The Bolivar bulletin. (Bolivar, Tenn.) 1888-1946, 1889-01-04
TALMAGE's SERMON.
Prayer as an Eficac1ous Remedy
for Human Ills.
God VIII Hear and Answer Prayer When
the Supplicant is Backed Up by
Unfllnehing Belief and
Faith in Him.


following sermon recently in the BROOKLYN
Tabernacle. His subject was the efficacy
of Prayer; or, A Bad Boil Cured" His
text was:
have heard thy prayer; behold, I will heal
thee. And Isaiah said: Take lump of figs
And they took and laid it on the boil, and he
recOvered--II Kings, Xxx, 5, z.
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 a carbuncle, virulent and deathful.
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 it,
saying: "Behold, I will heal thee" But
there was human instrumentality to be
employed. The carbuncle needed a "cat-
aplasm." That is q 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 q cataplasm,
which is poultice. Your old
the time when physicians were not as
plenty as they are now, will tell you that
the very best poultice is a fig, and that
was what was used upon the carbuncle of
King Hezekiah. The power of God ac-
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
been found out that prayer to God is a
dead failure. All things are arranged
according to inexOrab1e law. There is no
use in praying to God for rain in the time
of drought. The "weather probabilities"
in the morning papers VIII decide the
question, rain or no rain, and the whole
Nation in prayer before God would not
bring down a single crop. 1 am not now
speaking of ain imaginary theory, but of
that which is believed by ten thousand
times ten 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 well. 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
| cast-iron God seated at the head of the
metal fingers q band of law from which
nothing can break away.
| Men 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 a farce !;
there is good enough in US, and the only
thing is to bring it out. Development is
/ the d-develOpment. The Garden OF
| Eden is q fairy story, and no more to be
! believed than the Arabian Nights, or Gull
| liver's Travels, or Robinson Crusoe. We
all started as balloons, and are blood re-
lations to that monkey squirn1ing 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 it
seemed as if He really were on the water.
| What is still more alarming is that
]
There is not one Christian man in five that
! can, unbIenched, stand in the presence Of
all this ralllery, saying: ''T believe IN the
! whole Bible, and in every single state
| m ent that it makes" Christian men try
to soften the Bible down to suit the
skeptics. The skeptics sneer 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,
/ Ill Ieef Toc
that it was low water, anyhow, and 50 the
| Israelites went through without any
| trouble. Why not be frank and say: 81
believe the Lord God Almighty came to
the brink of the Red Sea, and with His
right arm swung back the billows 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 Israe1ites?" The rational.
ist comes to you, saying: Glow about
Jonah and the whaleY Do you really
believe that fish story?" There were
| never so many Nantucket fishermen
after one whale as there have
been rationalists finging harpoons a
the Mediterranean sea monster, and from
that one whale they have got enough Oh
to light ten thousand souls to perdition
/ "A skGpblC bGll5 you bAAslb oOAldA WOeAAI
have been killed in the process Of swal.
lowing, and that he could not, anyhow
have lived three days In such close quar-
ters, but would have been smOthered by
the poor ventilation. How the goOt
Christians Immediately go to work anC
try to explain the whole thing by natura
laws, so as to please the ratiOnalists, anc
say that whale is an r-breathing fish
that every little while it comes to the sur
I hal ma
| lolTed Jonah did the same thing, ant
thus got a supply for itself and for TIA
prophet. Why not rather say that Co
can do any thing, and He could take Jonal
| through the whales throat, although tn
| throat would not have been half larg
enough ordinarily to let him pass, an
| could have kept him alive in the whal
FIVE years without any air, if He ha
chosen to? Who made the whaleY GOO
Who made Jonah? God. Then He cOul
do any thing He pleased with either q
them.
The moment you begin to explain ava
the miraculous and supernatural, you Sun
render the Bible. Take the supernaturs
out of the Bible, and you make it q colleC
ton Of lies and humbugs, in preference
which I choose Esop's Fables. They al
what they pretended to be-fables. b
If, after all that, the Bible declares jest
is not God, and Lazarus was not raise
from the dead, and the water was N
turned into wine, and the Red Sea was n
divided, and in answer to prayer Hezt
kiah's boil did not get well, then the Bib
is the worst fraud ever perpetrated
Gods universe.
All. my friends, have we been mistaken
Does God hear and answer prayer, or do
he not? Hezedah was sick unto death;
prayed for his life; God heard him al
added fifteen years to that lifetime. III
prayer saved him-the lump Of figs a.
piled being merely the God-appointed h
man iustrumentality.
ssBut, /" says some one, II don't beiie'
/ L. nil.l- y H. fi.as. r.a Eli haRa 70 pa