Herald and news. [volume] (West Randolph, Vt.) 1878-1943, 1893-03-09
HEN AND CHICKENS.
Peculiar Title of a Sermon by Rev.
T. Dewitt Talmage, d. d.
The Temptations OF Life Described In q
Graphic Ma ig ManIood aud
Young nan Especially
Needs the PROTECTING Wing
of Christ

49," 49,
lowing discourse at the Brooklyn Taber
nacle recently. taking for his text Matt
xiii. 81: s"As a hen gathereth her
chickens under her wings, and ye would
not"
Jerusalem was in sight as Christ came
to the crest of Mount Olivet a height
Of 700 feet. The splendors of the reli-
gious capital of the Whole earth irradi-
ated the landscape. There is the tenn
pie. 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 a place that lie
wdnld gladly have saved. and apostro-
phizes. saying: 30 Jerusalem, Jerusa-
LEM, how often would | have gathered
thy children together, even as a hen
gathereth her chickens under her
wings, and We would not"
Why did Christ sele ct hen and chick
ems as a simile? Next to the Apostle
ness of the comparison, l think il 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. Its only adorn-
ments sre the red comb in its hcad-dress
and the wattles under the 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 pretension of
nest like the eagles eyrie. 1t has no
luster of plumage like the g%oldfnch.
Possessing anatomy tn at allows fight,
yet about the last thin G il wants to do
is to fly. and in retreat, uses foot al
most as much as wing. Musicians have
written out in musical scale the song
of, lark and robin redbreast, and night
ineale, yet the hen of my text hath
nothing that could be taken for a
song, but only cluck and cackle. Yet
Christ, in the text uttered while look
ing 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 IL is
for us, who are Sunday-school .nstruc-
tors and editors AMI preachers and re-
formers, and those who would gain the
ears of audiences, to attain that heav-
emily and divine art of sim plicity. We
have to run a course of literary disor-
ders, as children a curse of physical
disorders We come out Of school and
loaded down with Greek my
thologies, and out of the theological
seminary weighed down with what the
learned fathers said, and we fly with
wings Of eagles and famingoes and al
batrosses, and it takes a good while be-
fore we can come down to Christ's sim
i~litudes, the candle under the bushel,
the salt that has lost its SAVIOR, the net
into the sea, the spittle on the
eyes of the blind man. and the hen an
chickens There is not much poetry
about this winged creature of God men
toned in my text, but she is more prac-
teal and NOR motherly and more sug-
of good things than many that
iy higher and wear brighter oolors
She is not a prima donna of the skies,
a strut of beauty in the aisle of the
She does not cut a circle under
he sun like the Rocky Mountain eagle,
tut stays at home to look after family
lffairs. She does not swoop like the
of the Cordilleras to transport a
'abbit from the valley to the top Of the
but just scratches for a living.
low vigorously with her claws she
,ulls away the ground to bring up
What is hidden beneath When the
breakfast or dinner hour arrives she
'egins to prepare the repast and calls
ii her young to partake.
l am in sy mpathy with the unpreten-
ious old fashioned hen. because, like
most Of us, she has to scratch for
living. She knows at the start the
essen which most people Of good sense
re slow to learn-that the gaining of a
livelihood implies work, and that sue
esses do not lie on the surface, but are
o be upturned by positive and c%ontinu-
us effort The reason that society and
church and the world are so full of
SO full of loafers, so full of
eadbeats, is because people are not
rise en- ough to take the lesson which
hen would teach them, that il they
7ould find for them selves, and for
hose Dope ndent upon them anything
,orth having they must scratch for it.
olomon said: go to the ant, thou
Iuggard." say, go to the hen. thou
Iuggard. In the Old Testament God
ompares Himself to an eagle stirring
p her nest, and in the New Testament /,
ne Holy Spirit is compared to a de-
,ending dove, but Christ, in a sermon Z
nat began with cutting sarcasm for ,
ypocrites and ends with the paroxysm i
I pathos in the text, compares Himself I
} a hen. I
One day in the country, we saw sud- 2
en- CONSERVATION in the behavior OF old n
ominick Why the hen should be so /
we could not understand We \
'oked about to see if a n~eighbor's dog 6
ere invading the farm. We looked up O
see If a storm cloud were lowering. b
e could see nothing on the ground $
lat could terrorize, and we could see a
IN fba mir 20 -, "a. kha fa.&L.-. I