Connecticut western news., 1890-10-08
CANAAN, CONN, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER s,

7
 tim of evil habit can be reformed?
 Oh, yes! Are you willing to do any
 thing, whether obscure or resounding, 1 for the welfare of the church and the
 salvation of a ruined world? Oh, yes! But am sorry to say that the most
 populous plain in all the earth today is 1 the Plain of Ono.
 THE DEMON OF DESTRUCTION. Here now we come to wherestood the fields into which Samson fired the foxes. The foxes are no rarity in this land. I counted at one time twenty
 or thirty of them in one group, and the | cry all along the line was stFoxes! Look ] at the foxes" and at night they some times bark until all attempts to sleep ] are an absurdity. Those I saw and heard ill Palestine might have been de- scendants of the very foxes that Sam l son employed for an appalling incendi-
 arism. The wealth of that land was
 in the harvests, and it was the harvest time and the straw was dry. Three hundred foxes are caught and tied in l couples by some wire or incombustible
 cord which the flames cannot divide, 1 and frebrands are fastened to those 1 couple of foxes, and the afrighted creatures are let loose and run every
 whither among the harvests, and in the
 awful blaze down go the corn shocks, 1 and the vineyards, and the olives, and all through the valleys and over the hills and among the villages is heard | the cry of ''Fire" And in the burnt
 pathway walk Hunger and Want and Desolation.
 All this for spite. And some theo- logians learn one thing and some an
 other. But learn from it that a great
 man may sometimes stoop to very
 mean piece of business, and that if men
 would use as much ingenuity in trying
 to bless as they do in trying to destroy, the world all the way down would be in better condition. Yet the fire
 of the foxes kindled that night in Pal estine has not gone out, but has leaped the seas, and the sly foxes, the human foxes, are now still running every whither, kindling political fires, fires of
 religious controversy, fires of hate, l world wide fires, and the whole har- vests of righteousness perish. It took the hard work of multitudes on all these plains of Palestine for months l and months to rear the vine and raise l the corn, but it took only three hun dred worthless foxes one night to blaze all into ashes.
 Brace up your nerves now, that you
 may look while point them out. Yon- der is Kirjath-J earim, where the ark of God staid until David took it to Jeru-
 salem. Wonder John the Baptist was born. Wonder is Emmaus, where Christ walked with the disciples at eventide
 Here are men blowing, only one han de to the blow, showing the accuracy 1 of Christ's allusion. When we blow in America or England there are two
 hands on two handles, but in Palestine only one handle. And so Christ uses the singular saying, ''No man having put his hand to the blow and looking
 back is fit for the kingdom" The OK
 is urged on by wooden stick pointed l with sharp iron, and the OK knows 1 enough not to kick, for he would only hurt himself instead of breaking the
 goad. And the Bible refers to that
 when it says to Saul, 'It is hard for thee to kick against the goads."
 THE VALLEY OF AVALON.
 Here is the valley of Ajalon, famous for Joshua's pursuit of the five kings
 and the lunar arrest. And in imagina- 1 ton see the moon in daytime halt. Who has not sometimes seen the moon dispute the throne with the sum- But
 when the king of day and the queen of
 night, who never before Joshua's time
 nor since then stopped moment in their march, halted at Joshua's com
 mand, it was scene enough to make l the universe shiver "Moon! stand thou still in the valley of Aja1on!" At an- other time we will see the sun stop above Gibeon, but now we have only to do with the moon, and you must re- member that it was more of an orb
 now, a dead world now, an extinct l world now, corpse laid out in state in
 the heavens, waiting for the judgment l day to bury it. But on the day of
 which speak the moon was probably
 living world, yet it halted at the
 wave of Joshua's finger, Stand thou stiu!" Do not budge an inch until Joshua finishes those five kings, who
 are there tumblng over the rocks,
 sword of man slashing them, hailstones out of the sky pelting them.
 And there is the cavern of Make
 dah, where they fled for safety, and
 where they were afterward locked in,
 and from which they were taken out
 to be slain, and in which they were af
 terward buried; and you do well to ex-
 amino that cavern, for within a few
 hours it became three things which no other cave ever was-fortress, prison,
 sepulcher.
 | Now we pass the place where once
 lived one of the greatest robbers of the
 century, Abou Gosh by name. From
 this point you see he could look over
 all the surrounding country, and long
 before the travellers came up to him
 the plan for the taking of their money l OI CLtl illC OI OoCLA WC%o
 He one day found a company of
 monks who would not pay, and he
 smothered them to death in hot oven.
 In his last days he lived here like an
 oriental prince, and had his attendants
 and admirers, to whom he told the sto-
 ries of brigandage and assassination.
 So late as when our eminent and be-
 loved American William c. Prime
 passed through Abou Gosh, the scoun-
 drelly Bedouin, sat at his doorway smok-
 ing his pipe. His descendants live in