The united opinion. [volume] (Bradford, Vt.) 1881-1970, 1906-04-20
Calnnage
Sermon
BY Rev.
Frank De Witt Talma6e, ID. d.

Los Angeles, Cal, April 15.-In this
sermon the preacher shows how oul
human misconceptions Of God and his
promises lead us into error and that
the remedy is simple faith and obedi
ence. The text is John iv, 48, Except
We see signs and wonders, We will moi
believe"
We are always demanding gospel
proof Like Gideon of old, we want
our faith bolstered up by the wet
fleece. Like doubling Thomas, we
want to see Christ in the flesh and to
thrust our fingers into the torn palms
of the hands and into the wounded side
before we will believe that he is risen
from the dead. When any fact about
God or the prophecies of the Bible is
told us we at once say, GIVE us the
evidence or we will not believe" Now,
want to show you not only that faith
is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seem" but
that we should believe and trust God
and accept his words and promises,
even when there are no signs and won
God help us as, in his name, we enter
upon this most important and vital
subject!
Signs and wonders theological have
come to us. God and his attributes
pass all the realms Of human eXplana-
ton. The story is told that one day
Michael Angelo entered the studio of
nI fhof 4ha
tine master was nearly a decade older
than the painter of the Sistine Madon-
ma AS an artist who had won his
spurs, he had right to give advice to
the younger man. Michael Angelo stood
for some time before one of Raphaels
easels. The young man at this time
was absent from his studio. Angelo
lifted pencil and drew the curves of
the figure upon the canvas along broad
er lines. Then under the picture he
wrote this one word three times: cam
plify! Amplify! Amplifyw You who
have stood before the wonderful crea-
tons of the architect of st. Peters of
Rome know what he meant by that
word. He meant Increase the concep-
ton Of your subjects" Oh, Raphael,
knot the muscles Of your models
arms and make swarthier necks and
broader shoulders and more leonine
countenances. The haunting Philistine
Is not dwarf, but a giant The mas
ter builders of history are not pygmies,
but Titans. Neptunes trident does not
rule mill pond, but has for its realm
the mighty deep. Amplify! Amplify!
Amplify! Good advice that for Raph-
ael, in an artistic sense. Good advice
for us in theological sense. We have
received certain revelations given in
reference to Gods personality, but we
must not stop with these revelations.
We must be continually enlarging our
ideas of God We must try to gain a
conception of him greater than our
eyes can see and greater than our hui
man lntellects can explain.
We must amplify our belief Of Gods
personality in reference to his eternal
existence. The first verse of the first
chapter of Genesis says, "In the begin
ming God created the heaven and the |
earth" But that beginning" simply |
and the planetary system. Friend, did
not God exist before that? "Oh, yes"
you answer; "God has always existed"
But what do you mean by "alwaysW |
l follow Hugh Miller, the Scottish ge-
ologist in his Testimony of the
Rocks" and in his Footprints of the
Creator" and he tells me that the six
days of creation were not six days of |
twenty-four hours each, but that each
day represented ages upon ages of
time. This conception of the time of
the creation was well expressed by the
'psalmist when he said, "a thousand
years In thy sight are but as yesterday
when it is past, and as watch in the
night" In the creation Of the world
the seconds of time are centuries, and
the minutes are millenniums, the hours
are eras, and the days are ages upon
ages. If you go and stand by the falls
of Niagara, the scientists will tell you
that the falling waters wear away
about six feet of rock every year. Then
they will take you for miles down the
rapids, toward Lake Ontario, and show
you where those rocks have gradually
been worn away by the falling waters
of thousands of years. Next these ge-
ologists will open the leaves of the
rocks and tell you that those rocks
which have been worn away took ages
upon ages to form. Then, after we go
back thousands upon thousands of
years to the creation of the world, you
are not yet at the beginning of Gods
eternal existence, for God existed be-
fore the world was.
What Eternal Means.
What the eternal existence of God
means cannot be better illustrated than
by the following words of NJ. Camille
Flammarion, the celebrated astrono-
mer. What this French writer says
about the heavens we can easily apply
to the duration of time: Let us mag
inc that we sail a million years with
the velocity of light, 10000 miles a
second. Are we at the confines of the
visible universe? See the black i'm.
mensities we must cross! But yonder
new stars are lit up in the depth of the
heavens. We push on toward them;
we reach them-again million years.
new revelations, new starry splendors.
new systems, new worlds, new earths.
What, never an end? We are at the
yestibule of the infinite. We have ad-
yanced but a single step. We are al
ways at the same point-the center ev-
anywhere, the circumference nowhere.
We see before us the infinite, of which
the study is not yet begun. We have
might fall in a straight line during a