The Banner-Democrat. [volume] (Lake Providence, East Carroll Parish, La.) 1892-current, 1895-10-26
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
Christ "Chiefest Among Ten Thous
sand
The Most Conspicuous Character OF His.
tory-The Parcon of All Sin and
the Correction of All EVIL
Chief I'm Heaven.


week on the subject OF '''fhe Chief
tain,s basing 1t upon the text:
The chiefest among ten thousanu:-Canticlss
v..l0
The most conspicuous character of
history steps ont upon the platform.
Tho finger which, diamonded with
light, pointed down to him from the
Bethlehem sky. was only a ratifica-
ton of the finger of prophecy, the
finger Of genealogy. the finger of
chronology. the finger of events-all
FIVE fingers pointing in one direction.
Christ is the overlapping figure of all
time He is the ''vox humana" in all
music, the gracefulest line In all
sculpture, the most exquisite mingiing
of lights and shades in all paintings,
the acme of all climaxes, the dome of
all cathedraled grandeur, and the per-
grafton OF all language.
The Greek alphabet Is made up OF
twenty-fonr letters, and when Christ
compared himself to the first letter
and the last letter, the Alpha and the
Omega, he appropriated to himself all
the splendors that you can spell out
either with those two letters or all the
letters between them: II am the
Alpha and the Omega, the beginning
and the end"
What does that Scripture mean
which says of Christ: HE that com.
eth from Above is above alp" 1t 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 SUBMITS. Pelion, high
mountain of Thessaly; Ossa, high
mountain, and Olympus. a high
mountain; but mythology tells when
the giants warred against the gods
they piled up these three mountains,
and from the top of them proposed to
scale the heavens; but the height was
not great enough, and there was
complete failure. 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 well
unite in the words of Paul and cry
out: above allr' above ALL" But
Solomon in my text prefers to call
Christ THE Chieftain," and so to-day
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 we'll as all
clergymen, have made up their minds
what sermons ought to be. That SER
mon is the most effectual which most
pointedly puts fort h Christ as the par
don of all sin and the correction of 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 or dis
course have frequent mention of
justification, sanctification, covenant
of works and covenant of grace,
therefore it must be profoundly evan
gelical, while they are suspicious of
discourse 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 inher-
tied from the Latin and the Greek and
the Indo-European, but we have a
right to marshal it in religious discus
sion. Christ sets the example. His
illustrations were from the grass, the
flowers. the barnyard fowl, the crystals
of salt, as well as from the seas and
the stars; and we do not propose in
our Sunday-school teaching and in
our pulpit address to be put on the
limits.
know that there is great deal
said in our day against words, as
though they were nothing. They may
be misused, 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 Oh Mount
Olivet? Words. Out of what did
Christ strike the spark for the illumi-
nation 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 without the
| ship? What you need, my friends,
in all your work, in your Sabbath
school class, in your reformatory insti-
buttons. and what we all need is to en-
large our vocabulary when we come to
speak about God and Christ and Heav-
en-. We ride few old words to death,
when there is such illimita BILE resource.
Shakespeare employed fifteen thou
sand different words for dramatic pur-
poses; Milton employed eight thousand
different words for poetic purposes;
Rufus Choate employed over eleven
| thousand different words for legal pur-
J poses; 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
tenderest phraseology wherever we
find it, aud 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 Con-
queror we are going to draw our
SMILES from triumphal arch and ora
torio and everything grand and stu
pendous. The French navy have
eighteen flags by which they give
signal, but those eighteen flags they
can put into sixty-six thousand differ
emit combinations. And / have to tell
ron that these standards of the cross
may be lifted into combinations in