Milford chronicle., 1896-10-02
WINDOWS AND GATES.
THE REV. DR.. TALMAGE breaches
FROM A NEGLECTED. TEXT.

"And 1 WIN Make Thy Windows of Agates
and Thy Gates of Carbuncies" II How
Christ H6istcd the Great Gates of Par
don In His Own Blood.
WASHINGTON, Sept 27.-From a neg
leeted text, and one to most people I'M
known, Rev DIR. Talmage this morning
produces a sermon appropriate to individ-
ual and national circumstances, The sub
iect was, Coates Of Carbuncle, the text
being Isaiah liv, II, "And will make thy
windows of agates and thy gates Of car.
buncles "
Perhaps because a human disease Of
most painful and Ofttimes fatal character
is named after it the church and the world
have never done justice to that intense and
all suggestive precious stone, the carbun-
Gle The pearl that Christ picked up to H..
lustrate his Sermon and the jasper and tho
sapphire and the amet hyst which the apoc-
alyptic vision masoped into the wall Of
heaven, have had proper recognition, but
this, in all the ages, is the first sermon on
the carbuncle.
This precious stone is found in the East
Indies, in color is an intense scarlet, and
held up between your eye and the sun it is
burning coal. The poet puts 1t into
rhythm rs he writes:
Like to the burning coal whence comes its
name,
Among the Greeks as Anthrax known to fame.
God sets it high up in Biblo crystallog-
raphy He cuts it with divine chisel,
shapes 1t with precise geometry and kin
dies its fire into an almost supernatural
flame Of beauty. Its law of symmetry, Its
law of zones, its law of parallelism, some
thing % excite tho amazement Of the sci
enlist, chime the captOs Of the Ioet and
arouse the alteration of the Christian.
None but God.
No one but tho infinite God could fash
ion carbunclo rs large as your thumb
nail, and as If to make all ages appreciate
this precious stone he ordered 1t set in the
first row of the high priests breastplnte in
olden time and higher up than the onyx
ard the emerald and the diamond, and in
Ezekjel's prophecies concerning the SPLEEN
doris of the qyrian court the earbuncle is
mentioned, the brilliancies Of the walls ana
Of the tessellated floors suggested by the
Bible sentence, "Thou hast walked mp and
down in the midst Of the stones Of nre!'
But in my text It is not u solitary spCci.
men lnhJ lhiuu 1oui 40 phO hSSl'oh "a q
museum might take down from the shelf
a precious Stone and allow you to examine
it. Nor is it the panel of door that you
might stand and study for its unique cary
ings or bronzed traceries, but there is
whole gate,of it lifted before our admiring
and astounded vision-aye, two gates Of 1t
Eayc many gates Of it, Il will make thy
gates Of carbuncles. " What gates? Gates
Of the church. Gates of anything worth pos.
sessing, Gates Of successful enterprise, Gates
of salvation. Gates of national achieve
ment. Isaiah, who wrote this text, wrote
also all that about Christ 'as tho Lamb
to the slaughter" and spoke Of Christ an
saying, Il have trod the wine press alone,
and wrote, 'Who is this that cometh from
Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrahg'
And do you think that Isaiah in my text
merely happened to represent the gates as
red gates, as carmine gates, as gates Of car
buncle? No He means that it is through
atapement, through blood real struggle,
through Ggonies, We get into anything
worth netting into.