The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1901-06-27

that die IN the Lord" That mans life
in the surrogate's court about the in.
capacity of the testator to make .
last will and testament it will only
be prolongation of the failure. The
son, through dissipation, spent his
share of the fortune before the fathes
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 oi
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 civilizati tions is weighed.
Egyptian civilizati tion did it's work, but
it was cruel and superstitious and
idolatrous and defiant of the Almighty
tourist finds his chief interest not in
the generation that now inhabits the
regions watered by the Nile and
sprinkled by her cascades, but in the
temples that are the skeletons of an
cient pride and pomp and power-her
obelisks, her cataeombs, her mosques
the colossus of Rameses, the dead cit.
~
scum containing the mummified forms
of the pharaohs. 1t 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 ma
ton, we weigh its 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, noun
tainful of this metal and another
mountainful of another metal. That
is we'll. 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 a Divine weighing in this country all
the time going on, and I can tell you
our country's destiny il you will tell
me whether it shall be God honoring
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 OBJ
served not in revelry, but in holy
convocation, marriage honored in
ceremony and in fact, blasphemy ST.
fenced in all the streets, high toned
systems of morals in all parts of our
land, then our institutions will live,
and all the wondrous prosperities of
the present are only faint hint of
the greater prosperities to come.
Richer harvests 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 the 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 place! Scientists
now guess at, the number of tons our
world weighs, and they put the Appe-
mines and the Sierra Neradas and
Chimborazo and the Himalayas in the
scales. But if weighed as. to it's NOR
ais 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 SOIL
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
war once was, then the world will be
weighed, and as the opposite side 'of
the scales lift as though it was light
as feather the right side of the
scales will come down. weighing more
than all else those tremendous values
that St. Peter enumerated--faith, yir-
tue, knowledge, temperance, patience,
godliness, brotherly kindness, char
ity.
] God forbid that it should ever be
| written concerning US as individuals
| or communities or nations as it was
written on the wall of Bclshazzar's s
banqueting hall the hour when Daniel
| impeached the monarch and trans.