Audubon County Republican. [volume] (Audubon, Audubon Co., Iowa) 1885-1894, 1892-06-02
TABERNACLE PULPIT.
TALMAGE ON THE SECRET
PLACE OF THUNDER.
A Beautiful Sermon from q Familiar
Bible Text-How Some Notable Con-

thick, and the Egyptian army in pur-
suit OF the escaping Israelites are on
the bottom of the Red sea, its waters
having been set up on either side in
masonry of sapphire, for God can make
of granite, and the trowels with
which these two walls were
built were none the less
powerful because invisible Such walls
had never before been lifted. When /
saw the waters of the Red sea rolling
through the Suez canal, they were blue
and beautiful and flowing like other
waters, but tonight, AS the Egyptians
look up to them built into walls, now
on one side and now on the other, they
must have been frowning waters, for
it was probable that the same power
that lifted them up might suddenly
fling them PROSTATE. A great lantern
of cloud hung over this chasm between
the two walls. The door of that
lantern was opened toward the Is
raelites ahead, giving them light,
and the back of the lantern was
toward the Egyptians, and it growled
and rumbled and Jared with thunder;
not thunder like that which cheers the
earth after a drought, promising the
refreshing shower, but charged and
surcharged with threats of doom. The
Egyptian captains lost their presence
of mind, and the horses reared and
snorted and would not answer to their
bits, and the chariot wheels got inter
locked and torn off, and the charioteers
were hurled headlong, and the Red
sea fell on all the host.
The confusing and confounding
thunder was in answer to the prayer OF
the Israeites. With their backs cut by
the lash and their feet bleeding, and
their bodies decrepit with the suffering
of whole generations, they had asked
Almighty God to ensepulchre their
Egyptian pursuers in one great sarcoph-
agus, and the splash and the roar of
the Red sea as it dropped to its natural
bed were only the shutting of the
sarcophagus on dead host That is
the meaning of the text when God
says: II answered thee in the secret
place of thunder"
/ Now, thunder, all up and down the
bible, is the symbol of power. Small
wits depreciate the thunder and say,
at is the lightning that strikes" But
God evidently thinks the thunder of
some Importance or he would not make
so much of it, That man must be with
out imagination, and without sensitive
ness, and without religion who can
without emotion see the convention of
summer clouds called to order by the
falling gavel of the thunder
bolt There is nothing in the
ICES me as the thunder The Egyptian
plague of hail was accompanied with
this full diapason of the heavens.
While Samuel and his men were MAX
ing burnt offering of a lamb, and the
PhilistInes were about to attack them,
it was by terrorizing thunder they
were discounted. Job, who was a
combination of the Dantesque and the
Miltonic, was solemnizcd by this re-
verberat ton of the heavens, and cried:
"The thunder of his power, who
can understand" and he challenges
the universe by saying: "Can'st
thou thunder with voice like hIm?"
and he throws Rosa Bonheur's Horse
Fair into the shade by the bible pho
tOgraph of war horse, when he de-
scribes his neck as clothed with thun-
der" Because of the power of James
and John, they were called 1.-THE sons
of thunder The law given on the
basaltic crags of Mount Sanai was en-
pathasized with this cloudy ebullition.
The skies all around about st. John at
Patmos were full of the thunder of war
and the thunder of Christly triumph
and the thunder of resurrection and
the thunder of eternity.
But, when my ext says, Unanswered
thee in the secret pace of thunder" it
suggests there is some mystery about
the thunder. To the ancients the cause
of this bonn harding the earth with loud
sound must have been more of mystery
than it is to us. The ltghtnings, which
were to them wild monsters ranging
through the skies in our time have been
domesticated. We harness electricity to
vehicles, and we cage it in lamps, and
every schoolbOy knows something
about the fact that it is the
passage of electricity from cloud
to cloud that makes the heav-
emily racket which we call thun-
der. But, after all that chemistry has
taught the world, there are mysteries
about this skyey resonance, and my
text, true in the time of the Psalmist,
is true now and always will be true,
that there is some secret about the
place of thunder.
To one thing known about the thun-
der, there are a hundred things not
known. After all the scientific bat
teries have been doing their work for
a thousand years to come and learned
men have discoursed TO the utmost
about atmospheric electricity and mag
netic electricity and galvanic electricity
and thermotic electricity and FRACTIONAL
electricity and positive electricity and
negative electricity, my text will be as
suggestive as it is to-day, when il
speaks of the secret place of thunder.
Now, right along by natural law,
there is always a spiritual law. AS
there is a secret place of natural thun-
der there is secret place of moral
thunder. In other words, the religious
power that you see abroad in the
church and in the world has hiding
place, and in many cases it Is never
discovered at all. / will use a simili-
tude. can give only the dim outline
of particular case, for many of the re-
markable circumstances ! have forgot
ten. Many years ago there was large
church. 1t was characterized by strange
and unaccounta BILE conversions. There
were no great revivals, but indi-
vidual cases of spiritual arrest and
transformation. A young man sat in
one of the front pews. He was grad
uate OF Yale, brilliant as the North
star and VIGOROUSLY dissolute. Every
body knew him and liked him for his
geniality but deplored his moral
arrantry, To please his parents he