The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1893-11-24
HEAVENLY REWARDS.
Ds- Ta'mage Discourses on Obliv-
ion and It's Defeats.
E1z= Monster That Swallows individuals
ard Nations VIII BE Defeated-Ths
Complete and Perfect Mem.
DRY of the Saved.

In n late sermon at Brooklyn Rev T..
DcWItt Talmage chose for his subject
Oblivion and its Defeats" The texts
selected were: Job, xiv. 20, "He shall
Esc nc more remembered" and Psalms,
zexSL G. 1.-The righteous shall be in ever
EzsSfzug remembrance" DIR. Talmage
saEd-
Oblivion, and its Defeats, is my SUBJ
Tccz to-day. There is an old monster
Gf1zS swallows down everything. 1t
=EUEclfes individuals. families, COM
zEES1u tiles, states, nations, continents.
hemfSpheres, worlds Its diet is made
<za of years, OF centuries, of ages, of
ssvcles, of milleniums, of aeons. That
zno1sfcr is called by Noah Webster and
MI the other dictionaries, Oblivion. 1t
Is u steep down which everything rolls.
&c Is confagration in which every
-efzIzg is consumed. 1t is dirge in which
al orchestras play, and a period at
which everything stops. 1t is the GEM
<sSe<y of the human race. 1t is the do
szai1 of forgetfulness. Oblivion! At
times IL throws a shadow over all of us,
zEs& would not pronounce it to-day if
I cid not come armed in the strength
of the eternal God on your behalf to
s.ftzcit it, to rout it, to demolish it.
Why. Just look at the way the fam
fires of the earth disappear. For
while they are together, inseparable,
and, % each other. Indispensable, and
Ssssu they part Some by marriage go
En- 10 estab lish other homes, and some
Esave this life, and century is long
enough to plant a family. develop it,
Eyzus7er il. and oblterate it. So the
generations vanish. Walk up Broad
zvay- New York; State street, Boston:
Chestnut street, Philadelphia; The
Strand, London; Princess street, Edin
S,zzrrf; Champs Elysees, Paris; Inter
den Linden, Berlin. and you will meet
ia this year 1898 not one person who
walked there in the year 1893 What
snrulfTaent. All the ordinary efforts
st perpetuation are dead failures.
Walter SCOTS ''Old Mortality" may go
round with his chisel to recut the
saded epitaphs on tombstones but old
Oblivion has quicker chisei with
which he can cut out thousand cpl
Eazshs while "old Mortality is cutting
IN one epitaph. The city of Rome,
ITALY, stands to-day, but dig down
deep enough and you will come TO an.
a1{aer Rome. buried. and 60 down still
Sarther and you will find a third Rome.
Jerusalem stands to-day, but dig down
deep enough and YOU will find Jeru
salem underneath. and GO on and
deeper down a third Jerusalem. Alex
aHdria, Egypt, on the top of an Alexan-
ssria- and the second on top of the
third Many of the ancient cities are
baried thirty feet deep, or fifty feet
deeo- or one hundred feet deep. What
was the matter? Any special calam-
ItyS No. The winds and waves and
sands and flying dust are all under
takers and grave-diggers, and if the
world stands long enough. the present
Drcokivn and New York and London
will have on top of them other Brook
gyms and New Yorlls and Londous and
only after digging and boring and
blasting will the arch8ologist of far
distant centuries come down as far as
che highest spires and domes and tur
rets of our present American and Eu-
ropean cities A hundred years from
EsEJW there will not be a being on this
earth that knew we ever lived.
En- some old family record descend
ant studying up the ancestral line may
spell ont our name, and from the near
1y faded ink, with great effort, find
that some person by our name was born
somewhere between 1910 and 1890, but
they will know no more about us than
Cvc know about the color of child's
eyes corn last night in a village of Pata-
gonna Oblivion! That mountain surge
rolls over everything. Even the pyra-
5znids are dying. Not day passes but
there is chiseled off a chip of that
granite. The sea is triumphing over
the land, and what is going on
at Coney island is going on all around
the world, and the continents are
-STumbling into the waves. And while
this is transpiring on the outside of the
world, the hot chisel of the sinternal
fire is digging under the foundations of
the earth and cutting its way out to-
ward the surface. Oblivion! The
world itself will roll into it as easily as
. schoolboy's India rubber ball rolls
down hill, and when our world goes,
II Is so interlocked by the law of gravi-
taGioa with other worlds that they will
Z,o too. Our earth is struck with death.
The axel-tree of the consultations will
break and let down the population of
other worlds Stellar, lunar, solar
mortality. Oblivion! 1t can swallow
nal will swallow whole galaxies of
vvETorlds as easily as a crocodile takes
down frog.
Vet oblivion does not remove or
=aIyovr anutbinu that had hatter NOT
I've removed or Swallowed The old
monster is welcome to his meat The
uxurld would long ago have been over
crowded if not for the merciful re-
rsoval of nations and generations
2ssat if all the books had lived that
were ever written and printed and
pzbtished. The libraries would by
SIseN immensely have INSTRUCTED intel
Eigence and made all research impos-
sible- The fatal epidemic of books was
a uaerciful epidemic. Many of the state
ss.nd national libraries o: to-dayl are
.oGiy morgues in which dead books are
waiting for some one to come and
recognize them. What if all the people
that had been horn were still alive?
SIe would have been elbowed by our
ancestors of ten centuries ago. and
uzoop1e who ought to have said their last
words s, 800 years ago, would snarl at
US saying: What are you doing
Ieere2'' There would have been no
z1oOzn TO turn around Some of the past
generations of mankind were not worth
remembering. The first useful thing
shat many people did was 10 die; their
"a 4lo;. 1r-o--o .,