Connecticut western news., 1892-01-21
NATURE TEACHES.
DR. TALMAGE FINDS AN IMPRESSIVE
 LESSON IN THE ECHO.

LESSON IN THE ECHO.
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 dren Through the Memory of Their
 Pious Parents.
 BROOKLYN. Jan. l7.-Dr. Talmage gave new illustration i'll his sermon this morning of his mastery of the art of drawing spiritual lessons from common natural phenomena. His subject was Echoes" and his text Ezekial vii. ', The sounding again of the mountains.
 At last l have found it. The Bible has it i'll recognition of all phases of the natural world from the aurora of the midnight heavens to the l,hos- phorescence of the mbled sea. But the well known sound that we call the Echo found not until d few days ago discovered it ill my text. The sounding again of the mountains. :" That is the Echo. Ezekiel of the text had heard it again and again.
 Born among mountains and in his journey to distant exile he had passed among mountains, and it was natural that all through his writings there should loom up the mountains. Among them he had heard the sound of cataracts and of tempests in wrestle with oak and cedar. and the voices of wild beasts; but man of so poetic a nature as Ezekiel could not allow another sound. viz, the Echo. to be disregarded. and so he gives us ill our text The sounding again of the mountains.
 ANALOGY OF MORAL AND MATERIAL.
 Greek mythology represents the Echo as a nymph, the daughter of Earth and Air, following Narcissus through forests and into grottoes and every whither. and SO strange and weird aud startling is the Echo l do not wonder that the supelstitious have lifted it into the supernatural You and l ill boyhood or girlhood ex perimented with this responsiveness of sound. Standing half way between the house and barn, we shouted | tions; or out among the mountains back of our home. on some long tramp. we stopped and made excla- nations with full lungs just to hear what Ezekiel calls The sounding again of the mountains.
 The Echo has frightened many d child and many q man. It is no tame thing after you have spoken to hear the same words repeated by the in- visible. All the silences are filled with voices ready to answer. Yet it would not be SO startling if they Baid something else. but why do those lips of the air say just what you say2 Do they mean to mock or mean to please? Who are you and where gre you. thou wondrous Echo2 Some times its response is a reiteration. The shot of gun. the clapping of the hands. the beating of a drum, the voice of a violin are sometimes r3- peated many times by the Echo. ! Near Coblentz that which is said writer says that near Milan. Italy. there were seventy such reflections of sound to one snap of a pistol. Play Il bugle near a lake of Killarney and the tune is played back to you as dis tinctly as when you played it. There Is well two hundred and ten feet deep at Carisbrooke castle ill the Isle of Wight. Drop d pin into that well and the sound of its fall comes to the top of the well distinctly.
 A blast from an Alpine horn comes back from the rocks of Jungfrau in surge after surge of reflected sound. until it seems as if every peak had lifted and blown an Alpine horn. But have you noticed and this is the reason for the present discourse that this Echo in the natural world has its analogy in the moral and re- [ liglous worldI Have you noticed the tremendous fact that what we say and do comes back in recoiled glad ness or dlsasteri About this reso- nance preach this sermon.
 First Parental teaching and ex- ample have their Echo ill the charac- terof descendants. Exceptions! Oh. yes. So i'll the natural world there may be no Echo or d distorted Echo, by reason of peculiar proXimities, but the general rule is that the character of the children is the Echo of the character of parents. The general rule is that good parents have good children and bad parents have bad children. If the old man is a crank, his son is apt to be crank and the grandchild crank
 The tendency Is so mighty in that direction that it will get worse and worse unless some hero or heroine iii that line shall rise and say: Here By the help of (iod, l will stand this no longer. Against this hereditary tendency to queerneSs l protest. And he or she will set up an altar and magnificent life that will re verse things, and there will be no more cr;tnlls among that kindred
 in another family the father and mother are conserrated people. What they do is right; what they teach is right. The boys may for some time be wild and the daughters worldly, but watch! Years pass on, perhaps ten years. twenty years, and you go back to the church where the father and mother uSesl to le consist ent members.
 You have heard nothing about the family for twenty years, and Ut the uoor of the church you see the sex ton and you ask him. Where is old MT. WpbStcr2' 'Oh, he has been , | deaI many wears" '.Whare is Mrs