Weekly expositor. (Brockway Centre, Mich.) 1882-1894, 1892-01-22
THE ECHOES.
THE SUBJECT OF DR.. TALMACE'S
LATEST SERMON.

BROOKLYN, N. Y. Jan. II. 1902. DR.
Talmage gave n new illustration in 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:
Ezelxil 7: 7, ''The sounding again of the
mountains"
At last have found it. The Bible
has in it recognition of all phases of
the natural world from the aurora of
the midnight heavens to the phosphor-
essence OF the tumbled sea. But the
well-known sound that we call the
echo, / found not until few days ago
discovered it in my text: "The sound
ng again of the mountains" That is
the Echo. Ezekiel of the teXte 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 the wild beasts, but
man of so poetic nature as Ezekiel
could not allow another sound, viz,
the Echo, to be disregarded, and so he
gives us in our text "the sounding
again of the mountains"
Greek mythology represented the
Echo as a nymph, the daughter of
Earth and Air, following Narcissus
through the forests and into grottoes
and every whittier, and so strange and
weird and startling is the Echo do not
wonder that the superstitious have
lifted it into the supernatural. You
and 1 in boyhood or girlhood expert
mented with this responsiveness of
sound. Standing halfway between the
house and barn, we shouted many
time to hear the reverberations, or out
among the mountains back of our
home, on some long tramp, we stopped
and made exclamation with full lungs
Just to hear what Ezekiel calls
"the sounding again OF the
mountains" The Echo has fright
ened many a child and many a man.
1t is no tame thing after you have
spoken 10 hear the same words repeated
by the invisible. All the silences are
filled with voices ready to answer. Yet
it would not be so startling if they said
something else, but why do those lips
of the air say just what you say? Do
they mean to mock or mean to please?
Who are you and where are you, thou
wonderous Echo? Sometimes its re-
spouse is reiteration. The shot of n
gun the clapping of hands, the beating
of a drum, the voice of violin are some-
times repeated many times by the
Echo Near Coblentz-that which
is said has seventeen echoes. In
1866, writer says that near Milan,
Italy, there were seventy such reilec-
tons of sound to one snap of a pistol.
Play bugle near Lake of Killarney
and the tune is played back to you as
distinctly as when you played it.
There is a well 2lo feet deep at Carts
brooke Castle in the Isle of Wight.
Dropa pin into that well, and the sound
of its fall comes to the top Of the well
distinctly. A blast of 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 religious world7 Have
you noticed the tremendous fact that
what we say and do comes back
in recoiled gladness or disaster?
So, also, The Judgment day will be
an echo of all our other days. The
universe needs such a day for there are
so many things in the world that need
to be fixed up and explained. If God
had not appointed such day all the
nations would cry out, "Oh, God, give
us Judgment day." But we are apt
TO think of it and speak about it
as a day away off in the future,
having no special connection with
this day or any other day. The fact is
that we are now making up its voices,
its trumpets will only sound back again
to us what we now say and do. That
Is the meaning of all that Scripture
which says that Christ will on that day
address the soul, saying, 81 was naked
and We clothed me, / was sick and in
prison and ye visited me-"
My subject advances to tell you that
eternity itself is only an Echo of time.
Mind you, the analogy warrants NY
saying this The Echo is not always
exactly in kind like the sound origin
ally projected Lord Raleigh says that
a woman's voice sounding from grove
was returned an octave higher. a
scientist playing a flute in Fairfax
county, Va, found that all the notes
were returned, although some of them
came in raised pitch. A trumpet
sounded ten times near Glasgow,
Scotland, and the ten notes were all re-
peated, but third lower. And the
spiritual law corresponds with the
natural world. What we do otgood or
bad may not come back TO us in just
the proportion we expect it, but come
back it will; it may be from a higher
gladness than we thought or from
deeper woe, from mightier conqueror
or from a worse captive, from n higher
throne or deeper dungeon. Our