The enterprise. [volume] (Wellington, Ohio) 188?-1899, 1895-09-04
CHRIST, THE CHIEFTAIN.
An Eloquent Discourse on jesus
as Our Spiritual Ruler.
Dr.. Tnlmnge Discourses Christ's Il ght to
be Our Leader From Earth to Heaven
--He VIII be ths Chier AttrRc-
tiSn in The celestial City.

The subject of DIR. t. Dewitt Tai.
IMAGES latest sermon is 1.-The Chief
tain" topic full of interest to all
Christians. His text can be found in
Canticles v, 10: The chiefest among
ten thousand.
The most conspicuous character of
history steps upon the platform. The
finger which, diamonded with light,
pointed down to him from the Bethle-
hem sky, was only ratification of the
finger of prophecy, the finger of gene
alogy, the finger of chronology, the fin
ger of events-all five fingers pointing
in one direction. Christ is the over
topping figure of all times. He is the
''vox humana" in all music, the grace
fullest line in all sculpture, the most
exquisite mingling of lights and shades
in all painting, the acme of all cli-
makes, the dome of all cathedral gran
deur, and the peroration of all Ian
guage.
The Greek alphabet is made up of
twenty-four letters, and when Christ
compared himself to the first letter and
the last letter, the Alpha and the One
ga, he appropriated to himself all the
splendors that you can spell out either
with those two letters or all the letters
between them: 81 am the Alpha and
the Omega, the beginning and the end. I"
What does the Scripture mean which
says of Christ: "He that cometh from
oh q. oh o1I r. oft
you have piled up all Alpine and Him
alayan attitudes, the glory of Christ
would have to spread its wings and
descend thousand leagues to touch
those submits. Pelion, high noun
tain of Thessaly; Ossa, high noun
tain, and Olympus, high mountain
but mythology tells us when the giants
warred against the gods they piled up
these three mountains, and from the
top of them proposed to scale the heav-
ems, but the height was not great
enough, and there was u complete fail
ure. And after all the giants-Isaiah
and Paul, prophetic and apostolic gi-
ants; Raphael and Michael Angelo,
artistic giants; cherubim and seraphim
and archangel, celestial giants-have
failed to climb to the top of Christ S
glory, they might all well unite in the
words of Paul, and cry out: above
alln' "Above ALI" But Solomon in
my text prefers to call Christ THE
Chieftain," and so to-day l hail him.
First, Christ must be chief in our
preaching. There are so many books
on homiletics scattered through the
country that all laymen, as well as all
clergymen, have made up their minds
what sermons ought to be. That SER
mon is the most effectual which most
pointedly puts forth Christ as the par.
don of all sin and the correction ot all
evil-individual, social, political, ma.
tional. There is no reason why we
should ring the endless changes on a
few phrases. There are those who
think that if an exhortation on dis
course have frequent mention of iusti
fication, sanctifcation, covenant OF
works and covenant of grace, there
fore it must be profoundly evangelical
while they are suspicious of dis
course which presents the same truth
but under different phraseology, Now,
say there is nothing in all the opulent
realm of Anglo-SaXonism of all the
word treasures that we inherited from
the Latin and the Greek and the Indo
European, but we have right to mar
shal it in religious discussion. Christ
sets the example. His illustrations
were from the grass, the flowers, the
barnyard fowl, the crystals of salt, az
we'll as from the seas and the stars; anC
we do not propose in our Sunday
school teaching and in our pulpit ad
dress to be put on the limits.
/ know that there is q great deal sale
in our day against words, as though
they were nothing. They may be mis-
used, but they have an imperial power
They are the bridge between soul ant
soul, between Almighty God and thu
human race. What did God write upor
the tables of stone? Words. What die
Christ utter on Mount Olivet? Words
Out of what did Christ strike the sparl
Out of words. ''Let there be light,
and light was. OF course, thought il
the cargo, and words are only the ship
but how fast would your cargo get OF
without the ship? What you need, my
friends. in all your work, in your Sab
bath school class, in your reformator!
institutions, and what we all need, is t.
enlarge our vocabulary when we COM
to speak about God and Christ and
Heaven. We ride few old words to
death, when there is such illimitablt
resource. Shakespeare employed fiji
teen thousand different words for dra
matte purposes; Milton employed eigh
thousand different words for poeti
purposes; Rufus Choate employed owe
eleven thousand different words TO
legal purposes; but the most of us hav
less than thousand words that w
can manage, and that makes us s.
stupid.
When we come to set forth the low
of Christ we are going to take the ten
derest phraseology wherever we fn'
it, and if it has never been used in tina
direction before, all the more shall w
use it, When we come to speak of tn
glory of Christ the Conqueror we ar
going to draw our SMILES from trium
phal arch and oratorio and everything
grand and stupendous. The Frencl
navy have eighteen flags by which the
give signal, but those eighteen flag
: they can put into sixty-six thousan
different combinations. And | have t
: tell you that these standards of tn
cross may be lifted into combination