Weekly expositor. (Brockway Centre, Mich.) 1882-1894, 1893-03-03
TABERNACLE PULPIT.
DIR rALMAdE mi THE posPEL
OF ST. MATTHEW ~
As the Hen Gathereth Her Chickens YIN
der Her Wings, and Ye Would Not
The Preacher Objects to Being an
Advertisements.


morning the Rev. DIR. Talmage in giving
out a number of notices, dwelt upon the
fact that certain picture-makers of Brook
Ign, had used his name az reference In
their advertisements and circulars without
his authority. Thousands of letters of com
plant have come to him in this respect,
and he wanted it distinctly understood
that he knew nothing of these people or
their business methods. The text selected
for the morning sermon was: Matt. 23:37:
"As a hen gathereth her chickens under
her wings, and We would not"
Jerusalem was in sight as Christ
came to the crest of Mount Olivet, a
height of seven hundred feet The
splendors of the religious capital of the
whole earth irradiated the landscape.
There is the temple. Yonder is the
kings palace. Spread out before his
eyes are the pomp, the wealth, the
wickedness and the coming destruction
of Jerusalem, and he bursts into tears
at the thought of the obduracy of
place that he would grady have saved,
and apostrophizes, saying: sob Jeru-
salem, Jerusalem, how often would l
have gathered thy children together,
even as hen gathereth her chickens
under her wings, and We would not"
Why did Christ select hen and chick
CUB us u ANCAb W lilC dDkttoAOC-
ness of the comparison, think it was
to help all public teachers in the mat
ter of illustration TO get down off their
stills and use comparisons that all can
understand. The plainest bird on earth
is the barnyard fowl. It's only adorn-
ments are the red comb in its head
dress and the wattles under its throat.
II has no grandeur of genealogy. All
we know is that its ancestors came
from India, some of them from a height
of four thousand feet on the sides of
the Himalayas. 1t has no pretention
of nest, like the eagles eyrie. 1t has
no luster of plumage, lie the gold
finch. Possessing anatomy thai allows
flight, yet about the last thing it wants
to do is to fly, and, in retreat, uses foot
almost as much as wing. Musicians
have written out in musical scale the
song of lark and robin red-breast and
nightingale, yet the hen of my text hath
nothing that could be taken for song,
but only clucks and cackles. Yet Christ
in the text, uttered while looking upon
doomed Jerusalem, declares that what
he had wished for that city was like
what the hen does for her chickens.
Christ was thus simple in his teachings,
and yet how hard it is for us, who are
Sunday School instructors and editors
and preachers and reformers, and those
who would gain the ears of audiences,
to attain that heavenly and divine art
of simplicity. We have to run a course
ofliterary disorders as children a course
of physical disorders. We come out of
school and college loaded down with
Greek mythologies, and out of the
Theological Seminary weighted down
with what the learned fathers said, and
we fly with wings of eagles and fiamin-
goes and alhatrosses, and it takes a
good while before we can come down
to Christi similitudes, the candle under
the bushel, the salt that has lost its
SAVIOR, the net thrown into the sea, the
spittle on the eyes of the blind man,
and the hen and chickens. There
is not much poetry about this winged
creature of God mentioned in my text,
but she is more practical and more
motherly and more suggestive of good
things than many that fly higher and
wear brighter colors. She is not a
prima donna of the skies, nor strut
of beauty in the aisle of the forest.
She does not cut a circle under the sun
like the Rocky Mountain eagle, but
stays at home to look after family af-
fairs. She does not swoop like the
condor of the Cordilleras to transport a
rabbit from the valley TO TIE top ofthe.
crags, but just scratches for a living.
How vigorously with her claws she
pulls away the ground to bring mp
what is hidden beneath! When the
breakfast or dinner hour arrives, she
begins to prepare the repast, and calls
all her young to partake.
am in sympathy with the UMPIRE
tentious old-fashioned hen, because,
like most of us, she has to scratch for
a living. She knows at the start the
lesson which most people of good sense
are slow to learn-that the gaining of
a livelihood implies work, and that
successes do not lie ON the surface, but
are TO be upturned by positive and con-
tinuous effort. The reason that society
and the church, and the world are so
full of failures, so full of loafers, SO
full of dead beats, is because people
are not wise enough to take the first
lesson which any hen would teach
them, that if they would find for them
selves, and for those dependent upon
them anything worth having they
must scratch for it Solomon said:
go to the ant, thou sluggard." say,
go to the hen, thou sluggard." In the
Old Testament God compares himself
to an eagle stirring up her nest, and in
the New Testament the HoleSpirit is
compared to descending dove, but
Christ, in a sermon that began with
cutting sarcasm for hypocrites ana
ends with the paroxysm of pathos
in the text compares himself To hen.
: One day in the country, we saw sud-
den CONSERVATION in the behavior of
old Dominick. Why the hen should be
so disturbed, we could not understand.
We Looked about to see if neighbours
dog were invading the farm. We looked
up TO see If a storm cloud were hover
ing. We could see nothing on the
ground that could terrorize, and we
could see nothing in the air to ruffie the
feathers Of the hen, but the loud, wild,
affrighted eluck which brought all her
brood at full run under her feathers,
made us lookagain around us and above
us, when we saw that high up and far
away there was a rapacious bird wheel
ing round and round, and down and
down, and not seeing us as we stood in
the shadow, Ii came nearer and lower,
until we saw it's beak was curved from
base to tip and it had two flames of FIRE
for eyes, and IL was hawk. But all
the chickens were under old Dominicks
wings and either the bird of prey caught