Part 22

THE TRUSTEE OF PIETY

in that ancestral line, and are you going to augment or squander that solemn trust fund? are you going to disinherit your sons and daughters of the heirloom which your parents left you? Ah! that cannot be possible, that cannot be possible that you are going to take such a position as that. You are very careful about the life insurances, and careful about the deeds, and careful about the mortgages, and careful about the title of your property, because when you step off the stage you want your children to get it all. Are you making no provision that they shall get grandfather and grandmother's religion? Oh, what a last will and testament you are making, my brother! "In the name of God, Amen. I, being of sound mind, make this my last will and testament. I bequeath to my children all the money I ever made and all the houses I own; but I disinherit them, I rob them of the ancestral grace and the Christian influence that I inherited. I have squandered that on my own worldliness. Share and share alike must they in the misfortune and the everlasting outrage. Signed, sealed and delivered in the presence of God and men and angels and devils and all the generations of earth and heaven and hell, March, 1886."

O ye of highly favored ancestry, wake up this morning to a sense of your opportunity and your responsibility. I think there must be

AN OLD CRADLE,

or a fragment of a cradle somewhere that could tell a story of midnight supplication in your behalf. Where is the old rocking-chair in which you were sung to sleep with the holy nursery rhyme? Where is the old clock that ticked away the moments of that sickness on that awful night when there were but three of you awake--you and God and mother? Is there not an old staff in some closet? is there not an old family Bible on some shelf that seems to address you, saying: "My son, my daughter, how can you reject that God who so kindly dealt with us all our lives and to whom we commended you in our prayers living and dying? By the memory of the old homestead, by the family altar, by our dying pillow, by the graves in which our bodies sleep while our spirits hover, we beg you to turn over a new leaf for the new year." Oh, the power of ancestral piety, well illustrated by a young man of New York who attended a prayer-meeting one night and asked for prayer, and then went home and wrote down these words:

AN ENTRY IN A DIARY.

"Twenty-five years ago to-night my mother went to heaven, my beautiful, blessed mother, and I have been alone, tossed up and down upon the billows of life's tempestuous ocean. Shall I ever go to heaven? She told me I must meet her in heaven. When she took her boy's hand in hers and turned her gentle, loving eyes on me, and gazed earnestly and long into my face, and then lifted them to heaven in that last prayer, she prayed that I might meet her in heaven. I wonder if I ever shall.

"My mother's prayers! Oh, my sweet, blessed mother's prayers! Did ever boy have such a mother as I had? For twenty-five years I have not heard her pray until to-night. I have heard all her prayers over again. They have had, in fact, a terrible resurrection. Oh, how she was wont to pray! She prayed as they prayed to-night, so earnest, so importunate, so believing. Shall I ever be a Christian? She was a Christian. Oh, how bright and pure and happy was her life! She was a cheerful and happy Christian. There is

"MY MOTHER'S BIBLE.

"I have not opened it for years. Did she believe I could ever neglect her precious Bible? She surely thought I would read it much and often. How often has she read it to me. Blessed mother, did you pray in vain for your boy? It shall not be in vain. Ah! no, no, it shall not be in vain. I will pray for myself. Who has sinned against so much instruction as I have? against so many precious prayers put up to heaven for me by one of the most lovely, tender, pious, confiding, trusting of mothers in her heavenly Father's care and grace? She never doubted. She believed. She always prayed as if she did. My Bible, my mother's Bible and my conscience teach what I am and what I have made myself. Oh, the bitter pangs of an accusing conscience! I need a Saviour mighty to save. I must seek Him. I will. I am on the sea of existence, and I can never get off from it. I am afloat. No anchor, no rudder, no compass, no book of instructions, for I have put them all away from me. Saviour of the perishing, save or I perish."

Do you wonder that the next day he arose in a prayer-meeting and said: "My brethren, I stand before you a monument of God's amazing mercy and goodness, forever blessed be His holy name; all I have and all I am I consecrate to Jesus, my Saviour and my God?" Oh, the power of ancestral prayer. Hear it! Hear it!

II. But I turn for a moment to those who had

EVIL PARENTAGE,

and I want to tell you that the highest thrones in heaven and the mightiest triumphs and the brightest crowns will be for those who had evil parentage, but who by the grace of God conquered. As useful, as splendid a gentleman as I know of to-day had for father a man who died blaspheming God until the neighbors had to put their fingers in their ears to shut out the horror. One of the most consecrated and useful Christian ministers of to-day was born of a drunken horse-jockey. Tide of evil tremendous in some families. It is like Niagara Rapids, and yet men have clung to a rock and been rescued.

There is a family in New York whose wealth has rolled up into many millions that was founded by a man who, after he had vast estate sent back a paper of tacks because they were two cents more than he expected. Grip and grind and gouge in the fourth generation--I suppose it will be grip and grind and gouge in the twentieth generation. The thirst for intoxicants has burned down through the arteries of a hundred and fifty years. Pugnacity or combativeness characterize other families. Sometimes one form of evil, sometimes another form of evil. But

IT MAY BE RESISTED,

it has been resisted. If the family frailty be avarice, cultivate unselfishness and charity, and teach your children never to eat an apple without offering somebody else half of it. Is the family frailty combativeness, keep out of the company of quick-tempered people, and never answer an impertinent question until you have counted a hundred both ways, and after you have written an angry letter keep it a week before you send it, and then burn it up! Is the family frailty timidity and cowardice, cultivate backbone, read the biography of brave men like Joshua or Paul, and see if you cannot get a little iron in your blood. Find out what the family frailty is, and set body, mind and soul in battle array.

CONQUER YOUR WILL.

I think the genealogical table was put in the first chapter of the New Testament, not only to show our Lord's pedigree, but to show that a man may rise up in an ancestral line and beat back successfully all the influences of bad heredity. See in that genealogical table that good King Asa came of vile King Abia. See in that genealogical table that Joseph and Mary and the most illustrious Being that ever touched our world, or ever will touch it, had in their ancestral line scandalous Rehoboam and Tamar and Bathsheba. If this world is ever to be Edenized--and it will be--all the infected families of the earth are to be regenerated, and there will some one arise in each family line and open a new genealogical table. There will be some Joseph in the line to reverse the evil influence of Rehoboam, and there will be some Mary in the line to reverse the evil influence of Bathsheba. Perhaps the star of hope may point down to your manger. Perhaps you are to be the hero or the heroine that is to put down the brakes and stop that long train of genealogical tendencies and switch it off on another track from that on which it has been running for a century. You do that, and I will promise you as fine a palace as the architects of heaven can build, the archway inscribed with the words: "More than conqueror."

ADOPTED CHILDREN.

But whatever your heredity, let me say, you may be sons and daughters of the Lord God 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 God 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 God! Heir of mortality! Take your inheritance!

THE MOTHER OF ALL.

"And the Lord God 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 God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man."--GENESIS 2:21, 22.

It is the first Saturday 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 Saturday 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 grass. 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