The Montgomery advertiser., 1901-10-06
DR. TALMAGE'S SERMON.

' SERMON. 2 <1f<eE<xz<e<<esse<<s<<ssezS<sss
 Washinxton, Sept. 2s.--In this discourse Br. Taimage shows how any one can bs widely and forever recoifected and cheer 0eGpondent Christian workers; texts, Jot xxiv. 70. He shall be no more remember ed" and Psalms cxii. (. The srighteou: shall be In everlasting remembrance:
 of oblivion and it's defeats speak to day. There Is an old monster that swal' lows down everything. II crunches indi' viduals. families. communities. states. na. tions, continents, hemispheres. worlds. It: diet is made up of years. of centuries. of ages, of cycles. of millenniums. Of cons That monster is called by Noah Webster and all the other dictionaries Oblivion It is a steep down which everything rolls. It Is a confiagration in which everything issconsumed. It is dirge which all or- erything stops. It is the cemetery of the human race It is the domain of forget fuiness. Oblivion! At times 1t throws a shadow over all of us. and l would not armed in the strength of the eternal God on your behalf to attack it, to route 1t, to demolish 1t.
 Why. just look at the way the families are together. inseparable.. and to each other Indispensable. and then they part. some by marriage going to establish other homes, and some leave this life. and century is long enough to plant a family, develop it, prosper 1t and obliterate it. So the generations vanish. Walk up Penn sylvania Avenue. Washington; Broadway, New York; State Street, Boston; Chest nut Street. Philadelphia; the Strand Lon. don: Princess Street, Edinburg; Champs Elysees, Paris: Inter den Linden. Berlin. and you will meet in this year 1901 not one person who walked there in the year npf efforts at perpetuation are dead failures. Walter Scott's Old Mortality may go round with his chisel to recut>the faded epitaphs on tombstones. but Old Oblivion has a quicker chisel. with which he can cut out a thousand epitaphs while Old Mortality is cutting in one epitaph. Whole libraries of biographies devoured of book worms or unread of the rising genera, warehouses of great firms have changed, unless the grandsons think it is an ad- vantage to keep the old sign up because the name of the ancestor was more com mandatory than the name of the descen- dant. The city of Rome. Italy, stands today. but dig down deep enough and you come to another Rome. buried. and go down still farther and you will find 2 third Rome. Jerusalem stands today. but dig down deep enough and you will find a Jerusalem underneath. and go on and deeper down a third Jerusalem.
 A Hundred Years Hence.
 Call the roll of the armies of Baldwin I or of Charles Martel or of Marlborough or of Mithridates or of Prince Frederick or of Cortes. and not one answer vii you hear. Stand them in line and call the roll of the 1.o0o.0o0 men in the army of Thebes. Not one answer. Stand them ir line. the 1.7oo0oo infantry and the 2O0. .Ooj cavalry of the Assyrlan army under Mi nus. and call the roll. Not one answer. Stand in line the 1000. GOO men of Sesostris the l,20o.010 men of Artaxerxes at Cunaxa, the 2641. 900 men under xerxes at Ther- Inopylae and call the long roll. Not one answer. At the opening of our civil war the men of the Northern and Southern armies were told that if they fell in bat tie their names would never be forgotten by their country. Out of the million men who fell in battle or died in military hos pitals you cannot call the names of a thousand nor the names of 800 nor the names of 100 nor the names of fifty. Ob- livioni
 In some old family record a descendant studying up the ancestral line may spell out our name and from the faded ink with great efo3. find that some sperson by onr name was born somewhere in the nineteenth century. but they will know no more about us than we know about the color of a childs eyes born last night in village in Patagonia. Tell me sonl s- thing about your great grandfather. What were his features? What did he do? What year was he born? What year did he die? And your great-grandinother? Will you describe the style of the hat she wore and how did sne and your great grandfather get on in each others com panionship? Was 1t March weather or June? Oblivion, That mountain surge rolls over everything. Even the pyra- mids are dying. Not day passes but there is chiseled off a chip of that gran- ite. The sea Is triumphing over the land. and what is going on at our Atlantic coas. is going on all around the world. and the continents are crumbing into the waves. And while this is transpiring on nt-fS of ho xrorld ha hot -hi If tn" internal fire is digging under the foundation of the earth and cutting its way out toward the surface. It surprises me to hear people say they do not think all scientists will tell you that it has for ages been on fire.
 We Like to Be Remembered.
 Why, there Is only crust between us and the furnaces inside raging to get out Oblivion! The world itself will roll into it as easily as a schoolboy's india rubber ball rolls down hill. and when our world goes it is so interlocked by the law of gravitation with other worlds that they will go, too, and so far from having our memory perpetuated by a monument of Aberdeen granite in this world there is no world in sight of our strongest telc- scope that will be sure pediment for any slab of commemoration of the fact that we ever lived or died at all Our earth is struck with death. The aXletree of the consteilaticns will break and let down the populatiCnS or other worlds Stella. lunar, solar, mortality. Oblivioni It can swallow and will swallow whole galaxies of worlds as easily as a croco- dile takes down a frog.
 Yet oblivion does not remove or swal- low anything that had better not be re- moved or swallowed. The old monster is welcome to his meal. This world would long ago have been overcrowded if not for the merciful removal of nations and generations. What if all the books had lived that were ever written and printed and published? The libraries would by their immensity have obstructed intelli- gence and made all research Impossible. The fatal epidemic of books was a mer- ciful epidemic. Many of the state and national libraries today are only morgues, in whfah dead, books are waiting for some one come and recognize them. What if aff the people that had been born were still alive? We would have been elbowed by our ancestors of ten centuries ago. and people who ought to have said their last word three thousand years ago would srarl at us. saying: "What are you doing here?" There would have heen no room to turn around. Some of the past gen. erations of mankind were not worth re- nembering The first useful thing that many people did was to die; their era dIe a fgfn l.ol.,