The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1890-01-09
TALMAGE'S FAREWELL.
Goodbye Words on Starting for
the Holy Land.
The Needs of a Vessel in Preparing for q
Voyage and the Needs of a Soul EN-
barking for Eternity Compared
Christ the Only Pilot.

The following farewell, not only to
his own congregation, but to his thou
sands of readers, was dictated by Rev.
L. Dewitt Talmage on the eve of his
departure for the Holy Land, based on
the words:
And they accompanied him unto the ship.
Acts Xxx, 38.
To the more than twenty-five million
people in many countries to whom my
sermons come week by week, in English
tongue and by translation, through the
kindness of the newspaper press, 1 ad-
dress these words. l dictate them to a
stenographer on the eve of my departure
for the Holy Land, Palestine. When
you read this sermon shall be in mid
atlantic. go to be gone few weeks
on religious journey. I go because
want for myself and hearers and readers
to see Bethlehem, and Nazareth, and
Jerusalem, and Cavalry, and all the
other places connected with the
Saviour's life and death, and so re-en-
force myself for sermons. go because
am writing the 'Life of Christ" and
can be more accurate and graphic when
/ have been an eyewitness of the
sacred places. Pray for my successful
journeying and my safe return.
wish on the eve of departure to pro-
nounce loving benediction upon all
my friends in high places and low, upon
congregations to whom my sermons are
read in absence of pastors, upon groups
gathered out on prairies and in mining
districts, upon all sick and invalid and
aged ones who can not attend churches,
but to whom l have long administered
through the printed page. My next SER
mon will be addressed to you from Rome,
Italy, fol- feel like Paul when he said:
$50, as much as in me is, I am ready to
preach the Gospel to you that are at
Rome also" The fact is that Paul was
ever moving about on land or sea. He
was an old sailor-not from occupation,
but from frequency of travel. l think
he could have taken vessel across the
Mediterranean as well as some of the
ship captains, The sailors never scoffed
at him for being 'land lubber." If
Paul's advice had been taken the crew
would never have gone ashore at Melita.
bare poles Paul was the only self-pos-
sessed man on board, and, turning to the
excited crew and despairing passengers,
he exclaims, in voice that sounds above
the thunder of the tempest and the
wrath of the sea: ''Be of good cheer"
The men who now go to sea with maps
and charts and modern compass, warned
by buoy and lighthouse, know nothing of
the perils of ancient navigators. Horace
said that the man who first ventured on
the sea must have had heart bound
with oak and triple brass. People then
ventured only from headland to head
land and island to island, and not until
long after spread their sail for voyage
across the sea. Before starting the
weather was watched, and the ship hav-
ing been hauled up on shore, the mari
ners placed their shoulders against the
stern of the ship and heaved it off, they
1T the last moment leaping into it.
Vessels were then chiefly ships of bur-
den-the transit of passengers being the
exception, for the world was not then
migratory as II. our day, when the first
desire of a man in one place seems to be
to get into another place. The shin
from which Jonah was thrown over
board, and that in which Paul was car
ried prisoner, went out chiefly with the
idea of taking a cargo. And now, so
then, vessels were accustomed to carry
q flag. In those times it was inscribed
with the name of a heather deity. A
vessel bound for Syracuse had on it the
inscription: Castor and Pollux.''
The ships were provided with
anchors. Anchors were of two
kinds: those that were dropped
into the sea, and those that were thrown
up onto the rocks to hold the vessel fast.
This last kind was what Paul alluded to
when he said: (Which hope we have as
an anchor of the soul, both sure and
steadfast, and which entereth into that
within the vail" That was what the
sailors call a ''Eook anchor" The rocks
and sand bars, shoals ard headlands.
not being mapped out, vessels carried
plumb line. They would drop it and
find the water fifty fathoms, and drop it
again and find it forty fathoms, and
drop it again and find it thirty fathoms,
thus discovering their near approach to
the shore.
In the spring, summer and autumn the
Mediterranean sea was white with the
wings of ships, but at the first wintry
blast they hied themselves to the near
est harbor, although now the worlds
commerce prospers in January as well as
in June, and in midwinter, all over the
wide and stormy deep, there float pal
aces of light, trampling the pillows I'M
der foot, and showering the sparks of
terrible furnaces on the wild wind; and
the Christian passenger, tippeted and
shawled, sits under the shelter of the
smokestaek, looking off upon the phos-
phorescent deep, on which is written, in
scrolls of foam and fire: ssThy way, o
God, is in the sea, and Thy path in the
great waters!"
1t is in those days of early navigation
that see group of men, women and
children on the beach of the Mediter-
ranean. Paul is about to leave the con-
gregation to whom he had preached and
they are come down to see him off. It
is solemn thing to part. There are so
many traps that wait for a mans feet.
The solid ground may break through.
and the sea-how many dark mysteries