Sunday at Home

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 49, 3 March 1894, Page 10

Sunday at Home

POINTS FROM TALMAOE. Many of our pulpits arc dying of humdrum. People do not go to church because they cannot endure the technicalities, and profound explanations of nothin?’, and sermons about the “ Eternal Generation of the Son,” and the difference between sub]»psarianism and supra-lapsarianism, and about who Melchisedec wasn’t. There ought to be as much difference between the modes of presenting truth now' and in the olden time, as between an express rail-train and a canal-boat.

Several years ago I went up to the door of a factory in England. On the outside door 1 saw the words ‘ No admittance.’ I went in and came to another door, over which were the words ‘No admittance.’ Of course 1 went in, and came to the third door inscribed with the words ‘No admittance.’ Having entered this, I found the-people inside making pins, beautiful pins, useful pins, and nothing but pins ! So over the outside door of many of the churches has been written the words ‘No admittance.’ Some have entered, and have come to the inside door, and found the words ‘No admittance.’ But persisting, they have come inside, and found us sounding out our little nice tie • of belief, pointing out our little t iff rences of theological sentiment making pins !

Bethel was distinguished for that famous dream which Jacob had, his head on a collection of stones. He had no trouble in this rocky region in finding a rocky pillow. There is hardly anything else but stone. Yet the people of those lands have a way of drawing their outer garment up

over their head and face, and such a pillow I suppose Jacob had under his head. The plural was used in the Bible story, and you find it was not a pillow of stone, but of stones, I suppose, so that if one proved to be of uneven surface he'would turn over in the night and take another stone, for with such a hard bolster he would probably often change in the night. Well, that night God built in Jacob’s dream a long splendid ladder, the feet of it on either side of the tired pilgrim’s pillow, and the top of it mortised in the sky. And bright immortals came out from the castles of amber and gold and put their shining feet on the shining rungs of the ladder, and they kept coming down and going up, a procession both ways. I suppose they had wings, for the Bible almost always reports them as having wings, but this was a ladder on which they used hands and feet to encourage all those of us who have no wings to climb, and encouraging us to believe that, if we will use what we have, God will provide a way, and if we will employ the hand and the foot, He will furnish the ladder. Young man ! do not wait for wings. Those angels folded theirs to show you wings are not necessary. Let all the people who have hard pillows, hard for sickness, or hard for poverty, or hard for persecution, know that a hard pillow is the land-ing-place of angels. They seldom descend to pillows of eider-down. They seldom build dreams in the brain of the one who sleeps easy. The greatest dream of all time was that of St. John with his head on the rocks at Patmos, and in that vision he heard the seven trumpets sounded, and saw all the pomp of heaven in procession cherubic, seraphic, archangelic. The next most memorable and glorious dream was that of John Bunyan, his pillow the cold stone of the floor of Bedford gaol, from which he saw the celestial city, and so many entering it, he cried out in his dream, ‘ I wished myself among them.’ Nearly all those who are to-day great in merchandise, in statesmanship, in law, in medicine, in art, in literature, were once at the foot of the ladder, and in their boyhood had a pillow hard as Jacob’s. Those who are born at the top of the ladder are apt to spend their lives in coming down, while those who are at the foot, and their head on a boulder, if they have the right kind of dream, are almost sure to rise.

I notice that those angels, whether in coming down or going up on Jacob’s ladder, took it rung by rung. They did not leap to the bottom, nor jump to the top. So you are to rise. Faith added to faith, good deed to good deed, industry to industry, consecra-

tion to consecration, until you reach the top, rung by rung. Gradually going up from a block of granite to a pillar of throne. tv