Connecticut western news., 1893-02-23

shells with no more order than a mother premeditates or calculates how many
 kisses and hugs she shall give her babe
 waking up in the morning sunlight.
 Yes, my God is an emotional God,
 and he says, We must have colors and
 let the sun paint all of them on the scroll of that shell, and we must have music, and here is carol for the robin, and a
 psalm for man, and a doxology for the
 seraphim, and a resurrection call for the
 archangel." Aye, he showed himself a God of sublime emotion when he flung
 himself on this world in the personality of Christ to save it, without regard to
 the tears it would take, or the blood 1t would exhaust, or the agonies it would
 crush out.
 When I see the Louvres and the Lux
 embourgs and the Vaticans of Divine
 painting strewn along the 5000 miles of coast, and hear in forest on summer
 morning musical academies and Han del's societies of full orchestras, I say God is God of emotion, and if he ob-
 serves mathematics it is mathematics
 set to music, and his figures are written not in white chalk on blackboards, but
 written by finger of sunlight on walls of jasmine and trumpet creeper.
 WE HAVE A CLEAN RELIGION. In my study of the conchology of the Bible this onycha of the text also i'm
 presses me with the fact that religion is perfumed. What else could God have
 meant when he said to Moses, "Take unto thee sweet spices, stacte and ony-
 chaY' Moses took that shell of the ony-
 cha, put it over the fire, and as it crum-
 bled into ashes it exhaled an odor that
 hung in every curtain and filled the an cient tabernacle, and its sweet smoke es-
 capped from the sacred precincts and sat
 urated the outside air.
 Perfume! That is what religion is,
 But instead of that some make it 8 mal-
 odor. They serve God in a rough and
 because he does not properly keep Sun
 day instead of making Sunday so attract i've the child could not help but keep it. They make him learn by heart difficult chapter in the book of Exodus, with all the hard names, because he has been naughty. How many disagreeable good people there arei No one doubts their
 piety, and they will reach heaven, but they will have to get fixed up before they go there or they will make trouble
 by calling out to us: keep off that
 grass!" What do you mean by pluck ing that fower?" 'Show your ticketsi' Oh, how many Christian people need to obey my text and take into their wor- ship and their behavior and their conso- ciations and presbyteries and general as- semblies and conferences more onycha.
 have sometimes gone in very gala of spirit into the presence of some disagree able Christians and in five minutes felt
 wretched, and at some other time I have
 gone depressed into the company of suave and genial souls, and in a few mo-
 ments I felt exhilarant. What was the difference? It was the difference in what
 they burned on their censers. The one burned onycha; the other burned asa fetida.
 THE ROYAL PURPLE.
 In this conchological study of the Bi- ble also notice that the mollusks or shelled animals furnish the purple that you see richly darkening so many Scrip ture chapters. The purple stuff in the
 ancient tabernacle, the purple girdle of the priests. the purple mantle of Roman
 nnperors, the apparel of Dives in purple and fine Iinen-aye, the purple robe which in mockery was thrown upon Christ-were colored by the purple of the shells on the shores of the Mediterra-
 lean. It was discovered by shepherds
 dog ha.lng stained his mouth by break ing one of the shells, and the purple aroused admiration.
 Costly purple! Six pounds of the pur- pie liquor extracted from the shellfshes were used to prepare one pound of wool. Purple was also used on the pages of
 books. Bibles and prayer books ap- peared in purple vellum, which may still be found in some of the national libraries of Europe. Plutarch speaks of some pur- pie which kept its beauty for 190 years. But after awhile the purple became easier to get, and that which had been a sign of imperial authority when worn in
 robes was adopted by many people, and so an emperor, jealous of this appropria- tion of the purple, made a law that any
 one except royalty wearing purple should be put to death.
 Then, as if to punish the world for that outrage of exclusiveness. God ob- liberated the color from the earth, as
 much as to say, If all cannot have it,
 none shall have it." But though God has deprived the race of that shellfsh
 which afforded the purple there are | shells enough left to make us glad and
 worshipful. Oh, the enhancement of
 hue and shape still left all up and down
 the beaches of all the continents! These
 creatures of the sea have what roofs of
 enameled porcelain! They dwell under
 what pavilions blue as the sky and fiery
 And am I not right in leading you for a
 few moments through this mighty realm
 of God so neglected by human eye and
 human footstep?
 It is said that the harp and lute were invented from the fact that in Egypt
 the Nile overfowed it's banks, and when the waters retreated tortoises were left by the million on all the lands, and these
 tortoises died, and soon nothing was left ! but the cartridges and gristle of these creatures, which frightened under the heat into musical strings that when | touched by the wind or foot of man vii brated, making sweet sounds, and so the
 world took the hint and fashioned the
 harp, and am I not right in trying to | make music out of the shells and lifting
 them as a harp, from which to thrum
 the jubilant praises of the Lord and the pathetic strains of human condolence? THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE.
 But I find the climax of this conchol-
 ogy of the Bible in the pearl, which has
 this distinction above all other gems l that it requires no human hand to bring
 out its beauties. Job speaks of it, and l its sheen is in Christ's sermon, and the Bible, which opens with the onycha of | my text, closes with the pearl. Of such value is this crustaceous product I do 1 not wonder that for the exclusive right