The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1894-10-09
SOMETHING APROPOS.
An Article That Is Creating a Sem
safion in America.

safiOu in America.
Ia circles clerical and lay there
is today much talk in the United
States about an article that ap-
peared in Scribner's Magazine for
October. In it a woman, Mary
Tappan Wright, breaches sermon
to all mankind a sermon that ac-
cording to exchanges is being COM
mented upon from seaboard to sea-
board. This article, especially the
sermon, is apropos.
The authoress pictures a bishop
of the Episcopal church summoned
from HARVEST country diocese to
preach a sermon at the ordination
of young brother in city. After
years of life on the plains the cleric
enters a metropolis and for hours
before the service begins he gazes
at things about him; at struggling
humanity; at misery new to his
eyes.
In his pocket is a conventional
sermons doctrinal one. The de-
sire to tear it up comes to the
bishop, but he does not, and when
he mounts the pulpit the notes are
in his hand. For a few moments
he follows the stilted phraseology
he had found for the occasion, then
gazing at the vast throng in the
church he drops the manuscript.
'TN THE GREED OF RICHES, THE VAN
ITY OF LEISURE, THE UNCHARITABLENEss
OF GOODNESS, AND THE ALooFNEss OF
LEARNING; IN THE NARRowNEss OF ECCLE'
sIAsTIcIsM, THE OBsTIANCY OF AGE, THE
INTOLERANCE OF YOUTH, AND THE BLIND
NESS OF INExI ERIENCE, You STAND ASIDE
As IF THE FATE OF Your BRETHREN Con-
CERNED You Nor!"
It was as though the wind had
blown through q grove of poplars.
The whole congregation rustled, and
q thousand white faces turned all at
once in a flash of intelligence toward
the pulpit, for the old Bishop was
speaking his hidden thought aloud!
GAIL the great dark world around |
you cries out to you for help. Men |
and women starve at your gates, they |
plead beneath your windows, and,
dragging themselves up your stair |
ways, they knock with fleshless |
hands upon the very panels of your |
doors. Desolate, oppressed, trodden |
down, ground into the mire; even |
through these mighty walls their cry |
rings in to you; far up in the dim |
mist of their tears. You see it, and !
you close your ewes; you hear it, and |
you place your hands upon your ears.
'All of you, all of you! Saint and
sinner alike, you steel your hearts to
the unspeakable suffering OF the world
about you; cruel beyond all cruelty re-
corded in tie slow torture to which you
leave the miserable; hard beyond
all savage hardness in the years upon
years during which you have stood,
like adamant, for your own, abso-
lutely untouched to any active issue.
You talk; you may think you act
but, save a devoted few, you none of
you act.
"Carried onward by the impetus of
your own selfishness, you all roll for
ward, hardening your hearts. with
the rest, an old man. /, too, have lain
down softly when my brother shivered
in the icy air; have eaten daintily
when my brother became a very brute
for hunger; have turned the light God
gave me to the pleasant illumination
of my own soul, when the lamp of
my brother, starving for oil, guiding
made his path among the pit
falls more fatal than the darkness
itself.
"And in this mad race to destruc-
ton are there none to reach out by
the way? None to cry halt?
Scholars, men of learning! How
will you help our brother? In the
calm Of retirement, when do you give
these things thought? To what do
you turn your efforts? Where is your
land The love of country, the love of
man, the love of God, seed dead with
in you /! Thousands of souls are in
to you. Into your hands is
given the formation of our future.
Who among you remembers it? The
task laid upon your shoulders sur
passes all other tasks. How do you
perform it?
"You train up scholars and gentle
men, but where are your statesmen
Where are the youth that out of leis-
ure and knowledge turn to their coun-
try as their most sacred charge? The
young men whom you send into life