The Yale expositor., 1896-05-15

| lily u teach his senators
va wisdom; and II any
men on earth ought to be endowed with
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 en-
couraged in every possible way, instead
| OF severely criticised and blamed and
excoriated, 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 resi-
dence in Washington l have come to
find out that many of our public lien
are persistently misrepresented, and
some of the best of them, the purest
in their lives and most faithful in the
discharge of their duties, are the worst
DETAINED. Some day want to preach
sermon from the text in ii. Peter:
They are not afraid to speak evil of
dignities. Whereas angels, which are
greater in power and might, bring not
railing accusation against them before
the Lord. But these, as natural brute
beasts, made to be taken and destroyed,
speak evil of the things that they un-
derstand not" So constant and ma!g-
nant is this depreciation and scandaliza-
ton in regard to our public men that all
over the land there are those who sup
pose that the city of Washington is the
center of all corruption, while, what
with it's parks and its equestrian statu-
airy, and its wide streets, and it's archi-
tectural symmetries, and it's 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 | 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 adj
journment of two bodies of men as tai
ented, as upright and as patriotic as
ever graced the capitol, will take place.
The two or three unfortunate out
breaks which you have noticed only
make more conspicuous the dignity, the
fraternity, the eloquence, the fidelity
which have characterized those two
bodies during all the long months of
important and anxious elaboration
We put halo around great men of the
past because they were so rare in their
time. Our senate and house of repre-
sentatives have five such men where
once they bad one But it will not be
until after they are dead that they will
get appreciated. The world finds it
safer to praise the dead than the living
because the departed, having a heavy
pile of marble above them, may not rise
to become rivals. But, before the
gavels of adjournment drop and the
doors of Capitol Hill shut, there are
one or two things that ought to be
done, and let US pray God that they may
be accomplished. More forcibly than
ever before, congress has been I'M
plored to acknowledge God in our con-
stitution. The Methodist church. q
church that is always doing glorious
things, has in it's recent Wilmington
conference requested our congress to
amend the immortal document, which
has been the foundation and wall and
dome Of our United States government,
by inserting the words, Trusting in
Almighty God" If that amendment is
made, it will not only please all the
good people of the country, but Will
please the heavens. 1t was only an
oversight or mental accident that the
fathers who made the constitution did
not insert a divinely worshipful SEN
tence. 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 begotten Son. THE con-
stitution would have been failure mad
it not been for the Divine interference.
The members Of the convention could
agree on nothing until, in response to
Benjamin Franklin's request that the
meetings be opened by prayer, the Lord
God was called on to Interfere and
help, and then the way was cleared,
and the states signed document; a
historical fact that all the rat-terriers
of modern infidelity cannot bark out of
existence! / know that there was an
exception to the fact that the promi-
nent men of those good times were good
men. Tom Paine, libertine and sot,
did not believe in any thing good Until
ne was dying, and then he shrieked out
for Gods mercy. And Ethan Allen,
from one Of whose descendants have
received within few days confirma-
ton of the incident l mentioned in a
recent sermon, as saying to his dying
daughter that she had setter take her
mothers christian religion than mis-
own infidelity. The article sent me
says: 1.-THE story has been denied by
some of the Allen family, but the Bron-