Wessington Springs herald. (Wessington Springs, Aurora County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1891, 1889-03-01

posed, and go out quicker than they
came in, He must have laughed. At any
rate, it makes me laugh to read of it.
All of these libertines, dramatizing in
leeturing on optics. A flock of crows
on their way up from carcass, denounc-
ing carrion. Yes, think that one word
written on the ground that day by the
finger of Christ was the awful word
Hypocrisy: But I am sure there
was another word in that dust.
From her entire manner I am sure
that arraigned woman was repent
ant. She made no apology, and
Christ in no wise belittled her sin. But
her supplicatory behavior and her tears
moved Him, and when He stopped down
to write on the ground, He wrote that
When on Sinai God wrote the law, He
wrote it with finger of lightning on
tables of stone, each word cut as by
chisel into the hard granite surface. But
when He writes the offense of this wo-
man He writes it in dust so that it can be
easily rubbed out, and when she repents
of it, oh, He was q merciful Christ.
was reading of legend that is told in
the far East about Him. He was walking
through the streets of city and He saw
crowd around dead dog. And one
man said: What a loathsome object is
shst nsaed ana h said another his ears
another, even his hide would not be of
any use to the tanner" "Yes," said an.
other, the odor of his carcass is dread
full" Then Christ, standing there, said:
But pearls cannot equal the Wilderness
of his teeth" Then the people, moved
by the idea that any ono could find any,
thing pleasant concerning dead dog,
said: why, this must be Jesus Of
Nazareth" Reproved and convicted
they went away. Surely this legend Of
Christ is good enough to be true. Kind
ness in all his words and ways and
habits. Forgiveness. Word of eleven
letters, and some of them thrones. and
some of them palm 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 monu-
mental granite with the letters that the
storms of a thousand years cannot oblit-
crate. Bishop Darlington 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
publication. That is the whole story.
God will abundantly pardon.
But while I speak of Christ of the
text, His stopping down writing in the
dust, do not think underrate the liter
allure of the dust. 1t is the most solemn
and tremendous of all literature. 1t is
ard exhumed Nineveh he was only OPEN
ing the door of its mighty dust. The
excavations of Pompeii have only been
the unclasping of the lids Of volume
of nations dust When Admiral Far
ragut and his friends, few years ago,
visited that resurrected city, the house
of Balbo, who had been one of its chief
citizens in its prosperous days, was
opened and table was spread in that
house which eighteen hundred and
ten years has been buried by
volcanic eruption, and Farragut and his
| guests, walked over the exquisite mosaics
and under the beautiful fresco, and it
almost seemed like being entertained by
those who eighteen centuries ago had
turned to dust. Oh, this mighty litera-
ture of the dust. Where are the re-
mains Of Sennacherib, and Attila, and
Epaminondas, and Tamerlane, and Tro-
jan, and Philip of Macedon, and Julius
Caesar? Dust! Where are the heroes
who fought on both sides at Ch@ronea,
at Hastings, at Marathon, at Cressy, of
the 10000 men who fought at Agin-
court, of the 100000 men who faced
death at Jena, of the 100000 whose ar
NOR glittered in the sun at Wagram, of
the 1000, 900 men under Darius at Ar
bella, of the 2,641, 1000 under Xerxes ct
Thermopyle? Dust!
Where are the guests who danced on
the floors of the Alhambra, or the Persian
palaces of Ahasuerus? Dust! Where
orators who spoke, and the sculptors
who chiseled, 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 volumes and
the vastest wealth, is the under
ground library. It 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 ali
these volumes unclasped and as easily
as in your library or mine we take up q
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! 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, in
stead of a hard pen, put forth His fore
finger 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 re-
pentant sinners, even the worst.
And now can believe that which ]
read, how that mother kept burning q
candle in the window every night for ten
years, and one night very late a 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 hayward daughter when she
returns. Since she went away ten years
ago, my hair has turned white. Folks
blame me for worrying about her, but
you see am her mother, and sometimes,
half dozen times night, I open the
door and look out into the darkness and
cry, Lizzie! Lizzie! But I must not