The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-09-18
DR. STAGG ON GODS INFLUENCE ON MAN Strong Sermon Yesterday by PresbyteIia ian Minister TEXT FROM EZEKIEL A Study of History Shows That in Every Instance Strength Is an
 Importation From
 Above.

The Rev. pr. J. w. stagg, pastor of the First Presbyterian church preached at that church yesterday on the subject, Gods Influence on Man" He made his applications from the following text:
 And 1t shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth. whither- soever the rives shall come, shall live; and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither; for they shall be healed and everything shall live whither the river cometh' Ezekiel xvii g.
 His sermon abounded in short, pithy sentences. He summed up briefly some of the principal accomplishments of man and attributed them all to the Influence of God which came. he said. as the river referred to In the text.
 He said:
 Dr. Thomas Guthrie once preached 2 series of sermons, "The Gospel According to Ezekiel" and some one said he went a long ways to find the gospel; but there is such likeness between the figures that Ezekiel uses to set out his teachings, that it is nothing difficult to show an
 
 of Jesus.
 Nevertheless. there are certain limita- tions to the picture of the prophet which will make it best for us to get first the outline to see how far he, himself, in- tended his teachings to apply and thus try to draw from this seer of visions, that which belongs to our day and time.
 There has been great disputation about tEe words used in this text. In one place the river is spoken of in the singular, and in another the plural is used. Neu- mann. Schroder, Maurer. Havernick and Currey have all spent considerable time in attaching importance to this discrep- ancy, which so far as we are concerned, this morning, matters no whit. It Is of no great importance whether he was de- scribing the Kedron, or the Jordan and the Dead Sea, or not.
 The picture is of rivers of water flow Ing through barren waste into the stag nant waters of the sea. If 1t be the Dead Sea that Is alluded to, it's waters yet re- main so salt and hostile to life that noth- ing lives beneath It's surface, no vegeta- tion graces its rim and the bird of the air flies high above It's foulness and death. It may have been that Ezekiel intended that the boundaries of the Land of Promise was the limit of his applica- tion of the blessings that would follow in the course of the life-giving stream. He did not see the gospel as it Is taught In the New Testament, nor has he de- scrbed Jesus as Christ has described Himself, he saw the influence of God in the vision of river and its influence on a barren land and a dead sea. Mems visions and dreams have always been limited by what has gotten into their inner consciences. No man ever de- scribed America until America was dis covered, no European ever dreamed of Indians, until Indians had scalped the Old World home-seeker in the New World Inspiration does not make the dweller of Judea build the Kingdom of God beyond the boundaries of his own land, nor does it make the Jew give the promise to those outside the line of in heritance.