The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1898-04-15

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""''" To the soul?" My
REV. TALMAGE. oegative renlv then
is my negative reply now. The Bible
statement agrees with all physicians,
and all psychologists, and all scien-
lists, in saying that the blood is the
life, and in the Christian religion it
means simply that Christ's life was
given for our life. Hence all this talk
of men who say the Bible story of
blood is disgusting, and that they
don't want what they call a slaughter
house religion" only shows their inca
pacity or unwillingness to look through
the figure of speech toward the thing
signified. The blood that, on the
darkest Friday the world ever saw,
oozed, or trickled, or poured from the
brow, and the side, and the hands, and
the feet OF the Illustrious Sufferer,
back of Jerusalem, in few hours CO.
agulated and dried up, and forever dis
appeared; and il men had depended on
the application OF the literal blood of
Christ there would not have been a
soul saved for the last Is centuries In
order to understand this red word of
my text, we only have to exercise as
much common sense in religion as we
do in everything else. Pang for pang,
hunger for hunger, fatigue for fatigue,
tear for tear, blood for blood life for
life, we see every day illustrated. The
act of substitution is no novelty,
although / hear men talk as though
the idea of Christs suffering substi-
tuted for our suffering were something
abnormal, something distressingly
odd, wildly eccentric, solitary episode
in the worlds history, when [ could
take you out into this city and before
shutdown point you to 500 cases of sub
stitution and voluntary suffe ring of
one in behalf of another.
About So years ago there went forth
from our northern and southern homes
hundreds of thousands of men to do
battle. All the poetry of war soon van.
ished and left them nothing but the
terrible prose. They waded knee-deep
in mud. They slept in snow banks.
They marched till their cut feet tracked
the earth. They were swindled out of
their honest rations, and lived on meat
not fit for a dog. They had jaws frac-
tured, and eyes eXtinguished. and
limbs shot away. Thousands of them
cried for water as they lay on the field
the night after the battle and got IL
not They were homesick, and re-
ceived no message from their loved
ones They died in barns, in bushes.
in bitches, the buzzards of the summer
heat the only attendants on their oh
sequies. No one but the infinite God
who knows every thing, knows the ten
thousandth part of the length, and
breadth, and depth, and height of an
guish of the northern and southern
battlefelds. Why did these fathers
leave their children and go to the
front, and why did these young men,
postponing the marriage day, start
ont into the probabilities of never
coming backP For a principle they
died. Life for life. Blood for blood
Substitution!
But we need not go so far What is
that monument in the cemetery? It's
TO the doctors who fell in the southern
epidemics. Why go? Were there not
enough sick to be attended in these
northern ATTITUDES? Oh, yes, but the
doctor puts few medical books in his
valise, and some walls of medicine, and
leaves his patients here in the hands
of other physicians, and takes the rail
train. Before he gets to the infected
region he passes crowded rail-trains,
regular and extra, taking the flying
and atfrighted populations. He ar
rives in city over which a great
horror is brooding. He goes from
couch to couch, feeling the pulse and
studying symptoms, and prescrib-
ing day after day, night after
night, until fellow-physician
says; doctor, you had better go home
and rest you look miserable" But
he cannot rest while so many are suf-
fering. On and on, until some morn
ing finds him in a delirium, in which he
talks of home, and then rises and says
he must go and look after those pa
tients. He is told to lie down; but he
fights his attendants until he falls
back, and Is weaker and weaker, and
dies for people with whom he had no
kinship, and far away from his own
family, and is hastily put away in a
strangers tomb, and only the fifth
part OF a newspaper line tells us OF his
sacritice-his name just mentioned
among five, Yet he has touched the
furthest height of sublimity in that
three weeks Of humanitarian service.
lie goes straight as an arrow to the
bosom of Him who said: ~ was sick
and ye visited me-" Life for life.
Blood for blood. Substitution
In the legal profession | see the
same principle of self-sacrihce. In $40,
William Freeman, paupcriZed ind
idiotic negro, was at Auburn, N. Y,
on trial for murder He had slain ihe
entire Van Nest family. The foaming
wrath Of the community could be Ike pit
of him only by armed constabl,s.
Who would volunteer TO he his coun-
sci? No attorney wanted to sacri6;e