The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1894-06-22

| in the business of the soul pay the
debts of their spiritual insolvents? Can
a million wrongs make one right?
| Poneropolis was a city where King
Philip, of Thracia, put all the bad peo-
pie of his kingdom. If any man had
opened primary school at Ponerop-
oils, do not think the parents from
other cities would have sent their chill
dren there. Instead of amendment in
the other world, all the associations,
now that the good are evolved, will be
degenerating and down. You would
not want to send a man to a cholera or
yellow fever hospital for his health;
and the great lazaretto of the next
world, containing the diseased and
plague-struck, will be a poor place for
moral recovery. If the surroundings
in this world were crowded of tempta-
ton, the surroundings of the next
world, after the righteous have passed
up and on, will be a thousand per cent.
more crowded of temptation.
The count of Chateaubriand made
his little son sleep at night at the top
of castle turret, where the wind
howled and where the specters were
said to haunt the place; and while the
mother and sisters almost died of fright
the son tells us that the process gave
him nerves that could not tremble and
a courage that never faltered. But l
htrnly haf off
and the spectral world swept by sirocco
and euroclydon will ever fit one for
the land of eternal sunshine. won
der what is the curriculum
of that college of Inferno,
where, after proper preparation by
the sins of this life, the candidate en-
tiers. passes on from freshmen class of
depravity to sophomore of abandon
ment, and from sophomore to junior,
and from Junior to senior, and day of
graduation comes, and with diploma
signed by Satan, the president, and
other professional demoniacs, attest
ing that the candidate has been long
enough under their drill, he passes up
to enter Heaven! Pandemonium pre-
parative course for heavenly admis-
sionl All, my friends Satan and his
cohorts have fitted uncounted multi
tudes for ruin, but never fitted one
soul for happiness.
Furthermore, it would not be safe
for this world if men had another
chance in the next. If it had been an
nounced that, however wickedly man
might act in this world, he could fix it
up all right in the next, society would
be terribly demoralized, and the human
race demolished in few years. The
fear that, if we are bad and unforgiven
here, it will not be well for us in the
next existence, is the chief influence
that keeps civilization from rushing
back to standardization, and semi-bar-
barism from rushing into midnight
savagery, and midnight savagery from
extinction; for it is the astringent i'm
preston of all nations, Christian and
heather, that there is no future chance
for those who have wasted this.
Multitudes of men who are kept
within bounds would say: go to,
now! Let me get all out of this life
there is in it. Come, gluttony, and in
ebriation, and uncleanness, and re-
venge, and all sensualities, and wait
upon me, My life may be somewhat
shortened in this world by dissolute-
ness, but that will only make heavenly
indulgence on a larger scale the sooner
possible. | will overtake the saints at
last and will enter the Heavenly Temple
only little later than those who be-
haved themselves here. l will on my
way to Heaven take little wider ex-
cursion than those who were on earth
pious, and l shall go to Heaven via Ge
henna and via sheol" Another chance
in the next world means free license
and wild abandonment in this.
Suppose you were party in an i'm
portant case at law, and you knew from
with judges and attorneys
that it would be tried twice, and the
first trial would be of little Importance,
but that the second would decide every
thing; for which trial would you make
the most preparation? for which retain
the ablest attorneys? for which be most
anxious about the attendance of wit
nesses? You would put all the stress
upon the second trial, all the anxiety,
all the expenditure, saying: The first
is nothing, the last is everything"
Give the race assurance of second and
more important trial in the subsequent
life, and all the preparation for eternity
would be post mortem," post funeral,
post sepulchral, and the world with one
jerk be pitched off into impiety and
chance should be given in the next
world if we have refused innumerable
chances in this? Suppose you give a
banquet, and you invite a vast number
of friends, but one man declines to
come, or treats your invitation with
You in the course of
twenty years give twenty banquets,
and the same man is invited to them
all, and treats them all in the same OBJ
noxious way. After awhile you re-
move to another house. larger and bet
ter, and you again invite your friends,
but send no invitation to the man
who declined or neglected the other
invitations. Are you to blame? Has
he a right to expect to be invited after
all the indignities he has done you?
God in this world has invited us all to
the banquet of His grace. He invited
us by His providence and His spirit 365
days of every year since we knew our
right hand from our left. If ave de-
clined it every time, or treated the in
vitation with Indifference, and gave
twenty or forty or fifty years of indig
nifty on our part toward the banqueter,
and at last he spreads the banquet in a
more luxlirious and kindly place amid