Connecticut western news., 1890-11-05
BUT MORAL SUPERIORITY Is OURS.

In the old cathedrals of England,
 modern painters in the repair of win
 dows are trying to make something as
 good as the window painting of four
 hundred years ago, and always failing
 by the unanimous verdict of all who
 examine and compare The color of
 modern painting fades in fifty years,
 while the color of the old masters is as
 we'll preserved after five hundred years
 the walls of exhumed Pompeii paint
 ings with color as fresh as though made
 the day before, though they were bu
 ried eighteen hundred years ago. The
 making of Tyrian purple is an impossi
 bility now. In our modern potteries
 we are trying hard to make cups and pitchers and bowls as exquisite as those
 exhumed from Herculaneum, and our
 artifcers are attempting to make jew
 elry for ear and neck and finger equal
 to that brought up from the mauso-
 leums of two thousand years before
 Christ.
 We have in our time glass in all
 shapes and all colors, but Pliny, more
 than eighteen hundred years ago, de- scribed malleable glass which, if thrown upon the ground and dented, could be pounded straight again by the hammer or could be twisted around the
 wrists, and that confounds all the glass manufactures of our time I tried in Damascus, Syria, to buy Damascus blade, one of those swords that could be bent double or tied into a knot without breaking. Icould not get one. Why? The Nineteenth century cannot make a Damascus blade. If we go on enlarging our cities we may, after a while, get a city as large as Babylon, which was five times the size of London. These aqueducts of Solomon that visit today finding them in good con- dition three thousand years after con- struction make me think that the world may have forgotten more than it now knows. The great honor of our age is
 not machinery, for the ancients had some styles of it more wonderful; nor art, for the ancients had art more ex- quisite and durable; nor architecture,
  ropolis surpass all modern architecture {; nor cities, for some of the ancient cities were larger than ours in the sweep o1 their pomp. But our attempts must be in moral achievement and Gospel vic tory. In that we have already sur passed them, and in that direction let the ages push on. Let us brag less of vryor1I1xy oo1,inx,or,,nnf thorL d1@ for moral opportunity. More good men and good women is what the world wants. Toward moral elevation and spiritual attainment let the chief struggle be. The source of all that l will show you before sundown of this day, on which we have visited the pools of Solomon, and the gardens of the king
 LOWLY ESTATE OF CHRIST.
 We are on this December afternoon on the way to the cradle of him who called himself greater than Solomon. We are coming upon the chief cradle of all the world, not lined with satin, but strewn with straw; not sheltered by 8 palace, but covered by a barn; :; not presided over by princess, but lowered over by peasant girl; yet cradle the canopy of which is angelic wings, and the lullaby of which is the first Christmas carol ever sung, and from which all the events of the past and all the events of the future have and must take date as being B. C. or A. D.-before Christ or after Christ. All eternity past occupied in getting ready for this cradle and all eternity to come to be employed in celebrating it's consequences.
 I said to the tourist companies plan ming our oriental journey, "Put us in Bethlehem in December, heplace and the month of our Lords birth" and we had our wish. I am the only man who has ever attempted to tell how Bethlehem looked at the season Jesus was born. Tourists and writers are there in February or March or April, when the valleys are an embroidered 1 sheet of wild flowers, and anemones ! and ranunculus are flushed as though from attempting to climb the steeps, and lark and bulfinch are flooding the air with bird orchestra But I was 1 there in December, a winter month, ! the barren beach between the two 1 oceans of redolence. was told must l not go there at that season, told so be- 1 fore started, told so in Egypt; the 1 books told me so; all travellers that I ! consulted about it told me so But I 1 was determined to see Bethlehem the
 same month in which Jesus arrived, l and nothing could dissuade me-
 Was I not right in wanting to know 1 how the Holy Land looked when Jesus came to it? He did not land a!uld 1 flowers and song. When tine angels
 chanted on the famous bilihnight. all the fields of Palestine were silent The 1 glowing skies were answered by gray
 rocks As Bethlehem stood against a
 bleak wintry sky, climbed up to it as
 through a bleak wintry sky Jesus de-
 scended upon it. His way down was
 from warmth to chill, from bloom to
 barrenness, from everlasting June to a
 sterile December If were going to
 Palestine as a botanist, and to study
 the flora of the land, I would go in
 March, but l went as a minister of
 Christ to study Jesus, and so went in
 December. I wanted to see how the
 worlds front door looked when the
 heavenly Stranger entered it.
 The town of Bethlehem to my sur
 prise is in the shape of d horseshoe, the
 houses extending clear onto the prongs
 of the horseshoe, the whole scene
 more rough and rude than can be i'm
 agined. Verify, Christ did not choose