The Brookhaven leader. [volume] (Brookhaven, Miss.) 1883-1891, 1889-01-03
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
Prayer as an Efflcacious Remedy
for Human Ills.
Sod VIII Hear and Answer Prayer Whom
= the supplicant Is Backed Up By
UnfInching Belief aud
Faith In Him.

text was:
have heard thy prayer; behold, will heal
thee. And Isaiah said: Take q lump of figs.
And they took and laid IL on the boil, and he
recovorcd.-IT Kings Xxx, 81.
Luxurious living is not healthy. The
second generation of kings and queens
and lords and princes is apt to be BRAIN
less and invalid. The second crop of
grass is almost always short. Royal
blood is generally scrofulous. You will
not be surprised, then, to hear that King
Hezekiah had disorders which broke out
in carbuncle, virulent and beautiful.
The Lord told him he must die; he did not
want to die. He turned his face to the
wall, so that his prayer would not be in
terrupted, and cried to God for his life.
God heard the prayer and answered il,
saying: "Behold, will heal thee" But
there was human instrumentality to be
employed. The carbuncle needed scat
aplasm." That is a tough word we use to
show how much we know. If in The pull
pit we always used words the people
understood, we never should have
any reputation for learning. Well,
this carbuncle needed a cataplasm,
which is poultice. Your old
mother who doctored her own children in
the time when physicians were not as
plenty as they are now, will tell you that
the very best poultice is fig, and that
was what was used upon the carbuncle of
King Hezekiah. The power of God ae-
companied by this human instrumental
ity, cured the King.
In this age of discovery, when men
know so much it almost kills them, and
write so wisely it almost kills us, it has
haH I'D % 81 -. q.
dead failure. All things are arranged
according to inexorable law. There is no
use in praying to God for rain in the time
of drought. The weather probabilities"
in the morning papers will decide the
question, rain or no rain, and the whole
Nation in prayer before God would not
bring down single crop. l am not now
speaking of an imaginary theory, but of
that which is believed by ten thousand
times ton thousand men.
If sickness comes to your household, it
will depend entirely upon ventilation,
good diet and the skill of the doctors as to
whether. your child gets we'll. The father
might pray all day, and the mother might
pray all night-it would not have any ef-
feet upon the case. If squills, belladonna,
paregoric and Cruel do the work, your
child will get we'll; if not. not. There is a
oast-iron God seated at the head of the
universe, holding in the cold grasp of His
metal fingers band of law from which
nothing can break away.
AMEN and women of God, at this point
the great battle of Christianity is to be
fought. The great foe of Christianity to =
day is ratiOnalism, that comes out from
schools, and universities, and magazines
and newspapers, to scoff at Bible truth
and caricature the old religion of Jesus.
1t says Jesus is not God, for it is impossi-
BILE to explain how He can be Divine and
human at the same time. The Bible is not
inspired, for there are things in it that
they don't like. Regeneration is farce;
there is good enough in us, and the only
thing is to bring it out. Development is
the word-development The Garden of
Eden is fairy story, and no more to be
believed than the Arabian Nights, or Gull
iver's Travels, or Robinson Crusoe. We
all started as balloons, and are blood re-
lations to that monkey squirming about
on the top Of that hand-organ. Lazarus
was not dead when Christ pretended to
raise him; he was Onlying playing dead.
The water was not changed into wine at
the wedding, but Christ brought in some
wine that He had found elsewhere to make
the deficiency. Christ did not walk on the
sea, but on the shore, so near that 1t
seemed as if He really were on the water.
What is still more alarming is that
Christian men dare not meet thisridicule.
There is not one Christian man in five that
can, unblanched, stand in the presence of
all this raillery, saying: ~ believe in the
whole Bible, and in every single state
ment that it makes" Christian men try
to soften the Bible down to suit the
skeptics. The skeptics sheer at the divid-
ing of the Red Sea, and the Christian goes
to explaining that the wind blew hur.
ricane from one direction a good while,
until all the water piled up, and besides,
that it was low water, anyhow, and so the
israelitcs went through without any
trouble. Why not be frank and say: II
believe the Lord God Almighty came to
the brink Of the Red Sea, and with His
right arm swung back the pillows on the
right side, and with His left arm swung
back the pillows on the left side, and the
abashed water stood up hundreds of feet
high, while through their CLASSY wall the
sea monsters gazed with affrighted eyes
on the passing Israelites:" The RATIONAL
list comes to you, saying: "How about
Jonah and the whale? Do you really
believe that FISH story" There were
never so many Nantucket fishermen
after one whale as there have
been rationalists flinging harpoons at
the Mediterranean sea monster, and from
that one whale they have got enough oil
to light ten thousand souls to perdition.
A skeptic tells you that Jonah would
have been killed in the process of swal-
lowing, and that he could Lot, anyhow,
have lived three days in such close quar-
tiers, but would have been smothered by
the poor yeptilation. How the good
Christians immediately go 10 work and
try to explain the whole thing by natural
laws, so as to please the ratiCnalists, and
say that a whale is an air. breathing fish:
that every little while it comes to the sur
face, and that the whale that swal-
lowed Jonah did the same thing. and
thus got supply for itself and for the
prophet. Why not rather say that God
can do any thing, and He could take Jonah
through the whales throat, although the
throat would not have been half large
enough ordinarily to let him pass, and
could have kept him alive in the whal e
five years without any air, if He had
chosen to? Who made the whale! God.
do any thing He pleased with either of
them.
The moment you begin to explain away
the miraculous and supernatural, you sur
render the Bible. Take the SUPERNATURAL
out of the Bible and you make it "a collec-
ton Of lies and humbugs, in preference to
which choose Esop's Fables. They are
what they pretended to be-fables. But