Connecticut western news., 1895-09-05
THE ROCK OF REFUGE
REV. OR. TAlMAGE'S SERMON ON
 CHRIST, THE CHiEFTAIN.

CHRIST, THE CHlEFTAlN.
 Remarkable Word Painting of the Great
 the Saviour The Hope of All Chris
 tians.
 NEW YORK, Sept. 1.-For his sermon i)r this forenoon Rev. Dr. Talmage se- lects topic which must prove full of inspiration to Christians everywhere. The title of his discourse is, "The Chief tain,' and the text, "The chiefest among ten thousand" Canticles V, 10.
 The most conspicuous character of history steps out upon the platform. The finger which, diamonded with light, pointed down to him from the Bethlehem sky was only ratification of the finger of prophecy, the finger of genealogy, the finger of chronology, the finger of events-all five fingers point Ing in one direction. Christ is the over topping figure of all time. 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 climaxes, the dome of all cathedraled grandeur and the peroration of all language.
 The Greek alphabet is made up of 24 letters, and when Christ compared him. self to the first letter and the last let ter, the Alpha and the Omega, he ap- propriated to himself all the splendors that you can spell out either with those two letters or all the letters between them, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
 Hail to the Chief.
 What does that Scripture mean which says of Christ, "He that cometh from above is above all?' It means after you have piled up all Alpine and Himalayan attitudes, the glory of Christ would have to spread its wings and descend thousand leagues to touch those summits. Pelion, a high noun tain of Thessaly; Ossa, high mountain, 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 tho heav- ems; but the height was not great enough, and there was complete fail ure And after all the giants-Isaiah and Paul, prophetic and apostolic giants; 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 we'll unite in the words of Paul, and cry out: "Above allP "Above all" But Solomon in my text prefers to call Christ "the Chieftain," and so today 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 sermon is the most effectual which most point edly puts forth Christ as the pardon of all sin and the correction of all evil individual. social, political, national. There is no reason why we should ring the endless changes on few phrases. There are those who think that If an exhortation or discourse have frequent mention of justification, sanctification, covenant of works and covenant of grace, therefore it must be profoundly evangelical, while they are suspicious of discourse which presents the same truth, but under different phraseology. Now, l 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 1ndo- European, but we have right to marshal it in religious discussion. Christ sets the example. His illustra- tions were from the grass, the flowers, the barnyard fowl, the crystals of salt, as we'll as from the seas and the stars; and we do not propose in our Sunday school teaching and in our pulpit ad- dress to be put on the limits.
 Resources of Words.
 know that there is great deal said 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 and soul, between Almighty God and the human race. What did God write upon the tables of stone? Words What did Christ utter on Mount Olivet? Words. Out of what did Christ strike the spark for the illumination of the universe Out of words "Let there be light, and light was. Of course thought is the cargo and words are only the ship, but how fast would your cargo get on with out the ship? What you need, my friends, in all your work, in your Sab bath school class, in your reformatory institutions, and what we all need, is to enlarge our vocabulary when we come to speak about God and Christ and heaven. We ride few old words to death, when there is such illimitable resource Shakespeare employed 15,000 different words for dramatic purposes Milton employed 5000 different words for poetic purposes Rufus Choate em- ployed over II, 1000 different words for legal purposes, but the most of us have less than thousand words that we can manage, and that makes us so stupid.
 When we come to set forth the love of Christ, we are going to take the ten derest phraseology wherever we find it, and if it has never been used in that direction before all the more shall we use it. When we come to speak of the glory of Christ the conqueror, we are going to draw our similes from trium- phal arch and oratorio and everything grand and stupendous. The French navy have IS flags by which they give signal, but those IS flags they can put into 66, 900 different combinations. And have to tell you that these standards of the cross may be lifted into combinations infinite and varieties everlasting. And let me say to the young men who come from the theological seminaries into ou, services, and are after awhile going tc preach Jesus Christ, you will have the largest liberty and unlimited resource. You only have to present Christ ln your own way.
 Brighter than the light, fresher than Al