The Princeton union. [volume] (Princeton, Minn.) 1876-1976, 1895-09-12
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
CHRIST "THE CHIEFEST AMONG
TEN THOUSAND.,'
The Most Conspicuous Character of
History-The Pardon of All Sin ana
the Correction OF All EviI-Chief
in Heaven. 49,


New York, Special..-For his sermon
for this forenoon Rev. DR.. Tallnage
selects topic which must prove full
OF inspiration to Christians every
where. The title of his discourse is.
'"Ihe Chieftain,' and the text, "The
chiefest among ten thousand. Can
ticles, ", 10.
The most conspicuous character of
history steps out upon the platform.
The finger which, diamoned 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
finger OF events-all five fingers point
Ing In one direction. Christ is the
overlapping figure of all time. He is
the "yoX humana" in all music, the
gracefulest line in all sculpture the
most exquisite mingling of lights and
shades in all paintings, the acme of
all climaXes, the dome of all cathe-
draled grandeur, and the perora ton
of all language.
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
omega, ne appropriated to himself all
the splendos that you can spell out
elther with those two letters or all the
letters beWeen them: Il am the Alpha
l.,
end"
What does that Scripture mean
which says of Christ, "He that cometh
from above is above all?' 1t means
after you have piled up all Alpine and
Hlmalayan attitudes the glory of
Christ would have to spread it's wings
and descend a thousand leagues to
touch those SUBMITS. Pelion, high
mountain of Thessaly; Ossa, a high
mountain, and Olympus, a high noun
tain; 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 a com
plete failure. And after all the giants
Isaiah and Paul, prophetic and apos-
tollc giants; Raphael and Michael An
gelo, artistic giants; cherubim and SER
aphim 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 CIV
out: "Above allr' "Above ALL, But
Solomon in my text prefers to call
Christ '"The Chieftain," and 50 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 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 forth Christ as the par
don of all sin and correction of all evil
individual, social, political, national
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 a discourse
have frequent mention of justification,
SanctlflcatiOn, 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 diff
ferent phraseology. Now, I say there
is nothing in all the opulent realm OF
Anglo-SaXonism, of all the word treas
ures that we inherited from the Latin
and the Greek and the Indo-European,
but we have a right to marshal it in
religious discussion Christ sets the
example. His illustrations 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 address to
be put on the limits.
l know that there is a 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 on Mount Oil
vet? 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 without the
ship?. What you need, my friends, in
all your work, in your Sabbath 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 $4,000 different
words for dramatic purposes; Milton
employed 5000 different words for
poetic purposes; Rufus Choate en-
ployed over 1000 different words for
legal purposes but the most of us
have less than a thousand words that
we can manage, and that makes us 50
stupid.
When we come to set forth the love
of Christ we are going to take the ten
derest phraseology wherever we find
1t, 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 SMILES from tri-
umphal arch and oratorio and every
thing grand and stupendous. The
French navy has eighteen flags by
which they give signal, but those
ni rh Ho~ ;,,fo