In this discourse Dr. Talmage tells something of what he expects the next hundred years will achieve and declares that the outlook is most inspiring; text, II Samuel XXIII, "A morning without clouds."
"What do you expect of this new century?" Is the question often asked of me, and many others have been piled with the same inquiry. In the realm of invention I expect something as startling as the telegraph and telephone and the X- ray. In the realm of poetry I expect as great poets as Longfellow and Tennyson. In the realm of medicine I expect the cure of cancer and consumption. In the realm of religion I expect more than one Pentecost like that of 1857, when 500,000 souls professed to have been converted. I expect that universal peace will reign and that before the arrival of the two thousandth year gunpowder will be out of use except for blasting rocks or pyrotechnic entertainment. I expect that before the new century has expired the millennium will be fully inaugurated. The twentieth century will be as much an improvement on the nineteenth century as the nineteenth century was an improvement on the eighteenth.
I thank God for the place of our residence, and while there are a thousand things that ought to be corrected and many wrongs that ought to be corrected and many wrongs that ought to be overthrown, while I thank God for the past, I look forward this morning to a glorious future…
In that day of which I speak taxes will be a mere nothing. Now our businessmen are taxed for everything. City taxes, county taxes, State taxes, United States taxes, stamp taxes, license taxes, manufacturing taxes-taxes, taxes, taxes! Our business men have to make a small fortune every year to pay their taxes. What fasteus on our great industries this awful load? Crime, individual and official. We have to pay the board of the villalus who are incarcerated in our prisons. We have to take care of the orphans of those who plunged into their graves through beastly indulgence. We have to support the municipal governments, which are expensive just in proportion as the criminal proclivities are vast and tremendous. Who supports the nimshouses and police stations and all the machinery of municipal government? The taxpayers.
But in the glorious time of which I speak grievous taxation will all have ceased. There will be no need of supporting criminals. Virtue will have taken the place of vice. There will be no orphan asylums, for parents will be able to leave a competency to their children. There will be no voting of large sums of moneys for some municipal Improvement, which moneys, before they get to the improvement, drop into the pockets of those who voted them. No oyer and terminer kept up at vast expense to the people. No impaneling of juries to try theft and arson and murder and slander and blackmail. Better factories, grander architecture, finer equipage, larger fortunes, richer opulence-"a morning without clouds."…
In that day of which I speak do you believe that there will be any mid-night carousal? Will there be any kicking off from marble steps of shivering mendicants? Will there be any unwashed, unfed, uncombed children? Will there be any blasphemies in the street? Will there be any inebriates staggering past? No. No wine stores, no lager beer saloons, no breweries where they make the three XXX's no bloodshot eye, no bloated cheek, no instruments of ruin and destruction, no fist pounded forehead. The grandchildren of that women who goes down the street with a curse, stoned by the boys that follow her, will be the reformers and the philanthropists and the Christian men and the honest merchants of our great cities…