Connecticut western news., 1902-01-23

he ever created. Oh, I like the mira cles because they show God independ- ent of everything.
 Notice also the divine power in the backwoods. Wonderful things were done at the cities of Jericho and Jeru-
 salem and Babylon and Nineveh, and the great cities of our time have seen the divine power, but this miracle of
 my text was in the backwoods, far | away from the city, in the lumber dis tricts, where the students had gone to cut timber for the new theological
 seminary. And if this sermon shall come, as 1t will come, like my other sermons for the last thirty years, with | out missing a week, let me say to those far away from the house of God and in the mountain districts that my text shows the divine power in the back ! woods. The Lord by every stream as he certainly was by the Jordan, on ey- | cry mountain as surely as he was on | Mount Zion, on every lake as on IT.
 berias, by every rock as by the one
 whose gushing waters slaked the thirst of the marching Israelites.
 Do not feel lonely because your near
 est neighbor may be miles away, be-
 cause the width of the continent may separate you from the place where your | cradle was rocked and your fathers grave was dug. Wakened though you
 may be by lions roar or panther's scream, God will help you, whether at
 the time the forest around you raves
 In the midnight hurricane or you suffer
 from something quite insignificant, like the loss of an ax head. Take your
 Bible out under the trees, if the wealth | CT will permit, and after you have lis tened to the solo of bird in the tree tops or the long meter psalm of the | thunder, read those words of the Bible, l which must have been written out of | doors: "The trees of the Lord are full of sap, the cedars of Lebanon which l he hath planted, where the birds make | their nests; as for the stork, the fir trees are her house. The high hills are l refuge for the wild goats and the
 rocks for the comics. Thou makest
 darkness, and 1t is night, wherein all
 the beasts of the forest do creep forth.
 The young lions roar after their prey
 and seek their meat from God, The
 sun ariseth, they gather themselves to-
 gether and lay them down In their dens.
 Man goeth forth unto his work and to
 his labor until the evening. O Lord, how manifold are thy worksl In wis
 dom hast thou made them all. The
 earth is full of thy riches" How do
 you like that sublime pastoral2
 Overcome Evil.
 My subject also reminds us of the
 importa ace of keeping our chief imple- ment for work in good order. I think that young theological student on the
 banks of Jordan was to blame for not ! examining the ax before he lifted it that day against tree. He could in a moment have found out whether the
 helve and the head were firmly fas- tened. The simple fact was the ax was not in good order or the strongest stroke that sent the edge into the hard sycamore would not have left the im- plement headless. So God has given every one of us an ax with which to hew. Let us keep 1t in good order, having been sharpened by Bible study
 and strengthened by prayer. The req
 son we sometimes fail in our work is
 not know how aright to swing it. The
 head is not alright on the handle. At the time we want the most skill for work and perfect equilibrium we lose
 our head. We expend in useless ex-
 citement the nervous energy that we
 ought to have employed in direct, straightforward work. Your ax may
 be pen or type or a yardstick or a
 scales or tongue which in legislative
 hall or business circles or Sabbath
 class or pulpit Is to speak for God and
 righteousness, but the ax will not be worth much until 1t has been sharp
 ened on the grindstone of affliction. Go right through the world, and go right through all the past ages, and
 show me one man or woman who has
 done anything for the world worth speaking of whose ax was not ground
 on the revolving wheel of mighty trou-
 ble. It was not David, for he was de- l throned and bounded by unfilial Ab-
 salon. Surely it was not Paul, for he
 was shipwrecked and whipped with
 thirty-nine stripes from rods of elm
 wood on his way to beheadment. Sure
 ly 1t was not Abraham Lincoln, called
 by every vile name that human and l satanic turpitude could invent and de- picted by cartoonists with more mean
 ness than any other man ever suffered, ] on the way to meet a bullet crashing
 through his temples.
 God Does the Impossible.
 But I have come to the foot of the
 Alps, which we must climb before we
 can see the wide reach of my subject.
 See in all this theme how the impossi-
 bilities may be turned into possibilities.
 That ax head was sunken in the mud diest river that could be found. The
 alarmed student of Elisha may know where it went down and may dive for
 1t and perhaps fetch 1t up, but can the
 sunken ax head be lifted without a
 hand thrust deep into the mud at the
 bottom of the river? No; that is i'm
 possible. I admit, so far as human
 power is concerned, 1t is impossible,
 but with God all things are possible.
 After the tree branch was thrown upon
 the surface of Jordan "the iron did swim"
 Some one asks me, Did you ever see iron swim?" Yes, yes; many a l time. 1 saw a soul hardened until
 nothing could make 1t harder. All
 styles of sin had piled that soul. It
 was petrified as to all fine feeling. It
 had been hardening for thirty years.
 It had gone into the deepest depths.
 It had been given up as lost. The fa-
 ther had given 1t up. The mother, the
 last to do so, had given it up. But one day in answer to some prayer a branch
 of the disfoliaged tree of Calvary was
 thrown into the dark and sullen
 stream, and the sunken soul responded
 te its power and rose into the light, and, to the astonishment of the church
 and the world, the iron did swim" I hox