Telegram Herald

THE WORLD WILL NOT KNOW IT BUT ALMIGHTY GOD WILL

Dr. T. De Witt Talmage. Tale of Things Which Men and Women May Do—Save a Human Soul for Heaven.

OCEAN GROVE, N. J., Aug. 23.—This is a camp meeting Sunday at Ocean Grove. Its celebration is always regarded as the great event of the year at this famous religious watering place. This year the attractions of its observance have been enhanced by the presence of Dr. Talmage, who preached this afternoon in the Auditorium. Every seat was filled and every inch of standing room in the aisles was occupied, and the greatest enthusiasm prevailed. It is estimated that fully fifteen thousand persons were able to hear the doctor, and many others were deprived of that privilege.

His text was Daniel xi, 32, "The people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits."

Antiochus Epiphanes, the old sinner, came down three times with his army to desolate the Israelites, advancing one time with a hundred and two trained elephants, swinging their trunks this way and that, and sixty-two thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry troops, and they were driven back. Then, the second time, he advanced with seventy thousand armed men, and had been again defeated. But the third time he laid successful siege until the navy of Rome came in with the flash of their long banks of oars and demanded that the siege be lifted. And Antiochus Epiphanes said he wanted time to consult with his friends about it, and Popilius, one of the Roman ambassadors, took a staff and made a circle on the ground around Antiochus Epiphanes, and compelled him to decide before he came out of that circle: whereupon he lifted the siege. Some of the Hebrews had submitted to the invader, but some of them resisted valorously, as did Eleazer when he had swine's flesh forced into his mouth, spit it out, although he knew he must die for it, and did die for it; and others, as my text narrates, did exploits.

ALL HAVE THREE OPPORTUNITIES.

An exploit I would define to be an heroic act, a brave feat, a great achievement. "Well," you say, "I admire such things, but there is no chance for me; mine is a sort of humdrum life. If I had an Antiochus Epiphanes to fight, I also could do exploits." You are right, so far as great wars are concerned. There will probably be no opportunity to distinguish yourself in battle. The most of the brigadier generals of this country would never have been heard of had it not been for the war. Neither will you probably become a great inventor. Nineteen hundred and ninety-nine out of every two thousand inventions found in the patent office at Washington never yielded their authors enough money to pay for the expenses of securing the patent. So you will probably never be a Morse or an Edison or a Humphrey Davy or an Eli Whitney. There is not much probability that you will be the one out of the hundred who achieves extraordinary success in commercial or legal or medical or literary spheres. What then? Can you have no opportunity to do exploits? I am going to show that there are three opportunities open that are grand, thrilling, far reaching, stupendous and overwhelming. They are before you now. In one, if not all three of them, you may do exploits.

The three greatest things on earth to do are to save a man, or save a woman, or save a child.

During the course of his life almost every man gets into an exigency, is caught between two fires, is ground between two millstones, sits on the edge of some precipice, or in some other way comes near demolition. It may be a financial or a moral or a domestic or a social or a political exigency. You sometimes see it in courtrooms. A young man has got into bad company and he has offended the law, and he is arraigned. All blushing and confused he is in the presence of judge and jury and lawyers. He can be sent right on in the wrong direction. He is feeling disgraced and he is almost desperate. Let the district attorney overhaul him as though he were an old offender; let the ablest attorneys at the bar refuse to say a word for him, because he cannot afford a considerable fee; let the judge give no opportunity for presenting the mitigating circumstances, hurry up the case and hustle him up to Auburn or Sing Sing. If he live seventy years, for seventy years he will be a criminal, and each decade of his life will be blacker than its predecessor. In the interregnums of prison life he can get no work, and he is glad to break a window glass or blow up a safe or play the highwayman so as to get back within the walls where he can get something to eat and hide himself from the gaze of the world.

HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN SAVED.

Why don't his father come and help him? His father is dead. Why don't his mother come and help him? She is dead. Where are all the ameliorating and salutary influences of society? They do not touch him. Why did not some one long ago in the case understand that there was an opportunity for the exploit which would be famous in heaven a quadrillion of years after the earth has become scattered ashes in the last whirlwind? Why did not the district attorney take that young man into his private office and say: "My son, I see that you are the victim of circumstances. This is your first crime. You are sorry. I will bring the person you wronged into your presence, and you will apologize and make all the reparation you can, and I will give you another chance." Or that young man is presented in the courtroom, and he has no friends present, and the judge says, "Who is your counsel?" And he answers, "I have none." And the judge says, "Who will take this young man's case?" And there is a dead halt, and no one offers, and after awhile the judge turns to some attorney who never had a good case in all his life and never will, and whose advocacy would be enough to secure the condemnation of innocence itself. And the professional incompetent crawls up beside the prisoner, helplessness to rescue despair, where there ought to be a struggle among all the best men of the profession as to who should have the honor of trying to help that unfortunate. How much would such an attorney have received as his fee for such an advocacy? Nothing in dollars, but much every way in a happy consciousness that would make his own life brighter, and his own dying pillow sweeter, and his own heaven happier—the consciousness that he had saved a man!

DESTRUCTION IS BEFORE HIM.

So there are commercial exigencies. A very late spring obliterates the demand for spring overcoats and spring hats and spring apparel of all sorts. Hundreds of thousands of people say, "It seems we are going to have no spring, and we shall go straight out of winter into warm weather and we can get along without the usual spring attire." Or there is no autumn weather, the year plunging into the cold, and the usual clothing which is a compromise between summer and winter is not required. It makes a difference in the sale of millions and millions of dollars of goods, and some oversanguine young merchant is caught with a vast amount of unsalable goods that will never be salable again, except at prices ruinously reduced. The young merchant with a somewhat limited capital is in a predicament. What shall the old merchants do as they see the young man in this awful crisis? Rub their hands and laugh and say: "Good for him. He might have known better. When he has been in business as long as we have he will not load his shelves in that way. Ha! Ha! He will bust up before long. He has no business to open his store so near to ours anyhow." Sheriff's sale! Red flag in the window: "How much is bid for these out-of-fashion spring overcoats and spring hats or fall clothing out of date? What do I hear in the way of a bid?" "Four dollars." "Absurd; I cannot take that bid of four dollars apiece. Why, these coats when first put upon the market were offered at fifteen dollars each, and now I am offered only four dollars. Is that all? Five dollars do I hear? Going at that! Gone at five dollars," and he takes the whole lot.

The young merchant goes home that night and says to his wife: "Well, Mary, we will have to move out of this house and sell our piano. That old merchant that has had an evil eye on me ever since I started has bought out all that clothing, and he will have it rejuvenated, and next year put it on the market as new, while we will do well if we keep out of the poorhouse." The young man, broken spirited, goes to hard drinking. The young wife with her baby goes to her father's house, and not only is his store wiped out, but his home, his morals and his prospects for two worlds—this and the next. And devils make a banquet of fire and fill their cups of gall, and drink deep to the health of the old merchant who swallowed up the young merchant who got stuck on spring goods and went down. That is one way, and some of you have tried it.

SAVE HIM IN THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT.

But there is another way. That young merchant who found that he had miscalculated in laying in too many goods of one kind, and been flung off by the unusual season, is standing behind the counter, feeling very blue and biting his finger nails, or looking over his account books, which read darker and worse every time he looks at them, and thinking how his young wife will have to be put in a plainer house than she ever expected to live in, or go to a third rate boarding house, where they have tough liver and sour bread five mornings out of the seven.

An old merchant comes in and says: "Well, Joe, this has been a hard season for young merchants, and this prolonged cool weather has put many in the doldrums, and I have been thinking of you a good deal of late, for just after I started in business I once got into the same scrape. Now, if there is anything I can do to help you out I will gladly do it. Better just put those goods out of sight for the present, and next season we will plan something about them. I will help you to some goods that you can sell for me on commission, and I will go down to one of the wholesale houses and tell them that I know you and will back you up, and if you want a few dollars to bridge over the present I can let you have them. Be as economical as you can, keep a stiff upper lip, and remember that you have two friends, God and myself. Good morning!"

The old merchant goes away and the young man goes behind his desk, and the tears roll down his cheeks. It is the first time he has cried. Disaster made him mad at everything, and mad at man and mad at God. But this kindness melts him, and the tears seem to relieve his brain, and his spirits rise from ten below zero to eighty in the shade, and he comes out of the crisis. About three years after, this young merchant goes into the old merchant's store and says: "Well, my old friend, I was this morning thinking over what you did for me three years ago. You helped me out of an awful crisis in my commercial history. I learned wisdom, prosperity has come, and the pallor has gone out of my wife's cheeks, and the roses that were there when I courted her in her father's house have bloomed again, and my business is splendid, and I thought I ought to let you know that you saved a man!"

In a short time after, the old merchant, who had been a good while shaky in his limbs and who had poor spells, is called to leave the world, and one morning after he had read the twenty-third Psalm about "The Lord is my shepherd," he closes his eyes on this world, and an angel who had been for many years appointed to watch the old man's dwelling, cries upward the news that the patriarch's spirit is about ascending, and the twelve angels who keep the twelve gates of heaven, unite in crying down to this approaching spirit of the old man, "Come in and welcome, for it has been told all over these celestial lands that you saved a man."

THE WORLD AGAINST A WOMAN.

There sometimes come exigencies in the life of a woman. One morning a few years ago I saw in the newspaper that there was a young woman in New York whose pocketbook, containing thirty-seven dollars and thirty-three cents, had been stolen, and she had been left without a penny at the beginning of winter in a strange city, and no work. And although she was a stranger, I did not allow the 9 o'clock mail to leave the lamppost on our corner without carrying the thirty-seven dollars and thirty-three cents, and the case was proved genuine.

Now, I have read all Shakespeare's tragedies, and all Victor Hugo's tragedies, and all Alexander Smith's tragedies, but I never read a tragedy more thrilling than that case, and similar cases by the hundreds and thousands in all our large cities. Young women without money and without home and without work in the great maelstroms of metropolitan life. When such a case comes under your observation, how do you treat it? "Get out of my way. We have no room in our establishment for any more hands. I don't believe in women anyway. They are a lazy, idle, worthless set. John, please show this person out of the door."

Or do you compliment her personal appearance and say things to her which if any man said to your sister or daughter you would kill him on the spot? That is one way, and it is tried every day in the large cities, and many of those who advertise for female hands in factories and for governesses in families have proved themselves unfit to be in any place outside of hell. But there is another way, and I saw it one day in the Methodist Book Concern in New York, where a young woman applied for work, and the gentleman in tone and manner said in substance: "My daughter, we employ women here, but I do not know of any vacant place in our department. You had better inquire at such and such a place, and I hope you will be successful in getting something to do. Here is my name, and tell them I sent you."

The embarrassed and humiliated woman seemed to give way to Christian confidence. She started out with a hopeful look that I think must have won for her a place in which to earn her bread. I rather think that considerate and Christian gentleman saved a woman. New York and Brooklyn ground up last year about thirty thousand young women and would like to grind up about as many this year. Out of all that long procession of women who march on with no hope for this world or the next, battered and bruised and scoffed at, and flung off the precipice, not one but might have been saved for home and God and heaven. But good men and good women are not in that kind of business. Alas for that poor thing! Nothing but the thread of that sewing girl's needle held her, and the thread broke.

A CONTRAST

I have heard men tell in public discourse what a man is; but what is a woman? Until some one shall give a better definition, I will tell you what woman is. Direct from God, a sacred and delicate gift, with affections so great that no measuring line short of that of the infinite God can tell their bound. Fashioned to refine and soothe and lift and irradiate home and society and the world. Of such value that no one can appreciate it, unless his mother lived long enough to let him understand it, or who in some great crisis of life, when all else failed him, had a wife to reinforce him with a faith in God that nothing could disturb.

Speak out, ye cradles, and tell of the feet that rocked you and the anxious faces that hovered over you! Speak out, ye nurseries of all Christendom, and ye homes, whether desolate or still in full bloom with the faces of wife, mother and daughter, and help me to define what woman is. But as geographers tell us that the depths of the sea correspond with the heights of the mountains I have to tell you that a good womanhood is not higher up than bad womanhood is deep down. The grander the palace the more awful the conflagration that destroys it. The grander the steamer Oregon the more terrible her going down just off the coast.

Now I should not wonder if you trembled a little with a sense of responsibility when I say that there is hardly a person in this house but may have an opportunity to save a woman. It may in your case be done by good advice, or by financial help, or by trying to bring to bear some one of a thousand Christian influences. If, for instance, you find a woman in financial distress and breaking down in health and spirits trying to support her children, now that her husband is dead or an invalid, doing that very important and honorable work—but which is little appreciated—keeping a boarding house, where all the guests, according as they pay small board, or propose, without paying any board at all, to decamp, are critical of everything and hard to please, busy yourselves in trying to get her more patrons, and tell her of divine sympathy.

Yea, if you see a woman favored of fortune and with all kindly surroundings finding in the hollow flatteries of the world her chief regalement, living for herself and for time as if there were no eternity, strive to bring her into the kingdom of God, as did the other day a Sabbath school teacher, who was the means of the conversion of the daughter of a man of immense wealth, and the daughter resolved to join the church, and she went home and said, "Father, I am going to join the church, and I want you to come" "Oh, no," he said. "I never go to church" "Well," said the daughter, "if I were going to be married would you not go to see me married?" And he said, "Oh, yes" "Well," said she, "this is of more importance than that."

So he went and has gone ever since, and loves to go. I do not know but that faithful Sabbath school teacher not only saved a woman, but saved a man. There may be in this audience, gathered from all parts of the world, there may be a man whose behavior toward womanhood has been perfidious. Repent! Stand up, thou masterpiece of sin and death, that I may charge you! As far as possible make reparation. Do not boast that you have her in your power and that she cannot help herself. When that fine collar and cravat and that elegant suit of clothes comes off and your uncovered soul stands before God, you will be better off if you save that woman.

YOU MAY SAVE A CHILD.

There is another exploit you can do, and that is to save a child. A child does not seem to amount to much. It is nearly a year old before it can walk at all. For the first year and a half it cannot speak a word. For the first ten years it would starve if it had to earn its own food. For the first fifteen years its opinion on any subject is absolutely valueless. And then there are so many of them. My, what lots of children! And some people have contempt for children. They are good for nothing but to wear out the carpets and break things and keep you awake nights crying.

Well, your estimate of a child is quite different from that mother's estimate who lost her child this summer. They took it to the salt air of the seashore and to the tonic air of the mountains, but no help came, and the brief paragraph of its life is ended. Suppose that life could be restored by purchase, how much would that bereaved mother give? She would take all the jewels from her fingers and neck and bureau and put them down. And if told that that was not enough she would take her house and make over the deed for it, and if that were not enough she would call in all her investments and put down all her mortgages and bonds, and if told that were not enough she would say: "I have made over all my property, and if I can have that child back I will now pledge that I will toil with my own hands and carry with my own shoulders in any kind of hard work and live in a cellar and die in a garret. Only give me back that lost darling!"

I am glad that there are those who know something of a value of a child. Its possibilities are tremendous. What will those hands yet do? Where will those feet yet walk? Toward what destiny will that never dying soul betake itself? Shall those lips be the throne of blasphemy or benediction? Come, chronologists, and calculate the decades on decades, the centuries on centuries, of its lifetime. Oh, to save a child! Am I not right in putting that among the great exploits?

But what are you going to do with those children who are worse off than if their father and mother had died the day they were born? There are tens of thousands of such. Their parentage was against them. Their name is against them. The structure of their skulls is against them. Their nerves and muscles contaminated by the inebriety or dissoluteness of their parents; they are practically at their birth laid out on a plank in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, in an equinoctial gale, and told to make for shore. What to do with them is the question often asked.

There is another question quite as pertinent, and that is, What are they going to do with us? They will, ten or eleven years from now, have as many votes as the same number of well born children, and they will hand this land over to anarchy and political damnation just as sure as we neglect them. "Suppose we each one of us save a boy or save a girl"

You can do it. Will you? I will.

KNOW GOD AND BE STRONG.

How shall we get ready for one or all of these three exploits? We shall make dead failure if in our own strength we try to save a man or woman or child. But my text suggests where we are to get equipment. "The people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits." We must know him through Jesus Christ our own salvation, and then we shall be his help in the salvation of others. All while you are saving strangers you may save some of your own kin. You think your brothers and sisters and children and grandchildren all safe, but they are in deadly peril, and no one is safe till he is dead. On the English coast there was a wild storm and a wreck in the offing, and the cry was, "Man the lifeboat!" But Harry, the usual leader of the sailor's crew, was not to be found, and they went without him, and brought back all the shipwrecked people but one.

By this time Harry, the leader of the crew, appeared and said, "Why did you leave that one?" The answer was, he could not help himself at all, and we could not get him into the boat. "Man the boat," shouted Harry, "and we will go after that one." "No," said his aged mother standing by, "you must not go. If you go your father in a storm like this, and your brother Will went out six years ago, and have not heard a word from Will since he left, and I don't know where he is, perhaps Will, and I cannot let you also go, for I am old and dependent on you." His reply was, "Mother, I must go and save that man, and if I am lost God will take care of you in your old days."

The lifeboat put out, and after an hour's struggle with the sea they picked the poor fellow out of the rigging just in time