INTERDENOMINATIONAL, BUT STRICTI.'V 
 EVANGELICAI, " 
 
 ■-''^tlC 
 
 SEP 1 
 
 V^'^OiOG/fJi ^}^^. 
 
 Rummer 
 
 ^ermons 
 
 iprcacbcJ in 
 
 Zcwt Evangel, 
 
 36roa^^vav; an^ 56tb St., 
 ■Rcw Jljorl? Cits. 
 
 Summer of 1902. 
 
 Published by Francis E. Fitch. 47 Broad Street, New York City. 
 
 m< arc able to publlsb " Souvenir Summer Sermons" 
 throuflb tbe Generosity of mr. Trancis fl. Palmer. 
 
; 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 1. MountaLin-Moving Faith. 
 
 Rev. F. B. Meyer, D. D., London, England. 
 
 2. The Lost Bible. 
 
 Rev. P. vS. Henson, D. D. 
 
 3. The Godhood of Jesus. 
 
 Rev. D. D. McLaurin, D. D. 
 
 4. From Bethel to Bethel. 
 
 Rev. J. Wilbur Chapman, D. D. 
 
 5. A Call to Personal Service. 
 
 Rev. Wilton Merle Sisiith, D. D. 
 
 6. Winning Souls. 
 
 Rev. John BalCOLM Shaw, D. D. 
 
 7. Supreme Moments in Human Life. 
 
 Rev. Geo. C. Lorimer, D. D. 
 
 8. Sowing and Reaping. 
 
 Rev. William Chas. Stinson, D. D. 
 
 9. The Divine Appeal to Man's Will. 
 
 Rev. E. E. Chiveks, ]). D. 
 
 to. At the Door of the Kingdom. 
 
 Robert E. Speer. 
 
 1 1. Jesus. Saving from Sins. 
 
 Rev. Chas. L. Mead. 
 
 12. The Desert and the Garden. 
 
 Rev. G. Campbell Morgan, London. Eng. 
 
 €2'^' 
 
 All orders for this Book to be addressed to 
 Rev. S. Hartweil Pratt, tiS West S7th 
 Street, New York City, until November ro, 
 after that date to 47 Broad Street. 
 
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 nDountaiivflDovincj jfaitb. 
 
 IRev. 3f. JB. mc^cv, D. 2)., 
 
 XonDon, JEnglanD. 
 
 Y 
 
 Mark xi : 22-24. 
 
 HnJ» 3e8U6 answering sa'.tb unto tbcm, Ibavc faitb in O06. 
 3For >-eril? H gav unto ?ou, ^bat wbosocvcr sball sa^ 
 unto tbis mountain, 36e tbou rcmovc^, an^ be tbcu cast 
 into tbc sea ; anb sball not 6oubt in bis bcart, but sball 
 believe tbat tbosc tbings wbicb be saitb sball come to 
 pass; be sball bave wbatsoever be saitb. Xlberetore IF 
 sas unto 'ecu, TOUbat tbings soever ije Besire, wben i^c 
 prav, believe tbat se receive tbcm, an6 y^c sball bave 
 tbem." 
 
 ■OU are all fa- 
 miliar with the 
 incident to 
 which this pas- 
 sage refers. 
 On the morning of 
 this particular day the 
 Saviour left Bethany 
 and for some reason 
 he did so breakfastless. 
 Where was Martha ? 
 Where was Mary ? 
 Where was Lazarus, that they permitted 
 Him to leave their home without food? 
 The reason probably is that He had stolen 
 out very early indeed for prayer — or may, 
 perhaps, have been engaged in prayer all 
 night— so that nobody heard Him leave 
 the house. 
 
 Be that as it may, as He proceeded on 
 His way to Jerusalem He saw the fig tree; 
 and being hungry, He sought fruit, the ap- 
 pearance of the tree justifying Him in ex- 
 
 Pastor of Christ Church, formerly Reverend Newman Hall's, London 
 
 England. The Lincoln Tower was contributed to 
 
 by American friends. 
 
pecting some, as the fruit comes before the 
 leaves. 
 
 But He found none there; and then, in 
 order that He might teach a great spiritual 
 lesson. He cursed the tree. And that tree 
 has been full of lessons to all the centuries 
 since. 
 
 Next morning, as He passed the place 
 again with His disciples, Peter's quick eye 
 saw what had happened, and he called the 
 Lord's attention to the tree. He, instead 
 of deducing the obvious lesson of the curse 
 of God upon spiritual barrenness or sterili- 
 ty, diverged from it and deduced another, 
 which to me is wonderful in depth and 
 strength. 
 
 What He really said was this: You see 
 that tree ; now, if you can reckon on God as 
 I did, you may not only have the power 
 that blighted that tree, but whenever mount- 
 ains block you in you may move mountains. 
 
 Evidently, Jesus in His human life did not 
 work miracles by His divine attributes of 
 omnipotence. He put that aside and pre- 
 fered to live a purely human life, using pure 
 faith in God — the faith that we can have 
 through the Holy Ghost that came at Pen- 
 tecost. 
 
 "Plave faith in God!" What did those 
 words mean? 
 
 I shall never forget the occasion when 
 in my church, Hudson Taylor, the head of 
 the China Inland Mission, stood up and 
 spoke from these words as a text. I did 
 not know all the meaning that there was in 
 them for the speaker, but I remember that 
 he said the words were to be read as saying 
 "Count on God," "Reckon on God's faith- 
 fulness" — not on your faith in God, but 
 upon God's faithfulness to you. 
 
 Afterwards I heard something of his life 
 story. When quite a young man he had 
 heard God say to him, "I am going to evan- 
 gelize inland China, and if you are willing to 
 go there with Me, I will do the work 
 through you." And he determined to 
 obey the call, and so began to reckon on 
 God's faithfulness, with results that are 
 known to all the world. 
 
 Jesus in His earthly life divested Him- 
 self of His omnipotence, which He forbore 
 to use that He might lead such a life as 
 vours and mine might be, and that He might 
 begin and lead the life of faith as you and 
 I can. He is now glorified with the glory 
 He had before the world was made, and has 
 all power in Heaven and on earth delivered 
 to Him. So that He has the human power 
 of the Son and the divine power of God 
 over all, blessed forever. 
 
You will note that He says in effect that 
 all our lives are limited by mountain ranges. 
 These great mountains, how they tower up 
 in our daily lives ! 
 
 You, dear woman, are hemmed in by them 
 in your home; you, man of business, see 
 them in the affairs of this life ; and you^ 
 Christian worker in the slums of New York, 
 are sequestered and shut in by high moun- 
 tains. These shut out the great world be- 
 hind high ramparts, and confine, restrain 
 and narrow the activities of your life. 
 
 ^^'hat are these mountains ? 
 
 Here is one man hemmed in by guilt. 
 His sins seem to rise up before him into 
 the very sky, and in overhanging crags and 
 precipices almost threaten to crush him. 
 
 Another is clogged by the outcome or 
 result of some early sin. He repented long 
 ago, but yet to-day the results of thati 
 wrongdoing loom up high before him. 
 
 Another has great anxieties confronting 
 him, like the mountains of Switzerland, 
 that bar the way to the smiling, sunny plains 
 of Umbria in Italy ; only for him there seems 
 no way either of crossing his Alps or of 
 tunneling through them. 
 
 Others have to face the approach of some 
 disease, either for themselves or some one 
 dear to them — consumption, cancer or some 
 such thing. 
 
 How many of you, if I could only know 
 your hearts, I should find to be penned in 
 and limited by mountains of one kind or 
 another ! They are there the first thing in 
 the morning and the last thing at night. 
 The}' are present with you both summer 
 and winter. Other things change or pass 
 away but these mountains are continually 
 in your sight. 
 
 Xow Jesus says that it is possible for 
 mountains like those to be moved. And 
 wherever you are I bring you glad tidings 
 of great joy — that mountain shall become 
 a plain. One day you shall look for it and 
 find it gone. And instead of its rugged, 
 massive height you shall see the green past- 
 ures, the beautiful rolling land, the prairie, 
 covered with beauty and fruitful harvests. 
 
 I want you to see how this can take place. 
 I rejoice to speak of it because I have so 
 often in my own life seen the mountains go. 
 
 How is this mountain-moving done? 
 
 First, there comes a blessed invitation 
 into the soul that it is not the will of God 
 that your life should be hemmed in by moun- 
 tains. This is said in the Word of God and 
 corroborated by the words of God ; and the 
 more you pray the more clearly you will see 
 that the mountain is not an essential to vour 
 
experience — not meant to exist continually 
 for you. You can base this conviction on 
 the words of promise — the adamantine in- 
 vincible words of God afford solid ground 
 upon which the soul can stand with both 
 feet and from which it can hurl forth to 
 the mountains the words : "Thou shalt re- 
 move!" 
 
 Therefore, I come back to the Bible. I 
 do not need to be told that the sea is salt; 
 I know it : I have only to dip my finger into 
 the brine and to taste it. C3r, that sugar is 
 sweet, for I have proved it. So I do not 
 need to study books of evidence that the 
 Bible is the word of God : There is a quality 
 in it, a fire, a divinity. And just as the 
 canon of Holy Scripture was made by the 
 church of old times, so the hemmed in soul 
 that reads it will detect quality and flavor 
 and power that make it different from all 
 other books that were ever written. 
 
 Such a soul can read, for example, "Cast- 
 ing all your care upon Him, for He careth 
 for you ;" "your Heavenly Father knoweth 
 that ye have need of all these things," and 
 similar passages that furnish love for the 
 heart and truth for the mind. Get the real- 
 ization of these passages into your heart 
 and the conviction will be wrought in your 
 soul that God never meant your life to be 
 always shadowed by high cliffs. 
 
 Second, you begin to pray, and you call 
 to mind the promise of Christ — "All things 
 whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that 
 ye have received them, and ye shall have 
 thenr' (Mark xi :24, r. v.) Then you 
 begin to pray. But mind the quality of 
 your prayer. I want to put emphasis on 
 that point. 
 
 There is a sort of prayer repeated in a 
 kind of plaintive and despairing way. It 
 has been prayed so often, and has never 
 been answered, that those who offer it have 
 little hope of any reply, and it is doubtful 
 if they would pray at all were it not that 
 praying is the only thing to be done. This 
 kind of prayer has a note of hopelessness 
 or despair in it. 
 
 There is another sort of prayer with a 
 note of faith in it : in which the soul feels 
 that — not in its own power — it can count 
 on God to be faithful. 
 
 I have met many people who are always 
 looking at their faith, and they say, "I've 
 got so little faitli." They remind me of an 
 old Scotch lady who had a wide reputation 
 as a woman of faith. A minister called to 
 see her and said he had come because he 
 had heard her spoken of as a woman of 
 great faith. Her reply was : "No. I am not 
 
 6 
 
a woman of great faith. I am a woman of 
 little faith in a great God." That is it. It 
 is a happy day for the soul when it ceases 
 relying on its faith and begins trusting in 
 the faithfulness of God instead. 
 
 Sometimes the woman who "touched the 
 hem of His garment" is thought of as hav- 
 ing had little faith. The fact is that she had 
 great faith. If she had but little faith she 
 would have felt it necessary to take hold of 
 His garment with both hands, or to touch 
 His flesh or to stop Him as He walked. 
 But her faith was so great that she felt 
 sure the merest contact with His garment 
 would be sufficient to heal her. Just so the 
 lightest touch of the faith that counts on 
 God — that forgets whether it is great faith 
 or not because it reckons on God obtains 
 the answer. The faith that does nothing 
 itself, and so leaves God plenty of room 
 to do it all, that is the faith we want. 
 
 People say 'T have not faith enough." 
 You do not want faith enough. It is God 
 that is going to do the work and it is for 
 you to sit still and see Him do it. A friend 
 wrote me a letter the other day, which I 
 was glad to get, chiefly on account of the 
 way in which he concluded it. Many peo- 
 ple sign themselves "Yours faithfully," 
 "Yours sincerely," and so on, when they 
 mean nothing of the kind and may perhaps 
 be trying to take advantage of you even in 
 the very letter itself. But my friend signed 
 himself "Yours to count nn." That is the 
 sort of signature I like to get from my 
 friend; and God has signed all His letters 
 to us in the Bible "Yours to count on." 
 
 Oh, friends, never forget that the best 
 faith is that which is not conscious of being 
 faith at all, but reckons upon God's faithful- 
 ness. I like to go sometimes — as perhaps I 
 shall to-morrow night — out upon the deck 
 of a vessel at night time, and look up at 
 the stars. And as I do so I say "Who has 
 created all these?" And as I remember 
 that through uncounted aeons all those stars 
 have been kept running in their appointed 
 courses with such exactness that no varia- 
 tion of even the smallest fraction of a sec- 
 ond has ever been discovered, I say to my- 
 self, "If God can be faithful in making 
 such a timepiece He will surely be faithful 
 in all that concerns me !" 
 
 I look at Abraham and see how he count- 
 ed on God and how God never failed him; 
 1 see that no man ever trusted God and 
 was put to confusion; and all these things 
 make me say, "I will count on Thee. Thou 
 hast never put any of those who trusted in 
 Thee among mountains without being 
 
 7 
 
abundantly able either to tunnel through 
 them or to reduce them to the level of the 
 plain." 
 
 You say, "I have got God's promise." 
 Pray then, reckoning upon His faithfulness. 
 The more you think of Him the more you 
 will feel at rest; and the day you are able 
 without effort to believe that the mountain 
 will go, you have it from God. "Believe 
 that you have received it" — (I think that 
 is one of the most wonderful things in the 
 whole Bible ; indeed I constantly have to 
 look at that text to see that I have not mis- 
 quoted it). "Believe that you have received 
 it !" 
 
 As yet the mountain is there. As yet the 
 parcel has not come to you. As yet the 
 squadrons of God's angels do not appear 
 hastening to your help ; but as you kneel in 
 prayer you receive. You believe you have 
 got it. The very thing you want is labelled 
 for you, the direction is written on it. It 
 may not be to-day, or to-morrow, or a 
 month, or a year, but you knozv that thing 
 has been absolutely consigned to you. It 
 is in God's bonded warehouse waiting for 
 you to take it. 
 
 I hai>e received ; I have the Holy Spirit ; 
 I liaz'C the salvation of my child ; I have my 
 drunken husband restored to me as he was 
 when he took me to the altar ; I have that 
 great boon — you take it ; you receive it, and 
 an infinite peace settles down on the soul. 
 
 Lastly. One morning — it may be a week 
 or a year, or ten years, or twenty years, as 
 you get up and go to the window you rub 
 your eyes. You hardly dared to. expect it, 
 after all, but the mountain is gone. You 
 could never have moved it, but your faith 
 has been receptive of the lever of God's 
 power, and the mountain has gone into the 
 sea. Oh, peace of God, in which so many 
 mountains are buried ! Oh, ocean of God, 
 coming up in little wavelets at our feet ! 
 Oh, mighty God, able to deal with things 
 beyond all our power to combat ! 
 
 If you will take these words and let them 
 ring in your souls until you die — "Believe 
 that you have received them," in your ex- 
 perience the words of the Saviour shall be 
 fulfilled. 
 
 What is great to you is nothing to God. 
 What is impossible for you God can put 
 right by a very trifling exercise of His 
 ])ower. You have been worrying greatly 
 over certain matters, but God could deal 
 as easily with all your affairs put together 
 as you could with a little pebble. And God 
 cares for you and your little life just as if 
 there was nothing else in His almighty 
 
keeping — as if you were the only person 
 who existed — as if all the resources of His 
 being were concentrated on your little life. 
 
 It is nothing for Him to set you free, and 
 if He lets the mountain stay there, it is for 
 some wise reason. One day He will ex- 
 plain to you and take you on His bosom, 
 and when you ask Him why you passed 
 through these experiences that now try you 
 so sorely He will caress you and smooth 
 the wrinkles from your brow and say, dear 
 cliild, that mountain was there to try you I 
 
 Mountains make strong climbers, deep 
 breathers and vigorous men. The enervat- 
 ed inhabitants of valleys miss the mountains. 
 I have been told by New Englanders in 
 Omaha that they have there missed the 
 mountains among which they were brought 
 up. 
 
 The mountain is needed just to do that 
 work, and when we are strong enough to 
 stand on our high places God will say, that 
 discipline is needed no more, so let the 
 mountain be removed; "for My love shall 
 not depart nor shall t:--2 covenant of My 
 peace be removed." 
 
Zbc %05t JSible. 
 
 1Rcx>. ip. 5. fbenecn. 
 
 2 Kings xxii : 8. 
 
 ' Hn& lljilljiab tbc bigb pricat sait unto Sbapban tbc Scribe, 
 IF bave foun^ tbc booh of tbc law in tbc lljoufc ot tbc 
 
 THERE are many things that we 
 do not at all appreciate at their 
 proper value, simply because we 
 have always been accustomed to 
 them. We never know what 
 anything is worth till we have lost it. Saul 
 did not appreciate Samuel till Samuel was 
 dead, and then in his despair he cried to the 
 witch of Endor. "Bring me up Samuel." 
 Nobody knows what bread is worth till he 
 finds himself famishing in a desert, or air 
 till thrust in some "black hole of Calcutta," 
 or light till cast out into the "outer dark- 
 ness," or water till he lifts up his eyes in 
 torment and vainly begs for a single drop 
 to cool his parched tongue. 
 
 And the like is true of the book we call 
 the Bible. We were born in a Bible land, 
 and from earliest childhood our lives have 
 been illumined by the radiance that streams 
 from its open pages. We have so long been 
 accustomed to it that we cannot conceive 
 of the blackness of the pall that would en- 
 shroud us if this lamp were I" 'own out. 
 
 Upon the most of Africa it has never 
 shone, and therefore we call it "The Dark- 
 Continent." It is the absence cf the "Book 
 of books" that makes it dark. And the 
 like is true of large tracts of Asia. And 
 over much of Europe and South America 
 and Central America and INTexico "dim 
 eclipse disastrous twilight spreads." What 
 ails them ? Why are they overspread with 
 gloom when the sun is so near the meridian? 
 Why lag they behind when other peoples 
 witli prodigious strides are forging ahead? 
 
 Pastor of Hanson Place Baptist Church, Brooklyn. 
 
The all sufficient answer is that they have 
 either no Bible at all, or it is chained to 
 the pillars of priestly cloisters or hidden 
 away beneath the rubbish of almost heathen- 
 ish superstition. 
 
 And per contra what is it that guides 
 and glorifies the Anglo-Saxon race, and 
 makes the Union Jack and the Stars and 
 Stripes fly the highest of any flags that 
 float beneath the whole heavens? It is not 
 the grit that goes with Anglo-Saxon blood, 
 but the grace that goes with the Word of 
 God. The strong nations are the Bible na- 
 tions the wide world over. If ever a people 
 had occasion to bless God for the Bible 
 they are the people that dwell beneath the 
 American flag. 
 
 And if ever the time should com.e when 
 the Bible shall cease to be potential in the 
 councils of the nation and in the school 
 and in the home then our boasted free in- 
 stitutions will topple to their fall and Icha- 
 bod will be written all over their ruins. 
 Suppress free speech if you please, abolish 
 trial by jury, repudiate the Declaration of 
 Independence, banish the newspapers, shut 
 up the public schools, and tear down all the 
 splendid monuments of our twentieth cen- 
 tury civilization, and yet if out of the wreck 
 you save the Bible, we will build them 
 all over again even grander than before. 
 But destroy the Bible and ''chaos and old 
 night" will be all that will be left. And yet 
 some of our race, as if devil possessed, are 
 working like beavers to rid the world of 
 a book to which they are so deeply indebted, 
 and which, strangely enough, they so 
 cordially hate, and are gloating like demons 
 over the prospect of success in their dia- 
 bolical endeavors. And in these latter days, 
 when rationalistic infidelity is riotous and 
 rampant everywhere, and men who are ac- 
 counted as foremost scholars, and who oc- 
 cupy conspicuous positions in our theologi- 
 cal seminaries are dealing resounding blows 
 at the very citadel of faith, there be many 
 earnest, simple-hearted folk who are actu- 
 ally afraid that something dreadful is about 
 to befall the dear old book to which they 
 have clung so lovingly and so long. And 
 this brings us face to face with the most 
 momentous question that has ever occupied 
 the thoughts of man — Is there any real dan- 
 ger that the Bible unll he lost? 
 
 There would seem to be such a possibil- 
 ity, for once upon a time it actually hap- 
 pened. There was not so much of it then as 
 now, but what there was of it was a thing 
 most precious, for it was all that man had 
 of a written revelation from God. That it 
 
chanced to be lost need not surprise us, for 
 there was only one copy in all the wide 
 world. That would seem indeed to have 
 been sufficiently safe-guarded, for it had 
 been entrusted to the custody of a people 
 raised up for this very purpose. "What 
 advantage then hath the Jew ? Much every 
 way. Chiefly because that unto them were 
 committed the oracles of God !" 
 
 Enshrined in the temple on Mount Zion, 
 the very Gibraltar of the chosen race, and 
 surrounded by the very flower and chivalry 
 of the nation's strength, one would have 
 thought the sacred book secure. But the 
 sin-sodden Manasseh introduced the de- 
 baucheries of idolatry into the very courts 
 of the house of God, and God's "book on 
 every page flamed out at "the abomination 
 of desolation standing where it ought not,"' 
 and therefore the old King hid the book 
 away in a corner, and then conveniently for- 
 got the corner. It was buried deep beneath 
 the rubbish of heathenism, and the years 
 rolled by and even the Jews lost sight of 
 the fact that there had been such a book. 
 There was but one copy and that was lost, 
 nor was it found again till long after j\la- 
 nasseh was dead and the pious Josiah was 
 reigning in his stead. That such a catas- 
 trophe could occur again would seem to be 
 a thing impossible, for instead of a single 
 copy now there are millions upon millions, 
 and every year adds millions more. In pub- 
 lic libraries, private libraries, in hotels, on 
 railroads, in steamboats, in mining camps, 
 and the palaces of princes — everywhere one 
 may find the Bible. No list of bridal pres- 
 ents is complete without a Bible, for wheth- 
 er it be prized and read or not it is not re- 
 garded as good form to keep house without 
 it. ^lore widely than any other book in the 
 world, or that ever was in the world, it is 
 distributed. Surely now there is no possi- 
 bility of its perishing from the earth. And 
 it will not. Let no faint-hearted Eli sit 
 trembling in the gate in mortal fear lest 
 some disaster shall befall the ark of God. 
 And if the timorous saint suggest that the 
 ancient Eli had cause to tremble, for the 
 ark of God was carried away into captivity 
 and ignominiously installed l)y the Phil- 
 istines in the house of their god, Dagon. 
 I would remind him that in the night fol- 
 lowing the installation Dagon fell down be- 
 fore the ark and broke his neck, and that 
 the Philistines made haste to take the ark 
 out of the temple of the idol, but wherever 
 they bore it, like a scythed chariot, it mowed 
 down everything before it, and they were 
 glad enough to send it back to its resting 
 
place in Israel. Let us be sure that the 
 Lord of hosts will take care of his ark. The 
 Book of God is as indestructible as the 
 throne of God. Men have buried it, but, 
 like the Christ to whom it witnesses, it 
 will not stay buried. They have burned it, 
 but Phoenixlike it rises again out of the 
 ashes. 
 
 Heaven and earth may pass away, but not 
 one jot or tittle of God's Word shall fail. 
 
 And yet while the Word itself shall sur- 
 vive all "the wrecks of time" and never 
 shall be lost to the race of men, there is 
 imminent danger of its being lost to the 
 individual — of its being lost indeed to you. 
 In a very sad sense it has perhaps been 
 lost to you already. You have lost the Bi- 
 ble that your mother gave, inscribed with 
 your name traced by a hand that has long 
 siiice mouldered into dust. Just how you 
 lost it you may not be able to tell, but some- 
 where in the hurried march of life it has 
 dropped out of sight. You bought another 
 more costly, it may be, but not so precious 
 as the one that was hallowed by her pray- 
 ers and tears. But there is imminent dan- 
 ger of your losing the Bible that you now 
 have and losing it in a still sadder way, 
 by losing the grip of faith upon it. The 
 binding may be left and the printed pages 
 all intact, but the Bible as a Bible may for 
 you have slipped away. 
 
 I had a precious boy long ago, now safe- 
 ly sheltered in the upper fold, who loved me 
 dearly while I had him here, and who de- 
 lighted in nothing more than to clamber 
 up the stairs to my study and sit at my feet 
 on the floor, and look at the "picture books" 
 I gave him. 
 
 One day in my absence he mounted the 
 chair at my desk, and seeing my Bible open, 
 and an inkstand and a sponge very tempt- 
 ingly near at hand, he proceeded to make 
 for me an illustrated Bible by passing the 
 ink-saturated sponge over its pages. 
 Blessed boy ! he meant not to ruin my Bible 
 but he did. He was only a "little tot." 
 and so I kissed him and forgave him. But 
 what shall be said of the "grave and vener- 
 able seignors," who year after year are de- 
 lightedly engaged in this same blotting busi- 
 ness ? Men have ever been accustomed to 
 execrate the memory of Jehoiakim, king of 
 Judah, who, with his penknife, cut out tthe 
 leaves of the book of God and threw them 
 in the fire, and are we to be expected pa- 
 tiently to look on while the destructive crit- 
 ics, with their knives sharpened upon Ger- 
 man whetstones, are cutting out page after 
 page of the holy writ? 
 
 13 
 
The book survived the impious rage of 
 Jehoiakim, but alas, for Jehoiakim ! The 
 book will survive the attacks of its modern 
 critics, but alas for the critics themselves 
 and those who take counsel of them. For 
 them the Bible is a lost book as truly as 
 it was in the days of old Manasseh. 
 
 And then again even though faith in the 
 Bible be not gone, it may be practically lost 
 through sheer neglect. It has happened 
 in the Sunday school, which, though pre- 
 sumably built upon the Bible, is often ill- 
 provided with the book, and instead of it 
 in many a class there is "nothing but leaves" 
 — "Lesson Leaves." 
 
 And in the pulpit, though still retained 
 upon the desk out of deference to ancient 
 and time-honored usage, how frequently 
 only the barest shred of it is brought into 
 requisition by the preacher, and that shred 
 which he takes for a text he simply uses 
 as a point of departure — a point to which 
 he never returns in the course of his ser- 
 mon, but preaches out of his head instead of 
 out of the book, spinning airy cobwebs 
 instead of giving the famishing people the 
 pure milk or the strong meat of the Word. 
 
 And out of our individual homes and 
 hearts and lives it is in danger of being lost. 
 We are so cumbered with the cares of life, 
 so infatuated with the pleasures of life, so 
 hot-footed in the pursuit of the almighty 
 dollar that we have left little or no time for 
 the perusal of the Bible. And what time 
 we do have is apt to be monopolized by other 
 books. Even as far back as Solomon's time 
 it was said that "of making many books 
 there is no end," but what would the wise 
 man say if he were living now? Tons upon 
 tons, tons upon tons, hundreds of thousands 
 of tons of books are being dumped by the 
 printing press over all the face of the 
 earth, and under them the Bible is in danger 
 of being buried out of sight. And the daily 
 newspaper, especially the monster Sunday 
 newspaper — that "abomination of desola- 
 tion." standing where it ought not ! — that 
 clinging curse entailed by the civil war falls 
 like a pall upon our Christian homes, and 
 shuts out the light which would otherwise 
 stream from the pages of God's book. And 
 Christian people such as are not absorbed 
 in the Sunday papers are sometimes so ab- 
 sorbed in religious work as scarcely to have 
 leisure left to feed their own souls on the 
 Word of God. And so the book is largely 
 lost to them. And this is what ails the 
 church to-day. The pulpit has lost its 
 grip on the people because the preacher has 
 lost his grip on the Bible. He has let go 
 
the two-edged sword of the Spirit and is 
 flourishing instead a baton all bedecked with 
 ribbons. He is playing at preaching in- 
 stead of fighting like a man who is dead in 
 earnest. 
 
 And this is what is the matter with the 
 pew. This is why there is so little love 
 and faith and hope, and why such soft sus- 
 ceptibility to sin, and such readiness to be 
 caught by every fad that the devil sets 
 afloat, and to be carried about by every 
 wind of doctrine, and to be overborne by 
 every wave of trouble. They have none of 
 the stable anchorage and solid stamina of 
 those "whose delight is in the law of the 
 Lord and who meditate upon it day and 
 night." 
 
 In the bosom of many a man who has 
 practically lost the Bible there is sometimes 
 awakened a painful consciousness of the 
 dropping out of his life of that which once 
 gave to him the sweetest solace and the 
 noblest inspiration, and he is disposed to 
 crv with Job, "Oh, that I were as in months 
 past, as in the days when God preserved 
 me, when His candle shone upon my head, 
 and when by His light I walked through 
 darkness !" And this leads up to the ques- 
 tion as to how the lost Bible may be found 
 once more. 
 
 You remember how you found it first. 
 Long had you had it in your hands, but it 
 was as unintelligible as a Delphic Oracle and 
 as dark as Mammoth cave. It was to you 
 a sealed book and you had no power to 
 loose the seals. In your extremity you 
 reached out your hands unto God, and 
 prayed, "Lord, lift thou upon me the light 
 of thy countenance !" Then something hap- 
 pened as the consequence of which you saw 
 light — God's light. 
 
 Some of you may remember to have heard 
 the story of a man that afterwards became 
 eminent in public life, but who. in very 
 early childhood was counted little better than 
 a fool. He was always to be found at the 
 foot of his class, and was the butt of the 
 boys, and was to the teacher what seemed 
 to him "a thorn in the flesh, a messenger 
 of Satan sent to buffet him" — not by reason 
 of his viciousness, but his invincible stupid- 
 ity. He was the only son of his mother, 
 and she was a widow. She did her best to 
 stimulate his sluggish powers, if indeed his 
 feeble mental faculties deserved the name of 
 powers at all, but apparently in vain. On 
 one occasion when the school in which he 
 was a pupil was to give an entertainment 
 tne poor mother besought the principal to 
 give her boy "a piece to speak," hoping 
 
 15 
 
thus to make him feel that he was not an 
 utter "derehct." The officer appealed to 
 reluctantly consented, and the mother un- 
 dertook the task of teaching him the piece, 
 but, after hours of patient labor, not a line 
 was the boy able to repeat. At the last, 
 the mother, frantic with despair, dropped on 
 her knees and cried, "Oh, God, have 
 pity upon me, for my poor boy is 
 a fool." The boy overheard her, and, 
 in sympathy with her, felt as if his 
 heart would break ; and something did 
 break, only it was not his heart, but 
 something in his head, as he declared 
 afterwards. All the blood in his body 
 seemed to rush to his brain, and something 
 gave way, and his mind was flooded as with 
 sudden sunburst, and throwing his arms 
 about his mother's neck he exclaimed, 
 "Mother, I can say it now," and say it he 
 did, every word of it without a break, and 
 many other things he delightedly repeated 
 that he had vainly tried to learn at school, 
 and from that hour as with preternaturally 
 quickened faculties he forged ahead until he 
 became the loremost scholar in the school, 
 and afterwards rose to be one of the most 
 distinguished jurists in the land. 
 
 Something like unto that happened when 
 "God who commanded the light to shine 
 out of darkness shone into your heart to 
 give the light of the knowledge of the glory 
 of God in the face of Jesus Christ." And 
 ■'beholding as in a mirror the glory of the 
 Lord you were changed into the same image 
 from glory unto glory even as by jthe Spirit 
 of the Lord." That mirror was the Word 
 of God, and as you rapturously gazed into 
 it you declared you had never seen it in 
 this wise before. You had found the Bible. 
 But maybe you have lost it since — lost 
 it as Man'asseh lost it — strange gods have 
 come in with all their train of trumpery, 
 and the Bible has been "hidden among the 
 stuff." You have sought satisfaction by 
 dallying with these strange delights, but 
 there has always been a consciousness of an 
 aching void which such things could never 
 All. You had had enough of religion to 
 s])oil the world, and you have enough of the 
 world to spoil religion. And so there is no 
 light but rather darkness visible, and you 
 are miserably groping through the gloom 
 towards your grave, and all because you 
 have lost the only light that can illumine 
 this world of sorrows and sin. Would you 
 find your lost Bible? Look for it in the 
 house of God. That is where they found 
 it in the time of King Josiah. Linger 
 lovingly in the King's courts with an ear- 
 i6 
 
nest long-ing in your heart "to behold the 
 beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His 
 temple," and you shall find it. 
 
 And slacken the speed at which you are 
 racing after worldly goods. There is no 
 scripture which says, "He that runs shall 
 read," but "He that reads shall run." God's 
 plan is not to read as we run, but to read 
 first, and then, inspired by the reading, to 
 run. Once on a time I discovered on awak- 
 ing while aboard a sleeping car that when- 
 ever I undertook to read a line every word 
 was strangely cut in two so that only half 
 of it was legible. An awful apprehension of 
 approaching blindness seized me. On arriv- 
 ing at my destination I hurried to an oculist, 
 who mightily relieved me by assuring me 
 that there was nothing in the world the mat- 
 ter with my eyes, but that I had been driv- 
 ing my brain at too hot a pace and needed 
 to slow up if I would avert a breakdown. 
 
 Let us learn the meaning of taking time 
 to be holy, and taking time for the patient 
 and pious pondering of the Word of God. 
 
 INIany a scripture is like a sleeping child, 
 at which, if you only gaze long and steadily 
 enough, it will open its eyes, and you will 
 look down into the very depths of God's 
 wells of truth. 
 
 Would you find your lost Biole? Clear 
 away all the rubbish that has been allowed 
 to cover it up. It was thus that Hilkiah 
 found it in the time of King Josiah. And 
 above all — Do it. If anv man fails to do 
 the duty that he knows, and that is clearly 
 set before him in the Word of God, there 
 shall presently settle a cloud upon the very 
 \\'ord itselt and in that cloud it shall be 
 caught away. But "if any man will do 
 His will he shall know of the doctrine." 
 and as he goes forward in the doing the light 
 shall shine more and more unto the perfect 
 day and presently he shall be ready exult- 
 ingly to say : 
 
 What glory gilds the sacred page. 
 
 Majestic like the snn ; 
 It gives a light to every age — 
 
 It gives, but borrows none. 
 
(Tbe 6o^bea^ of Jceue, 
 
 iRcv. D. 2). ^cXaurin, B. 2). 
 
 CoLOSSiANS ii : 9. 
 "Tor in film dwelletb all the fulness of tbe 6odhead bodily." 
 
 THERE are majesties of expres- 
 sion in nature that absolutely 
 overwhelm us, and that we can- 
 not understand. They overpower 
 the emotions and force the mind 
 to admit that it is unable to canvass their 
 greatness. Such an expression is Niagara. 
 Its vastness absolutely dwarfs one. It was 
 Daniel Webster who said, when standing 
 at the base of the American falls: "I feel 
 myself to be no larger than an ant standing 
 here. I cannot compress with my niind the 
 majesty of this presentation." No one, so 
 far as I knov.% in any part of our country, 
 will deny to the eminent Webster great 
 mental capacity. Men have felt the same 
 on the Swiss Alps, those wonderful snow- 
 clad ranges like mountain masses of frozen 
 splendor. Thus men have felt on the im- 
 measureable slopes of the Andes. And so 
 we say there are majesties of expression in 
 nature that the mind cannot comprehend, 
 that force it to admit that it cannot com- 
 prehend them, and that prefer themselves 
 for translation to the realm of the emotions. 
 As in nature, which is the realm of ob- 
 jects, so in thought, which is the realm of 
 ideas, there are majesties that we cannot 
 understand in the Bible where the moun- 
 tainous thoughts of the world stand. We 
 cannot scale them to their summit, however 
 strong we may be in our power of climbing. 
 We cannot sound them to their profoundest 
 depths, we cannot measure the extent of 
 
 Pastor of Second Baptist Church, Rochester, N. Y. 
 
their reach, we cannot touch their outermost 
 rim. And so as the mind of man travels 
 through this wonderful Bible of ours, it 
 comes at times upon such an expression, 
 such a conception, and before it, stands 
 dumb. 
 
 The text which I have announced for 
 our consideration this evening seems to me 
 to be of this character. It must have leaped 
 from the mouth of inspiration itself. No 
 man unaided would have dared to give it 
 utterance. Mortal faculty of its own self 
 could never have created the conception. 
 Paul did not speak it of himself. It was 
 spoken through him. It sounds like a 
 voice from the skies. Using Paul as an 
 herald, the skies made proclamation of a 
 truth that otherwise could never have been 
 communicated to man. The mountainous 
 expression is this: "In Jesus of Nazareth, 
 an historical character, the man confessedly 
 of all men — in Jesus of Nazareth the ful- 
 ness of the Godhead dwelleth bodily." 
 
 SOME DEFINITIONS. 
 
 I want to be very simple, although the 
 theme may indicate the reverse, and so I 
 will begin by definition, and first with some 
 preliminary definitions. 
 
 The word "fulness" means that which is 
 filled, made perfect, made complete. "The 
 earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof," 
 that is to say, that all the earth contains 
 is the Lord's. And the meaning of our text 
 is that all the natural, the moral attributes 
 or qualities of the eternal God are in the 
 person under consideration. If any one at- 
 tribute or quality were omitted, any one 
 element of his being were left out, it would 
 be impossible for inspiration to say that "in 
 Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead 
 bodily." 
 
 And the word "dwelleth" needs also a 
 preliminary observation. It differs from 
 the word used by John in John i:i4, that 
 marvelous verse, which says "the Word 
 became flesh and dwelt among us." The 
 word there means "to tabernacle among." 
 You will find that written in the margin of 
 the revised version. It means that Jesus 
 made a temporary sojourn. The word here 
 is not the same word, nor does it mean to 
 tabernacle. It means to live as in a house 
 abidingly. Paul was making a strong argu- 
 ment against certain heresy teachers in the 
 early church, men who asserted that matter 
 was in itself evil, and who could not brook 
 the thought that the son of God should be 
 forever linked with a human body, and 
 therefore they taught a doctrine at variance 
 
with the Bible concerning Him. To me 
 there is nothing more delightful than the 
 thought that the Son of God, the eternal 
 now dwells in the bodily manifestation 
 which He took with Him to glory. You 
 will see Him, you will know Him, for He 
 is the God now dwelling in the body. 
 
 Now, a little further by way of definition. 
 ''Fulness" means sufficiency, abundance, 
 richness. In Christ, therefore, dwells all 
 the sufficiency of the Godhead. Will you 
 fathom that thought? What mortal mind 
 can apprehend the sufficiency of the out- 
 goings of the Eternal? Who understands 
 the sufficiency of the sea? Who knows its 
 multitudinous life? How vast and wonder- 
 ful it is ! Who knows the richness of the 
 earth, the mother and nurse of all the seeds, 
 the parent and cradle of all growths ? Have 
 you never been astonished at the wonderful 
 richness of the earth? How, year after 
 year, without failure, she yields through her 
 bosom the wonderful growths that delight 
 the world and that feed the world. Who 
 knows the sufficiency of the orbs that make 
 the day and that braid their glory into the 
 robes of night? Who knows the overflow- 
 ing of the clouds, the springs that never fail, 
 the streams that never run dry, the rivers 
 that flow on in their majestic current cen- 
 tury after century, millennium after mil- 
 lennium, carrying forward without cessa- 
 tion or break their mighty tide? Yet these 
 are only a few among the creatures of God, 
 and the creatures that we can apprehend 
 with our capacity. If this, then, -be true 
 of these creatures of God, what must we 
 say of the Maker of them all? If confes- 
 sedly man cannot comprehend the majesties 
 of these presentations, if even Daniel Web- 
 ster cannot grasp with his gigantic mind 
 the majesty of Niagara, rolling on and on, 
 tumbling with its massive power into the 
 gorge below, need we apologize if we can- 
 not comprehend some of the mountainous 
 thoughts of the word of God, or compre- 
 hend the Being to whom even this tiny earth 
 is but "as the small dust of the balance?" 
 There is something very strange about men 
 who will gladly own their inability to master 
 things at hand, things that are sensuous, 
 that they can feel and touch, and yet will 
 not believe something supernatural, beyond 
 their reach, simply because they cannot 
 master it. Is that not strange? 
 
 Now, the word "Godhead" is a symbol. 
 All words are in some sense symbolic. 
 They present ideas. But some words have 
 more inclusive in their symbolization than 
 others, and this is one of them. The word 
 
Godhead is symbolic of more than one 
 idea, yea, of many ideas. I want this even- 
 ing to speak to you in a brief way of three 
 of them. 
 
 GOD AS A PERSON. 
 
 First of all, God is a person, and Godhead 
 stands for that. I know I am venturing 
 into a most difficult realm of thinking when 
 I undertake to speak of personality, either 
 human or divine, but we know that God 
 is a person. I know that the doctrine of the 
 personality of God has sometimes been very 
 crudely put, but because it has been crude- 
 ly put, and because its representations have 
 sometimes been gross, are we therefore to 
 deny the personality of God? Modern 
 thought, unilluminated by the gospel of 
 Christ, influenced by the current philosophy 
 of evolution, seeks to eliminate personality 
 from the universe, and therefore, from God. 
 That sort of philosophy teaches us that 
 there is nothing stable, that nothing is sta- 
 tic, to use their term, that everything is in 
 process. The universe is not a being, but 
 process. The universe is not a being, but a 
 becoming ; man is not a being, but a becom- 
 ing; God is not a Being, but a becoming. 
 If everything is in process how can any one 
 have personality ? The boldest of these phi- 
 losophers claim that the universe is in pro- 
 cess, man is in process, and therefore God 
 is in process and so they deny Him His per- 
 sonality. But I am very glad to report that 
 there is a sane return from that extreme 
 position of men who have mastered, as they 
 think, evolution, but have not yet been mas- 
 tered by the illuminating Spirit, to the doc- 
 trine of the personality of God. 
 
 I found while reading that strong book of 
 harnack's this splendid little sentence: Fire 
 is kindled only by fire ; personal life only by 
 personal forces. I know not how it is with 
 you, but I know that I am a person. Is not 
 my ^laker also a person? I will not under- 
 take to define myself a person, but I know 
 that I am an individual, a person distinct 
 from you all and from every other thing in 
 the universe. I am conscious of a sover- 
 eignty. I know that I am. God is a person, 
 and He is a person who loves us. and whom 
 we can love. 
 
 GOD A PURE ESSENCE. 
 
 Then, in the second place, God is pure 
 being, pure essence. God is the origin and 
 fountain of all that is. God is the source 
 of every life. Every tiniest rill of it in 
 the universe has flowed forth from the 
 Eternal. I am not going to enter into this 
 
argument as it might be elaborated, but I 
 simply attempt to bring it before you that 
 the colossal thought may find a proper 
 place in your minds. God is the essence 
 of things. There is nothing about Him that 
 is evanescent, nothing, as in us, that is ex- 
 posed to decay and change. He is life. He 
 is vital. He is so vital that all his overflow- 
 ings are vital, and quicken everything they 
 touch. God is a tree without a withered 
 leaf. God is a sky which from all Eternity 
 has lost never a star. Godhead stands sym- 
 bolic of that. 
 
 MERCY, PITY, LOVE, AMONG HIS ATTRIBUTES. 
 
 Then, in the third place, God has attri- 
 butes, such as justice, mercy, pity, com- 
 passion, love. I am extremely reluctant, 
 thus to analyze God into His attributes. I 
 prefer to conduct my thinking along the line 
 suggested by my noble college president, 
 when he said : "All of God is in every at- 
 tribute," and it is thus I think of Him, not 
 as torn asunder into attributes as theology 
 has separated Him. Yet, for sake of conve- 
 nience, we speak of Him in this way. I 
 believe that theology has done vast harm 
 in more directions than one, and perhaps in 
 no direction more than in setting God's at- 
 tributes over against one another, as when 
 it has set His justice over against His mercy 
 and has required His mercy to placate His 
 justice, and has taught that Jesus Christ 
 died in order to appease the wrath of God 
 and satisfy His justice, as if Jesus were not 
 the expression of the mercy and love of God. 
 I believe that His mercy is in His justice 
 and His mercy and His justice are in His 
 pity, and His justice and mercy and pity 
 are in His love, in a word, that all of God 
 is love. 
 
 Godhead stands symbolic of all that. Is 
 not that wonderful? God is great in all 
 His qualities and attributes. He is great 
 in His love. But what is love? We some- 
 times quote the definition of God given in 
 the Bible : "God is love," and we know that 
 our little child can understand it in part; 
 we also believe that- the most intelligent 
 angel, if there be degrees in their intelli- 
 gence at all, cannot exhaust its meaning. 
 God is love, but what is love ? Will you de- 
 fine love? Will you tell me what love is? 
 Can you give us an analysis of love ? The 
 term love is like the term God itself. It is 
 spiritual it is invisible, it is subtle, it is intri- 
 cate, it is impossible for you to analyze it. 
 Yet we are not going to hang our heads in 
 shame because we are not able to analyze 
 or define love. We cannot understand or 
 
know everything, but we know love when 
 we see it. We feel it, we recognize its mani- 
 festations in life, and the child can do that 
 and the mature man can do nothing more. 
 Who possibly can fathom the meaning of 
 that wonderful sentence, the gospel in epi- 
 tome : "For God so loved the world that 
 He gave His only begotten Son, that who- 
 soever believeth in Him should not perish, 
 but have everlasting life." God is so great 
 that even in love, while He is love itself, 
 we cannot begin to comprehend Him. 
 
 THE GREAT INDEFINABLE. 
 
 Do you know, friends, that anything is 
 m}-sterious to us that we are unable to de- 
 fine, that we are unable to limit or measure ? 
 The ocean is no longer a mystery to us, 
 because we have sent our great ships back 
 and forth across it. First, five months was 
 required for the voyage, then five weeks, 
 now but five days. There is no mystery 
 longer in the melancholy, heaving sea. But 
 before men knew the outermost bounds of 
 it, and measured its shores, the ocean was a 
 mystery. So it is with the being of God. 
 He is indefinable. It is impossible for us 
 to sound His depths by any plummet we 
 can find, or to measure the extent of His 
 being by any measuring rod that mortal 
 man has ever yet seen. 
 
 The word Godhead, then, is a symbol of 
 that collectiveness of attributes of power, of 
 faculty or whatever else you choose to call 
 it, which inheres in God. To say that all 
 this dwelleth bodily in a man is simply 
 startling. It lifts that man above considera- 
 tion or comparison with all other men. It 
 stands Him aside, it makes Him the unique 
 figure thus far in human history. If you 
 can say of Him that "In Him dwelleth all 
 the fulness of the Godhead bodily," you 
 are saying of Him what it is impossible to 
 say of any other man known in human his- 
 tory, or lives at this hour two thousand 
 years after Him. 
 
 SOME PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS. 
 
 Let us look at Him. Here is a great 
 crowd surrounding a house. This Teacher 
 of Galilee is within. Men are coming bear- 
 ing a poor paralytic on a cot. It is impos- 
 sible for them to enter by the door. They 
 climb a stone stairway on the outside, and 
 remove the tiles from the roof and let their 
 precious patient down before Him. This 
 Galilean Teacher stops in the midst of His 
 discourse, and says : "Son, thy sins are for- 
 given." I want you to see Him — your God 
 — in the midst of men, God, who alone has 
 
 23 
 
power to forgive sins. The fulness of 
 God's power is there to forgive human sin ! 
 
 Another clay. The crowd is pressing close 
 upon the Teacher. He has been summoned 
 to yonder stricken home. A poor woman 
 who had suffered many years at the hands 
 of the physicians and was nothing better, 
 said: "If I can reach up and touch but the 
 border of His garment I shall be made 
 whole," and she reaches through the crowd 
 and timidly touches that garment, and im- 
 mediately she was made whole. Let me 
 draw the curtain aside and say to you, men 
 and women, behold }our God. As you see 
 Him giving life and healing to earth's 
 wounded and suffering, you behold God 
 Himself in these beneficent acts of mercy. 
 
 Another picture. It is midnight. It is in 
 the city of the great King. There is a 
 knock at the outer door. A venerable fath- 
 er is ushered in. As soon as he takes his 
 place on the divan over against the Teacher, 
 he says: "Rabbi, we know that thou art a 
 teacher come from God ; for no man can do 
 these signs that thou doest, except God 
 be with him." And brushing away the 
 questions with which he came Jesus opened 
 to him the profoundest truths concerning 
 man's needs and nature that man had ever 
 heard. 
 
 Another day. He is journeying up 
 through the country, and at the noon hour 
 He takes His seat on the curb of Jacob's 
 ancient well. His disciples have gone to 
 buy bread. A woman of the town comes 
 to the well to draw water, and Jesus there 
 terminates the old Jewish economy and gives 
 the sublimest teaching concerning worship 
 the world has ever heard. Put the two to- 
 gether and you have in this Galilean Teach- 
 er the fulness of wisdom. He is the only 
 Teacher who has spoken so fundamentally 
 upon the highest problems of worship and 
 experience. In Him behold God. "He that 
 hath seen Me hath seen the Father." 
 
 Another day. There is a lovely family 
 in a beautiful town about two miles from 
 Jerusalem. When at Jerusalem He made 
 His home there. There were three in the 
 family, a brother and two sisters. The 
 Teacher was away beyond Jordan, but they 
 knew His address and when the brother was 
 sick they sent Him word, but He did not 
 come immediately. He told His disciples 
 associated with Him that His friend was 
 sick over in Bethany, and by and by He 
 went. But, ah, it is too late. The body is 
 now in the grave four days. The sisters 
 are smitten, with grief, their eyes are red 
 with tears, and this Galilean Teacher weeps 
 24 
 
with them, and as He stands there weeping- 
 He says : "I am the Resurrection and the 
 Life; he that beheveth on Me, though he 
 die, yet shall he live ; and whosoever 
 liveth and believeth in Ale shall never die." 
 Listen, men and women, only God could 
 speak in that way. 
 
 JFSUS SPEAKS WITH POWER OF GOD. 
 
 And once more. Around Him are grief- 
 stricken men. Their hearts are sore. Tliev 
 are full of trouble, the common lot of hu- 
 manity. And this Teacher seated in their 
 midst says to them : "Let not your hearts 
 be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also 
 in me. In my Father's house are many 
 mansions; if it were not so, I would have 
 told you, for I go to prepare a place for you. 
 And if I go and prepare a place for you, 
 I will come again and will receive you unto 
 myself ; that where I am there ye may be 
 also." Only God could speak like that. 
 
 Have you lost your friend? Have you 
 buried him away out of your sight ? I want 
 to draw the curtain away and say to you : 
 "Behold your sympathetic God, for in Him 
 who stands in the presence of your grief, 
 Himself moved by a sympathy that makes 
 Him tremble like a leaf, you see how God 
 feels." 
 
 Are you looking out upon the future? 
 You know that your years are few? Are 
 you disturbed as to what comes next? I 
 want you to listen to me. In seeing Jesus 
 Christ you see God, and when He says to 
 you : "Let not your heart be troubled, I will 
 come back for you, I will take you to my- 
 self, that where I, the God dwelling in 
 the body like your own, glorified now as 
 you and yours will be glorified by and by, 
 am, there you may be also," He speaks with 
 the authority of the Father, God. 
 
 I was startled quite as much, when I 
 first approached the study of this text, by 
 the verse next, which I am not now really 
 treating, as by this one, but in the 
 light of this exposition we can appreciate it : 
 
 "For in Him dwelleth all the fulness of 
 the Godhead bodily ; and in Him are ye made 
 full, who is the head of all principality and 
 power." 
 
 Is that not a wonderful gospel? Let us 
 thank God for it. 
 
Jfrom Betbcl to Bethel. 
 
 IRer. 5. 'WaUbur Cbapman, 2>. 2). 
 
 Genesis xxxv : 3. 
 
 "E«t us arise and go up to Bctbcl." 
 
 I DOUBT not you have frequently 
 seen the sky when throughout a 
 long day it has been overcast with 
 clouds, only now and then the sun 
 would break forth but for a mo- 
 ment and then the curtain would be 
 drawn together once more and only the 
 clouds were to be seen. To me this is 
 an illustration of the life of Jacob. The 
 sun breaks through at Bethel, and while 
 this seems to be a mixing of figures, for 
 the hour of the vision was in the night, 
 yet the glory of Heaven was upon him 
 brighter than the shining of the sun. It 
 pushes its way through at Peniel, once 
 more appears in his pathetic love, for Jo- 
 seph, and later in his dignified appearance 
 in the presence of Pharaoh, but, for the 
 most part, his was a life with a clouded sky, 
 and yet there are few stories more inter- 
 esting. What Peter is to the New Testa- 
 ment Jacob is to the Old. The Bible would 
 hardly be complete without the accounts of 
 these two remarkable men. When we read 
 of the Saviour of Peter we are comforted, 
 for we find ourselves saying: "If Jesus can 
 save such a man as Peter, transforming him 
 from the fisherman to the preacher, from 
 the profane man to the writer of epistles, 
 there is hope for every one of us." We 
 read about the God of Jacob and are in- 
 spired, for there are few of us to-day whose 
 lives are so deceitful, whose characters are 
 so questionable, as Jacob's, and yet he be- 
 came Israel the Prince. Is anything too 
 hard for the Lord? 
 
 From Bethel to Bethel is a good subject 
 growing out of such a text. Thirty years 
 of time stretch out between the two expe- 
 
 Pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, New York. 
 26 
 
riences, and yet in these thirty years Jacob 
 passes through much that is beyond ordi- 
 nary interest, as for example his experi- 
 ences with Laban, when he toiled fourteen 
 years for his beloved Rachel, the prosperity 
 which came to him both by fair means and 
 foul, his struggling- with the angel at Jab- 
 bok's Ford, and his tarrying at Shechem 
 contrary to the command of God, for in it 
 all he was never satisfied, for I hold it true 
 that if one has once been to Bethel nothing 
 else can satisfy, and if we have ever had a 
 vision of Heaven the earth ever afterward 
 seems dull and uninteresting. 
 
 After all this varied experience Jacob is 
 at Bethel once again. It is not much in it- 
 self, just a long range of hills running north 
 and south ; the eastern slope descending to 
 the Jordan and the western slope stretching 
 away towards the more thickly populated 
 part of the country. Through the valley 
 before us illustrious travelers in all the his- 
 tory of the Holy Land have made their 
 journey, and up the rough mountain road 
 people have climbed with great delight. 
 There is no house in sight and no animals 
 are to be seen, excepting now and then an 
 eagle or a wild mountain goat, but to Ja- 
 cob it was a sacred place. There the first 
 night of his flight from Esau he saw the 
 ladder which linked earth to Heaven, the 
 ladder which was thronged with angels per- 
 forming their heavenly ministry, and he 
 heard the voice of God. There are some 
 words we cannot speak without arousing 
 the tenderest emotions and the holiest mem- 
 ories. Mother is such an one. I well re- 
 member preaching to a crowd of rough 
 miners in the mountains, holding their in- 
 terest passably well until I spoke this match- 
 less word, when all faces were softened and 
 tears were seen in many eyes. Home is 
 another such word. You doubtless remem- 
 ber the soldiers at Sebastopol, brave men 
 who were ready to die, many of whom did 
 die, bursting into tears as they heard the 
 band of musicians playing "Home, Sweet 
 Home." and Bethel was such a word to Ja- 
 cob. It stirred the best that was in him 
 and was the summons of God bidding h^s 
 better nature arouse itself. 
 
 We have all of us had our Bethels. 
 Some of us are separated from them by 
 the dreary lapse of time, and between those 
 happy days and our present unsatisfactory 
 experience, days, weeks, months and even 
 years stretch out, we say it to our shame. 
 For some of us an active business life has 
 separated us from Bethel, and yet this is 
 positively unnecessary. "Not slothful in 
 
 27 
 
business, fervent in spirit, serving the 
 Lord," and if there is anything in your 
 business that dampens your spiritual ardor, 
 or bHnds your vision of Christ, either your 
 business is wrong or vou are wrong vour- 
 self. 
 
 With some of us a foreign residence Hcs 
 between us and Bethel. Back in the old coun- 
 try we were most faithful and devoted to 
 Cnrist and constantly serving the church, 
 but in this free land we have forgotten our 
 vows, we have made the fatal mistake of 
 leaving God out of our calculations, and 
 somehow seem to forget the words of the 
 psalmist, "If I take the wings of the 
 morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of 
 the earth and the sea thou art there." We 
 might have been in fellowship with God 
 all these days if we would. 
 
 With some of us it is worldliness that has 
 dimmed our vision and robbed us of power, 
 and that is the sad part of the story. Obli- 
 gations once taken upon us have been over- 
 laid and burdened with the lapse of years, 
 and I would like if I might, to touch the 
 harp of memory and bring back those happy 
 days once more when our vision of Christ 
 was unclouded, our appropriation of the 
 Spirit of God complete and our joy inex- 
 pressible, so therefore I say, "Let us arise 
 and go to Bethel." I would like to carry 
 }0u back perhaps a quarter of a century 
 when you left your home like Jacob and 
 you said, "If God will I will." All 
 these years He has been near to you, pour- 
 ing out upon you His best blessings. I ask 
 you, have you kept your vow? 
 
 Many Christians suffer from spiritual 
 declension ; they scarcely realize it, the 
 stupor has come on so gradually, and it is 
 only on a day like this, when they compare 
 what they are with what they once were, 
 that they realize their dangerous position. 
 VV^e do not come to be like Judas in a day, 
 or even like Peter, but wc leave our Lord 
 by inches, some little sin creeps in at which 
 wc smile to-day but which defeats us to- 
 morrow, and we are out of tune, we have 
 lost our power, we are not what wc want to 
 be ourselves, and if our hearts condemn us 
 God is greater than our heart and knoweth 
 all things. We need, therefore, to go back 
 to Bethel. 
 
 Where was your Bethel ? Perhaps in 
 some little church wliere on a certain occa- 
 sion you forgot the minister and the one 
 sitting by your side and had a vision of 
 glory; or .in some home where poverty 
 abounded, but you were utterly unmindful 
 of it. The house was filled with heaven. 
 
and down to every pillow was sent the lad- 
 der, up and down which angels of God 
 made their way. Or it may have been in 
 some other land where you naa a vision of 
 God, and while we may not make the jour- 
 ney back to these places in the flesh, we 
 can go back in thought and meet Him. 
 Shall we not do so ? As many as God loves 
 He reminds constantly of neglected duties, 
 sometimes using conscience, sometimes His 
 providences ; to-dav in the loss oi property 
 He speaks, to-morrow in the departure of 
 health, again in the death of a friend. It 
 would be a good thing if we should stop 
 and listen to His warning and then aris2 
 and go to Bethel. 
 
 Some Preliminary Steps. — Before we 
 may ever expect to go back to the place 
 of blessing it will be necessary for us to 
 observe the instructions which Jacob gave 
 to his household. 
 
 First: "Put away the strange gods," 
 that is literally, "the god of the strangers." 
 They have been living with the enemies of 
 God's people, and little by little the gods of 
 these people had gotten possession of them. 
 They were taken into their tents and then 
 into their hearts, and they were out of fel- 
 lowship with God. Wherever there is a 
 fungus growth in the forests there is cor- 
 ruption and decay, wherever there is an 
 idol in the heart there is a fresh indication 
 of weakness, and we cannot hide our idols, 
 they refuse to be hidden. When we least 
 expect it there is a resurrection. 
 
 What is an idol? It may be a very little 
 thing. That which tends to usurp an 
 luidue place in our affections, which gives 
 us more pleasure than the thought of God, 
 is an idol. The thing is our life which 
 makes us sacrifice nearness to God, which 
 may not necessarily be sinful, only ques- 
 tionable, is an idol. That which makes us 
 indifferent to spiritual advantages and in- 
 different to Bethel is an idol. Your repu- 
 tation, your fortune, that unworthy friend 
 upon whom you lavish your affection, these 
 may be idols, for "no man can serve two 
 masters, for either he will hate the one and 
 love the other, or will cleave to the one and 
 depart from the other." 
 
 Therefore put away the strange gods, 
 and if we really want to be near to God 
 how easy it will be to find out the thing 
 that hinders us, and yet as a matter of fact, 
 who can put away his idols? I cannot, I 
 am sure, but there is a deliverance. Do 
 you remember the story of David and Na- 
 than, when David forgets that he is a king 
 and a father and sins, and Nathan is the 
 29 
 
messenger of God who comes to rebuke 
 him with the touching story of the ewe 
 lamb. When David acknowledges his sin 
 Nathan immediately responds, "The Lord 
 also hath put away thy sin," and there is 
 in this expression a reference to the scape- 
 goat of the Old Testament on the day of 
 atonement, when the priest confesses the 
 sins of the people and the goat was repre- 
 sented as staggering away under the load of 
 Israel's sins, down through the valley, up 
 the mountain yonder until he is lost to 
 sight, and then finally, according to tradi- 
 tion, is pushed over into the abyss where 
 no man is. He can put away our sins on 
 whom the Lord hath laid our iniquity. 
 
 Second : Be Clean. — This refers to in- 
 ner cleanliness which is only brought about 
 by the indwelling of Cnrist. God puts 
 awav our sins, it is true, when He forgives 
 us, but it is one thing to be set right con- 
 cerning the guilt of sin and quite another 
 tnnig to be set free from the pollution of 
 sin. This second privilege is ours when 
 Christ comes in to dwell with us. We are 
 very much afraid of the word "holiness," 
 in preaching and teaching, yet we have as 
 much of holiness as we have of Christ, no 
 more and no less. Let us be clean in the 
 heart. This is possible by the Word of 
 God which is cleansing in its very touch. 
 Let us be clean in what we say, making a 
 covenant with Christ to guard our lips. 
 Asking Him to keep our eyes, let us not 
 do the things that will grieve the Spirit, 
 remembering that God can only use that 
 which is clean. 
 
 Third : Let us Change our Garments. — 
 This must refer to the outward practices of 
 our life. In other words, our habits. What 
 is the garment we are wearing to-day? 
 With some of it is a robe of our own weav- 
 ing, the robe of selfishness and pride, and 
 mark you this, where self comes into a life 
 Christ passes out. There is another robe 
 which we may wear to-day, woven in the 
 loom of Heaven, bearing the red mark of 
 the blood of Christ. 
 
 Do you remember the story of the fatlier 
 and the prodigal, where the boy returned 
 from his wanderings clad in rags, and the 
 father said to his servant, "Bring forth the 
 best robe and put it on him." I used to 
 think it was a robe beautifully embroidered, 
 but not so. One of our best Greek schol- 
 ars has said it means, "Bring forth the same 
 old robe he used to wear and put it on him, 
 the robe he wore when he was as my son, 
 living up to the privileges of his position, 
 so that he mav know that he is restored 
 
again," and this is what we need to have 
 put around us ; the robe we wore at Bethel, 
 when we walked in fellowship with God and 
 had a vision of Qirist. 
 
 In Ephesians Paul says, "Put off the old 
 man, put on the new man," and then tells 
 us to "keep putting away sin." This is the 
 position of us here to-day. Oh, that we 
 might change our garments ! In the twenty- 
 second of Matthew and the eleventh verse, 
 when the King came into the wedding feast 
 He rebuked the man without a wedding 
 garment. He who had been rebuked was 
 speechless. How can we stand before Him 
 without the robe of His righteousness? 
 
 Never until Jacob came back to the place 
 where he had slept with the pillow of stones 
 underneath his head, to the very spot where 
 he had seen God, did he receive blessing. 
 And it is interesting to note in the sixth 
 verse that when he came, his family came 
 with him. As the head of the house goes 
 the family will usually go. 
 
 Mr. Moody used to tell the story of the 
 man, backslidden for thirteen years, who 
 came into his meeting and got back the old 
 feeling for Christ, and then determined to 
 seek his family, but he found that in thir- 
 teen years they had wandered away from 
 Christ and he came back to the great evan- 
 gelist to say in an agony that every one 
 of them had lapsed into infidelity. 
 
 I traveled the other day with a mission- 
 ary from Wisconsin who told me how he 
 had reached a drunken man in the woods 
 of Wisconsin, told him the story of Christ 
 and won him, and later had the joy of re- 
 ceiving the man and the six members of 
 his household into the fellowship of the 
 church. When Noah entered the ark, his 
 family went with him. Let us arise and go 
 up to Bethel. 
 
 Results. — First, in the fifth verse we read 
 that the people were afraid of Jacob and his 
 company, for the terror of the Lord was 
 upon them. Matthew Henry has said that 
 "when sin was in Jacob's house he was 
 afraid of his neighbors, but when the idols 
 were put away his neighbors were afraid 
 of him." When shall we learn the lesson 
 that we have power over men by the way of 
 God. The world does not fear a worldly 
 Christian, nor does the devil, and we need 
 expect no triumph over men until we have 
 first prevailed with God. 
 
 Second : — God appeared and talked with 
 Jacob. This we read in verses nine and ten. 
 Of course, no man can see God as He is 
 and live. Moses asked this of God and 
 He said : "I will put thee in the cleft of the 
 
rock and cover thee with my hand while I 
 pass by,'' and he saw the glory of the gar- 
 ments of God and His face did shine, but 
 we can see Christ, and when we behold Him 
 in His tenderness with little children and 
 His ministering- to the sick and suffering 
 everywhere, we hear Him say, "He that 
 hath seen me hath seen my Father also." 
 God still speaks so to us ; if we did but have 
 our ears open we should find Him speaking 
 in nature. 
 
 I can remember as a boy out in the coun- 
 try holding my ear up against the telegraph 
 pole and listening to what was told me 
 was the whirr of the messages flashing from 
 city to city, and I used to wonder if it might 
 be possible for someone to hear what might 
 even then be passing through the air, and 
 now to-day we have accomplished this in 
 the wireless telegraphy, and if we did but 
 have our ears open I am sure that widi 
 every rising sun, with every running stream, 
 with every singing bird, with every thing 
 in nature we should hear God speak. 
 
 And He speaks to us in the Bible, but 
 the difficulty with us is that we have not 
 faith. It has long been my desire to own 
 one of the large old fashioned clocks used 
 by our forefathers, and recently it became 
 possible for me to gain possession of one. 
 The works are perfect, the pendulum is 
 perfect, and the whole clock is a thing of 
 beauty, and I started it, but the pendulum 
 would swing for a moment and then stop 
 and I thought I had made a poor bargain 
 in the purchase of my clock, but at last 1 
 discovered there was a little catch by means 
 of which the pendulum was united to the 
 works and I started the clock once more and 
 it is keeping perfect time. Here is this old 
 Book, truer than ever, if that were possible, 
 certainly more precious than ever. We 
 have called it uninteresting; we have let it 
 alone when we might have been listening 
 to its Heaven-born messages, none other 
 than the voice of God, if we had but had 
 faith. God said to Jacob, "I am God al- 
 mighty," and that was enough for Him to 
 say. "I will walk with thee." 'Tf God be 
 for us who can be against us?" 
 
 Third: In the thirty-fifth chapter of 
 Genesis there are four burials. There is 
 the burial of the idols, the burial of Deb- 
 orah, the burial of Rachel and the burial of 
 Isaac. It is a chapter of sorrow, but what 
 a difference Bethel must have made in the 
 way that sorrow was endured. I stood not 
 long ago in the home of a man whose child 
 was dead and I heard him say, although he 
 liad once been a Qiristian, that he all but 
 
hated God, and I recall another experience 
 where a woman with a breaking heart said, 
 with tears flowing down her face that was 
 shining, "The Lord gave and He hath taken 
 away," and she was dwelling in Bethel. It 
 is a beautiful thing to know that, over the 
 body of Isaac, Esau and Jacob clasped 
 hands and were united once more. If we 
 did but live in Bethel old differences would 
 be put away, trying experiences would be 
 easily met. 
 
 Come let us arise and go to Bethel. We 
 have all of us had Bethel experiences, so 
 let us go back and pray as we used to prav, 
 work as we used to work, and preach as we 
 used to preach, and the heavens will be 
 opened above us. 
 
>--'^pi. 
 
 ^9y- 
 
 y 
 
 y 
 
 H Call to Ipersonal Service. 
 
 IRev. IClilton /Ifterle Smitb, 5). 2). 
 
 lyUKE x: 2. 
 
 'Che harvest truly i$ great, but the laborers are few: pray v« 
 therefore the Cord of the harvest, that Re would send forth 
 laborers into fiis harvest." 
 
 I 
 
 HAVE here a little rhyme which 
 was once sent out to his people by 
 a ministerial friend of mine, which 
 I will read to you : 
 
 What kind of a church would my church be 
 If every member was just like me? 
 
 These lines may suggest several questions 
 to our minds. If all the members of my 
 church were just like me, would the church, 
 as a whole, please the Master? What kind 
 of a prayer meeting would there be if every 
 member always did exactly as I do? How 
 about the Sunday School, if everybody fol- 
 lowed my example? How much money 
 would there be in the church treasury if 
 all the rest gave just as I do? What would 
 the unconverted people that come to church 
 do and say, and what about the unsaved 
 relatives and personal friends of the mem- 
 bers, if the latter were all like me? 
 
 I remember reading a certain dream that 
 Dr. A. J Gordon, of Boston, now gone to 
 his reward, once had. 
 
 He thought he was in his pulpit, when 
 he saw a stranger enter the church with one 
 of his deacons," beside whom he took a seat. 
 There was nothing special about his dress 
 to distinguish him from others in the con- 
 gregation, but yet his face, and especially 
 his eyes, continually drew the doctor's at- 
 tention to him during the progress of the 
 
 Pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church, New York. 
 34 
 
sermon, every point in which was closely 
 followed by the stranger. At the close of 
 the service Dr. Gordon went up to the dea- 
 con and said, "Who was that stranger in 
 your pew with you to-day?" 
 
 "That was Jesus Christ, of Nazareth." 
 
 Dr. Gordon said that the influence of that 
 dream never departed out of his life, and 
 that he never went into the pulpit after that 
 without seeing Jesus of Nazareth sitting 
 in the congregation. 
 
 "I begin to ask myself whether Jesus 
 Qirist liked that sermon that I preached — 
 whether it was really preached for His 
 glory or not. I wonder what He thought 
 of the music and the paid quartette, and 
 the high-faluting anthems they sang; of 
 the way I read the Scriptures ; and what was 
 His opinion of the way I scolded the peo- 
 ple about the small attendance at the Fri- 
 day prayer meeting." 
 
 If Jesus Christ came to take charge of 
 the church to which you and I belong would 
 He be satisfied with the way in which we 
 do our parts in the church work? No 
 doubt He would find the building filled with 
 very respectable people, but don't you think 
 that He would want us to go out on Tenth 
 and Eleventh avenues and Avenue A? 
 
 I do not believe that in any way the 
 church of to-day shows the mind of Christ, 
 as He looked out over the great unsaved 
 multitude and longed for their salvation. 
 See Him weeping over Jerusalem and say- 
 ing: "Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which kill- 
 eth the prophets, and stoneth them that are 
 sent unto thee; how often would I have 
 gathered thy children together, as a hen 
 doth gather her brood under her wings, and 
 ye would not !" As He utters these words, 
 see the great scalding tears falling down 
 His cheeks. I find nothing in my own 
 heart or in the hearts of my church that 
 corresponds to that great agony of desire 
 that this city should be saved. 
 
 Then see Him sending out the twelve on 
 their mission of mercy, and later, the seven- 
 ty — the latter lay workers as distinguished 
 from the twelve. It is worthy of note that 
 the instructions given to the seventy were 
 almost identical with those given to the 
 apostles. They were to do the work of the 
 ministry, haling men and women and say- 
 ing that the Kingdom of God was nigh. 
 
 Is there any sense in which you and I are 
 in any way near the mind of Christ in His 
 anxious longing for the salvation of souls? 
 
 In the Sistine Chapel in Rome is a great 
 painting by INIichael Angelo of the Last 
 Judgment, before which thousands have 
 
 35 
 
stood in awe. Let me tell you that> the 
 twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew is our Sis- 
 tine Chapel, and we ought to be more im- 
 pressed with the picture presented there 
 than anybody could ever be who looks at 
 the Italian painter's masterpiece in the Vati- 
 can. 
 
 The marvel is that when we are to stand 
 before Christ the thing we are going to 
 meet is not whether we have been pure in 
 heart and life, or whether our business has 
 been done honestly. The paramount ques- 
 tion is involved in the verse : "I was an 
 hungered, and ye gave Me no meat ; I was 
 thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink ; I was a 
 stranger, and ye took Me not in; naked 
 and ye clothed Me not ; sick, and in prison, 
 and ye visited Me not," and the important 
 thing will be whether you and I have given 
 the bread and water of life to the multitudes 
 in their starving condition of soul, without 
 Christ and the hope of His salvation. 
 
 Let me paint from the Scripture the mind 
 of the Church as contrasted with the mind 
 of Christ. On one occasion He said to cer- 
 tain people: "Ye seek Me, not because ye 
 saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of 
 the loaves, and were filled." Why are you 
 a Christian? If you have any interest in 
 Christianity, is it because of anything you 
 can put into it or because of something that 
 you can get out of it ? That is the question. 
 Are you, spiritually, a "rice" Christian, as 
 some mission converts in Asia are called? — 
 that term being meant to imply that the per- 
 son professes Christianity for the sake of 
 some temporal advantage. Yes, many of 
 you are. Is it not the purple and fine linen 
 of religion that many of you seek? I do 
 not say that the hope of reward in Christi- 
 anity is altogether an unworthy one, for 
 Jesus Himself held it up before us. But as 
 compared with the all-consuming desire for 
 souls that we ought to have, it is a com- 
 paratively ignoble motive. 
 
 If your religion is chiefly based on a de- 
 sire to get to Heaven that is only another 
 way of saying that you are seeking the 
 loaves and fishes of the next world instead 
 of this. 
 
 Multitudes of people are still ignorant of 
 Christ, and I say, "What is there in your 
 religion or mine that can so recommend it 
 to them that they shall leave their darkness 
 and superstition to embrace it ?" 
 
 I remember once hearing Edward Everett 
 Hale say in a Unitarian convention — and 
 my cheeks flushed with shame as he said it : 
 "The trouble with a good many orthodox 
 people is that they are so much concerned 
 36 
 
about saving their own little souls, many of 
 which are so small as hardly to be worth 
 sa^^ing, that they care very little about the 
 souls of anybody else." But if we get near 
 the mind of Christ and enter into the pas- 
 sion of His heart for the salvation of men, 
 we shall hardly have time to think about 
 ourselves at all. 
 
 In the fifteenth of Luke there is an ap- 
 palling revelation of the heart of only too 
 many professors of religion. In that chap- 
 ter there are three parables and after each 
 there comes a sort of refrain. If you look, 
 you will see that after each of the first two 
 there is a statement of the importance at- 
 tached in Heaven to the salvation of souls. 
 The seventh verse says "joy shall be in 
 Heaven" and the tenth verse speaks of the 
 joy of the angels, when a sinner turns to 
 God. When I looked for a corresponding 
 refrain after the story of the Prodigal Son, I 
 could not find one at all at first, but at 
 length I discovered it — in these verses : 
 "And he was angry, and would not go in : 
 therefore came his father out, and entreated 
 him. And he answering, said to his father, 
 Lo, these many years do I serve thee, 
 neither transgressed I at any time thy com- 
 mandment ; and yet thou never gavest me a 
 kid, that I might make merry with my 
 friends : But as soon as this thy son was 
 come, which hath devoured thy living with 
 harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted 
 calf." 
 
 What a difference in the pictures ! In 
 Heaven appreciation of what it means for a 
 soul to be lost, and joy over its being saved; 
 but on earth utter failure to care whether 
 men are saved or lost. 
 
 If we had the mind of Christ on this 
 matter we should be able to see the great 
 field that lies before each one of us. If we 
 had one-tenth of the Master's longing for 
 the salvation of the people our buildings 
 would soon be filled with the seeking souls 
 who are now absent from all churches. 
 
 If there is one thing more than another 
 for which we should pray it is for a great, 
 overwhelming, baptism of the mind of 
 Christ, so that we can see, as He saw, what 
 the "lostness" of a soul really means. If 
 we could only realize the depth of those 
 words : He "took upon Him the form of a 
 servant and * * * humbled Himself, and 
 became obedient unto death, even the death 
 of the cross," we should substitute real 
 genuine service for much of the unreality 
 of our present lives. 
 
 The trouble with the church — with you 
 and me as Christians — is that we have not 
 
 37 
 
one-tenth the willingness to suffer and to do 
 the hard things that He had. It is because 
 of our supineness and unwillingness to suf- 
 fer sacrifice that the work Jesus wants us to 
 do is never done. Our feeling in such mat- 
 ters was accurately expressed by Peter in his 
 words to Christ when the latter was speak- 
 ing of the things he should suffer in Jerus- 
 alem : "Be it far from Thee, Lord !" or as 
 the margin has it, "Spare Thyself, Lord." 
 
 When during an earthly war some desper- 
 ate undertaking has to be carried through, 
 in which not one-third of those who take 
 part in it are expected to survive, thous- 
 ands of men will volunteer for it without 
 a moment's hesitation as soon as the call 
 for volunteers is issued, although they 
 know that their action is almost certain to 
 involve tears and agony and blood and 
 death. 
 
 Do you remember that awful verse in 
 Malachi : "If ye offer the blind for sacrifice, 
 is it not evil? and if ye offer the lame and 
 sick, is it not evil ?" The Israelites were told 
 to bring to God for sacrifice the very best 
 they had, and we ought to do the same. 
 Yet some of us seem to think that anything 
 is good enough for God, and wc bring Him 
 the lame or blind lamb instead of that which 
 has no blemish. We give Him the little 
 when we might give Him the great. We 
 take up a cross that is so small that we can 
 hardly feel it, w^hen we ought to carry one 
 that should make our knees stagger beneath 
 its size and weight. 
 
 Years ago I went to a jeweler's store be- 
 cause I wanted to buy a beautiful stone. 
 He showed me a very fine specimen, and 
 then he fetched out from a drawer another 
 stone, and much larger, although very sim- 
 ilar to the first. He said that I could have 
 the second for the same price as the first, 
 because it had a small flaw in it ; though 
 he added that this flaw was so small that a 
 microscope would be needed in order to 
 detect it. 
 
 Of course, I instantly rejected the 
 thought of giving to the person so dear to 
 me a jewel that had any imperfection at all, 
 and purchased the perfect one. How often 
 the stnnc wc give to God is the one with the 
 flaw in it ! We do not find the most bril- 
 liant jewel we can buy and lay that on His 
 table; but we bring Him some half-hearted 
 compromise with flaws in it instead. 
 
 I had a friend who went gunning in the 
 mountains of Tennessee; and as he had no 
 dog, a little bare-legged boy belonging to 
 one of the mountaineer families went with 
 him to pick up the birds. Every time the 
 
gun went off away the little fellow would 
 go into the bushes after the bird, his legs 
 soon becoming all torn and bleeding from 
 the thorns and brambles through which he 
 passed. My friend asked him what he was 
 going to do to them. "Nothin'." 
 
 "But don't they hurt?" 
 
 "You bet they do." 
 
 "Well, what are you going to do about 
 it?" 
 
 "Jest let it hurt." 
 
 And as the gun went off again, away 
 went the boy to fetch the bird last brought 
 down. 
 
 That is the kind of philosophy we want 
 in the service of God ; and only when the 
 churches come to that "jest-let-it-hurt" spirit 
 will their best be laid upon the altar of God. 
 
 I want to lay on you the burden and re- 
 sponsibility of personal work for souls. The 
 Seventy were sent into people's houses to 
 hale men and women and tell them that the 
 Kingdom of God was nigh unto them — to 
 do hand-to-hand, heart-to-heart and face- 
 to-face work. 
 
 In London there is a place called Toynbee 
 Hall, to which students and others go 
 to try to help and benefit the people who 
 live in its vicinity. The leading thought 
 there is that it is of little use to try to lift 
 up humanity in the mass, but that it is well 
 worth while to take one man or one family 
 in hand and continue steady, patient effort 
 to make that man or that family a center 
 of light and happiness. The trouble with 
 us is that we have been, and are still, try- 
 ing to lift up people in masses instead of as 
 individuals. If we could only get any good 
 proportion of the members of this congre- 
 gation to see the value of personal work for 
 Christ and to engage in it, there is no know- 
 ing what the results might be, or where 
 those results might stop. 
 
 When I was pastor in Cleveland I tried 
 to do a little work in that way myself. 
 About a block and a half from my church 
 lived a foreman employed on one of the 
 large papers. He and his family were avow- 
 edly skeptical. One day I called and in- 
 vited the folks to come to church. I had a 
 chilly reception. Next week I called again. 
 This time the skepticism of the father was 
 plainly announced and doubt expressed as 
 to his acceptance of the invitation. The 
 third time there was a little thawing out. 
 The fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth 
 visits followed, and on the Sunday evening 
 following my ninth call I had the satisfaction 
 of seeing the man and his wife coming and 
 take a back seat in the church. Before the 
 
 39 
 
year was up I had the joy of receiving that 
 man and his wife, and the only child big 
 enough to take the step, as members into 
 the church. 
 
 Did it pay ? Soon after that episode I was 
 called to New York, and five years passed 
 before I returned to Cleveland, and stood 
 again in the old church. There was a great 
 congregation before me, and when I went 
 into the pulpit I looked up into the galleries 
 for these friends of mine, but could not see 
 them. I looked about in different parts of 
 the church, but could not discover them. 
 I began to wonder whether they had drifted 
 off to some other city or not, when, after 
 looking in about every other part of the 
 church, I saw them sitting in the very front 
 seat. 
 
 At the close of the service, the first 
 hands I shook were theirs, and when I 
 asked if they had been faithful during my 
 absence, the father said he did not think 
 they had missed a service since I went away, 
 and that now all the children were members 
 of the church. 
 
 Anything you can do for souls by sym- 
 pathy and hard work pays. Yes, it does. 
 And that is the only thing that does count 
 to any practical extent in the church. You 
 may go regularly to the prayer meeting and 
 do a little good to those who go there. You 
 may be faithful and upright in business and 
 set a good example to the few who are under 
 you in that. But when you become real 
 greedy for souls, and work for them con- 
 tinually, then your influence and power for 
 good are felt not only all through your 
 church but far beyond it. 
 
 Once in Cleveland I was called tx) conduct 
 the funeral of a lady who died at the age 
 of ninety-four. Gathered together there 
 were forty-six of her descendants, every one 
 of whom was an earnest Christian — some of 
 them being among the foremost workers of 
 my church. One of them said to me, "We 
 owe it to her that we are Christians to-day 
 — to her earnest prayers, faithful words and 
 consistent life." I wondered, as I heard 
 that, whose hand it was that — many, many 
 years before ! — had pointed a young girl to 
 Tesus with such excellent results, extending 
 over nearly a century, and larger and more 
 far-reaching than ever before. 
 
 Do you suppose that Peter Bohler realized 
 what he was accomplishing through his 
 personal dealing with John Wesley, that 
 young Church of England clergyman ? He 
 really founded Methodism— that magnifi- 
 cent cliurch that has never been false to her 
 T.ord. 
 
And in the conversation between Stan- 
 pitz and Martin Luther lay the whole of 
 that mighty Reformation accomplished by 
 "the solitary monk that shook the world." 
 
 Nobody can possibly know all that it 
 means to try to lead a soul to Christ, and 
 if we are willing- to work for Him He will 
 surely bless our efforts. 
 
 I am not fond of talking about my per- 
 sonal experience, but some of it may be 
 helpful. 
 
 During my junior year at Princeton Col- 
 lege, a day was appointed to pray for col- 
 leges and universities, and a special conse- 
 cration meeting was convened for enrolling 
 those who would undertake to speak to at 
 least one of the men in college about his 
 soul. I was a Christian then, but only a 
 poor, miserable, nominal specimen, and 
 when this consecration meeting was fixed I 
 took good care not to attend it. 
 
 Next day there was a wonderful service. 
 Dr. Taylor, then pastor of the Broadway 
 Tabernacle, preached from the text "He 
 shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and 
 with fire." He preached so that the fire 
 entered into my soul, and made me the most 
 miserable man in the college. The sermon 
 was followed by a meeting, in which about 
 twenty men belonging to my own class 
 talked. 
 
 After the meeting one of my friends asked 
 me why I had not been at the consecration 
 meeting the day before. I said I had had to 
 study. That was a lie. My friend said, 
 "Ldon't believe it. The fact is you haven't 
 got any grit or any courage in your religion, 
 and I don't believe you've got very much 
 at all even of that." He went on talking 
 to me for an hour or so along that line till 
 I felt about as small as my little finger ; and 
 I never felt meaner in my life than I did as 
 I went up the steps to my room on the third 
 story. 
 
 As I reached the second story I saw the 
 light shining in the room of a classmate. 
 He was the son of the mayor of an impor- 
 tant city, and was a skeptic as to religion. 
 
 I knocked at his door, earnestly hoping 
 that he was out. But he was not out, and 
 when I got inside the room I closed the door 
 behind me and stood with my back to it. 
 I don't know which of us looked the most 
 astonished. Then I blurted out, "Eddie, I 
 don't see why you are not a Christian !" He 
 looked at me with a look of surprise and 
 said : "Do you know I'm very glad you 
 came in ? I've been thinking about that very 
 thing all this day." 
 
 I did my best to lead him to Christ, and 
 
the next day sent somebody to talk to him 
 who had had more experience than I. 
 
 Three days later he confessed Christ be- 
 fore the world. 
 
 Two years ago I shook hands with him 
 in a distant city where he is an officer in a 
 Presbyterian church. 
 
 There was a reunion not long ago of my 
 old class of twenty-five years ago. There 
 were fifty-five of us present. Among those 
 I met was the former captain of the baseball 
 nine. I was the pitcher, when we were 
 both at college. He was then somewhat pro- 
 fane and drank a little, loo. I felt I could ' 
 speak to almost any man at Princeton about 
 religion except Dave. 
 
 One night Dave said to me "Why have 
 you never asked me to be a Christian ?" He 
 cried and I cried and to-day he is preaching 
 the Gospel. 
 
 Are you willing to try to do some of this 
 personal work for the glory of God and the 
 building up of His church? There is no- 
 thing that the church needs so much, and I 
 would like to know whether you are going 
 to take everything that God gives you, but 
 not give Him in return anything that really 
 costs you. 
 
 It is over blood and tears and sacrifice 
 that you walk to glory. Will you not give 
 some service and make some sacrifice that 
 others may meet you there? 
 
 If so, begin at once to do some personal 
 work for Jesus. God grant that the mind 
 of the Master — longing for the salvation of 
 the city — may be yours, and that the sacri- 
 fice of Christ, which caused Him to give His 
 blood for men, may at least, in some slight 
 degree, be your sacrifice. Amen ! 
 
Che mcrk of Soul Ulinntng, 
 
 TRcv. 5obn :ffialcom Sbaw, ®. 5). 
 
 Proverbs x : 30. 
 "Re that winnetb souls is wise." 
 
 THE Revised Version renders it : 
 "He that is wise winnetli souls." 
 Either of those statements is true, 
 whichever rendering you take. 
 The man that is wise will win 
 souls if he be truly wise, and only he that 
 is wise can win souls. In other words, there 
 is a secret to this work, and, like all of God's 
 secrets, it is known only to them that fear 
 Him. May the Holy Spirit guide us this 
 afternoon as we seek to know the secret of 
 soul winning. 
 
 First and last there can be, of course, only 
 one secret of soul winning, and that is the 
 Holy Spirit's co-operation with us. Without 
 His aid our mightiest effort will be im- 
 potent, and with His help our weakest effort 
 will be omnipotent; and, speaking again 
 fundamentally, there is only one thing that 
 conditions the Holy Spirit's co-operation 
 with us, and that is our co-operation with 
 Him. As dear old Dr. Spencer, of Brook- 
 lyn, himself one of the greatest winners of 
 souls in his time, used to say when he was 
 speaking to pastors who were seeking an 
 awakening work of grace in their churches : 
 "Be sure that you co-operate with the Holy 
 Spirit." So that our inquiry as to what is 
 the secret of soul winning resolves itself 
 into this one basic inquiry : Wherein does 
 our co-operation with the Holy Spirit con- 
 sist? And I think I will answer that ques- 
 tion under three heads. 
 
 First, we co-operate with the Holy Spirit 
 when we yield ourselves to His influence 
 and become the personal subjects of His 
 gracious operation. Otherwise, what are we 
 
 Pastor of the West End Presbyterian Church, New York 
 43 
 
doing? We are resisting the Holy Spirit, 
 and what is resistance but the very opposite 
 of co-operation? 
 
 Secondly, we co-operate with the Holy 
 Spirit when we share His purpose, and share 
 it so truly and so deeply that it stirs our 
 being to its depths, and fires us as with an 
 all-controlling and consuming passion. If 
 that be not the case, then in our purpose 
 our face is in one direction and the Holy 
 Spirit in His great impelling purpose has 
 His face in the opposite direction. We are 
 at variance, and there can be no co-operation 
 between us. 
 
 Thirdly, we co-operate with the Holy 
 Spirit when we join Him actively in His 
 work, for a co-operation that is only nega- 
 tive is no co-operation at" all. I believe we 
 shall discover the secret of the Lord in this 
 matter along those three paths. 
 
 Friends, I believe it with my soul, and I 
 believe it so that I am willing to act it out, 
 that we must go to the people. H they will 
 not come to the church, we must carry the 
 church to them. Let us have our tents ; let 
 us hire our theatres ; let us go to the race 
 grounds and to the fair grounds, anything 
 that is legitimate, in order to bring the life- 
 saving Gospel of Jesus Christ to dying men 
 around us. 
 
 Plrst of all, we co-operate with the Holy 
 Spirit when we yield ourselves to His in- 
 fluence and become the personal subjects of 
 His gracious operation. How true it is that 
 we go out to ask men to come to Christ, 
 when we have really not truly accepted 
 Christ ourselves. How true it is that many 
 a man who has attempted to be a winner 
 of souls has urged men to have absolute 
 faith in Christ, and his whole life lias been 
 one unbroken piece of unbelief. And how 
 true is it that we have enjoined men to make 
 full surrender, and we have not known what 
 surrender is ourselves. Now can there be 
 anything more devitalizing spiritually than 
 that? It will not only sap a man of his 
 power, but sap a man of his sense of power 
 to be conscious of inconsistency. Why, it 
 is like leakage to a vessel ; it is like escaping 
 steam to an engine ; it is like a defective 
 wire to an electric current ; and if this sense 
 of inconsistency aflfects us in this way, how 
 nuich more does it affect the men around 
 us that we arc trying to bring to Christ. 
 I think that inconsistency is the highest 
 stumbling block that many people around 
 us have to fall over before they get into the 
 kingdom of God. You let a man be able to 
 pick you out and say, "Physician, heal thy- 
 self," and not only will he be sure to say 
 
 44 
 
it, but the fact which enables him to say it 
 will render him utterly unsusceptible to 
 your influence and to your work. 
 
 And if it affects others and affects our- 
 selves, then how must it affect God? A 
 man who has never himself put away sin, 
 God can never use to call other men out of 
 sin. A man who has not himself abso- 
 lutely surrendered to Christ can never be- 
 come the apostle of surrender to other peo- 
 ple ; and he who is living in union with the 
 world, rather than in separation from the 
 world, is obstructing and not conducting 
 the flow of Christ's grace into his life, and 
 out from his life into other lives. 
 
 Therefore, dear friends, I believe that 
 before any of us can become effective and 
 fruitful soul winners, we must yield to the 
 threefold conviction of the Holy Spirit ; so 
 far yield to His conviction of sin that we 
 have put sin absolutely and forever out of 
 our hearts and lives ; so far yield to His 
 conviction of righteousness that God's will 
 is our will, and we rest in it, and we sur- 
 render to it; and so far yield to His con- 
 viction of judgment to come that here and 
 now we are drawing the line of separation 
 which divides the followers of Christ from 
 the adherents of Satan. In other words, 
 we cannot be winners of souls unless we 
 are clean men and women, unless we are 
 surrendered men and women, unless we are 
 separate men and women. Aye, it costs to 
 win men to Christ. It costs sometimes the 
 thing which, humanely speaking, is the 
 dearest to us, and the reason why we fail 
 in the effort is because we are unwilling to 
 pay the cost. 
 
 A friend of mine has only recently re- 
 turned from a tour around the world, and 
 he has a great deal to say about the con- 
 version of a cannibal chief down in the 
 South Sea Islands, whom he met and ad- 
 mired when he was visiting that part of 
 the world. The old chief was truly con- 
 verted, and, like a man truly converted, he 
 immediately became a missionary, and he 
 took his dugout canoe and rowed in and out 
 among those islands to preach Christ to his 
 fellow cannibals. But after a while he 
 thought he ought to have a better boat than 
 the dugout canoe, and he came to the Amer- 
 ican missionary and said he wished that he 
 could have a boat like his, and the Ameri- 
 can missionary said : "Why, I will sell you 
 mine ; I haven't much use for it." He sold 
 him his American boat, and the chief sailed 
 in and out among the natives, and the na- 
 tives looked at him and thought it was a 
 fine thing to be converted to this religion, 
 
 45 
 
that there were certain earthly advantages 
 attaching to it; and he began to reahze it, 
 and it began to affect him spiritually and 
 bring the flesh back into control, and he 
 came back after the course of a few weeks 
 to the missionary and said : "I have brought 
 back the boat." The missionary said: 
 "Why, what is the trouble? Do you want 
 your money back?" "Not a cent of it; it 
 isn't for that reason I bring it back." "Is 
 it because she isn't seaworthy" "Not for 
 a moment ; she is a splendid boat ; I wish I 
 could keep her, but I can't keep her." 
 "Well, what is the trouble?" "Ah," he said, 
 "I want to tell you that when I sit in that 
 boat and sail in and out among my fellow 
 cannibals, I see them looking at me, and 
 it brings back the old cannibal feeling. I 
 shall go back to the cannibal life in less 
 than a year if I keep my boat ; I must give 
 up my boat." Dear friends, there are some 
 of us that will have to give up our boat. 
 I don't know what yours is ; I think I know 
 what mine is. I trust that any one of us 
 who desires to be a winner of souls will not 
 make the mistake of keeping his boat and 
 expecting to be successful in bringing men 
 to Jesus Christ. You will have to search 
 your hearts for yourselves. 
 
 I well remember when it seemed to me 
 that the Master almost visibly started up 
 the steps of the throne of my heart and 
 life. I can see Him as if He were photo- 
 graphed before me, and I can see Him this 
 morning, with His right foot on the first 
 step up to the throne, looking up into my 
 face and saying, "Shall I come farther? 
 Here is where you have kept me all the rest 
 of your life. May I come to my rightful 
 place?" And 1 said: "Lord Jesus, ascend 
 the throne and take the sceptre," and new 
 life came to me, and I verily believe a new 
 anointing. Dear friend, can you get any 
 such vision of Christ beneath the influence 
 of the meeting this morning as that? Is 
 Christ in control over your life? Have you 
 allowed Him to come into only a part of it, 
 and He is still waiting to have absolute 
 control? Let Him come to the throne this 
 morning. Give up your boat, whatever it 
 costs you, and let Christ have His rightful 
 place. You will never be a winner of souls, 
 believe me, until you give up your boat, 
 whatever that boat may be. 
 
 Now may we turn to the second part 
 which I outlined, namely, in order to co- 
 operate with the Holy Spirit in such a way 
 as to insure your success in the winning of 
 souls, you must share His purpose ; share 
 it truly and share it fully, so that it becomes 
 46 
 
a consuming purpose, a passion, in other 
 words. Now that is the great purpose of 
 the Holy Spirit. We are all agreed upon 
 that. He has but one great purpose in the 
 world, and that is to bring the world to the 
 foot of the Cross. Wherever He works and 
 in whatsoever way He works, that is His 
 passion, and we must have it before we 
 shall share His purpose. How far have we 
 that purpose so that we can call it our pas- 
 
 sion 
 
 You say, "Why, I have that purpose, and 
 that purpose is in command in my life. I 
 give to these things ; I am interested in 
 them ; I pray for them ; I seek the advance- 
 ment of the church and the advancement of 
 Christ's kingdom." You may do all that, 
 and yet not be in the purpose of the Holy 
 Spirit. That is theoretical; what about the 
 practical thing? I confess that as I go up 
 and down throughout our country — and I 
 have done a good deal of it this last year 
 in an effort to awaken some of the churches 
 of our own denomination to the duty of 
 this thing — I am more and more impressed 
 with the absence of a passion for souls.^ I 
 do not find it among church people as I be- 
 lieve I ought to find it. I surely do not 
 discover it among many of our church offi- 
 cers, and even among our church women, 
 as I think it should be; and I frequently 
 find much of it absent from the preaching 
 of the day, the old love of souls that used 
 to take hold of the church and stir it until 
 it would break out in those wonderful re- 
 vivals back in the years that some of us 
 remember, and remember well, and we have 
 been longing for a return of those days ever 
 since. 
 
 I do not know why it is absent. Some tell 
 me it is because of Universalism that has 
 grown up in the church, in which increas- 
 ingly so many people do not believe they 
 need to be brought to Christ in order to be 
 saved; and, do you know, I half believe it. 
 Sometimes I am told that it is the commer- 
 cialism of the age, in which even church 
 people are elevating the seen and deterior- 
 ating the unseen, after the gold that itself 
 is eluding them, as well as better treasures 
 that they ought to be after. Sometimes I 
 am told that it is the secularism of. the day, 
 the worldliness of the church, so that there 
 isn't any longer in a great many churches 
 any line that separates the world from the 
 church ; it is all rubbed out ; worldliness 
 honeycombing our churches in the country 
 as well as the city; and I sometimes think 
 that is true. And then I have been told — 
 and I half believe that — that it is the selfish- 
 
 47 
 
ism, the religious selfishism of the day ; and 
 there is a great deal in that. 
 
 I have often felt that we were altogether 
 too willing to sing our way into the better 
 and sweeter and higher things in Christ, 
 to the forget fulness of the world around us, 
 and that wc were contented if we could get 
 the good felling in our hearts, and we forgot 
 all about the men and women that were 
 dying all around us. But whatever be the 
 cause, I know that until the church gets its 
 passion for souls, there will be no wide- 
 spread awakening and there will be no 
 fruitful ingathering of souls to Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 It is the difficulty of the church to-day. 
 We have advanced along missionary lines 
 splendidly; along sociological lines, with 
 our church houses and their equipments, 
 with our various organizations. We have 
 advanced along humanitarian and benevo- 
 lent lines, but we have not advanced these 
 years one step along this line, and that is 
 where I put my finger upon many hearts 
 that perhaps are just before me this morn- 
 ing. 
 
 When I see old Christmas Evans, on his 
 way to the meeting, the schoolhouse where 
 he was to preach that night, and preach a 
 sermon for souls, tying his horse to a sap- 
 ling by the way, and literally throwing his 
 face upon the ground and staying there 
 until sunset; when I see Charles G. Finney 
 out in the haymow all night praying, asking 
 his host to let him sleep in the barn, rather 
 than sleep in a comfortable bed in the house, 
 and he on his knees all night praying for 
 power with souls the next night; when I 
 see our own dear Dwight L. Moody in those 
 great hippodrome meetings in New York 
 city, anxious to get through the service in 
 the big auditorium, where he was dealing 
 with the multitude, in order that he might 
 get into the inquiry room and deal with the 
 individual ; and when I read in the life of 
 George Macgregor, recently published by 
 his cousin, this remarkable statement in that 
 chapter entitled, "A Passion for Souls," 
 that there was probably not an hour of the 
 day in all the last years of his life when 
 a passion for souls did not present itself 
 consciously and consumingly to his heart, 
 I know, dear friends, what is the matter 
 with me, and I think I know what is the 
 matter with a good many of you. It is a 
 lack of a passion for souls. When we see 
 the world dying, as Christ saw it, when He 
 looked out from, the Calvary, and when we 
 feel for that world as Christ felt for it 
 when He set His feet to go to Jerusalem, 
 
and stopped not until He had gone to the 
 end of His Hfe and given it up for the ran- 
 soming of dying men and women, when, in 
 other words, we have something of His pas- 
 sion for the wolrd's salvation, then we will 
 become winners of souls, and not until then. 
 May God breathe that passion into our 
 hearts to-day. Away with our religious 
 selfishness, away with the honeycombing 
 of universalism in the church, away with 
 worldliness in your life and mine, away 
 with the commercialism that is shackling 
 your hands and feet alike, and the inbreath- 
 ing and inflowing of that love of Christ 
 for the world which will send us out to be 
 successful winners of souls. 
 
 Now just a moment along the third path, 
 which is this : that if we would co-operate 
 with the Holy Spirit, we must join Him in 
 His work. Of course, there are various 
 ways in which we may thus join the Holy 
 Spirit in His work. The various lines will 
 suggest themselves to you. I put increas- 
 ing accent every day of my life, upon the 
 life of the people of God before and among 
 those that they are trying to bring to Christ. 
 We do not, as a rule, put a strong enough 
 accent there, dear friends : 
 
 "Thou must thyself be true. 
 
 If thou the truth wouldst teach. 
 Thy soul must overflow. 
 
 If thou another soul wouldst reach. 
 It takes the overflow of heart. 
 To give the lips full speech." 
 
 You let a man sincerely live the life of 
 Christ before others, and it is a tremen- 
 dous drawing power Calvaryward. Oh, 
 that we might realize it. I know it is a 
 truism ; I know you call it a commonplace ; 
 the trouble is, it has come to be a common- 
 place in our thought, and in our experi- 
 ence; that is the trouble. Our lives count 
 for more than we dream of every day. 
 You cannot win a boy in your home be- 
 fore whom you are not living the true 
 Christian life. You cannot win a scholar in 
 your Sunday-school class if you are living 
 a life that does not honor Qirist, while you 
 are trying to win such a scholar. It is im- 
 possible. May it be impressed upon us 
 anew to-day. 
 
 And then what shall we do as a means 
 of co-operating with the Holy Spirit, join- 
 ing Him in His work? You know the old 
 adage ran : "To labor is to pray." I turn 
 that around and say, "To pray is to 
 labor." I said to my people last fall, 
 when we started out on a campaign 
 for souls, if I could have ten men 
 who would give themselves altogether to 
 
 49 
 
active service, or ten men who would give 
 themselves altogether to prayer, I would 
 choose the latter. Do 3^ou know why? Be- 
 cause when I go out to work myself active- 
 ly, God simply uses my arm; my hand is 
 withered, and He restores it, and then uses 
 that human hand. But when I go out to 
 pray for souls and for the work for souls — 
 I speak not irreverently — I use God's arm 
 and God's hand. What shall I say of 
 preaching the Gospel? Oh, I wish that I 
 had an hour to speak on that theme. I be- 
 lieve that as a rule, speaking to my fellow 
 ministers, that we haven't preached for 
 souls as we ought to have done. I know 
 some of our people will say to us, "I do 
 not like these evangelistic sermons." Let 
 them say on along that line ; let us keep on 
 with our evangelistic sermons. We must 
 preach for souls ; we must preach the Gos- 
 pel of redemption to the sinner; we must 
 do it faithfully ; we must do it as effective- 
 ly as we have the power to do. 
 
 And I fear that not only are we not 
 preaching this kind of a Gospel as we 
 should, many of us, but that we are not 
 getting the men to preach it to, and we still 
 stick to our old methods. What we want 
 is the giving up of a great deal of what I 
 call conservatism of method, ceasing for 
 a while and being willing for a while to 
 give up our dignity. I know some of the 
 other churches represented here have not 
 been so dignified, thank God, as the Pres- 
 byterian Church, which I represent. We 
 are traditionally very dignified and conser- 
 vative and conventional, but we are fast 
 becoming otherwise, thank God again. I 
 believe we must be willing to give- up much 
 of this dignity in order to get hold of men. 
 
 I was up in Albany speaking last fall, 
 and as I climbed the hill up toward the 
 Capitol to the hotel where I was going to 
 stay, there was a little boy crying the even- 
 ing papers with all the voice he had, and I 
 looked around, and there wasn't another 
 soul to hear the cry but myself, and I didn't 
 want an Albany evening paper. Do you know, 
 that is just about the way many ministers 
 are preaching. It is not their fault, so far 
 as their preaching is concerned, but they 
 are calling for sinners to come to Christ, 
 and the sinners are beyond the reach of 
 their voice. A man in New England told 
 me when I was speaking along these lines : 
 
 "I want to emphasize and endorse what 
 you said about this. I live in one of the 
 chief cities in Massachusetts, right across 
 the way from one of the great churches of 
 the city, having the best preacher in the 
 
city, having the best music in the city, hav- 
 ing the handsomest church in the city, hav- 
 ing the most fashionable church in the city ; 
 but I sit on mv veranda and watch that 
 church on a Sunday night, and when the 
 windows begin to be open I see people pass 
 down the street and stand under the open 
 windows and listen to the singing and try 
 to get the voice of the preacher, and pass 
 on. They never go in; and all that music 
 is being sung, and all that preaching is be- 
 ing given to a little handful of people, and 
 the crowd is surging by." 
 
 But there is one line that I want to sug- 
 gest much more emphatically than any 
 other. Dear friends, with all our living and 
 with all our praying, and with all our 
 preaching, I believe there is something else. 
 I believe that something else is needed in 
 order to render any one of those effective, 
 and that is the personal touch, what we 
 choose to call in these days personal work, 
 and in Avhich we are altogether — and I fear 
 all of us altogether — too neglectful, person- 
 al work that reaches a man where something 
 else has failed fully to reach him. I be- 
 lieve that there are people in our churches, 
 as ministers, to whom we are preaching 
 every Sunday that are unsaved men, and 
 will stay unsaved so long as we depend upon 
 our preaching. We may be afraid to go 
 and speak to them. That man is the presi- 
 dent of our Board of Trustees, that woman 
 is one of the social leaders of our church ; 
 nominally they are Christians, but they 
 have never taken a stand for Christ; they 
 are dishonoring Him openly before the rest 
 of the congregation. 
 
 We are depending on our sermons, and 
 our sermons are proving undependable ; we 
 need to say the word to such men ; and, be- 
 lieve me, in my experience, such men have 
 been surprised for years that we have never 
 said the word to them. They have won- 
 dered why we haven't come and talked to 
 them on the subject of personal religion, as 
 Dr. Adams's trustee in the Madison Square 
 Church was surprised. When Dr. Adams 
 came up of a Sunday night after the ser- 
 vice to talk with him, the man looked him 
 in the face and said : 
 
 "Why haven't you done this before? For 
 months now I have wondered why my pas- 
 tor never said a single immediate and per- 
 sonal word to me about my own individual 
 salvation." Men are waiting for it, and 
 men are wondering why we do not give it. 
 
 Did you ever go over your church and 
 pick out the men who have pews and the 
 members of their families sitting in those 
 
 51 
 
pews ^Y,ho were unsaved, and hand them 
 over to your officers or to your active 
 church women, to your workers who were 
 active in everything else, but were shrink- 
 ing back when you called them to 
 real spiritual personal service? I went 
 over my pew record last spring, and 
 I made up a list, and it astonished 
 me, and when I carried it to my 
 session, the governing body of our church, 
 and told Elder So and So that there sat 
 twenty men and women, or young men and 
 women, right around him in church Sunday 
 after Sunday, that had never confessed 
 Christ, and asked him whether he had ever 
 spoken to Mr. So and So or Mrs. So and 
 So, and he confessed that he hadn't, I saw 
 one reason why the preaching of the Gospel 
 wasn't as effective as it ought to be in that 
 church. 
 
 How about that boy in your family? 
 You go to your minister and you say to 
 him "I don't know why it is that I cannot 
 get hold of my boy ; won't you come and 
 talk with him and pray with him ?" and you 
 have failed to say the personal word and 
 give the personal touch in tactfulness and 
 kindliness and persistence, and there is 
 where your whole effort and your whole 
 aspiration and desire have broken down, 
 and broken down at your own door. Per- 
 sonal work, it is the summons I give this 
 afternoon. I have no other summons to 
 give to the Church to-day. Personal work 
 on the part of the minister, on the part of the 
 church officer, on the part of the Sunday- 
 school teacher, on the part of the rank and 
 file of our membership, and until we have 
 consecrated ourselves to that kind 'of work, 
 believe me, my dear friends, we shall pray 
 to an unanswering Heaven and feel not so 
 much as the first drops of rain in the shower 
 for which we have been waiting all these 
 years, and all these years upon years. God 
 makes us personal workers. 
 
 I went up into New England to preach my 
 yearly sermon to one of the colleges. A 
 splendid college it is, and there is a strong 
 religious life there, though not enough, it 
 seems to me, of evangelistic life, and cer- 
 tainly not enough of personal work. I 
 preached my sermon to the boys. I chose 
 after I got there a different sermon from 
 what I had expected to preach, ignoring 
 the old professors back on the last pews 
 and their cultured families, and just trying 
 to get hold of the boys' hearts with a very 
 simple, almost commonplace Gospel mes- 
 sage. I had preached to them every year 
 for years. I had lived among these boys, 
 52 
 
for whenever I go there I stay in the chapter 
 house of the fraternity of which I am a 
 member. I Hved my life before them. I 
 prayed for those boys. I had preached to 
 them, as I say, and I had preached my best 
 sermons to them with this thing- in mind, 
 the best Gospel sermons I could preach, 
 but many of them in my own chapter of 
 the fraternity of which I am a member 
 had never been brought to confess Christ. 
 I made an appointment that afternoon in 
 the Young Men's Christian Association 
 Building, where I would meet those who 
 wanted to talk to me upon the subject, and 
 one of the members of the fraternity chapter 
 said: 
 
 "I will go and show you the way." He 
 knew perfectly well that I knew the way; 
 I had been there years enough to know the 
 way, and I thought there was something in 
 the wind. I took him along with me, and 
 when we got up into the room I said : 
 
 "Now, while we are waiting, suppose we 
 talk upon the subject of religion." T saw 
 his eyes begin to water; I knew there was 
 something behind it ; and then he said : 
 
 "Yesterday was my twenty-first birthday, 
 and I got such a letter from my mother in 
 yesterday morning's mail; it just broke my 
 heart in two. She said : 'Are you goin^ 
 to pass your twenty-first birthday and not 
 be a Christian? I cannot bear to think of 
 it. I pray of you to give your heart be- 
 fore nightfall to Jesus Christ. I have sent 
 this letter just so it would reach you in the 
 first mail in the morning, that you might 
 have all day and all the evening to think 
 it over ; and when you go to bed won't you 
 just kneel down and give yourself to 
 Christ?' I am so glad you have spoken to 
 me; it is just the time to speak to me," and 
 we got down on our knees and I prayed for 
 the fellow, and he prayed for himself. 
 
 The next morning, when I was on the 
 way to the station in a cab, a snowy morn- 
 ing, at seven o'clock, he stood there by the 
 roadside waiting for the cab to come along. 
 He hailed the driver and stopped it, pulled 
 the door open with a great jerk, and putting 
 his head in, said : "It is all settled, I set- 
 tled the matter before I went to bed last 
 night, and you don't know what happiness 
 is in my soul." Everything else had failed 
 but personal work. O, friends, may we not, 
 many of us, trace our failure back to the 
 same dereliction? God help us to conse- 
 crate ourselves this morning to personal 
 work in our homes, in our social circles, in 
 our churches, and God will honor the per- 
 
 53 
 
sonal touch which we give in His name 
 and for His sake every time we use it. 
 
 Let me tell you the story of the death 
 of my old Adirondack driver, old Harvey. 
 He had driven me for hundreds of miles 
 over those mountain roads ; we had been 
 about everywhere together; and I had 
 broached the subjest of religion, as we 
 sometimes say, in an indirect way ; I had 
 gone away around the barn to talk about 
 these things to him, but I nad never until 
 the week before his death got right to the 
 point of trying to grip his soul with my own 
 personal touch, and I talked to him in a low 
 voice, as I sat on the front seat next to him 
 all that drive through, about becoming a 
 Christian. I didn't make very much prog- 
 ress, but I said, "I am going to preach down 
 in the mountain church next Sunday night." 
 My friend. Dr. Smith, and I had the habit 
 then, as we have this summer, of preaching 
 alternately Sunday nights, just to the guiiles 
 and the mountain people, just trying to get 
 hold of those among whom we summer. 
 It was my turn to preach the next Sunday 
 night, and said: "I am going to preach 
 next Sunday night. Won't you come and 
 hear me? 
 
 "Well," he said, "if you put i' that way" 
 — and one never likes to put it that way, 
 and yet we are willing to be all things to all 
 men, and even to put down our modesty 
 and pride — "if you put it that way, I will 
 come." 
 
 The very next morning one oi mv neigh- 
 bors in the mountains said: "Did aou hear 
 that Harvey was very sick?" I said, "No, 
 I will go and see him." I went straight to 
 his house, and the son said : You cannot 
 see him this morning. He is critically ill, 
 and the doctor said no one must go in but 
 the nurse." I went the next day and he 
 was worse, and still they wouldn't let me 
 in. The third day I went, and the little 
 granddaughter came with the tears rolling 
 down her face and said : "Grandpa has 
 just died." The next day was Sunday, and 
 that day I went down to the mountain 
 church, and I preached the sermon that 1 
 had prepared with Harvey in mind. T had 
 imagined him sitting in the pew, and my 
 preaching the Word, trving to p-et the seed 
 into the soul, but old Harvey wasn't there. 
 And do you know, I couldn't see those 
 people: that was just what might be called 
 an absent-minded sermon ; mv mind ran 
 down the road to a little mountain house 
 where old Harvey, m\- Adirondack driver, 
 lav cold in death. 
 
 And the next morning, when we held 
 
 54 
 
his funeral service, and they asked me to 
 take part, I said, "I cannot speak, and I 
 cannot pray, even ; I do not feel that I am 
 worthy to go to the throne; 1 will just read 
 a few passages of Scripture." When I fell 
 in line with the country folk, trying to do 
 what they do, though I dislike it, and walked 
 around his casket, as I drew near, the plate 
 on it disappeared, I didn't see that ; I don't 
 think I saw Harvey's face — I loved him 
 dearly, too — but I saw instead the inscrip- 
 tion on that casket put there by divine 
 hands, and it read : "A lost opportunity," 
 and though I am sound to the core theo- 
 logically, I believed then and I believe this 
 day, that it was more of a lost opportunity 
 to me than it was even to old Harvey. 
 There are men dying down in your town, 
 and over in your little country village, and 
 in yours, and in yours, and in every case it 
 is a lost opportunity. 
 
Supreme IHottients in f)\imm Eife. 
 
 IRev. ©eorse C. Xorimcr, D. D. 
 
 Mark vi : 22. 
 
 *'J>$k of me whatscevcr tbou wiJt, and 1 will 9i»e it thee." 
 
 Matt, xv : 28. 
 
 "Be it unto tbee even as tbou wilt." 
 
 THESE texts bring before us two 
 monarchs — Herod and Jesus ; and 
 two women — the one a daughter, 
 the other a mother. Notably great 
 is the contrast between the rulers. 
 Herod, lord over many people, was slave 
 to his own passions ; and, though tetrarch 
 in outward dignity, was basely servile 
 in inward spirit. His contemptibleness 
 was conspicuous. He was self-willed, 
 self-indulgent, weak and wayward; a sov- 
 ereign whose animalistic nature was en- 
 grossed in sensuality, and whose govern- 
 ment was subordinated to personal gain and 
 self-gratification. How dilTerent was Jesus. 
 No glittering court symbolizing His majes- 
 ty, no regal insignia asserting His author- 
 ity, and yet the native grandeur of His char- 
 acter was such that it drew obedient sub- 
 jects to His feet. He walked the earth 
 crownless, throneless — yea, oftentimes with- 
 out a place in which to rest His weary head 
 — and still the multitudes thought they 
 could discern beneath the peasant's garb the 
 true nobility of a God-anointed one. He 
 was pure, gentle, sclf-forgctful, self-sacri- 
 ficing, swaying a scepter in which the jew- 
 els of love studded the gold of power. 
 While these monarchs were so widely sepa- 
 rated from each other, they were possessed 
 of large resources, gifts, wealth, honors, 
 which they could confer on the deserving, 
 or on any who should secure their favor. 
 
 The affluence of the Hcrodian prince, 
 however, was not as limitless as that of the 
 
 Pastor of the Madison Avenue Baptist Church, New York. 
 56 
 
princely peasant ; for the revenues of the 
 former were bounded by the capabiHties of 
 a meagre district in an impoverished land, 
 while those of the latter were commensurate 
 with the inexhaustible treasures of the uni- 
 verse. The first could only say to his favor- 
 ite, "Ask whatsover thou wilt, and I will 
 give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom," 
 but the second could reply to his importu- 
 nate suppliant, while knowing and realizing 
 the boundlessness of human desires, "Be it 
 unto thee even as thou wilt." One could 
 give according to the littleness of Judea, and 
 only a part of that; the other according to 
 the vastness of heaven, and all of that ; 
 for he could say, what Paul subsequently 
 wrote for the joy of the saints, "I am able 
 to do exceeding abundantly above all that 
 you ask or think" ; "for all things are yours ; 
 whether Paul, Apolios, or Cephas, or the 
 world, or life, or death, or things present or 
 things to come, all are yours ; and ye are 
 Christ's, and Christ is God's." 
 
 Two women stand before these poten- 
 tates. In Herod's castellated palace a feast 
 has been given to soldiers and "chief estates 
 of Galilee," and during the merry evening 
 the daughter of Herodias has danced in 
 presence of the brilliant company. Her 
 graceful movements and her graceless free- 
 dom, the poetry of her form and the har- 
 mony of her gestures, have quite captivated 
 heart and eye of the luxurious tetrarch. 
 There she stands, radiant in youthful beau- 
 ty, panting for breath ; her bosom heaving 
 with excitement, and her proud eye flashing 
 the consciousness of her triumph. Wanton 
 creatures, personally attractive and gifted 
 with genius, in every generation have been 
 able to fascinate the affluent and the great, 
 and have sometimes captivated those whose 
 wisdom and age should have lifted them 
 above the influence of such Circean charms. 
 No wonder, then, that Herod was enchant- 
 ed, when so many better men have yielded 
 to the seductive spell. From his canopied 
 throne he speaks — from that seat where jus- 
 tice should reign in calm and awful majes- 
 ty, but which is now usurped by fire-eyed, 
 lawless passion — he speaks, and lays at the 
 feet of a giddy girl one-half of his king- 
 dom. Tlie lives of his people, their hard- 
 earned wealth, their homes and simple joys, 
 combined with office, rank and power — the 
 prizes for which the mighty toil and strive 
 • — are placed at the disposal of the frail 
 daughter of a notorious mother. 
 
 It is Salome's opportunity, the decisive 
 moment, the time of times, which, if care- 
 fully seized and wisely improved, will im- 
 
 57 
 
part to her future life a purer lustre and a 
 fairer charm. Surely dancer was never 
 more highly complimented, and surely none 
 ever reached a more important crisis ! How 
 will she choose? How will she avail her- 
 self of her unexpected happy fortune? 
 What will she demand? What gift solicit, 
 what service claim, what honor seek? Un- 
 able to decide, too much agitated to rely on 
 her own weak judgment, she hastens to her 
 mother's side that her counsel may assist 
 her choice. Leaving for a little while her 
 parent to point out the way in which the 
 golden opportunity may best be coined, let 
 us glance at the other woman who has 
 sought the favor of a mightier prince than 
 Herod. 
 
 History has not preserved her name ; only 
 Mark records that she was a Greek, a Syro- 
 phenician, one of a race despised by the 
 self-righteous Jews. Evidently she was not 
 rich, certainly not young, and her heart was 
 burdened with a heavy load of care. From 
 her humble home she had ventured forth, if 
 possibly to meet with Him whose fame as a 
 gracious healer was spread throughout the 
 whole land, and who in His compassion 
 might relieve her sore distress by restoring 
 her afflicted daughter. She found Him on 
 the borders of Tyre and Sidon, resting in 
 som.e modest house, surrounded by His dis- 
 ciples, and apparently averse to give her 
 audience. Thrusting aside every obstacle 
 in her way, she prostrated herself at His 
 feet and cried, "O Lord, thou Son of David ! 
 my daughter is grievously vexed with a 
 devil." About her person there was prob- 
 ably nothing attractive but her earnestness, 
 nothing persuasive or interesting but her 
 pathos. Her greeting was not such as de- 
 lighted Salome, and at first the king seemed 
 inclined to scorn her suit. His answer to 
 her impassioned appeal, "Lord, help me!" 
 sounds harshly to our car, and to her must 
 have been as the knell of all her hopes. 
 Commentators explain that He employed 
 such language to test her faith and stimulate 
 her persistency; and if they are correct, 
 His design was eminently successful. She 
 would not be silenced, she would not be 
 thwarted; coldness could not chill her, in- 
 ch tiference could not discourage her, rude- 
 ness could not subdue her, and cruel scorn 
 could not daunt her indomitable will. 
 
 Before such energy of faith, such vigor 
 of determination, such insistency of appeal, 
 the king could not. maintain his real or as- 
 sumed attitude of rejection. He yielded: 
 "Oh. woman, great is thy faith!" But he 
 does not accede to her request — he does 
 
 5S 
 
more. He does not say thy daughter shall 
 be healed. That had been to bound his 
 favor, to measure His gift, and He would 
 honor her as she had honored Him. "Be it 
 unto thee even as thou wilt." That was His 
 form of answer to her petition, an answer 
 implying that on her decision the future of 
 herself, her home and her child depended. 
 She had but to will what she desired, and 
 whether it was the restoration of her daugh- 
 ter, the increase of her worldly goods, or 
 any other longed-for blessing, she would re- 
 ceive the same. Her golden opportunity 
 had arrived. The crucial moment of her 
 life, as in the life of Salome, had come at 
 last, and her own choice must decide the 
 rest. 
 
 It is Shakespeare' who writes: "There is 
 a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at 
 its flood leads on to fortune." So also 
 Schiller in The Piccolomeni : 
 
 ''Seize, seize the hour, 
 Ere it slips from you. Seldom comes the mo- 
 ment 
 In life, which is indeed sublime and mighty." 
 
 Never was there truer sentiment. What 
 we have seen befall these women is but a 
 picture of what is sure to occur in every 
 life. Every human being is sooner or later 
 brought face to face with advantageous cir- 
 cumstances, which, if improved, will result 
 in manifold blessings. To employ a current 
 expression, "every man has his chance" ; his 
 "chance" to free himself from over-master- 
 ing evil, to carve for himself a name and 
 place in this busy world, and a "chance" to 
 rise above the earthy temper of his spirit 
 and approach to the heavenly purity of the 
 saved. With a burst of virtuous indigna- 
 tion an English writer, contemplating the 
 miserable lot of thousands of our fellow be- 
 ings in the world, and comparing it with 
 what may possibly be their condition in the 
 great hereafter, exclaims, as though singular 
 in the conviction, "I believe that God will 
 give every man a chance." I do not ques- 
 tion the soundness of the faith. But I think 
 we are too much inclined to the opinion 
 that the wretched masses of people who ex- 
 cite our compassion have never enjoyed the 
 opportunity of being other than they are, 
 or of acting differently than they do ; and 
 that what has been denied them here ought 
 to be aft'orded them in the world beyond. 
 I do not wish to discuss in this discourse 
 the relations of the present to the future; 
 nor is it necessary, for it is clear to my 
 mind that every soul in the course of its 
 earthly history is brought, perhaps more 
 
 59 
 
than once, under conditions favorable to its 
 highest good. 
 
 There are few men who have made ship- 
 wreck of themselves, who have gone 
 through a series of years from disaster to 
 disaster, and who have been a snare and a 
 curse to others, who cannot on looking back 
 see where they have made fatal mistakes, 
 and where, if they had acted other than 
 they did, the outcome would have been vast- 
 ly different. Who is there that cannot re- 
 call some auspicious moment when unseen 
 hands threw open wide the portals to suc- 
 cess, when a competency, if not affluence, 
 was placed within their reach; who cannot 
 remember some precious season when the 
 heart was moved as by invisible angels to 
 repentance, and when aspirations to a nobler 
 and purer life were awakened and almost 
 fanned into a flame ? Perhaps it was an early 
 manhood, when hopes ran high, when cour- 
 age was abiding, and when a proud con- 
 sciousness prevailed that no enemy could 
 daunt, no obstacle impede, that suddenly, 
 unexpectedly, the testing hour came. As 
 we now mournfully look back we see if, 
 when the war broke out, when the fire 
 raged, when the estate descended to us, 
 when the enterprise was proposed, or when 
 the way of retreat was opened from some 
 questionable calling, we had only been 
 equal to the emergency, we would be im- 
 measurably better off in worth of character 
 and estate than we are. It may have hap- 
 pened in later years that we were brought 
 to "where two roads meet," and at their 
 junction paused irresolute, realizing the im- 
 mense importance of our decision, and now 
 regretting that we did not choose the one 
 we then declined to tread. 
 
 That was a supreme moment in the his- 
 tory of Columbus when he craved a drink 
 of water at a convent door, when the good 
 prior, drawn to him by the grandeur of his 
 plans, supplied him with letters of intro- 
 duction which" opened the way for the dis- 
 covery of a new world. Without this op- 
 portunity his magnificent schemes might 
 have miscarried; but with it how many 
 men would never have succeeded. That was 
 a supreme moment to Martin Luther when 
 the pope's bull was published in his German 
 home, and when his usefulness and happi- 
 ness centered in its defiant destruction. 
 How few would have the courage in these 
 days to commit it, as he did, to the flames, 
 and yet had not the reformer done so he 
 would have regretted it all his days. That 
 was a supreme moment in the career of 
 Ignatius Loyola when, on the walls of Pam- 
 60 
 
peluna, the cannon-shot fractured his legs 
 and forced him into seclusion, from whence 
 the hot-blooded Spanish soldier might have 
 come forth a saint, but instead came forth 
 a Jesuit. That was a supreme moment when 
 Wallenstein halted between loyalty to the 
 empire and his own aggrandizement. That 
 was a supreme moment in the turbulent life 
 of Nelson, when he turned his blind eye to 
 the signal that had been hoisted for him to 
 retire from before Copenhagen and contin- 
 ued the fight for the honor of his country. It 
 was then that his relation to the victory at 
 Trafalgar was practically decided. That 
 was a supreme moment to Gen. Grant when 
 he was appointed to command in the south- 
 west, and made it possible for him at last 
 to receive the sword of Gen. Lee; and yet 
 how many might have fought on the Cum- 
 berland who would only have demonstrated 
 their unfitness to lead an army on the 
 James. 
 
 Such, also, was the moment in the life 
 of Napoleon, when Barras proposed in the 
 hour of the Convention's peril that the 
 young general should command its meagre 
 forces. And thus, to every one, in great 
 degree or small, comes the favorable oppor- 
 tunity, the hour for which all previous 
 hours have been made, the great divide 
 from whose summit the traveler will rush 
 down either into the chilly valleys of the 
 north or into the warm, sunny, flowery vales 
 of the south. That is a supreme moment 
 in life when the lad becomes disttincly con- 
 scious of the great world of nature that lies 
 around him, and hears its merry voices 
 sounding in wind and waves, murmuring in 
 leaves of trees, and warbling of birds, and 
 saying: "Ask what thou wilt, and even to 
 the half of my kingdom will I give you." 
 That is a supreme moment, too, when the 
 youth is brought into the presence of the 
 mighty dead, who survive for evermore in 
 their recorded thoughts, and whose shades, 
 bending lovingly over the inquiring mind, 
 seem to whisper: "Be it unto thee even as 
 thou wilt." That, also, is a moment never 
 to be forgotten when the sacred majesty of 
 religion first sheds its holy halo on the dusty 
 path of life, when inspired men of God and 
 the exalted Christ come near the soul and 
 breathe in its inner chambers the divine 
 messages of grace and peace. Supreme mo- 
 ments each to be followed by others in their 
 time supreme as well ; but by none of whose 
 magnitude and solemn import shall ever 
 surpass these more familiar ones which are 
 the common heritage of all. 
 
 Like the Syrophenician woman, many 
 6i 
 
seek unfalteringly and unweariedly the more 
 promising circumstances of earthly life, and 
 hear at last the cheering words, "Be it unto 
 thee even as thou wilt" ; while others, 
 thoughtless and unconcerned, pursue their 
 way laughing and dancing, and are startled 
 and surprised when the voice of fortune 
 assures them that whatsoever they ask shall 
 be granted. But, alas ! when the favorable 
 hour conies how many fail to realize its 
 significance, and know not how to choose, 
 or at the best choose wildly, madly. Poor 
 Salome hastens to her mother, and returns 
 to Herod with the sanguinary demand for 
 the head of John the Baptist. Was there 
 nothing worthier her ambition than such a 
 g-hastly object? Would it not have been no- 
 bler to have taken some of the possessions 
 laid at her feet, and to have consecrated 
 them to the elevation of the degraded, the 
 instruction of the ignorant, and the succor- 
 ing of the poor? Nobler, and wiser, too, 
 beyond all question ; but no, the supreme 
 moment is perverted, degraded, abused. 
 Indignation at the faithfulness of God's ser- 
 vants, sees only in the turn afifairs have ta- 
 ken an opening through which the spirit of 
 revenge may enter the dark prison with a 
 gleaming axe and on his helpless form ex- 
 pend its malignant cruelty. And thus have 
 thousands chosen, and thus are thousands 
 choosing every day. 
 
 The majority of people look upon their 
 opportunities simply as means for self-grati- 
 fication, self-importance, and self-aggran- 
 dizement. If they do not employ them to 
 murder others they use them to assassinate 
 themselves. They do not discern their sig- 
 nificance, do not follow them up with vigor, 
 and so lose the advantages which they are 
 fitted to confer. What do you do, young 
 man, when, after much seeking, a situa- 
 tion was provided for you in a house where 
 everything was ofifered to assure success? 
 Did you grow negligent, careless, spending 
 your nights in riot and your days in shirk- 
 ing work? How did you carry yourself, 
 my friend, when fortune was inherited, 
 and you were suddenly transferred from a 
 realm of poverty to a domain of affluence? 
 Did you immediately set about the easy task 
 of proving to community the truth of the 
 adage, "Place a beggar on horseback and he 
 will ride to the devil," and illustrate its 
 veraciousness in your own miserable per- 
 son ? What course did you pursue when 
 llie much-coveted opportunity for distin- 
 guishing yourself came? When the post of 
 honor was assigned you, which is always 
 the post of danger, whether it be on the bat- 
 62 
 
tie-field or in the sharp conflict betweeen 
 truth and error, and between right and 
 wrong, what did you do ? Betray your trust 
 — run away? Well, if you did, you only 
 formed part of a "goodly company" who 
 have done likewise from the beginning of 
 the world to the present. Very few indeed 
 have been like the Syrophenician woman 
 who understood the "signs of the times," 
 and had honest decision to make her oppor- 
 tunity tributary to the well-being of others. 
 She willed that the striken one at home 
 should be restored, that the devil which 
 possessed her should be cast out, and the old 
 peace and joy should reign again beneath 
 the domestic roof. Others have been equal- 
 ly wise, and to-day we call them the world's 
 benefactors, heroes, leaders, friends, and we 
 speak their names with tender accents born 
 •of love. But if men and women have not 
 this discernment, if they do not recognize 
 the spring-time when it comes, and fail to 
 break the soil and prepare for golden har- 
 vests, let them not rail against God, and 
 moodily contend that they have known only 
 unbroken winter, and an ice-bound earth. 
 Let them not, as too many do, bewail their 
 lot, that nature has held them fast in a fro- 
 zen sea, with frost-clouds resting on every- 
 thing about them, as though the snu had 
 not more than once rent a channel for them 
 to the friendlier ocean. 
 
 The impression prevails that man is a 
 creature of circumstances, and circumstances 
 are repeatedly invoked to explain the suc- 
 cess of one and to account for the failure of 
 another. This is the usual plea of the unfor- 
 tunate, who find some solace in laying on a 
 scape-goat their weaknesses and stupidities. 
 It is also the refuge of envy and malice from 
 whence they can snarl at those who have 
 tramped on to victory. But they are de- 
 ceiving themselves. Circumstances are in- 
 deed indispensable to grand achievements, 
 but they are not everything. It is not 
 enough for Herod and Christ to say: "Be 
 it unto thee even as thou wilt" ; for whether 
 the generous o'^erture is really made musi- 
 cal or discor 'ant will depend on the key 
 which the A^ill" aspires to strike. "As 
 thou wilt," aaid Herod to the daughter, and 
 she chose a death's-head ; "as thou wilt," 
 said Qirist to the mother, and she chose 
 life and health. Circumstances never made 
 a man, but it is the man always that im- 
 proves the circumstances, and causes them 
 to yield their richest treasures and their 
 sweetest fragrance. What you may be, 
 what you will be, rests with yourself and 
 with no one else, and nothing else. Hegel 
 
 63 
 
has said that "'the essence of spirit is free- 
 dom" ; even as "the essence of matter is 
 gravity"; intimating that there is in us a 
 power of volition that cannot be explained 
 by any mechanical system, or by any meta- 
 physical subtleties whatever. Why one man 
 rides upon the tide to fame and fortune, 
 and another goes down beneath its swirling 
 waters, no one can explain. It is enough 
 for us to know that the deepest thinkers 
 find the secret in the men themselves, though 
 unsolvable, and impentrable, or at best, 
 if not inconceivable, certainly inexpressi- 
 ble by the poor organs of human speech. 
 
 Schiller writes, when alluding to one who 
 allows himself to be influenced by the stars : 
 
 "You'll wait upon the stars, and on their hours, 
 'Til the earthly hour escapes you. O, believe me, 
 In your own bosom are your destiny's stars. 
 Confidence in yourself, prompt resolution, 
 This is your Venus ! and the sole malignant, 
 The only one that harmeth you is doubt." 
 
 The Bible confirms philosophy at this 
 point, verifies the instincts of humanity, 
 and assumes throughout that "man is his 
 own star," and that his position in time and 
 his destiny in eternity are determined by 
 his own volition. He is w^hat he willed to 
 be ; he will be what he wills to be ; and if he 
 never is what he might be, it is because he 
 would not be what he could be. "Have I 
 any pleasure at all that the wicked should 
 die?" indignantly asks God; "and not that 
 he should return to his ways and live?" 
 This solemn inquiry is repeated in the Old 
 Testament ; and Christ declares in the New : 
 "Even so it is not the will of you Father 
 which is in heaven that one of these little 
 ones should perish." 
 
 The prophet represents the Almighty as 
 saying: "Oh, that thou hadst hearkened 
 to my commandments ! then thy peace had 
 been as a river, and thy righteousness as the 
 waves of the sea" ; and Christ pathetically 
 exclaims : "How often would I have gath- 
 ered thy children together, as a hen doth 
 gather her brood under her wings, and ye 
 would not"; "Ye would not come to me 
 that ye might have life." Such passages 
 could be multiplied, and many others whose 
 burden is, that "Whosoever will may come 
 and drink of the water of life freely.'^ Here 
 we touch on the borders of a great mystery. 
 We know that God is spoken of as omnipo- 
 tent, and we wonder often, if He is, why he 
 permits evil to continue, and man to remain 
 in suflFering or sorrow. But may it not be 
 that we speak too absolutely on this subject, 
 and that, after all, some limits to the Divine 
 power in reality exists? 
 
 64 
 
I suppose it will not be claimed that even 
 He could put an atom in two places at one 
 and the same time. But if He is bounded 
 by the laws of matter, why not equally so 
 by the laws of spirit? Having made the 
 soul free, may not freedom be a perpetual 
 restraint on the exercise of His power, so 
 that He can only plead with His erring 
 creature, furnish assistance and means of 
 deliverance, but never break through the 
 barriers that the free spirit may interpose 
 between itself and His purposes of mercy? 
 If this is conceivable, it brings us a little 
 nearer the solution of the question why a 
 God of might and goodness does not sweep 
 by one exercise of His power all forms of 
 evil from this suffering earth ; and it sets in 
 a clearer light the central truth of this dis- 
 course, that favorable crisis, supreme mo- 
 ments, and glorious opportunities are as 
 nothing in themselves, and depend on man 
 himself for their value and their profit. 
 
 Blessings are responsibilities in disguise. 
 When adverse circumstances disappear, and 
 when our surroundings wear an air of pros- 
 perity, obligation proportionately increases. 
 We shall render an account to God for our 
 abuse or neglect of His gracious and help- 
 ful providences, and will find our souls 
 filled with bitter regrets if we shall esteem 
 them lightly. • 
 
 "Of all the sad words of tongue or pen, 
 The saddest are these, it might have been." 
 
 Picture to yourself wretched Salome with 
 her bloody trophy in her hands, the mute 
 lips of the murdered saint reproaching, as 
 the living John never did when he thun- 
 dered in Herod's ear his words of awful 
 warning. All through her future life will 
 she be haunted by the memory that she had 
 her opportunity, and madly clotted it with 
 blood. Never can she recall the past, never 
 restore what she has wasted ; responsible 
 for what it might have been, she plods heav- 
 ily to the grave, conscious that it can never 
 be what it ought to be. Mr. Robert Brown- 
 ing in "Paracelsus" sings : 
 
 " 'Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels 
 Reveal themselves to you; they sit all day 
 Beside you, and lie down at night by you. 
 Who care not for their presence, muse or sleep; 
 And all at once they leave you, and you know 
 them." 
 
 And some one has said, "We prize our 
 blessings when they are flown," but all our 
 regrets, weeping and remorse will never — 
 never can — bring them back again. The 
 angels that once were nevermore return to 
 those who have slighted their presence and 
 
 65 
 
scorned their favor. Then cling to them 
 while they are with you. Pray them to 
 abide; or, if they must in a Httle time be 
 gone, learn while you may, each word and 
 sentence of the message that they bring. 
 Especially learn of Christ. Not once but 
 often has He spoken to you ; not once but 
 often has He drawn close to your soul with 
 promises of eternal blessing. A precious 
 privilege, a wondrous honor, to be the ob- 
 ject of His solicitude and the creature of 
 riis thoughtful love! Is He near vqu now? 
 Do you hear His footfall — do you catch the 
 sound of His voice? It is to you, beloved, 
 the moment of moments ; cast yourself at 
 His feet, and realizing the need that is in 
 you for cleansing, the need that is in you 
 for power to help others, and realizing 
 the world's need for earnert laborers to cast 
 out the devils that infest it — making its 
 burdens yours — like the Syrophenician 
 woman, pray : "O, Lord, thou son of Da- 
 vid, help me!" 
 
Sowing and Reaping. 
 
 IRev. imtlliam C. Stinson, 5). H). 
 
 Gal. vi :7, 8. 
 
 "Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man 
 sowetb, that shall be also reap. Tor be tbat sowetb to his 
 flesb sball of the flesh reap corruption ; but be that sowetb 
 to the Spirit sball of the Spirit reap life everlasting." 
 
 THIS is a moral as well as a physical 
 world. It is governed by moral 
 laws. Man is a moral being and 
 he is subject to these laws. This 
 does not mean that he is under 
 the bondage or tyranny of law. There is 
 a disposition in many quarters to regard 
 man as the victim of seen or unseen forces 
 which either make or break him. There is 
 a false teaching to-day which says there 
 is a predetermined course marked out for 
 each man by an arbitrary, partial power, 
 and each individual must follow this pre- 
 destined course. Then there is a philoso- 
 phy of fate and chance, and they who be- 
 lieve it look upon the soul as in a lifelong 
 game of battle-door and shuttle-cock. Too 
 many persons regard their lives as marbles 
 flung out indiscriminately upon the baga- 
 telle-board of human existence. They bump 
 against obstacles, wobble around life's hon- 
 ors and go bounding and rolling toward 
 some unknown destiny. Pathetic, indeed, 
 is it to see the persons who have yielded 
 to such teaching. Many of them have 
 ceased to struggle and ceased to care. Baf- 
 fled, discomfitted by the strange and hard 
 experiences through which they have 
 passed, they have lost, or well nigh lost, 
 their faith in human volition and divine 
 providence. It is pitiful to see them swept 
 along like driftwood on a river, or hustled 
 about like dead leaves in an autumn w'ind, 
 victims of forces over which they cease to 
 exert any control. Such fatalism expresses 
 
 Pastor of Ihe Bloomingdale Reformed Church, New York. 
 67 
 
Itself this way : "I am an automaton, a 
 puppet dangling on my distinctive wire, 
 which fate holds with an unrelaxing grasp. 
 I am not different, nor do I feel different, 
 from my fellow men, but my eyes refuse to 
 blink away the truth, which is that I am an 
 automatic machine, a piece of clock-work, 
 wound up to go for an allotted time, 
 smoothly or otherwise, as the efficiency of 
 the machine may determine." There is a 
 fatalism which declares that the train is 
 the world, we are the freight, fate is the 
 track, death is the darkness, God is the en- 
 gineer — but, alas ! He is dead. 
 
 Much of modern fiction is saturated with 
 the thought that heredity and environment 
 are the all-powerful factors in human des- 
 tiny, that personality counts for nothing, 
 that every man is the ghost of his dead an- 
 cestors, who look through his eyes, speak 
 in his word and act in his deeds. In other 
 words, that human life is like a piece of 
 shoddy cloth in the great mill of circum- 
 stance, which stands on the banks of the 
 River of Time, and turns out the shabby 
 lives of men and women. 
 
 It is against this morbid and erroneous 
 conception of life that we raise a word of 
 protest and warning. Heredity and envi- 
 ronment are not to be underrated. They 
 are powerful factors. Nor are they to be 
 over-estimated ; but I maintain that in every 
 man there is an untainted power, something 
 which passes from generation to generation 
 untouched by change, and even though 
 it may be shut in by evil conditions and tied 
 to a thousand evil tendencies, yet it may and 
 does frequently assert itself and show its 
 superiority. 
 
 Man is morally free. Strip that state- 
 ment of all theological sophistry and meta- 
 physical subtlety ; is it not true of every 
 man here to-day that he has the power of 
 moral choice? Your presence here is evi- 
 dence of the existence of this power. The 
 existence of this and every other evangelis- 
 tic enterprise is based on the presumption 
 that man can choose between the good and 
 the evil. If you deny that, then it is useless 
 to appeal to motives. You may as well close 
 the avenues to academic honors and abolish, 
 courts of justice and penitentiaries. We 
 preachers may as well close our churches 
 and cease pleading with the consciences of 
 men. Deny man's capacity of moral choice, 
 and you deny man's personal accountabil- 
 ity and destroy manhood itself. 
 
 There is the beautiful picture in the Gos- 
 pel, brought out in the words of Jesus, "Be- 
 hold, I stand at the door and knock." What 
 68 
 
does it mean? It means that even though 
 the infinitely patient Saviour may stand 
 and knock all day and all night at the door 
 of your heart, He will never force His en- 
 trance. If He ever enters, it is because 
 you heard Him knocking, and yourself with- 
 drew the bolt, and, opening the door, you 
 gave Him welcome. Man is morally free. 
 
 Man is also under law. You admit that 
 of man's bodily nature, but there are laws 
 moral as well as physical. Man's physical 
 freedom consists in an adjustment of his 
 body to these physical laws. So man's 
 moral freedom consists in the adjustment 
 of his spirit to moral laws. Both physical 
 and moral laws find their gravitating centre 
 in God. The God of Nature and the God 
 of Morals are not two different Gods, but 
 one and the same God. "Though there be 
 that are called gods many, and lords 
 many, yet to us there is but one God." 
 
 These laws are inexorable in their opera- 
 tion. \/e talk about breaking the laws of 
 God, but that is careless speech. We break 
 the laws of God? No. If we do not obey 
 them, they break us. There is no more 
 escaping the consequences of the violation 
 of the moral law than there is of exemption 
 from a broken body if you violate the law 
 of gravitation. ]\Ian is under law. 
 
 Man is wider the law of heredity. This 
 means vastly more than the reproduction 
 of the traits and characteristics of his par- 
 ents. It means that he is not only heir to 
 his environments, inheriting, for example, 
 the lineaments of parents, birthplace, nurs- 
 ing, early training, and the like, but it means 
 that he is also inheriting himself in himself. 
 He is reproducing his own character. He 
 is repeating himself in himself. Each repe- 
 tition of an act is intenser than the preced- 
 ing. Each bad act becomes the sire of many 
 bad acts, even as each good act becomes the 
 sire of many good acts. In other words, 
 he illustrates in himself the law of the har- 
 vest, "Whatsoever a man sows, that shall 
 he also reap.'' The law holds absolutely 
 in the vegetable world. The farmer knows 
 full well if he sows wheat he will reap not 
 tares, but wheat, and vice versa. The same 
 law holds in the spiritual world. If a man 
 sows righteousness, he will reap from that 
 righteousness, not sinfulness, but righteous- 
 ness. You cannot sow one kind of seed and 
 reap another kind of harvest. This truth 
 was brought out in a memorable conversa- 
 tion between a Galilean carpenter and a 
 Judean rabbi. "That which is born of the 
 flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the 
 spirit is spirit." Marvel not. You do not mar- 
 69 
 
vel at the law of bodily inheritance. Why 
 should you marvel at the law of spiritual 
 inheritance? You must reap what you sow. 
 There is no setting aside the natural, in- 
 evitable outworking of the law. Will you 
 expect a spiritual harvest from a physical 
 sowing? If you sow to the flesh, you must 
 reap to the flesh. If you sow to the spirit, 
 you must reap to the spirit. There is no 
 passing of the flesh over into the spirit. 
 That is the reason why Christ said, "Ye 
 must be born again, anew, from above." 
 That was not a new, special edict by the 
 founder of Christianity. It is written in the 
 very constitution of human nature. Christ 
 discovered it and set it forth for our in- 
 struction and salvation. Man is under the 
 law of the harvest. 
 
 The harvest gathered is ever larger than 
 the seed sozvn. He who sows sparingly 
 reaps sparingly. He who sows bountifully 
 reaps bountifully. For example, a man 
 sows the love of money. What does he 
 reap? Dollars and cents? Possibly; but 
 one thing he does reap — an intensifying love 
 of money. As the growth is ever larger 
 than the germ, he grows fonder and fonder 
 of money. It is not to be wondered at, if 
 he grows covetous, becomes more and more 
 grasping and grinding. Nor need we won- 
 der if we see him growing miserly, until the 
 habit of miserliness is ever becoming more 
 and more confirmed. What is true of cov- 
 etousness and avarice is also true of intem- 
 perance, indolence, skepticism, and the 
 whole train of moral evils. The crop is 
 ever larger than the seed. He -that sows 
 to the wind shall reap to the whirlwind. 
 That is to say, that every man by reason of 
 his moral choice, and in sheer virtue of the 
 law of the harvest, is ever more intensify- 
 ing his moral character. Do you not see 
 this all around you? Do you not see bad 
 men growing worse and worse, and good 
 men becoming better and better? 
 
 Behold the illustration of this law in the 
 case of Pharaoh. You will remember that 
 God commanded Pharaoh through Moses to 
 let the children of Israel go free from their 
 Egyptian bondage. Now, Pharaoh was a 
 mere moral agent. He had the ability to 
 obey or disobey the divine command. He 
 chose to disobey. God treated Pharaoh as a 
 free man, declining to interefere with his 
 own divine law of heredity, but allowing it 
 to take its natural course. Now, in the 
 book of Exodus, we have the constant inter- 
 change of expressions. "God hardened 
 Pharaoh's heart;" "Pharaoh hardened his 
 own heart ;" "Pharaoh's heart was hard- 
 
ened." Now, the question arises, Did God 
 harden Pharaoh's heart? Not directly; 
 perish the thought. But as God had made 
 Pharaoh a free man under the moral law, 
 then indirectly He hardened Pharaoh's 
 heart? In other words, God's doing was 
 the occasion, but Pharaoh's doing was the 
 cause. Pharaoh chose to disobey, but dis- 
 obedience grew upon him, so that by per- 
 sistent refusals to heed the Divine Com- 
 mand, he reaped a dreadful crop of stub- 
 bornness, obstinacy and hardening of the 
 heart, or moral parahsis. So that in the 
 last analysis, Pharaoh hardened his own 
 heart. "Let no man say, when he is tempt- 
 ed, I am tempted of God; for God is un- 
 tried of evil, and He Himself tempted no 
 man ; but each man is tempted when he is 
 drawn away by his own lust and enticed; 
 then the lust, when it hath conceived, bear- 
 eth sin : and the sin, when it is full grown, 
 bringeth forth death." Be not deceived. 
 
 Pharaoh's case is typical. It is a daily 
 phenomenon. Pharaoh acted throughout 
 just as he pleased. He was cruel and proud 
 and stubborn, and he acted out of his own 
 nature. He chose to sow pride, and he 
 reaped what he sowed — obstinacy, and the 
 harvest of pride and obstinacy, of course, 
 was larger than the original seed. 
 
 Pharaoh's guilt has ever been the guilt 
 of many. Pathetic, indeed, the instances 
 of men, otherwise great, who have permitted 
 the hardening of their moral faculties 
 through sheer disobedience of God's laws. 
 How many are callous to distinctivelv sacred 
 influences, proof alike against the promises 
 of God's grace and the menaces of God's 
 law. There was a process in the hardening, 
 m the days of youth they refused to remem- 
 ber God; they were carried away by life's 
 gaieties, sowed the seed of procrastination 
 or neglect of the Saviour's gracious invita- 
 tion. Now, in mature years, choice is hard- 
 ened into habit, and during the days of 
 middle life or old age they are reaping what 
 they sowed, in the careless, reckless days 
 of youth. "Whosoever hath, to him shall 
 be given." Whosoever is susceptible to 
 truth, to him shall truth be given, and he 
 shall have abundance ; with the increase of 
 susceptibility shall come an increase of 
 truth, and with the increase of truth shall 
 come an increase of susceptibility. But 
 whosoever is not susceptible to truth, from 
 him shall be taken away even what he hath ; 
 not only his opportunity for hearing truth, 
 but also his capacity for truth itself. "Take 
 away the talent from him." Is there a tal- 
 ent for music, for painting, for business? 
 
 71 
 
So is there a talent for godliness. And this 
 talent abused or disused is forfeited. 
 
 There is a disease called ossification, as 
 when an artery is changed into bone. So 
 there is such a thing as moral ossification, 
 or spiritual petrefaction. Have you never 
 read of a conscience seared with a red-hot 
 iron ? There is such a thing as a cauterized 
 sense. 
 
 Let me conclude with two thoughts : 
 
 First. — Each man is responsible for his 
 own character. Each man has the liberty 
 of sowing what he pleases. The harvest 
 that he reaps is the aggregate of his habits, 
 — that is to say, his character. Accordingly, 
 then, it is for each man to say whether he 
 will be good or bad ; whether he will grow 
 better or worse. Conditions and circum- 
 stances may be partially responsible for 
 your character, but the final, ultimate re- 
 sponsibility is with yourself. Only in one 
 sense can you hold God responsible, and 
 that is for the laws under which you have 
 your moral being and growth ; but those 
 laws include your moral freedom, without 
 which you would not have the blessing of 
 manhood itself. 
 
 Second. — Each man is responsible for his 
 destiny. He is responsible for his destiny 
 because he is responsible for his character. 
 Character determines destiny. A profound 
 truth lies in the adage of Sallust, — "Every 
 man is the architect of his own fortune." 
 Daily character is shaping your future des- 
 tiny. 
 
 "For the structure that we raise, 
 
 Time is with materials filled; 
 Our to-days and yesterdays, 
 Are the blocks with which we build." 
 
 In a very real sense, the future is a state 
 of retribution. You call that a hard doc- 
 trine of Christ's teaching. Christ did not 
 create it. He simply declared it. It was 
 in existence long before His appearance. 
 It was manifest at the very beginning of 
 human history. What does retribution 
 mean? Retributing — paying back in the 
 same coin — and that at the fearful rate of 
 compound interest. He that is unrighteous, 
 let him be unrighteous still ; he that is holy, 
 let him be holy still. Take heed how you 
 live. "Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a 
 habit, reap a character; sow a character, 
 reap a destijiy." 
 
 God grant that these words may come 
 with a special appeal to those of you who 
 arc young, you who are in the plastic, for- 
 mative period of life. You are now electro- 
 tvping your eternal destiny. It is easier 
 to become a Christian to-day than ten years 
 72 
 
hence, even as it was easier ten years ago 
 than to-day. 
 
 "Heaven Hes about us in our infancy.'' 
 "Those who seek me early shall find me." 
 Remember now thy Creator in the days of 
 thy youth ; before the evil days come, and 
 the years draw nigh when thy moral nature, 
 no longer susceptible and formative, shall 
 become confirmed in the habit of sin, for- 
 ever petrified into adamantine hardness. 
 
 You are at the sowing end of the harvest 
 field. God help you to sow pure seed that 
 you may reap a golden harvest. And if 
 there is one here to-day who feels helpless 
 in the clutch of appetites, who seems to be 
 held in the grip of a giant, on the brink of 
 a precipice, and is crying, — "Who shall de- 
 liver me? who will help me?" to him I say, 
 "There is a helper and deliverer; He stands 
 at the door of your heart; listen to His 
 words, — 'Behold, I stand at the door and 
 knock ; if any man hear my voice and open 
 the door, I will come in to him and sup with 
 him and he with me. To him that over- 
 cometh will I grant to sit with me in my 
 throne. Even as I also overcame and am 
 set down with my Father in His throne.' 
 'He that hath an ear, let him hear.' T will 
 take away the heart of stone and give the 
 heart of flesh.' " 
 
the Divine Appeal to man's mill 
 
 1Rev>, }£. IB. Cbivcre, ©. S). 
 
 John v :4o. 
 "Ve will not come to me, that ve miabt bave life.' 
 
 Matt, xxv : 37. 
 " tiow often would T * * * and v< would not.' 
 
 o 
 
 N almost every battlefield," says 
 one writer, " there is some one 
 spot where the issue of the battle 
 is decided." He cites as an illus- 
 tration the field of Waterloo. Well- 
 ington, "the iron duke," had established 
 himself and his forces in a strong position. 
 The key to that position was an old Flemish 
 farm-house of brick, called Hougomont. 
 This house, with its outbuildings and gar- 
 den, was enclosed by a high brick wall. 
 Beyond lay an orchard and a stretch of 
 woods, with a pond, which served as a moat. 
 The walls of this stronghold were loopholed 
 for musketry fire, and a scaffolding was 
 erected to enable the troops within the 
 garden to fire over the wall. It was an al- 
 most impregnable position. Against it Na- 
 poleon hurled his forces. Troops were 
 massed against it. Cannon and rifle were 
 turned upon it. Column after column of 
 French soldiery swept towards it, and as- 
 sailed it with fiery valor. The battle raged 
 and surged about it for hours. The woods 
 adjoining were several times taken and re- 
 taken ; but the chateau itself remained in 
 the kee])ing of the I'ritish. The British 
 troops held it firmly to the last, and "the 
 iron duke" won his Waterloo. 
 
 "Similarly," says our writer, "in every 
 human being there is one element about 
 which the battle of life is fought. It is the 
 will. '■' ='= * The whole contest of good 
 and evil over our humanity is as to the 
 control of the will. '■'''' * * As goes the 
 
 Pastor of the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
 74 
 
will, so goes the man — for time and for eter- 
 nity." This is the regnant power in human 
 nature. It is the imperial faculty which 
 makes choices and decisions. 
 
 *''John, wnat do you do that for?" asked 
 a father of his son, who was performing 
 some curious and unusual movements 
 around the room. "Oh, I do it because I 
 want to, father," was the reply. The fact 
 and the philosophy of the will are expressed 
 in that simple statement. 
 
 "I do it — because — I want to." The child 
 refers his action to himself. He does it. 
 This is the assertion of the man concerning 
 all his acts and courses of conduct. What- 
 ever may be the theories of the philosopher 
 as to the freedom of the will, every man 
 teels that practically he is free. His whole 
 mental being rises in protest against any 
 scneme of necessity that would rob him of 
 his freedom and reduce him to a mere au- 
 tomaton. He knows that he is free; that 
 what he does is his own doing; that the 
 spring of action is within. And the lad 
 nnds the occasion, the moving cause, of 
 his activity in his own desire. No con- 
 straint is brought to bear upon him from 
 without. He simply wants to do a certain 
 thing, and he does it. The actions of the 
 man are, in like manner, determined by his 
 own desires, preferences, choices. He is 
 not bound, in regard to his actions, by any 
 outward constraint. The entire conduct of 
 his life — its domestic relations, its business 
 and social arrangements, proceeds upon the 
 conviction that the will is free. 
 
 This will in man is as forceful as it is 
 free. Inaeed, so striking are its achieve- 
 ments, that its power to overcome difficul- 
 ties and to bring things to pass is expressed 
 in the maxim, which is almost accepted 
 as an axiom : "Where there is a will there 
 is a way." Many a youth who started in 
 life under unpromising conditions has said 
 to himself: "I will," and his sturdy deter- 
 mination has made for nim a wav to a thor- 
 ough education or to a successful business 
 or professional career. Men have gathered 
 tnemselves up in the face of sickness, and 
 even of death itself, resolved that they 
 would live, if living were a possibility; and 
 the very resolve has been a tonic, quickening 
 vitality and bringing back health. Alen have 
 faced difficulties, and by sheer force of will 
 have taken adverse circumstances as by the 
 throat, and compelled them to yield. Ob- 
 stacles have been brushed aside as though 
 tJiev had been but a feather. There is that 
 
 ^The Will in Theology. A. H. Strong, D. D. 
 75 
 
in thorough resolution that savors ahnost 
 of omnipotence. To think that we are able 
 is ahnost to be so ; to determine upon attain- 
 ment is often attainment itself. "You can 
 only half will" were the disdainful words 
 of the resolute Suwarrow to people who 
 failed. 
 
 This power, of course, has its limitations. 
 There are many things — things, too, which 
 are vitally related to the development of 
 character — that lie altogether outside the 
 range of our choosing or willing. We have 
 no choice as to the country or condition 
 into which we are born, or as to the influ- 
 ences that touch and mould us in infancy 
 and early life ; we cannot shape at will the 
 circumstances that play upon our lives ; but 
 it is within our province and power to deter- 
 mine whether we will breast adverse condi- 
 tions, or weakly and ignobly yield to them. 
 It is for us to decide whether we will make 
 the most and the best of ourselves, whatever 
 the setting of circumstances in which our 
 lives are placed. We can decide whether 
 we will make good or evil the aim and end 
 of life's pursuit. In this region — the region 
 of moral choices — the will is sovereign. We 
 are not as mere straws upon the water, 
 tossed to and fro in helplessness by every 
 breath of wind and every eddying wave ; 
 we have within us the power of the swim- 
 mer, and can strike out and bufifet the 
 waves. Herein lies the "manliness of man- 
 hood, that a man has reason for what he 
 docs, and has a will in doing it." 
 
 To this element of power — this deter- 
 mining element — in human nature, as well 
 as to reason, conscience, sensibility, the 
 Gospel makes appeal. This is after all the 
 key position. The outposts may be taken 
 and re-taken ; but the issue of life's Water- 
 loo depends upon the masonry of this cen- 
 tral stronghold. Reason may assent to the 
 teachings and claims of the Gospel ; the con- 
 science may be stirred to intensest activity, 
 uttering its imperative in clearest tones, and 
 enforcing it with highest sanctions; the 
 sensibilities may be moved to their inmost 
 depths ; and yet tlie will may remain un- 
 subdued. Not until the will yields is the 
 victory of truth and love and righteousness 
 won. 
 
 If we turn to the sacred Scriptures, we 
 find in them everywhere a recognition of 
 the human will, with all its powers and pre- 
 rogatives; and an appeal, through persua- 
 sions of every conceivable kind, to influ- 
 ence aright its action. By command and 
 prohibition, by entreaty and warning, by 
 rich promise of grace and stern threatening 
 76 
 
of judgment, is this appeal enforced; but 
 nowhere is there even a suggestion of in- 
 fringement upon the domain of man's free- 
 dom of choice. Boundless persuasions 
 there are ; but the thought of coercion is as 
 alien to the spirit of the Gospel and the 
 thought of God as it is inconsistent with the 
 nature and prerogatives of man. 
 
 Upon the opening pages of revelation, 
 we have a picture of man in his primitive 
 state. He is endowed with intellect or rea- 
 son to discern the difference between right 
 and wrong; he has sensibility that can be 
 moved by these ; he has freedom to do the 
 one or the other. His moral condition is 
 that of innocence — child-like innocence. 
 From this condition he is to pass into that 
 of mature moral manhood. This transition 
 can be made only through a process of 
 testing. The test is made. He is placed 
 in a position where good is not the onlv 
 thing that offers. An alternative is pre- 
 sented. The choice of good in preference 
 to evil is set before him. Evil is chosen. 
 Man tastes its bitter fruit of shame and 
 fear, and entails upon the race a heritage 
 of woe. But he is free in his doing. He 
 does it because he wants to. There was a 
 wilful turning away from the divine good, 
 clearly expressed. In the face of a divine 
 command, he yielded to temptation. He 
 gave place to the temptation until that 
 which it offered became his own preference 
 and deliberate choice. Before him lay a 
 blessed possibility of fellowship with God 
 and of increasing likeness to Him. Fain 
 would the Infinite One have seen that pos- 
 sibility realized. But there are some things 
 that even gracious Omnipotence cannot do. 
 A forced goodness is among the things that 
 are not possible. It is a contradiction in 
 terms. A moral agent must be free. A 
 forced obedience has in it no moral value. 
 You may keep a boy's hands out of mischief 
 by tying them behind his back, but in so 
 doing you also take away the power of 
 beneficent activity. A man cannot be made 
 virtuous by any fiat from without. Such a 
 result can come only from the free working 
 of his own will within him. God recog- 
 nizes this, and acts upon it, even though 
 man's free action seems to involve the 
 thwarting of the divine desires, and to bring 
 to the divine heart unspeakable pain. Man 
 has the power to resist God. He can take 
 a course that is contrary to all the expressed 
 wishes and commands of God. He can say 
 "No" to God; and God permits him to 
 say it. 
 
 "See, I have set before thee this day life 
 
and good, and death and evil ; . . . . 
 I call heaven and earth to witness against 
 you this day, that I have set before you>life 
 and death, the blessing and the curse ; there- 
 fore, choose life that thou mayest live, thou 
 and thy seed, to love the Lord thy God, 
 to obey His voice and to cleave unto Him; 
 for He is thy life and the length of thy 
 days." Such are the words in which Mo- 
 ses, as the representative of the Most High, 
 addresses Israel at the close of his eventful 
 life. He proclaims to them the law of God, 
 with the blessings that would follow upon 
 obedience ; he rehearses all the gracious 
 dealings of God wnth the people, and 
 uses them as persuasions ; but having 
 set before them the practical alternatives, 
 he leaves with them the final act of de- 
 cision. 
 
 ''Choose ye; choose ye;" this is the call 
 which rings out again ■ and again in the 
 story of God's dealings with men. He ever 
 seeks to bring men to the exercise of de- 
 liberate and settled choice. His dealings 
 are gracious ; His mercies are kind ; H'S 
 patience is long-suffering; He brings to 
 bear on men sweet compulsions of love ; He 
 appeals to men by ten thousand ministries. 
 But He ever respects the freedom with 
 which He endowed man, and which is man's 
 inalienable birthright. 
 
 The story of redemption is one of un- 
 ceasing divine effort to win man's love and 
 obedience. It is, from first to last, the un- 
 veiling of a love that seeks, even at cost of 
 utmost sacrifice, to bring resistless motives 
 to bear upon man's will, and infinite per- 
 suasions upon his heart. That love finds 
 its final expression in Jesus Christ. The 
 words of the Lord Jesus are gracious ut- 
 terances of it. Tlie deeds of Jesus are out- 
 shinings of it. The cross of Jesus is the 
 consummate exhibition of it. There God 
 surrenders the inmost treasure of His heart 
 to utmost experience of suffering and pain 
 and death, that man might thereby be won 
 to a responsive love. Wonderful is the at- 
 tractive power of the cross ! It moves men 
 to repentance by the mightiest force of 
 mercy ; it draws and binds men to holy liv- 
 ing by the enduring bonds of gratitude and 
 love. God sends forth His servants to pro- 
 claim the love and sacrifice of that cross, 
 and beseeches men, through their persua- 
 sions and entreatings, to be reconciled to 
 Him. The ministry of the Holy Spirit 
 waits upon the word to that same end. A 
 thousand gracious influences press continu- 
 ally upon man's heart and will. Christ 
 stands at the door and knocks. Gladly would 
 78 ■ 
 
He come in and make men partakers of the 
 joy of fellowship. He will take the place of 
 a suppliant, in lowliness of love and earnest- 
 ness of longing ; but He will not break open 
 the door or enter an unwilling heart. "Be- 
 hold, I stand at the door and knock; if any 
 man open the door, I will come in to him, 
 and sup with him." 
 
 We are prepared now to find that the 
 Scriptures, which thus clearly recognize the 
 will of man, and respect its freedom, charge 
 home with telling force and directness upon 
 man the responsibility for wrong choices, 
 with all their dread issues. The effort is 
 made in some quarters to shift the responsi- 
 bility and blame for wrong doing. If it be 
 not charged directly upon God, it is laid 
 at the door of circumstances and attributed 
 to the necessary outworking of certain nat- 
 ural laws. Conduct and character, we are 
 told, are only the evolution of certain in- 
 herited tendencies, wrought out in given 
 circumstances. We had nothing to do with 
 the choosing of our inheritance, or of our 
 environment. And we can no more help 
 acting as we do under given conditions, we 
 are told, than we can the texture of our 
 brain. Against all such theorizings that 
 which is deepest and noblest in us rises in 
 revolt. It is an aspersion upon the dignity 
 of our nature. Our consciousness gives the 
 lie to it. It makes sin a mere figment of 
 the imagination. The sense of sin is too 
 deeply inwrought into universal conscious- 
 ness to make any such view tenable or 
 credible. We know that sin is a fact, and 
 that our sinning is our own doing. 
 
 Very grave is the responsibility which 
 our freedom entails. By our own choices 
 and decisions we are shaping character and 
 determining destiny. Temperament we are 
 born with ; character we have to make. 
 Circumstances may be beyond our power; 
 our choices are our own. Evil thoughts, 
 like carrion birds, may darken the atmos- 
 phere about us ; if they find a dwelling-place 
 within, our own hands must build the nests. 
 Surroundings may seem unfavorable to the 
 development of a high type of character ; 
 but there is a power within reach that can 
 re-enforce the will, and make us rise above 
 circumstance. Sometimes rarely beautiful 
 characters are developed amid most for- 
 bidding surroundings, like pure and fra- 
 grant lilies coming up from beds of ooze. 
 Heredity and environment count for much ; 
 but they are not chargeable with every- 
 thing. There is a personal element ; and 
 that personal element is, after all, the deter- 
 mining factor. Others may bring influ- 
 
 79 
 
ences to bear upon us ; our choices are our 
 own. We cannot escape the responsibility 
 of them. 
 
 Not only is it impossible to escape re- 
 sponsibility for our moral choices when 
 made ; we cannot evade the making of them. 
 Whenever the claims of right are presented 
 to us, or the temptation to wrong assails 
 us, we cannot escape decision of some kind. 
 As Professor James, in his essay on "The 
 Will to Believe," puts it: "To say under 
 circumstances, 'Do not decide, but leave the 
 question open,' is itself a passional decision, 
 — just like deciding Yes or No, — and is at- 
 tended with the sam.e risk of losing the 
 truth." Sometimes we are pressed by di- 
 rect appeal to moral decision. If not thus 
 pressed, it still remains true that at any 
 given time the ruling preference of the 
 nature is either God-ward, or self-ward and 
 sin-ward. 
 
 Our salvation cannot be thrust upon us 
 even by God. God has, we may be sure, 
 done all for us that He can do. "Christ 
 finished our salvation on the divine side; 
 we must finish it on the human. Christ 
 made it possible; we must make it actual." 
 We may thwart the working of grace, "I 
 am come that ye might have life." That 
 was the declared purpose of Christ's advent. 
 "Ye will not come to me that ye might have 
 life." That was the sad charge which 
 Christ laid at the door of an unwilling and 
 unbelieving people. "How often would I 
 
 and ye would not." That was 
 
 the lament of Christ over doomed and un- 
 repentant Jerusalem. And the bitterness of 
 it all was, and is, "It might have been other- 
 wise." 
 
 Acting upon the lives of all of us are gra- 
 cious divine agencies and influences. Other 
 powers than those of darkness are at work; 
 there are influences of grace and love to 
 lift us up, and shape our lives to noble ends. 
 Everything that even divine love can in- 
 spire or suggest; everything that gracious 
 power can do; — all this is brought to bear 
 upon us for our good ; but in our wilfulness 
 we resist God, and receive His grace in 
 vain. This is the sad tragedy of life. The 
 blame of it lies at our own doors. "Ye 
 would not." "Ye will not." 
 
Bi tbe Door of tbe Kind<loiti» 
 
 IRobert IB. Speer. 
 
 1 THINK one of the most attractive and 
 yet one of the most distressing stories in 
 the Bible is the story told at the close of 
 the Gospel of Mark regarding a certain 
 lawyer who came up to the gates of the 
 kingdom of God and refused to go in. It was 
 the day, some of you will remember, on which 
 Jesus Christ was involved in a great contro- 
 versy. The three different factions of the 
 Jews — the Pharisees, and the Sadducees, and 
 the Herodians, who did not agree very much 
 in anything else, agreed in this : that they 
 hated Jesus, and they had prepared a trap 
 in which they hoped that that day they 
 might catch IJim. Certain subtle questions 
 they had phrased which they thought could 
 be answered in only one or the other of two 
 ways, and whichever way Jesus answered 
 them they felt sure that they had Him 
 snared. And they asked their questions, and 
 Jesus answered them without evasion, with- 
 out any shuffling, in a plain, straightforward 
 way, and yet they found they were no bet- 
 ter off when He had got through answering 
 them than they were before. And there 
 seems to have come a little hush over the 
 crowd, while those who had been question- 
 ing Jesus stood in rather shame-faced si- 
 lence, not knowing just what next to do. 
 And thereupon, Mark tells us, a certain 
 lawyer in the crowd spoke up and asked 
 Jesus Christ a question. Maybe it was only 
 a catch question that they used in the Jew- 
 ish schools to test scholars on ; maybe it 
 was a question that had really puzzled this 
 man, and he saw as he listened to Jesus 
 
 Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. 
 8i 
 
talking that day that here at last was a 
 Teacher genuine, sincere, honest, open- 
 minded, who might be able to answc* his 
 question for him. And he put his question 
 to Jesus, and Jesus gave him a reply. It 
 was a reply such as the man had never got 
 to his question before, and for the moment 
 he forgot himself, lie forgot the crowd ; he 
 looked straight in Jesus' face and he said : 
 "Master, Thou hast well said that there is 
 only one God, and that our whole duty is 
 to love Him, and that beside loving Him 
 and our neighbor everything else is as noth- 
 ing." And Jesus looked him back straight 
 in the eye and said: "Thou art not far 
 from the kingdom of God." I imagine He 
 paused a moment then to see what the man 
 would do. Doubtless the lawyer heard a 
 little rustle behind him. Maybe somebody 
 pulled the skirt of his robe ; maybe some- 
 body nudged him and told him he was going 
 a little too far — at any rate, he suddenly 
 remembered himself and the crowd that 
 stood round him, and he sank back and was 
 lost in the multitude, and we never hear of 
 him again. He came right up to the door 
 of the kingdom of God. The King of the 
 kingdom stood at the door inviting him to 
 come in, and because he was afraid of his 
 surroundings he shrank back from the king- 
 dom and its King. Will you fix that man 
 in your mind now as a type of the men who 
 refuse to come into the kingdom of God 
 because they are afraid of their surround- 
 ings, and just hold him in your memory 
 while we range up beside him three other 
 men. 
 
 One of them was a rich voung ruler who 
 came to Jesus one day as He was travelling 
 along the highways of Palestine — a bright 
 faced fellow with none of those blotches 
 on his countenance that tell their story 
 only too well of what is back of the coun- 
 tenance ; with nothing back of the outside 
 to show that it was an unclean or evil life. 
 And when Jesus looked upon him, the clean, 
 ruddy face telling of the clean, pure life, 
 we are told that He loved him. And when 
 the young man came up to Him and said 
 to Him : "Good Master, what shall I do 
 that I may inherit eternal life?" He an- 
 swered him in a way to draw out his con- 
 fidence, and told him what he must do : first 
 of all, keep the commandments. He wanted 
 to try the young man's character. "Well," 
 said the young man, "perhaps I have kept 
 them. I have not committed adultery ; I - 
 liave not stolen ; I have not borne false wit- 
 ness ; all these things I have kept from my 
 youth. My mother taught me to be clean, 
 82 
 
and I never have given up my birthright 
 of purity and of cleanliness." "One thing," 
 said Jesus, laying His finger on the real 
 weak spot in that young man's life, "one 
 thing thou lackest." He saw that the man 
 was clean ; that he had no gross vices cling- 
 ing to him ; that he had in a measure kept 
 the outside of the commandments, whether 
 he had kept the inside of them in Christ's 
 way or not. What he still lacked was the 
 spirit of generous abandon, of liberty, of 
 unselfish service, the lack of which Christ 
 laid His finger on as his great defect and 
 sore. Once again the doors of the kingdom 
 of God swung open before a man and the 
 King of the kingdom stood on the threshold 
 and invited him in, and the man shrank 
 back because he had something he was un- 
 willing to give up. Fix that man in your 
 mind beside the lawyer as a type of the men 
 who will not come into the kingdom of God 
 because they have something in their lives 
 that they are unwilling to give up. 
 
 I think of another man before whom a 
 little Jew is standing, and he is speaking of 
 the kingdom of God, and appealing to those 
 deep moral instincts that never have been 
 suppressed and never can be suppressed in 
 any human heart, and as he pleads Agrippa 
 wavers, and yet he passes it ofif with a su- 
 percilious smile, feeling too high to be of- 
 fended, but too great and proud altogether 
 to yield to Paul's appeal. "Paul," he says, 
 sarcastically perhaps, "thou dost al- 
 most persuade me to be a Chris- 
 tian." There once again the kingdom 
 of God opened its doors to a man, and a 
 friend of the King stood with his hand on 
 the door inviting a man to come in, and 
 the man refused to come into the kingdom 
 and to make the acquaintance of the King, 
 because of that feeling of personal pride 
 that to do this thing would be a little be- 
 neath him. He had a standing to maintain. 
 He was a man of self-poise, of dignity. 
 He had never given himself away. Do you 
 suppose he was going to betray his own 
 inner life and make a show of himself be- 
 fore his fellows by confessing himself a 
 follower of the poor, despised Jesus? And 
 he turned away from the gate of the king- 
 dom of God. Let him stand in your mind 
 side by side with these two other men as 
 a type of the men who stay out of the 
 kingdom because of personal pride. 
 
 And now range up beside these three one 
 more. Once again that little Jew, a few 
 weeks before this scene of which I have 
 just been speaking, is arguing before a gov- 
 ernor. He knows the character of that gov- 
 83 
 
ernor. He reads on his face the story of 
 his inner Hfe, and he argues before him 
 of righteousness, of self-control, and of a 
 judgment to come; and while he reasons, 
 Felix trembles. He is too weak a man to 
 answer. He knows that what Paul is say- 
 ing is true, and he stands there shifting to 
 and fro, the poor, pliable, feeble, vacillating 
 nature, afraid to come to a decision, and yet 
 afraid not to do so. And he says: "Paul, 
 Paul, go thy way ; a little later I will think 
 about it, and some day I will take the ques- 
 tion up ; when I have a little more convenient 
 season I will call for thee." Let him stand 
 for that great class of men who shuffle ; who 
 have not the moral power to take a clean 
 step ; the men who fail to go into the king- 
 dom of God when its marble-white doors 
 swing open before their hearts, because of 
 a lack of downright, sterling, manly force. 
 
 Now, men, underneath these four lives — 
 let them drop for just a moment — there runs 
 this great truth : It is possible for a man to 
 miss what God wants him to have. There 
 were the gates of the kingdom of God wide 
 ajar before those four men. Every one 
 of those four men was free to go in, and they 
 turned away from the open gates of the open 
 kingdom, and never looked upon the face of 
 the King in His beauty. Men think some- 
 times if they are lost it is God's fault, and 
 not their fault. It is not so. God has done 
 for the salvation of men everything Pie can 
 do. He cannot break down the human per- 
 sonality. He cannot invade a. man's own 
 sovereignty. All He can do is just to say 
 to us : "Come, My son, let us reason to- 
 gether." All He can do is just to plead with 
 us and stand at the door and knock, and say : 
 'Tf any man will open the door I will come 
 in to him," but He cannot break through into 
 the man's life. Why, what does human 
 history teach but that? It is possible for 
 men to miss the will of God for themselves. 
 That is the whole great lesson of Jewish 
 history. They wandered forty years through 
 the wilderness, when it was only eight days' 
 journey over into the promised land. God 
 was getting them ready to recognize the 
 Messiah when He came, and when "He 
 came to His own, His own received Him 
 not." The very first lesson of Jewish his- 
 tory is that it is possible for a race to miss 
 what God wants it to have, and that is the 
 whole lesson of human history. The King 
 came to men, and He walked around about 
 among men, and they saw the King's na- 
 ture in Him, and they crucified Him Hke a 
 thief, and between two thieves, on a cross. 
 All human history went awry that bitter 
 
day on Calvary, though the good God over- 
 ruled it all. 
 
 My friends, we need only look into our 
 own lives to see how easy it is to miss what 
 God wants us to have. There are men 
 here who have wrecked homes ; who have 
 had people in their own family lines die of 
 broken hearts. I will warrant there isn't a 
 family history represented here in this audi- 
 ence , that does not bear the seams and the 
 scars of sin. Just think back over your 
 family history. Think of the drunkards in 
 it. Just think, some of you, may be, upon 
 the sin and the shame of your own homes. 
 Did God intend us to have those things? 
 It is possible for a man to miss what God 
 wants him to have. 
 
 There was Jesus Christ standing with 
 His outstretched arms before the gates of 
 the kingdom, and there was that lawyer 
 standing in the crowd. There had just come 
 a little burst of manliness in him, and he 
 separated himself a little bit from the throng, 
 and he was standing there, I suppose, the 
 first time for many years with that sense 
 of isolation and freedom that belongs to the 
 real man, and Jesus Christ was speaking to 
 his heart, wanting just to throw his arms 
 around that man and drag him into the 
 kino;dom. The man turned away and went 
 back into the crowd again. And there 
 the Saviour stood that day talking to that 
 young man whom He loved; loved him be- 
 cause of what he was ; loved him because 
 of what he knew He could make him — and 
 the young man turned away from what 
 Christ wanted him to have. 
 
 It is possible for men to miss what God 
 wants them to have, and men are missing 
 it today in just the same way that those 
 men missed it eighteen hundred years ago. 
 There are thousands of men who are kept 
 out of the kingdom of God because they are 
 afraid of their crowds. There are some 
 young men here who know well enough 
 what they ought to do. They know 
 that sin is a damnable thing; they 
 know it is no part of a man's life to soil 
 himself with lust and vice, and they are only 
 tied fast to it because they are afraid to 
 break with their crowd. There are thou- 
 sands of men who are shut out of the king- 
 dom of God today just because they are not 
 men enough to shake themselves free and 
 exercise their own will, independent of the 
 sneer of some little set in which they move. 
 
 I heard the other day of a boy who went 
 to a Nev/ England college, and he joined 
 one of the fraternities there at the beginning 
 of his freshman year, before he knew what 
 
 85 
 
the character of the fraternity \\as ; and he 
 found out after a few days that he had*got 
 in with a lot of speckled men. He found 
 it was harder to get out than to get in. 
 Those men were not going to let him loose. 
 And he stood it for a few weeks until he 
 could not stand it any longer, and then he 
 deliberately broke free and announced that 
 he was going to leave the fraternity. They 
 slandered him from the beginning to the 
 end of his college course ; they tried to 
 blacken his character, and it was only be- 
 cause he had strength of personal will 
 enough to stand up against it all that he 
 emerged at last with a clean record and 
 the respect of all men ; because he had not 
 been willing to knuckle under to a crowd. 
 
 There is a college at Aberdeen, Scotland, 
 upon the stone walls of which it is said these 
 words are cut, "'They say. What do they 
 say? Let them say." What difference does 
 it make to me what other men say? Are 
 they going to be my judges at the Judgment 
 Day? I shall stand out all alone then, and 
 the eyes of all the universe will be on me, 
 and the Judge upon the throne will be 
 speaking to me, and no crowd of men who 
 drove me in slavery to their sins and vices 
 here will be able then to stand up and take 
 my punishment for me. By as much as 
 I am to stand alone before the Great Throne 
 on the Judgment Day, I propose to stand 
 alone among men now. 
 
 What it is right for a man to do, it is 
 right for a man to do, and no amount of 
 sneering, no amount of sneering, no amount 
 of poor, weak, frivolous criticism from his 
 fellows can ever justify a man in being 
 other than he ought to be. And yet, how 
 many men there are here who will dodge 
 some one going out ; who will refuse the 
 invitation to come into the kingdom of God 
 to-day, just because they are afraid of the 
 little crowd in which they move. 
 
 And there are men still who are shut out 
 of the kingdom of God because they are 
 unwilling to surrender. That vicious habit 
 that you practice in secret — you know it 
 would have to go if you came into the 
 kingdom of God. That illicit relationship 
 that you dare not speak about to your moth- 
 er— vou know it would have to go if you 
 came into the kingdom of God. All that 
 set of sins in men's lives that compels them 
 to have secret places where they do not want 
 their mothers' eyes, or God's eyes, to pene- 
 trate ; all that class of sins that drag in their 
 train corruption and corrosion of life, that 
 make it impossible for a nian to give what 
 he gets on his wedding day — the man who 
 86 
 
stands on the threshold of the kingdom of 
 God knows he cannot carry those things 
 with him. 
 
 "I beheld in my dream," says John Bun- 
 yan, "there was room for riie, but there 
 was not room for me and my sins." There 
 are many men who stand on the threshold 
 of the kingdom of God and they don't want 
 to come in because they have got this or 
 that thing in their lives that they don't want 
 to give up — some dishonest practice in their 
 business ; some vicious habit ; some foul spot 
 in their lives. Maybe it is only a little thing ; 
 maybe it is a big thing; but there 
 are men still who will sacrifice eter- 
 nity for the sake of a passing lust. 
 There are men still who will let all the end- 
 less years of God and the joy of abiding 
 forever in the Father's house of many man- 
 sions slip away for the sake of some poor, 
 paltry little thing that they cannot carry 
 beyond the grave. Even still as Jesus Christ 
 stands by the gate of His kingdom and calls 
 men in, there are men who will not come 
 because they will not surrender the things 
 that cannot be taken in. 
 
 And I suppose that here in a com- 
 pany like this, there are some who 
 are held out of the kingdom of God 
 just as Agrippa was. They are respected 
 men ; men whom everybody trusts and con- 
 fides in ; men who never have betrayed them- 
 selves. "Why." they say, "people would 
 hardly know what to make of it if I became 
 a Christian. It w^ould be a little demeaning 
 in me now with my standing in the com- 
 munity just to bow down as any ordinary 
 sinner and go into the kingdom of God." 
 How strange it is that a man should think 
 it humbling to become the son of God, when 
 the Son of God did not think it humbling 
 to become man. If God was wilHng to be- 
 come a son of man for my sake, I am willing 
 to become a son of God for His sake. Hu- 
 miliating ? I like to go back to my old home 
 in Pennsylvania because I am my father's 
 son. Is there any man here who does not 
 feel a thrill of pride — maybe there are some 
 — because they are their father's sons? 
 Why? Because they themselves respect 
 their fathers ; because other men respect 
 their fathers, and they are proud to acknowl- 
 edge that they are their father's sons. "To 
 as many as received Him," we read in the 
 1st chapter of the Gospel by John — "To as 
 many as received Him, to them gave He 
 power to become the sons of God" — the 
 right to become the sons of God : the privi- 
 lege to become the sons of God. Oh, friends, 
 you cannot exaggerate the glory of it — of 
 
 87 
 
being a son of God, and of having God ac- 
 knowledge you as His son, and of having 
 in your own heart the testimony, born of 
 His Spirit, that you are the Son of God. 
 And yet there are men who think that to 
 have that in their hves would be humbling, 
 and therefore as the King stands on the 
 threshold of the kingdom of God and calls 
 them in, they will not go. 
 
 And how many there are — every man of 
 us knows them — who will not go into the 
 kingdom of God just for a lack of sheer 
 manly force. A man says to them : "Now, 
 you know what you ought to be ; you know 
 what you ought to do. Come in and be 
 what you ought to be and do what you ought 
 to do," and the man whimpers a little and 
 he shifts back, and he says : "I — I intend 
 to some day. I am not going to be a sheer 
 fool. I know I ought some day to do this 
 thing. There is only one thing for a man 
 to do, and that is the right thing; there is 
 only one thing for a man to be, and that 
 is the right thing. I intend some day to 
 do the right thing and be the right thing." 
 But the truth of the matter is that the man 
 is not just a man. What makes a man? 
 When the prodigal off there among the 
 swine, filling his own belly with the husks 
 that the swine did eat, came to himself at 
 last ; when he broke through all the shell of 
 corruption and foul habit, and got into 
 himself, how did the man express himself? 
 "I will;" "I will;" "I will;" "I will arise 
 and go to my father. I will say unto him : 
 'Father, I have sinned against Heaven and 
 in thy sight.' I will ask him to make me 
 as one of his hired servants." And the 
 poor outcast was a man again. When that 
 moment comes in any life, tired of shuffling, 
 tired of compromise, tired of drivelling im- 
 becility, and the man gets up and says : "I 
 will arise and go," then the arms of Jesus 
 Christ clasp him around and lift him up 
 through the gates of the city of God. 
 
 My brothers, there are hundreds of men 
 who are staying out of the kingdom of God 
 in just such ways as these, and I say that for 
 a man to stay out under any such pretext 
 is a weak and a weakening thing. It is a 
 weak thing. Stay out of the kingdom of 
 God because you are unwilling to give up a 
 little lust or sin ! Stay out of the kingdom 
 of God because you are afraid of what some 
 man will say ! Stay out of the kingdom of 
 God because of the want of sheer force and 
 strength in your life! A course of 
 action like that is a weak course of action, 
 and it ends in the excavation of a man's 
 character that leaves him where that poor 
 8S 
 
prodigal was before he came to himself and 
 said : "I will get up out of this and go to 
 my father." We deprecate in men any 
 shuffling, vacillating weakness, in other men 
 or in ourselves. We like in them and in our- 
 selves that solid, robust rigidity of principle 
 that makes the man say: "I know what 
 the right thing for me to do and be is, and 
 I propose to be the right thing and do the 
 right thing, though a hell of devils assail me 
 and try to drive me from my course." 
 
 I happened to be over night in Edinburgh 
 a couple of years ago, just after the news 
 of the battle of Magersfontein came to Scot- 
 land. You know that was a battle in South 
 Africa, where some British general blun- 
 dered and the Black Watch, one of the 
 finest Scotch regiments, was cut to pieces, 
 half of its men being left dead on the 
 battlefield. Almost that whole regiment had 
 been enlisted in Edinburgh. A friend of 
 mine was telling me of passing down the 
 street the day the tidings came. He said 
 every shop in Edinburgh was closed, and 
 there were little knots of men standing on 
 the streets, and many of them had tears 
 coursing down their cheeks. I happened 
 to be staying with a gentleman who had a 
 little boy. I asked the lad what he thought 
 about the war. He said he hadn't thought 
 much about it until that day the news came, 
 but now it seemed very sad to him. He had 
 a friend there, General Wauchope, who was 
 killed at the head of his regiment, one of the 
 best-known men in Edinburgh, and one of 
 the best-beloved. He was one of the largest 
 landholders in that section of Scotland. 
 And when he and half his regiment were 
 cut down in needless sacrifice, the whole city 
 of Edinburgh wept like a little child. And 
 yet. after all, there was a great feeling of 
 contentment in it. They were sure that their 
 regiment had died like a regiment of men. 
 Almost every soldier in that regiment was 
 a Christian. It was organized as a Presby- 
 terian church, and the regimental officers 
 presided at their regular regimental com- 
 munion, and on their way to the front, 
 going to the transports they went marching 
 down the streets of Cork singing: 
 
 "I'm not ashamed to own my Lord, 
 
 And to defend His cause, 
 Maintain the honor of His Word, 
 
 The glory of His cross." 
 
 And when a few weeks afterwards they 
 came sailing into the harbor of Cape Town 
 and disembarked, going at once up to the 
 field of battle, thev went ashore singing 
 
that great soldier's song, the song that 
 Hugh Beaver loved so : '■ 
 
 "When the roll is called up yonder I'll be there." 
 
 It was only a few days afterwards that 
 the roll was called up yonder for most of 
 them, and they answered to their names. 
 And one loves to think to-day of 
 the Black Watch, the way it lived and 
 the way it died, because it was made up of 
 men who had their faith and were not 
 ashamed to show it. 
 
 Aly brothers, you stand this evening on 
 the threshold of the kingdom of God, and 
 the King is here. Maybe your eyes see 
 Him, and maybe they do not see Him. But 
 I am speaking for Him, and inviting you 
 into the kingdom. Will you come in to- 
 night ? How do you know you are 
 going to have another chance to come in? 
 Of course, you may. You are not going to 
 die at once, probably, and there will be other 
 opportunities, perhaps, wdien men will ask 
 you to come and give your lives to Christ; 
 to be the kind of men you know you ought 
 to be ; to do the sort of thing you know you 
 ought to do. But how do you know, if you 
 turn away from the kingdom this afternoon, 
 that you will ever want to come in again ? 
 God won't change, but you will never be- 
 the same again that you are this afternoon. 
 That lawyer came up to the gate of the 
 kingdom, and Christ asked him to come in, 
 and the door was open in front of him, and 
 he felt a drawing down in his heart, just 
 like the pulling of the fingers of a little 
 child — you know what it is — drawing him 
 in through the gates of the kingdom, and he 
 turned away and never came back again. 
 How can a man know, if he once refuses to 
 accept Jesus Christ and to come in through 
 the doors of the kingdom, that the next time 
 his heart won't be a little harder, and he 
 will want even less to come in ? 
 
 In the life of the great naturalist, Charle.« 
 Darwin, there is a storytelling how once as he 
 sat at his table he saw a little passion plant 
 in front of him. and he took up a lead pencil 
 and he laid on the lax tendrils. You know 
 what the passion plant is, what it docs. All 
 the little leaves began to curl themselves 
 around the lead pencil, and before they had 
 quite grasped it. he drew the pencil out, and 
 the leaves rolled back to their original posi- 
 tion. And he laid the lead pencil down on 
 them again, and they responded once more, 
 only a little more slowly than the last time; 
 and again, just before they had clutched the 
 pencil, he drew it away, and the leaves a 
 
 QO 
 
little more slowly and patiently unfolded. 
 And he did it a third time, and a fourth 
 time, and a fifth time, and a sixth time, and 
 each time those little tendrils responded, 
 but each time more slowly than the last time. 
 And the last time they stood absolutely un- 
 responsive, and did not try to fold them- 
 selves around it at all. Oh, men, I beseech 
 you not to trifle with your hearts. To-day, 
 if you feel Jesus Christ lying on them, and 
 the tendrils of your hearts are beginning to 
 wrap around Him, don't slip away ; let them 
 clutch Him now, while it is time. 
 
 I have a dear friend who was an army 
 chaplain, and he told me an old war story 
 that happened within his own knowledge of 
 a family down in Maine. There had been 
 six boys, and five of them were shot in the 
 war, and one of them, the only lad who was 
 left, had enlisted, and he had been wounded 
 on a Southern battlefield, and he was going 
 home on a leave of absence. The surgeon 
 told him he might never get home. He 
 said he would like to try anyhow, and he 
 got as far as New York, and he was pretty 
 weak there. But he got across the city and 
 took a train for Boston, and then for Maine. 
 He got off at last at the railroad station 
 that was nearest his father's house. It was 
 snowing — just Christmas time — and he 
 stood for a little time in the railroad station 
 to rest, and then he made his way out 
 through the storm down toward his father's 
 home. He leaned up against the fence now 
 and then to rest himself and regain his 
 strength. And bye and bye he got on at 
 last to the little gate that led up to 
 his father's door. He saw the light from 
 the great open fireplace, and he could see 
 the shadows of his father and mother on the 
 walls. He worked his way half way up the 
 path to the door, and he felt his strength 
 ebbing away. He got up near enough just 
 to catch the sound of his old mother's voice 
 by the fireside, and then he fell down dead 
 on the very doorstep of his home. Oh, it 
 is no illustration of the sinner and God. 
 No one of us ever got to the threshold 
 who didn't find the door swung wide ajar, 
 and the Father's arms wrapped right around 
 our hearts. But, friends, how do you know 
 that if this evening you do not go in you 
 wnll ever want to go in again ? The harvest 
 may be past, and the summer be ended. I 
 beseech you to-day, "To-day harden not 
 your hearts. Behold, now is the accepted 
 time. Now is the day of salvation." Now, 
 while the doors of the kingdom stand wide 
 ajar, and the Son of the King stands in the 
 open door inviting you in. Oh, friends, let 
 
us get up as one man and go in, in to the 
 King, into our Father's house. Will y-ou 
 not go in to-day? Shaking off the cow- 
 ardice, the littleness, the sin, the pettiness, 
 the paltriness of life, and, taking Jesus 
 Christ by the hand, come home. 
 
3e$u$, Saving from $in$, 
 
 IRev. Cbas. %. /ifoeaD. 
 
 Matt. 1:21. 
 
 "Cbou sbalt call fjis name 3e$u$, for l>e shall save l^is people 
 from their sins." 
 
 THE oue great fact of this world is 
 Sm. 
 It is stamped upon all human 
 history and written on every in- 
 dividual life. Its baneful effects 
 are evidenced throughout the world, and it 
 remains for the religion which can give a 
 sufficient remedy for sin to become the tri- 
 umphant religion of the world. If we look 
 for the evidences of sin, we find them 
 
 1. In Human Government. Among all 
 the governments which have been constitut- 
 ed among men not one has been so builded 
 as to ignore the fact of sin. Laws are en- 
 acted and penalties enjoined because of sin. 
 The prison house and penitentiary are con- 
 stant evidences of the fact that men sin. 
 Our legislatures and law-makers acknowl- 
 edge the fact that men sin and must be pun- 
 ished. If we turn to 
 
 2. The Religions of the World, we find 
 there the acknowledgment of the fact 
 of sin. Every religion which appeals to the 
 human heart deals with sin, acknowledges 
 its baneful presence and seeks a remedy. 
 The consciousness of condemnation in the 
 human heart demands a remedy of some 
 kind, hence every religion must acknowledge 
 and deal with the fact of sin. 
 
 If we turn 
 
 3. To Science, we find there the admis- 
 sion of the fact of sin. She recognizes a 
 vitiating perverting influence in nature. 
 There are storms in the air, quakings in the 
 earth, tyranny of the weak by the strong, 
 baffling obstacles in the stream of thought, 
 all of which reveal the presence of dark, ob- 
 
 Pastorofthe First M. E. Church, Hoboken, N. 
 
 93 
 
stinate and often unconquerable foes ; so 
 that the best men can do gives to them o>ily 
 approximate and never exacts results. Men- 
 tal Philosophy admits the ignorance of the 
 intellect, Moral Philosophy, the perplexity 
 of the passions, while Natural Philosophy 
 acknowledges the perverting influences of 
 the visible world. Thus does Science confirm 
 the fact that something is amiss in this 
 world and that she herself is seeking to set 
 it right. 
 
 If we turn to 
 
 4. The Word of God, we find that Scrip- 
 ture not only admits, but declares the fact 
 of sin. Three hundred and seven times the 
 word sin describes man's condition of alien- 
 ation from God. "Behold," said the Proph- 
 et, "vour sins have separated vou from vour 
 God.'" 
 
 Paul declares that all men have sinned 
 and come short of the glory of God. Sin, 
 then, is the cause of man's separation from 
 His maker and his failure, and is universal 
 in its sweep, overwhelming the race. 
 
 If we turn to the story of the Fall in 
 Genesis we find that whatever construction 
 we may put upon it figuratively that it is 
 correct philosophically. 
 
 The first fact we meet with after the Fall 
 is the fact of conscience. 
 
 When God came to Adam in the Garden, 
 in the cool of the day, we read that Adam 
 hid himself, and in answer to God's ques- 
 tion "Where art thou ?" said : "I was afraid 
 and I went and hid myself." 
 
 That is the cry of every convicted sinner 
 and fugitive from justice to this hour, every- 
 where on earth. The Conscience Fund in 
 the Police Department of our cities, reveals 
 that men are conscious of their sin, and seek 
 relief through separation. 
 
 The second fact in the story is man's con- 
 sciousness that his was a destiny of toil and 
 labor. 
 
 Here begins the wasting, wearing exist- 
 ence, the presence of the thorn and thistle, 
 the sweat of the brow, the physical agony in 
 human life, which through sin when it is fin- 
 ished, bringeth forth death. 
 
 The third fact in confirmation of the story 
 in Genesis is found in the curse pronounced 
 upon Motherhood. 
 
 For Motherhood is the sacred tragedy of 
 life, its holiest experience, the perpetual re- 
 newal of heaven coming to earth in the little 
 face of the loving child. 
 
 Accepting the Biblical idea of the word 
 sin in the original, i. c., the coming short of 
 the mark, we find its evidences also 
 
 5. In Individual Experience. We have 
 
 ■ 94 
 
sinned, that is, we have come short of 
 the mark. Look at your individual Hfe as 
 a citizen ! Have you not, some time, come 
 short in your duty to your country? or as 
 a father in your duty to your family ! or 
 as a created child of God in vour duty to 
 Him ? 
 
 The indictment becomes terribly and se- 
 verely true that all have sinned and come 
 short of the mark, attaining approximate 
 and never exact results. 
 
 So does sin become to us the one stern 
 damning fact of this world, universal in its 
 sweep and overwheming in its power. Hav- 
 ing thus established the fact of sin, let us 
 look for a remedy from its terrible power. 
 
 How can man get rid of sin? A divine 
 law must be satisfied, for "sin is a trans- 
 gression of the law." Atonement must be 
 made, for "without the shedding of blood 
 there is no remission of sin." Forgiveness 
 must be granted, and sin can then be as if 
 it had never been. "Let the wicked forsake 
 his way .... and return unto our 
 God, for He will abundantly pardon." 
 
 Men seek to get rid of sin. 
 
 I. Through the worship of Nature man 
 says, "Nature is my'God; I will seek relief 
 from my sin through Nature." 
 
 So Adam sought to cover his nakedness 
 by making an apron of fig-leaves, but God 
 said to him, "You cannot cover sin that 
 way," and He made a coat of skin and 
 clothed him. 
 
 Adam took leaves from an unfeeling tree. 
 God took the life of an animal to cover the 
 naked man. "Sin cannot be atoned for by 
 any mechanical action. Suffering and atone- 
 ment must always follow. From the be- 
 ginning to the end the track of the sinner 
 is marked with blood." 
 
 Nature makes no atonement for sin, nor 
 does she ever forgive the sinner. 
 
 Men seek relief from the condemnation 
 of sin through morality. They trust in 
 morality as a sufficient remedy. 
 
 The rich young man who came to Christ 
 believed that morality should be sufficient, 
 yet revealed in his question the fact of its 
 failure to save from sin. 
 
 For morality cannot relieve man of his 
 past ; it can form his future, but cannot for- 
 give his past. So the rich young man went 
 away into darkness, sorrowfully, with the 
 fatal shortcomings of his past, for morality 
 never forgives. 
 
 ]\Ien look also to Conscience as a 
 sufficient guide to lead them away 
 from their sin. They say, "If I live up 
 to the light of my Conscience, I will be 
 
 95 
 
safe. But Conscience never satisfies a brok- 
 en law nor offers atonement for man. Con- 
 science recalls in vivid fearful outline the 
 sins of the past, but Conscience never for- 
 gives ; and when man has found that all his 
 plans and schemes are futile, he turns at 
 last to see how God deals with sin. 
 
 The text declares that Jesus came to save 
 His people from their sins, and suggests to 
 us that Christ was born into this world 
 with a specific relationship to sin. 
 
 If we look to God for relief from our sin, 
 we find that coincident with the Fall, God 
 gave man hope and sounded the voice of 
 promise, keeping the race from despair 
 and desolation. 
 
 Down the centuries as they ceaselessly 
 pass the divine purpose runs, and the divine 
 promise gleams when God declared that the 
 seed of the woman should bruise the ser- 
 pent's head. A redeemer should come, who 
 could satisfy a divine law, make atonement 
 for sin, man could be forgiven his iniquity 
 and his transgressions remembered no more. 
 We must not forget that when man sinned 
 Satan was enthroned as the god of this 
 world ; that the battle for the mastery of 
 man began ; that Satan, acquainted with the 
 divine purpose, would defeat God's plan if 
 possible, and would, by the very attribute 
 of God's justice, hold God to the strict con- 
 ditions of the promise ; for God could not be 
 unjust even to the Devil. 
 
 And God respected the conditions of the 
 promise made in His dealings with Satan 
 and sin. One of these conditions was 
 
 1. That the Redeemer must be born un- 
 der the full force of the broken law, and be 
 obedient to the divine command. 
 
 He must be tempted as Adam was, but He 
 must stand where Adam fell. He must 
 have an ancestry which had been so sinful 
 as to have broken at some time, somehow 
 and somewhere the entire law of God. 
 Hence, it is possible from the genealogy in 
 Matthew to discover that all of the Ten 
 Commandments were broken by the ancestry 
 of the Redeemer, bringing Him under the 
 force of the broken law. So when the hu- 
 man race had utterly failed and had broken 
 the law, "in the fulness of time God sent 
 forth His Son, made of a woman, made 
 wider the law, to redeem them that were 
 under the law that we might become the 
 sons of God." God met perfectly this con- 
 dition of His promise. 
 
 Another condition was this : 
 
 2. That the Redeemer of the race must 
 be born of woman. It was the seed of the 
 woman, not the man, which, according to 
 
 96 
 
the promise, was to bruise the serpent's 
 head. 
 
 Christ must have an earthly mother. 
 Both Matthew and Luke record how per- 
 fectly God met this condition. We repeat 
 in the Apostles' Creed that Christ was be- 
 gotten by the Holy Ghost, born of the Vir- 
 g'in Mary, and Christ, as the only begotten 
 Son of God, was made of a wovian, as well 
 as made under the law, that we might be 
 redeemed from our sin through the sacrifice 
 of Himself. 
 
 Still another condition which must be 
 met was this : 
 
 3. That He must represent all classes 
 of the human race, the highest as well as tho 
 lowest, the poor as well as the rich. His 
 life must have blended in it toil, labor, fa- 
 tigue, disappointment, pain and death. He 
 must be made perfect through suffering that 
 He might bring many sons unto glory. He 
 must die for the sins of the people that the 
 divine law could be upheld and the sinner 
 forgiven. So when I study His companions 
 around His cradle, and there see the ex- 
 tremes of society worshipping the young 
 child ; when I look at His cross and see 
 there the nations of the earth acknowledging 
 His Kingship, I feel that in His life and 
 death He has met perfectly the conditions 
 which sin created and made possible man's 
 forgiveness with God. 
 
 Thus it is that God removes sin by giving 
 His only begotten Son as a sacrifice for 
 sin and forgiving the sinner. Thus Jesus 
 saves His people from their sins by the 
 sacrifice of Himself; for "He died the just 
 for the unjust that He might bring us to 
 God." 
 
 In a little town in the northern part of 
 Germany there lived a widow with a large 
 family. Hunger and privation pressed 
 harder and harder upon the widow's purse 
 until the eldest daughter, an accomplished 
 musician, felt that she must aid her mother 
 in bearing the heavy burden of family sup- 
 port. She conceived the idea of giving a 
 musicale in a distant city where her friends 
 resided. 
 
 She drew up her "Prospectus," and in a 
 fateful moment of temptation placed upon 
 the announcement a lie, stating that she 
 was the pupil of Abbe Liszt. 
 
 She was not nor had she ever been a 
 pupil of the great master. The day arrived 
 for the recital. She went to the city, sought 
 out the best hotel, and there on the register 
 above her name was the name of the master 
 himself. There on the bulletin was her 
 "prospectus" with its horrible lie. Con- 
 
 97 
 
science-stricken, she resolved tJiat she would 
 i;o to the master, tell him of her wearied 
 mother and the hungry children in her little 
 home, confess her sin, then as quietly as 
 possible leave the city and go back to her 
 home hopeless and despairing. 
 
 She sought his room, timidly knocked on 
 the door, and when his kindly voice an- 
 swered "Come in," she threw herself at his 
 feet, sobbed out her pitiful story, and asked 
 his forgiveness. He gently lifted her up 
 and said : "I have been composing a nev\^ 
 piece to-day and would like to hear how it 
 sounds. Will you come and play it for me?*' 
 She sat down at the piano, and when she 
 touched the keys the master saw that his 
 successor had come. He made a suggestion 
 here, a little correction there, and then said: 
 "Now, my dear child, I have given you your 
 first lesson and you are my pupil now ; so 
 go down and place upon the bulletin that 
 the master is in town and will play the last 
 number on the program, for you are freely 
 forgiven." 
 
 So when I came to the Master a guilty 
 sinner and fell prostrate at His feet, He 
 lifted me up, forgave my sin, made it as if 
 it had never been, and remembers it no 
 more. 
 
 And when I see Jesus standing and reach- 
 ing out with pitying hands toward a re- 
 pentant sinner, and saying, "Son, be of 
 good cheer ; thy sins are forgiven thee." 
 When I see His tenderness toward a sinful 
 woman and hear Him say, "Thy sins, which 
 are many, are all forgiven thee ! Go and 
 sin no more," I feel that He is able to save 
 to the uttermost all who come unto God by 
 Him. 
 
 With a confidence that is absolute and a 
 conviction that is unwavering, I point you 
 to Jesus Christ as the Saviour from sin. 
 
 He will take thy guilty soul, and, with the 
 crimson tide which streams from ?Iis, own 
 heart, will roll back the tide of sin, sweep- 
 ing thee on to ruin and death and pour in 
 the tides of life and immortality. And when 
 death shall smite thy mortal frame, stand- 
 ing beside thy trembling soul, holding in 
 His hand thy feeble fingers, He will stoop 
 down and whisper to thy fainting heart. 
 "Because I live ye shall live also," and will 
 guide thee to a blessed immortalitv. 
 
the Desert ana the Garden. 
 
 IRev. (3. Campbell /iRorgan, 
 
 OLonOon, jEnglanD. 
 
 Isaiah Iv : 7. 
 
 "Cet the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his 
 thoughts; and let him return unto the Cord, and Re will 
 have mercy upon him : and to our God, for Re will abund- 
 antly pardon." 
 
 BY a coincidence of arrangement this 
 is the central verse of the chapter. 
 I put it that way because the chap- 
 ters and verses are usually a hin- 
 drance to reading the Scriptures. 
 There are six verses before this one, and 
 six following it, and it is the dividing line 
 between descriptions of two conditions of 
 
 life — the description of one condition in the 
 first six verses, and that of another in the 
 second six. 
 
 Ill the first part of the chapter you have 
 a picture of a man away from God. In the 
 last half you have a picture of a man in 
 fellowship with God; and if you ask me 
 how a man can go from the first half into 
 
 Late Pastor of New Court Chapel, London, England. 
 
 99 
 
the second half, the answer is that he must 
 go through tlie seventh verse, and no man 
 passes from the first into the second except 
 through that gateway. 
 
 Let us refresh our memories. If we 
 glance at the first part we find such ex- 
 pressions as these: "Everyone that thirst- 
 eth:"' "he that hath no money:" "ye spend 
 money" (not contradictory of the last one 
 .IS 1 will show later) for that which is not 
 hread : "your labor :" "satisfieth not." 
 Those expressions describe a condition 
 which we shall do well to look at. Thirsty 
 — without mone}- — spending money for 
 what is not bread — hard at work — never 
 satisfied. 
 
 Jumping to the other end of the chapter 
 we can see the counterpart points of that 
 half: "go out with joy;" "led forth with 
 peace ;" "the mountains shall break forth 
 into singing, and all the trees of the field 
 shall clap their hands ;" "instead of the 
 thorn, the fir tree;" "instead of the brier, 
 the myrtle tree." 
 
 It needs no argument to show that a 
 direct contrast is presented by the two ends 
 of the chapter. At one end is set forth 
 drudgery and degradation — at the other, 
 joy and peace, singing and clapping of 
 hands. In the first half are thirst, hunger, 
 hard work, no rest; in the second, joy, peace 
 and gladness. 
 
 Now, what are these conditions ? Who 
 is speaking? The speaker is God's prophet 
 and he is addressing God's own people. It 
 is not a warning by the prophet to an out- 
 side nation, and this is perhaps a startling 
 fact. Many people consider this text as a 
 Gospel message to the unsaved, and so it 
 is ; but it is a double-edged sword, and is 
 meant for saints as well as sinners. In any 
 case its first call is to the man who has gone 
 away from God. 
 
 It was probably uttered to the Jews while 
 captive in Babylon. They had inherited a 
 spiritual birthright from their fathers. They 
 had been brought up in an atmosphere of 
 knowledge of the law of God, but for their 
 own sins had been sold into captivity. 
 
 This is the Scripture picture of their 
 condition. They had gone away down and 
 had become tainted with the commercial 
 spirit of Babylon. The i)rophet says to 
 them. You are a thirsty people whose thirst 
 can't be quenched, and the money you are 
 making cannot buy you any water that will 
 (luench it. Your spirits long for the land of 
 rocks and mountains and trees and hills ; 
 in fact, your souls cry out after God. You 
 buy bread that does not strengthen you, 
 
you are always at work, and you are never 
 satisfied. 
 
 That is a perfectly correct picture of hu- 
 man life apart from God. A Godless life 
 is a dissatisfied life, is a thirsty life ; and you 
 may make all the money you like but it will 
 never buy the living water. A man without, 
 God is always thirsty and hungry, he spends 
 his money for what is not bread, and he has 
 no rest. 
 
 All the unrest of the world at this mo- 
 ment — political, social and individual — is 
 due to one fact and one only — that man has 
 got away from God. If you could bring 
 the whole race back to the heart of God 
 and to His love and to His law all the prob- 
 lems that now vex humanity would be im- 
 mediately solved. All woe, misery and 
 suffering would cease if men could be got 
 back to God. 
 
 The Godless man is never satisfied. He 
 never says "I have enough." He devotes 
 himself to attempting to feed immortality 
 with mortality ; that part of his nature which 
 belongs to eternity with the fleeting things 
 of time ; the subtle intangible soul with the 
 material dust and ashes of the world which 
 pass away even while he tries to hold them. 
 Thank God ^ for the feverish unrest that 
 possesses the* soul of the Godless man ! 
 
 The prophet tries to woo his people back 
 to God by showing them a very strong con- 
 trast. He says to them : You are in Baby- 
 lon there — on that flat, dry waste where 
 you have no mountains or hills. (The New 
 Englander or anyone else who has been 
 raised in a hilly or mountainous countrv 
 feels pretty lonesome if he finds himself out 
 on the prairies.) You belong to a land of 
 hills and trees and rivers, but you are down 
 there on the flat dead level of Babylon, 
 'true, you are in a great city, but what are 
 cities compared with mountains and trees 
 and hils ? You are making money, but that 
 Duys nothing but dust. 
 
 You see the spiritual value of the pas- 
 sage? The nation had lost its sense of God 
 everywhere ; it had lost communion with 
 God ; had lost everything, indeed, worth 
 having. He wants to say to them : "When 
 you get back from the Desert of Babylon to 
 the Garden of God, you will get back to 
 i\ature as well as to Nature's God." 
 
 I wonder how long it is since some of 
 you business men heard a mountain sing. 
 That is worth thinking about. How long 
 since you heard the trees clap their hands?' 
 You say, it's a long time. When I was a 
 lad I used to think when the breeze moved 
 in the trees that they clapped their hands. 
 
but that is many years ago ! I shoulc|^ be 
 very glad to push you back again if I could, 
 to niake you backslide into your boyhood 
 again. Did not the Master Himself say, 
 ■'Except ye be converted and become as 
 little children, ye shall in nowise enter into 
 the Kingdom of Goci r" 
 
 How is it you have not heard the moun- 
 tains sing? Because you have been money- 
 grubbing in this Babylon. You have been 
 trying to feed your immortal soul with the 
 bread that perishes. You can't do it. 
 
 When a man gets back to God he'll hear 
 the mountains sing ; and I am now on the 
 dead level of fact ; not speaking in a figure 
 at all. You have lost Nature because you 
 have lost God. 
 
 No man ever found God in Nature — not 
 the God that demands .worship. He may 
 find the God who demands his fear, or rev- 
 erence, but not the God who draws his heart 
 out. When you find God in Girist, in the 
 heart-beat of the Son of Man. then vou find 
 Him. 
 
 When you get back through the gate that 
 opens into everything worth having in life 
 you will get the flowers, and God in the 
 flowers; fhe mountain, and God on the 
 mountain ; the sea, and Him who said to the 
 mighty ocean, "Thus far shalt thou come, 
 and no farther !" 
 
 The spiritual value and the spiritual ver- 
 ity of this chapter is based on that thought. 
 Man finds his peace and joy when he finds 
 God. When he gets back to God he is at 
 the place of rest, the place of the living 
 bread and the living water which will satis- 
 fy all his needs. 
 
 Thirsty ones of Babylon, there, is living 
 water in the Garden of C^od ! Hungry ones 
 of Babylon, the Bread of Heaven- is in the 
 Garden of God ! You who have no satis- 
 faction in Babylon, your heart can find rest 
 in the Garden of God ! 
 
 You who have no music in Babylon can 
 liave all the music of the Garden of God ! 
 
 Where are you living? We are all living 
 either in Babylon or in the Garden of God. 
 
 Where are you living? Are you living in 
 the Desert or in the Garden of songs and of 
 living water? Is your heart at rest or is it 
 troubled? Are you thirsty or has your 
 thirst been quenched? Are you hungry or 
 have you been fed? Are y(->u in the Desert 
 or in the Garden? That is the question. 
 
 You say you are not quite sure. Then 
 you are certainly in the Desert ; for every 
 man in the Garden of God is dead positive 
 about it. The Church of God is crowded 
 u]) with people who are not sm-e. Some "be- 
 
lieve" they have crossed into the Garden; 
 but when a man is Hving- with God, do you 
 think he does not know it for a certainty ? 
 
 This congregation can be divided into 
 tliose who are in the Desert and those who 
 are in the Garden of God. I want to talk 
 to the people of the Desert. 
 
 If you spoke the truth you would say : I 
 am not at rest ; my sins, my passions, my 
 evil forces are against me. Do you want to 
 be right ? Are you asking : How can I get 
 out of the Desert? 
 
 Hear your answer : ''Let the wicked for- 
 sake his way, and the unrighteous man his 
 thoughts ; and let him return unto the Lord, 
 and He will have mercy upon him : and to 
 our God and He will abundantly pardon." 
 
 This text has two parts to it. The first 
 half shows the conditions that man has to 
 fulfil, and the second half gives the promises 
 that God will fulfil. 
 
 What is man's part? "Let the wicked 
 forsake his way and the unrighteous man 
 his thoughts : and let him return unto the 
 Lord." 
 
 That is your business. Nothing else. 
 
 What is God's half? "He will have 
 mercy upon him * * * our God * * * will 
 abundantly pardon." Get that clear. 
 
 Let us, for the moment, put the second 
 half on one side. Let us say, as a messen- 
 ger of Christ, that if at any moment any 
 person here will fulfil the conditions, God 
 will fulfil His promise without delay. God 
 never waits any longer than man keeps Him 
 waiting. God is waiting now to be merci- 
 ful. Let no man make the mistake of wait- 
 ing for God to forgive him. Obey the com- 
 mand, and quicker than any lightning flash 
 shall mercy come. When there is delay it 
 is with us and not with my Master. And 
 that leads me to the heart of the message. 
 
 What am I to do that God may fulfil His 
 promise? "Let the wicked forsake his way, 
 and the unrighteous man his thoughts : and 
 let him return unto the Lord." 
 
 How many things are you to do ? Three ? 
 Yes, and no. There are three things named, 
 but they are different statements of one 
 thing only. 
 
 What is that one thing? "Returning un- 
 to the Lord," the prophet said, but he led up 
 to it by showing the way. 
 
 1. Let the wicked forsake his way (put- 
 ting the emphasis on the last word) : 
 
 2. Forsake his thoughts : 
 
 3. Return to the Lord. 
 
 Now the prophet began with the external 
 facts of life. The Hebrew word for "way" 
 means a beaten track, a roadway. You 
 103 
 
must forsake the way you are traveling in, 
 and go another way. 
 
 How can the wicked forsake his way? 
 There is only one way to do it— -by forsak- 
 ing his thoughts. 
 
 I want to say a word about "thoughts." 
 You say, "I can't help my thoughts." You 
 are not told to forsake thoughts. The He- 
 brew word conveys the idea of weaving — 
 something that has a warp and woof — a 
 plan, a conception. If they are possessed of 
 their reason, men never do anything without 
 thinking first about achieving certain re- 
 sults : they make their outward experience 
 out of their inward ideas. 
 
 There is no one here that has not, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, deep down in his 
 thoughts some conception of life, and every 
 one of you is living his or her life on the 
 basis of that conception as to what life is. 
 
 One man's conception is that life gives 
 him the chance to enjoy himself; another, 
 that it is his opportunity to make a great 
 name for himself, and so on. 
 
 Now that "thought" that underlies all 
 your life is what you have to give up. What 
 you have to give up is the heart's false idea, 
 the internal blasphemy. You have to give 
 up your conception of life — your thought — 
 and take God's. Your way of living is not 
 His, and your thoughts not His thoughts. 
 
 H you read your Bible carefully you will 
 see the reason : "My thoughts are not your 
 thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, 
 saith the Lord." The period there in the 
 King James version has made people think 
 that a new subject is then begun, but the 
 fact is tliat the the reason immediately fol- 
 lows — "for as the heavens are higher than 
 the earth, so are My ways higher than yoiu" 
 ways, and My thoughls than your 
 thoughts." 
 
 The reason why you are to abandon vour 
 thoughts and take God's is because His wav 
 for you is as high as Heaven, and you have 
 been trying to satisfy your soul down on the 
 earth. God's thought for you includes the 
 eternals, while your thought for yourself is 
 bounded by the dust of to-day. His tliought 
 reaches up to eternal life for yon; your 
 thought is all on the earth and bounded by 
 I'arthly conditions. You are trying to de- 
 grade your soul to the level of the earth, 
 while lie wants to lift it to the level of 
 I leaven. 
 
 You say : "That is a stern Gospel?" 1 f it 
 is, it has the sternness of love, and don't 
 you know that there is no sternness like the 
 sternness of love ? 
 
 1 once saw a mother become a veritable 
 
fury on account of her love for her chiKi. 
 It was during my first charge. 
 
 There was a level railroad crossing in the 
 town. One day a sweet little child, about 
 seven years old, dimple-fisted and golden- 
 haired,^ strayed on to the track at this cross- 
 ing. An express train running to London 
 at" the rate of sixty miles an hour was ap- 
 proaching. The mother saw the child's 
 peril. She rushed to her rescue, seized hold 
 of her as she had never seized her before, 
 and almost hurled the child off the track. 
 The child was frightened at the mother's 
 rough grasp and screamed with terror ; but 
 it was love that drove the mother up to the 
 apparent cruelty in her determination to 
 save the child's life. 
 
 Clod's love is sincere. I bring you news 
 beaming with sincerity. You must quit 
 \our way, your thought, and get back to 
 God, even if you are crucified in the pro- 
 cess. Only that way will take you out of 
 the Desert and into the Garden. 
 
 Some one says, "Suppose I do that — that 
 T deliberately give up my thought for His 
 thought, my way for His way, and go back 
 to Him, how am I to know? What will 
 He do when I come?" 
 
 "He will have mercy ; He will abundantly 
 pardon." 
 
 "Is there anything else?" 
 
 "Nothing else." 
 
 "Do you mean to say that this can hap- 
 pen this moment? I didn't come in here in- 
 tending to go into any such a serious mat- 
 ter as this. I only turned in with the rest 
 of the people. If, sitting here, I turn back 
 to . Him, as you say, will He pardon me 
 without any period of probation?" 
 
 "He will." 
 
 "I can't believe it." 
 
 Why not? Are you saying in your heart 
 what a man once said to me? He was a 
 Yorkshire collier — a hard-headed, intelli- 
 gent specimen of humanity. As I spoke to 
 him in an after-meeting, he said. "I can't 
 believe that Gospel." 
 
 I asked, "Why not?" 
 
 It is too cheap! 
 
 I could not help feeling some admiratioti 
 for the man's thinking deep enough into the 
 subject to say that : still he was wrong. 
 
 "Do you say that if I return to the Lord 
 He will forgive all my sins and blot out- the 
 whole thing?" he asked. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Excuse me for saying it in my own way, 
 but that is too easy." 
 
 I said to him, "Have you been to work 
 to-day ?" 
 
 105 
 
A little startled, he said, "Yes, certaii^ly.*' 
 
 "Were vou down in the pit to-dav?" 
 
 "Yes." " 
 
 "How did you get home?"' 
 
 "I walked home; what do you mean?" 
 
 "How did you get out of the pit and on to 
 the road? You were down some five hun- 
 dred yards under ground; how did you get 
 up ?" 
 
 "As I always do; up the shaft in the 
 cage." 
 
 "How much did you pay?" 
 
 "Nothing" (with an astonished look). 
 
 "How did you trust yourself in the cage 
 to come up the shaft? It was so cheap." 
 
 "I did not pay anything, but it cost the 
 company a great deal of money to sink the 
 shaft and put the machinery in place for 
 the working of the cage." 
 
 "Did you ever think what it cost God to 
 write that verse in Jsaiah for you, 'He will 
 have mercy' ?" 
 
 It is not cheap. Do you know the cost 
 set forth in that verse — "for God so loved 
 the world that He gave His only begotten 
 Son that whosoever believeth on Him should 
 not perish, but have everlasting life?" I 
 can't fathom that — I cannot tell what it 
 means ; but that is what it cost God to give 
 vou mercy. You want to get into the Gar- 
 den, go through the wicket gate. Turn back 
 from your sins, your thought, your self- 
 centered life, and' put your hand on the 
 wicket. 
 
 "It is too easy?" That gate is hinged to 
 the Cross of Calvary, and you will never 
 know what it did cost till you have fath- 
 omed the depth of the agony of the Son of 
 His love. He ivill have mercy. In the cost 
 was included the forsaking of the Son of 
 His love, and in this way only -could He 
 l)c just, and the justifier of him who be- 
 lieveth. 
 
 Some one says: "I am not interested in 
 this thing at all." 
 
 I have no other message for you. I can 
 only pray for you. If you are content with 
 the dust and will live in the dust, I have no 
 other word for you. 
 
 But some one else says: "I am interest- 
 ed, but I cannot quit my way." Then you 
 can't get into the (iarden ni God. I have 
 no authority to tell you of any other way. 
 I*.ut- I say that God, knowing all your past 
 liistnry. all Ihe inwardness of your deprav- 
 ity and all the evil of your nature, loves you, 
 and if you will turn from your way He will 
 have mercy. 
 
 He is waiting now to "abundantly par- 
 d(-)n," but He cannot do it till you return to 
 1 06 
 
Him. He waits for the wicked to forsake 
 liis way, for the return of the sinner to him- 
 self; and then — and not till then — will He 
 save. If you love your sin and refuse to 
 o'ive it up, I have no warrant to offer you a 
 pardon. 
 
 Yet another says: "I am interested. I 
 am tired and sick of sin. I am in dead earn- 
 est about the matter, and am ready to leave 
 my way, but it is difficult for me to be- 
 lieve." 
 
 Don't tell me that it is difficult to believe. 
 Tell God. Say to Him, Oh, God, I can't 
 believe what Thou dost say ! I never met 
 a man yet who could do that. I always find 
 that when you can get a man away from 
 talking to man to talk to God, he cannot say 
 very much about unbelief. 
 
 Don't say that you will try to believe. 
 In Chicago, during some meetings, I had 
 a certain Bible that my mother gave me 
 when I was twenty-one. In dealing with a 
 young man he made a remark of that kind 
 to me. I said, "You see this Bible; my 
 mother gave "it to me on my twenty-first 
 birthday ; why don't you say you will try 
 and believe me when I say that?" 
 
 'T would not be so rude, sir. I do believe 
 you." 
 
 '.'Then would you be more rude to God 
 than you would be to me? If not, then go 
 and tell Him you believe Him." 
 
 If you are going to take Him at His word 
 now say to God, "I forsake my way, I aban- 
 don my thoughts, I turn to Thee !" 
 
 Then He does have mercy : He does 
 abundantly pardon, and you can sing : 
 
 Oh, happy day that fixed my choice 
 On Thee, my Saviour and my God : 
 
 Weil may this glowing heart rejoice 
 And tell its rapture all abroad. 
 
 'Tis done ! the great transaction's done ! 
 
 I am my Lord's and He is mine ! 
 He drew me and I followed on. 
 
 Charmed to confess the voice divine ! 
 
 That's faith ! 
 Let us pray ! 
 
4WWHH^ 
 
 TENT EVANGEL. 
 
 Superintendent, 
 Rev. S. HARTWELL PRATT. 
 
 Missionary, 
 WARREN O. BARNES. 
 
 Soloist, 
 Miss FLORENCE LOYNES. 
 
 Treasurer, 
 HARVEY D. BLAKESLEE, 
 
 Calvary Baptist Church. 
 
 Assistant Treasurer, 
 SILAS H. BERRY, 
 
 West End Presbyterian Church. 
 
 ADVISORY COMMITTEE. 
 
 WILLIAM A. TUCKER, WILLIAM M. BEEKMAN, 1r. 
 
 5th Av. Presbyttrian Church. .Madison Av. Kef. Church. 
 
 T. B. FREESE. B. SHERWOOD DUNN, 
 
 Hanson Place Baptist Church. Madison Av Baptist Church 
 
 WILSON LEE CANNON, Jr., EDWIN M. BLISS, 
 
 St. Paul M. E. Church. Broadway Tabernacle. 
 
 ALEX C. EADIE, 
 
 Central Presbyterian Church. 
 
 4H)?4WW^ 
 
EVANGELIvST. 
 
 IRcv. $. Ibartwell pratt, 
 
 Superintendent of Tent Evangel. 
 
 MR. PRATT inaugurated Tent work in the 
 City of Taiinton, Mass., June 3d, 1879, 
 afterwards holding meetings at Holyoke 
 and Westfield. The next year he held Tent ser- 
 vices in Westerly, R. I.., and Saratoga Springs. 
 In 1881 the Tent was pitched in New York City, 
 on Second Avenue, corner of Twentieth Street' 
 and for three seasons services were held — 1881, 
 1882 and 18S3 — and at the corner of Broadway 
 and Fifty-fifth Street in 1884. In 1885 a long 
 series of meetings was held in Pittsfield, Mass. 
 Mr. D. L. Moody became so interested in the 
 reports of the Tent work that at the close of the 
 Pittsfield meetings he invited Mr. Pratt to come 
 with his Tent to Northfield during the August 
 Conference. The Tent was pitched -on the Semi- 
 nary grounds, and was used as an " Object 
 Lesson." Addresses were made from the plat- 
 form, and Mr. Moody inquired very carefully 
 into the methods and results of the work. The 
 next year Mr. Moody opened a number of Tents 
 in Chicago. During ths years 1899 and 1900 the 
 Tent was pitched at Broadway and Fifty-sixth 
 Street. The series of meetings each season con- 
 tinuing sixteen weeks. This year, 1902, the Tent 
 was opened May 25th, and meetings were held 
 for twenty weeks. 
 
 " Mr. Pratt's Tent Meetings in New York 
 inspired Mr. John Converse of PKiladel- 
 phia to inaugurate Tent meetings in that 
 
 city."— Rev. J. F. Carson, 1). I)., ruKtor of 
 the Central Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, 
 N. Y. 
 
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