The Russellville Democrat., 1890-02-27
l'ALMAGE'S SERMON.
Christ the One Conspicuous Figure
 of All Time.
A Perpetual Text for Successful Preach ipx and n Perpetual Balm for Wounded sonls--Deatha
 Sting Removed.

sting Removed.
 Rev. T. Dewitt Talmage delivered the following sermon in the Brooklyn Acad' emy of Music from the text:
 He that cometh from above Is above all.- John, ill, si.
 The most conspicuous character of history steps out tupon 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 gen ealogy, 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 most graceful line in all sculpture, the most exquisite mingling of lights and shades in all painting, the acme of all eli maxes, the dome of all cathedraled grandeur, and the peroration of all splendid language. The Greek alphabet is made up 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 Him. self all the splendors that you can spell out either with those two letters and all the letters between 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 'sAbove all.'
 What does it mean? It means, after you have piled up all Alpine and Himalayan
 attitudes, the glory of Christ would have to spread it's wings and descend one thousand leagues to touch those sum- mits. Pellon, a high mountain of Thes- sally; Ossa, high mountain, and Olym-
 pus, high mountain; but mythology tells us when the giants 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, prophetic and apostolic giants; Raphael and Mich
 ael Angelo artistic giants, cherubim
 and seraphim and archange1, celestial
 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
 our 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, na-
 tional. There is no reason why we
 should ring the endless changes on few
 phrases. There are those who think
 that if an exhortation or a discourse
 have frequent mention of justification,
 sanctification, covenant of works and
 covenant of grace, that therefore it
 must be profoundly evangelical, while
 they are suspicious of discourse which
 presents the same truth, but under
 different phraseology. Now, l say,
 there is nothing in all the opulent
 realm of Anglo-Saxonism, of all the
 word treasures that we inherited from
 the Latin and Greek and the Indo-Eu-
 ropean, but we have right to marshal
 1t in religious discussion. Christ sets
 the example His illustrations were
 from the grass, the flowers, the spittle,
 the salve, the barn-yard fowl, the crys-
 tals of salt, as well as from the seas and
 the stars: and we do not propose in our
 Sabbath-sohool teaching and in our pull
 pit address to be put on the limits.
 know that there is great deal said
 in our day against words, as though they
 were nothing. They may be misused,
 but they have an imperial power. They
 are the bridge between soul and soul,
 between Almighty God and human race.
 What did God write upon the tables of
 stones? Words. What did Christ utter Qn Mount Olivet? Words. Out of what
 did Christ strike the spark for the il- lumination 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; but how
 fast would your cargo get on without
 the ship? What you need, my friends,
 in all your work, in your Sabbathschool
 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 a few old words to death when
 there is such illimitable resource
 Shakespeare employed fifteen thousand
 different words for dramatic purposes;
 Milton employed eight thousand differ ent words for poetic purposes; Rufus Choate employed over eleven thousand different words for legal purposes; but the most of us have less than one thou- sand 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 if
 1t has never been used in that direction
 before, alls the more shall we use it. When we come to speak of the glory of Christ, the Conqueror, we are going to draw our similes from triumphal arch and oratorio, and every thing grand and stupendons. Tho French navy has eighteen flags by which they give sig
 nal, but these eighteen flags they can put into sixty-six thousand different combinations. 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 awhile go- ing to preach Jesus Christ, you will have the largest liberty and unlimited resource. You only have to present Christ in your own way Jonathan Ed wards preached Christ in the severest argument ever penned, and John Bun yan preached Christ in the sublimesi allegory ever composed. Edward Pay son, sick and exhausted, leaned uI against the sido of the pulpit and wepi out his discourse, while George White field, with tho manner and voice and start of an actor, overwhelmed his audi. tory It would have been different thing if Jonathan Edwards had tried to write and dream about the pilgrim x,rC0raac to tha CalaQ4{al rstv ~r TAI x