The Van Buren press., 1897-12-25
finds God In the Fishes.

Rev. 7. Dewitt Talmage delivered
the sixth of his series of sermons on
God Everywhere. at the First
Presbyterian church Washington City
Sunday morning. his subject being the
Ichthyology of the Bible; or God
among the fishes. The text was
Genesis | Xxx; And God said, let the
waters bring forth abundantly the
moving creature that hath life. .
DR.. Talmage spoke In part as follows:
Is 1t not strange that the Bible
imagery Is 30 inwrought from the
fisheries, when the holy Land is. for
the most part. an inland regionf
.The worlds geography has
changed. Lake Galilee was larger and
deeper and better stocked than now,
and no doubt the rivers were deeper and
the fisheries were Of far more import
ance then than now. Beside that. there
was the Mediterranean Sea only thirty
five miles away, and the fish were salted
or dried and brought inland, and 80
much OF that article Of food was sold in
Jerusalem that fish market gave the
name to one Of the gates Of Jerusalem
nearby, and it was called the Fish
Gate.
so important was the fish that the
god Dagon, worshiped by the Philis-
tines, was made half fish and half man,
and that is the meaning Of the Lord 8
indignation when in 1st Samuel we read
that this Dagon, the fish god, stood
beside the ark of the Lord. and Dagon
was by invisible hands dashed to pieces,
because the Philistines had dared to
make the fish god.
s'Lavard and Wilkinson found the
fish an object Of idolatry all through
Assyria and Egypt. The Nile was full
Of fish, and that explains the horrors of
the plague that slaughtered the finny
tribe all up and down that river. which
has been and is now the main artery of
Egypt s commerce. Itpreceded the bird,
quadrnped, the human race. The fish
has priority of residence over every
living thing. The next thing done after
God had kindled for our world the
golden chandelier of the sun and the
silver chandelier of the moon WAS to
make the fish The first motion of the
principle of life. principle that all the
thousands Of years since have not been
able to define or analyze, the very first
stir of life was in fish to confound the
scientists. It does not take the uni
verse to prove God. A fish does it.
No wonder that Linnaeus and Cuvier
and Agassiz and the greatest minds of
all the centuries sat enraptured before
its anatomy. Oh, its beauty. and the
adaptedness.
1.-The Lord. by placing the fish in
the second course of the menu in
paradise. making it precede beast and
bird, indicated to the world the import
ance of the fish as an article of human
food. We mix up fantastic food that
kills the most Of us before thirty years
of age. Custards and whipped sillabubs
and Roman punches and chicken salads
at midnight are a gauntlet that few
have strength to run. We put ON many
tombstone epitaphs saying that the one
beneath died of patriotic services or
from exhaustion in religious work,
when nothing killed the poor fellow but
lobster eaten at party four hours after
he ought to have been sound asleep in
bed. No man or moman ever amounted
to anything who was brought up on
floating island or angel cake. The
world must turn back to paradisaic diet
II 1t is to get paradisaic morals and
paradisaic health. The human race
today needs more phosphorus.
1.-The fools who become infidels
because they cannot understand the en-
gulfment Of the recreant Jonah In sea
monster, might have saved their souls
by studying little natural history,
The fisherman think it best to keep the
useful and worthless of the haul in the
same net until 1t is drawn upon the
beach, and then the division takes
place, and If it is on Long Island coast
the moss bunkers are thrown ont and
the blue fish and shad preserved, or if
1t is on the shore of Galilee the fish
classified as siluroids are hurled back
into the water or thrown up the bank as
unclean, while the perch and the carp
and the barbel are put in pals. to be
carried home for use. So in the church
on earth the saints and the hypocrites,
the generous and the mean. the chaste
and the unclean, are kept in the same
membership, but at death the division
will be made, and the good will be
gathered into heaven. and the bad,
however many holy communions they
may have celebrated. and however
many rhetorical prayers they may have
offered. and however many years their
names may have been on the church
rolls, will be cast away. God forbid
that any Of us should be among the
cast away. 80