The Penn's Grove record., 1891-07-10

t"e IA III thO
needle gun, which decided the battle Of
Sadowa, was 1t a mere accident9 When a
farmers boy showed Butcher q short cut by
which he could bring his army up soon
enough to decide Waterloo for England, was
1t a mere ACCIDENT When Lord Byron took
a piece of money and tossed it up to decide
whether or not he should be afianced to Miss
Millbank, was 1t a mere accident which side
OF the money was up and which was down.
When the Christian army was besiged at
Baziers, and q drunken drummer came In at
midnight and rang the alarm bell. not know
ing what he was doing, but waking up the
host In time to fight their enemies that mo-
ment arriving, was it was accident?
When In one of the Irish wars a starving
mother, flying with her starving child, sank
down and tainted on the rocks in the night
and her hand fell on a warm bottle of milk,
did that just happen so? God is either in the
affairs Of men or our religion is worth moth
ing at all, and you had better take it away
from us, and instead of this Bible, which
teaches the doctrine, give us a secular book,
and let us, as the famous Mr.. Fox, the MEM
Der of parliament, in his last hour. cry out:
Read me the eighth book of Virgil"
Oil my friends, let us rouse up to in ap-
probation OF the fact that all the affairs Of
our life are under a kings command and un-
horse, B~ucephalus, would allow anybody to
mount him when he was embarrassed, but as
| soon as they put on that war horse. Bucepha-
lus, the saddle and trappings of the con-
queror he would allow no one but Alexander
to touch him. And il a ~soulless horse could
have so much pride in his owner, shall not
W immortals exult In the fact that we are
| owned by a king? Hath the rain a fatherr'
Again my subject teaches me that Gods
dealings with as are inexplicable. That was
the original force of my text. The rain was
agreat mystery to the ancients. They could
| not understand how the water should get
into the cloud, and getting there, how IL
should be suspended, or falling, why 1t should
come dow in drops Modern science comes
along and says there are tive portions of air
Of different temperature, and they are
charged with moisture, and the one portion
Of air decreases in temperature 30 the water
may no longer be held in vapor, and it falls.
And they tells us that some of the clouds
that look to be only as large as mans hand,
| and to be almost quiet In the heavens, are
great mountains Of mist four thousand feet
from base to top, and that they rush miles a
minute.
But after all the brilliant experiments of
DR.. James Hutton, and Saussure, and other
| scientists there is an infinits mystery about
the rain. There is an ocean of the unfath-
enable in every raindrop, and God says to-
day as He said in the time OF Job, IF you
cannot understand one drop Of rain, do not
l Dc suTpE lStl IL u ucdtliko j lou II III
explicable." Why does that aged man, de-
crepit, ~beggared, vicious, sick Of the world.
| and the world sick of him, live on, while
here is a man in mid life, consecrated to
| God, hard working, useful in every respect,
who diesf Why does that old gossip, CAD
ding along the streetabout everybody's bust
ness but her own, have such good health,
while the Christian mother, with a flock OF
| little ones about her whom she Is preparing
| for usefulness and for heaven-the mother
| who you think could not be spared al hour
from that household-why does she lie down
and die with a cancerf
Why does that man, selfish to the core, go
on adding fortune to fortune, consuming
| everything on himself, continue to prosper,
while that man, who has been giving ten per
cent. of all his income to God and the church,
| goes into bankruptcy Before we make
stark fools of ourselves, let US stop pressing
| this everlasting 'why." Let us worship
where we cannot understand. Let a man
take that one question, "Whyr and follow
In wretchedness and perdition. We want in
our theology fewer interrogation marks and
| more exclamation points. Heaven Is the
| place for explanation. Earth is the place for
trust. II you cannot understand 30 minute
a thing as a raindrop how can yon expect
to understand Gods dealingss "Hath the
| rain a father?'
fAkhtu, tuy bCAb hhnhoS ~ AAhh ptae pho
rain OF tears is of divine origin. Great
| clouds Of trouble sometimes hover over us
| They are black, and they are gorged, and
they are thunderous. They are more por-
~tentious than Salvador or Claude ever
painted-clouds Of poverty, or persecution,
or bereavement. They hover over us, and
\ they get darker and blacker, and after
awhile a tear starts, and we think by an
extra pressure of the eyelid to stop it. 9th
ers follow, and after awhile there is a show
er of fearful emotion. Yea, there Is a rain
Of tears. 'Hath that rain a fatherp'
"Oh," you say. "a tear is nothing but a
dropof limpid fluid secreted by the ZACH,
rymal gland-it is only a sign OF weak eyes"
Great mistake. 1t Is one OF the Lords rich
est benedictions to the world. There are
people in Blackwell's Island insane asylum,
and at Utica, and at all the asylums OF this
land, who were demented by the fact that
they could not cry at the right Sad
a maniac in one Of our public institutions
under q gospel sermon that started the tears.
"Do YOU see that teari that Is the first l
have wept for twelve years. think 1t VIII
help m brain"
There are a great many in the grave who
could not stand any longer under tine glacier
of trouble. II that glacier had only melted
into weeping they could have endured it.
There nave been times in your life when you
would nave given the world, If you had pos
sessed it, for one tear. You could shrek,
you could ~blaspheme, but you could not cry;
Have you never seen a man holding the hand
OF a dead wife, who had been all the world
TO hims The temples livid with excitement,
the eye dry and frantic, no moisture on the
upper or lower lid You saw there were
bolts Of anger in the cloud, but no ram; Io
your Christian comfort. he said, Don
talk to me about God; there is no God, or il
there is l hate Him; don't talk to me about
God would He have left me and these mother
less children"
But a few hours or days after. coming
across some lead pencil that she owned In
life, or some letters which she wrote when
he was away from home, with an cutlery that
appals, there bursts the fountain OF tears,
and as the sunlight of Gods consolation
strikes that fountain of tears, You find out
that IL Is a tender-hearted, merciful, pitifui
and all compassionate God who was the
Father Of that rain. "Oh," you say, sit is
absurd to think that God is going to watch
over tears" No, my friends. There are
three or four kinds OF them that God counts,
bottles and eternizes. First, there are all
parental tears and there are more OF these
fhan any other kind, because the most of
the race die in infancy, and that keeps pa
rents mourning all around the world. They
never get over it. They may live to shout
and sing afterward, but there IS always a
corridor in the soul that is silent, though 1t
l oAiLD
Ny parents never mentioned the death of a
child who died fifty years before without a
tremor in the voice and a sigh, oh, how deep
fetched! It was better she o die. 1t was
a mercy she should die. She would have
been a lifelong invalid. But you cannot argue
away a parents grief. How often you heai
the moan: ''0h, my child, my cblde' Their
there are the filial tears. Little children soor
get over the loss of parents. They are easily
diverted with a new toy. But where is thu
man that has come to thirty or forty or fifty
years of age, who can think of the old peo-
pie without having all the fountains OF hi
soul stirred upf You may have had TO TAX
care Of her a good many years but you
never can forget how she used to take cars
of you.
There rave been many sea captains CON-
verted in our church, aud the popularity Of
them was that they were nearly all prayed
ashoreby their mothers though the mothers
went into the lust soon after they went to
sea. Have you never heard an DID man in
delirium Of some sickness call for hismotheri
The fact is We get so used to calling for her
the first ten years OF our life We never get
over it, N when she goes ava from US il
makes deep sorrow. You sometimes, per-
haps, In days Of trouble and darkness. when
the world would say, ''You ought to be able
TO take care Of yourself'-you wake. up from
your dreams finding yourself saying, .'Oh,
motheri mother 70 Have these tears no d.
vine originf Why, take all the warm hearts