The Russellville Democrat., 1888-06-21
TALMAGES SERMON.
The Question "Does Religion Pro long LifeP' Met and Answered.
Practical Religion Grand sedative, Con- ducing to Peace of Mind and Happi- ness in Life and Tending to
 Its Prolongation.

T. DeWitt Talmage at the Brooklyn Tabernacle was: Docs Religion Prolong Life?v In answering the query, Mir. Tal- mage took for his text:
 With long life will satisfy him Psalms, xci., 16.
 Through the mistake of its friends relig ion has been chiefly associated with sick beds and graveyards. The whole subject. to many people, is odorous with chlorine and carbolic acid. There are people who can not pronounce the word religion without hearing in it the clipping chisel of the tombstone cutter. It is high time that this thing were changed, and that religion, instead of being represented as a hearse to carry out the dead should be represented as a chariot in which the liv- ing are to triumph.
 Religion, so far from subtracting from one's vanity, is glorious addition. It is sanative, curative, hygenic. It is good for the eyes, good for the ears, good for the spleen. good for the digestion, good for the nerves, good for the muscles. When David, in another part of Psalms, prays that religion may be dominant, he does not speak of it as a mild sickness, or an cancellation, or an attack of moral and spiritual cramp; he speaks of it as 'the saving health of all nations;" while God, in the text, promises longevity to the pious, saying: "Withlong life will satisfy him."
 The fact is that men and women die too soon. 1t is high time that religion joined the hand of medical science in attempting to improve human longevity. Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years Methuse- lah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine I ...4 I. s1s. I-l as Vespasian there were at one time in his Empire forty-fye people one hundred and thirty five years old. So far down as the sixteenth century, Peter Zartan died at one hundred and eighty-fve years of age. I do not say that religion will ever take the race back to antediluvian long evity, but l do say the length of human life will be greatly improved.
 It is said in Isaiah: "The child shall die hundred years old" Now. if according to Scripture the child is to be hundred years old, may not the men and women reach to three hundred, and four hundred and five hundred? The fact is that we are mere dwarfs and skeletons compared with some of the generations that are to come. Take the African race. They have been under bondage for centuries. Give them a chance and they develop a Frederick Douglass or a Toussaint L'Overture. And if the white race shall be brought from under the serfdom of sin, what shall be the body? what shall be the soul? Religion has only just touched our world. Give it full power for a few centuries and who can tell what will be the strength of man and the beauty of women, and the longevity of all?
 My design is to show that practical re- hgion is the friend of long life. I prove it, first, from the fact that it makes the care of our health a positive Christian duty. Whether we shaH keep early or late hours, whether we shall take food digestible or indigestible, whether there shall be thorough or incomplete mastica- tion, are questions very often deferred to the realm of whimsicality; but the Chris tian man lifts this whole problem of health into the accountable and the Divine. He says: "God has given me this body, and He has called 1t the temple of the Holy Ghost, and to deface its altars or mar Its walls or crumble its pillars is God-defying sacrilege."
 He sees Gods caligraphy in every page anatomical and physiological. He says: ''God has given me wonderful body for noble purposes"
 That arm with thirty-two curious bones wieided by forty-s six curious muscles, and all under the brain's telegraphy; three hundred and fifty pounds of blood rush. ing through the heart every hour, the heart in twenty-four hours beating one hundred thousand times, during the twen- ty-four hours overcoming resistances amounting to two hundred and twenty four million pounds of weight, during the same time the lungs taking in fifty seven hogsheads of ar, and all this mechanism not more mighty than delicate and easily disturbed and demolished.
 The Christian man says to himself:
 eff l hurt my nerves, if I hurt my brain, if 1 hurt any of my physical facul- ties, insult God and call for dire retri- bution."
 Why did God tell the I,evites not to offer to Him in sacrifice animals imper- feet and diseased? He meant to tell us in all the ages that we are to offer to God our very best physical condition, and 0 man who, through irregular or gluttonous eating, ruins his health, is not off ering to God such sacrifice. Why did Paul write for his cloak at Troas? Why should such a great man as Paul be anxious about a thing so insignificant as an overcoat? It was because he knew that with pneumonia and rheumatism he would not be worth half as much to God and the Church as with respiration easy and foot free.
 An intelligent Christian man would con- sider it an absurdity to kneel down at night and pray and ask Gods protection while at the same time he kept the win dows of his bedroom tight shut against fresh air. He would just as soon think of going out on the bridge between New York and Brooklyn, leaping off and then praying to God to keep him from getting hurt, Just as long as you defer this whole subject of physical health to the realm of whimsicality or to the pastry cook, or to the butcher or to the baker, or to the apotheeary, or to the clothier, you are not acting like Christian. Take care of all your physical forces-nervous, muscular, bone, brain, cellular tissue--for all you must be brought to judgment.
 Smoking your nervous system into fidgets, burning out tho coating of your stomach with wine, log-wooded and strychnined, walking with thin shoes to make your feet look delicate, pinched at the waist until you are nigh cut in two, and neither part worth any thing, groan- ing about sick headache and palpitation of the heart which you think came from God, when they came from your own folly.
 What right has any man or woman to deface the temple of the Holy Ghost! What is the earY Why, it is the whispering galley of the human soul. What is the eye? It is the observatory God constructed, it's tell escope sweeping the heavens. What is the hand! An instrument so wonderful that when the Earl of Bridgewater be- queathed in his will forty thousand dollars for treatises to be written OF the wis., dom, power and goodness of God, Sir Charles Bell, the great English anatomist and surgeon, found his greatest illustra-- tion in the construction of the human hand devoting his whole book to that subject So wonderful are these bodies that God names his own attributes after different parts or them. His omniscience it is Gods eye, His omnipresence Ut is Gods ear. His omnipotence-it is Gods arm. The upholstery of the mid