The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1896-05-15
TALMAGES sERNON.
He Offers Some Advice TO Our Ma
t.onel Legislators.
importaDt Things That should Be Done
Before Aaiournm-nt-He ALSO sug-
Eests . Plan for the National
Conventions to Follow.

Before They Adjourn was the sub
5ect of a recent sermon by Rev. 7. De
Witt Talmage in Washington. having
reference to the early dissolution of
congress. The text selected was:
Psalms cv:22, ''and teach his senators
wisdom" DR.. Tslmage said, among
other things:
| Senator's In this text stand for law
makers. Joseph was the lord treas
urer of the Egyptian government, and
among other great things which he
did, according to my text, was to teach
his senators wisdom; and if any man
on earth ought to be endowed with
wisdom 1t is senator's, whether they
stand in congresses, parliaments, or
reichstags, or assemblies, or legisla-
lures BY their decisions, nations go
up or down. Lawmakers are some
times SO tempted by prejudices, by Sec
tional preferences, by opportunity of
personal advancement, and sometimes
what is best to do is so doubtful
that they ought to be prayed
for and encouraged in every pos
sible way, instead of severely
criticised and blamed and ex-
coriated. as is much of the time the
case. Our public men are so often the
target to be shot at, merely because
they obtain eminence which other men
wanted, but could not reach, that more
injustices are hurled at our national
legislature than the people of the
United States can possibly imagine.
The wholesale belying of our public
men is simply damnable. By residence
in Washington have come to find out
that many of our public men are per-
sistently misrepresented, and some of
the best of them, the purest in their
| lives and most faithful in the dis
charge of their duties, are the
worst DETAINED. So constant and
malignant is the work of de-
probation and standardization in
regard to our public men that all over
the land there are those who suppose
that the city of Washington is the CEN
ter of all corruption, while, what with
its parks, and its equestrian statuary,
and its wide streets, and its architect
ural symmetries, and its lovely homes,
it is not only the most beautiful city
under the sun, but has the highest
style of citizenship l have seen but
one intoxicated man in the more than
six months of my residence, and l do
not think any man can give similar
testimony of any other city on the
American continent.
The gavels of our two houses of ma
tional legislature will soon fall and
adjournment of two bodies of men as
talented, as upright, aud as patriotic
as ever graced the capitol will take
place. The two or three unfortunate
outbreaks which you have noticed
only make more conspicuous the dig
nifty, the fraternity, the eloquence,
the fidelity which have characterized
those two bodies during all the long
months of important and anxious
deliberation. We put halo around
great men of the past because they
were so rare in their time. Our
senate and house of representatives
have five such men where once they
had one. But it will not be until after
they are dead that they will get APP
preciated. The world finds it safer to
praise the dead than the living, be-
cause the departed having heavy pile
of marble above them, may not rise to
become rivals. But, before the gavels
of adjournment drop and the doors of
apitol hall shut, there are one or two
things that ought to be done. and let
us pray God that they may be ac-
before congress has been implored to
acknowledge God in our con stitution.
The Methodist church, church that
is always doing glorious things, has in
it's recent Wilmington conference re-
quested our congress to amend the
immortal document which has been
the foundation and wall and dome of
our United States government, by in
serting the words, Trusting in AL
made, it will not only please all the
good people of the country, but will
please the heavens 1t was only an
oversight or a mental accident that
the fathers who made the constitution
did not insert a divinely worshipful
sentence. They all, so far as they
amounted to anything, believed in
"God, the Father Almighty, the
Maker of Heaven and earth, and
in Jesus Christ, His only be-
gotten Son." The constitution
would have been a failure had it
not been for the divine inference. The
members of the convention could agree
on nothing until, in response to Benja-
min Franklin's request that the meet
ings be opened by prayer, the Lord
God was called on to interfere and
help, and then the way was cleared,
and all the states signed the document;
a historical fact that all the rat terriers
of modern infidelity cannot bark out
of existencel 1 know that there was
an exception to the fact the prominent
men of those times were good men.
Tom Paine, libertine and sot, did
not believe in anything good until
he was dying, and then he shrieked
out for Gods mercy. And Ethan AL
len, from one of whose descend
ants / have received within a few
DAYS a confirmation of the incident I
mentioned in a recent sermon, as say
;uo IN his DIVING dauphter that she had