The Maryville times. (Maryville, Tenn.) 1884-1944, 1899-06-10
AN ETERNAL GLOOM.
DR.. Talmege Pictures the Earth
Without the Gospel.
WILDLY POrtrays the Gloom of an In
fidel WOrld--Triumph of Atheism
Would Mean Death of
Civilization.
Copyright, Louis Klopst h, 1891
WashingtoI

The text is Acts 2:20: 1.-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 lblasphemy to turn the
sun into darkness. Suppose the arch
angels 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 luminary of the planetary
system, and the waters 60 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 few Goals left.
and these are whitening and going out
until there is not speck left in all the
mountains of ashes and the valleys of
ashes and the chasms of ashes. An eX-
tinguished sun! A dead sun! A buried
sun! Let all worlds wall at the stupen-
dous obsequies.
OF course this withdrawal of the solar
light and heat throws our earth into a
universal chill, and the tropics become
the temperate, and the temperate be-
comes the arctic, and there are frozen
rivers and frozen lakes and frozen
oceans. From arctic and antarctic re-
gions the inhabitants gather in toward
the center and find the equator as the
poles. The slain forests are piled up
into a 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
bonfires begin to lower, and the fur
naces begin to 60 out, and the nations
begin to die. Cotopaxi, Vesuvius, Etna,
Strombcli, California geysers, cease to
smoke, and the ice of hailstorms re-
mains unmelted in their crater All
the flowers 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 nations dying, first at the
north and then at the south. Child
frosted and dead in the cradle. Octo-
genarian 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. Perpetual winter.
Globe of frigidity. Hemisphere shack
led to hemisphere by chains of
ice Universal Nova Zembla. The earth
an ice foe grinding against other ice
foes. The arehangels of malice and
horror have done their work, and now
they may take their thrones of glacier
and look down upon the ruin they have
wrought. What the destruction of the
sun in the natural heavens would be
to our physical earth, the destruction
of Christianity would be to the moral
world. The sun turned into darkness!
Infidelity in our time is considered a
great joke. There are people who re-
joice to hear Christianity caricatured
and to hear Christ assailed with bubble
and quirk and misrepresentation and
badinage and harlequinade. Propose
to-day to take infidelity and atheism
out of the realm of iocularity into one
of tragedy and show you what infidels
propose and what if they are successful
they will accomplish. There are those
in our communities who would like to
see the Christian religion overthrown
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 atheism and infdel-
ity have triumphed over it. if they can
say, if they can. reiterate it, If they
| can.
In the first place. it will be the COM
plete 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 amelio-
rated and improved. and she is deferred
| to and honored in thousand things,
and every gentleman takes off his hat
before her. If your associations have
been good, you know that the name of
wife. mother. daughter, suggests gra-
cious surroundings. You know there
are no better schools and seminaries
in this country than the schools and
seminaries for our young ladies. You
know that while woman may suffer in
justice in England and the United
| States she has more of her rights in
| Christendom than she has anywhere
| else.
Now, compare this with woman's con-
dition in lands where Christianity has
made little CT no advance-in China,
in Barbary, in Borneo. in Tartary, in
Egypt, in Hindustan. The Burmese sell
their wives and daughters as so many
sheep. The Hindoo Bible makes it dis
graceful and an outrage for woman to
listen to music or look out of the win
dow in the absence of her husband and
| gives as lawful ground for divorce a
woman's beginning to eat before her
husband has finished his meal. What
mean those white bundles on the ponds
and rivers in China in the morning?