Sunday at Home.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 12, 17 June 1893, Page 3

Sunday at Home.

GOD OF THE STARS. (From a sermon by the Rev. Dr. T. De Witt Talmage.) “Seek Him that maketli the Seven Stars and Orion.” —Amos, v., viii. When I read, “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” I do not know but that each world is a room, and as many rooms as there are worlds, stellar stairs, stellar galleries, stellar hallways, stellar windows, stellar domes. A mansion with as many rooms as worlds, and all their windows illuminated lor festivity. Oh, how this widens, and lifts, and stimulates our expectation ! How little it makes the present,, and how stupendous it makes the future ! How it consoles us about our pious dead, who, instead of being boxed up and under the ground, have the range of as many rooms as there are worlds, and welcome everywhere, for it is the Father’s house, in which there are many mansions ! Oh, Lord God of the Seven Stars and Orion, how can I endure the transport, the ecstacy, of such a vision? I must obey my text and seek Him. I will seek Him. I seek Him now, for I call to mind that it is not the material universe that is most valuable, but The spiritual, and that each of us has a soul worth more than all the worlds which the inspired herdsman saw from his booth upon the hills of Tekoa. I have studied it before, but the Cathedral of Cologne, Germany, never impressed me as it did the last time I saw it. It is admittedly the grandest Gothic structure in the world, its foundation laid in 1248, only eight or nine years ago completed. More than six hundred years in building. All Europe taxed for its construction. Its chapel of the Magi with precious stones enough to purchase a kingdom. Its chapel of St. Agues with masterpieces of painting. Its spire springing five hundred and eleven feet into the heavens. Its stained glass the chorus of all rich colours. Statues encircling the pillars and encircling all. Statues above statues, until sculpture can do more, but faints and falls back against carved stalls, and down on pavements over which the kings and queens of the earth have walked to confession. Nave and aisles and transept and portals combining the splendours of sunrise. Interlaced, interfoliated, intercolumned grandeur. As I stood outside, looking at the double range of flying buttresses and the forest of pinnacles, higher and higher, until I almost reeled from dizziness, I exclaimed, “ Great doxology in stonej Frozen prayer of many nations ! ” But while standing there I saw a poor man enter and put down his pack and kneel beside his burden on the hard floor of that cathedral. And tears of deep emotion came into mine eyes, as I said to myself : “ There is a soul worth more than all the material surroundings. That man will live after the last pinnacle has fallen, and not one stone of all that cathedral glory will remain uncrumbled.” And what is true of that man is true of us all. But where shall we spend that eternity ? shall it be in the unveiled light of the countenance of Him who made the seven stars and Orion, or in the outer darkness prepared for the devil and his angels ? That must be decided in this life by your acceptance or non-acceptance of the salvation of Jesus Christ.