The united opinion. [volume] (Bradford, Vt.) 1881-1970, 1892-01-22
NATURE TEACHES.
hR. TALMAGE FINDS AN UMPIRE SsIvE
Il .odoLESSON IN THE ECHO. VA

itnssry Act and WORD Has Eternal Con-
seauences-The Redemption OF Chill
dreni through the Memory Of Their
Pioxs Parents. glf
n BROOKLYN, Jan. IL. DIR. Talmage
gave new illustration in his sermon
this morning of his mastery of the
art of drawing spiritual lessons from
9 sommon natural phenomena. His
subject was Echoes" and his text
Ezekial vii, 2, THE sounding again
Of the mountains"
l9N At last have found it. The Bible
has it in a recognition of all phases of
the natural world from the aurora
Of the midnight heavens to the phos-
phorescence 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
sounding again of the mountains"
That is the Echo. Ezekiel of the text
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 wild beasts; but man of
SO poetic a 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.
ANALOGY OF MORAL AND MATERIAL.
| Greek mythology represents the
Echo as a nymph, the daughter of
Earth and Air, following Narcissus
through forests and into grottoes and
every whittier, and so strange and
weird and startling is the Echo l do
not wonder that the superstitious
have lifted it into the supernatural.
You and | in boyhood or girlhood ex
perimented with this responsiveness
Of sound Standing half way between
the house and barn, we shouted
many a time to hear the reverbera-
tons; or out among the mountains
back of our home, on some long
tramp, we stopped and made excla-
nations with full lungs just to hear
what Ezekiel calls THE sounding
again of the mountains" tl3aiHg
1a The Echo has frightened many a
child and many a man. 1t is no tame
thing after you have spoken to hear
the same words repeated by the in
visible. All the silences are filed
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 say2
Do they mean to mock or mean to
please9 Who are you and where are
you, thou wondrous Echo? Some
times its response is a reiteration.
The shot Of gun, the clapping of the
hands. the beating of drum, the
voice of violin are sometimes re-
peated many times by the Echo.
" Near Coblentz-t that which is said
has seventeen Echoes In 1866 a
writer says that near Milan, Italy,
there were seventy such reflections
OF sound to one snap of a pistol. Play
a bugle near a lake of Killarney and
the tune is played back to you as dis
tinctly as when you played it. There
is well two hundred and ten feet
deep at Carisbrooke castle in the Isle
of Wight Drop pin into that well
and the sound of it's fall comes to the
top of the well distinctly. b " -u
IA blast from an Alpine horn comes
back from the rocks of Jungfrau in
stirge after surge of reflected sound,
until it seems as if every peak had
lifted and blown an Alpine horn.
But have you noticed this is
the reason for the present discourse
that this Echo in the natural work.
has its analogy in the moral and re-
ligious world2 Have you noticed the
tremendous fact that what we say
and do comes back in recoiled glad
ness or disaster9 About this reso-
nance preach this sermon.
First-Parental teaching and ex-
ample have their Echo in the charac-
ter of descendants. Exceptions2 Oh,
yes. So in the natural world there
may be no Echo or distorted Echo,
by reason of peculiar proximities, but
the general rule is that the character
of the children is the Echo of the
character of parents. The general
rule is that good parents have good
children and bad parents have bad
children. If the old man is crank,
his son is apt to be a crank and the
grandchild crank .t 4
The tendency is so mighty in that
direction that it will get worse and
worse unless some hero or heroine in
that line shall rise and say: ''Herel
BY the help of God, will stand this
no longer. Against this hereditary
tendency to queerness | protest"
And he or she will set up an altar
and a magnificent life that will re-
verse things, and there will be no
m GRO Sf1sa =, he ar,,cy,cr tlof I~indroI