The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1888-06-14
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
Infldelfty and Atheism and Their
Relation to the World.
The Triumph of Their Ideas Would Mean
Ketrogression in Every Channel in
Which Humanity Has Progressed
A Moral Observation.

Rev. T. Dewitt Talmage, In a recent
sermon in the Brooklyn Tabernacle, took
for his theme "Obscuration," making a
determined onslaught on the infidels and
atheists of the present day. His text was:
The sun shall be turned into darkness-Acts,
H., 20.
He said:
Solar eclipse is here prophesied to take
place about the time of the destruction of
ancient Jerusalem. Josephus, the his
torian, says that the prophesy was literal
ly fulfilled, and that about that time there
were strange appearances in the heavens.
The sun was not destroyed, but for a little
while hidden.
Christianity is the rising sun Of our
time, and men have tried with the uproll-
ing vapors OF skepticism and the smoke
of their blasphe11iy to turn the sun into
darkness. Suppose the archangels OF
malice and horror should be let loose a
little while, and be allowed to extinguish
and destroy the sun in the natural heav-
ems. They would take the oceans
from other worlds and pour them
on this luminary of the planetry
system, and the waters 60 hiss
ing down amid the ravines and the cav
ems, and there is explosion after explo-
sion, until there are only few peaks of
fire left in the sun, and these are cooling
down and going out until the vast conti-
nents of flame are reduced to small
acreage Of fire. and that whitens and cools
off until there are only few Goals left,
and these are whitening and going out
until there is not spark left in all the
mountains of ashes and the valleys of
ashes and the chasms of ashes. An ex-
tinguished sun. A dead sun. A buried
sun. Let all worlds wall at the stupen-
dous obsequies.
OF course, this withdrawal of the solar
light and heat throws our earth into a uni
versal chill, and the tropics become the
temperate, and the temperate becomes
the arctic, and there are frozen rivers and
frozen lakes and frozen oceans. From
Arctic and Antarctic regions the inhabit-
ants gather in toward the center and find
the equator as the poles. The slain forests
are piled up into a great bonfire, and
around them gather the shivering viii
lagos and cities. The wealth of the coal
mines is hastily poured into the furnaces
and stirred into rage of combustion, but
soon the bonfires begin to lower, and the
furnaces. begin to go out and the nations
begin to die. Cotopaxi, Vesuvius, Etna,
Stromboli, Californian geysers cease
to smoke, and the ice of hail
storms remains unmelted in their
crater. All the flowers have breathed their
last breath. Ships with sailors frozen at
the mast, and helmsmen frozen at the
wheel, and passengers frozen in the cabin;
all nations dying, first at the north and
then at the south. Child frosted and dead
In the cradle. Octogenarian frosted and
dead at the hearth. Workmen with fro zen
hand on the hammer and frozen foot on
the shuttle. Winter from sea to sea. ALL
congealing winter. Perpetual winter.
Globe of frigidity. Hemisphere shackled
to hemisphere by chains of ice. Univer-
sal Nova Zembla. The earth an ice-foe
grinding against other ice-foes. The
archangels of malice and horror have
done their work, and now they may take
their thrones of glacier and look down
upon the ruin they have wrought.
What the destruction of the sun in the
natural heavens would be to our physical
earth the destruction of Christianity
would be to the moral world-the sun
turned into darkness. Infidelity in our
time is considered a great joke. There
are people who rejoice to hear Christianity
caricatured, and to hear Christ assailed
with bubble and quirk and misrepre-
sentation and badinage and harleaui-
made.
propose this morning to take infidelity
and atheism out of the realm and iocu-
larity into one of tragedy, and show you
what they propose, and what. if they are
successful, they will accomplish. There
are those in all our communities who
would like to see the Christian religion
overthrown, and who say the world would
be better without it, want to show Won
what is the end of this road, and what is
the terminus of this crusade. and what
this world will be when atheism and in
fidelity have triumphed over it, if thew
can. | say, if they can. reiterate it, If
they can.
In the first place, it will be the COM
plete and unutterable degradation of
womanhood. will prove it by facts and
arguments which no honest man will dis
pute. In all communities, and cities, and
states, and nations where the Christian
rellgion has been dominant woman's con-
oltlon has been ameliorated and i'm
proved, and she is deferred to and honor
cd IN thousand things, and every GENTLE
man takes off his hat before her. If your
associations have been good, YOU know
that the name of wife, mother. daughter
suggests gracious surroundings. You
Know there are no better schools and
seminaries in Brooklyn or in any CITY of
this country than the schools and
seminaries for our young ladies. You
know that while woman may suffer in
Justice In England and the United States
she has more of her rights in Cbristen,
dom than she has anywhere else.
Now, compare this with woman's condi.
ton in lands where Christianity has made
little or no advance-in China, irisBarbarv
IN Borneo, in Tartary, in Egypt, in Hin
dostan. The Burmese sell their wives and
daughters as so many sheep. The Hindoo
bible makes it disgraceful and an outrage
Tor woman to listen to music, or look
out OF the window in the absence of her
husband, and gives as lawful ground for
divorce woman's beginning to eat before
her husband has finished his meal. What
mean those white bundles on the ponds
and rivers in China in the morning. In
fanticide following infantieide. Female
children destroyed simply because they
are female. Woman harnessed to a nlov
as an OK. Woman vailed and barricaded
and in all styles of cruel seclusion. Her