VISIONS OF THE NIGHT
Dr. Talmage Shows How God Has
Honored the Dream.
|t Ha* Decided the Fate of Nations
and Has Changed Coarse of
World's History—Warn
ings from God.
[Copyright, 1901, by Louis Klopsch, N. Y.]
Washington. Dec. 1.
In this discourse Dr. Talmage dis
cusses a much talked of subject, and
one in which all are interested. The
text is Joel 2, 28: “I will pour out my
spirit upon all flesh; your old men
shall dream dreams, your young men
shall see visions.”
In this photograph of the millen
nium the dream is lifted into great
conspicuity. You may say of a dream
that it is nocturnal fantasia or that
it is the absurd combination of wak
ing thoughts, and with a slur of in
tonation you may say: “It is only a
dream,” but God" has honored the
dream by making it the avenue
through which again and again He
has marched upon the human soul,
decided the fate of nations and
changed the course of the world’s his
tory. God appeared in a dream to
Abimelech, warning him against an
unlawful marriage; in a dream to
Jacob, announcing by the ladder set
against the sky full of angels the
communication between earth and
heaven; in a dream to Joseph, fore
telling his coming power under the
figure of all the sheaves of the
harvest bowing down to his sheaf;
to the chief butcher, foretelling his
disimprisonment; to the chief baker,
announcing his decapitation; to
Pharaoh, showing him first the seven
plenty years and then the seven
famine-struck years, under the figure
of the seven lean cows, devouring the
seven fat cows; to Solomon, giving
him the choice between wisdom and
riches and honor; to a warrior, under
the figure of a barley cake smiting
down a tent, encouraging Gideon in
his battle against the Midianites; to
Nebuchadnezzar, under the figure of
a broken image and a hewn-down
tree, foretelling the overthrow of His
power; to Joseph of the New Testa
ment, announcing the birth of Christ
in his own household, and again bid
ding him fly from Herodic persecu
tions; to Pilate's wife, warning him
not to become complicated with the
judicial overthrow of Christ.
■We all admit that God in ancient
times and under Bible dispensation
addressed the people through dreams.
The question now is, does God appear
in our day and reveal Himself through
dreams? That is the question every
body asks, and that question I will
try to answer. You ask me if I be
lieve in dreams. My answer is, I do,
but all I have to say will be under
five heads.
Remark the First.—The Scriptures
are so full of revelations from God
that if we get no communication
from Him in dreams we ought, never
theless, to be satisfied.
With 20 guidebooks to tell you how
to get to New York or Pittsburg or
London or Glasgow or Manchester do
you want a night vision to tell you
how to make the journey? We have
in this Scripture full direction, in re
gard to the journey of this life and
how to get to the celestial city, and
with this grand guidebook, this mag
nificent directory, we ought to be sat
isfied. I have more faith in a decision
to which 1 come when I am wide
awake than when I am sound asleep.
I have noticed that those who give a
great deal of their time to studying
dreams get their brains addled. They
are very anxious to remember what
they dreamed about the first night
they slept in a new house. If in their
dream they take the hand of a corpse,
they are going to die. If they dream
of a garden, it means a sepulcher.
If something turns out according to
a night vision, they say: “Well, I am
not surprised. I dreamed it.” If it
turns out different from the night
vision, they say: “Well, dreams go
by contraries.” In their efforts to
put their dreams into rhythm they
put their waking thoughts into dis
cord. Now, the llible is so full of
revelation that we ought, to be satis
fied if we get no further revelation.
If there should come about a crisis
in your life upon which the llible does
not seem to be sufficiently specific,
go to God in prayer and you will get
especial direction. 1 have more faith,
99 times out of 100, in directions given
you with the Bible in your lap and
your thoughts uplifted in prayer to
God than in all the information you
will get unconscious on your pillow.
Kemark the Second.—All dreams
have an important meaning. They
prove that the soul is comparatively
independent of the body. The eyes
are closed, the senses are dull, the
entire body goes into a lethargy
which in all languages is used as a
type of death, and then the soul
spreads its wing and never sleeps. It
leaps the Atlantic ocean and mingles
in scenes 3,000 miles away. It travels
great reaches of time, Hashes back 80
years, and the octogenarian is a boy
again in his father's house. If the
soul, before it has entirely broken its
chain of llesh. can do all this, how far
can ft leap, what circles can it cut,
when it is fully liberated? Every
dream, whether agreeable or harass
ing, whether sunshiny or tempestu
ous, means so much that, rising from
your couch, you ought to kneel down
and say: “O (iod, am I immortal!
\t hence? Whither? Two natures.
My soul caged now—what when the
door of the cage is opened? If my
soul can fly so far in the few hours
in which my body is asleep in the
night, how far can it fly when my
body sleeps the long sleep of the
grave?” Oh, this power to drea'm,
how startling, how overwhelming!
immortal, immortal!
Remark the Third.—The vast ma
jority of dreams are merely the re
sult of disturbed physical conditions
and are not a supernatural message.
Job had carbuncles, and he was
scared in the night. lie says: “Thou
nearest me with dreams and terri
liest me with visions.” Solomon had
in overwrought brain, overwrought
with public business, and he suffered
from erratic slumber, and he writes
in Ecclesiastes: “A dream cometh
through the multitude of business.”
Dr. Gregory, in experimenting with
dreams, found that a bottle of hot
water put to his feet while in slum
ber made him think he was going
up the hot sides of Mount Etna. An
other morbid physician, experiment
ing with dreams, his feet uncovered
through sleep, thought he was rid
ing in an Alpine diligence. But a
great many dreams are merely nar
cotic disturbances. Anything that
you see while under the influence of
chloral or brandy or hasheesh or
laudanum is not a revelatipn from
God.
uo not mistake narcotic disturb
ance for Divine revelation. But I
have to tell you that the majority of
the dreams are merely the penalty
of outraged digestive organs, and
you have no right to mistake the
nightmare for heavenly revelation.
Late suppers are a warranty deed
for bad dreams. Highly spiced sal
ads at 11 o’clock at night, instead
of opening the door heavenward,
open the door infernal and diabol
ical. You outrage natural law, and
you insult the God who made those
laws. It takes from three to five
hours to digest food, and you have
no right to keep your digestive or
gans in struggle when the rest of
your body is in somnolence. The
general rule is, eat nothing after six
o’clock at night, retire at ten, sleep
on your right side, keep the window
open five inches for ventilation, and
other worlds will not disturb you
much. By physical maltreatment you
take the ladder that Jacob saw in
his dream and you lower it to the
nether world, allowing the ascent of
the demoniacal. Dreams are mid
night dyspepsia. An unregulated de
sire for something to eat keeps it
ruined. The world during 6,000 years
has tried in vain to digest that first
apple. The world will not be evan
gelized until we get rid of a dyspep
tic Christianity. Healthy people do
not want this cadaverous and sleepy
thing that some people call religion.
They want a religion that lives reg
ularly by day and sleeps soundly by
night. If through trouble or coming
on of old age or exhaustion of Chris
tian service you cannot sleep well,
then you may expect from God
“songs in the night,” but there are
no blessed communications to those
who willingly surrender to indi
gestibles. Napoleon’s army at Leip
sic, Dresden and Borodino came nea
being destroyed through the dis
turbed gastric juices of its command
er. That is the way you have los
some of your battles.
Waking1 thoughts have their echo
in sleeping thoughts. If a man spend
his life in trying to make others
happy and is heavenly minded,
around his pillow he will see cripples
who have got over their crutch and
processions of celestial imperials
and hear the grand march roll down
from drums of Heaven over jasper
parapets. You are very apt to hear
in dreams what you hear when you
are wide awake.
Now, having shown you that, hav
ing a Hible, we ought to be satisfied
with not getting any further com
munication from God, and having
shown you that all dreams have an
important mission since they show
the comparative independence of the
soul from the body, and having
shown you that the majority of
dreams are a result of disturbed
physical conditions, and having
shown you that ( our sleeping
thoughts are apt to be an echo of
our waking thoughts, I come now to
my fifth and most important remark,
and that is to say that it is capable
of proof that God does sometimes in
our day and has often since the
close of the Bible dispensation ap
peared to people in dreams.
All dreams that make you better
are from God. How do I know it? Is
not God the source of all good? It
does not take a very logical mind to
argue that out. Tertuillan and Mar
tin Luther believed in dreams. 1 he
dreams of John lluss are immortal.
St. Augustine, the Christian father,
gives us the fact that a Carthaginian
physician was persuaded of.the im
mortality of the soul by an argument
which l'.e heard in a dream. The night
before liis assassination the wife oi
•Julius Caesar dreamer that her hus
band fell dead across her lap.
It Is possible to prove thai God does
appear in dreams to warn, to Convert
and to save men. My friend, a retired
sea captain and a Christian, tells me
that one night while on the sea he
dreamed that a ship’s crew were in
great suffering. Waking from his
dream, he put about the ship, tacked
in different directions, surprised
everybody on his vessel—they thought
he was going crazy—sailed on irt an
other direction hour after hour and
for many hours until he came to the
perishing crew and rescued them and
brought them to New York. Who con
ducted that dream? The God of the
sea.
Rev. Dr. Bushnell in his marvelous
book entitled “Nature and the Super
natural,” gives the following fact that
he got from Capt. Yount in California,
a fact confirmed by many families:
Capt. Yount dreamed twice one night
that 150 miles away there was a com
pany of travelers fast in the snow.
He also saw in the dream rocks of pe
culiar formation, and, telling this
dream to an old hunter, the hunter
said: “Why, I remember those rocks.
Those rocks are in the Carson valley
pass, 150 miles away.” Capt. Yount,
impelled by this dream, although
laughed at by his neighbors, gathered
men together, took mides and blankets
and started out on the expedition,
traveled 150 miles, saw those very
rocks which he had described in his
dream, found the suffering ones at
the foot of those rocks and brought
I them back to confirm the story of
Capt. Yount. Who conducted that
dream? The God of the snow, the God
of the Sierra Nevadas.
vjtuu Hits oiien ajjpecirtu in resource
and comfort. You have known people
—perhaps it is something I state in
your own experience—you have seen
people go to sleep with bereavements
j inconsolable, and they awakened in
| perfect resignation because of what
they had seen in slumber. Dr. Cran
age, one of the most remarkable men
I ever met—remarkable for benevo
lence and great philanthropies—at
Wellington, England, showed me a
house where the Lord had appeared
in a wonderful dream to a poor wom
an. The woman was rheumatic, sick,
poor to the last point of destitution.
She was waited on and cared for by
another poor woman, her only attend
ant. Word came to her one day that
this poor woman had died, and the in
valid of whom 1 am speaking lay help
less upon the couch, wondering what
would become of her. Tn that mood
she fell asleep. In her dreams she said
the angel of the Lord appeared and
took her into the open air and pointed
in one direction, and there were moun
tains of bread, and pointed in another
direction, and there were mountains
of butter, and pointed in another di
rection, and there were mountains of
all kinds of worldly supply. The an
gel of the Lord said to her: “Woman,
all these mountains belong to your
Father, and do you think He will let
you, His child, hunger and die?” Dr.
Cranage told me by some Divine im
pulse he went into that destitute
home, saw the suffering there and ad
ministered unto it. caring for her all
the way through. Do you tell me that
that dream was woven out of earthly
anodynes? Was that the phantas
magoria of a diseased brain? Xo. Tt
was an all sympathetic God addressing
a poor woman through a dream.
T!ev. Herbert Mendes was converted
to God through a dream of the last
judgment, and many of us have had
some dream of that great day of judg
ment which shall be the winding up
of the world’s history. If you have
not dreamed of it, perhaps to-night
you may dream of that day. There are
enough materials to make a dream—
enough voices, for there shall be the
roaring of the elements and the great
earthquake; enough light for the
dream, for the world shall blaze;
enough excitement, for the mountains
shall fall; enough water, for the ocean
shall rear; enough astronomical phe
nomena, for the stars shall go out;
enough populations, for all the races of
all ages will fall into line of one of
two processions, the one ascending
and the other descending, the one led
by the rider on the white horse of
eternal victory, the other led on by
Apollyon on the black charger of
eternal defeat. The dream comes on
me now, and I see the lightnings from
above answering the volcanic disturb
ances from beneath, and I hear the
long reverberating thunders that shall
wake up the dead, and all the seas,
lifting up their crystal voices, cry:
“Come to judgment!” and all the
voices of the heaven cry: “Come to
judgment!” and crumbling mausol
eum and Westminster abbeys and
pyramids of the dead with marble
voices cry: “Come to judgment!”
And the archangel seizes an instru
ment of music which has never yet
been sounded, an instrument of music
that was made only for one sound,
and, thrusting that mighty trumpet
through the clouds and turning it this
wav, he shall put it to his lip and blow
the" long, loud blast tliat shall make
the solid earth quiver, crying: “Come
to judgment!”
•'Trien from this earthly grossness quit,
Attired in stars, we shall forever sit.”
The I,nn*.»iiH«e.
“You Sundayed in the mountains?"
“Xo, the agent routed us the other
way.”—Detroit Free Press.
PUZZLE PICTURE.
I ’
‘•I WONDER IF MATVDIE WILL SAY THESE EGGS ARE NOT FRESH?”
WHERE IS MANDIE?
PREPONDERANCE OF MEN.
There Are Twenty-Four More Mnle»
Thun Females in Every One
Thousand of Oar Population.
Curiosity, not to say astonishment,
is excited, by th'e recent announcement
of the census bureau. The enumera
tion of 1900 shows that there are more
men and boys than women and girls
in this country and that the difference
exceeds 1,800,000 in a population of
76,303,387. The excess appears more
distinctly perhaps, when it is 9aid that
there are 512 males and only 488 fe
males in every thousand people in the
United States, says the Chicago Trib
une.
What is more this sort of thing has
been going on, with some little fluc
tuation in the percentage, for over half
a century. As long ago as 1850 there
was a distinct numerical superiority
of the male over the female element.
By I860 the preponderance was even
more conspicuous, but in 1S70 less than
for several decades. The returns for
18S0 show a slight gain once more,
though the disparity of I860 was not
quite reached, and those for 1890 a still
further increase. The situation has
scarcely changed in the last ten
years. Indeed, the census bureau
figures out a microscopic falling
off in the growth of the male popula
tion as compared with the female. To
be sure, the excess was only 1.560,097 in
1S90, and has since been enlarged by
254,727; but the bureau finds that the
percentages of gain are not quite alike,
and there are faint indications of a fu
ture reaction.
The state of things here revealed is
the more striking when compared with
that existing- in Europe. Both in the
United Kingdom and on the continent
the women are more numerous than
the men. It is possible to detect forces
that disturb the balance in some of
these countries. But Mr. Porter, su
perintendent of the census of 1890, was
inclined to think that these influences
did not operate perceptibly in Austria
and the Netherlands, and hence that
normally the female sex outnumbers
the male in nearly the proportion of
51 to 49. Comparison with the stand
ard. then, makes the excess of males in
America stranger than if nature ex
hibited strict impartiality.
The two forces which appear to be
chiefly concerned in upsetting the
equilibrium are war and immigration.
And of the two the former is much less
effective. Still, it was powerful enough
to influence the returns in Germany
and France after the famous struggle
of 1870-71. And in the United States it
pulled down the male proportion of
5.112 in every 10,000 in I860 to 5,056 in
1S70.
Migration, of course, works in two
ways. The majority of immigrants are
men. The departures from one coun
try, therefore, leave the other sex in
excess in one part of the world, while
they promote the preponderance of
their own in another. Thus in some
European countries the proportion of
males to females is about 485 to 515.
Now, inasmuch as three out of every
five immigrants who come to the Unit
ed States are men and ten out of every
seventy-five people here are of foreign
birth it is easy to see how important
is this factor in establishing the ratio
between the sexes. In 1S90. for in
stance, the excess of males here was
made up in this proportion: Native
born, 628,797; foreign born. 884,713.
And yet scarcely a seventh of the pop
ulation came from other lands. It is
to this fact, no doubt, that immigra
tion has experienced a slight check in
the last few years and that the recent
slight falling off in masculine ascend
ency here is due.
But people migrate not only from
one country to another, but also from
one part of the country to another.
This is peculiarly true in the United
States. In consequence, there is a de
pletion of the ranks of the sterner sex
in the east and a strong reenforee
ment in the west. Indeed, in the latter
quarter there is a double invasion—
from the more densely populated parts
of our own land and from the old
world. Hence the distribution of the
sexes is not uniform. Along the Atlan
tic seaboard for at least half a century
there has been practically no excess of
males, and on the whole a slight de
ficiency. The superabundance of wom
en has been most conspicuous, though,
in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and
the District of Columbia. Just why
there should be such a situation at the
national capital is not clear. But in
New England a special local agency
has been at work—an influx of factory
girls from Canada. Thus there is an
occasional exception to the rule that
the majority of the immigrants are
males.
As might be expected, the great
est excess of men is to be found
in the far west, in the great ag
ricultural and mining districts.
In Minnesota and Nebraska there
were at least 54 men out of every
100 people for a long time, from 55 to
58 in the Dakotas, and from 60 to 68 in
most of the regions of the west and
southwest. The ratio in Montana was
once as great as 81 out of 100, and even
in 1890 was 661/, to 33y2. A slow,
steady tendency toward equality has
been observable, however, except in
Utah, where the excess of men kept
below the national average until 18S0
and then increased only slightly. The
connection between this fact and po
lygamy is too obvious to need pointing
out.
i _
MAINE’S SKUNK CROP.
Cash ltetnrns from the Pelts nnd the
Oil of the Animals Estimated
at If75,000 a Year,
Now that the frost is on the stubble
in the fields of Maine, the skunk hunt
ers are out for business, says the New
York Sun. The skunk, although
shunned by society in general, is much
sought for by the boys of rural Maine,
because its oil is worth about five dol
lars a gallon for making into liniment
and its pelt sells for from 75 cents to
two dollars, according to color and
thickness of the fur.
The skunk industry is a bigger thing
in Maine than most people suppose,
the annual cash returns being abotit
$75,000. One man in the town of Pros
pect sold last year $200 worth of pelts
and $60 worth of oil, and others have
done as well, while the boys who earn
the price of their winter clothing in
this way are numbered by thousands.
Black skunk pelts are worth about
four dollars apiece.
The purchasers have the skins
tanned and dyed black, and sell them
to furriers, who make them up, under
various names, for the adornment and
comfort of stylish women. The oil
is tried out over a slow fire, and bot
tled. It is a limpid, semi-transparent
fluid, free from odor and much used
by druggists. Applied pure, it is a
favorite remedy for sprains, scalds
and bruises, while mixed with am
monia it makes a liniment that is re
garded with confidence amounting al
most to superstition by the country
people as a cure for every ill.
With all the killing of tens of thou
sands every year, the skunk seems to
increase rather than to decrease in
numbers, and there are more skunks in
itaine to-day than there were ten years
ago, so say the hunters. Naturally an
insect hunter, the skunk does not
thrive w'ell on anything else, and an
attempt made some years ego by a
few farmers to breed them in inclos
ures, with offal as food, was a flat fail
ure. This diet made the animal’s fur
thin and coarse, and they yielded very
little oil. To be useful as well as fra
grant, the skunk must have a wide field
j of activity and all his nights out.