The Hazel Green herald. [volume] (Hazel Green, Wolfe County, Ky.) 1885-19??, 1893-03-24


into his nose or bore his paw through
with n thorng' 40 important was
the fish that the god Dagon. worshiped
by the Philistines, was made half Ash
and half man. and that Is the meaning
of tho Lords indignation. when In
!. Samuel we read that this Dagon. the
fish-god, stood beside the ark of the
Lord, and Dagon was by invisible hands
dashed to pieces, because the Philis-
tines had dared to make the fish god.
That explains the Scripture passage
''Thc head OF Dagon and both the
palms of his hands were cut of upon
the thresholds; only the stump Of Dsgon
was left TO him." Now the stump Of
Dagon was the fish part The top part,
which was the figure of man. was
dashed to pieces. and the Lord, by de-
molishing everything but the stump or
fish part OF the idol, practically said,
You may keep your Ash, but know from
the way / have demolished the rest of
the idol that It is nothing Divine.
Layard and wilkinson found the fish
an object Of idolatry all through As
syria and Egypt The Nile was full Of
fish, and that explains the horrors Of the
plague that slaughtered the fnny tribe
all up and down that river, which has
been and now is the main artery of
Egypt's life. In Job you hear the
plunge OF the spear into the hippopota-
mus, as the great dramatic poet cries
out: ''Canst thou fill his skin with
barbed irons or his head with fish
spears?" Yea, the fish began TO swim In
the very first book of Genesis, where
my text records, and God said: Let
the waters bring forth nbundantly the
moving creature that hath life" Do
that God created was the fish? 1t pre-
coded the bird, the quadruped, the hui
man race. The fish has priority Of res
idence over every living thing. The
next thing done after God had kindled
for our world the golden chandelier of
the sun and the silver chandelier OF the
moon was to make the fish. The first
motion of the principle of life, prin-
ciple that all thousands of years since
have not been able to define or analyze,
the very first stir OF life was in a fish.
What an hour that was when, in the
Euphrates the Gihon. the Pison and
the Hiddeket, the four rivers of Para
disc, the waters swirled with fins and
frightened with scales. All the attri-
butes of the Infinite God were called
into action for the making Of that first
fish. Lanceolate and translucent mira
Gle! There is enough wonder in the
plate of sturgeon or in the cartilage
of a shark 20 confound the scientists.
1t does not take the universe to prove
God A fish does it. No wonder that
LinnBus and Cuvier and Agassiz and
the greatest minds of all the centuries
sat enraptured before it's anatomy. oh,
its beauty and the adaptness OF its
structure 10 the element in which II
must live; the picture gallery on the
sides of the mountain trout unveiled as
they spring up to snatch the flies; the
grayling, called the flower of fishes; the
salmon, ascending the Oregon, and the
Severn, easily leaping the falls that
would stop them; the bold perch, the
gudgeon, silver and black spotted; the
herring, moving in sqadrons five miles
long; the carp, for cunning, called the
fox of fishes; the mondrous surgeons,
formerly reserved for the tables of roy
al families and the isinglass made out
of their mem brane; the tench, called the
physician of fishes, because when APP
applied to human ailments it is said to
be curative; the lampreys, SO tempting
to the epicurean that too many of them
slew Henry H.; aye, the whole world Of
fishes. Enough of them floating up
and down the rivers to feed the hemi-
spheres if every ear of corn and every
head of wheat and every herd OF quad
ruped, and II every other article of food
in all the earth were destroyed. Uni
versal drought, leaving not SO much as
q spear of grass on the round planet,
would leave in the rivers and lakes and
seas for the human race a staple COM
modify Of food which, IL brought to the
shore, would be enough not only to feed
but fatten the entire human race In
times to come the world may be 80 pop
ulated that the harvests and vineyards
and land animals may be insufficient TO
feed the human family, and the nations
NAV be obliged to come to the rivers
and ocean beaches TO seek the living
harvests that swim the deep, and that
would mean more health and vigor and
brilliancy and brain than the human
race now own.
The Lord, placing the fish In the first
course of the menu in Paradise, making
il precede bird and beast, indicated TO
the world the Importance of the fish as
an article of human food. The reason
that men lived 800 and 400 and 500 and
300 years was because they were kept
on parched corn and fish. We mix up
a fantastic food that kills the most of
us before thirty years of age. Gus