Newport weekly independent., 1902-02-14
A HAVEN OF REFUGE.
Heaven Affords Comfort and Pro-
 tection to the Trusting.
Dr. TaImaEc Draws Sermon from the Familiar Illustration from the Barnynrd-~SimpIe Teach
 ings of Christ.
rCopyrightS 1902. by Louis Klopsch, N. VI
 ya Shinsrfnn March

Sbarnyard Is employed in this discourse by Dr. Talmage to show the comfort and protection that Heaven affords to all trusting souls. The text is Matt thew 23:37: Even as hen gathereth her chickens under her wings and ye would not"
 Jerusalem was in sight as Christ came to the crest of Mount Olivet, a height of TOO feet. The splendors of the religious capital of the whole earth irradiated the landscape. There is the temple. Wonder is the kings palace. Spread out before his eyes are the pomp, tue wealth, the wickedness and the coming destruction of Jerusalem, and he bursts into tears at the thought of the obduracy of a place that he would gladly have saved and apostrophizes, saying: 70, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would l have gathered thy children together, even as q hen gathereth her chickens under her wings. and ye would not!"
 Why did Christ select hens and chick ems as simile2 Next to the opposite ness of the comparison, think it was to help all public teachers in the mat * ter of illustration to get down off their stilts and use comparisons that all can understand. The plainest bird on earth is the barnyard fowl. Its only adornments are the red comb in it's headdress ard the wattles under the throat. It has no grandeur of genealogy. All we know is that it's an- cestors came from India, some of them from height of 4,000 feet on both sides of the Himalayas. It has no pretension of nest like the eagles eyrie. It has no luster of plumage like the goldfinch. Possessing anat- omy that allows fight yet about the last thing it wants to do is to fly. and in retreat uses foot almost as much as wing. Musicians have written out in musical scale the song of lark and robin redbreast and nightingale, and yet the hen of my text hath nothing that could be taken for song, but only the cluclS and caclSle. Yet Christ in the text uttered while looking upon doomed Jerusalem declares that what he wished for that city was like what the hen does for her chickens.
 Christ was thus simple in His teach ings, and yet how hard it is for us who are Sunday school instructors and ed itors and preachers and reformers and those who would gain the ears of audiences to attain that Heavenly and Divine art of simplicity! We have to run course of literary disorders as children course of physical disorders. We come out of school and college loaded down with Greek mythologies and out of the theological seminary weighed down with what the learned fathers said, and we fly with wings of eagles and fiamingoes and albatrosses, and it takes good while before we can come down to Christ's similitudes, the candle under the bushel, the salt that has lost its savor, the net thrown into the sen, the spittle on the eys of the blind man and the hen and chick ems.
 There is not much poetry about this winged creature of God mentioned in my text, but she is more practical and more motherly and more suggest i've of good things than many that fly higher and wear brighter colors. She is not prima donna of the skies nor strut of beauty in the aisle of the forest. She does not cut a circle un- der the sun like the Rocky mountain eagle, but stays at home to look after family affairs. She does not swoop like the condor of the cordilleras to transport a rabit from the valley to the top of the crags, but just scratches for a living.
 am in warm sympathy with the unpretentious and old fashioned hen because, like most of us, she has to scratch for living. She knows at the start what most people of good sense are slow to learn-that the gaining of a livelihood implies work and that successes do not lie on the surface. but are to be upturned by positive and con tinuous effort. The reason that soci- ety and the church and the world gre so full of failures, so full of loafers. 50 full of deadbeats is because the pso- pie are not wise enough to take the lesson which any hen would teach them that if they would find for them selves and for those dependent upon them anything worth having they must scratch for it.
 One day in the country we saw sudden consternation in the behavior of old Dominick. Why the hen should be so disturbed we could not understand. We looked about to see if a neighbor's dog were invading e. Xy,