The Grenada sentinel. [volume] (Grenada, Miss.) 1868-1955, 1901-12-07

w" H"u cdrpuhcleS, and he was
scared in the night. He says: Chou
s%carest me with dreams and terri
fest me with visions.' Solomon had
an overweight brain. overwrought
with public business, and he suffered
from cratic slumber, and he writes
IN Ecclesiastes: "A dream cometh
through the multitude of business"
III gregory, in experimenting with
dreams, found that a bottle of hot
water put to his feet while in slum-
Der made him think he was going
up the hot sides of Mount Etna. An
other morbid physician, experiment.
ing with dreams, his feet uncovered
through sleep, thought he was rid
ing in an Alpine diligence. But n
great many dreams are merely mar
cote disturbances. Anything that
you see while under the influence of
choral or brandy or hasheesh or
laudanum is not a revelation from
God.
Do not mistake narcotic disturb
ance for Divine revelation. But I
have to tell you that the majority of
the dreams are merely the penalty
OF outraged digestive organs, and
you have no right to mistake the
nightmare for heavenly revelation.
Late suppers are a warranty deed
for bad dreams. Highly spiced sal
ads at IL o'clock at night, instead
of opening the door heavenward,
open the door Internal and diabol-
zeal. You outrage natural law, and
you insult the God who made those
laws. 1t takes from three to five
hours to digest food, and you have
no right to keep your digestive or
gans in struggle when the rest of
your body is in somnolence. The
general rule is, eat nothing after six
o'clock at night, retire at ten, sleep
on your right side, keep the window
open five inches for ventilation. and
other worlds will not disturb YOU
much. By physical m-altreatment you
take the ladder that Jacob saw in
his dream and you lower it to the
neither world, allowing the ascent of
the demoniacal. Dreams are mid
night dyspepsia. An unregulated de-
sire for something to eat keeps it
ruined. The world during 5000 years
has tried in vain to digest that first
apple. The world will not be evan
gelized until we get rid of n dyspep-
tic Christianity. Healthy people do
not want this ~cadaverous and sleepy
thing that some people call religion.
They want a religion that lives reg
ularly by day and sleeps soundly by
night. If through trouble or coming
on of old age or exhaustion of Chris
tan service you cannot sleep well,
then you may expect from God
"songs in the night" but there are
no blessed communications to those
who willingly surrender to indi-
gestibles. Napoleon's army at Leip-
sic, Dresden and Borodino came near
being destroyed through the dis
turbed gastric juices of its command
er. That is the way you have lost
some of your battles.
Waking thoughts have their echo
in sleeping thoughts. If a man spend
his life in trying to make others
happy and is heavenly minded,
around his pillow he will see cripples
who have got over their crutch and
professions of celestial imperials
and hear the grand march roll down
from drums of Heaven over Jasper
parapets. You are very apt to hear
in dreams what you hear when you
are wide awake.
Now, having shown you that, hav-
ing a Bible, we ought to be satisfied
with not getting any further COM
munication from God, and having
shown you that all dreams have an
important mission since they show
the comparative independence of the
soul from the body, and having
shown you that the majority of
dreams are a result of disturbed
physical conditions, and having
shown you that our sleeping
thoughts are apt to be an echo OF
our waking thoughts, I come now to
my fifth and most important remark,
and that is to say that it is capable
of proof that God does sometimes in
our day and has often since the
close of the Bible dispensation ap-
peared to people in dreams.
All dreams that make you better
are from God. How do l know it? Is
not God the source of all good? II
does not take a very logical mind to
argue that out. Tertuillan and Mar
tin Luther believed in dreams. The
dreams of John lIuss are immortal.
st. Augustine, the Christian father,
gives us the fact that a Carthaginian
physician was persuaded of the i'm
mortality of the soul by an argument
which he heard in a dream. The night
before his assassination the wife of
julius Caesar dreamed that her hus-
band fell dead across her lap.
1t is possible to prove that God does
appear in dreams to warn, to convert
and to save men. My friend, a retired
sea captain and a Christian, tells me
that one night while on the sea he
dreamed that a ships crew were in
great suffering. Waking from his
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