The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1895-09-06
THE GREAT CHIEF.
DR.. Talmage Discourses on the
GSOry of Christ.
The Overlapping Figure of An Time-"Hc
That COmeth from Above Is Above
An"-The Alpha ane
the Omega.

The latest sermon DIV Kew. Il. DeN1t
Talmage was a theme that is full o
inspiration to Christians everywhere
The subject of his discourse was: ''Tht
Chieftain," and the text; "The chiefes
among ten thousand. d."-Canticles V. 10
Following is the sermon:
The most conspicuous character o.
history steps out upon the platform
The finger which, diamonded with
light, pointed down to Him from the
Bethlehem sky, was only a ratification
of the finger of prophecy, the finger Of
genealogy, the finger of chronology
the finger of events-all five fingers
pointing in one direction. He is the
+'vox humana" in all music, the grace.
fullest line in all sculpture, the most
exquisite mingling of light 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
twenty-four 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: lam the Alpha
and the Omega, the beginning and the
end
What does that Scripture mean
which says of Christ, "He that cometh
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 a thousand leagues to
touch those SUBMITS. Pelion, a high
mountain of Thessaly; Ossa, a high
mountain, and Olympus, a 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 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 allI' above allr' But Solo
mon 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 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 a dis
course have frequent mention of
justification, sanctification, covenant
of works and covenant of grace,
therefore it must be profoundly
evangelical, while they are suspicious
of a 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 treas
ures that we inherited from the Latin
and the Greek and the Indo- European,
but we have 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 well as
from the seas and the stars; and we do
not propose in our Sunday school teach
ing 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 sthe 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
without the ship? What you need
my friends, in all your work, in your
Sabbath school class, in your reforma-
tory 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 illimita-
BILE resource. Shakespeare employed
$1,000 different words for dramatic
purposes; Milton employed 5000 differ
ent words for poetic purposes; Rufus
Choate employed over 11,OOO different
words for legal purposes, but the most
of us have less than a 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 SMILES from tri-
umphal arch and oratorIo and every
thing grand and stupendous- The
French navy have eighteen flags by
which they give signal, but those
eighteen flags they can put into $4,000
different combinations And have to
tell you that these standards of the
cross may be lifted into combinations
infinite and varieties everlasting. And
1et me say to these young men who
come from the theological seminaries
into our services, and are after awhile
going to preach Jesus Christ: You
will have the largest liberty and un-