The age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1897-1902, 1902-04-13
DIR. T'almage's Sermon.

| old hymn spelled In the old style and
once sung in lie churches:
The race is not forever got
BY him who fastest runs
Nor the Battel by those peopell
That shoot with the longest guns.
My friends, the tossing sea of Galilee
seemed most to offend Christ by the
amount of noise 1t made, for he said to
1t, BE stillr' Heaven has been crown
ing kings and queens unto God for many
centuries, yet heaven never stopped
MON ent for any such occurrence, but 1t
stopped thirty minutes for the corona
ton of silence. There was silence in
heaven about the space of half hour"
Heaven an Eventful Place.
Learn also from my text that heaven
must be an eventful and active place
from the fact that 1t could afford only
thirty minutes of recess. There have
been events on earth and in heaven that
seemed to demand a whole day or whole
week or whole year for celestial corsid-
Grafton. If Grotius was right and this
silence occurred at the time of the de-
struction of Jerusalem. that scene was
so awful and so prolonged that the in
habitants of heaven could not have done
justice to 1t in many weeks. After fear
full besieRement of the two fortresses of
Jerusalem, Antonio and Hippicus had
been going on for a long while, Roman
soldier mounted on the shoulder of an
other soldier, hurled into the window of
the temple a flrebrand, and the temple
was all afiame. and after covering many
sacrifices to the holiness of God the
building itself became a sacrifice to tie
rage of man. The hunger of the people
in that city during the besiegement was
so great that as some outlaws were pass
ing a doorway and inhaled the doors of
food they burst open the door, threaten
ing the mother of the household with
death unless she gave them some food,
and she took them aside and showed
them that 1t was her own child she was
cooking for the CHASTITY repast. Six hum
dred priests were destroyed on Mount
Zion because, the temple being gone,
there was nothing for them to do. Six
thousand people in one cloister were con-
sumed. There were 100000 dead accord
ing to Josephus. Grotius thinks that this
was the cause of silence in heaven for
half an hour. If Mr. Lord was right, and
this silence was during the Diocletian
persecution, by which $4,000 Christians
suffered death from sword and fire and
Punishment and exposure, why did not
heaven listen throughout at least one
of those awful years? No! Thirty min
utes! The fact Is that the celestial pro-
gramme is so crowded with spectacle
that it can afford only one recess in all
eternity, and that for a short space.
While there are great choruses in which
all heaven can join, each soul there has
a story of divine mercy peculiar to itself
and 1t must be a solo. How can heaven
get through with all it's recitatives, with
all Its cantatas, with all it's grand march
es, with all its victories? Eternity is too
short to utter all the praise.
In my text heaven spared thirty min
utes, but 1t will never again spare one
minute. In worship In earthly church.
es where there are many to take part
we have to counsel brevity, but how
will heaven get on rapidly enough to
let one hundred and forty-four thousand
get through eac-- with his own story and
then one hundred and forty-four million
and then one hundred and forty-four
billion and then one hundred and forty
four trillion? Not only are all the
triumphs of the past to be commemorated
but all the triumphs to come. Not only
what we now know of him after ever
lasting study of the deific. If my text
had said there was silence in heaven
for thirty days. 1 would not have been
startled at the announcement, but 1t in
dicates thirty minutes. Why, there will
| be so many friends to hunt up, so many
| of the greatly good and useful that we
| will want to see. so many of the in
| scrutable things of earth we will need
| explained, SO many exciting earthly ex-
| periences we will want to talk over. and
| all the other spirits and all the ages will
want the same, that there will be no
more opportunity for cessation. How
busy we will be kept in having pointed
out to us the heroes and heroines that
the world never fully appreciated-the
yellow fever and cholera doctors who
died. not flying from their posts; the
female nurses who faced pestilence in
the lazarettos; the railroad engineers who
stayed at their places in order to save
the train. though they themselves per-
ished. Hubert Coffin, the master miner,
who, landing from the bucket at the bot
tom of the mine just as he heard the
waters rush in and when one jerk of
the rope would have lifted him into safe
ty, put in the bucket blind miner who
wanted to go to his sick child and jerk
ed the rope for him to be pulled up,