The Bolivar bulletin. (Bolivar, Tenn.) 1888-1946, 1889-03-01

offending women scourgcs and objuTga- |
ton, and for Just one offense she becoSreS
an outcast, while for men whose lives have
been sodomic for twenty years the world
swings open its doors Of brilliant well /
come, and they may sit in Legislatures and
Senates and parliaments or on thrones
Unlike the Christ of my text, the world
writes a mans misdemeanor in dust, but
chisels a woman's offense with great capt.
tails upon ineffaceable marble. For for
eign lords and princes, whose names can
not even be mentioned In respectable cir
cles abroad, because they are walking
| 1azarettos Of abomination, our American
princesses Of fortune wait, and at the first
beck sail out with them into the blackness
of darkness forever. And in what are
called higher circles Of society there is now
not only the imitation of foreign dress and
/ foreign manners, but imitation OF for
eign dissoluteness. L like an Englishman
and like an American, but the sickest
| creature on earth is an American playing
4 the Englishman. Society needs to be re-
constructed on this subject. Treat them
1 alike, masculine crime and feminine
crime. If you cut the one in granite, cut
them both in granite. If you write the
/ one in dust, write the other in dust No,
no, says the world, let woman go
down and let man go up. What is
that I hear FLASHING into the East river
at midnight, and there is a gurgle as of
strangulation, and all is still. Never
mind. It is only a woman too discouraged
to live. Let the mills of the cruel world
grind right on.
But while / speak of Christ of the text,
His STOPPING down writing in the dust, do
| not think underrate the literature Of the
dust. 1t is the most solemn and tremen-
dous of all literature. It is the greatest OF
all libraries. When Layard exhumed
Nineveh he was only opening the door Of
it's mighty dust. The excavations of
Pompeii have only been the unclasping
of the lids of a volume of q nations dust.
| When Admiral Farragut and his friends,
a few years ago, visited that resurrected
! city, the house of BaIbo, who had been
one of its chief citizens in its prosperous
! days, was opened aud table was spread
in that house which 1910 years has been
buried by volcanic eruption, and Far
ragut and his guests walked over the ex-
quisite mosaics and under the beautiful
fresco, and it almost seemed like being
entertained by those who, eighteen CEN
| turtles ago, had turned to dust. Oh, this
mighty literature of the dustl Where are
the remains of Sennacherib and Attila
and Epaminondas and Tamer1ane and
Trojan and Philip of Macedon, and
julius Caesar? DustI Where are the
heroes who fought on both sides at Char
onea, at Hastings, at Marathon, at Cressy,
of the one hundred and ten thousand men
who fought at AgincOurt of the two
hundred and fifty thousand men who
faced death at Jena, of the four hundred
thousand whose armor glittered in the
sun at Wagram, of the one million men
under Darius at Arbella, of the two
million six hundred and forty one thou
sand men under Xerxes at Thermopyl8i
Dustl
Where are the guests who danced the
floors of the AIhambra, or the Persian
palaces of Ahasuerus? Dust! Where are
the musicians who played, and the orators
who spoke, and the sculptors who CHS
eled, and the architects who built in all
the centuries except our own? Dust! The
greatest library of the world, that which
has the widest shelves, and the longest
aisles, and the most multitudinous vol
umes, and the vastest wealth, is the UNDER
ground library. 1t is the royal library,
the continental library, the hemisphere
library, the planetary library, the library
of the dust.
And all these library cases will be
opened, and all these scrolls unrolled,
and all these volumes unclasped, and as
easily as in your library or mine we take
up a book, blow the dust off of it, and turn
over its pages, so easily will the Lord Of
the resurrection pick up out of this
library of dust every volume of human
it. And the volume will be rebound, to
be set in the royal library Of the Kings
palace, or in the prison library Of the
self destroyed. On, this mighty litera-
ture of the Dust 1t is not so wonderful
after all that Christ chose, instead of an
inkstand, the impressiOnable sand on the
floor of an ancient temple, and instead Of
hard pen, put forth his forefnger with
the same kind Of nerve and muscle, and
bone, and flesh, as that which makes up
our own fOrefnger, and wrote the awful
doom of hypocrisy and full and complete
, forgiveness for repentant sinners, even
the worst.
And now I can believe that which read,
how that a mother kept burning a candle
in the window every night for ten years,
and one night very late poor waif of the
street entered. The aged woman said to
, her: ''Sit down by the fire." and the
stranger said: "Why do you keep that
light in the Window" The aged woman
said: THAT is to light my maynard
, daughter when she returns. Since she
went away ten years ago, my hair has
turned white. Folks blame me for wor-
rying about her, but you see 1 am her
mother, and sometimes, half a dozen
, times a night, open the door and look
, out into the darkness and cry, Lizzie 2
'LizzieP But I must not tell you any more
, about my trouble, for 1 guess, from the
way you cry, you have trouble enough of
, your own. Why, how cold and sick you
! seem? Oh, myl Can it be? Yes, you are
Lizzie, my own lost child. Thank God
, that you are home againw And what a
time of rejoicing there was in that house
that night And Christ again stopped
down, and in the ashes of that
, hearth, now lighted up not more by the
{ great blazing logs than by the joy of a
reunited household, wrote the same liber-
ating words that he had written more
: than eighteen hundred years ago in the
dust Of the Jerusalem temple. Forgive
, ness! A word broad enough and high
enough to let pass through it all the ar
mics of Heaven, a million abreast, on
white horses, nostril to nostril, flank to
, flank.
/. AMERICAN WOMEN.