davidaulloa/AmericanStories huggingface dataset:
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

of grief. The effect is inconceivable. The whole house resounded with the mingled groans, and sobs, and shrieks of the con- gregation. -t
 "It was some time before the tumult had subsided so far as to permit him to proceed. Indeed. judging by the usual but fallacious standard of my own weak ness, 1 began to be very uneasy for the situation of the preacher. For l could not conceive how he would be able to let his audience down from the height to which he had wound them without im- pairing the solemnty and dignity of his subject, or perhaps shocking them by the abruptness of the fall. But no: the de- scent was as beautiful and sublime as the elevation had been rapid and en- thusiastic.
 "The first sentence with which he broke the awful silence was a quotation from Rousseau, Socrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus Christ like God,'
 "I despair of giving you any idea of the effect produced by this short sen tence, unless you could perfectly con well as the peculiar crisis in the dis course Never before did I completely understand what Demosthenes meant by laying such stress on delivery. You are to bring before you the venerable figure
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

TlHAT is to say, waves. Light and
 heat, color and cold, are waves; ;
 sound and smell. electdic flash and the thought of the heart, just undula- tions, waves. The sea called Being hath it's storms and it's callns. It is never without it's waves. Not yet have we sunk to Oriental Nirvana existence, devoid of emotion, Of conscious will, devoid even of the absence of emotion, devoid alike of the positive and the negative conscious ness
 To save our sanity we postulate person. ality. To save his Nirvapa the Buddhist denies personality and anticipates the moment that shall be eternity, wherein his denial shall be both denied and af- flrmed in the Infinite Void, where person. ality becomes impersonal and where no consciousness thrusts itself above the level of the sea that has swallowed )Thought. Neither death nor the ab- sence Of death, neither life nor the ab- sence of life," that is Nirvana.
 When New England began to dabble at the same time in these unthinkables and in spirit-rappings. mystic bells, and silly table hostings, surely that was an un- dulation! On It's crest rode strange kin folks the homeopaths, the Book Farm enthusiasts, Mrs. Eddy and the Fox sis ters Beating at the barriers of accepted materialisms. some with a truth, some with half truth, some honestly and sac rificially some with dollars and destiny in plain view, they did their deyoir and have left us their legacy. The individ- uals rose and sunk, themselves. like
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08
UNDULATIONS-By George Eaves, D. D.

waves, and have passed away. Their mass has conveyed the impulse to others, and these heave and cry, deep unto deep, for their brief span, and then sink into the indistinguishable sea- The last to go was Mrs. Eddy.
 Whoever has stood on the bridge of a ship and felt the majesty of the sea in real storm, and the storms aftermath, will not accuse me of irreverence when lilSen the movements of the human mind to such waves. They come from the outer wilds of the sea, green or gray or nearly black,l creaming at the crest to a fringe of foam, the dust" of the sea- Beneath your ship they thrust them- selves. Their mighty, heaving Hanks and shoulders hoist you. Their hands ,smite the vessels sides. Sometimes a vast arm, bare to the shoulder, sweeps from stem to stern along the washing declSs snatches at the davitts where the life boat swings, booms against the poop, or twirls in play the whirring screws, where they snarl awhile at the sea that has ejected them.
 Whence came all this bother of disturb ance, these 1.-the and leaping monsters of the deep? Did the wind bring them? And whither do they go, big and not so big. heaving there beneath the heavy sky? Each has a sort of Individuality But their play seems so purposeess, so inconclusive, so blind! Here surely is a picture of chaos, august only because vast, as sort of almightiness of blind yehemence. There, in the midst of the ocean, you get no impression of direction,
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

and-curses, then somehow there's dif- ference.
 That is a sin against the spirit and 1t goes deep. But whoever authoritatively
 told what Mary Baker Eddy's Christian
 Science creed really was, :" if he adopted
 1t for his own, would, believe. be quite cordially welcomed member in the New
 York church presided over by our polemio
 friend, the Rev. John Baptist Secundus.
 He would not need ito define the person. ality of evil as devip' (sc). He Is quite scientific, but not strictly traditional, to deny "the supposed naturaness of sin. sickness and death" and his orthodoxy none could challenge among the Baptists,. whatever the judgment of "the motheRl church in Boston" might be. His descrip- tion of the atonement lacks indeed the, completeness which one in this age has c right to expect of it's exponent, but i'd does not Indeed deny that august mys- tery. And so on: Surely here is not only the spirit of unity, but the growth of the sense of amalagamation, the feeling that
 the wave is in the very act and momenh oc coalescing with the sea. It is endeav-,
 bring to glorify itself as the one expo- nent of the lmmanence of God, and that is too large an order, for every church confesses 1t; and as I said, we must rs- fuse to issue patent rights to the discov-
 erer of God or pay tax to those who
 imagine that they have monopolised the Spirit. Only he who leaves out these wordy disputes and actually proves the lmmanance of God by a life obedient to His impulse of unselfsh love-only he
 has hold of the eternities. For the waves pass. The Spirit abides
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than prophet. For this is he, of whom il is written, behold, I send my mes senger before thy face, which shall pre- pare thy way before thee. Verify I say unto you, among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist"
 In those days it was customary for Eeralds to march near or before the kings to proclaim their presence; and these men were regarded as being especially favored, and greater than other men.
 John the Baptist had been sent by God as herald to usher in the Messiah s reign. God had honored him above all men. as forerunner of His own son, Jesus. Johns earnest. devout eloquence had aroused the people, and thousands gathered in the wilderness to hear him. His work was now done. It had been of short duration. But God had declared that His word shall accomplish that which please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.' And now as John lay in prison, Jesus tells the multi tude of his Johns) greatness.
 But to return to the sketch which has so often. entertained me. It is from William Wert's writings, and apart from the in- terest of the subject, is of the finest liter
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

drew d picture of the sufferings of our Savior; His trial before Piate; His as cent up Calvary; His erucifxion and His death. I knew the whole history; but never, until then, had I heard the cir cumstances so selected so arranged, so colored! It was all new, and I seemed to have heard it for the first time in my life. His enunciation was so deliberate that his voice trembled on every syllable. and every heart in the assembly trembled in unison His peculiar phrases had that force of description that the original scene appeared to be, at that moment, acting before our eyes We saw the very faces of the Jews; the staring, frightful dis tortions of malice and rage. We saw the buffet; my soul kindled with flame of indignation and my hands were invol- untariy and convulsively clenched. But when he came to touch on the patience, the forgiving meekness of our Savior. when he drew to the life His blessed eyes streaming in tears to heaven; His breath- ing to God a soft and gentle prayer of pardon on His enemies, Father forgive them, for they know. not what they do along faltered, grew fainter and fainter,
 until his utterance being entirely ob- structed by the force of his feelings. he raised his handkerchief to his eyes and burst into a loud and irrepressble flood
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

have before me long clipping from Denver paper, evidently authorized and authoritative, purporting to tell us what creed really was" It Is an interesting document, much more interesting than the prophecy of New York Baptist pas tor that Christian Science is about to dis integrate. This writer does not prophecy. He proves. 5 He does not attack or de- nounce. He pallates, he defends, he gives an apologetic along the lines of common sense. And have the strong persuasion that, being nationalist, he Is a most reprehensible heretc. And yet he is symptom inevitable
 Nothing indeed can convey to Christian Science immunity from the law of anal gamation. It's ideas were derived else- where. Its destiny is to become other than it was, changing, modifying. assimi- latng doctrine on its way to that Mir vana of undulations, the past From other-where to other-whither, the waves roll, now, strenuous and now more de- corous, till some wind of God stirs up some other waves. And 1t can be almost demonstrated that no other power is i'm mortal but that wind, blowing where 1t listeth, the spirit of the eternities acting upon the passing age, creating personali- ties and history.
 In this view it matters little what Mrs. Eddy managed to discover. what her teachings were what her books contain. All that is wave-matter, changing, amal- gamating, dissolving, becoming part of the acknowledged orthodoxy of the world, just as it was before she thought she had
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

IT is sometimes the case on the Lord s
 day, that some of you would gladly attend divine worship in the house of God, were you not deprived of that priv'- lego of physical indisposition. or some other cause. Not many of us can sit at home, as some do II larger cities, and enjoy a sermon through the megaphone but if we are Christians our thoughts will naturally turn to the subject of the gospel, and the preaching of the word Our greatest pleasure and duty in the morning df possible) shouldsbe the study of our Bibles, and 1t would also be help full to read. some good healthy book or paper, and in this way mitigate our shut in loneliness.
 A sketch that I have been reading to- day, perhaps for the tenth time, brings to my mind the thought that God has often put 1t into the hearts of His great est servants to go into the wilderness to do His work. I could cite many, but first of them all, hear our blessed Saviour bearing testimony to John the Baptist What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in king S houses. But what went ye for to see? A
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

of the preacher; his blindness constantly recalling to your recollection old Homer, Ossian and Milton, and assoeiating with his performance the melancholy gradeur of their. genluses. You are to imagine. that you hear his slow, solemn. well-ao- cented enunciation, and his voice of af- fectng, trembling melody; you are to remember the pitch of passion and en- thusiasm to which the congregation was raised: and then the few minutes of DOT tentous. death-llke silence which reigned throughout the house; the preacher re- moving his white handkerchief from his aged face (even yet wet from the recent torrent of his tears) and slowly stretch- ing forth the palsied hand which holds 1t, begins the sentence, Socrates died like philosophers; then pausing, raising hts other hand. pressing them both. clasped together with warmth and energy to his breast lifting his 'sightless balls to heaven, and pouring his whole soul into his tremuous voice, but Jesus Christ like a Godr If he had been indeed and in truth an angel of light, the effect could scarcely have been more divine.''
 The preacher here described was the Rev. James Waddel, who, Mir. Scott tells us, twas born in 1739 either in Ireland or else on the Atlantic while his parents were en route to this country"
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

consumptive's grave, via the reform sohool-won't poor Jimmie rise again? Why so jealous, dear man? Could you not ascend the clouds in comfort, f1anked by the lady from Concord and poor Jimmie?
 Somebody once wrote a famous book entitled "Guesses at Truth" MT. w. R. Greg wrote a more drastic work which he called "Enigmas of Life" Mrs. Eddy made her guesses and thought she solved the enigmas; but I suspect that both Coleridge and Greg were Intellectually far better equipped for the task, thor oughy they did not profess so much.
 Meantime to me at least it is pleasant to learn that there is a steady tendency asserting itself in the thoughtful mem- bers of the Christian Science body, the result of which will be increased likeness to our Baptist pastor. And he, on his part, will open his eyes to see that what folks want is less indignation and d lit- tie more time. Yes, time! Time is what ripens us Most of the heretics would have come back to the fold if they had been given time to ripen. But 1t is hard to learn the lesson. The modernists seem devils to the orthodox; the Rev. John Baptist Secundus thinks as hardly of Mrs. Tertium Quid, who looks for resurrect- ed Mrs. Eddy. But does it not perhaps occur to both groups of judges that the only thing that matters is not prophecy nor definition, but the spirit of life? I can dare to anticipate an amalgamation of muchs that has passed for heresy with much that goes as unchallenged truth. But when a man looks in the eyes of love
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

only the weltering inanity of discontent,
 the blind anger of fear and general
 wrath. They go muttering, quivering, heaving, and so pass out to the Infinite. Watch the pageant of the storm from the shore, and you get keener sense of pur- pose, as though the waves were com ing on some predestined errand. And you revere their power even while you grow weary of their dull sameness. Always the same curling breaker, edged with white lace that 1t weaves for the wind the shallowing sands; always the same fruitless smashing thunder and hiss as the wave dies, defeated and dispersed! But after all, whether Jack is af1oat or ashore, the waves fade into each other.
 Their path always ends in amalgama- ton. The individuality and vivid strength of each seems intense enough when the wave is at it's height; but it changes every moment and presently is lost in the wave that it has pushed into being
 So with these world-movements, that make the story of religion or philosophy Do what they will, however strong or vast, they cannot resist the tendency to
 amalgamation. Egypt was necessary to Israel, the learning of the priests at On as truly as that in the nature-temple at
 Sinai. But Israel learned later from Per sa and who has not learned from Is- rael? The theory that some modern sect halls as "the truth is only an echo from past ages, only residuary impulse from waves that are no more.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

ary merit. w ". Scott, state law li- brarian of Virginia, in his admirably written book, "The History of Orange County says that this sketch taken from MT. Wirt's British Spy' fought to be read, marked, learned and digested by every citizen of Orange" As master piece of rhetoric, why not by all others? For the benefit of those who are not &C., quainted with MT. Wirt's writings, and have never read this sketch. shall here give it-verbatim The reader must know that the time of the scene here described must have been in the eighteenth cen tury; as Mir Wirt's Letters of a British Spy'' were published in 1893, and must have been written some time after the time referred to. At that time Orange was little more than wilderness. MT. Wirt writes:
 Tt was one Sunday, as I travelled throuh the county of Orange, that my eye was caught by cluster of horses tied near a ruinous old wooden house in the forest, not far from the roadside. Having frequently seen such objects be- fore, in travelling through these states, had no difficulty in understanding that this was place of religious worship
 Devotion alone should have stopped me, to join in the duties of the congre-
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08
THE STAR AND MEN-By w.

surrounding the shekinah deepened by | day and became a column of cloud, but at night it became a pillar of light or
 fire, luminous with the glorious symbol
 of Gods presence. It appeared again on
 the mount whither Moses had ascended,
 and when the cloud broke. there was
 the shining forth of the glory of God like a devouring fire on the top of the
 mount in the eyes of the Children of Israel" l At the dedication of Solomon's temple the shekinah again descended enfolded in clouds of glory and filled the sacred fane.
 Later in the ages, just after the angelic hosts had announced the birth of Jesus
 to the shepherds, we read, 'The glory of the Lord shone round about them" This
 was not the glory of the stars or planets.
 It was the glory of the Lord, and. as I
 believe, the shekinah.
 | Prior to this august scene, the shekinah | had appeared to those men of good will who worshipped God amid the silences of | the Persian hills, and which the Magi
 lnistook for star of splendid light. In- deed 1t may be that the Shekinah as- suHleu iHe IOTfH or StdT. WHy HOl. God usually reveals things unknown to us, by the things that we know, and these wise men were students of the l stars.
 I have omitted many instances in the | Old Testament of the apearance of the shekinah, and have not space to say anything of the many allusions to 1t in
 the New Testament, but they are numer- ous. The shekinah unites the two dis | pensations.
 This interpretation meets all the demands
 of the history thus: First, the manifesto tion of the star was local. Had there | been an actual star, the world would
 have known of it, and Herod would not
 have 'enquired of the Wise Men diligent- ly when the star appeared" The ap- pearanee of the shekinah was local. Second, it is impossible to think of
 stars descending close enough to the
 earth to guide the enquirers to partic-
 ular house; while 1t is easy enough to
 believe that the shekinah that once led Isael out of Egypt, could guide the Wise Men to a particular and special abode nor Sanhs
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

discovered it. The only thing of high and permanent worth must be sought in the spirit which the ages must test and on which they must pass verdict. The movement was and is one phase of a much broader thing, as a wave is only a phase, say, of typhoon. The spirit that stirred the souls of men in those creative years was no more Mrs. Eddy's than it was John Smiths. Browning caught it from Wordsworth and Keats, Carlyle from Goethe, Ruskin from his mother S Bible and from Turner's brush The waves were sweeping forward. for a storm was blowing. Men were on the eve of discovering anew the old secret of wis dom. not the accessibility. but the pres ence of God. "Immanence,' they called it, and loked wise. The gospel had preached it more wisely for nearly 200O years. And before the gospel 1t had been the supreme truth to uncounted multi tudes. For it was not a statement, not a dogma not a creed, but a clean, fun damental human intuition which the foolish had lost and that comes back You cannot put patent rights on God, nor tag the Holy Spirit.
 Our New York iconoclastic Baptist di- vine ayers that Mrs Somebody is ''blas- phemous'' to foretell that Mrs. Eddy will rise again But why this heat, this fierce invictive and indignation? Dear man, won't you rise again, orthodox as you are, to the last degree? And poor little Jimmie Jones, whose mother was no bet ter than she should be and left Jimmie to scratch his way up from babyhood to a
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-01-08

ous light was that of profoundest rever- ence. Turning to the left entered the treasure room and stood before "The shrine of the three kings"
 Here, on a platform of about four feet in elevation. there Is large caslSet of gold, radiant with a thousand precious stones of all descriptions, and beautified with the most exquisite enamelled tracery of Scriptural scenes. At the head of the casket there is a panel of gold which, 1 upon being raised discloses three skulls. Each is encircled with coronet of blaz- ing diamonds; and, formed of rubies, above the heads respectively, are the names-Gasper Mechior, Balthazar. There is much else in the treasure room, but the object of greatest interest is that which I have described
 These three skeletons were brought from the far east by the mother of Con- stantine, St. Helena. After they had remained at Milan for long time they were presented by the Emperor Barba- rossa to the archbishop of Colongne, and in Colongne they have remained for nearly 800 years. During these centuries unnumbered thousands of religious people have visited this shrine, and have cher ished a belief in sacred relics; not the same quality of faith that they have in their savior, but belief that In some way those whose spirits were on earth associated with the relics, might assist them in their religious lives. And if they, or even if a small proportion of them, have been helped and comforted in their services of devotion thus, who shall speak lightly of 1t? Therefore. I, while writing of the traditional side of the story of the Magi. mean not to be otherwise than reverent, and considerate of those who may not think as I do
 It is generally agreed that the Wise Men were Persians, and representatives of a class of astrologists well instructed in the mysteries of the starry heavens. Among the Hebrew, students of this phase of science, were called "chozeh bakkokab,' term of contempt, because, from a proper study of the stars, the conjunction of the planet, and the moons various phases, the astronomer, generally, was lost in the astrologist, who sought wisdom and knowledge from the stars and not from God. He was classed with