Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1897-03-01

8 6SO ~
the earth
Wings OF Humility.
Give me ire history Of your foot, and
I will gle yeu the history Of your life
time. Tell me MP what steps it hath
gone, down what declivities and in
what roads and in what directions, and
I will know more about 0 than /
want to know. None of us could en-
dure the scrutiny. Our feet not always
in paths Of God, sometimes in paths Of
wOrldliness. Our feet, a divine and
glorious machinery for usefulness and
work, SO often making missteps, SO often
going in the wrong direction. God
knowing every step, the patriarch say
ing, ""Thou settest a print on the heels
of my feet" Crimes Of the hand, crimes
of the tongue, crimes Of the re, crimes
of the ear not worse than crimes of the
foot. Oh, we want the wings Of humil-
ity to cover the feetl Ought we not to
go into self abnegation before the all
searching. ali s~crutinizing, all trying
eye of God? The seraphs do. How much
more we? with twain he covered the
feet"
All this talk about the dignity of hui
man nature is braggadocio and sin. Our
nature started at the hand of God regal,
but it has been pauperized. There is a
we'll in Belgium which once had very
pure water, and it was stoutly masoned
with stone and brick, but that well aft
erward became the enter Of the battle
of Waterloo. At the opening of the bat
tie the soldiers with their sabers COM
PEELED the gardener, William Won Kyl-
r@~1, ~ 1,ax xr-oAOr 0zA 20 RI1 r-o11 fo~
them, and it was very pure water. But
the battle ragged, and 500 dead and half
dead were flung into the we'll for quick
and easy burial, 81 that the we'll of re-
freshment became the well of death, and
long after people looked down into the
well and they saw the bleached skulls,
but no water. So the human soul was a
we'll of good, but the armies of sin have
fought around it and fought across i,
and been slain, and it has become a
we'll of skeletons. Dead hopes, dead res.
olutions, dead opportunities, dead am
billions. An abandoned well unless
Christ shall reopen and purify and fill
it as the well of Belgium never was.
Unclean, unclean.
Irreverence.
Another seraphic posture in the text,
with twain he covered the face That
means reverence Godward. Never S,
much irreverenoe abroad in the world
as today. You see it in the defaced
~statuary, in the cutting out of figures
from fine paintings, in the chipping OF
monuments for a memento, in the fact
that military guard must stand at the
grave of Lincoln and Garfield, and that
ILL Cl,olo MO 800 Ho o-4 lO--~ "a
frewood, though SO George p. Morrises
beg the wOodmen to spare the tree, anC
that calls a corpse a cadaver, and hat
speaks of death at going over to the ma.
jority, and substitutes for the reverent
terms father and mother 1.-THE old man"
and "the old woman, and finds moth
ing impressive in the ruins of Baalbe.
or the columns of Karnac, and sees nc
difference in the Sabbath from other
days except it allows more dissipation,
and reads the Bible in what is called
higher criticism, making it not the WORD
of God. but a good book with some fine
things in it.
Irreverence never 10 much abroad.
How many take the name of God il
vain, how many trivial things said
about the Almighty Not willing t.
have God in the world, they roll up an
idea of sentimentality and humanitari-
anism and i~mpudence and imbecility
and call it God. No wings of reverence
over the face. no taking off of shoes on
holy ground. You can tell from the
way they talk they could have made q
better world than this, and that the
of the Bible shocks every sense OF
nrsonrio+r Trhor fo1E of %ho fox-a of GoI
in a way that shows you they believe it
does not make any difference how bad a
man is here he will come in at the shin
ing gate. They talk of the love of God
in a way which shows you they think it
is a general Jail delivery for all the
abandoned and the scoundrelly of the
universe. No punishment hereafter fol-
any wrong done here.
The Bible gives two descriptions I
God, and they are just opposite, and
they are both true. In one place the
Bible says God is love. In another place
the Bible says God is a consuming fire.
The explanation is plain as plain can
be. God through Christ is love. God
out of Christ is fire. To win the one
and to escape the other we have only tc
throw ourselves, body, mind and soul,
into Christ's keeping. mo" says ir-
81 want no atonement; ]
want no pardon; I wan no interven-
ton; I will go up and face God, and ]
will challenge him, and / will defy
him, and I will ask him what he wants
to do with me-" So the finite confronts
the Infinite; SO a tack hammer tries tc
break a thunderbolt; SO the breath OF
human nostrils defies the everlasting
God, while the hierarchs of heaven bow
the head and bend the knee as the
Kings chariot goes by, and the arch
turns away because he cannot Ell