Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1899-05-15
TURNED TODARKNESS
DIR. TALMAeE's GRAPHIC PICTURE OF
A GODDESS WORLD.

AdeIity Would, If 1t Could, Plunge
Humanity-A Lost Race without
Divine Guidance.
Copyright. Louis Klopsch, 1891
WASHINGTON, May 14.-In this SER
mon DR.. Talmage gives a glimpse of
what the world would be if the gospel
twere abolished and the human race left
without divine guidance. The text is
Acts ii, 90, ''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 heavensi They would take the
oceans from other worlds and pour
them on the luminary of the planetary
system, and the waters go kissing down
amid the ravines and the caverns, and
there is explosion after explosion until
there are only few peaks of fire left
In the sun, and these are cooling down
and going out until the vast continents
of fame are reduced to a small acreage
of fire, and that whitens and cools off
until there are only a few Goals left,
and these are whitening and going out
until there is not spark left in all the
mountains of ashes and the valleys of
ashes and the chasms of ashes. An ex-
finguished sum- A dead sum- 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 q universal chill, and the tropics
become the temperate, and the temper
ate becomes the arctic, and there are
frozen rivers and frozen lakes and fro
zen oceans From arctic to antarctic
regions the inha gather in to-
ward the center and find the equator as
the poles. The slain forests are piled up
into great 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
bonfres 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-
mains unmelted in their crater. All the
howers have breathed their last breath.
Ships with sailors frozen at the mast,
and helmsmen frozen at the wheel, and
passengers frozen in the cabin. All ma
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-
Detual 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-
ton of the sun in the natural heavens
would be to our physical earth the de-
struction Of Christianity would be to
the moral world. The sun turned into
darkness
What Atheism Wou1d Do.
1AAUG1lGy III OUI GlLu0 Is COuSlQSESQ d
great joke. There are people who re-
tjoice to hear Christianity caricatured
and TO hear Christ assaulted with quib-
Ible and quirk and misrepresentation
and badinage and harlequinade pro-
pose today to take infdelity and atheism
cut Of the realm of jocularity into-one
of tragedy and show you what infdels
propose and what, if they are success
full, 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
he 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-
hsm and in6delity have triumphed over
at, if they can. l say, if they can. I re-
iterate it, if they can.
/ In the first place, it will be the COM
jplete and unutterable degradation of
swomanhood. 1 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
iwoman's condition has been ameliorat-
ed and 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
Dur young ladies. You know that while |
woman may suffer injustice in England |
and the United States, she has more of |
l.aer rights in Christendom than she has
anywhere else.