Courier Democrat. (Langdon, N.D.) 1891-1920, 1898-08-11

spoke, ana the sculptOrs who chiseled
and the architects who built. in all the
centuries except our own? Dust
Where are the most of the books that
once entranced the world? Dust!
Pliny wrote twenty books of history;
all lost. The most of Menander's
writings lost. OF one hundred and
thirty comedies of Plautus, all gone
but twenty. Euripides wrote a hun
dred dramas; all gone but nineteen.
Eschylus wrote hundred dramas; all
gone but seven. Varro wrote the la
borious biographies of 700 Romans,
not fragment left. Quintilian wrote
his favorite book on the corruption of
eloquence; all lost. Thirty books OF
Tacitus lost. Dion Cassius wrote
eighty books; only twenty remain.
Berosius' history all lost. Where there
IS one living book there are thou
sand dead books. The greatest library
in the world, that which has the wild
est shelves and longest aisles and the
most multitudinous volumes and the
vastest wealth, is the underground
library. It is the royal library, the
continental library, the hemisphere
library, the planetary library, the
library of the dust. And all these
library cases will be opened, and all
these scrolls unrolled, and all these
volumes unclasped and as easily as in
your library or mine we take up a
book, blow the dust off of it, and turn
over its pages, so easily will the Lord
OF the Resurrection pick out of this
library of dust every volume of human
life and open it and read it and dis
play it. And the volume will be re-
bound, to be set in the royal library
OF the Kings palace, or in the prison
library of the self-destroyed
Oh! this mighty literature of the
dust! 1t is not so wonderful after all
that Christ chose, instead of an ink
stand, the impressionable sand on the
moor OF an ancient temple, ana, instead
of hard pen, put forth his forefinger
with the same END of nerve and
muscle and bone and flesh as that
which makes up our own forefnger
and wrote the awful doom of hypocrisy
and full and complete forgiveness for
repentant sinners, even the worst. We
talk about the ocean of Christ's mercy
Put four ships upon that ocean and lei
them sail out in opposite directions
for thousand years, and see if they
can find the shore of the ocean OF
the Devine mercy. Let them sail tc
the north and the south and the eas
and the west, and then after the thou
sand years of voyage let them come
back and they will report, "No shore
no shore to the ocean of Gods mercy.
And now l can believe that which
I read, how that mother kept burn
ing candle in the window every nigh,
for ten years, and one night, very late
a poor Waif of the street entered. The
aged woman said to her, Sit down by
the fire. and the stranger said, why
do you keep that light in the window? o.
The aged woman said, That is to light
my hayward daughter when she re.
turns. Since she went away, ten wears
ago, my hair has turned white. Folks
blame me for worrying about her, but
you see l am her mother, and some
times half dozen times a night !
open the door and look out into tbs
darkness and cry, Lizzie! Lizzie.' But
1 must not tell you any more about
my troubles, for guess, from the way
you cry, you have trouble enough of
your own. Why, how cold and sick
you seem! Oh, my! can it be? Yes
you are Lizzie, my own lost child!
Thank God that you are home again!"
And what a time of rejoicing there was
in that house that night! And Christ
again stopped down, and on the ashes
Of that hearth, now lighted up, not
more by the great blazing logs than
by the joy of "a reunited household,
wrote the same liberating words that
had been written more than eighteen
hundred years ago in the dust of the
Jerusalem temple. Forgiveness! A
word broad enough and high enough to
let pass through it all the armies of
heaven, a million abreast, on white
horses, nostril to nostril, flank to
flank.