Connecticut western news., 1894-04-26

in the chapel one day talking to the heather, and she was in very poor health and so weak she sat upon mat while she talked and felt the need of some thing to lean against, when she felt a woman form at her back and heard a woman voice saying, Lean on me. '" She leaned little, but did not want to be too cumbersome, when the woman's voice said, "Lean hard; if you love me, lean hard ...-.sa--.
 And that makes Christ so lovely. He wants all the sick and troubled and weary to lean against him, and he says, ''Lean hard; if you love me, lean hard. !" Aye, he is close by with his sympathet- ic help Hedley Wears, the famous sol dier and Christian of the Crimean war, died because when he was wounded his regiment was too far off from the tent of supplies He was not mortally wound ed, and if the surgeons could only have got at the bandages and the medicines he would have recovered. So much of human sympathy and hopefulness comes too late But Christ is always close by if we want him, and has all the medi- cines ready, and has eternal life for all who ask for it. Sympathy!
 A Sublime Self Sacrifice.
 Aye, he was lovely in his doctrines. Self sacrifice or the relief of the suffer ing of others by our own suffering. He was the only physician that ever pro- posed to cure his patients by taking their disorders. Self sacrificed And what did he not give up for others? The best eli mate in the universe, the air of heaven, for the wintry weather of Palestine, a scepter of unlimited dominion for a prisoners box in an earthly courtroom, flashing tiara for crown of st1nging l brambles, palace for cattle pen, a throne for a cross. Self sacrificed What is more lovely? Mothers dying for their children down with scarlet fever, rail ! road engineers going down through | the open tlrawbridge to save the train, firemen scorched to death trying to help some one down the ladder from the | fourth story of the consuming house. All these put together only faint and ! insufficient similes by which to illustrate the grander, mightier, farther reaching self sacrifice of the altogether lovely. y Do you wonder that the story of his self sacrifice has led hundreds of thou sands to die for him? In one series of prosecutions over 200, 900 were put to | death for Christ's sake. For him Blan- ! dina was tied to a post and wild beasts were let out upon her, and when life | continued after the attack of tooth and | paw she was put in a net, and that net containing her was thrown to wild bull that tossed her with its horns till l life was extinct. All for Christ! Hugue- nots dying for Christi Albigenses dying for Christ! The Vaudois dying for | Christ! Smithfeld fires endured for Christ! The bones of martyrs, if distrib- | uted, would make path of moldering | life all around the earth. The loveliness of the Saviour's sacrifice has inspired all the heroisms and all the martyr doms of subsequent centuries. Christ has had more men and women die for him than all the other inhabitants of all the ages have had die for them.
 Furthermore, he was lovely in his sermons. He knew when to begin, when to stop and just what to say. The long est sermon he ever preached, so far as the Bible reports him-namely, the ser mon on the mount was about Is min utes in delivery-at the ordinary rate of | speech. His longest prayer reported, commonly called ''The Lords Prayer, !" | was about half a minute. Time them by your own watch, and you will find | my estimate accurate, by which l do | not mean to say that sermons ought to | be only 16 minutes long and prayers only half a minute long. Christ had such infinite power of compression that he could put enough into his 6 minute sermon and his half minute prayer to keep all the following ages busy in thought and action. No one but a Christ could afford to pray or preach as short I as that, but he meant to teach us com l pression. . l Christ's Sermons. l At Selma, Ala, the other day was shown cotton press by which cotton was put in such shape that it occupied | in transportation only one car where three cars were formerly necessary, and one ship where three ships had been re- quired, and I imagine that we all need to compress our sermons and our prayers into smaller spaces.
 And his sermons were so lovely for sentiment and practicality and simplic- ity and illustration. The light of a can- dle, the crystal of the salt, the chuck of hen for her chickens, the hypocrite' $ dolorous physiognomy, the moth in the clothes closet, the black wing of a raven, the snowbapk of white lilies, our ex- treme botheration about the splinter of | imperfection in some one else's charac-
 ter, the swine fed on the pearls, wolves
 dramatizing sheep, and the peroration made up of Q cyclone in which you hear
 the crash of a tumbling house unwisely constructed No technicalities, no split ting of hairs between north and north
 west side, no dogmatics, but great
 Christly throb of helpfulness. I do not
 wonder at the record which says,
 tWhen he was come down from the
 mountain, great multitudes followed
 him" They had but one fault to find
 with his sermon. It was too short. God
 help all of us in Christian work to get
 down off our stilts and realize there is
 only one thing we have to do--there is
 the great wound of the worlds sin and
 
 plaster of the gospel What you and
 want to do is to put the plaster on the
 wound. All sufficient is this gospel if it
 is only applied. A minister preaching
 to an audience of sailors concerning the
 ruin by sin and the rescue by the gospel
 accommodated himself to sailors yer.
 nacular and said, ''This plank bears. ''
 Many years after this preacher was
 called to see dying sailor and asked
 him about his hope and got the suggest.
 i've reply, "This plank bears. ]"
 ! An Appeal For Love.
 Yea, Christ was lovely in his chief
 life's work. There were a thousand
 things for him to do, but his great work
 was to get our shipwrecked world out
 of the breakers. That he came to do, and
 that he did, and he did it in three years.
 He took 30 years to prepare for that | three years' activity From 12 to 3C