their compilations are
generally fair and without color. At 20
| years of age the women have no longer the
freshness of youth. At 30 or 40 they are
| decrepitn In 1912 a foreign consul wrote a
book entitled "a Sketch of the United
States at the Commencement of the Present
| Century," and he says of the women of
those times: "At the age of 80 all their
charms have disappeared" One glance at
| the portraits of the women a 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 improve
ment on the old-time saddlebags, 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 glorious race OF Cody women, sew
enty and 100 years ago, who held the world
back from sin and lifted it toward virtue,
and without their exalted and sanctified in
fuence before this the last good influence
would have perished from the earth. In
deed 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 grandmothers They sometimes feel
that the world has gone past them, and
they have an idea they are of little account.
Their head sometimes gets aching from the
racket of the grandchildren down stairs or
in the next room. They steady themselves
by the banisters as they go up and down.
When they get n cold it hangs on to them
longer than it used to. They cannot bear TO
have the grandchildren punished even
when they deserve IL, and have SO relaxed
their ideas of family discipline that they
would spoil all the youngsters Of the house
hold by too great leniency. These old folks
are the resort when great troubles come,
and there is a calming and soothing power
in the touch of an aged hand that is almost
supernatural. They feel they are almost
through with the journey Of life and read
| the old book more than they used TO, hardly
knowing which most they enjoy the Old
| Testament or tho New, and often stop and
| dwell tearfully over the family record half
way between We hail them TO day
whather in the house OF God or at the
! homestead. Blessed u that household that
has la II a grandmother Lois. Where she Is