Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page. It is also available as plain text as well as XML.

jew goods, a flu tneir clerks hanging idly around the counters, commit the same trangression. There have been seasons when the whole spring and fall trade has been ruined by protracted wet weather. The merchants then examined the “weather probabilities” with more interest than they read thtir Bibles. They watched for a patch of blue sky. They'went complaining lo the store and came conplaining home again. In all that season of wet feet and dripping garments and impassable streets they never once asked the question, “Hath the rain a father:'’ So agriculturists comm : t this sin. There Is nothing more annoying than to have planted corn rot in the ground because of too much moisture, or nay all ready for the mow dashed of a shower, or wheat almost read3* for the sickle spoiled with the rust. How hard it is to bear the agricultural dis appointments. God has infinite resources, but 1 do not think He has capacity to make weather to please all the farmers. Some times it is too hot, or it is too cold; it is too wet, or it is too dry; it is too early, or it is too late. They forget that t.ie God who promised seed time and harvest, summer and winter, cold and beat, also ordained all cli matic changes. There is one question that ought to be written on every barn, on every fence, on every haystack, on every farm -house, “Hath the rain a lather?” If you only knew what a vast enterprise it is to provide appropriate weather for this world we would not be so critical of the Lord. Isaac Watts at ten years of age complained ihat he did not like the hymns that were Bung in the English chapel. “Well,” said his father, “Isaac, instead of your complaining about the hymns, go and make hymns that are better.” And Be did go and make hymns that were better. Now, I say to you it you do not like the weather get up a weather company and have a president, and a secre tary, and a treasurer, and a board of direc tors, and ten million dollars of stock, and then provide weather that will suit us all. There is a man who has a weak head, and he cannot stand the glare of the sun. You must have a cloud always hovering over him. I like the sunshine; I cannot live without plenty of sunlight, so you must always have enough light for me. Two ships meet in mid-Atlantic. The one is going to South ampton and the other is coming to New York. Provide weather that, while it ia abaft for one ship, it is not a head wind for the other. There is a farm that is dried up for the lack of rain, and there is a pleasure party going out for a tieid excursion. Pro vide weather that will suit the dry farm and the pleasure excursion. No. sirs, I will not »ake one dollar of stock in your weather company. There is only one Being in the universe who knows enough to provide the right kind of weather lor this world. “Hath the rain a father?” My text also suggests Goi’s minute super- visal. You see the divine Sonship in every drop of rain. The jewels of the shower are not flung away by a spendthrift who knows not how many he throvrs or where they fall. They are all shining princes of heaven. They all have eternal lineage. They are all the children -of a king. “Hath the rain a father?” Well, then, I say if Go 1 takes notice of every minute raindrop He will take notice of the most insignificant affair of my life. It is the astronomical ▼lew of things that bothers me. We look up into the night heavens, and wesay, “Worlds! worlds!” and how insig nificant we feel! We stand at the foot of Mount Washington or Mont Blaue, and we feel that we are only insects, and then we say to ourselves, “Though the world is so large, the sun is one million four hundred thousand times larger.” “Oh!” we say, “it is no use, if God wheels that great machinery through immensity He will uot take the trouble to look down at me.” Infidel con clusion. Saturn, Mercury and Jupiter are no more rounded and weighed and swung by the hand of God than arc the globules on a lilac bush the morning after a shower. God is no more in magnitudes than He is in minutiae. If He has scales to weigh the mountains, He has balances delicate enough to weigh the infinitesimal. You can no more see Him through the telescope than you can see Him through the microscope; no more when you look up than when you look down. Are not the hairs of your head ail numbered? And if Himalaya has a God, “Hath not the rain a father?” I take this doctrine of a particular Providence, and I thrust it into the very midst of your every day life. If God fathers a raindrop, is there anything so insignificant in your affairs that God will not father that? When Drnyse, the gunsmith, invented the needle gun. "which decided the battle of Sadowa, was it a mere accident? When a farmer’s boy showed Biutcher a short cut by fa presure of the eyelid to stop it. Oth ers follow, and after awhile there is a show er of tearful emotion. Yea, there is a rain of tears. “Hath that rain a father?” “Oh,” you say, “a tear is nothing but a drop or limpid fluid tecreted by the lach rymal gland—it is only a sign of weak eyes.” Great mistake. It is one of the Lord’s rich est benedictions to the world. There are people in Blackwell’s Island insane asylum, and at Utica, and at all the asylums of this land, who were demented by the fact that they could not cry at the right time. Said a maniac in one of onr public institutions, under a gospel sermon that started the tears’ “Do you" see that tear? that is the first I have wept for twelve years. I think it will help my brain.” There are a great many in the grave who could not stand any longer under the glacier of trouble. If that glacier had only melted into weeping they could have endured it. There have been times in your life when you would have given the world, if you had pos sessed it, for one tear. You could shriek, you could blaspheme, but you could not cry. Have you never seen a man holding the hand of a dead wife, who had been all the world to him? The temples livid with excitement, the eye dry and frantic, no moisture on the upper or lower lid. You saw there were bolts of nnjjer in the cloud, but no rain. To your Christ'an comfort, Le said, “Don’ t talk to me about God; there is no God, or if there is I hate Him; don’t talk to me about God; would He have left me and these mother* less children” But a few hours or days aftsr, coming across some lead pencil that she owned in life, or some letters which she wrote when he was away from home, with an outcry that. appals, there bursts the fountain of tears, and as the sunlight of God’s consolation strikes that fountain of tears, you find out that it is a tender-hearted, merciful, pitiful and ail compassionate God who was the Father of that rain. “Oh,” you say, “it is absurd to think that God is going to watch over tears.” No, my friends. There are three or four kinds of them that God counts, bottles and eternizes. First, there are all parental tears, and there are more of these than any other kiud, because the most of the race die in infancy, and that keeps pa rents mourning all around the world. They never get over it They may live to shout and sing afterward, but there is always a corridor in the soul that is silent, though it once resounded. My parents never mentioned the death of a child who died fifty years before without a tremor in the voice and a sigh, oh, how deep fetched! It was better she should die. It was a mercy she should die. She would have been a lifelong invalid. But you cannot argue away a parent’s grief. How often you hear the moan: “Oh, my child, my child!” Then there are the filial tears. Little children soon get over the loss of parents. They are easily diverted with a new toy. But where is the man that has come to thirty or forty or fifty years of age, who can think of the old peo ple without having all the fountains of his soul stirred up? You may have had to take care of her a good many years, but you never can forget how she used to take caro of you. There have been many sea captains con verted in our church, and the peculiarity of them was that they were nearly all prayed ashore by their mothers, though the mothers went into the dust soon after they went to sea. Have you never heard an old man in delirium of some sickness call for his mother? The fact is we get so used to calling for her the first tea years of our life we never get over it, aud when she goes away from us it makes deep sorrow. You sometimes, per haps, in days of trouble and darkness, when the world would say, “You ought to be able to take care of yourself”—you wake up from your dreams finding yourself saying, “Oh, mother! mother!” Have these tears no di vine origin? Why, take all the warm hearts that ever beat in all lands, and in all ages, and put them together and their united throb would be weak compared with the throb of God’s eternal sympathy. Yes, God also is father of all that rain of repentance. Did you ever see a rain oi repentance? Do yon know what it is that makes a man re pent? I see people going around trying to repent. They cannot repent. Do you know na man can repent until' God helps him to repent? How do I know? By this passage. “Him hath God exalted to be a prince aud a Saviour to give repentance.” Oh. it is a tre mendous hour when one wakes up and says: “I am a bad man. I have not sinned against the laws of the land, but I have wasted my life; God asked me for my services and I haven’t given those services. Oh, my eins; God forgive me.” When that tear starts it thrills all heaven. An angel cannot keep bis eyes off it, and the etytreb of GoJ assembles relght ana passenger Tratnc ot toe count is practically controlled by 600 of these cor porations, and of these 600 no fewer than 375 prohibit the use of intoxicating liquors by their employes, among the number be ing most of the largest companies. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers uses its influence in the same direction. “When ever a member of tbs Order is known to be dissipate.!,” soys Mr. Arthur Long, the head of the organization, “we not only expel or suspend him, but notify his employers,” and during the last year 375 members were ex pelled for this cause. This is only one Ulus - tration of the way in w hich practical busi ness considerations are operating to promote the spread of temperance. It is purely a matter of business with the railroad com panies. They simply cannot afford to em ploy a man who is liable any day to get tirunk and precipitate some tenable disaster. The average man can thus see that it is “money in his pocket,” in more senses than one, if he keeps out of the saloon; and the moral is not lost upon him.—The Nation. BEER DRINKING IN THE SLUMS. It is interesting to an observer of human nature to walk through the slums of New York nowadays and watch the unfortunate dwellers there in their endeavors to keep cool. On a warm summer afternoon all the windows and doors of the tenements are wide open, and hundreds of heads may be seen hanging from them in the hopes of catching stray whifs of air. The stench of the region, intensified by the close atmos phere there, is augmented by the odors of cooking which come steaming through every aperture. Many women huddle together on the stoops of the houses and gossip and wrangle, and in the excitement of their chat ter forget for a time their troubles. Scores of babies play about in the gutters, happy in their satislactiou with their surroundings and in their ignorance of anything better. There are, of course, plenty of idle men in the poor districts. The chief meeting places of these are tiie liquor stores, which abound everywhere around. Every few moments a girl ora woman wearing a plaid shawl over her head, which also envelops most of her body and conceals the tin can which she carries in herTiand, darts into one of the sa loons and in a few moments darts out again, but with a more careful movement than be fore lest she lose any of the precious liquor. Sometimes she takes it to one of the groups of women on the sidewalk, who pass it from mouth to mouth, not forgetting to give sips of it to the children who come clamoring around for their share.—New York 1'ele- gram. TEMPERANCE NEWS AND NOTES. The Bompeh (South Africa) W. C. T. U. has sent #10 to the WOman’s Temperance Temple Fund. In Cambridge, Mass., the aldermen have decided to grant one druggist license where forty were granted before. Dr. C. L. Dana, visiting physician to Belle vue Hospital, says: “There is no salvation in malt liquors and light wines.” Des Moines, Iowa, is a city of 60,000 peo ple, and has not an open saloon within its limits, nor within the county in which it is situated. The twenty-first general convention of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of Amer ica will meet in the city of Washintou, D. C., August 5th. A temperance lecturer says that three times as many people drink intoxicants to day as ten years ago, but the amount con sumed is less by one-half than it was at that time. Mrs. Mary Clement Leavitt, Correspond ing Secretary of the World’s W. O. T. U., has been absent from America eight years, and basin that time organized 112 societies, held over sixteen hundred meetings, traveled 100,000 miles and has had the services of 22J interpreters in forty-seven languages. The new administration in Vincennes, Ind., having ordered saloon-keepers to close up on Sundays, the latter, who are in the majority in councils, retaliate by reviving an old ordinance requiring that all business be suspended on Sunday. As a cousequenca drug stores, cigar stands, barber shops, letn ouade stands, ice-cream parlors, etc., are closed on the sacred day. A despatch from Topeka, Kansas, says that the prohibition leaders are delighted at the result of the Supreme Court decision in the Rohrer Original Package case, hold ing the Wilson bill constitutional. County Attorney Welch, who had dropped his prose cutions of the men charged witn continuing to sell liquor after tho passage of the Wiisou bill, will now continue, and the war will be waged with determination. by its effects. So the Spirit o£ the soul, sometimes by the sometimes by the word re through a human instrument apart from any human instrurnq the effects become in due time \i 9. “Nicodemus answered ancf Him, How can these things beP’j natural man trying to s le spirit blind mau wondering what the lig an earthly man puzzled over things; an intellectual, religious ing the one thing needful; but tba is inquiring, and he has coraj though he has not yet received Hjl 10. “Jesusanswered and said unt thou a master (the teacher—R. V.)\ and knoweth not these things?” As of Israel he should have known thl garded the heart mare than the ouj poarance; that circumcision refer inner life more than to the body; moons and Sabbaths and sacrific, nothing without true faith in God j heart worship of Him. 11. “Verily, verily, I say unto tl speak that we do know, and testify have seen; aud ye receive not our In another place He so speaks of His with the Father, and of the Father' ing the words and doing the works Him (John xiv., 10), that I conclude, “we” here refers to the Father and f 12. “If I have told you earthly th( ye believe not. how shall ye believe you heavenly things?” Nicodemus \ zled over what He said about the wim was a matter in connection with the The new birth also was matter in cof with the earth, for it must take pla on the earth in our mortal bodies or all. But the open heaven, and the a^ and descending angels of which spoken to believing Nathanael, thei heavenly things of which He could mj to reasoning Nicodemus. 13. “And no man hath ascende heaven but He thatcamedown fror even the Son of Man which is in 1 In chapter i., 18, John spoke of Hiu the bosom of the Father,” and speaks of Himself as “the Son of Ma is in heaven.” Although now seat Father’s right hand in heaven, yeti two or three meet in His name He midst, aud He says to His obedient i “Lo, I am with you alway” (Mat] 20* xxviii 2Ql 14. “And as Moses lifted uo tk in the wilderness, even so much tt Man be lifted up.” Here is tb “must,” to which we referred in and if this “must” had never becoc complished fact the new birth had impossibility. 15. “That whosoever believeth should not perish, but have eteri Israel murmured at God’s way aj bread (Nutn. xxi., 4. 5). He then , pents to bite them, and much We are all bitten by the serpent; of death is sin, all have sinned, d] passed upon all, but Jesus lifted up the serpent harmless, for He reejj sting for all in His owu body, made sin for us who knew no sinl own self bare our sins in His own! the tree.” 16. “For God so loved the world § ave His only begotten Son, that wj elieveth iu Him should not parish, everlasting life.” There was no ot| to save sinners than that some one sin should become the sinner’s subst 17. “For God sent not His Son world to condemn the world, but world through Him might be “Herein is Love.” “Behold what: Love.” “See the Great Love wheH loved us.” “The Son of God loved] f ave Himself for me (I John iv., Iph. ii., 4; Gal. ii., 20) But half does not know about it yet, alth came to save the world.—Lesson Hi BEER IN A BIG FACTORY. At the great factory of the Singe! facturing Company, at Elizabethpor i half hour is allowed for the noon-d and it is invariably taken in the shop the immediate vicinity. The whistle aud instantly 500 or more boys or men appear on a run armed with ti some carrying a dozen. They imm repair to some ad joining saloons, wl pails are filled with beer, which she lore has been drawn into tubs so as of expeditious dipping. The beer i carried to waiting cotnr.ades in the fi] —Scientific American. *.