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hurry, and one of them gets on the lid and cranches it down to its place in the ground. Stop! Wait for the city missionary until he can come and read a chapter, or say, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." "No," say the men of the spade, "we have three or four more cases just like this to bury before night." "Well," I say, "how, then, is the grave to be filled up?" Christ suggests a way. Perhaps it had better be filled up with stones. "Let those who are without sin come and cast a stone at her," until the excavation is filled. Then the wagon rolls off, and I see a form coming slowly across the Potter's Field. He walks very slowly, as his feet hurt. He comes to that grave, and there he stands all day and all night, and I come out and I accost him, and I say, "Who art thou?" And he says, "I am the Christ of Mary Magdalen!" And then I thought that perhaps there might have been a dying prayer, and that there might have been penitential tears, and around that miserable spot at the last there may be more resurrection pomp than when Queen Elizabeth gets out of her mausoleum in Westminster Abbey.

But I must close the two lanterns.

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CHAPTER VI.

SATANIC AGITATION.

"The devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth he hath but a short time."-Revelation xii: 12.

Somehow the enemy of all good has found out what will be the hour of his dismissal from this world. He cried out to Christ: "Hast thou come to torment us before the time?" It is a healthful symptom that Satan is so active now in all our cities. It is the indication that he is going out of business. From the way that he flies around, he is practically saying: "Give me 500,000 souls; give me New York and Brooklyn; give me Boston and Philadelphia and Cincinnati; give me all the cities, and give them to me quickly, or I will never get them at all." That Satan is in paroxysm of excitement is certain. His establishments are nearly bankrupted. That the powers of darkness are nervous, knowing their time is short, is evident from the fact that, if a man stand in a pulpit speaking against the great iniquities of the day, they all begin to flutter.

A few nights ago, riding up Broadway, I asked the driver to stop at a street-lamp that I might better examine my memorandum (it happened to be in front of a place of amusement), when a man rushed out with great alarm and excitement, and said to the driver, "Is that Talmage you have inside there?" Men write me with commercial handwriting, protesting, evidently be

cause they fear that sometimes in their midnight carousal they may meet a Christian reformer and explorer. I had thought to preach three or four sermons on the night side of city life; but now that I find that all the powers of darkness are so agitated and alarmed and terrorized, I plant the battery for new assault upon the castles of sin, and shall go on from Sabbath morning to Sabbath morning, saying all I have to say, winding up this subject by several sermons on the glorious daybreak of Christian reform and charity which have made this cluster of cities the best place on earth to live in. Meanwhile, understand that whatever Satanic excitement may be abroad is only in fulfillment of the words of my text: "The devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweththat he hath but a short time."

A few nights ago, passing over from Brooklyn by South Ferry, our great metropolis looked like a mountain of picturesqueness and beauty. There were enough stars scattered over the heavens to suggest the street-lainps of that city which hath no need of the sun. The masts of the shipping against the sky brought to us the cosmopolitan feeling, and I said, "All the world is here." The spires of St. Paul's, and St. George's, and of Trinity pointed up through the starlight toward the only rescue for the dying populations of our great cities. Long rows of lamps skirted the city with fire. More than ten thousand gaslights, united with those kindled in towers and in the top stories of establishments which ply great industries in perpetual motion, threw on the sky from horizon to horizon the radiance of a vast illumination. Landing on New York side, the first thing that confronted us was the greatest nuisance and the grandest relief which New York has experienced in the last thirty years, the elevated railway, which, while it has commercial

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significance, has more moral meaning. Ruin and death to the streets through which it runs, it is the means of moral salvation to the crowded and smothered tenementhouses, which have been slaying their thousands year by year. Was there ever such a disfigurement and sacrification of carpentry and engineering that wrought such a blissful result? The great obstacle to New York morals is the shape of the island. More than nine miles long, in some places it is only a mile and a half wide. While this immense water frontage of twenty miles is grand for commerce, it gives crowded residence to the population, unless, by some rapid mode of transit, they can be whirled to distant homes at night, and whirled back again in the morning. These people must be near their work. Some of them do not like ferriage. Many of them are afraid of water. From the looks of some of their hands and faces, you find it proved that they are afraid of water. Hence they are huddled together in tenement-houses, which are the destruction of all health, all modesty, and the highest style of morals. For the last thirty years New York has been crowded to death. Hence, when on the night of our exploration we saw the rail-train flying through the air, I said to myself, "This is the first practical alleviation of the tenement-house system." People of small means will have an opportunity of getting to the better air and the better morals and the better accomodations of the country. But let not this style of improvement be made at the expense of those whose property is destroyed by the clatter and bang and wheeze of mid-air locomotive. Let cities, like individuals, pay for damages wrought, and for horses frightened out of their harness, and for carriages smashed against the curbstone. New York and Brooklyn and all our great cities need what London has already gained—

underground railroads which shall, without hindrance and without danger and without nuisance, put down our great populations just where they want to be, morning and night.

Passing up through the city, on the left was Castle Garden, now comparatively unattractive; but as we went past, my boyhood memory brought back to me the time when all that region was crowded with the finest equipages of New York and Brooklyn, and Castle Garden was thronged with a great multitude, many of whom had paid $14 for a seat to hear Jenny Lind sing. While God might make a hundred such artists in a year, He makes only one for a century. He who heard her sing would have no right to complain if he never heard any more music until he heard the doxology of the one hundred and forty and four thousand. There was the music of two worlds in her voice. While surrounded by those who almost deified her, she wrote in a private album a verse which it may not be wrong to quote:

In vain I seek for rest
In all created good;
It leaves me still unblest

And makes me cry for God.
And sure at rest I cannot be

Until my heart finds rest in Thee.

That was the secret of her music, and never, either day or night, do I pass Castle Garden, but I think of the Swedish cantatrice and the excited and vociferating assemblage, the majority of whom have joined the larger assemblages of the next world.

Passing on up into New York, we left on the right hand, the once fashionable Bowling Green, around which the wealth of New York congregated-the once elegant drawing-rooms, now occupied by steamship companies,

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