Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1892-01-18

The successful merchant who ut
tered the kind words did not know
how much good he was doing, but
the Echo viii come back in five life
times of virtue and usefulness and
five Christian deathbeds and five
heavens. From all the mountains of
rapture and all the mountains Of
glory and all the mountains of eter
nifty he will catch what Ezekiel in
my text styles The sounding again
of the mountains
Yea, take a step further in this
subject and say that our own eternity
will be a reverberation of our own
earthly lifetime What we are here
we will be there, only on a larger
scale Dissolution will tear down the
body and enbank it, but our faculties
Of mind and soul will go right on
without the hesitancy Of a moment
and without any change except en-
largement and intensificatiOn There
will be no more difference than be
tween lion behind the iron bars and
lion escaped into the field, between
an eagle in the cage and an eagle III
the sky. Good here, good there; bad
here, bad there. Time is only a be-
dwarfed eternity. Eternity is only
an enlarged time. In this life our
soul is in dry dock.
The moment we leave this life we
are launched for our great voyage,
and we sail on for centuries quintil-
lion, but the ship does not change it's
fundamental structure after it gets
out of the dry dock; it does not pass
from brig to schooner or from
schooner to man-Of-war What we
are when launched from this world
we will be in the world to come. Oh,
God! by thy converting and sancti-
flying spirit make us right here and
now, that we may be right forever!
''Well," says some one, this idea
of moral, spiritual and eternal Echo
is new to me. Is there not some way
of stopping this Echo?" My answer
is. God can, and he only" If it is
a cheerful Echo we do not want it
stopped; if baleful Echo we would
like to have it stopped. The hardest
thing in this world to do is to stop
an Echo. Many an Grafton has been
spoiled and many an orator con-
founded by an Echo. Costly churches,
cathedrals, theaters and music halls
have been ruined by an Echo. Archi-
tects have strung wires across audi
forums to arrest the Echo and hung
upholstery against the walls, hoping
to entrap it. and hundreds of thou
sands of dollars have been expended
in public buildings of this country to
keep the air from answering when it
ought to be quiet.
Aristotle and Pythagoras and Isaac
Newton and La Place and our own
Joseph Henry tried to hunt down the
Echo. but still the UNEMPLOYED realms
Of acoustics are larger than the eX-
plored. When our first Brooklyn
Tabernacle was being constructed we
were told by architects that it was of
such shape that the human voice
could not be heard in it, or, if heard,
it would be tangled in Echoes.
In state of worriment | went to
Joseph Henry, the president of the
Smithsonian institution at Washing
ton, and told him of this evil prop. :
ecy, and he replied: Il have prOba-
bly, experimental more with the laws
of sound than any other man. and |
got as far as this. Two buildings may
seem to be exactly alike and yet in
one the acoustics may be good and
in the other bad. Go ON with your
church building and trust that all
will be we'll And all was well.
Oh. this mighty law of sound Oh,
this subtle Echo There is only one
Being in the universe who thorough
ly understands 1.-THE sounding
again of the mountains.
AWFUL NATURE OF THE IMMORTAL.
And it is SO hard to destroy nat
ural Echo, how much harder to stop
a moral Echo, a spiritual Echo, an
immortal Echo. You know that the
Echoes are effected by the surfaces,
and the shape of rocks, and the depth
of ravines, and the relative position
of buildings? And once in heaven,
God will so arrange the relative pO-
sition Of mansions and temples and
thrones that one Of the everlasting
charms Of heaven will be the roll
ing, bursting, ascending, descending,
chanting Echoes All the songs we
ever sang devoutly, all the prayers
we have ever uttered earnestly, all
the Christian deeds we have ever
done, will be waiting to spring upon
us in Echo.
The scientists tell us that in this
world the roar of artillery and the
boom of the thunder are so loud, be-
cause they are a combination of
Echoes-an the hillsides, and the
caverns, and the walls furnishing a