Part 11

He is moved with compassion when He sees this little funeral procession; and it does not take Him long to find out that this woman who walks next the bier is a poor widow, whose only son she is following in sadness to the grave.

He tells the bearers to put down the bier; and while the mother wonders what is to be done, He bends tenderly over the dead man, and speaks to him in a low and sweet voice:

“Arise!”

And the dead man hears Him. His body begins to move; the man that was dead is struggling with his grave clothes; they unbind them, and now he sits up.

He leaps off the bier, catches sight of his mother, remembers that he was dead and is now alive again. He takes his mother in his arms, kisses her again and again, and then turns to look at the Stranger who has wrought this miracle upon him.

He is ready to do any thing for that Man--ready to follow Him to the death. But Jesus does not ask that of him. He knows his mother needs him; and so He does not take him away to be one of His disciples, but gives him back to his old mother.

I would have liked to see that young man re-entering the city of Nain, arm-in-arm with his mother. What do you suppose he said to the people, who looked at him with wonder? Would he not confess that Jesus of Nazareth had raised him from the dead? Would he not go everywhere, declaring what the Lord had done for his dead body?

Oh, how I love to preach Christ, who can stand over all the graves, and say to all the dead bodies: “Arise!”

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ROCK OF AGES.

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee! Let the water and the blood From Thy riven side which flowed Be of sin the double cure-- Cleanse from guilt and make me pure.

In my hand no price I bring; Simply to Thy cross I cling. Naked--come to Thee for dress; Helpless--look to Thee for grace; Foul--I to Thy fountain fly; Cleanse me, Savior, or I die!

Not the labors of my hands Can fulfill Thy law’s demands. Could my zeal no respite know-- Could my tears for ever flow-- All for sin could not atone; Thou must save, and Thou alone!

While I draw this fleeting breath, When my eye-strings break in death, When I soar to worlds unknown, See Thee on Thy judgment throne-- Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee!

WHERE HE LEADS I’LL FOLLOW.

Sweet are the promises, kind is the word-- Dearer far than any message man ever heard! Pure was the mind of Christ--sinless I see; He the great example is, and pattern for me.

Where He leads I’ll follow-- Follow all the way! Where He leads I’ll follow-- Follow Jesus every day!

Sweet is the tender love Jesus has shown-- Sweeter far than any love that mortals have known! Kind to the erring one, faithful is He; He the great example is, and pattern for me!

Where He leads I’ll follow-- Follow all the way! Where He leads I’ll follow-- Follow Jesus every day!

List to His loving words: “Come unto Me.” Weary, heavy-laden, there is sweet rest for thee! Trust in His promises--faithful and sure; Lean upon the Savior, and thy soul is secure.

Where He leads I’ll follow-- Follow all the way! Where He leads I’ll follow-- Follow Jesus every day!

BIBLE CHARACTERS

AS DEPICTED BY THE BRILLIANT AND NOTED PREACHER, T. DE WITT TALMAGE.

ATHALIAH

Grandmothers are more lenient with their children’s children than they were with their own.

At forty years of age, if discipline be necessary, chastisement is used; but at seventy, the grandmother, looking upon the misbehavior of the grandchild, is apologetic and disposed to substitute confectionery for whip.

There is nothing more beautiful than this mellowing of old age toward childhood. Grandmother takes out her pocket handkerchief and wipes her spectacles and puts them on, and looks down into the face of her mischievous and rebellious descendant, and says:

“I don’t think he meant to do it; let him off this time; I’ll be responsible for his behavior in the future.”

My mother, with the second generation around her--a boisterous crew--said one day: “I suppose they ought to be disciplined, but I can not do it. Grandmothers are not fit to bring up grandchildren.”

But here we have a grandmother of a different hue.

I have been at Jerusalem, where the occurrence that I shall describe took place, and the whole scene came vividly before me while I was going over the site of the ancient Temple and climbing the towers of the king’s palace.

Here is old Athaliah, the queenly murderess.

She ought to have been honorable. Her father was a king. Her husband was a king. Her son was a king. And yet we find her plotting for the extermination of the entire royal family, including her own grandchildren.

The executioner’s knives are sharpened; the palace is red with the blood of princes and princesses. On all sides are shrieks, and hands thrown up, and struggle and death groan. No mercy! Kill! Kill!

But while the ivory floors of the palace run with carnage and the whole land is under the shadow of a great horror, a fleet-footed woman--a clergyman’s wife, Jehosheba by name--stealthily approaches the imperial nursery, seizes upon the grandchild that had, somehow, as yet escaped massacre, wraps it up tenderly but in haste, snuggles it against her, flies down the palace stairs--her heart in her throat, lest she be discovered in this Christian abduction.

Get her out of the way as quickly as you can, for she carries a precious burden--even a young king.

With this youthful prize she presses into the room of the ancient Temple, the church of olden time, unwraps the young king and puts him down, sound asleep as he is, and unconscious of the peril that has been threatened; and there for six years he is kept secreted in that church apartment.

Meanwhile, old Athaliah smacks her lips with satisfaction and thinks that all the royal family are dead.

But the six years expire, and it is now time for the young Joash to come forth and take the throne, and to push back into disgrace and death old Athaliah.

The arrangements are all made for political revolution. The military come and take full possession of the Temple, swear loyalty to the boy Joash, and then stand around for his defense. See the sharpened swords and burnished shields! Every thing is ready.

Now Joash, half affrighted at the armed tramp of his defenders, scared at the vociferation of his admirers, is brought forth in full regalia. The scroll of authority is put into his hands, the coronet of government is put on his brow, and the glad people clap and wave, huzza and trumpet.

Athaliah is aroused, and asks:

“What is that? What is that sound over there in the Temple?”

She hurries out to see, and on the way they meet her and say:

“Why, haven’t you heard? You thought you had slain all the royal family, but Joash has come to light.”

Then the queenly murderess, frantic with rage, laid hold on her mantle and tore it to tatters, and cried out until she foamed at the mouth:

“You have no right to crown my grandson. You have no right to take the government from my shoulders. Treason! Treason!”

While she stood there, making this cry, the military started for her arrest, and she took a short cut through a back door of the Temple and ran through the royal stables; but the battle-axes of the military fell on her in the barn-yard, and for many a day, when the horses were being unloosed from the chariot after drawing out young Joash, the fiery steeds would snort and rear while passing the place, as they smelt the taint.

The first thought which I hand you from this subject is that the extermination of righteousness is an impossibility.

When a woman is good she is apt to be very good, and when she is bad she is apt to be very bad; and this Athaliah was one of the latter sort. She would exterminate the last scion of the house of David, through whom Jesus was to come. There was plenty of work for embalmers and undertakers. She would clear the land of all God-fearing and God-loving people. She would put an end to every thing that could in any wise interfere with her imperial criminality.

Athaliah folds her hands and says: “The work is done; it is completely done.”

Is it?

In the swaddling clothes of that church apartment are wrapped the cause of God and the cause of good government.

That is the scion of the house of David; it is Joash, the Christian reformer; it is Joash, the friend of God; it is Joash, the demolisher of Baalitish idolatry. Rock him tenderly; nurse him gently.

Athaliah, you may kill all the other children, but you can not kill him. Eternal defenses are thrown all around him, and this clergyman’s wife, Jehosheba, will snatch him up from the palace nursery, and will run up and down with him into the house of the Lord, and there she will hide him for six years, and at the end of that time he will come forth for your dethronement and utter obliteration.

DAVID.

David, the shepherd boy, is watching his father’s sheep.

They are pasturing on the very hills where afterward a Lamb was born of which you have heard much--“the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

David, the shepherd boy, was beautiful, brave, musical and poetic. I think he often forgot the sheep in his reveries. There in the solitude he struck the harp-string that is thrilling through all ages. David the boy was at work gathering the material for David the poet and for David the man.

Like other boys, David was fond of using his knife among the saplings, and he had noticed the exuding of the juice of the tree; and when he became a man he said: “The trees of the Lord are full of sap.”

David the boy, like other boys, had been fond of hunting the birds’ nests, and he had driven the old stork off the nest to find how many eggs were under her; and when he became a man he said: “As for the stork, the fir trees are her house.”

In boyhood he had heard the terrific thunder storm that frightened the red deer into premature sickness; and when he became a man he said: “The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve.”

David the boy had lain upon his back, looking up at the stars and examining the sky, and to his boyish imagination the sky seemed like a piece of divine embroidery, the divine fingers working in the threads of light and the beads of stars; and when he grew up he wrote:

“When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers.”

When he became an old man, thinking of the goodness of God, he seemed to hear again the bleating of his father’s sheep across many years, and to think of the time when he tended them on the Bethlehem hills, and he cries out: “The Lord is my shepherd.”

There is one scene in the life of David that you may not have pondered.

You have seen him with a harp, playing the devil out of Saul; with a sling, smashing the skull of Goliath; with a sword, hacking to pieces the Philistines; with a scepter, ruling a vast realm; with a psalm, gathering all nations into doxology.

But now we have David playing the fool.

He has been anointed king, yet he is in exile and is passing incognito among the Gathites. They are beginning to suspect who he is, and they say:

“I wonder if this is not the warrior, King David? It looks like him. Is not this the man about whom they used to make poetry, and about whom they composed a dance, so that the maidens of the city, reeling now on one foot and now on the other, used to sing: ‘Saul has slain his thousands, but David has slain his tens of thousands’? Yes, he is very much like David; he must be David; he is David.”

David, to escape their hands, pretends to be demented; and he said within himself:

“If I act crazily, then these people will not injure me. No one would be so much of a coward as to assault a madman.”

So, one day, while these Gathites are watching King David with increased suspicion, they see him standing by the door, running his hands meaninglessly up and down the panels--scrabbling on the door as though he would climb up, his mouth wide open, drooling like an infant.

I suppose the boys of the streets threw missiles at him, but the sober people of the town said:

“This is not fair. Do you not see that he has lost his reason? Do not touch this madman. Hands off! Hands off!”

So David escaped. But what an exhibition he made of himself before all the ages!

There was a majesty in King Lear’s madness after Regan and Goneril, his daughters, had persuaded him to banish their sister, Cordelia, and all the friends of the drama have been thrilled with that spectacle.

The craziness of Meg Merrilies was weird and imposing, and formed the most telling passage in Sir Walter Scott’s “Guy Mannering.”

There was a fascination about the insanity of Alexander Cruden, who made the best concordance of the Bible that the world ever saw--made it between the mad houses.

But there was nothing grand, nothing weird, nothing majestic, nothing sublime about this simulation on the part of David. Instead of trusting in the Lord, as he had trusted on other occasions, he gathers before him a vast audience of all generations that were to come, and, standing on that conspicuous stage of history, in view of all the ages, he impersonates the slavering idiot.

Taking the behavior of David as a suggestion, I wish to show you how many of the wise, the brave and the regal sometimes play the fool. Those men as badly play the fool as did David who, in any crisis of life, take their case out of the hand of God.

David, in this case, acted as though there were no God to lift him out of the predicament. What a contrast between his behavior, when this brave little man stood up in front of the giant ten feet in height, looking into his face, and this time, when he debased himself and bedraggled his manhood by affecting insanity in order that he might escape from the grip of the Gathites! In the one case, he played the hero; in the other case, he played the fool.

There came a time when David fled from his pursuers. The world runs very fast when it is chasing a good man. The country is trying to catch David, and to slay him. David goes into the house of a priest, and asks him for a sword or spear with which to defend himself.

The priest, not being accustomed to use deadly weapons, tells David that he can not supply him; but suddenly the priest thinks of an old sword that had been carefully wrapped up and laid away--the very sword that Goliath formerly used. He takes down that sword, and while he is unwrapping the sharp, glittering and memorable blade it flashes upon David’s mind that this is the very sword that was used against himself when he was in the fight with Goliath, and David can hardly keep his hand off it until the priest has unwound it.

David stretches out his hand toward that old sword, and says: “There is none like it; give it me.” In other words: “I want in my own hand the sword that has been used against me, and against the cause of the Lord.” So it was given him.

Here passes through these streets, as in imagination I see him, a wonderful man. Can it be that I am in the very city where lived and reigned David--conqueror, king and poet? David--great for power and great for grief!

He was wrapped up in his boy, Absalom, who was a splendid boy, judged by the rules of worldly criticism. From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot there was not a single blemish. The Bible says that he had such a luxuriant shock of hair that, when once a year it was shorn, what was cut off weighed over three pounds.

But, notwithstanding all his brilliancy of appearance, he was a bad boy, and broke his father’s heart. He was plotting to get the throne of Israel. He had marshaled an army to overthrow his father’s government.

The day of battle had come; the conflict was begun. David, the father, sat between the gates of the palace, waiting for tidings of the conflict.

Oh, how rapidly his heart beat with emotion! Two great questions were to be decided--the safety of his boy and the continuance of the throne of Israel.

After a while a servant, standing on the top of the house, looks off, and he sees some one running. He is coming with great speed, and the man on top of the house announces the coming of the messenger.

David watches and waits, and as soon as the messenger from the field of battle comes within hailing distance the father cries out. Is it a question in regard to the establishment of his throne? Does he say: “Have the armies of Israel been victorious? Am I to continue in my imperial authority? Have I overthrown my enemies?” Oh, no.

There is one question that springs from his heart to his lip, and springs from the lip into the ear of the besweated and bedusted messenger flying from the battle field--the question:

“Is the young man--Absalom--safe?”

When it was told to King David that, although his army had been victorious, his son had been slain, the father turned his back upon the congratulations of the nation, and went up the stairs of his palace, his heart breaking as he went, wringing his hands sometimes, and then again pressing them against his temples, as though he would press them in, crying:

“O Absalom! My son! My son! Would to God I had died for thee, O Absalom! My son! My son!”

* * * * *

Stupendous grief of David, resounding through all succeeding ages!

DEBORAH.

A text of five words, and four of them one and the same, is found in the fifth chapter and twelfth verse of Judges: “Awake, awake, Deborah; awake, awake!”

It seems that the men of Israel had lost their courage. Trampled into the dust by their oppressors, the cowards had not spirit to rise.

Their vineyards destroyed, their women dishonored, their children slain, the land was dying for a leader worthy of the cause.

A holy woman by the name of Deborah saw the desolation, and, putting her trust in the Lord, sounded the battle-cry, and by the help of General Barak launched into the plain ten thousand armed men.

The Canaanites, of course, came out with a larger force. They came out against Israel with nine hundred iron chariots, each of these iron chariots having attached to the sides of it long and sharp scythes, so that when these engines of war were driven down to battle, each one of the nine hundred was ready to cut two great swaths of death.

But, when God gives a mission to a woman, He also gives her strength and grace to execute it.

The nine hundred iron chariots of the Canaanites could not save them. They fly! They fly--horse and horseman, chariot and charioteer, officers and troops--in one wild and terrific overthrow. Sisera, their leader, is so frightened in the conflict that he can not wait until his team turns around. He leaps from the chariot and starts, full run, for the mountains.

Then this epic of the text was composed to celebrate the grand womanly triumph: “Awake, awake, Deborah; awake, awake!”

DORCAS.

Impressed as I am with the mosque at Joppa, the first I ever saw, and stirred as I am with the fact that this harbor once floated the great rafts of Lebanon cedar from which the Temple at Jerusalem was builded, Solomon’s oxen drawing the logs through this very town on the way to Jerusalem, nothing can make me forget that this Joppa was the birthplace of the sewing society that has blessed the poor of all succeeding ages in all lands.

The disasters to Joppa when Judas Maccabæus set it on fire and when Napoleon had five hundred prisoners massacred in this neighborhood can not make me forget that one of the most magnificent charities of the centuries was started in this seaport by Dorcas--a woman who with her needle embroidered her name ineffaceably into the beneficence of the world.

I see her sitting in the village home. In the door way and around about the building, and even in the room where she sits, are the pale faces of the poor.

She listens to their plaint.

She pities their woe.

She makes garments for them, and she adjusts the manufactured articles to suit the bent form of this invalid woman and to that cripple who comes crawling upon his hands and knees. She gives a coat to this one and sandals to that one. With the gifts she mingles prayers and tears and Christian encouragement.

Then she goes out to be greeted on the street corners by those whom she has blessed, and all through the way of her walk the cry is heard: “Dorcas is coming!”

The sick look up gratefully in her face as she puts a hand on the burning brow, and the lost and the abandoned start up with hope as they hear her gentle voice, as though an angel had addressed them; and as she goes out the lane, eyes half put out with sin think they see a halo of light about her brow and a trail of glory in her pathway.

That night a half-paid shipwright climbs the hill and reaches home. There he sees his little boy well clad, and he asks: “Where did these clothes come from?” They tell him: “Dorcas has been here.”

In another place, a woman is trimming a lamp; Dorcas brought the oil.

In another place, a family that had not been at table for many a week are gathered now, for Dorcas brought them bread.

But there is a sudden pause in that woman’s ministry. They say: “Where is Dorcas? Why, we have not seen her for many a day. Where is Dorcas?”

Then one of these poor people goes up and knocks at the door, and finds the mystery solved. All through the haunts of wretchedness the news comes:

“Dorcas is sick!”

No bulletin flashing from the palace gate, telling the stages of a king’s disease, is more anxiously waited for than the news from this sick benefactress. Alas for Joppa! There is weeping and wailing. That voice which has uttered so many cheerful words is now hushed; that hand which had made so many garments for the poor is cold and still; that star which had poured light into the midnight of wretchedness is dimmed by the blinding mists that go up from the river of death.

In every God-forsaken place in that town; wherever there is hunger and no bread; wherever there is guilt and no commiseration; wherever there is a broken heart and no comfort--there are despairing looks, streaming eyes and frantic gesticulations as they cry:

“Dorcas is dead!”

They send for the apostle, Peter. He edges his way through the crowd around the door, and stands in the presence of the dead. What expostulation and grief all about him!

Here stand some of the poor people, who show the garments which this good woman had made for them. Their grief can not be appeased.

Peter, the apostle, wants to perform a miracle. He will not perform it amid the excited crowd, so he kindly orders that the whole room be cleared. The door is shut against the populace.

The apostle stands now with the dead. Oh, it is a serious moment, you know, when you are alone with a lifeless body! The apostle gets down on his knees and prays, and then he comes to the lifeless form of this one all ready for the sepulcher, and in the strength of Him who is the resurrection he exclaims:

“Tabitha, arise!”

There is a stir in the fountains of life; the heart flutters; the nerves thrill; the cheek flushes; the eye opens; she sits up!

We see in this subject Dorcas the disciple, Dorcas the benefactress, Dorcas the lamented, Dorcas the resurrected.

If I had not seen that word disciple in my text, I yet would have known this woman was a Christian. Such music as that never came from a heart which is not both chorded and strung by Divine grace.

Before I show you the needle-work of this woman, I want to show you her regenerated heart--the source of a pure life and of all Christian charities.