The Russellville Democrat., 1889-02-28

d utdu uDET Stihs w Ag1 this must be Jesus of Nazareth" Reproved and convicted they went away. Surely this legend of Christ is good enough to be true. Kindness in all His words and ways and habits. Forgiveness. Word of eleven letters, and some of them thrones, and some of them plain branches. Better have Christ write close to our names that one word, though he write it in dust, than to have our name cut into monumental granite with the letters that the storms of thou sand years can not obiterate. Bishop Babington had book of only three leaves. The first leaf was black, the second leaf red the third leaf white. The black leaf suggested sin; the red leaf atonement; the white leaf purifcation. That is the whole story. God will abund- antly pardon.
 must not forget to say that as Christi stooping down, with his finger wrote on the ground, it is evident that his sympa- thies are with this penitent woman, and that he has no sympathy with her hypo- critical pursuers. Just opposite to that is the worlds habit. Why didn't these unclean Pharisees bring one of their own number to Christ for excoriotion and cap ital punishment? No, nc; they overlook that in a man which they damnate in woman. And so the world has had for offending women scourges and objurga- tion, and for just one offense she becomes an outcast, while for men whose lives have been sodomic for twenty years the world swings open it's doors of brilliant wel- 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 capi- tals 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 lazarettos 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 an imitation Of for eign dissoluteness. I like an Englishman and like an American, but the sickest creature on earth is an American playing the Englishman. Society needs to be re- constructed on this subject. Treat them 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. Mo- no, says the world, let woman go down and let man go up. What is that hear plashing into the East river at midnight, and there is gurgle as of strangulation, and all Is still. Never mind. II is only woman too discouraged to live. Let the mills of the cruel world grind right on.
 But while speak of Christ of the text, His stepping down writing in the dust, do not think I underrate the literature of the dust. It is the most solemn and tremen- dous of all literature. It is the greatest of all libraries. When Layard exhnmed Nineveh he was only opening the door of its mighty dust. The excavations of Pompeii have only been the unclasping of the lids of volume of a nations dust. When Admiral Farragut and his friends, a few years ago, visited that resurreeted city, the house of Balbo, who had been one of it's chief citizens in its prosperous days, was opened and a table was spread in that house which 1S10 years has been buried by volcanic eruption, and Far ragut and his guests walked over the ex auisite mosaics and under the beautiful fresco, and it almost seemed like being entertained by those who, eighteen cen- turies ago, had turned to dust. Oh, this mighty literature of the dust! Where are the remains of Sennacherib and Attila and Epaminondas and Tamerlaue and Trojan and Philip of Macedon, and Julius Cesar? Dust! Where are the heroes who fought on both sides at Ch@r- onea, at Hastings, at Marathon, at Greasy, 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 tho 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 Thermopyla; Dust?
 Where are the guests who danced the floors of the Alhambra, or the Persian palaces of Ahasuerus? Dust! Where are the musicians who played, and the orators who spoke, and the sculptors who ohis- eled, and the architects who built in all the centuries except our own? Dustl 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. It is the royal library, the continental library, the hemispheric 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 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 life and open it and read it and display 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. Oh, this mighty litera- ture of the dust It is not so wonderful after all that Christ chose, instead of an inkstand, the fmpressionable sand on the floor of an ancient temple, and instead of a 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 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 fre," and the stranger said: "Why do you keep that light in the windowy" The aged woman said That is to light my wayward 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 I am her mother and sometimes, half dozen times a night, open the door and look out into the darkness and cry, 'Lizziep 'Lizziep But must not tell you any more about my trouble, for I guess, from the way you cry, you have trouble enough of your own. Why, how cold and sick you seem? Oh, my! Can it be: Yes, you arc Lizzie, my own lost child. Thank God that vou are home againv And what a