Connecticut western news., 1899-08-03
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Solomon had their homes furnished with 1t. The tusks of African and Asiatic elephants were twisted into all manner of shapes, and there were stairs of ivory, and chairs of ivory, and tables of ivory, and floors of ivory, and pillars of ivory, and windows of ivory, and fountains that dropped into basins of ivory, and rooms that had ceilings of ivory. Oh, white and over mastering beauty! Green tree branch es sweeping the white curbs. Tapestry trailing the snowy floors. Brackets of light flashing on the lustrous surround ings. Silvery music rippling on the beach of the arches. The mere thought of 1t almost stuns my brain, and you say: "Oh, if I could only have walked over such floors! If I could have thrown myself In such a chair! If I could have heard the drip and dash of those fountainsr' You shall have something better than that If you only let Christ introduce you. From that place he came, and to that place he proposes to transport you, foS his gar ments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces" What d of the French, the Windsor castle of the English, the Spanish Alhambra, the Russian Kremlin, are mere dungeons compared with it! Not so many cas- ties on either side the Rhine as on both sides of the river of God-the ivory palaces, One for the angels, insuffera- bly bright, winged fire eyed, tempest charioted; one for the martyrs, with blood red robes from under the altar; one for the King, the steps of his pal ace the crown of the church militant; one for the singers, who lead the 144,- 900; one for you, ransomed from sin; one for me, plucked from the burning. Oh, the ivory palaces!
 Realms of Beauty.
 Today it seems to me as if the win dows of those palaces were illumined for some great victory, and look and see, climbing the stairs of ivory and walking on floors of ivory, some whom we knew and loved on earth. Yes, I know them. There are father and mother, not S2 years and 79 years, as when they left us, but blithe and young as when on their marriage day. And there are brothers and sisters, mer- rier than when we used to romp across the meadows together. The cough gone. The cancer cured. The erysipe- las healed. The heart break over. Oh, how fair they are in the ivory palaces! And your dear little children that went out from you-Christ did not let one of them drop as he lifted them. He did af oft fvnr Nn They went as from one they loved well to one whom they loved better. If l should take your little child and press its soft face against my rough cheek, might keep 1t little while, but when you, the mother, came along, 1t would struggle to go with you. And so you stood holding your dying child when Jesus passed by in the room and the little one sprang out greet him. That is all. Your Christian dead did not go down into the dust and the gravel and the mud. Though 1t rained all that funeral day, and the water came up to the wheels hub as you drove out to the cemetery, it made no difference to them, for they stepped from the home here to the home there, right into the ivory palaces. All is we'll with them. All Is we'll
 It Is not dead weight that you lift when you carry Christian out. Jesus makes the bed up soft with velvet promises, and he says: Put her down here very gently. Put that head which will never ache again on this pillow of hallelujahs. Send up word that the procession is coming. Ring the bells. Ring! Open your gates, ye ivory pal acesw And so your loved ones are there. They are just as certainly there, having died in Christ, as that you are here. There is only one thing more they want. Indeed, there Is one thing in heaven they have not got. They want it. What Is 1t? Your company. But, oh, my brother, unless you change your tack you cannot reach that har- Dor. You might as well take the Southern Pacific railroad, expecting in that direction to reach Toronto, as to go on in the way some of you are going, and yet expect to reach the ivory palaces. Your loved ones are looking out of the windows of heaven
 
 back upon them. You do not seem to know the sound of their voices as well as you used to or to be moved by the sight of their dear faces. Call louder, ye departed ones! Call louder from the ivory palaces!
 Mystery Solved.
 When think of that place and think of my entering 1t, I feel awkward. l feel as sometimes when I have been exposed to the weather, and my shoes have been bemired, and my coat is soiled, and my hair Is disheveled, and I stop In front of some fine residence where I have an errand. I feel not fit to go in as I am and sit among the guests. So some of us feel about heav- en. We need to be washed; we need to be rehabilitated before we go into the ivory palaces. Eternal God, let the surges of thy pardoning mercy roll over us! want not only to wash my hands and my feet; but, like some skilled diver, standing on the pier head, who leaps into the wave and comes up at far distant point from where he went in, so I want to go down, and so l want to come up. o Jesus, wash me in the waves of thy salvation!
 And here I ask you to solve a mys- tery that has been expressing me for 30 years. I have been asking 1t of doctors of divinity who have been studying theology half a century, and they have given me no satisfactory answer. have turned over all the books in my library, but got no solu tion to the question, and today come and ask you for an explanation. By what logic was Christ induced to ex- change the ivory palaces of heaven for the crucifixion agonies of earth? I shall take the first thousand million years in heaven to study out that prob lem; meanwhile and now taking 1t as the tenderest, mightiest of all facts