The Birmingham age-herald., 1903-09-27
DIR. TALMAGE'S SERMON.
eY THE REV. FRANK DE WITT TALmAoE. D.. D.

Chicago, September 2O.-At this season, when the great army of teachers take up their tasks in our schools. colleges and universities, many of them for the first lime. this sermon is peculiarly and widely appropriate. The text is Matthew Xi 29' Learn of me"
 The school house is the great reservoir in which are collected the streams of knowledge which have flowed down from the ages. It is the place where scholars can climb up the broad shoulders of the intellectual giants of the past and the present and see as far as they have seen. because those shoulders are lifting those students heads towards the stars It is the place in which man is taught how to harness the winds and lasso the electricity and tap the oil wells and contribute to the common wealth and development of his brother man, so that all working together may cause the desert to blossom as the rose.n What is the cause of all those fine farms, big barns and immense gran aries? Why this thrift and prosperity everywhere?" l once asked a Pennsyl-
 Vana farmer when bicycling through
 Lancaster county. "The school house.
 he replied. You cannot go anywhere in this part of the state without finding the public school house at almost every cross roads and the small college in almost every town of any size" What is the cause of your dilapidated farms and the slothfulness and filth l see everywhere around me?' I asked another farmer that same spring in a region a few hundred miles from the one the prosperity or which prompted my first question. "Io the absence of the school house. was the answer Most of our people are ignor- ant and uneducated. What is more, most of our people do not want to learn; neither do they wish their children to learn. Against such a wall of opposition as that it is almost impossible for intellectual progress to make any true headway.
 A Representative Term.
 We would eulogize that compound word of eleven letters called the school house" But, after all. the "school house" IS merely a representative term. Its true value is not in the intrinsic worth Of the bricks and stones and wood which com pose its buildings; it is in the spiritual and intellectual worth of the men and the women who stand behind it's teachers desks Students from far and near came to sit at the feet of Hillel and his famous grandson Gamaliel. although for the most part those teachers had no buildings Of any worth Plato was the disciple of So- crates and the teacher of Aristotle who IS the founder of the academic school fa- nous the world round. yet for the most part these men had the street corners Tor their classrooms and the hillsides for their They were poor in pocket, though rich in brains. The name of Thom- as Arnold has given Rugby it's greatest fame The name of Ellphalet Mott Is the most priceless heritage Union college at Schenectady ever received. The name or Mark Hopkins is of more value to Will Hams college than an endowment or $o'- COG, 900 could ever be. With my own eyes, as student, l saw that great educator then S4 years of age, leaving our college town to attend the Harvard centennial Seated upon the rostrum at Harvard on that great occasion were the president Of the United States and senators and gov ernors and leaders in the various walks of life But when Mark Hopkins, old Will Hams pride, slowly ascended the platform the whole audience rose en masse and bowed. That homage was tribute to the fact that the skilled workman is greater than his factory; that the teacher is of more importance than the school house in which he stands
 The Divine Teacher is our theme If we have not yet learned the value of Jesus Christ as an instructor then let us learn it now in the command of text. Jesus in these three words recorded In Matthew emphasizes the great fact that from him. and him alone, we can learn the gospel lessons we ought to learn. Thus today l would grasp the ropes or the village school house and the city church bells as the college sexton holds his bell rope, and as 1 pull and the church bells swing backward and forward and the silver notes of these bells go echoing down the valleys until they plunge up against the sounding boards of the hills would cry as a gospel minister: Come 10 school! Come to school All ye who would learn of Jesus, come to school come to school" Is not this the meaning of my text, Learn of me-?