Connecticut western news., 1899-05-18
TURNED DTODARKNESS
DR. IAlMAGE;S GRAPHIC PICTURE OF
 A GoDL-SS WORLD.

Deplorable Condition Into Which In-
 fidelity Would, If It Could. Plunge
 Humanity A Lost Race Without
 Divine Guidance.
 IOopy light. Louis Klopsch, 1see.l
 w WASHINGTON, May 14.-In this ser mon Dr. Taimage gives a glimpse of what the world would be if the gospel were abolished and the human race left without divine guidance The text is Acts ii, 20, "The sun shall be turned into darkness.
 Christianity is the rising sun of our time. and men have tried with the up- rolling vapors of skepticism and the smoke of their blasphemy to turn the sun into darkness. Suppose the archan- gels of malice and horror should be let loose little while and be allowed to extinguish and destroy the sun in the natural heavens They would take the oceans from other worlds and pour them on the lnrinary of the planetary system, and the waters go hissing down amid the ravines and the caverns, and there is explosion after explosion until there are only few peaks of fire left insthe sun, and these are cooling down fahd going out until the vast continents of flame are reduced to a small acreage of fire, and that 'whitens and cools off until there are only few coals left, and these are whitening and going out until there issnot spark left in all the mountains of ashes and the valleys of mhes snd'the chasms of ashes. An ex- ? tingnished snn A dead sunl A buried sun Let all worlds wall at the stu pendous obsequies.
 Of course this withdrawal of the solar light and heat throws our earth into universal chill, and the tropics become the temperate, and the temper ate becomes the arctic, rapd there are frozen rivers and frozen lakes and fro zen oceans From arctic to antarctic regions the inhabitants gather in to- ward tho center and find the equator as s'tie poles. The slain forests are piled up intoHsgreat bonfire, and around them gather the shivering villages and cities The wealth of the coal mines is hastily poured into the furnaces and stirred into rage of combustion, but soon the bonires begin to lower, and the fur naces begin to go out, and the nations begin to die. Cotopaxi, Vesuvius, Etna, Stromboli, California geysers, cease to smoke. and the ice of hailstorms re- maine iun1neltsd in their crater. All the flowers have breathed their last breath. Ships with sailors frozen at the mast, and helmsmen frozen atltheswheel, and passengers frozen in the cabin. All na- tions dying, first at the north and then at the south. Child frosted and dead in the cradle. Octogenarian frosted and dead at the hearth. Workmen with frozen hand on the hammer and frozen foot on the shuttle. Winter from sea to sea. All -congealing winter. Per petnal winter. Globe of frigidity. Hemisphere shackled to hemisphere by chains of ice. Universal Nova Zembla. The earth an ice foe grinding against other ice foes. The archangels of malice and horror have done their work, and now they may have their thrones of glacier and look down upon the ruin they have wrought. What the destruc-
 
 would be to our physical earth the de- struction of Christianity would be to the moral world. The sun turned into darknessi
 What Atheism Would Do.
 Infidelity in our time Is considered great joke. There are people who re- joice to hear Christianity caricatured and to hear Christ assailed with quib- bie and quirk and misrepresentation and badinage and harlequinade. I pro- pose today to take infdelity and atheism cut of the realm of jocularity into one of tragedy and show you what in6dels propose and what, if they are success ful, they will accomplish. There are those in all our communities who would like to see the Christian religion over thrown and who say the world would be better without it. I want to show you what is the end of this road, and what is the terminus of this crusade, and what this world will be when athe- ism and infdelity have triumphed over it., if they can. gay, if they can. re- iterate it, if they can.
 In the first place, it will be the con- piete and unutterable degradation of womanhood. will prove it by facts and arguments which no honest man will dispute. In all communities and cities and states and nations where the Christian religion has been dominant woman's condition has been ameliorat- edfand improved, and she is deferred to and honored in thousand things, and every gentleman takes off his hat be- fore her. If your associations have been good, you know that the name of wife, mother, daughter. suggest gracious sur roundings. You know there are no bet ter schools and seminaries in this coun- try than the schools and seminaries for our young ladies. You know that while woman may suffer injustice in England and the United States she has more of her rights in Christendom than she has any where else.
 Now, compare this with woman's condition in lands where Christianity has made little or no advance-in China, in Barbary, in Borneo, in Tar tary, in Egypt, in Hindustan. The Bur mese sell their wives and daughters as so many sheep. The Hindoo Bible makes it disgraceful and an outrage for a woman to listen to music or look out of-the window in the absence of her husband and gives as a lawful ground for divorce a woman's beginning to eat Defore her husband has finished his meal. What mean those white bundles on the ponds and rivers in China in the morningf Infanticide following in fanticide. Female children destroyed simply because they are female. Wom- an harnessed to the blow as an OK. Woman yelled and barricaded and in llstyles of cruel seclusion. Her birth a misfortune. Her life torture. Her death horror. The missionary of the cross today in heathen lands breaches generally to two groups-a group of men who do as they please and sit where they please; the other group, women hidden and carefully secluded in eide apartment, where they may hear the voice of the preacher, but may