SUNDAY READING

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9368, 18 May 1889, Page 4 (Supplement)

SUNDAY READING

TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT SMALL THINGS. [BY" TIIK REV. T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D.D.] " Ve blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel."—Matthew xxiii., 21. A PROVERB is compact wisdom, the electricity of many clouds discharged in one bolt. When Christ quotes the proverb of the text He means to set forth the ludicrous behaviour of those who make a great bluster about small sins and have no appreciation of great ones. In my text a small insect and a large quadruped are brought into comparison— gnat and a camel. You have in museum or on the desert seen the latter, a great, awkward, sprawling creature, with back two storeys high, and stomach having a collection of reservoirs for desert travel, an animal forbidden to the Jews as food, and in many literatures entitled " the ship of the desert." The gnat spoken of in the text is in the grub form. It is born in pool or pond, after a few weeks becomes a chrysalis, and then after a few days becomes a gnat as we recognise it. But the insect spoken of in the text is in its very smallest shape, and it yet inhabits the waterfor my text is a misprint, and ought to read " strain out a gnat." I My text shows you THE PKINCE OF INCONSISTENCIES. A mail after long observation has formed the suspicion that in a cup of water he is about to drink there is a grub or the grandparent of a gnat. He goes and gets a sieve or strainer. He takes the water and pours it through the sieve in the broad light. He says, "I would rather do anything almost than drink this water until this larva; be extirpated." This water is brought under inquisition. The experiment is successful. The water rushes through the sieve, and leaves against the side of the sieve the grub or gnat. Then the man carefully removes the insect and drinks the water in placidity. But going out one day, and hungry, he devours a "ship of the desert," the camel, which the Jews were forbidden to eat. The gastronomer has _no compunctions of conscience. He suffers from 110 indigestion. He strained out a gnat; lie swallowed a camel. While Christ's audience were yet smiling at the appositeness and wit of His illustration—for smile they did in church unless they were too stupid to understand the hyperbole—Christ practically said to them, " That is you." Punctilio as about small things; reckless about affairs of great magnitude. No subject ever withered under a surgeon's knife more bitterly than did the Pharisees under Christ's scalpel of truth. As an anatomist will take a human bodv to pieces and put them under a microscope for examination, so Christ finds his way to the heart of the dead Pharisee, and cuts it out and

puts it under the glass of inspection for all generations to examine. How they must have writhed under the red-hot words as He said, "Ye fools, ye wliited sepulchres, ye blinded guides, which strain out a gnat and swallow a camel." There are in our day a great many gnats strained out and a great many camels swallowed, and it is the object of this sermon to sketch a few persons who are extensively engaged in that business. How particular a great many people are about the infinitesimals while they are quite reckless about the magnitudes. What did Christ say ? Did He not excoriate the people in His time who were so careful to wasli their hands before a meal, but did not wash their hearts? It is a bad thing to have unclean hands; it is a worse thing to have an unclean heart. How many people there are in our time who are very anxious that after their death that they shall be buried with their feet toward the east, and not at all anxious that during their whole life they should face in the right direction, so that they shall come up in the resurrection of the just whichever way they are buried ! How many there are chiefly anxious that a minister of the Gospel shall come in the line of apostolic succession, not caring so much whether lie conies from Apostle Paul or Apostle Judas! They have a way of measuring a gnat until it is larger than a camel. STEALING : SMALL AND LARGE. My subject photographs all those who are abhorrent of small sins while they are reekless in regard to magnificent thefts. You will find many a merchant who, while he is so careful that he would not take a yard of cloth or a spool of cotton from the counter without paying for it, and who, if a bank cashier should make a mistake and send in a roll of bills five dollars- too much, would despatch a messenger in hot haste to return the surplus; yet who will go into a stock company in which, after a while, he gets control of the stock, and then waters the stock, and makes one hundred thousand dollars appear like two hundred thousand dollars. lie only stole one hundred thousand dollars by the operation. Many of the men of fortune made their wealth in that way. One 'of those men, engaged in such unrighteous acts, that evening, the evening of the very day when he watered the stock, will find a wharf rat stealing a newspaper from the basement doorway, and will go out and catch the urchin by the collar, and twist the collar so tightly the poor fellow cannot say that it was thirst for knowledge that led him to the dishonest act ; but grip the collar tighter and tighter, saying, "I have been looking for you for a long while; you stole my paper four or five times, haven't you, you miserable wretch?" And then the old stock gambler, with a voice they can hear three blocks, will cry out, " Police ! police !" That same man, the evening of the day in which he watered the stock, will kneel with his family in prayers and thank God for the prosperity of the day, then kiss his children good-night with an air which seems to say, " I hope you will all grow up to be as good as your father." Prisons for sins insectile in size, but palaces for crimes dromedarian. No mercy for sins animalcule in proportion, but great leniency for mastadon iniquity. A poor boy slily takes from the basket of 'a market woman a choke pear—saving someone else from the cholera—and you smother him in the horrible atmosphere of Raymondstreet Gaol or New York Tombs, while his cousin, who has been skilful enough to steal fifty thousand dollars from the city, you will make him a candidate for the New York Legislature! There is a great deal of uneasiness and nervousness now among some people in our time who have gotten unrighteous fortunes— a great deal of nervousness about dynamite. I tell them that God will put under their unrighteous fortunes something more explosive than dynamite—the earthquake of His omnipotent indignation. It is time that we learn in America that sin is not excusable in proportion as.it declares large dividends and

has outriders in equipage. Manv a ruling to _ Perdition postilion UeaSF" 1 L ? j lackey behind. To steal one copy of a L d • paper is a gnat; to steal many thousand , dollars is a camel. There is many a fc f dealer who would not consent to !V ut ; basket of peaches from a n hbl' ® 1 , 1 ; but ' 10 would not scruple to depress ' L THE FRUIT MARKET ; I and as long as I can remember we h* heard every summer the neaoh J. Ve . Maryland is a failure, and by the tim°J\i? f ; C ™V comes 'I l th ?, misrepresentation matT - difference of millions of dollars A a i who would not steal one peach basU? t ma , n - fifty thousand peach baskets Go ,1 alii i the summer time to the Mercantile T;k n ltl . m the reading-rooms, and see the newsW' i reports of the crops from all parts of If , country, and their phraseology is very n ,S the same, and the same men wroin h" 1 . methodically and infamously car vim,' ; the huge lying about the grain Son . year to year and for a score of years u 1 a while there will be a " corner"in the ,f.i er • market, and men who had a contemr.f V i petty theft will burglarise the wheat-bin nf a > nation and commit larceny upon the A ■ 3 can corn-cub. And some of the men wiTi'"'.'" } in churches and in reformatory institut trying to strain out the small gnat,-? ' scoundrelism, while in their grain dew ° J and their store-houses they are fatte 3 5 huge camels, which they expect after i wi'-l" ; to swallow. Society has to he e'ntirli i reconstructed on this subject. \\' e Hr y i find that a sin is inexcusable in proportior to I it is great. 1b ~ i- I know in our time the tendency i« i charge religious frauds upon .rood 7 They say, " Oh, what a class of fraud en- ; have in the Church of God in this day '' • } ' when an elder of a church, or a deacon 5 minister of the Gospel, or a sunerint».,' r a ' of a Sabbatli-scool turns out a default 61 1 what display heads there are in maiiVof t\' 3 newspapers ! Great primer type. Fiv.v ' pica. Another Saint Absconded," " ri'l? • cal Scoundrelism." " Religion at a Discount •' . " Shame on the Churches," while there ar • thousand scoundrels outside the Church fc - a L where there is one inside the Church } the misbehaviour of those who never <41' • inside of a church is so great that it • , enough to tempt a man to_ become a Chr' 1 ' L tian to get out of their company. But in-'m circles, religious and irreligious, the . ' dency is to excuse sin in proportion as it""" • mammoth. Even John Milton in his " ar 3 i dise Lost," while he condemns Satan "j/ . such a grand description of him you L, 03 , hard work to suppress your admiration* [ Oh ! this straining out of small sins lib gnats, and this gulping down great iniquiti*! ; like camels. 1 ues ' A WIDE RANGE OF A I*I'LIGATION" • This subject does not give the picture of one or two persons, but is" a gallery in which 1 thousands of persons may see their likeiies- ' For instance, all those people who, while the - • .would not rob their neighbour of a farthin* ! appropriate the money and the treasure of the public. A man has a house to sell aud he tells his customer it is worth twenty thousand dollars. Next day the assessor comes around the owner says it is worth fifteen thousand dollars. The Government of the United States took oil' the tax from personal income, among other reasons because so few people would tell the truth' and many a man with an income of hundreds o f dollars a day made statements which seemed ■ to imply he was about to be handed oyer to the overseer of the poor. Careful to pay their passage from Liverpool to New York" yet smuggling in their Saratoga trunk ten silk dresses from Paris and half a dozen watches from Geneva, Switzerland, teilin" the Custom-house officer on the wharf " There is nothing in that trunk but wearing apparel," and putting a five-dollar piece in his hand to punctuate the statement. Described in the text are all those who are particular never to break the law of grammar, and who want all their language an elegant specimen of syntax, straining out all the inaccuracies of speech with a line sieve of literary criticism, while through their conversation go slander and innuendo, and profanity and falsehood larger than a whole caravan of camels, when they might better fracture every law of the language and shock intellectual taste, and better let every verb seek in vain for its nominative, and every noun for its government, and every preposition lose its way in the sentence, and adjectives and participles and pronouns get into a grand riot worthy of the b ourth Ward on election day, than to commit a moral inaccuracy. Better swallow a thousand gnats than one camel. « Such persons are also described in the text who are very much alarmed about THE SMALL FAULTS OF OTHERS, and have 110 alarm about their own great transgressions. There are in every "community and in every church watch-dogs who feel called upon to keep their eyes on others and growl. They are full of suspicions. They wonder if that man is not dishonest, it that man is not unclean, if there is not something wrong about the other man. They are always the first to hear of anything wrong. Vultures are always the first to smell carrion. They are self-appointed detectives. I lay this down as a rule without any exception, that those people who have the most faults themselves are the most merciless ia their watching of others. From scalp of Lead to sole of foot they are full of jealousies and hypercriticisms. They spend their life in hunting for musk-rats and mud-turtles instead or hunting for Rocky Mountain eagles— for something mean instead of something grand. They look at their neighbours 1 imperfections through a microscope, and look at their own imperfections through a telescope upside down. Twentyfaults of their own do not hurt them so much as one fault of somebody else. Thenneighbours' imperfections are like gnats, and they strain them out; their own imperfections are like camels, and they swallow them. TIME AXD ETERNITY". But lest some might think they escape the scrutiny of the text, I have to tell you that we all come under the Divine satire when we make the questions of time more prominent than the questions of eternity. Come, now, let us all go into the confessional. Are not all tempted to make the question, Where shall I live now? greater than the question. Where shall I live for ever? How shall I get more dollars here? greater than the question, How shall I lay up treasures in Heaven ? the question, How shall I pay my debts to man? greater than the question. How shall I meet my obligations to God? the question, How shall I gain the world? greater than the question, What if 1 lose my soul? the question, Why did God let sin come into the world? greater than the question, How shall I get it extirpated from my nature? the question, What shall I do with the twenty, or forty, or seventy years of my sublunary existence ? greater than the question, What shall I do with the millions oJ cycles ■of my terrestrial existence? Time, how small it is! Eternity, how vast it is ! The former more insignificant, m comparison with the latter, than a gnat is insignificant when compared with a camel. We dodged the text. We said, "That doesn't mean me, and that doesn't mean me," and with a ruinous benevolence we are giving the whole sermon away. But let us all surrender to the charge. What an ado about things here. What poor preparation for a great eternity. As though a minnow were larger than a behemoth, as though a swallow took wider circuit than an albatross, as though a nettle were taller than a Lebanon cedar, as though a gnat " ,ere greater than a camel, as though a minute were greater than a century, as though time were niglier, deeper, broader than eternity; So the text, which flashed with lightnings wit as Christ uttered it, is followed bv the crashing thunders of awful catastrophe to those who make the questions of time greater than the questions of the future, the oncoming, overshadowing future.

BECAUSE HE DIED FOR ME. With sin my soul is weary, No help, no hope have I, Save only that for sinners A loving Christ did die. But, ah ! I've often grieved Him, And scorned His proffered love, How can I hope my pleading Will now His pity move ? And yet Thou art the Refuge, The Saviour of the lost, The Shepherd of the straying, The hope of tempest-toss'd. I flee to Thee to hide me, Without another plea But that. I know Thou lovest Poor guilty ones like me. I want Thee for my Shelter, I nestle at Thy side, There from the dreaded tempter My fearful heart would hide ; I own that I am sinful, Deserving nought from Thee, And yet, 0 Lord, I trust Thee, For Thou hast died for me. My great High Priest in Heaven, Before the throne He stands; Each prayer or praise I utter Is offered by His hands ; I dare not have a trouble, Or carry any care, But cast them all on Jesus, Who will each sorrow share. My heart lies hushed before Him In a deep sea of praise, Unruffled by the storm winds That sweep o'er life's dark days. And when m Heaven I see Him, My glory-song shall be One long, glad hymn of triumpn, Because He died for me. Eva Travers EverED POOI^