Democratic Northwest. [volume] (Napoleon, Ohio) 1869-1894, 1890-02-20
THE FIRST AND LAST.
DIR TALMAGE TELLS OF TIE MAI.
EsTY OF CHRIST.
No Burden Is Too Great for Him 10 LIN, No
Miracle Too Wonderful for Him to Per-
form-Death should Have No Terror for
True Christians.

announced that he would very soon be-
gin series of sermons on his journey
To and Through the Holy Land" The
subject of his discourse was The Glo-
rious Christ" His text ives: "He that
cometh from above is above all. John
iii, 81. The great preacher said:
The most conspicuous character OF
history steps out upon the platform.
The finger which, diamonded with light,
pointed down to him from the Bethle-
hem sky, was only ratification of the
finger of prophecy, the finger of gene
alogy, the finger of chronology, the
finger of events-all five fingers point
ing in one direction. Christ is the over
topping figure of all time. He is the vox
humana in all music, the gracefulest
line in all sculpture, the most exquisite
mingling of lights and shades in all
painting, the acme of all climaxes, the
dome of all cathedraled grandeur, and
the peroration of all splendid language.
The Greek alphabet is made mp of
twenty four letters, and when Christ
compared himself to the first letter and
the last letter, the alpha and the omega,
he appropriated to himse If all the splen-
dors that you can spell out either with
those two letters and all the letters be-
tween them. Il am the Alpha and the
Omega, the beginning and the end, the
first and the last" Or. if you prefer the
words of the text, above all.
What does it mean? 1t means, after
you have piled up all Alpine and Him
alayan attitudes, the glory of Christ
would have to spread its wings and de-
scend thousand leagues to touch those
SUBMITS. Pelion, a high mountain of
Thessaly; 0ssa, q high mountain, and
Olympus, a high mountain; but my
thology tells us when the giarts warred
against the gods they piled up these
three mountains, and from the top of
them proposed to scale the heavens; but
the height was not great enough, and
there was complete failure. And after
all the giants-Isaiah and Paul, proph-
etic and apostolic giants; Raphael and
Michael Angelo, artistic giants; cheru-
bim and seraphim and archangel, celes-
tial giants-have failed to climb to the
top of Christ's glory they might all well
unite in the words of the text and say:
He that cometh from above is above
ALL"
First, Christ must be above all else in
eur preaching. There are SO many
books on homiletics scattered through
the country that all laymen, as we'll as
all clergymen, have made up their
minds what sermons ought to be. That
sermon is most effectual which most
pointedly puts forth Christ as the par
don of all sin and the correction of
all evil-individual, social, political,
national. There is no reason why we
should ring the endless changes on a
few phrases. There are those who
think that if an exhortation or dis
course have frequent mention of justi-
tication, sanctifcation, covenant of
works, and covenant of grace, that
therefore it must be profoundly evan
gelical, while they are suspicious of
discourse which presents the same
truth, but under different phraseology.
Now, say there is nothing in all the
opulent realm of Anglo -Saxonism, Of
all the word treasures that we inherited
from the Latin and the Greek and the
Indo- European, but we have a right to
marshal it in religious discussion.
Christ sets the example. His illustra-
tions were from the grass, the flowers,
the spittle, the salve, the barn yard fowl,
the crystals of salt, as well as from the
seas and the stars; and we do not pro-
pose in our Sunday school teaching and
in our pulpit address to be put on the
limits.
1 know that there is a great deal said
in our day against words, as though
these were nothing. They may be mis-
used, but thev have an imperial power.
They are the bridge between soul and
soul, between Almighty God and the
human race. What did God write npon
the table of stones? Words. What did
Christ utter on Mount Olivet? Words.
Out of what did Christ strike the spark
for the illumination of the universe?
Out of words. "Let there be light" and
light was. Of course, thought is the
cargo and words are only the ship; and
how fast would your cargo get on with
out the ship? What you need, my
friends, in all your work, in your Sab
bath school class, in your reformatory
institutions, and what we all need is to
enlarge our vocabulary when we come
to speak about God and Christ and
Heaven. We ride few old words to
death when there il such illimitable re-
source. Shakespeare employed fifteen
thousand different words for dramatic 4
Milton employed eight thou
sand different words forpoetic purposes;
Rufus Choate employed over eleven
thousand different words for legal pur-
poses; but the most of us have less than
o thousand words that we can manage,
Less than FIVE hundred, and that makes
US SO stupid.
When We come to set forth the love of
Christ we are going to take tenderest
phraseology wherever we find it, and il
it has never been used in that direction
before, all the more shall we use it.
When we come to speak of the glory of
Christ, the Conqueror, We are going to
draw our SMILES from triumphai arch
and oratorio and everything grand and
The French navy have
flags by which they give signal,
but those eighteen flags they can put
into sixty-six thousand different COM
binations. And have to tell you that
these standards OF the cross may be
lifted into combinations infinite and
varieties everlasting. And let me say to
these young men who come from the
theological seminaries into our services
every Sabbath, and are after while
going to preach Jesus Christ, you will
have the largest liberty and unlimited
resource. You only have to present
Christ in your own way.
Jonathan Edwards preached Christ i n
The seyerest argument ever penned, and
John Bunyan preached Christ in the
sublimest aliegory ever composed.
Edward Payson, sick and exhausted,
leaned up against the side of the pulpit
and wei out his discourse, while George
with the manner and the
voice and the start of an actor, over
whelmed his auditory. It would have
been different thing if Jonathan Ed
wards had tried to write and dream about
the pilgrims progress to the celestial