Barton County democrat. [volume] (Great Bend, Kan.) 1885-1915, 1902-04-18

feasteone of those.awfnl years? Mol
/ Thirty minutes! The fact is that the
Celestial programme 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 story
of Divine mercy peculiar to itself,
and it must be a solo. How can
Heaven get through with all it's reci-
tatives, with all its cantatas, with
all its grand marches, with all it's
victories? Eternity is too short to
utter all the praise.
| In my text Heaven spared 80 min
utes, but it will never again spare
| one minute. In worship in earthly
churches where there are many to
| take part we have to counsel brew
| ity, but how will Heaven get on rap
| idly enough to let IA 900 get through
each with his own story and then
| IA 100000 and then IA, 0OO, 900, 900 and
then IA, 0OO, 900, 100000? 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 God, but what we will know
of Him after everlasting study of the
deific. If my text had said there
was silence in Heaven for 80 days, I
would not have been startled at the
announcement, but it indicates 80
minutes. Why, there will be many
friends to hunt up, so many of the
greatly good and useful that we will
want to see, so many of the inscru-
table things of earth we will need
explained, so many exciting earthly
experiences we will want to talk
over. and all the earthly spirits and
all the other spirits and all the ages
will want the same, that there will
be no more opportunity for cessa-
ton. 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 them
selves persisted. Hubert Coffin, the
master miner, who, landing from the
bracket at the bottom of the mine
and when one jerk of the rope would
have lifted him into safety, put in
the bucket a blind miner who wanted
to go to his sick child and jerked the
rope for him to be pulled up, crying:
Tell them the water has burst in
and we are probably lost, but we will
seek refuge at the other end of the
right gallery and then giving the
10 he al
they digged themselves so near out
that the people from the outside
could come to their rescue. The null
titudes of men and women who got
no crown on earth we will want to
see when they get their crown in
Heaven. I tell you Heaven will have
no more half hours to spare.
Besides that. Heaven is full of chill
dren. They are in the vast ma jority
No child on earth who amounts to
anything can be kept quiet half an
hour, and how are you going to keep
5OO.ooO,OOO of them quiet half an
hour? You know Heaven is much
more of a place than it was when
that recess of 30 minutes occurred
It's population has quadrupled, sex
tupled, centupled. Heaven has more
on hand, more of rapture, more of
knowledge. more of intercommunica-
ton, more of worship. The most
thrilling place we have ever been in
is stupid compared with that, and, if
we now have no time to spare, we
will then have no eternity to spare.
Silence in Heaven only half an hour!
Ny subject also impresses me with
the immortality of half hour. That
half hour mentioned in my text is more
widely known than any other period in
the calendar of Heaven. None of the
whole hours of Heaven is measured
off, none of the years, none of the CEN
turtles. Of the millions of ages past
and the millions of ages to come not
one is especially measured off in the
Bible. But the half hour of my text is
made immortal. The only part of eter-
nifty that was ever measured by earth |
1y timepiece was measured by the min |
ute hand of my text. Oh, the half |
hours! They decide everything. am
not asking what you will do with the |
years or months or days of your life, |
but what of the half hours? Tell me |
the history of your half hours and I |
will tell you the story of your whole |
life on earth and the story of your |
whole life in eternity. The right or
wrong things you can think in 80 min |
utes, the right Or wrong things you |
can say in 80 minutes, the right or |
wrong things you do in 80 minutes are |
glorious or baleful, inspiring or des-
perate.
Again, my text suggests way of |
studying Heaven so that we can better |
understand it. The word eternity" |
that we can handle so much is an i'm |
measurable world. Knowing that we |
could not understand that word the