Burlington weekly free press. [volume] (Burlington, Vt.) 1866-1928, 1892-03-31

thousands Oh people may see tHtlf llNC-
nesses. For instance, all those people Who
while they would not rob their ucighh0r "
a farthing, appropriate the money and the
treasure of the public. A man has Il house
to sell, and he tells his customer il is worth
10000 Next day the assessor comes
around and the owner says it is worth $5,-
600 The government of the United States
took off the tax from personal income,
among Other reasons because so few people
would tell the truth, and many a man with
an income of hundreds of dollars day
made statements which seemed to imply
he was about to be handed over to the over
seer of the poor.
Careful to pay their passage from Liver
pool to New York, yet smuggling in their
Saratoga trunk ten silk dresses from Paris
and half dozen watches from Geneva,
Switzerland, telling the custom house Of
ficer on the wharf, "There is nothing in
that trunk but wearing apparel" and put
ting five dollar gold piece in his hand TO
punctuate the statement.
Described in the text are all those who
are particular never to break the law of
grammar, and who want all their Ian
guage an elegant specimen of syntaX,
straining out all the inaccuracies of
speech with fine sieve of literary criti
cism, while through their conversation go
SANDER and innuendo and profanity and
falsehood larger than whole caravan of
camels, when they might better fracture
every law of the language and shock their
intellectual taste, and better let every verb
seek in vain for its nomnative, and every
noun for its government, and every prepo-
sition lose it's way in the sentence, and adj
jectives and participles and pronouns get
into a grand riot worthy of the Fourth
ward on election day, than to commit a
moral inaccuracy. Better swallow a thou
sand gnats than one camel.
THE PETTY FAULT FINDERS.
Such persons are also described in the
text who are very much alarmed about
the small faults of others and have no
alarm about their own great transgres-
sions. There are in every community and
in every church watchdogs who feel called
upon to keep their eyes on others and
growl. They are full of suspicious. They
wonder if that man is not dishonest if that
man is not unclean, if there is not something
wrong about the other man. They are al
ways the first to hear of anything wrong.
Vultures are always the first to smell car
rion. They are self appointed detectives.
| lay this down as n rule without any eX-
ception-that those people who have the
most faults themselves are most merciless
in their watching of others. From scalp
of head to sole of foot they are full Of jeal-
ousies and hypercriticisms.
They spend their life in hunting for
muskrats and mud turtles instead of hunt
ing for Rocky mountain eagles; always for
something mean instead of something
grand. They look at their neighbors' i'm
projections through microscope, and look
al hal inn rife I RI t.,la
scope upside down. Twenty faults of their
own do not hurt them half so much as one
fault of somebody else. Their neighbors'
imperfections are like gnats, and they
strain them out; their own imperfections
are like camels, and they swallow them.
But lest any ight think they escape
the scrutiny of the text have to tell you
that we all come under the divine satire
when we make the questions of time more
prominent than the questions of eternity.
Come now, let us all go into the confess
siOnal. Are not all tempted to make the
question, Where shall live now9 greater
than the question, Where shall l live for
ever? How shall get more dollars here?
greater than the question, How shall lay
up treasures in heaven? the question, How
shall pay my debts to man? greater than
the question, How shall | meet my obliga-
lions to God? the question, How shall
gain the world? greater than the question:
What if | lose my soul? the question, Why
did God let sin come into the world greater
| than the question, How shall | get it eX-
tlrpated from my nature: the question,
| What shall do with the twenty or forty
\ or seventy years of my suDlunar existence,
greater that the question, What shall do
with the millions Of cycles of my POSTER
restrial existence? Time how small it is.
Eternity, how vast it is! The former more
insignificant in comparison with the latter
than "A gnat is insignificant when COM
pared with camel. We lodged the text
We said, That doesn't mean me, and that
doesn't mean me-" and with a ruinous be-
nevoence we are giving the whole sermon
| away.
But let us all surrender to the charge
What an ado about things here. What
| poor preparation for a great eternity. AS
! though minnow were larger than behc-
| moth, as though a swallow took wider cir
cult than an albatross, as though nettle
were taller than Lebanon cedar, as
| though gnat were greater than a camel,
as though minute were longer than a
century, as though time We're higher,
deeper, broader than eternity. So the
text which flashed with lightning of wit
as Christ uttered it, is followed by the
| crashing thunders of awful catastrophe to
! those who make the questions of time
| greater than the questions of the future,
| the oncoming, overshadowing future. 0
/ Eternity! Eternity Eternity
|