The Fulton County news. [volume] (McConnellsburg, Pa.) 1899-current, 1901-10-31
THE SWEET INFLUENCES.
DR.. TaImage Says We Are Affected for
Good or Evil By Forces That We
Seldom Recognize.


tcopyrisht, lsoI.I
WASHINGTON, ID. C.-In this discourse
DR.. Talmage demonstrates that we are
affected by forces tina. we seldom recog-
bility The text is Job xxxviii, 81,
"Canst thou bind the sweet influences Of
Pleiades"
What is the meaning of that question
which God put to Job? Have we all our
lives been reading it, and are most of us
ignorant of its beauty and power and
practical suggestiveness? A meaningless
passage of Scripture many thought It to
be, but the telescopes were busy age after
age, and astronomical observations kept
on questioning the skies until the mean
ing OF my text comes out lustrously. The
Pleiades is a constellation of seven stars
appearing to the naked eye, but scien-
tiic instruments reveal more than 400
properly belonging to the group. Alcyone
is the name of the brightest star of that
group called the Pleiades. A Russian as
tronomer observed that Alcyone is the
centre Of gravitation of our solar system.
Hugh Macmillan says that the sun and its
planets wheel around that centre at the
rate Of 422,000 miles n day in an orbit
which it will take 100000 years to COM
plete. The Pleiades appear in the spring
time and are associated with flowers and
genial warmth and good weather. The
navigation OF the Mediterranean was
the setting Of the Pleiades. The priests
of Beus noticed that rising and setting
1000 years before Christ.
Now, the glorious meaning of my text
is plain as well as radiant. To give Job
the beautiful grace Of humility God asked
ences Of the Pleiades" Have you any
power over the laws of gravitation? Can
you modify or change an influence welded
by star more than 400, 900 miles away?
Can you control the winds of the spring
time? Can you call out the AowersY How
little you know compared with omnis-
cience? How. little you can do compared
with omnipotence!
The probability is that Job had been
tempted to arrogance by his vast attain
ments. He was a metallurgst, a zoolog-
ist, poet, and shows by his writings he
had knowledge of hunting, of music, of
husbandry, of medicine, of mining, of
astronomy and perhaps was so far ahead
of the scholars and scientists of his time
that he may have been somewhat puffed
up: hence this interrogation of my text.
And there is nothing that SO soon takes
down human pride as an interrogation
point rightly thrust. Christ used it
nightly. Paul mounted the parapet of
his great arguments with such a battery.
Men of the world understand it. Demos
themes began his speech to the crown and
Cicero his grafton against Catiljne and
Lord Chatham his most famous orations
with a question. The empire of ignor-
ance is so much vaster than the empire
of knowledge that after the most learned
and elaborate disquisition upon any sub
ject Of sociology or theology the plainest
man may ask a question that will make
the wisest speechless. After the pro-
foundest assault upon Christianity the
humblest disciple NAV make an inquiry
that would silence Voltaire.
We n n
defend our holy religion, instead of argu-
ment that can always be answered by
argument let us try the power of interro-
cation. We ought to be loaded with at
least half dozen questions and always
ready and when Christianity is assailed,
and we are told there is nothing in it and
there is no God and there never was
miracle and that the Scriptures are un-
reasonable and cruel and that there new
er will be a Judgment day, take out of
| your portable armory of interrogation
something like this; What makes the
better than in heather lands? Do you
think it would be kind in God to turn
the human race into world without any
written revelation to explain and en-
courage and elevate and save? And if
revelation was made, which do you pre-
| fertile Zenda-Vesta of the Persian or
the Confucian writings of the Chinese
| or the Koran OF Mohammed or our Bibley
If Christ is not divine being, what
did He mean when He said. Before
Abram was, / amp" If the Bible is q
bad book what are the evil results of
influence of the book in your father or
mother or sister who used to read it!
| Do you not think that judgment day
is necessary in order to explain and fix
up things that were never explained or
fixed up? If our religion is illogical and
| an imposition upon human credulity, why
were Herschel and Washington and Glad.
stone and William Mckinley its advo-
Gates?
furnished the theme for the greatest
poem ever written, Paradise Lost" and
70 the painters their gre greatest themes srha IN
TIE 9d be the Lnss supper
'The Cruciixion," '"The Entombment,"
'The Last Judgment" and that all the
schools of painting put forth their utmost
genius in presenting .The Madonna?"
Why was it that William, Shakespeare
after amazing the world as ne will amaze
er of "The. Merchant Of Venice and
''King Lear" and "Othello," and MAC
beth" and Hamlet" wrote with his own
hand his last will and testament, begin
ming il with the words; IN n, the name
| OF 1Ou, dmtn9 L, w DHdhNSpSoiSi
| of Stratford -on-Avon, in the County OF
Warwick, in perfect health and memory
| (God be praised!) do make and ,ordain
this my last will and testament, through
the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saw
iour, to be made partaker of life. ever:
lasting and my body to the earth whereof
it is madeH Had Shakespeare lost his
reason when he wrote his faith in Christ
and the great atonement? Put your an,
tagonist a few questions like that, and
you will find him excusing himself for an
engagement he must meet Immediately.
These words also recognize far-reaching
influences. Job probably had no adequate
idea of the distance of the worlds men
toned from our world but he knew them
to be far off, and we, who have had
the advantage of modern sidereal inves-
tigation, ought to be still more impressed
| than was Job with the question of the
text, as it puts before us the fact that
worlds hundreds of thousands of miles
distant have a grip on our world. There
are sweet influences which hold us from
afar. There may have been in our an
cestral line perhaps 200 years ago some
consecrated man or woman who has held
over all the generations since an infu-
ence for good which we have no power to