Essex County herald. [volume] (Guildhall, Vt.) 1873-1964, 1897-04-02
TALMAGE'S SERMON
INTERESTING THEME ny THE
WASHINGTON PREACHER.
Subjects "our Debt to the Greeks. f"

TEXT; Il am debtor both to the Greeks
and 10 the barbarians. '-Romars l. IA
AT this time. when that bahemoth oil
denominations. MOhammedanisn m. after b,y.
ing gorged itself on the carcasses OF 100 900
Armenians, Is irving e. put its paws upon
one OF the fairest Of all nations. that OF the
Greeks. / preach this sermon OF sympathy
and protest, for every intelligent person on
this side, like Paul. who wrote the text. l.
debtor to the Greeks. The present cris : i
emphasized by the guns Of the Alliat Powrrs
OF Europe, ready to be uuilmbsrei against
the Hellenes, and / am asked to speak ont.
| Paul, with a master intellect of the ages.
sat in brilliant Corinth, the great Aero
Corinthus fortress frowning from the height
OF 1856 feet, aud in the house Of Gaius.
where he was "A guest. "A big pile of money
near him, which he was taking 10 Jerusalem
for tho Door
/ In this letter to the Romans. which Chry.
session admired so much that he had IL read
| 10 him twice weak. Paul practically saw:
II, the apostle, am bankrupt. / owe what
cannot pay, but will pay as large a percent
age as | can. Ii is an obligation for what
/ Greek literature and Greek sculpture and
! Greek architecture and Gr.ek proves have
done for me. l will pay all can in INSTALL
ments OF evangelism. am insolvent to the
Greeks"
! Hellas, Us the inhabitants call il, or trreece,
/ as We call it, is insignificant i'm size. about a
l third as large as the State OF New York, but
what II lacks in breadth il makes up in
/ height, with its mountains Cylene and
| Eta ami Taygetus and Tymphrestus.
each over 1000 feet in elevation. and
/ its Parnassus, over 5000. just the
country for mighty men to ba born in, for in
all lands the most of the intellectual and
moral giants were not born on the plain,
but had for cradle the valley between two
mountains. That country, nc part OF which
! is more than forty miles from the sea, has
| made its impress upon the world rs no 9th IT
nation, and it to-day holds first mortgage
/ OF obligation upon all civilized people.
| While we must leave to craftsmanship and
| diplomacy the settlement OF the intricate
/ questions which now involve all Europe and
| Indirectly all nations, il is time for all the
| churches, al schools. all universities, all
/ arts. all lteratureS, 10 sound out in the
most emphatic way the declaration, II am
/ debtor TO the Greeks"
In the first place, we owe to their language
/ our New Testament All of it was first writ
/ ten in Greek, except the book of Matthew.
and that, written in the AramRan language,
/ was soon put into Greek by our SaviOur's
| brother James. TO the Greek language we
/ owe the best sermon ever preached, the bess
/ letters ever written. the best visions ever
| kindled. All the parallels in Greek. All the
miracles in Greek. The sermon on the
mount in Greek. The story of Bethlehem
and Golgotha. and Olivet. and Jordan banks,
and Galilean beaches, an Pauline embarka.
ton, and Pentecostal tongues, and seven
| trumpets that sounded over PatmOs, have
como to the world in liquid, symmetric,
picturesque, philosophic. unrivaled Greek.
instead Of the Sbberish language in which
many of the nations of the earth at
that time jabberet. Who eau forget
it. and who can exaggerate its thriI-
ling importance, that Christ and heaven
were introduced to us in the language
of the Greeks, the language in which Homer
| had sung, and SOphocles dramatized,
and Plato dialogued. and Socrates discoursed,
/ and Lycurgus legisated, and Demosthenes
| Numbered his Grafton on 1.-THE Crown
Everlasting thanks to God that the waters of
life were not handed to the world in the I'M
washed cupof corrupt languages from which
nations had been drinking, but in the clean,
bright, golden lippe l. emerald handled
chaltce of the Hellenes. Learned Curtius
wrote a whole volume about the Greek verb.
| PhilolOgists century after century have been
measuring the symmetry OF tina. language,
laden with elegy aud philippe drama an
comedy, Odyssey" and "llad.' but the
grandest thing that Greek language ever ac-
complished was to give to the world the
DbueulCIlOu, lnt COWtOEI, lns ltThuldlIOu,
the salvation. of the gospel Of the Son OF
God For that we are debtors to the Greeks.
From the Greeks the world learned how to
make history. Had there been no Herodotus
and Thucydides there would have been no
Macaulay or Bancroft Had there been no
Sophocles in tragedy there would have been
no Shakespeare. Had there been no Homer,
there would have en- no Milton. The mod
ern wits. who are now or have been out ON
hn mic ~ mn ha ri 4
laugh at the right time. can be traced back
to Aristophanes, the AtheGian, and many OF
| the locOsities that are now taken as new had
their suggestions 2300 years ago in the fifty
four comedies of that master of merriment.
Grecian mythology has been the richest
mine from which orators and essayis.s
have drawn their illustrations and paint
ers the themes for their canvas, and, nj
though now an exhausted mine, Grecian
mythology has done n work that moth
ing else could have accomplished. Be-
reas, representing the north wind; Sissy
phus, rolling the stone up the hill, only
to have the same thing to do over again;
Tantalus, with fruits above him that he
could not reach; Achilles, with his arrows;
lcarus, with his waXen wings. flying too
near the sun: the Centaurs, Mailman and
half-beast; Orpheus, with his Tyre; Atlas,
with the world on his back-aIl these and
more have helped literature, from the grad
yates speech on commencement day to Ru-
fus Choate's eulogium on Daniel Webster at
Dartmouth. Tragedy and comedy were
born In the festivals of Dionysius ut Athens.
The lyric and elegiac and epic poetry OF
Greece 500 years before Christ has its echoes
in the TennysOns, Longfcllows and Bryants OF
1860 and 1900 years after Christ. There Is
not an effective pulpit or editorial chair OF
professors room or cultured parlor or intel
ligent farmhouse to-day in America or
Europe that could not appropriately employ
Pauls ejaculation and say. al am debtor to
the Greeks"
The TACT is this-Paul had got much Of his
oratoricaI power of expression from the
Greeks. That he had studied their literature
was evident when, standing in the presence
of an audience of Greek scholars on Mars
hill, which overlooks Athens, he dared to
quote from one Of their own Greek poets
either Cleanthus or Aratus, declaring, "As
certain also of your own poets have said
For We are also his offspring" And he
made accurate quotation, Cleanthus, one Of
the poets having written:
For we thine offspring are. All things that
creep
Are bur the echo of the voice divine.
And Aratus, one of their own poets, had
written:
Doth care perpIex? Is lowering danger
nigh?
We are his offspring, and to Jove we fly.
1t was rather a risky thing for Paul to at
tempt to quote eXtemporaneously from a
poem, in a language foreign to his and be-
fore Greek scholars, but Paul did it without
stammering and then acknowledged before
the most distinguished audience on the
planet his indebtedness to the Greeks, cry
ing out in his grafton, "As one of your own
poets has said"
Furthermore, all the civilized world, like
Paul. is indebted to the Greeks for architec-
ture. The world before the time OF the
Greeks had built monoliths. obelisks, crom'
lechs, sphinxes and pyramids, but they were
mostly monumental, to the dead whom they
fn,lad 70 ,nanorializp We are not certain