Big Bottom and Its History. 17
ADDRESS OF C. L. MARTZOLFF. It is said that a minister's text is but a peg upon which to hang his sermon. If I were a minister the peg upon which I |
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would hang this speech would be found among the jewels of the wonderful mines of King Solomon - The Book of Proverbs. "Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set." Man has ever been a monument builder, When the Israelites fought with the hosts of Amalek, when the hands of Moses were stayed by Aaron and Hur until the going down of the sun and the Amalekites had been put to the sword, then it was that Moses builded an altar as a memorial of the |
great victory. When David the warrior king sent forth his mighty Joab to wage war upon the Edomites, he celebrated his success by a mon- ument of triumph, an inscribed tablet carved on the rocks of Edom after the manner of eastern kings. But centuries before the Hebrews built their rude memori- als among the hills of Palestine, the monarchs of the Orient had erected upon the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile, monu- ments to commemorate their achievements in war, or to extol the glories of royalty. We are told that at the portals of the sculptured palaces of Nineveh, there were colossal figures of men and beasts carved from white alabaster; that within the interior stretching for miles and miles, the builder of the palace ranged the illustrated record of his exploits. There cut in the walls were represented vast pro- cessions of warriors, and satraps, and eunuchs, and tributary kings winding and winding through the corridors until the mind grows dizzy with the regal splendor and the heart grows sick at the vanity of kings. To-day the antiquarian digs down beneath the accumulated dust of the centuries and from the broken pieces of pottery and the ruined columns he reads its history. Vol. XV- 2. |