Herald and news. [volume] (West Randolph, Vt.) 1878-1943, 1893-03-15

! ULODEAh w AhAt ny mAoAOIluuEr k0nG 0ut
OF ones possession, on the fiftieth year
it came back to him If he had fooled
IL away, it was returned without a
farthing TO pay. If a man had been
e%nslaved, he was, in that year, enamel
pated. A trumpet was sounded loud
and clear and long, and it was the
trumpet of jubilee. They shook hands,
they laughed, they congratulated. What
a time it was, thai fiftieth year, And
if under the old dispense ton it was
such a glad time, under our new and
more glorious dispensation let all who
have come to the hfties zeal the trum-
pet of jubilee that now blow. That
was the allusion made by Mr.. Toplady,
the great hymnologist, when he wrote;
Blow yc the trumpet. blow
The gladly solemn sound,
Let all the nations know.
To earth's remotest bound,
The year OF jubilee IS come;
Return, We ransomed sinners, homo.
We who have sold for naught
Your heritage above,
Shall have il back unbought,
The gift OF Jesus's love.
The year of jubilee has come;
AtN1AAS
My sermon next accosts the sixties.
The beginning of that decade is more
startling than any other. In his
chronological journey, the man rides
rather smoothly over the figures "2'
and ''s" and -" and IS, but the figure
80" gives him a big jolt He says: 1T
cannot be that l am sixty. Let me ex-
anime the old family record / guess
they made a mistake. They got my
name down wrong in the roll of
births" But no, the older brothers or
sisters remember the time of his advent,
and there is some relative a year older,
and another relative a year younger,
and sure enough the fact is established
beyond all disputation. Sixty! Now
your great danger is the Re mptation to
fold up your faculties and quit You
will feel a tendency to reminisce. IL
you do not look put you will begin al
most everything with the words,
''When / was a boy" But y on ought
to make the sixties more memoir
able for God and the truth than
the fifties or the forties or the
thirties. You ought to do more
during the next ten years than you did
in any thirty years of your life, because
of all the experience you have had.
You have committed enough mistakes
in life to make yon wise above your
juniors. Now. under the accommodating
light of your past experimenting, go TO
work for God as never before. When a
man in the sixties folds up his energies
and feels that he has done enough. it is
the devil of Incidence to which he is
surrendering, and God generally takes
the man at his word and let's him die
right away. His brain, that under ten
sion of hard work was active, now sud-
denly shrivels- Men, whether they
retire from secular or religious work,
generally retire to the grave. No well
man has a right to retire. The world
was made for work. There remaineth
a rest for the people of God, but it is ia
a sphere beyond the reach of telescopes
The military charge that decided n of
the greatest battles of the ages-the
battle of Waterloo-was not made until
s o'clock in the evening. but some
of you propose to go into camp at q
o'clock in tine afternoon.
My subject next accosts those in the
seventies and hey ond. My word to them
is con~gratulation. You have got near
ly, If not quite through. You have
safely crossed the sea of life and are
about to enter the harbor. You have
fought at Gettysburg and the war is
over. Here and there a skirmish with
the remaining sin of your own heart
and the sin of the world. but | guess
you are about done. There may he
some work for you yet on small or large
scale. Bismarck of Germany vigorous
in the eighties. The prime minister of
England strong at eighty-four. Haydn
composing his o~ratorio The Creation"
at seventy years of age Isocrates
doing some Of his best work at seventy
four. Plato busy thinking for all sue
ceeding centuries at eighty-one Noah
Webster. after making mis- world-re-
nowned die tionary, hard at work until
eighty-ive years old; Rev. Daniel Waldo
praying in my pulpit at one hundred
years of age; Humboldt producing the
immortal Cosmos at se~venty-six years.
William Blake, al sixty-seven learning
Italian so as to read Dante in the origi-
nal. Lord Cockburn at eighty-seven
writing his best treatise John Wesley
stirring great audiences at eighty-dve.
William c. Bryant without spectacles,
reading in my house 'Thanatopsis' at
eighty-three years of age Christian
men and woman in all departments
serving God after becoming septuage-
narians and -octogeuarians and nonoge-
ns<ians prove that there In possible