Psalms 127

Psalms 127:1

THE OF THE CITY’S CENTER (Delivered following the loss of several firemen). Psalms 127:1IT is positively enheartening to find that the spirit which animated Jesus when He wept over the awful moral condition of Jerusalem is still regnant in the breasts of many metropolitans. In the average city one has not far to seek to find men and women ready to make any reasonable sacrifice for the moral improvement of the metropolis; and the same good citizens hang their heads in sorrow over gross immorality whether it be published to the discredit of the individual, the social, or the municipal life. Recent months in Minneapolis have given abundant illustration to this text, “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain”.The downtown of our city, like that of many another, has presented a series of tragedies, some of which revealed too great indifference to the value of human life; and others lay bare immoralities which have sickened the heart; and all of which illustrate our scripture.Think, will you, of the Tragedies of Accident, the Tragedies of Intemperance, the Tragedies of Infidelity, the Tragedies of Murder and Suicide.THE OF Their suddenness has shocked the entire municipality. For a very excellent reason the public peculiarly mourns when a fireman, in the discharge of duty, loses his life. The office itself is so hazardous, the whole work requires such unusual heroism, that firemen are public favorites. This is always evident when they parade the streets. Greater crowds will gather to witness their procession than can be called by any other department of the city’s service. The policeman may be dressed in better uniform, and present a more attractive appearance, but they can never excite the same popular response.

Once in a long while a policeman does a daring deed; but almost daily firemen face danger and death. Two brave men carried down in the Boutell building, though familiarly known to but few in Minneapolis, were mourned by all.

The toppling of the south wall of this doomed building, and the sudden taking of the many lives in the Crocker hotel added shock to shock, and the very mien of the men and women upon the streets told the story of the city’s sorrow. And yet, be it known unto us that such is the end of the average man, the death of the average woman. The public impression is that life will fail after a lingering illness; the fact is that life is quite as often lost in a second; for, except the Lord keep you, the watchman who patrols the streets waketh in vain. He may help you in the hour when you have been held up by the highway man; or run to your assistance after the robber has entered your home, but he has no eyes to see the dark form of death; no ears with which he can hear his stealthy step, and no warrant for his arrest.The subjects of these tragedies perished unexpectedly. It is doubtless possible that the firemen going into the burning building realized their imminent danger, and yet remembering repeated escapes from difficult situations, expected to come forth again. It is certain that, with a solitary exception, the inmates of the Crocker hotel dreamed not their danger until death was just upon them.

When they lay down that night they went with the same lack of concern which will characterize you as to-night you pillow your head for sleep. Cyclones had swept over cities and left death behind them; robbers had entered other men’s houses and wreaked vengeance against those who had resisted their plans; sudden sickness had overtaken other men and women; in an hour when one thought himself in health the heart had ceased to beat; but the inmates of this house supposed, as you think, as I think, “none of these things will come to us”.

As we have laid ourselves down night after night for years, to be wakened in the morning by the beauty of a new day, so shall we slumber again; and, after sweet rest, rise again. The fireman slept with open ears, the policeman patroled his beat, and even the overhanging wall had been pronounced by the city inspector “safe”. They cast all care and committed themselves to slumber. Doubtless there were those in that place who did not even think to bend the knee to God, confess the sins of the day and ask to be forgiven; nor yet to utter the petition lisped by their baby lips:“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Yet, like Belshazzar of old, that night they were slain. Is it possible men and women that we will pass this tragedy without learning a lesson? Is it conceivable that we will continue in the same unconcern about life, and about that mysterious thing called death? A few years since at Niagara Falls the mid-winter had piled ice to ice until a great bridge was formed by the gorge and the people walked over it. Suddenly, on a Sunday afternoon, a strange crackling was heard. Instantly all realized that the great mass was beginning to move; then a great rush for life began.

Those nearest the shore reached it with ease. Three people were upon it when it struck the bridge, and yet by a dexterous leap upon the part of one, the great steel arch was caught and he pulled himself up out of danger; and, by unusual calmness, the other man saved both himself and the woman by waiting until it came near enough the Canadian shore to clear the distance by a leap.

But the average man is not permitted to race with death, or, if he does, this last enemy will overtake him and he will find himself helpless in his awful hands. Woe to him who in that hour has not the help of God!These accidents sealed the fate of souls. The greatest authorities of all ages have agreed that this world is the place, and time is the season of human probation. The Scriptures assert, “As a tree falleth so it lieth”. Though you search all Revelation you will discover no promise of pardon after death. The second probation of Andover has not a single Scripture upon which to rest. The story of Dives and Lazarus is the statement of the all-wise Son of God concerning the fixedness of character and condition for both the righteous and unrighteous in the worlds to come.When one of the greatest preachers of the past century was questioned after this manner, “If you knew that you had to die to-morrow night, how would you spend your time?” he answered by reciting his list of engagements and adding, “When I had finished the last I should go to my friend’s home, kneel at my bedside in prayer, commit my spirit to the God of all grace and lie down to sleep in his house and wake in Heaven.”If only to-night we knew that every man and woman, recently removed from our midst by the terrible tragedy of accident, were thus prepared, our tears might be wiped and our sighing changed to song; and yet, the obligation would remain upon every preacher of the Gospel to appeal to his every auditor to make the same preparation.THE OP In speaking to this subject we present no new theme. There has not been a night in many years in which intemperance has not wrought havoc in the city, turning rational men into demons, and sending the living to the place of the dead. We speak, of course, of the intemperance of drink; and yet we are not unmindful of the fact that such be intemperate in the use of good things, as food, is not the only form of intemperance. A man may It is doubtful if a man can use evil things temperately, as for instance alcoholic beverages. So of lesser evils: The tobacco habit is an intemperance —in many instances a severe one. It is declared that if you put two or three drops of tobacco oil on the tongue of a cat, it will kill it.

Arthur Pierson is authority for the statement that the College of Physicians attribute 20,000 deaths annually in America to the use of this narcotic. But the greater number of the tragedies of intemperance, and the most terrible in character, are associated with strong drink.Its approach is insidious.

The devil is described as “a roaring lion going about seeking whom he may devour”. But, let no one forget that the lion does not roar until the prey is within his power. On the contrary, he approaches it with the stealthy tread of the cat; not a sound is heard until the spring is accomplished. The demon of intemperance does his work much after the same manner. The youth who drinks a little bit from his companion’s bottle looks upon the whole process as a practical joke; and if, after a few such experiences, he takes too much and becomes intoxicated, once sober, he will jest about that. And, when, at last, repeated experience becomes his practice, he still hopes to reform at will, and imagines that these seasons of intoxication are only questionable indulgences in pleasure.

It is reported that there was a man in a western city who, after a debauch, would suffer terribly with the gout, but between his groans he would ejaculate, “Had a good time, anyway.”It seems after somewhat earnest study of this subject, through dealing with scores of men addicted to the cup, that while the devil is tearing down one’s manhood through drink, he is introducing into the man’s heart a growing conceit which beclouds the intellect, and blindfolds the victim, so that he walks with no fear towards the terrible precipice which will end it all. A man in Chicago testified that he began drinking by spending five cents a week, taking a single glass of beer a week.

When he began he was earning a salary of $1,500. After five years he had grown such an appetite for liquor as to lose every position which had opened to him; and though a man of good education, natural refinement, he walked the streets of that great city begging bread. The Prophet Haggai graphically described the consequences of strong drink when to the people of his time, ruined by their own vineyards, he said, “Consider your ways. Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes” (Haggai 1:5-6).Intemperance degrades its every victim. There is no sin which can more truly bloat the body, deaden the sensibilities, dethrone the intellect, render insensible the soul, than intemperance. It not only tears down all that is best in men, but at the same time it builds up every baser passion.

The most of us know something of the great Christian work Fred Charrington is doing in East London. While he was yet in the brewing business, he walked past a bar room where his beer was being sold and the firm name, Charrington, Head and Co., was over the door of the infamous place.

Just as He went by a woman pushed the door open and begged money of her husband who was within, to buy bread for their starving children. The man, who, at the altar, had promised to love and cherish her, with one brutal stroke felled her to the ground. As Charrington looked upon the awful scene he said, “This is the product of my business.” From that hour he sacrificed an income of $100,000 a year, and went out of the liquor business, giving his heart to God, being unwilling to longer do that which degraded and imbruted men.Do you not remember how Hawthorn, in Ethan Brand, tells the story of the village doctor! A man of some fifty years, who in the earlier period of his life was a successful practitioner, but now had become a “purple-visaged, rude and brutal, yet half-gentlemanly figure.” Hawthorn says, “Brandy possessed this man like an evil spirit, and made him as surly and savage as a wild beast, and as miserable as a lost soul.” When you walk the streets of a city you are constantly passing the duplicate of Hawthorn’s picture. “Satan loves a shining mark.” It is his custom to drag down, by drink, men who by nature were fitted for the highest stations, and we believe it is his delight to take their better abilities and finer feelings and bestialize both. The form of yonder reeling man tells the tragedies of intemperance. The joshing crowd about the saloon counter emphasizes it yet more; the homes out of which happiness long since went, tell its more terrible pain; while the despair of the drunkard, the wail of the drunkard’s wife, and the cry of the drunkard’s children is sufficient to content the black heart of the prince of demons.The tragedy of intemperance ends in destruction.

It is an awful thing to degrade a man; it is a fearful thing to dethrone his reason, overthrow his family and bring an utter end to home and happiness. But intemperance is not content with even this.

Only when the bloated body is buried, the once boasted intellect is destroyed, and the soul itself doomed, does this demon count his work well done. You remember that Hawthorn, in that same story Ethan Brand, speaks of Lawyer Giles—as the people still called him in courtesy—describing him as “an elderly ragamuffin, in his soiled shirtsleeves and tow-cloth trousers. This poor fellow had been an attorney; in what he called, his better days, a sharp practitioner, and in great vogue among the village litigants; but flip, and sling, and toddy, and cocktails, imbibed at all hours, morning, noon, and night, had caused him to slide from intellectual to various kinds and degrees of bodily labor, till at last, to use his own words, he ‘slid into a soap-vat’.” For Giles was now a soap-boiler, and Hawthorn continues, “He had come to be but a fragment of a human being, a part of one foot having been chopped off by an axe, and an entire hand torn away by the devilish grip of a steam-engine.” All this had happened incidental to his custom of the cups. But the end was not yet, for when the tragedy of intemperance is over, you will not find even a fragment of the man. The speech of the wise man of the Old Testament is appropriate here, “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death”. The words of Jesus are particularly applicable to the drink demon, “Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear Him, which after He hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear Him”.THE OF This word is used in a double sense. There is an infidelity of morals, and there is an infidelity of mind. The infidelity of morals makes a more ready and more effective appeal to our minds and hearts. We mourn over the men who lead lustful lives; who forget the eye of God and trample under foot sacred vows, and treat with indifference the human ties of heavenly appointment. We mourn yet more over women who walk in forbidden paths, forsaking the Guide of youth, and forgetting the covenant of God, converting their houses into the way to hell. Yet the city mourns not as it should!

The great down-town district is more and more becoming a moral sink in which the souls of our daughters are being drowned daily. If all that occurs in this center, which more and more becomes sufficiently crowded to provide cover for sin, were known, the wails of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, in the homes upon our avenues and boulevards, as certainly as in those upon more humble streets, would remind one of Egypt’s cry on the night when the death angel slew the firstborn in her every house.Think of what W.

T. Stead once spoke to the people in Newcastle-on-the-Tyne. After reciting the legend of the past, in which one country, after conquering another, compelled it to pay the annual tribute of seven of its most beautiful daughters to be consumed by the great dragon, Stead remarked, “Suppose that the town council were to declare that there had been established four pagan deities as the gods of Newcastle, to whom temples should be opened and sacrifices offered. And that once, at each quarter of the year, human sacrifices, selected by lot, should be burned alive. One victim to Bacchus, a young man, January 1st; then, on April 1st, a beautiful girl taken by lot, and offered by the same burning, to the great goddess Venus; do you not think it would nerve young men to any extremity in order to prevent that sacrifice taking place? And walk through town any night and you will see many girls who had better been burned alive on the Sandhill than do what they are doing!” Ah, men, let us make an appeal to you.

There may be those who look upon these lines to whom an appeal ought to be made. Would you not lay down your life if such were necessary to save one young woman being burned at the stake, an offering to the unclean goddess—Venus?

Yes; and would you not even lay down your life to save one young man, though he was a stranger, from being burned alive in offering to Bacchus? What then do you mean by tempting young men to a course infinitely worse than death by flame? What then do you mean by joining with that pack of human wolves who seek the lives of women and laugh at the wreck, as wolves howl when they have finished with the carcass?Years ago, there visited some of our great cities a man who for years has been a missionary to central Africa. While here he recited the awful atrocities of the Belgian government against the defenseless blacks. He told great audiences, assembled in the churches, how they sent those poor enslaved men to gather rubber and ivory, and if they returned with less than the Belgian soldiers demanded, they took them, in the presence of their assembled kith, and chopped off their hands and otherwise mangled them.It was a horrid history! The righteous-loving of the civilized world appealed to the powers to bring it to an end, even though it had to be done by battle with the Belgians and at the cost of much blood.But a plain truth is this, better stand before God in judgment for joining with the Belgians in making the poor blacks suffer, than face Him after having deliberately effected the downfall of those for whom Christ died, and who by birth and breeding were suited to noble and virtuous stations in life; who, by reason of their immortal souls are set either for the happiness of an eternal Heaven or the horrors of an everlasting hell.But the heart sickens when one speaks to this subject, and again as he turns from it to the fourth and last tragedy of the city’s center, namely:THE TRAGEDY OF MURDER AND SELF- Daily the newsboys in the streets announce both. The friends of those who so fall are yet in mourning, and some of them will so remain for many months. It is an art to impart happiness to human kind; it requires the exercise of head and heart to accomplish it; but how easy to superinduce sorrow. Any man can accomplish murder, and self-destruction is a more common custom than we had ever imagined possible. We will not take the time here to discuss the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”. The awful consequences of its transgression are written into the last statement of Divine revelation—“The fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and the murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death”.

Think on that if ever you are tempted to take a human life. Remember that to cut off the existence of another, here, is to doom yourself forever, there.But while we say no more concerning murder, we are not content to pass self-destruction without some adequate discussion.

There is a disposition on the part of society to pity the suicide, and that very spirit often leads men and women who contemplate it, to condone their own offense. Let it never be forgotten that one has no more right to take away his own life than to take the life of another: no right to take away that which he cannot give. He is not his own! Christ has already stood in his stead, and whether he will have it or no, the Son of God, by the sacrifice of Himself, has purchased one’s existence! We rob Him, therefore; we despise His claim and defeat His will, if we end existence before His time. This step is so awful to contemplate that the circumstance of its ever being taken requires explanation. Why do men suicide? Fifty in Minneapolis in the last year!

Of course some of them are insane and not morally responsible. But these I am persuaded are comparatively few.The decline of faith accounts for the increase in self-destruction. In Europe, while the population accomplished an increase of nineteen per cent, self-destruction increased sixty-three per cent. The ratio of self-destruction in Paris is proportionately four times as large as self-destruction in London. Why? Because a hundred years ago Paris gave up God and adopted infidelity.

When once God is denied, the sense of personal responsibility ends, and the doctrine of immortality, with all that it involves; and one who grows weary in the flesh, who must face bitter disappointment, or even struggle with poverty, looks upon suicide as a way of escape out of all trouble. Aye, to such depths of infidelity have we come that when men lose a few thousands, they adopt the false philosophy of Seneca and with knife, or pistol, or deep well, or rope, seek to be rid of responsibility.Some days since we saw what was so absurd as to be almost ludicrous—a young girl having desired some high heeled shoes and being denied them by her mother, attempted an almost successful effort at self-destruction.

In the face of an instance like this, one is almost ready to say that there was not sense enough to compensate the physician, who saved her, for his service.And yet when one looks into the blackness of darkness of the eternity which Christ unveiled, and hears the weeping and gnashing of teeth which is the eternal portion of them that choose the pit, he is stirred to the uttermost endeavor to show that God is, that man is immortal, and that to shipwreck the life here is to superinduce eternal sorrow there.A few days since a church was shocked and sorrowed by the sudden and accidental death of one if its best young men; one whose character invited emulation, and his conduct imitation. His sorrow-stricken mother said, “Awful as it is, it might have been infinitely worse. I had rather have my boy go this way, a thousand-fold, and strive to live on with the consciousness that his life had been acceptable to God, and his spirit went to dwell with Him who had redeemed it, than to have seen him live and descend into flagrant sin.” Ah, that would be real self-destruction, for that is the soul’s destruction.Think of Voltaire’s last hours! They were full of fear. Dr. Talmage, speaking of the same, quotes this appropriate verse:“The Scripture was his jest-book, whence he drew Bon mots to gall the Christian and the Jew; An infidel when well, but what when sick? Oh, then a text would touch him to the quick!” and adds, “Seized with hemorrhage of the lungs in Paris, where he had gone to be crowned in the theater as the idol of all France, he sends a messenger to get a priest, that he may be reconciled to the Church before he dies. A great terror falls upon him. He makes the place all round him so dismal that the nurse declares that she would not, for all the wealth of Europe, see another infidel die.”It is within the power of each to choose whether by indifference, neglect and sin he will send down his soul, becoming a moral suicide, or whether by a surrender to the Spirit and will of God he will save it, redeeming not only the first of all the days of the year, but determining also, by the grace of God, that life here shall be blessed, and life yonder, one unending joy.