Newport weekly independent., 1901-04-25

is failure, and if his heirs scufle in the sdrrogate's court about the in- capacity of the testator to make last will and testament it will only 1 be prolonga ton of the failure. The son, through dissipation, spent his share of the fortune before the father died and so was cut off with dol. lar. The daughter married against his will, and she is disinherited Relatives whom he could never bear the sight of will put in their claim and after years of litigation so much of the estate as the lawyers have not appropriated to themselves will go into hands which the testator never once thought of when, in his last days, he bade fearful farewells to the houses and lands and government securities he could not take along with him into the sepulcher.
 In the same divine scales the spirit of nations and civiliza tions is weighed. Egyptian ciyiliza tion did it's work, but it was cruel and superstitious and idolatrous and defiant of the Almighty. It was east out and cast down. The tourist finds his chief interest not in the generation that now inhabits the regions watered by the Nile and sprinlled by her cascades, but in the temples that are the skeletons of an- cient pride and pomp and power-her obelisks, her catacombs, her mosques, the colossus of Rameses, the dead cit ies of Memphis and Karnak, the mu- scum containing the mummifed forms of the pharaohs. It is not the Egypt of to-day that we go to see, but the Egypt of many centuries ago. Her spirit has departed. Her doom was sealed. The Lord weighed her spirit.
 And so the spirit of our American nation is put into the royal balance, and it will be weighed as certainly as all the nations of the past were weighed and as all the nations of the present are being weighed. When we go to estimate the wealth of this na- ton, we weigh it's gold and silver and coal and iron and copper and lead, and all the steelyards and all the balances are kept busy. So many tons of this and so many tons of that, a noun tainful of this metal and another mountainful of another metal. That is well. We want to know our mining wealth, our manufacturing wealth, our agricultural wealth, and the bushel measure and the scale have an impor- tant work. But know right well there is Divine weighing in this country all the time going on, and I can tell you our country's destiny if you will tell me whether 1t shall be God honorino nation, reverential to the only book of His authorship, observing the ''shalt nots" of the law of right given on Mount Sinai and the law of love given on the Mount of Beati- tudes, one day out of the week ob- served not in revelrv, but in holy convocation, marriage honored in ceremony and i'll fact, blasphemy si- fenced in all the streets, high toned systems of morals in all parts of ou
 land, then our institutions will live, and all the wondrous prosperities of the present are only a faint hint of the greater prosperities to come. Richer haryests will rustic in the fields, higher style of-literature will turn it's leaves in our libraries, nobler men will adorn our state and nation al legislature, and there will be Wash ingtons and Hamiltons and Patrick Henrys and John Marshalls and Abra- ham Lincolns in the future quite equal to those of the past. And the last day of tke worlds existence will find our free American institutions permanent as the mountains before they begin to fall and glorious as the seas before they begin to die.
 What world this will be when it is weighed after it's regeneration shall have taken placei Scientists now guess at the number of tons our world weighs, and they put the Appe- hines and the Sierra Nevadas and Chimborazo and the Himalayas in the scales. But if weighed as to it's mor- als at the present time in the royal balance the heaviest things would be the wars, the international hatreds, the crimes mountain high the moral disasters that stagger the hemi- spheres on their way through inn mensity. But when the Gospel has gardenized the earth, as it will yet gardenize it, and the atmosphere shall be universal balm and the soll will produce universal harvest and fruitage and the last cavalry horse shall be unsaddeled and the last gun carriage unwheeled and the last for tress turned into museum to show nations in peace what horrid thing xvo1. onoa was +han tha xunr1d will I>,