The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1904-01-25
PETERS PHILOSOPHY
SUBJECT OF SERMON
Interesting Discourse by Rev. J
Cumming Smith. OF the Tab
ernacle Church.
ONE PICTURE OF HEAVEN

At the Tabernacle Church yesterday
morning the Rev j. Cumming Smith. the
pastor. preached on Peters Philosophy of
Heaven" He said in part
Between the Peter who was reared in
the legal theory OF religion. to whom God
was bookkeeper and paymaster. saliva
! ton a check or credit system, justice po-
/ liceman, iron duty the ideal and heaven
] an artificial pleasure ground. and the later
4 Peter, who. In mellow years, held forth
/ God of love as the crown of thought re-
ligion that consisted OF interior culture ana
/ enthusiasm, a future that was resplendent
! with character and tropical with spiritual
/ fruits, sense of duty that was both
/ prompted and swallowed up in the inspira-
\ ton of sympathy-between those two Pc
\ ters there stretched 2 long distance not OF
/ straight, even road, but OF thorny and pre-
clpitous travel. All our advance IS not by
air line, as the bees when loaded, but by
earth line. up and down. smooth and stony,
fowery and prickly. We pay the toll or
macadamized thoroughfare.
! IF you trace the history OF Peter you
/ through a stormy and tumultuous career.
/ There Is no evolution that does not involve
/ struggle as the condition of betterment.
/ Our hymnologies mostly fatal in their
| sweet-scented suggestions about the faci-
! tiles OF spiritual conqueSts. The prayer
meeting lull and tranquility ofttimes decoy
! unwatchful souls into the idyllic notion
that religious power and vigor are an easy
! purchase. But il is a runous fancy. Mer-
! chants may advertise clearance sales and
| slaughtered prices 10 capture the strolling
| crowd. but heaven never announces a re-
| duction of figures. 1t is a one-price and
| high-price store He who wins the best
| wares must pay down the full sum or leave
Now. the revolution wrought in Peter
was the simple result of the new ideas he
! had espoused. To him ideas not
| dreams. but dynamics. One class of ideas
may be called speculative, and, like me-
teors or comets unfortunately burn out
pa r
/ Such speculations are foreign to the re-
| ligion of Jesus. The theologies that are
| mere spidery webs of guess. that
| fabricated of pagan ideas of justice and
| penalty, woven into the pure, pearly teach
! ings of Jesus-such elaborate creeds are
| adulterous like watered or bacterial milk
| or fruit They are illegitimate births. To
| distinguish between these colossal, accumu-
| lated systems bequeathed to us from de-
| fective ages and the original words of the
| Master is the prime duty OF the church.
! We will never drive out atheism make
| skepticism blush TO look at itself until
we reproduce the simple interpretations OF
| Jesus they fell white the new fallen
snow, and not yet soiled with the thick SCOT
and smoke and footprint of human ambi-
ton. And one simple test is at our hand
| If an idea never quickens TO duty, If a
| creed, however hoary and wild with cen
turtles, does not provoke to nobler com
the dusty garrett 1t Is not born OF God.
1t is a mere piece of bric-a-brac or a
fossil for a museum. How many such fruit
less ideas Christians carry and christen
with solemn-soundng name that hides
ignorance. and then, with those harsh, mag
esterial ideas standards, condemn their
fellow-Christians who see no life-givtng
quality in them. sunbeam pierceS dia-
mond, but does not change IT. sunbeam
enters the sensitive plant and is vivific. re-
productive and transforming. Truths enter
men to reorganize them.
THE NEW TESTAMENT
1.-The New Testament never toys or sports
with ideas. They terrible. They de-
termine destinies. AS man thinks so is
he Jesus planted truths in the disciples
as the gardener plants seeds slips. The
apostles absorbed from the Master ex-
! plantations of Gods temperament and pas
sionate purpose of the divine government
and human responsibility that did more
than regale their fancy or enchant their
ntellects as a play bill does, that went
| farther than such leisurely amorous oc-
equations and penetrated their moral ma
lures and begot a tireless ambition for
practical holiness. Therefore the argument
for Christianity cannot rest upon the in
tellectual symmetry harmony of its
truths because our very sense of symmetry
requires more refinement and nobility and
our very standards of logical accuracy are
very fallible and tickle through the ages.
The final argument is this, that when you
impart the ideas of Jesus into any mans
life that life slowly yields to their charm
and wooing influence and rises in the scale;
and when you plant the truths of Jesus in
a foreign empire and allow them time to
take deep root you are greeted with evil
dence of their divine influence in the trans
forming of heather life and civic relations.
1t is the logic not of intellect, but of ex-
perience; not of the subtle classroom or
cIoister where it is easy TO prove and then
disprove. but of open history and unques-
toned experiment. Europe is the argu-
ment: America Is the argument. The diff
ference between the civiliza lions of the ORR
| OCCtdent. difference
tween Peking and Baltimore or Philadel-
phia; the difference between iron-gloved
difference between yelled Zenanas or
harems and the spotlessness of English
homes; the difference between slaves
ground down and Ill paid and scourged In
pagan markets and Independent. self-re-
speeding workingmen in free country.
These are the tests of a true creed. The
courtroom Is history and long ranges of it,
Now. then, Peter, I'm the auturnnal beau
" of his mature manhood describes a
Christian as temple of sovereign ideas
as a partaker of the divine nature through
trial well borne and Affections well wealth
cred. He descends to specific virtues as
blossoming out of these freshening fertile
ideas: love. valor. temperance. goodness,
charity patience. Then the development of
these governing qualities escorts a mans
soul into the imperial kingdom. 1t is not
some external passport nor is it a slavish
clinging to some orthodox theory. 1t is an
internal culture. 1t is life like Gods life.
The abundant entrance into any condition
whose gateway demands intellectual or
spiritual qual1ca tons Is clear enough. No
man, for example, has abundant en-
trance into our America unless he is fully
attained 10 the genius of America.
"A poor Italian. encumbered with sell
fish traditions. clOgged with base heredities
! reared in an atmosphere of covert vilainy
or treachery-such a poor unfortunate may
drift TO our shores and mix up with the
Z sweltering hordes of lower New York. He
has stolen IN unawares. Unfit thousands
I thus smuggle themselves in annually and
| menace the government of our seething cit
les. He has entered in, but there is no
/ abundant entrance. Let single out an
other and opposite sample. Here is lofty
German or Dane. who was Graded on the
heights of freedom. who drew In truth from
! his mothers breast. whose caste OF though ut
has been popular, who has dared TO strike
q his youth and who has learned to love a
! republican system, who. thus equipped.
Z crosses the sea and dwells In our land,
and every year his love and veneration
for our people increase-for such a type
there is abundant entrance. To him Amer
/ lea is not mere haven. as Il is to the
/ prosecuted and oppressed il is a heaven of
( congenial climate. where every aspiration
of his cultured being finds satisfaction and
scope
PICTURE OF HEAVEN.
Now. this is the picture of heaven that
Peter hung up in the art gallery OF the
Bibles masterpieces. Why quote Peter at
thirty when at sixty he touches higher
chord? ANY man inspired or uninspired is
more authoritative in the plenitude of his