The Birmingham age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1902-1950, 1907-03-24

DIR. TALMAGE'S SERMON
BY THE REV. FRANK DE WITT TALMAGE, D. o.

| cradle to his spiritual surrender at the
| foot Of the cross, where today we are all
| gathered to worship our dying Lord.
In the first place, L imagine that this
| centurion was once a Roman youth who
was born amid the pure sweet whole
some country life of old Italy. BY that l
do not mean he came of an ignorant, pow
erty stricken family, but l believe he
came of an Italian Handwriting family
%tfeh aad neither poverty nor riches, but
had purity in domestic life refinement OF
home associations and had all which was
possible in n heather land to make life
| pure and sweet and wholesome. In other
words. / believe this Roman soldier came
from a family like that of hundreds and
thousands which lived before the civil
war in Georgia and Alabama and Ken
| lucky and Virginia and Tennessee and the
Carolinas. These families had their
slaves to work their plantations, but they
lived for something good besides money
making. They lived for the noble pur-
pose of making true, brave, manly men
out of their boys and noble, virtuous
wives and mothers out ofltheir daughters.
And what is more. they not only strove
TO make noble, pure men and women out
of their children, but as rule in the
Augustinian age from which this Roman
centurion sprung they accomplished what
they struggled for.
Not All Immoral.
1t is a very grave mistake to suppose
that rural Italy in the time of Augustus
was like immoral Rome. You can no
more judge the country life of Italy by
the moral standards of the social life Of
Caesars capital than you can judge the
moral standards of France by that of
Paris or the pure. sweet country life Of
our own land by the standards of the
Tenderloin district of New York or by the
social scandals of summer resorts. The
more l have read Roman history the
more / am impressed with the fact that
Rome was not only the immoral cesspool
of all Italy, but of all the foreign capitals
and the countries of the world. Do you
not re member the famous sentence of Jul
Venal I'm Tiberium defuxit Orontes9s
This translated means, Into the Tiber
the Orontes emptied itself" Where was
the Orontes river? Did 1t literally flow
into the TAer? No. The Orontes river
was away off in Syria. In order to empty
itself into the Tiber it would have to flow
through the Mediterranean waters, as the
Thames to empty into the Rhine would
have to Jump the English channel. Now.
what did Juvenal mean by that sentence?
Why, simply this: The Orontes was the
river upon whose banks eastern Antioch
was built, as Paris is built upon the
banks of the river Seine. Jevenal was
immoral rottenness of Antioch and of all
the eastern cities We're emptied into Rome
as the river Orontes figuratively empties
its filth into the river Tiber, upon whose
banks the Roman capital was built"
What Juvenal teaches us Farrar and
Stanley and all the penman who have
deved into Roman history also teach. In
the rural districts of the Roman empire
virtue dwelt There were purity and
truth and honor There the women lived,
like Caesars wife, above suspicion. There
thousands and tens of thousands of Cor
nelia's had their most precious jewels i'll
the setting of a cradle. From the pure,
sweet wholesome life of the rural dis
tricts of Rome came the men who filed
up the legions of Caesar. which defended
the Roman power from the Atlantic
ocean on the one side to the 1igris on the
east from the Danube on the north to
the Sahara desert on the south. The
men who conquered the then known
world under julius Caesar and Augustus
were not the debauched valetudinarians
These warriors were the physical and
mental giants who came from the rural
districts of Italy as the strength of the
French republic is found in the country
life of France and not In the haunts of
the dissipated youth of Paris
Life of Old Italy.
If the moral life of Italy was not pure
and domestically wholesome, how can
you account for the noble career of Tibe-
rius Gracious, the father of the two ia
nous Ciracchi-how for that firm inhex-
BILE stole. the Count Leo Tolstoi of julius
Caesars time, Marcus Porcius Cato?
They say that Cincinnatus, the legendary
hero of Rome, was twice offered the die
tatorship of Rome when in farmers dress
he was guiding the pillow over his farm. 1t