ADOPTED CHILDREN.
But whatever your heredity, let me say, you may be sons and daughters of the Lord G.o.d Almighty. Estranged children from the homestead come back through the open gate of adoption. There is royal blood in our veins. There are crowns in our escutcheon. Our Father is King. Our Brother is King. We may be kings and queens unto G.o.d forever. Come and sit down on the ivory bench of the palace. Come and wash in the fountains that fall into the basins of crystal and alabaster. Come and look out of the upholstered window upon gardens of azalea and amaranth. Hear the full burst of the orchestra while you banquet with potentates and victors. Oh, when the text sweeps backward, let it not stop at the cradle that rocked your infancy, but at the cradle that rocked the first world, and when the text sweeps forward, let it not stop at your grave, but at the throne on which you may reign forever and ever! "Whose son art thou, thou young man?" Son of G.o.d! Heir of mortality! Take your inheritance!
THE MOTHER OF ALL.
"And the Lord G.o.d caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord G.o.d had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man."--GENESIS 2:21, 22.
It is the first Sat.u.r.day afternoon in the world"s existence. Ever since sunrise Adam has been watching the brilliant pageantry of wings and scales and clouds, and in his first lessons in zoology and ornithology and ichthyology he has noticed that the robins fly the air in twos, and that the fish swim the water in twos, and that the lions walk the fields in twos, and in the warm redolence of that Sat.u.r.day afternoon he falls off into slumber; and as if by allegory to teach all ages that the greatest of earthly blessings is sound sleep, this paradisaical somnolence ends with the discovery on the part of Adam of
A CORRESPONDING INTELLIGENCE
just landed on the new planet. Of the mother of all the living I speak--Eve, the first, the fairest and the best.
I make me a garden. I inlay the paths with mountain moss, and I border them with pearls from Ceylon and diamonds from Golconda. Here and there are fountains tossing in the sunlight, and ponds that ripple under the paddling of the swans. I gather me lilies from the Amazon, and orange groves from the tropics, and tamarinds from Goyaz. There are woodbine and honey-suckle climbing over the wall, and starred spaniels sprawling themselves on the gra.s.s. I invite amid these trees the larks, and the brown thrushes, and the robins, and all the brightest birds of heaven, and they stir the air with infinite chirp and carol. And yet the place is a desert filled with darkness and death as compared with
THE RESIDENCE OF THE WOMAN
of the text, the subject of my morning story. Never since have such skies looked down through such leaves into such waters! Never has river wave had such curve and sheen and bank as adorned the Pison, the Havilah, the Gihon, and the Hiddakel, even the pebbles being bdellium and onyx stone! What fruits, with no curculio to sting the rind! What flowers, with no slug to gnaw the root! What atmosphere, with no frost to chill and with no heat to consume! Bright colors tangled in the gra.s.s. Perfume in the air. Music in the sky. Bird"s warble and tree"s hum, and waterfall"s dash. Great scene of gladness and love and joy.
Right there under a bower of leaf and vine and shrub occurred
THE FIRST MARRIAGE.
Adam took the hand of this immaculate daughter of G.o.d and p.r.o.nounced the ceremony when he said: "Bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh."
A FORBIDDEN TREE
stood in the midst of that exquisite park. Eve sauntering out one day alone looks up at the tree and sees the beautiful fruit, and wonders if it is sweet, and wonders if it is sour, and standing there, says: "I think I will just put my hand upon the fruit; it will do no damage to the tree; I will not take the fruit to eat, but I will just take it down to examine it." She examined the fruit. She said: "I do not think there can be any harm in my just breaking the rind of it." She put the fruit to her teeth, she tasted, she invited Adam also to taste of the fruit, the door of the world opened, and the monster Sin entered. Let the heavens gather blackness, and the winds sigh on the bosom of the hills, and cavern and desert and earth and sky join in one long, deep, h.e.l.l-rending howl:
"THE WORLD IS LOST!"
Beasts that before were harmless and full of play put forth claw, and sting, and tooth, and tusk. Birds whet their beak for prey. Clouds troop in the sky. Sharp thorns shoot up through the soft gra.s.s.
Blastings on the leaves. All the chords of that great harmony are snapped. Upon the brightest home this world ever saw our first parents turned their back and led forth on a path of sorrow the broken-hearted myriads of a ruined race.
Do you not see, in the first place, the danger of a poorly regulated
INQUISITIVENESS?
She wanted to know how the fruit tasted. She found out, but six thousand years have deplored that unhealthful curiosity. Healthy curiosity has done a great deal for letters, for art, for science and for religion. It has gone down into the depths of the earth with the geologist and seen the first chapter of Genesis written in the book of nature ill.u.s.trated with engraving on rock, and it stood with the antiquarian while he blew the trumpet of resurrection over buried Herculaneum and Pompeii, until from their sepulchre there came up shaft and terrace and amphitheatre. Healthful curiosity has enlarged the telescopic vision of the astronomer until worlds hidden in the distant heavens have trooped forth and have joined the choir praising the Lord. Planet weighed against planet and wildest comet la.s.soed with resplendent law.
HEALTHFUL CURIOSITY
has gone down and found the tracks of the eternal G.o.d in the polypi and the starfish under the sea and the majesty of the great Jehovah encamped under the gorgeous curtains of the dahlia. It has studied the spots on the sun, and the larvae in a beech leaf, and the light under fire-fly"s wing, and the terrible eye glance of a condor pitching from Chimborazo. It has studied the myriads of animalculae that make up the phosph.o.r.escence in a ship"s wake, and the mighty maze of suns, and spheres, and constellations, and galaxies that blaze on in the march of G.o.d. Healthful curiosity has stood by the inventor until forces that were hidden for ages came to wheels, and levers, and shafts, and shuttles--forces that fly the air, or swim the sea, or cleave the mountain until the earth jars, and roars, and rings, and crackles, and booms, with strange mechanism, and ships with nostrils of hot steam and yokes of fire draw the continents together.
I say nothing against healthful curiosity. May it have other Leyden jars, and other electric batteries, and other voltaic piles, and other magnifying gla.s.ses with which to storm the barred castles of the natural world until it shall surrender its last secret. We thank G.o.d for the geological curiosity of Professor Hitchc.o.c.k, and the mechanical curiosity of Liebig, and the zoological curiosity of Cuvier, and the inventive curiosity of Edison; but we must admit that unhealthful and irregular inquisitiveness has rushed thousands and tens of thousands into ruin.
Eve just tasted the fruit. She was curious to find out how it tasted, and that
CURIOSITY BLASTED HER
and blasted all nations. So there are clergy in this day inspired by unhealthful inquisitiveness who have tried to look through the keyhole of G.o.d"s mysteries, mysteries that were barred and bolted from all human inspection, and they have wrenched their whole moral nature out of joint by trying to pluck fruit from branches beyond their reach, or have come out on limbs of the tree from which they have tumbled into ruin without remedy. A thousand trees of religious knowledge from which we may eat and get advantage; but from certain
TREES OF MYSTERY
how many have plucked their ruin! Election, free agency, trinity, resurrection--in the discussion of these subjects hundreds and thousands of people ruin the soul. There are men who have actually been kept out of the kingdom of heaven because they could not understand who Melchisedec was not!
Oh, how many have been destroyed by an unhealthful inquisitiveness! It is seen in all directions. There are those who stand with the eye-stare and mouth-gape of curiosity. They are the first to hear a falsehood, build it another story high and two wings to it. About other people"s apparel, about other people"s business, about other people"s financial condition, about other people"s affairs, they are over anxious. Every nice piece of gossip stops at their door, and they fatten and luxuriate in the endless round of the great world of t.i.ttle-tattle. They invite and sumptuously entertain at their house Colonel Twaddle and Esquire Chitchat and Governor Smalltalk. Whoever hath an innuendo, whoever hath a scandal, whoever hath a valuable secret, let him come and sacrifice it to
THIS G.o.dDESS OF SPLUTTER.
Thousands of Adams and Eves do nothing but eat fruit that does not belong to them. Men quite well known as mathematicians failing in this computation of moral algebra: good sense plus good breeding, minus curiosity, equals minding your own affairs!
Then, how many young men through curiosity go through the whole realm of
FRENCH NOVELS,
to see whether they are really as bad as moralists have p.r.o.nounced them! They come near the verge of the precipice just to look off. They want to see how far it really is down, but they lose their balance while they look, and fall into remediless ruin; or, catching themselves, clamber up, bleeding and ghastly, on the rock, gibbering with curses or groaning ineffectual prayer. By all means encourage healthful inquisitiveness, by all means discourage ill regulated curiosity.
TREACHEROUS FRUIT.
The subject of the morning also impresses me with the fact that fruits that are sweet to the taste may afterward produce great agony.
Forbidden fruit for Eve was so pleasant she invited her husband also to take of it; but her banishment from Paradise, and six thousand years of sorrow, and wretchedness, and war, and woe paid for that luxury. Sin may be very sweet at the start, and it may induce great wretchedness afterward. The cup of sin is sparkling at the top, but there is death at the bottom. Intoxication has great exhilaration for a while, and it fillips the blood, and it makes a man see five stars where others can see only one star, and it makes the poor man rich, and turns cheeks which are white red as roses; but what about the dreams that come after, when he seems falling from great heights, or is prostrated by other fancied disasters, and the perspiration stands on the forehead, the night dew of everlasting darkness, and he is ground under the horrible hoof of nightmares shrieking with lips that crackle with all-consuming torture? "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth; but know thou, that for all these things G.o.d will bring thee into judgment!"
SWEET AT THE START,
horrible at the last. Go into that hall of revelry, where unG.o.dly mirth staggers and blasphemes. Listen to the senseless gabble, see the last trace of intelligence dashed out from faces made in G.o.d"s own image.
"Aha! aha!" says the roystering inebriate; "this is joy for you; fill high your cups, my boys. I drink to my wife"s misery and my children"s rags and my G.o.d"s defiance." And he knows not that a fiend stirs the goblet in his hand and that adders uncoil from the dregs and thrust their forked tongues hissing through the froth on the rim.