The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1890-12-04

family and friends on that house-top:
Listen while l read about what hap
pened here" And, opening the Bible,
we had the whole story. 1t seemed
that Peter on the house-tOp dreamed
that a great blanket was let down out
of Heaven, and in it were sheep and
goats and cattle and mules and pigeons
and buzzaads and snakes and all man
ner of creatures that fly the air or wrlk
the fields or crawl the earth, and in the
dream voice told him as he was hun
eat things unclean." Three times he
dreamed it. There was then heard a
knocking at the gate of the house,
on the top of which Peter lay in
a trance, and three men asked: rs
Peter here?" Peter, while yet wonder
ing what his dream meant descends the
stairs and meets these strangers at the
gate and they tell him that good man
by the name of Cornelius, in the City of
C@sarea, has also had dream and has
sent them for Peter and to ask him to
come and preach. At that call Peter
left Joppa for C@sarea. The dream he
had just had prepared him to preach,
for Peter learned by it to reject no peo-
pie as unclean, and whereas he previ-
ously thought he must preach daily to
Jews, now he goes to preach to the
Gentiles who were considered unclean.
Notice how the two dreams meet
Peters dream on the house-top,
Cornelius dream at C8sarea So l
have noticed providences meet, distant
events meet, dreams meet. Every dream
is hunting up some other dream, and
every event is searching for some other
event In the fifteenth century (1492)
the great event was the discovery of
America. The art of printing. born in
the same century, goes out to meet that
discovery and make the new world an
intelligent world. The Declaration of
Independence announcing equal rights
meets Robert Burns.
A mans a man for a. that.
But standing on this Joppa house-top,
l look off on the Mediterranean, and
what is that strange sight l see? The
waters are black, seemingly for miles.
There seems to be a great multitude of
logs fastened together. Oh, yes, it is
great raft of timbers. They are cedars
of Lebanon which King Hiram is fur
nishing King Solomon in exchange for
twenty thousand measures of wheat,
twenty thousand baths of oil and TWEEN
ty thousand baths of wine. These ce-
dars have been cut down and trimmed
in the mountains of Lebanon by the
seventy thousand axemen engaged
there, and with great withes and
iron bolts are fastened together,
and they are floating down to
Joppa to be taken across. the land for
Solomon's temple now building at Je-
rusalem, for we have lost our hold of
the nineteenth century, and are clear
back in the ages. The RATS of cedar
are guided into what is called the Moon
Pool, an old harbor south of Joppa, now
filled with sand and useless. With long
pixies the lumb Der is pushed this way and
that in the water, then with levers and
many loud, long so, heaveI"
as the carriers get their shoulders I'M
der the great weight, the timber is
fastened to the wagons, and the lowing
oxen are yol1ed to the load, and the
procession of teams moves on with crack
of whip and drawled out words, which
translated, suppose, would correspond
with the whoa, haw, gee!' of modern
transfers, toward Jerusalem, which is
thirty miles away, over mountainous
distances which for hundreds of years
defied all engineering. And these
rough cedars shall become carved pill
lars, and beautiful affairs, and rounded
banisters, and traceried panels, and sub
lime ceilings, and exquisite harps, and
kingly chariots.
AS the wagon train moves out from
Joppa over the plain of Sharon toward
Jerusalem, say to myself, what vast
numbers of people helped build that
Temple of Solomon, and what vast num-
bers of people are now engaged in build
ing the wider, higher, grander temple
of Righteousness rising in the earth.
Our Chistian ancestry toiled at it, amid
sweat and tears, and hundreds of the
generations of the good, and the long
train of Christian workers still
moves on, and as in the con-
struction of Solemon's Temple some
hewed with the axe in the far
away Lebanon, and some drove a wedge.
and some twisted withe, and some
trod the wet and slippery RATS on the
sea, and some yoked the OK, and some
pulled at the load, and some showed the
plane, and some fitted the points, and
some heaved up the rafters, but al.
helped to build the temple. though
some of these never saw it, so now let
us all put our hands to the work OF
building the tenn pie of righteousness,
which is to fill the earth, and one will
bind wound, and another will
wipe away a tear, and another will
teach class, and another will speak
the encouraging word, and all of us will
be ready to pull and lift and in some
way help on the work until the millen.
NAL morn shall gid the pinnacle of that
finished temple, and at its shining
gates the world shall put down its last
burden, and in its LAYERS wash off it's
last stain, and at it's affairs the last wan
derer shall kneel. At the dedication of
that temple all the armies of earth and
Heaven will shoulder arms" and