Evening capital journal. (Salem, Or.) 1888-1893, 1892-05-31
I VALUABLE LESSON.
EXTRACTED FROM A TEXT APPAR-
EMILY BARREN OF SUGGESTIONS.


Dc IN Novel Lines Of Pulpit oratory.
y BRooKL1N, May 99.-Dr. Talmage
:, rave a fresh illustration this morning OF
the power he possesses of extracting
e. valuable lessons from a text which
preachers have generally neglected as
y barren ground. His sermon was based
II on the text Psalms lxxxi, q, II answered
u thee in the secret place Of thunder"
~ Il IS past midnight, and two o'clock in
9. the morning, far enough from sunset
and sunrise to make the darkness very
~ thick, and the Egyptian army in pursuit
Of the escaping Israelites are on the bot
tom Of the Red sea, its waters having
been set up on either side in masonry of
sapphire, for God can make a wall as
solid out of water as out of granite, and
tho trowels with which these two walls
were built were none the less powerful
muse invisible Such walls had never
ore been lifted.
Fhen saw the waters Of the Red sea
ing through the Suez canal they were
and beautiful and flowing like
waters, but tonight, as the Egyp-
look up TO them built into walls,
on one side and now on the other,
must have been frowning waters,
it was probable that the same power
It lifted them up might suddenly fling
81 eIn prostrate. A great lantern of cloud
n ang over this chasm between the two
y ailg. The door of that lantern was
4 rened toward the Israelites ahead, Civ
/ az them light, and the back of the Ian
{px or1 he
q growled and rumbled and Jared with
4 thunder; not thunder like that which
4 cheers the earth after drought, prolnis-
! ing the refreshing shower, but charged
and surcharged with threats of doom.
The Egyptian captains lost their pres
ence Of mind, and the horses reared and
snorted and would not answer to their
bits, and the chariot wheels got inter
I locked and torn of. and the charioteers
were hurled headlong, and the Red sen
fell on all the host. The confusing and
confounding thunder was in answer TO
the prayer of the Israelites. 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 ensepulcher
their Egyptian pursuers in one great
sarcophagus, 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, 81 answered thee in the secret place
of thunder"
A POWER AND MYSTERY.
Now thunder, all up and down the
Bible, is the symbol of power. The Egyp-
tian plague of hail was accompanied
with this full diapason of the heavens
While Samuel and his men were making
burnt offering of lamb, and the Phil
istines were about to attack them, it was
by terrorizing thunder they were dis
comhted. Job, who was a combination
of the Dantesque and the Miltonic, was
solemnized on this reverberation Of the
heavens, and cried, "The thunder of his
power, who can understandY' and ho
challenges the universe by saying, "Canst
thou thunder with voice like him"
and he throws Rosa Bonheur's "IIorse
Fair" into the shade by the Bible photo
graph of warhorse, when he describes
his neck as "clothed with thunder" Be-
cause of the power of James and John,
they were called "the sons of thunder"
The law given on the basaltic crags Of |
Mount Sinai was emphasized with this |
cloudy ebullition. The skies ali around |
about st. John at Patrpos were full of
the thunder of war, and the thunder of |
Christly triumph, and tho thunder of |
resurrection, and the thunder of eternity. |
But when my text says, ~ answered |
thee in the secret place Of thunder" it |
suggests there is some mystery about |
che thunder. To the ancients the cause
Of this bombarding the earth with loud
sound must have been more of a mys-
terry than IL is to us. The hghtnings,
which were 10 them wild monsters
'anging through the skies, in our time
lave been domesticated. We harness
electricity to vehicles and we cage it in
lamps, and every schoolboy knows some
thing about the fact that il is the passage
OF electricity from cloud to cloud that
makes the heavenly racket which we
call thunder. But, after all that chem
isfry 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 DO
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 batteries
have been doing their work for a thou
sand years to come and learned men
have discoursed 70 the utmost about
atmospheric electricity and magnetic
electricity and galvanic electricity and
thersnotic electricity and frictional elee-
tiicity and positive electricity and mega
tive electricity my text viii be as sug-
geatiye as II is today, when 1t speaks Of
the secret place OF thunder.
RESULT OF A woMAN's PRAYERS.
Now right along by a 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 I
ia The world has hiding place, and in
many cases Il Is never discovered at all.
will use a similitude. can give only
HE dim outline Of particular case, for I
many Of the remarkable circumstances
A have forgotten. Many years ago there !
was large church. II was character
ize1 BY strange and unaccOmtable con- {
Fenuions. There were no great reviyals, I
bat individual cases Of spiritual arrest 4
aud transformation '
a young man sat In one Of the front 3
pewa He was q graduate Of Yale, bril-
liant a. the north star and nOtoriOuelv q