The united opinion. [volume] (Bradford, Vt.) 1881-1970, 1899-07-21

of their company. But in all circles.
religious and irreligious, the tendency
is to excuse sin in proportion as il Is
mammoth. Even John Milton in his
paradise Lost" while he condar,ne
Satan, gives such grand description Of
him you have hard work to withhold
your admiration. Oh, this strainino
out of small sins like gnats and this
gulping down great iniquities like cam
| els!
This subject does not give the picture
of one or two persons, but is gallery in
which thousands of people may see
their likenesses. For instance, allthose
people who, while they would not rob
their neighbors of farthing, appropri-
ate the money and the treasure of the
public. A man has house to sell, and
he tells his customer it is worth $20.-
900. Next day the assessor comes
around and the owner says it is worth
$4,000. The government Of the United
States took off the tax from personal
income, among other reasons, because
SO few people would tell the truth, and
many a man with an income of hun
dreds of dollars a day made statements
which seemed to imply he was about to
be handed over to the overseers of the
poor. Careful to pay their passage from
Liverpool to New York, yet smuggling
in their saratoga trunk ten silk dresses
from Paris and a half dozen watches
from Geneva, Switzerland, telling the
custom house officer on the wharf:
There is nothing in that trunk but
wearing apparel" and putting FIVE
dollar gold piece in his hand to punctu-
ate the statement.
Described in the text are all those
who are particular never to break the
law of grammar and who want all their
language an elegant specimen ofsyn-
tax, straining out all the inaccuracies
of speech with fine sieve of literary
criticism, while through their conversa-
ton go SANDER and innuendo and pro
family and falsehood larger than a
whole caravan of camels, when they
might better fracture every law of the
language and shock their intellectual
taste, and better let every verb seek in
vain for its nominative and every noun
for it's government, and let every prepo-
sition lose it's way in the sentence, and
adjectives and participles and pro-
nouns get into a grand riot worthy of
the Fourth ward of New York on cleo
ton day, than to commit moral mae
curacy. Better swallow a Thousand
gnats than one camel.
Such persons are also described in
the text who are very much alarmed
about the small faults of others and
have no alarm about their own great
munity and in every church watchdogs
who feel called upon to keep their eyes
on others and growl. They are full of
suspicious. They wonder if this man
is not dishonest, if that man is not I'M
clean, if there is not something wrong
the first to hear of anything wrong.
Vultures are always the first to srnSi
carrion. They are self-appointed de-
tectives. lay this down as a rule with
out any exception, that those people
who have the most faults themselves
are most nerciless in their watchings
of others. From scalp of head to sole
of foot they are full of jealousies and
hypercriticisms. They spend their life
in hunting for muskrats and mud
turtles instead of hunting for Rocky
mountain eagles, always for something
mean instead of something grand.
They look at their neighbors' imper-
fections through a microscope and look
at their own imperfections through a
telescope upside down. Twenty faults
of their own do not hurt them so much
as one fault of somebody else. Their
neighbors' imperfections are like gnats,
and they strain them out; their own i'm
projections are like camels, and they
swallow them.
But lest too many might think they
escape the scrutiny of the text, have
to tell you that we all come under the
Divine satire when we make the cues
tions of time more prominent than the
questions of eternity. Come, now, let
us all go into the confessional Are not
all tempted to make the question;
Where shall l live now? greater than
the question: Where shall live for
ever? How shall l get more dollars
here? greater than the question: How
shall lay up treasures in Heaven? The
question: How shall l pay my debts
to man? greater than the question:
How shall l meet my obligations to
God? The question: How shall gain
the world? greater than the question:
What if l lose my soul? The questions:
Why did God let sin come into the
world? greater than the question: How
SLall l get it extirpated from my
nature? The question: What shall | |
10 with the 20 or 40 or 20 years of nv
sub-lunar existence? greater than the
question: What shall do with the mil |
lions of cycles of my post terrestrial
existence? Time-how small it is! |
Eternity-how vast it is! The former |
more insignificant in comparison with
he latter than a gnat is insignificant
when compared with a camel. We |
lodged the text. We said: THAT does
not mean me, and that does not mean
me-" and with a ruinous benevolence we
ire giving the whole sermon away.
Rut LET us all surrender to tba