Chapter IX: Part 9

And there were men and women on the pier-heads and on the beach wringing their hands; and while they waited and watched, they saw something looming up through the mist, and it turned out to be the life-boat. As soon as it came within speaking distance the people on the shore cried out: "Did you save any of them? Did you save any of them?" And as the boat swept through the boiling surf and came to the pier-head, the captain waved his hand over the exhausted sailors that lay flat on the bottom of the boat, and cried: "All saved! Thank God! All saved!" So may it be to-day. The waves of your sin run high, the storm is on you, the danger is appalling. Oh! shipwrecked soul, I have come for you. I cheer you with this Gospel hope. God grant that within the next ten minutes we may row with you into the harbor of God's mercy. And when these Christian men gather around to see the result of this service, and the glorified gathering on the pier-heads of heaven to watch and to listen, may we be able to report all saved! Young and old, good and bad! All saved! Saved from sin, and death, and hell. Saved for time. Saved for eternity. "And so it came to pass that they all escaped safe to land."

SUMMER TEMPTATIONS.

"Come ye yourselves apart unto a desert place and rest
awhile."--MARK vi: 31.

Here Christ advises His apostles to take a vacation. They have been living an excited as well as a useful life, and He advises that they get out into the country. When, six weeks ago, standing in this place, I advocated, with all the energy I could command, the Saturday afternoon holiday, I did not think the people would so soon get that release. By divine fiat it has come, and I rejoice that more people will have opportunity of recreation this summer than in any previous summer. Others will have whole weeks and months of rest. The railway trains are being laden with passengers and baggage on their way to the mountains and the lakes and the sea-shore. Multitudes of our citizens are packing their trunks for a restorative absence.

The city heats are pursuing the people with torch and fear of sunstroke. The long silent halls of sumptuous hotels are all abuzz with excited arrivals. The crystalline surface of Winnipiseogee is shattered with the stroke of steamer, laden with excursionists. The antlers of Adirondack deer rattle under the shot of city sportsmen. The trout make fatal snaps at the hook of adroit sportsmen and toss their spotted brilliance into the game-basket. Already the baton of the orchestral leader taps the music-stand on the hotel green, and American life puts on festal array, and the rumbling of the tenpin alley, and the crack of the ivory balls on the green-baized billiard tables, and the jolting of the bar-room goblets, and the explosive uncorking of champagne bottles, and the whirl and the rustle of the ball-room dance, and the clattering hoofs of the race-courses, attest that the season for the great American watering-places is fairly inaugurated. Music--flute and drum and cornet-à-piston and clapping cymbals--will wake the echoes of the mountains.

Glad I am that fagged-out American life for the most part will have an opportunity to rest, and that nerves racked and destroyed will find a Bethesda. I believe in watering-places. Let not the commercial firm begrudge the clerk, or the employer the journeyman, or the patient the physician, or the church its pastor, a season of inoccupation. Luther used to sport with his children; Edmund Burke used to caress his favorite horse; Thomas Chalmers, in the dark hours of the church's disruption, played kite for recreation--as I was told by his own daughter--and the busy Christ said to the busy apostles: "Come ye apart awhile into the desert and rest yourselves." And I have observed that they who do not know how to rest do not know how to work.

But I have to declare this truth to-day, that some of our fashionable watering-places are the temporal and eternal destruction of "a multitude that no man can number," and amid the congratulations of this season and the prospect of the departure of many of you for the country I must utter a note of warning--plain, earnest, and unmistakable.

I. The first temptation that is apt to hover in this direction is to leave your piety all at home. You will send the dog and cat and canary bird to be well cared for somewhere else; but the temptation will be to leave your religion in the room with the blinds down and the door bolted, and then you will come back in the autumn to find that it is starved and suffocated, lying stretched on the rug stark dead. There is no surplus of piety at the watering-places. I never knew any one to grow very rapidly in grace at the Catskill Mountain House, or Sharon Springs, or the Falls of Montmorency. It is generally the case that the Sabbath is more of a carousal than any other day, and there are Sunday walks and Sunday rides and Sunday excursions.

Elders and deacons and ministers of religion who are entirely consistent at home, sometimes when the Sabbath dawns on them at Niagara Falls or the White Mountains take the day to themselves. If they go to the church, it is apt to be a sacred parade, and the discourse, instead of being a plain talk about the soul, is apt to be what is called _a crack sermon_--that is, some discourse picked out of the effusions of the year as the one most adapted to excite admiration; and in those churches, from the way the ladies hold their fans, you know that they are not so much impressed with the heat as with the picturesqueness of half-disclosed features. Four puny souls stand in the organ-loft and squall a tune that nobody knows, and worshipers, with two thousand dollars' worth of diamonds on the right hand, drop a cent into the poor-box, and then the benediction is pronounced and the farce is ended.

The toughest thing I ever tried to do was to be good at a watering-place. The air is bewitched with "the world, the flesh, and the devil." There are Christians who in three or four weeks in such a place have had such terrible rents made in their Christian robe that they had to keep darning it until Christmas to get it mended! The health of a great many people makes an annual visit to some mineral spring an absolute necessity; but, my dear people, take your Bible along with you, and take an hour for secret prayer every day, though you be surrounded by guffaw and saturnalia. Keep holy the Sabbath, though they denounce you as a bigoted Puritan. Stand off from those institutions which propose to imitate on this side the water the iniquities of Baden-Baden. Let your moral and your immortal health keep pace with your physical recuperation, and remember that all the waters of Hathorne and sulphur and chalybeate springs can not do you so much good as the mineral, healing, perennial flood that breaks forth from the "Rock of Ages." This may be your last summer. If so, make it a fit vestibule of heaven.

II. Another temptation around nearly all our watering-places is the horse-racing business. We all admire the horse. There needs to be a redistribution of coronets among the brute creation. For ages the lion has been called the king of beasts. I knock off its coronet and put the crown upon the horse, in every way nobler, whether in shape or spirit or sagacity or intelligence or affection or usefulness. He is semi-human, and knows how to reason on a small scale. The centaur of olden times, part horse and part man, seems to be a suggestion of the fact that the horse is something more than a beast.

Job sets forth his strength, his beauty, his majesty, the panting of his nostril, the pawing of his hoof, and his enthusiasm for the battle. What Rosa Bonheur did for the cattle, and what Landseer did for the dog, Job, with mightier pencil, does for the horse. Eighty-eight times does the Bible speak of him. He comes into every kingly procession and into every great occasion and into every triumph. It is very evident that Job and David and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and John were fond of the horse. He came into much of their imagery. A red horse--that meant war; a black horse--that meant famine; a pale horse--that meant death; a white horse--that meant victory.

As the Bible makes a favorite of the horse, the patriarch and the prophet and the evangelist and the apostle, stroking his sleek hide, and patting his rounded neck, and tenderly lifting his exquisitely formed hoof, and listening with a thrill to the champ of his bit, so all great natures in all ages have spoken of him in encomiastic terms. Virgil in his Georgics almost seems to plagiarize from the description of Job. The Duke of Wellington would not allow any one irreverently to touch his old war-horse, Copenhagen, on whom he had ridden fifteen hours without dismounting at Waterloo; and when old Copenhagen died, his master ordered a military salute fired over his grave. John Howard showed that he did not exhaust all his sympathies in pitying the human race, for when sick he writes home: "Has my old chaise-horse become sick or spoiled?"

But we do not think that the speed of the horse should be cultured at the expense of human degradation. Horse-races, in olden times, were under the ban of Christian people, and in our day the same institution has come up under fictitious names, and it is called a "Summer Meeting," almost suggestive of positive religious exercises. And it is called an "Agricultural Fair," suggestive of everything that is improving in the art of farming. But under these deceptive titles are the same cheating and the same betting, the same drunkenness and the same vagabondage and the same abominations that were to be found under the old horse-racing system.

I never knew a man yet who could give himself to the pleasures of the turf for a long reach of time, and not be battered in morals. They hook up their spanking team, and put on their sporting-cap, and light their cigar, and take the reins, and dash down the road to perdition. The great day at Saratoga, and Long Branch, and Cape May, and nearly all the other watering-places, is the day of the races. The hotels are thronged, nearly every kind of equipage is taken up at an almost fabulous price, and there are many respectable people mingling with jockeys, and gamblers, and libertines, and foul-mouthed men and flashy women. The bar-tender stirs up the brandy-smash. The bets run high. The greenhorns, supposing all is fair, put in their money soon enough to lose it. Three weeks before the race takes place the struggle is decided, and the men in the secret know on which steed to bet their money. The two men on the horses riding around long before arranged who shall beat.

Leaning from the stand or from the carriage are men and women so absorbed in the struggle of bone and muscle and mettle that they make a grand harvest for the pickpockets, who carry off the pocket-books and portemonnaies. Men looking on see only two horses with two riders flying around the ring; but there is many a man on that stand whose honor and domestic happiness and fortune--white mane, white foot, white flank--are in the ring, racing with inebriety, and with fraud, and with profanity, and with ruin--black neck, black foot, black flank. Neck and neck they go in that moral Epsom.

Ah, my friends, have nothing to do with horse-racing dissipations this summer. Long ago the English government got through looking to the turf for the dragoon and light-cavalry horse. They found the turf depreciates the stock, and it is yet worse for men. Thomas Hughes, the member of parliament and the author, known all the world over, hearing that a new turf enterprise was being started in this country, wrote a letter, in which he said: "Heaven help you, then; for of all the cankers of our old civilization there is nothing in this country approaching in unblushing meanness, in rascality holding its head high, to this belauded institution of the British turf." Another famous sportsman writes: "How many fine domains have been shared among these hosts of rapacious sharks during the last two hundred years; and unless the system be altered, how many more are doomed to fall into the same gulf!" The Duke of Hamilton, through his horse-racing proclivities, in three years got through his entire fortune of £70,000, and I will say that some of you are being undermined by it. With the bull-fights of Spain and the bear-baitings of the pit may the Lord God annihilate the infamous and accursed horse-racing of England and America.

III. I go further, and speak of another temptation that hovers over the watering-places; and this is the temptation to sacrifice physical strength. The modern Bethesda was intended to recuperate the physical health; and yet how many come from the watering-places, their health absolutely destroyed! New York and Brooklyn idiots boasting of having imbibed twenty glasses of Congress water before breakfast. Families accustomed to going to bed at ten o'clock at night gossiping until one or two o'clock in the morning. Dyspeptics, usually very cautious about their health, mingling ice-creams, and lemons, and lobster-salads, and cocoa-nuts, until the gastric juices lift up all their voices of lamentation and protest. Delicate women and brainless young men chassezing themselves into vertigo and catalepsy. Thousands of men and women coming back from our watering-places in the autumn with the foundations laid for ailments that will last them all their life long. You know as well as I do that this is the simple truth.

In the summer you say to your good health: "Good-bye, I am going to have a good time for a little while. I will be very glad to see you again in the autumn." Then in the autumn, when you are hard at work in your office, or store, or shop, or counting-room, Good Health will come and say: "Good-bye, I am going." You say: "Where are you going?" "Oh," says Good Health, "I am going to take a vacation!" It is a poor rule that will not work both ways, and your good health will leave you choleric and splenetic and exhausted. You coquetted with your good health in the summer-time, and your good health is coquetting with you in the winter-time. A fragment of Paul's charge to the jailer would be an appropriate inscription for the hotel-register in every watering-place: "Do thyself no harm."

IV. Another temptation hovering around the watering-place is to the formation of hasty and life-long alliances. The watering-places are responsible for more of the domestic infelicities of this country than all the other things combined. Society is so artificial there that no sure judgment of character can be formed. Those who form companionships amid such circumstances go into a lottery where there are twenty blanks to one prize. In the severe tug of life you want more than glitter and splash. Life is not a ball-room where the music decides the step, and bow and prance and graceful swing of long trail can make up for strong common sense. You might as well go among the gayly painted yachts of a summer regatta to find war vessels as to go among the light spray of the summer watering-place to find character that can stand the test of the great struggle of human life. Ah, in the battle of life you want a stronger weapon than a lace fan or a croquet mallet! The load of life is so heavy that in order to draw it, you want a team stronger than one made up of a masculine grasshopper and a feminine butterfly.

If there is any man in the community that excites my contempt, and that ought to excite the contempt of every man and woman, it is the soft-handed, soft-headed fop, who, perfumed until the air is actually sick, spends his summer in taking killing attitudes, and waving sentimental adieus, and talking infinitesimal nothings, and finding his heaven in the set of a lavender kid-glove. Boots as tight as an Inquisition, two hours of consummate skill exhibited in the tie of a flaming cravat, his conversation made up of "Ah's" and "Oh's" and "He-hee's." It would take five hundred of them stewed down to make a teaspoonful of calves-foot jelly. There is only one counterpart to such a man as that, and that is the frothy young woman at the watering-place, her conversation made up of French moonshine; what she has on her head only equaled by what she has on her back; useless ever since she was born, and to be useless until she is dead: and what they will do with her in the next world I do not know, except to set her upon the banks of the River Life for eternity to look sweet! God intends us to admire music and fair faces and graceful step, but amid the heartlessness and the inflation and the fantastic influences of our modern watering-places, beware how you make life-long covenants!

V. Another temptation that will hover over the watering-place is that of baneful literature. Almost every one starting off for the summer takes some reading matter. It is a book out of the library or off the bookstand, or bought of the boy hawking books through the cars. I really believe there is more pestiferous trash read among the intelligent classes in July and August than in all the other ten months of the year. Men and women who at home would not be satisfied with a book that was not really sensible, I found sitting on hotel-piazzas or under the trees reading books the index of which would make them blush if they knew that you knew what the book was.

"Oh," they say, "you must have intellectual recreation!" Yes. There is no need that you take along into a watering-place "Hamilton's Metaphysics" or some thunderous discourse on the eternal decrees, or "Faraday's Philosophy." There are many easy books that are good. You might as well say: "I propose now to give a little rest to my digestive organs; and, instead of eating heavy meat and vegetables, I will for a little while take lighter food--a little strychnine and a few grains of ratsbane." Literary poison in August is as bad as literary poison in December. Mark that. Do not let the frogs and the lice of a corrupt printing-press jump and crawl into your Saratoga trunk or White Mountain valise.

Would it not be an awful thing for you to be struck with lightning some day when you had in your hand one of these paper-covered romances--the hero a Parisian _roué_, the heroine an unprincipled flirt--chapters in the book that you would not read to your children at the rate of $100 a line? Throw out all that stuff from your summer baggage. Are there not good books that are easy to read--books of entertaining travel, books of congenial history, books of pure fun, books of poetry ringing with merry canto, books of fine engravings, books that will rest the mind as well as purify the heart and elevate the whole life? My hearers, there will not be an hour between this and the day of your death when you can afford to read a book lacking in moral principle.

VI. Another temptation hovering all around our watering-places is the intoxicating beverage. I am told that it is becoming more and more fashionable for woman to drink. I care not how well a woman may dress, if she has taken enough of wine to flush her cheek and put glassiness on her eyes, she is intoxicated. She may be handed into a $2500 carriage, and have diamonds enough to confound the Tiffanys--she is intoxicated. She may be a graduate of Packer Institute, and the daughter of some man in danger of being nominated for the Presidency--she is drunk. You may have a larger vocabulary than I have, and you may say in regard to her that she is "convivial," or she is "merry," or she is "festive," or she is "exhilarated," but you can not with all your garlands of verbiage cover up the plain fact that it is an old-fashioned case of drunk.

Now, the watering-places are full of temptations to men and women to tipple. At the close of the tenpin or billiard-game they tipple. At the close of the cotillon they tipple. Seated on the piazza cooling themselves off they tipple. The tinged glasses come around with bright straws, and they tipple. First they take "light wines," as they call them; but "light wines" are heavy enough to debase the appetite. There is not a very long road between champagne at $5 a bottle and whiskey at five cents a glass.

Satan has three or four grades down which he takes men to destruction. One man he takes up, and through one spree pitches him into eternal darkness. That is a rare case. Very seldom, indeed, can you find a man who will be such a fool as that.

When a man goes down to destruction Satan brings him to a plane. It is almost a level. The depression is so slight that you can hardly see it. The man does not actually know that he is on the down grade, and it tips only a little toward darkness--just a little. And the first mile it is claret, and the second mile it is sherry, and the third mile it is punch, and the fourth mile it is ale, and the fifth mile it is porter, and the sixth mile it is brandy, and then it gets steeper and steeper and steeper, and the man gets frightened and says, "Oh, let me get off!" "No," says the conductor, "this is an express train, and it does not stop until it gets to the Grand Central Depot at Smashupton." Ah, "look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth its color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder." And if any young man in my congregation should get astray this summer in this direction it will not be because I have not given him fair warning.

My friends, whether you tarry at home--which will be quite as safe and perhaps quite as comfortable--or go into the country, arm yourself against temptation. The grace of God is the only safe shelter, whether in town or country. There are watering-places accessible to all of us. You can not open a book of the Bible without finding out some such watering-place. Fountains open for sin and uncleanliness; wells of salvation; streams from Lebanon; a flood struck out of the rock by Moses; fountains in the wilderness discovered by Hagar; water to drink and water to bathe in; the river of God, which is full of water; water of which if a man drink he shall never thirst; wells of water in the Valley of Baca; living fountains of water; a pure river of water as clear as crystal from under the throne of God.

These are watering-places accessible to all of us. We do not have a laborious packing up before we start--only the throwing away of our transgressions. No expensive hotel bills to pay; it is "without money and without price." No long and dirty travel before we get there; it is only one step away. California in five minutes. I walked around and saw ten fountains, all bubbling up, and they were all different. And in five minutes I can get through this Bible _parterre_ and find you fifty bright, sparkling fountains bubbling up into eternal life.

A chemist will go to one of these summer watering-places and take the water and analyze it and tell you that it contains so much of iron, and so much of soda, and so much of lime, and so much of magnesia. I come to this Gospel well, this living fountain and analyze the water, and I find that its ingredients are peace, pardon, forgiveness, hope, comfort, life, heaven. "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye" to this watering-place!

Crowd around this Bethesda this morning! Oh, you sick, you lame, you troubled, you dying--crowd around this Bethesda! Step in it! Oh, step in it! The angel of the covenant this morning stirs the water. Why do you not step in it? Some of you are too weak to take a step in that direction. Then we take you up in the arms of our closing prayer and plunge you clean under the wave, hoping that the cure may be as sudden and as radical as with Captain Naaman, who, blotched and carbuncled, stepped into the Jordan, and after the seventh dive came up, his skin roseate-complexioned as the flesh of a little child.

THE BANISHED QUEEN.

"Also Vashti the queen made a feast for the women in the royal
house which belonged to King Ahasuerus. On the seventh day
when the heart of the king was merry with wine, he commanded
Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha, and Abagtha, Zethar, and
Carcas, the seven chamberlains that served in the presence of
Ahasuerus the king, to bring Vashti the queen before the king
with the crown royal, to show the people and the princes her
beauty: for she was fair to look on. But the Queen Vashti
refused to come at the king's commandment by his chamberlains;
therefore was the king very wroth, and his anger burned in
him."--ESTHER i: 9-12.

We stand amid the palaces of Shushan. The pinnacles are aflame with the morning light. The columns rise festooned and wreathed, the wealth of empires flashing from the grooves; the ceilings adorned with images of bird and beast, and scenes of prowess and conquest. The walls are hung with shields, and emblazoned until it seems that the whole round of splendors is exhausted. Each arch is a mighty leaf of architectural achievement. Golden stars shining down on glowing arabesque. Hangings of embroidered work in which mingle the blueness of the sky, the greenness of the grass, and the whiteness of the sea-foam. Tapestries hung on silver rings, wedding together the pillars of marble. Pavilions reaching out in every direction. These for repose, filled with luxuriant couches, in which weary limbs sink until all fatigue is submerged. Those for carousal, where kings drink down a kingdom at one swallow.

Amazing spectacle!

Light of silver dripping down over stairs of ivory on shields of gold. Floors of stained marble, sunset red and night black, and inlaid with gleaming pearl.

In connection with this palace there is a garden, where the mighty men of foreign lands are seated at a banquet. Under the spread of oak and linden and acacia the tables are arranged. The breath of honeysuckle and frankincense fills the air. Fountains leap up into the light, the spray struck through with rainbows falling in crystalline baptism upon flowering shrubs--then rolling down through channels of marble, and widening out here and there into pools swirling with the finny tribes of foreign aquariums, bordered with scarlet anemones, hypericums, and many-colored ranunculi.

Meats of rarest bird and beast smoking up amid wreaths of aromatics. The vases filled with apricots and almonds. The baskets piled up with apricots and figs and oranges and pomegranates. Melons tastefully twined with leaves of acacia. The bright waters of Eulæus filling the urns and dropping outside the rim in flashing beads amid the traceries. Wine from the royal vats of Ispahan and Shiraz, in bottles of tinged shell, and lily-shaped cups of silver, and flagons and tankards of solid gold. The music rises higher, and the revelry breaks out into wilder transport, and the wine has flushed the cheek and touched the brain, and louder than all other voices are the hiccough of the inebriates, the gabble of fools, and the song of the drunkards.

In another part of the palace, Queen Vashti is entertaining the princesses of Persia at a banquet. Drunken Ahasuerus says to his servants, "You go out and fetch Vashti from, that banquet with the women, and bring her to this banquet with the men, and let me display her beauty." The servants immediately start to obey the king's command; but there was a rule in Oriental society that no woman might appear in public without having her face veiled. Yet here was a mandate that no one dare dispute, demanding that Vashti come in unveiled before the multitude. However, there was in Vashti's soul a principle more regal than Ahasuerus, more brilliant than the gold of Shushan, of more wealth than the realm of Persia, which commanded her to disobey this order of the king; and so all the righteousness and holiness and modesty of her nature rise up into one sublime refusal. She says, "I will not go into the banquet unveiled." Ahasuerus was infuriate; and Vashti, robbed of her position and her estate, is driven forth in poverty and ruin to suffer the scorn of a nation, and yet to receive the applause of after generations, who shall rise up to admire this martyr to kingly insolence. Well, the last vestige of that feast is gone; the last garland has faded; the last arch has fallen; the last tankard has been destroyed; and Shushan is a ruin; but as long as the world stands there will be multitudes of men and women, familiar with the Bible, who will come into this picture-gallery of God and admire the divine portrait of Vashti the queen, Vashti the veiled, Vashti the sacrifice, Vashti the silent.

I. In the first place, I want you to look upon Vashti the queen. A blue ribbon, rayed with white, drawn around her forehead, indicated her queenly position. It was no small honor to be queen in such a realm as that. Hark to the rustle of her robes! See the blaze of her jewels! And yet, my friends, it is not necessary to have place and regal robe in order to be queenly. When I see a woman with stout faith in God, putting her foot upon all meanness and selfishness and godless display, going right forward to serve Christ and the race by a grand and a glorious service, I say: "That woman is a queen," and the ranks of heaven look over the battlements upon the coronation; and whether she comes up from the shanty on the commons or the mansion of the fashionable square, I greet her with the shout, "All hail, Queen Vashti!"

What glory was there on the brow of Mary of Scotland, or Elizabeth of England, or Margaret of France, or Catherine of Russia, compared with the worth of some of our Christian mothers, many of them gone into glory?--or of that woman mentioned in the Scriptures, who put her all into the Lord's treasury?--or of Jephtha's daughter, who made a demonstration of unselfish patriotism?--or of Abigail, who rescued the herds and flocks of her husband?--or of Ruth, who toiled under a tropical sun for poor, old, helpless Naomi?--or of Florence Nightingale, who went at midnight to stanch the battle wounds of the Crimea?--or of Mrs. Adoniram Judson, who kindled the lights of salvation amid the darkness of Burmah?--or of Mrs. Hemans, who poured out her holy soul in words which will forever be associated with hunter's horn, and captive's chain, and bridal hour, and lute's throb, and curfew's knell at the dying day?--and scores and hundreds of women, unknown on earth, who have given water to the thirsty, and bread to the hungry, and medicine to the sick, and smiles to the discouraged--their footsteps heard along dark lane and in government hospital, and in almshouse corridor, and by prison gate? There may be no royal robe--there may be no palatial surroundings. She does not need them; for all charitable men will unite with the crackling lips of fever-struck hospital and plague-blotched lazaretto in greeting her as she passes: "Hail! Hail! Queen Vashti!"

II. Again, I want you to consider Vashti the veiled. Had she appeared before Ahasuerus and his court on that day with her face uncovered she would have shocked all the delicacies of Oriental society, and the very men who in their intoxication demanded that she come, in their sober moments would have despised her. As some flowers seem to thrive best in the dark lane and in the shadow, and where the sun does not seem to reach them, so God appoints to most womanly natures a retiring and unobtrusive spirit.

God once in awhile does call an Isabella to a throne, or a Miriam to strike the timbrel at the front of a host, or a Marie Antoinette to quell a French mob, or a Deborah to stand at the front of an armed battalion, crying out, "Up! Up! This is the day in which the Lord will deliver Sisera into thy hands." And when the women are called to such out-door work and to such heroic positions, God prepares them for it; and they have iron in their soul, and lightnings in their eye, and whirlwinds in their breath, and the borrowed strength of the Lord Omnipotent in their right arm. They walk through furnaces as though they were hedges of wild-flowers, and cross seas as though they were shimmering sapphire; and all the harpies of hell down to their dungeon at the stamp of womanly indignation.

But these are the exceptions. Generally, Dorcas would rather make a garment for the poor boy; Rebecca would rather fill the trough for the camels; Hannah would rather make a coat for Samuel; the Hebrew maid would rather give a prescription for Naaman's leprosy; the woman of Sarepta would rather gather a few sticks to cook a meal for famished Elijah; Phebe would rather carry a letter for the inspired apostle; Mother Lois would rather educate Timothy in the Scriptures. When I see a woman going about her daily duty, with cheerful dignity presiding at the table, with kind and gentle, but firm discipline presiding in the nursery, going out into the world without any blast of trumpets, following in the footsteps of Him who went about doing good--I say: "This is Vashti with a veil on."

But when I see a woman of unblushing boldness, loud-voiced, with a tongue of infinite clitter-clatter, with arrogant look, passing through the streets with the step of a walking-beam, gayly arrayed in a very hurricane of millinery, I cry out: "Vashti has lost her veil!" When I see a woman struggling for political preferment--trying to force her way on up to the ballot-box, amid the masculine demagogues who stand, with swollen fists and bloodshot eyes and pestiferous breath, to guard the polls--wanting to go through the loaferism and the defilement of popular sovereigns, who crawl up from the saloons greasy and foul and vermin-covered, to decide questions of justice and order and civilization--when I see a woman, I say, who wants to press through all that horrible scum to get to the ballot-box, I say: "Ah, what a pity! Vashti has lost her veil!"

When I see a woman of comely features, and of adroitness of intellect, and endowed with all that the schools can do for one, and of high social position, yet moving in society with superciliousness and _hauteur_, as though she would have people know their place, and with an undefined combination of giggle and strut and rhodomontade, endowed with allopathic quantities of talk, but only homeopathic infinitesimals of sense, the terror of dry-goods clerks and railroad conductors, discoverers of significant meanings in plain conversation, prodigies of badinage and innuendo--I say: "Vashti has lost her veil."

III. Again, I want you this morning to consider Vashti the sacrifice. Who is this that I see coming out of that palace gate of Shushan? It seems to me that I have seen her before. She comes homeless, houseless, friendless, trudging along with a broken heart. Who is she? It is Vashti the sacrifice. Oh! what a change it was from regal position to a wayfarer's crust! A little while ago, approved and sought for; now, none so poor as to acknowledge her acquaintanceship. Vashti the sacrifice!

Ah! you and I have seen it many a time. Here is a home empalaced with beauty. All that refinement and books and wealth can do for that home has been done; but Ahasuerus, the husband and the father, is taking hold on paths of sin. He is gradually going down. After awhile he will flounder and struggle like a wild beast in the hunter's net--further away from God, further away from the right. Soon the bright apparel of the children will turn to rags; soon the household song will become the sobbing of a broken heart. The old story over again. Brutal Centaurs breaking up the marriage feast of Lapithæ. The house full of outrage and cruelty and abomination, while trudging forth from the palace gate are Vashti and her children. There are homes represented in this house this morning that are in danger of such breaking-up. Oh, Ahasuerus! that you should stand in a home, by a dissipated life destroying the peace and comfort of that home. God forbid that your children should ever have to wring their hands, and have people point their finger at them as they pass down the street, and say, "There goes a drunkard's child." God forbid that the little feet should ever have to trudge the path of poverty and wretchedness! God forbid that any evil spirit born of the wine-cup or the brandy-glass should come forth and uproot that garden, and with a lasting, blistering, all-consuming curse, shut forever the palace gate against Vashti and the children.

One night during the war I went to Hagerstown to look at the army, and I stood on a hill-top and looked down upon them. I saw the camp-fires all through the valleys and all over the hills. It was a weird spectacle, those camp-fires, and I stood and watched them; and the soldiers who were gathered around them were, no doubt, talking of their homes, and of the long march they had taken, and of the battles they were to fight; but after awhile I saw these camp-fires begin to lower; and they continued to lower, until they were all gone out, and the army slept. It was imposing when I saw the camp-fires; it was imposing in the darkness when I thought of that great host asleep. Well, God looks down from heaven, and He sees the fireside of Christendom and the loved ones gathered around these firesides. These are the camp-fires where we warm ourselves at the close of day, and talk over the battles of life we have fought and the battles that are yet to come. God grant that when at last these fires begin to go out, and continue to lower until finally they are extinguished, and the ashes of consumed hopes strew the hearth of the old homestead, it may be because we have

"Gone to sleep that last long sleep,
From which none ever wake to weep."

Now we are an army on the march of life. Then we shall be an army bivouacked in the tent of the grave.

IV. Once more: I want you to look at Vashti the silent. You do not hear any outcry from this woman as she goes forth from the palace gate. From the very dignity of her nature, you know there will be no vociferation. Sometimes in life it is necessary to make a retort; sometimes in life it is necessary to resist; but there are crises when the most triumphant thing to do is to keep silence. The philosopher, confident in his newly discovered principle, waited for the coming of more intelligent generations, willing that men should laugh at the lightning-rod and cotton-gin and steam-boat--waiting for long years through the scoffing of philosophical schools, in grand and magnificent silence.

Galileo, condemned by mathematicians and monks and cardinals, caricatured everywhere, yet waiting and watching with his telescope to see the coming up of stellar reenforcements, when the stars in their courses would fight for the Copernican system; then sitting down in complete blindness and deafness to wait for the coming on of the generations who would build his monument and bow at his grave. The reformer, execrated by his contemporaries, fastened in a pillory, the slow fires of public contempt burning under him, ground under the cylinders of the printing-press, yet calmly waiting for the day when purity of soul and heroism of character will get the sanction of earth and the plaudits of heaven.

Affliction enduring without any complaint the sharpness of the pang, and the violence of the storm, and the heft of the chain, and the darkness of the night--waiting until a Divine hand shall be put forth to soothe the pang, and hush the storm, and release the captive. A wife abused, persecuted, and a perpetual exile from every earthly comfort--waiting, waiting, until the Lord shall gather up His dear children in a heavenly home, and no poor Vashti will ever be thrust out from the palace gate.

Jesus, in silence and answering not a word, drinking the gall, bearing the cross, in prospect of the rapturous consummation when

"Angels thronged their chariot wheel,
And bore Him to His throne,
Then swept their golden harps and sung,
'The glorious work is done!'"

Oh, woman! does not this story of Vashti the queen, Vashti the veiled, Vashti the sacrifice, Vashti the silent, move your soul? My sermon converges into the one absorbing hope that none of you may be shut out of the palace gate of heaven. You can endure the hardships, and the privations, and the cruelties, and the misfortunes of this life if you can only gain admission there. Through the blood of the everlasting covenant you go through those gates, or never go at all. God forbid that you should at last be banished from the society of angels, and banished from the companionship of your glorified kindred, and banished forever. Through the rich grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, may you be enabled to imitate the example of Rachel, and Hannah, and Abigail, and Deborah, and Mary, and Esther, and Vashti.

THE DAY WE LIVE IN.

"Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a
time as this?"--ESTHER iv. 14.

Esther the beautiful was the wife of Ahasuerus the abominable. The time had come for her to present a petition to her infamous husband in behalf of the Jewish nation, to which she had once belonged. She was afraid to undertake the work, lest she should lose her own life; but her uncle, Mordecai, who had brought her up, encouraged her with the suggestion that probably she had been raised up of God for that peculiar mission. "Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" Esther had her God-appointed work; you and I have ours. It is my business to tell you what style of men and women you ought to be in order that you meet the demand of the age in which God has cast your lot. If you have come expecting to hear abstractions discussed, or dry technicalities of religion glorified, you have come to the wrong church; but if you really would like to know what this age has a right to expect of you as Christian men and women, then I am ready in the Lord's name to look you in the face. When two armies have rushed into battle the officers of either army do not want a philosophical discussion about the chemical properties of human blood or the nature of gunpowder; they want some one to man the batteries and swab out the guns. And now, when all the forces of light and darkness, of heaven and hell, have plunged into the fight, it is no time to give ourselves to the definitions and formulas and technicalities and conventionalities of religion.

What we want is practical, earnest, concentrated, enthusiastic, and triumphant help.

I. In the first place, in order to meet the special demand of this age, you need to be an unmistakably aggressive Christian. Of half-and-half Christians we do not want any more. The Church of Jesus Christ will be better without ten thousand of them. They are the chief obstacle to the Church's advancement. I am speaking of another kind of Christian. All the appliances for your becoming an earnest Christian are at your hand, and there is a straight path for you into the broad daylight of God's forgiveness. You may have come into this Tabernacle the bondsmen of the world, and yet before you go out of these doors you may become princes of the Lord God Almighty. You remember what excitement there was in this country, years ago, when the Prince of Wales came here--how the people rushed out by hundreds of thousands to see him. Why? Because they expected that some day he would sit upon the throne of England. But what was all that honor compared with the honor to which God calls you--to be sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty; yea, to be queens and kings unto God? "They shall reign with Him forever and forever."

But, my friends, you need to be aggressive Christians, and not like those persons who spend their lives in hugging their Christian graces and wondering why they do not make any progress. How much robustness of health would a man have if he hid himself in a dark closet? A great deal of the piety of the day is too exclusive. It hides itself. It needs more fresh air, more out-door exercise. There are many Christians who are giving their entire life to self-examination. They are feeling their pulses to see what is the condition of their spiritual health. How long would a man have robust physical health if he kept all the days and weeks and months and years of his life feeling his pulse instead of going out into active, earnest, every-day work?

I was once amid the wonderful, bewitching cactus growths of North Carolina. I never was more bewildered with the beauty of flowers, and yet when I would take up one of these cactuses and pull the leaves apart, the beauty was all gone. You could hardly tell that it had ever been a flower. And there are a great many Christian people in this day just pulling apart their Christian experiences to see what there is in them, and there is nothing left in them. This style of self-examination is a damage instead of an advantage to their Christian character. I remember when I was a boy I used to have a small piece in the garden that I called my own, and I planted corn there, and every few days I would pull it up to see how fast it was growing. Now, there are a great many Christian people in this day whose self-examination merely amounts to the pulling up of that which they only yesterday or the day before planted.

O my friends! if you want to have a stalwart Christian character, plant it right out of doors in the great field of Christian usefulness, and though storms may come upon it, and though the hot sun of trial may try to consume it, it will thrive until it becomes a great tree, in which the fowls of heaven may have their habitation. I have no patience with these flower-pot Christians. They keep themselves under shelter, and all their Christian experience in a small, exclusive circle, when they ought to plant it in the great garden of the Lord, so that the whole atmosphere could be aromatic with their Christian usefulness. What we want in the Church of God is more brawn of piety.

The century plant is wonderfully suggestive and wonderfully beautiful, but I never look at it without thinking of its parsimony. It lets whole generations go by before it puts forth one blossom; so I have really more heartfelt admiration when I see the dewy tears in the blue eyes of the violets, for they come every spring. My Christian friends, time is going by so rapidly that we can not afford to be idle.

A recent statistician says that human life now has an average of only thirty-two years. From these thirty-two years you must subtract all the time you take for sleep and the taking of food and recreation; that will leave you about sixteen years. From those sixteen years you must subtract all the time that you are necessarily engaged in the earning of a livelihood; that will leave you about eight years. From those eight years you must take all the days and weeks and months--all the length of time that is passed in childhood and sickness, leaving you about one year in which to work for God. Oh, my soul, wake up! How darest thou sleep in harvest-time and with so few hours in which to reap? So that I state it as a simple fact that all the time that the vast majority of you will have for the exclusive service of God will be less than one year!

"But," says some man, "I liberally support the Gospel, and the church is open and the Gospel is preached: all the spiritual advantages are spread before men, and if they want to be saved, let them come to be saved; I have discharged all my responsibility." Ah! is that the Master's spirit? Is there not an old Book somewhere that commands us to go out into the highways and the hedges and compel the people to come in? What would have become of you and me if Christ had not come down off the hills of heaven, and if He had not come through the door of the Bethlehem caravansary, and if He had not with the crushed hand of the crucifixion knocked at the iron gate of the sepulcher of our spiritual death, crying, "Lazarus, come forth"? Oh, my Christian friends, this is no time for inertia, when all the forces of darkness seem to be in full blast; when steam printing-presses are publishing infidel tracts; when express railroad trains are carrying messengers of sin; when fast clippers are laden with opium and rum; when the night-air of our cities is polluted with the laughter that breaks up from the ten thousand saloons of dissipation and abandonment; when the fires of the second death already are kindled in the cheeks of some who, only a little while ago, were incorrupt. Oh, never since the curse fell upon the earth has there been a time when it was such an unwise, such a cruel, such an awful thing for the Church to sleep! The great audiences are not gathered in the Christian churches; the great audiences are gathered in temples of sin--tears of unutterable woe their baptism, the blood of crushed hearts the awful wine of their sacrament, blasphemies their litany, and the groans of the lost world the organ dirge of their worship.

II. Again, if you want to be qualified to meet the duties which this age demands of you, you must on the one hand avoid reckless iconoclasm, and on the other hand not stick too much to things because they are old. The air is full of new plans, new projects, new theories of government, new theologies, and I am amazed to see how so many Christians want only novelty in order to recommend a thing to their confidence; and so they vacillate and swing to and fro, and they are useless, and they are unhappy. New plans--secular, ethical, philosophical, religious, cisatlantic, transatlantic--long enough to make a line reaching from the German universities to Great Salt Lake City. Ah, my brother, do not take hold of a thing merely because it is new. Try it by the realities of a Judgment Day.