Honey from a Strange Hive

“And, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcass of the lion.” — Judges xiv., 8.

A GIANT, unarmed, is on his way to Timnath, Turning aside from the road and sauntering in the jungles, suddenly a lion, with terrific roar, springs upon him. Seizing the uprearing monster by the jaws, with iron grip he twists and wrenches them apart, leaving the lion dead by the roadside. What the ordinary hunter does with trap, and trained elephants, and armed band, and fire-arms skillfully aimed at the prey, this giant did with his two hands. About a year after, going along by that place, he very naturally turned aside to see the carcass of the lion he had slain, A strange sight! There were the bones, and honey in the hollow of the skeleton. What a strange hive in which to gather honey! You might think it peculiar that bees, which are the most cleanly of all insects, should select such a place as that. Not strange at all. In that hot climate, and where there are so many other insects, in a few days all marks of death and pollution have gone from the carcass, and the skeleton is as pure and clean as the boxes in which bees in our day gather the wealth of gardens and meadows and orchards. It was a whole year after when the giant came along, and out of the bleached skeleton got that honey for himself and for his comrades.

Well, my friends, a lion has met you in the way — a lion fiercer than that which, putting its mouth to the ground, makes the Numidian jungle quake with its bellowing. Some monster bereavement has come upon you, and with merciless paw struck down your loved one, dragging him off into the dark jungles of death. All unarmed, you felt unable to cope with the grizzly, gaping, all-devouring monster; but after you had prayed a while you rose in the strength of God, and destroyed that monster trouble. You snapped it in twain. You trampled it under your foot. You left it by the roadside. And, coming along that way to-day, you see that all the promises of God have swarmed there, and the bleached skeleton of the slain monster is filled with honey from all the gardens of heaven. The jaws of the monster that gaped upon you have become the hive of sweetest Christian consolation. To bring a platter of that honey to all bereaved souls who may be in this house to-day is my work, first bringing it in general, and then to one specific trouble, the service this morning being in memoriam.

I think there is no sweeter or more potent consolation than the fact that we are to be re-associated in the future world with our Christian friends. I shall bring no passages to prove such a fact. That I have done in other sermons. I shall take it all for granted, supposing you believe it, only trying to show you what are the uses of such a warm-hearted. Christian theory. I would to God, while we are thinking about it, the church on earth might seem to respond to the church in heaven! During the last war I was down for a little while in the army, and 1 noticed in the night-time that one division of the army would signal to the other division, and there were times in the night when the sky seemed written all over with letters and words of fire, one division signaling to another division.

And so I would have it now, the church on earth signaling its joy to heaven, and heaven signaling back its joy to earth; for we are diiierent divisions of one great host:

“One army of the living God,
To his command we bow;
Part of the host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now.”

This idea of future association with our departed friends is honey out of the slain lion. In the first place, this consideration exalts and gives stability to Christian friendship. If our association is only a matter of five or ten or thirty years, it is not worth much. Can it be that our attachment to each other has such short arms that it can not reach across the grave? We go into a rail-train, and we sit down for a few hours beside a stranger, and talk with him. Then he leaves at one station, and we leave at another. He never thinks of us again; we never think of him again. Is that a type of our Christian attachments? Oh no. We are, in heaven, to rise up amidst infinite congratulations to renew our association. The only difference between our •acquaintanceship here and our acquaintanceship there will be that there we shall know each other better and love each other more. Death will not strike any thing out of our association but its imperfections. Wading down into the river of death, it will only bathe off our impurities. If you now count me to be your friend, when I shall have quit all my sins and follies and imperfections, and my entire nature is uplifted before the throne of God, you will have for me a millionfold greater attachment. If my friendship to you is merely because you invite me to grand entertainments, or because you allow me to have your

SiO HONEY FROM A STRANGE HIVE.

name on the back of my notes, such a mercenary and half-hearted attachment as that can not stride across the grave. But this communing of heart with heart, this mingling of sympathy with sympathy, this feeling which leads us to carry each other’s burdens, and weep each other’s sorrows, and laugh in each other’s joy — all these are prophecies of eternal intimacy. You and I may soon part; we may pitch our tents in different zones, our graves may be cleft in opposite sides of the earth; but the scenes in which we now mingle will be renewed under milder skies. And so I strike hands with you to-day in a friendship which shall bloom immortal after the mountains have crumbled, and the stars that flower in celestial gardens shall have wilted in the hot breath of a judgment-day-.

Again, this idea of future association ought to assuage 0U7’ bereavements. There is not a family in this house to-day that has not heard the tramp of the pall -bearers. There is hardly a house on all these streets that has not had its craped door-bell. I look into your upturned faces to-day, and see the marks of many griefs. They have wrinkled your brow. They have dropped a shadow under your eye. They have taken the color out of your cheek. There have been awful agonies of separation that have gone crashing down through the heart-strings. This world is not so bright as it used to be before such and such a light was put out. You walk with listless step along places where once you danced with delight. The spring grass of this April day would have been above your grave but for the consolation of the thought that you would be reunited with the departed in the better world. The dying one spake of that heavenly greeting, and for that hour you are waiting — waiting while the home is desolate; “waiting while the years go tediously by; waiting while the heart continues to break — and you shall not be disappointed. Your lives shall join again. Hand to hand. Heart to heart. Jubilee to jubilee. Throne to throne. Hallelujah to hallelujah.

The most frequent trial that comes across the families of the earth is the loss of children. The vast majority of the race may not reach manhood and womanhood. Infantile diseases are the gauntlet they can not ran. It seems as if this world were too chill and cold and drear for the flowers of childhood, so the heavenly gardener takes them in. You look down as you think of the little one that God took out of your cradle. At the moment when he was the most promising — at that moment the blast came. Oh! that was a grief — the closing of the lids over the blue eyes that shall never sparkle again at your coming. That was a heart-rending — the putting of the burial flowers that some playmate had brought into the hand that used to pluck its own wild flowers from the field, and gather them in bunches and wear them in her flaxen hair. And sometimes you sit down and look at the floor by the hour, until within the small pattern of the carpet at which you stare there come bounding in with mirth and gladness the feet that have long been still; and you wake up in the midnight as though you had heard the call of a loved one, as though it were a cry of distress, “Mother! mother!” But you fall back, for it is all a dream. I wish I could to-day hang one picture in your nursery, hang it over the place where your little ones used to play; hang it right between the windows up against which they used to press their sunny faces — a picture of the heavenly greeting. You know how it was after you had been absent a long

3i2 HONEY FHOJT A STRANGE HIVE.

while, and, coming home, they saw you before you got up to the front of the house, and they shouted, “They have come! they have come!” and they held to your dress, and told you a hundred things at once, and almost blocked up your entrance to the house with their gladness. So, methinks, it will be when you at last enter heaven’s gate; the shout will be, “She’s come! She’s come!” And they will put garlands on your brow and palms in your hands, and clap and sing, waking up heaven to brighter gladness with their sweet voices and their bounding feet and their jubilant hosannas.

“How shall we know them, the infant race?
How will the mother her loved one trace?
By the thrill which, when first he smiled,
Came o’er her soul, will she know her child I”

Oh glorious anticipation, that with all our Christian dead, whether young or old, we shall meet again! Be patient, therefore. No trouble, no comfort. No cross, no crown. No battle, no victory. No slain lion of assault, no hived honey of Christian consolation.

Again, this consideration gives great 2)eace to the dying. The step out of this world into the next is a very mysterious step; and though we are promised brilliant escort, some very good people shudder about dying. Bat how different that passage seems in one’s history if he realizes that he is going from a home circle here to a home circle there; that one moment after he has said “Good-night” to friends on earth he says “Good-morning” to friends in heaven. Oh, this irradiates the pallid cheek of the dying. This rekindles the lustre of the closing eye. This lifts the hand as though to join in the heavenly hand-shaking. It is the thought that he is surrounded by friends now and will be surrounded by friends there. It is the thought th;it he is only going from one room to another in “the house of many mansions,” Just as when you get into a boat, and some one on ‘the shore steadies you while you get in, and some one in the boat helps you, so it will be when you come to die: there will be friends here to help yon off, and friends there to help you in. You know very well that if you are to cross a swift stream, you need to take sight by some bluflf or tree or fixed object; and so, when we come down to cross the swift currents of death, we had just better put our eye upon the highlands crowned with the castles of our own loved ones, and then pull and pull for the beach,

“Steer this way, brother,
Steer straight for me;
Here, safe in heaven,
I am waiting for thee.”

Under this anticipation, Death, no more a lion, bears to us chalices of honey,

I bring the consolation of this subject especially to the friends of Gasherie De Witt, on this and the other side of the Atlantic, I parted with him three years ago at Victoria Station, England. Many of you parted with him at the Cunard wharf in Jersey City. Others of yon parted with him at the door of the village church in Belleville, Others of you parted with him in the last moment at the foot of Mont Blanc, But we shall meet again. He was a man worth meeting. Eighteen years ago he first dawned upon me in the parsonage at Belleville, where he had come to welcome me to my new home. Since then I have been with him in a great variety of circumstances, and, beginning by thinking well of him, I have loved him more and more as the years rolled by. He was born to be a leader, and by common consent men fell into line. He was aglow with enthusiasm, and flamed when advocating the right or denouncing the wrong. He did not take things by slow besiegement, but by storm. While others planned, he both planned and executed. With his own hand he made his fortune; but though the money came rapidly, the more rapidly did his heart enlarge. He had done the work of an octogenarian at mid-life. He was one of the few men who can do many things well. Whether advocating the building of a railroad, or inventing a new machine, or hunting in a Southern forest, or speaking in a legislative hall, or advocating a temperance reform, or wielding a painter’s pencil, or arousing a church meeting, he was an expert, a rnarksman, a connoisseur, an agitator, a commander. He was alwaj-s right, and never afraid; well-balanced, yet quick; conservative where things ought to be preserved, radical where they ought to be destroyed. He was impatient of time-serving people; explosive with red-foced indignation at any thing like meanness; tearfully tender with suffering; a bubbling well of sympathy; a many -keyed soul, on which you might play anthem or dirge, battle march or lullaby. But I think the master-passion of his soul was Christian generosity. He gave to his elder son counsel that I have never heard of being given in a dying hour, and that was, “Be generous.” He went everywhere, searching for sick ministers and feeble churches and struggling young men. It was his life to help somebody. At the dedication of our first Tabernacle he arose six times in the audience to make contribution, his tongue thick with that paralysis which helped after a while to end his life. I went to him, and laid before him the policy of a Lay College, the object of which should be the edacation of laymen for practical Christian work in all denominations. He slapped bis hand on his knee, and said, “That’s just what we want. I have been waiting for something of that kind for twenty years. The ministers can not do this work all alone. You must get the troops massed, and the private Christians of all denominations drilled for work. Go ahead, Talmage, and I’ll back you.” And he did back me with his money, and with his prayers, and with his counsel, from his dying pillow sending me stirring word of encouragement. The tide of influence through that institution set in motion will roll on forever. Many souls have already been brought to God through the instrumentality of the men who have been trained there. That institution would not have been formed but for the financial encouragement of Mr. De Witt. A colony of Chinese came near his residence, and at his own expense he opened a school to educate them for God and heaven; and in the long procession that followed him on the funeral day there was nothing more impressive than the saddened faces of those Chinese as they marched on after the dead body of their benefactor. That man turned his back on his elegant mansion, and went out for the most dismal

work that a man ever does — the hunting-up of his lost health. He sought for it in England, in Germany, in Italy, in Switzerland, staying long enough in the Christian chapels of foreign countries to help them with his money and with his prayers; staying long enough in the picture-galleries of Dresden to copy with his own hands some of the works of the great masters, astonishing the native artists with his skill; then coming to Geneva, Switzerland, to lie down and die in awful physical excruciation. It seemed as if God said to him, “Your search for health amidst the mountains of this world is a failure. Now, come up higher; breathe a better air. In the deep fountains of the rock bathe off all your physical tortures. There is no sorrow that heaven can not cure.” Some of his last utterances have been preserved. You would like to hear them. They are more jubilant than sad; some of them exquisitely poetic, others have the call of a clarion:” ‘This is evidently the end. My Saviour is coming for me. God will bless you, and raise you up protectors.’ There had been for three days one of the high mountain winds which we had feared would annoy him, but dared not allude to it, for fear of drawing his attention to it. He did not seem to notice it. Sunday morning broke clear, beautiful, and still, with a light fall of snow covering the whole landscape. He kissed me, and said, ‘I have no pain this morning, and my whole soul is in perfect peace. Thank God for this blessed peace. He giveth his beloved sleep. Oh, my dear wife! it is only the parting that I dread. We have been together so many years, so many happy years; but my Saviour is close to me now, my blessed, precious Saviour.’ And he put out his arms as though he would clasp him, while his whole face lighted up with love. ‘I welcome thee, I embrace thee. He will keep you, give you friends, keep our children always. Tell my dear mother I would have come to her if I could, but God ordered it otherwise. It will be only a short time before we shall meet again, and I will watch over her till then, if I can. Praise God for his mercy in raising up to me friends on both sides the ocean from among his children. This is the happiest day of my life. Notwithstanding the anguish of body, there is perfect happiness within. The storms among the mountains arc all over. There is perfect quiet. So it is with my life. Not that I have had particular storms, but the storms of my life are over now, and there is only perfect peace.’ He lay still for a few minutes, and commenced again, ‘There is a new, pure covering over Mont Blanc. Down over all the mountains and valleys, it covers every thing — all. That is an emblem of the new, pure covering over my life — the covering Jesus has given me. God grant it may cover every thing — all.’ He wanted the girls to sing ‘Rock of Ages,’ and ‘Just as I am,’ They did so, and at the end of every verse he seemed to pour his whole soul out in uttering the words, ’ 0 Lamb of God! I come.’

“He was just expressing his regret, Monday morning, that he had done so little for Jesus, when a letter came from the Lay College, telling him of its prosperity, and containing a resolution offered by the professors and students at a special meeting, expressing their gratitude for his sympathy and co-operation. This letter was very comforting, recalling to his mind- that he had done some very efiicient work for the Master, after all. Wednesday evening, at eight or nine o’clock, he dropped out of his suffering into a quiet slumber, which ended with three long-drawn breaths at half-past twelve.”

So Gasherie De Witt was emancipated. So he woke up. So he began to live. So he ascended. He came along where Death was, and “behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcass of the lion.” If I had ten thousand tears, I would not weep one of them for our departed friend. He might better weep over our bondage than we over his liberation. I save my tears for myself and for the friends whom he has left behind. Alas for the home, beautiful but devastated! The pictures are there and the books are there and all the familiar surroundings are there; but he who made the pictures, and he who bought the books, and he who planned the house, and he who laid out the grounds comes not up the hill, nor is his quick, strong footstep heard in the door-way. May the Lord Almighty comfort you to-day. He who helped your husband and your fother to die will help you in this sore bereavement. O widowed soul! O orphaned children! 0 mourning kindred! in God is thy refuge, and beneath thee are the everlasting arms.

I see in the audience a goodly number of his village neighbors and business associates. They have come in this morning from Belleville. You must have started early to join in this service. You are my acquaintances as well. Some of you the first parishioners I ever had. How do you do to-day, my old Belleville friends? Your presence rolls in upon me the m.emories of the past. I baptized in infancy some of those maidens. I united some of you in holy marriage. I buried some of your dead. I welcomed some of you into the kingdom of Christ. Good old da3’s we used to have together, did we not? And now, after so long a separation, we meet to-day to bend over the same sorrow, and to learn the lessons of the same providence. You knew and loved Gasherie De Witt. You will never bear his voice again in the village councils, nor will you greet him again to your firesides. But you know that if there is any such place as heaven, he is there; if there is any such being as God, Gasherie De Witt is with him. Oh, my friends! aspire after the same high residence. When you quit your abode on the banks of the beautiful Passaic, may you go up to walk on the margin of the river of life with your old friends and companions, and have explained to your everlasting satisfaction why Gasherie De Witt was put to so much pain; and why he must die so far away from home; and why he must go away from his family and the Church and the world at a time when they could so poorly afford to spare him.

To all this throng to-day there comes a lesson. Among the last words of this man were these: “There is no hope to live by or die by but the Christian hope.” Do you believe it? If so, to-day seek your eternal salvation. If you should this moment be hurled out of life, would you be ready? Not all ready. In proportion to the brightness of a Christian’s death-bed is the darkness of a sinner’s death-bed. He sings no song. He sees no light. He leaves behind him no consolation. Death to him is a wild catastrophe. He goes from the world stumbling out of it, feeling his way into the blackness of darkness forever.

0 dying soul! try something better. Standing to-day, as

1 do, in the brilliant halo that surrounds a Christian’s death-bed, the cry of desolated hearts overpowered by the chanting of angelic cohorts come to fetch a good man home, I commend to you Gasherie De Witt’s Redeemer. May God this moment overshadow you with his saving presence! May the Holy Ghost this moment overwhelm you with his striving!

So shall the swarms of trouble that come to buzz and sting and poison your soul leave for you the saccharine of immortal flowers. For while the honey of this world’s consolation often nauseates and sickens, like that of Trebizond, because the bees make it out of the rhododendron, the honey of Christ’s Gospel gives life and health, like that which drips from the delicious combs of Mount Ida and Chamouni.