Republican news item. [volume] (Laport, Pa.) 1896-19??, 1902-03-20
DIR. TALMAGES SERMON
SUNDAYS DIS, I7sE az THE NOTED
-. me.

| LINE.
Subject: Temptations For the Young-The
| Assailants of Virtue and Honesty Are
| Numerous-NeedF For Divine Protection
| Gods Grace Bringeth Salvation.
| WASHINGTON, D. ca familiar illus
tration from the barnyard is employed in
this discourse by DR.. Talmage to show
the comfort and protection that heaven af-
Matthew xiii, 81, Even as hen gather
eth her chickens under her wings, and ye
would not"
Jerusal Al sight as Christ came
to the CT, - Mount Olivet, a height of
700 feet. The splendors of the religious
landscape. There is the temple. Yonder
is the kings palace. Spread out before
His eyes are the pomp, wealth, the wick
| edness and the coming destruction of Je
rusalem and He bursts into tears at the
thought of the obduracy of place that
He would gladly have saved and apostro-
phizes, saying. 20 Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
how often would 1 have gathered thy
children together, even as hen gathereth
her chickens under her wings, and ye
would not?"
Why did Christ select hen and chickens
as simile? Next to the appositeness of
the comparison, l think it was to help all
public teachers in the matter of illustra-
tion to get down off their stills 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 head-dress and the wattles un.
der the throat. 1t has no grandeur of
genealogy. All we know is that its ances-
| tors came from India, some of them from
a height of 1000 feet on the sides of the
Himalayas. 1t has no pretension OF nest
like the eagles eyrie. 1t has no lustre of
plumage like the goldfnch. Possessing
ana Somy 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, yet the hen of my text
hath nothing that could be taken for a
song, but only cluck and caclSle. Yet
upon doomed Jerusalem declares that what
He had 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 editors
and preachers. and reformers and those
| who would gain the ears of audiences to
attain that heavenly and divine art of SIM
| plicity! We have to run course of lit
| erary disorders as children a course of ply
steal disorders. We come out of school
and college loaded down with Greek my
thologies and out of the theological semin-
| airy weighed down with what tlfe learned
fathers said, and we fly with wings of
eagles and hamingoes 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
SAVIOR, the net thrown into the sea, the
spittle on the eyes of the blind man and
the hen and chickens.
am in warm sympathy with the unpre
| tentious old fashioned hen because, like
| most of us, she has to scratch for a living.
| She knows at the start the lesson which
most people of good sense are slow to
| learn-that the gaining of livelihood i'm
plies work. and that successes do not lie
Ia on the surface, but are to be upturned by
positive and continuous effort. The rea-
son that society and the church and the
world are so full of failures, so full of loaf
ers, so full of deadbeats is because people
are not wise enough to take the lesson
which any hen would teach them that if
they would find for themselves and for
having they must scratch for it. Solo
mon said, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard." !"
| / say Go to the hen, thou sluggard. In
the Old Testament God compares Himself
to an eagle stirring up her nest. and in
the New Testament the Holy Spirit is
in sermon that began with cutting sar-
| casm for hypocrites and ends with the
paroxysm of pathos in the text compares
! Himself to hen.
One day in the country we saw sudden
CONSERVATION in the behavior of old Dom
mick. Why the hen should be so dis
turbed we could not understand. We
looked about to see if neighbor's dog
were invading the farm. We looked up to
see if storm cloud were lowering. We
could see nothing on the ground that could
| terrorize, and we could see nothing in the
air to ruffle the feathers of the hen. but
the loud, wild, affrighted cluck which
| her feathers made us look again around
and above us, when we saw that high up
| and far away there was rapaclous bird
| wheeling round and round and down and
down, and not seeing us as we stood in
| the shadow, it came nearer and lower un-
til we saw, its bealk was curved from base
| to tip and it had two flames of fire for
eyes. and it was a hawk. But all the
chickens were under old Dominick's wings,
and either the bird of prey caught a
glimpse of us or not able to find the brood
huddled under wing, darted back into the
clouds. -.s---'"--- "'r'.D"-s.-'"''-'.''
So Christ calls with great earnestness to
all the young. Why, what is the matter!
1t is bright sunlight, and there can be no
danger Health is theirs. A good home
is theirs. Plenty of food is theirs. Pros
pect of long life is theirs. But Christ con-
| tinues to call, calls with more emphasis
and urges haste and says not second
ought to be lost. Oh, do tell us what is
the matter Ah now l see; there are
, hawks of temptation in the air, there are
vultures wheeling for their prey, there
are bealss of death ready to plunge, there
are claws of allurement ready to clutch.
Now 1 see the peril. Now l understand
the urgency. Now | see the only safety,
Would that Christ might this day take
our sons and daughters into His shelter
''as hen gathereth her chickens under
her wing
| The fact is that the most of them will
! never mind the shelter unless while they
/ are chickens. 1t is simple matter of in
exorable statistics that most of those who
do not come to Christ in youth never come
at all. What chance is there for the
young without divine protection? There
are the grogshops, there are the gamb-
| ling hells there are the infidelities and
| i'm mn ora ties of sniritralism there are the