Connecticut western news., 1901-05-30


gram, which is the one six-thousandth
part of a grain. The only perfect
standard of weights and measures ever
established was established in the
heavens before the world was made
and will continue to do its work after
the world is burned up. To measure
the time we have calendars. TO meas
ure the lightning we have the electrom-
eters. To measure the atmospheric
pressure we have the baroneters. To
measure souls we have the royal bal
ances "rhe Lord weigheth the spir-
it's"
Weighed by the Lord.
In the same divine scales the spirit
of nations and civilizations is weighed.
Egyptian civilization did its work, but
it was cruel and superstitious and idol
atrous and defiant of the Almighty. 1t
was cast out and cast down. The tour
list finds his chief interest not in the
generation that now inhabits the re-
gions watered by the Nile and sprin-
killed. by her cascades, but in the tenn
piles that are the skeletons of ancient
pride and pomp and power-her ODE
lisks, her catacombs, her mosques, the
colossus of Rameses, the dead cities of
Memphis and Thebes, the temples of
Luxor and Karnak, the museum con-
tanning the mummified forms of the
pharaohs. 1t is not the Egypt of today
that we go to see, but the Egypt of
many centuries ago. Her spirit has de-
parted. Her doom was sealed. The
Lord weighed her spirit.
Now GROSS over thp Darfl1ppllns or
Hellespont and see Grecian civilization
put in the royal balances. Surely that
is an imperishable spirit. A land that
produced Pindar and a Homer in po-
etry, a Sophocles and an 4Fschylus in
tragedy, a Herodotus and Thucydides
in history Socrates and Plato in phi
losophy, Strabo in geography, Hip
pocrates in medicine, a Xenophon in
literature, Plutarch in biography, a
Miltiades and an Alexander in battle,
and could build a temple of Diana at
Ephesus and the acro-Corinthus at Cor
NTH, and could crown the Acropolis
with a Parthenon-surely such land,
with more genius compressed in small
space than in any Of the nations of all
the ages, will stand forever triumphant
among surrounding nations. No. Her
pride of heroics, her pride of literature,
her pride of architecture, must. be
brought down lower and lower, and hui
| initiation must follow humiliation until
In the latter part of the nineteenth CEN
fury she is compelled to submit to the
outrages of a sultan whose hands are
red with the blood of $4,000 Arme-
mans. Had Athens prayerfully lis
tened to Pauls sermon on Mars hill
and adopted his precepts of brother
hood and divine worship she would
have stood in her old power today, and
all Greece would have stood with her,
and that civilization so long dead I'M
der the carved pillars of her shrines
| and under the marble Of her pentelican
mountains would have been, perhaps
for all Asia and for much of Europe, a
living civilization. But for her AFRO
gance she was cast out and cast down.
The Lord weighed her spirit.
The Crucial Test.
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 weigh
|
| are being weighed When we go to
/ estimate the wealth of this nation, we
weigh it's gold and silver and coal and
| from 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 mountainful of
/ this metal and another mountainful of
another metal. That is well. We want
to know our mining wealth, our manu-
| featuring wealth, our agricultural
wealth, and the bushel measure and
! the scales have an important work.
But know right well there Is a divine
| weighing in this country all the time
| going on, and 1 can tell you our coun-
try's destiny, if you will tell me wheth-
| er it shall be a God honoring nation,
reverential to the only book of his au-
! thorship, observing the SHALT nots" of
/ the law of right given on Mount Sinai
and the law of love given on the Mount
| of Beatitudes, one day of the week OBJ
! served, not in revelry, but in holy con-
vocation, marriage honored in cere-
mony and in fact, blasphemy silenced
in all the streets, high toned systems of
morals in all parts of our land-then
our institutions will live, and all the
wondrous properties Of the present
are only faint hint of the greater
properties to come. Richer harvests
| will rustic in the fields, higher style
F.! of literature will turn it's leaves in our
libraries, nobler men will adorn our
state and national legislatures, and
there will be Washingtons and Hamil
tons and Patrick Henrys and John
Marshalls and Abraham Llncolns 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 noun
tains before they begin to fall and
glorious as the seas before they begin
/ to die.
But If our character and behavior
as nation are reversed and good NOR
ais give place to loose living and God
is put away from our hearts, and our
schools and our homes and our people
and our literature be debauched, and
/ anarchism and atheism have full sway,
and our American Sabbath becomes
Partisan Sabbath, and Infamous
| laws get place on our statute
books, and the marriage relation be-
comes q joke instead of n sanctity,
and the God to whom Columbus pray
ed to on the day of his landing
from stormy seas and whom Benjamin
Franklin publicly reverenced when he
moved, amid derisive cries, the regular
opening of the American congress with
e,lN, Sod, l.
insulted and blasphemed, then it will
not be long before we will need another
Edward Gibbon to write the decline
and fall of the United States republic,
and it will not be another case of de-
struction by the Goths and Huns and
Tartars and Tamerlanes and Attilas
or foreign opposition and hate, but it
will be case of world astounding ma
tional suicide.
| Invisible Scales.
Al. L., NI,o