SEYMOUR DURST 
 
 "t ' 'Fort nteiia/ ^rn^erdam^ oj> m Manhatarus 
 
 FORT NEW AMSTERDAM. 
 
 (NEW YORK. ) , 1651. 
 
 When you leave, please leave this book 
 
 Because it has been said 
 "Ever'thinQ comes t' him who waits 
 
 Except a loaned book." 
 
 Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library 
 Gift of Seymour B. Durst Old York Library 
 
THE 
 
 MASQUE TORN OFF. 
 
 BY 
 
 T. DeWITT TALMAGE, D. D., 
 
 Authob "Ckixbs Swept Up;" "Around thk Tea Table;" "Spobts That KsuLf 
 
 Etc., Etc 
 
 ILLUSTRATED.. 
 
 Chicago: 
 
 J. FAIRBANKS & CO. 
 
 St. John, N. B.: J. & A. McMillan. London, Eno.: R D. Dickenson. 
 
 New York: Evans & Co. Detroit, Mich.: R D. S. Tyler & Co. 
 St. Louis: N. D. Thompson & Co. Cincinnati: Forshek & McMakin. 
 
 San Francisco, Ual»: A. L Banc roft & Co. 
 
 ;88o. 
 
copyright: 
 J. FAIRBANKS & CO. 
 1878. 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 The following discourses were stenographically reported, 
 and by me revised for publication, expressiy for Messrs. J. 
 Fairbanks ft Co.. Chicago, 111., who are the only authorized 
 publishers. T. DeWitt Tai.mjlgel 
 
 Brooklyn, Xov. 10, 1373, 
 
PUBLISHER'S PREFACE- 
 
 In issuing the " Masque Torn Off " from our press we do it in 
 ^e profound conviction that the Christian community and the great 
 American Public in general will appreciate these soul-stirring dis- 
 courses on the temptations and vices of city life, by Dr. Talmage as 
 -seen by him in his midnight explorations in the haunts of vice of 
 New York City, with his exposure of the traps and pitfalls tliat tempt 
 our youth from the path of rectitude. They are written in his strongest 
 ■descriptive powers, sparkling with graceful images and illustrative 
 anecdotes; terrible in their earnestness; uncompromising in denun- 
 ciation of. sin and wickedness among the high or low, sparing neither 
 rich nor poor; and are Dr. Talmage's best efforts in his earnest, 
 aggressive warfare against the foes of society, every page burning with 
 ■eloquent entreaty for a better, purer life, and are of intense, soul- 
 ■absorbing interest to all who look for the advancement and higher 
 •development of the human race. This work is the only reviss-d 
 akd authorized publication of Dr. Talmage's sermons. 
 
 THE PUBLISHERS 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN IIAUNTS OP VICE. 
 
 Ezekiel Commanded to Explore Sin in His Day — Divine Commis- 
 sion to Explore the Iniquities of Our Cities— "Wild Oats"— Criti- 
 cism of Papers — Three Million Souls for an Audience — Houses oi 
 Dissipation — Moral Corpses— Cheapness of Furnishing — Music and 
 Pictures— The Inhabitants Repulsive— Surrounded by Music — 
 Young Men From the Country — Triumph of Sin — Blood of a 
 Mother's Heart— Cannot Hide Bad Habits— Fratricide and Matri- 
 cide — The Way of the Transgressor is Hard — Destroyed without 
 Remedy 29 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 LEPERS OP nrGII LIPE. 
 
 " Policeman, What of the Night?"— Desperadoes in Jerusalem — 
 King Solomon's Household— Night of Three Watches — Two Elders 
 of the Church — Muscular Christianity — Pulpit Physical Giants — 
 Spiritual Athletes — Thomas Chalmers — Deepest Moral Slush of 
 his Time — Hue and Cry Raised — " Ye Hypocrites" — Men of Wealth 
 Support Haunts of Sin — Gospel for the Lepers of Society — A Mo- 
 loch Temple— Heads of Families — Public Officers — Obstacles in the 
 Way — Dens of Darkness — The Men who have Forsaken their 
 Homes. 43 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE GATES OF II ELL. 
 
 Gambling Houses — Costly Magnificence Untrue — Merciless Place 
 — Twelve Gates — Impure Literature — Novelette Literature — Wide 
 Gate — The Dissolute Dance— First Step to Eternal Ruin — Indiscreet 
 Apparel — Fashion Plates of the Time of Louis XVI. — Henry VIII. — 
 Modest Apparel — Fashion Plate of Tyre — Alcoholic Beverage — 
 License Question— Gates Swing In— Is there Escape '—Practical Use 
 
viii 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 of these Sermons — Holy Imbecility — Christmas Night at the Farm 
 House— Poor Wanderer— "Oh ! Mother." 57 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 WHOM I SAW AND WHOM I MTSSED, 
 
 Genesis xiv: 10 — American Cities — Devil Advertising Free Gratis 
 — Purlieus of Death — Hard Working Classes Missed — Grand Trunk 
 Railroad — Fortunate Young Men — Vortex of Death — Midnight on 
 Earth— Sense of Piety— "Kept" Maelstrom of Iniquity — Aching 
 Hearts — Fragments of Broken Homes— Miserable Copy of European 
 Dissipations— Toadyism — Revolution Needed — Public Opinion — 
 Police Complicity — Edward Livingstone — The Printing Press — 
 John Bunyan, Richard Baxter, Five Oceans of Mercy — " Home, 
 Sweet Home." 71 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 A Mighty City — Midnoon — Midnight — Clerical Reformers— Their 
 Brave Charge — Mortal Fear — Tenement Houses — Ring the Bell — 
 Flash the Lantern — Night's Lodging — Silken Purse — Hear! Hear!! 
 — The Homeless — The Bootblack — The Newsboy — "You Miserable 
 Rat" — New Recruits — New Regiments — The Shipwrecked — The 
 Two Magic Lanterns — The Home — A Change of Scene — Another! 
 Still Another ! ! — Flowers — Greenwood — Poverty — Coroner — Potters* 
 
 Field — Close the Two Lanterns 83 
 
 / 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 Enemy of all Good— "Give me 500,000 Souls"— But a Short Time 
 — Elevated Railroads — Crowded to Death — Underground Railroads — 
 Castle Garden — Jenny Lind — Trinity — New York Dailies — Mighti- 
 ness of the Press — " Nations Born in a Day" — Exhaustion of Health 
 — Newsboys Lodging House — Boys — Extra Romp and Hilarity — 
 Over the Doorway — Savings Banks — Western Fever Among Them — 
 Howard Mission — Good and Bad Amusements — Temptation — "Come 
 with Me" — Stinging Remorse — To Hesitate is to Die 98 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 The Attack — Night of Theft and Assassination — "Who is my 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 is 
 
 Neighbor?" — Responsibility— Rogues' Gallery— Loaded Pistols — 
 Show me Crime — Respect Crime Pays the Law — " A Den of Thieves" 
 — Plans Matured — Liquors Poisoned Four Times— Their Modus 
 Operandi — $75,000 Check — Division of Spoils — Blackmailers — 
 Never Fear Them — A Principle Laid Down — Professionals — Dens 
 that Excite only Pity— "You Must Dress Better"— Crime the Off- 
 spring of Political Dishonesties — Immense Cost of Crime — Grace — 
 No Admittance— Two Incidents — A Second Deluge— Mercy 112 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 CLUB-HOUSES — LEGITIMATE AND ILLEGITIMATE. 
 
 Two Armies— Sword Fencing— Unlucky Clip— An Honest His- 
 tory of Clubs— Leading Clubs of Europe — Of America— Their 
 Wealth — Membership — Furnishing — Fascination of Club Houses — 
 Another Style— Flushed Face—" Chips " Test their Influences— Gen- 
 erous at the Club, Stingy at the Home Circle — Thousands of 
 Homes Clubbed to Death — Epitaph— Effect on Your Occupation — 
 A Third Test — A Vital Question— The Little Child's Influence— The 
 Three Strands— Pull for Your Life 128 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 
 The Students of Gilgal— Gathering Herbs— Death in the Pot- 
 Iniquity must be Roughly Handled — Its Hiding Place — A Good 
 Home is Deathless in its Influence— Unhappy Homes are Blood 
 Relatives to Crime and Rascality — Occasional Exceptions — An In- 
 dolent Life — The City Van — Four Ways of Getting Money — An In- 
 cident — How to Depreciate Real Estate — Warning from Gladstone — 
 The Marriage Day — The Scene Changes — Leaving the Farm House 
 —Anxiety of Parents— The End— Put Back Now 1 140 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE CART ROPE INIQUITY. 
 
 Construction of a Rope — No one can Stand Aloof— Honest Gam- 
 bling Establishments— An Introduction to a First Class One— Second 
 Class— The " Roper In "—Policy— "Saddle"— "Gig"— "Horse"— Ex- 
 change — Desire for Gain — Incidents — Close Proximity to Wall Street 
 — Gift Enterprises — Their Evil Tendency — Be Honest or Die — The 
 Prodigal— The Game Ended. . 151 
 
X 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 
 
 Solid Satisfaction— An Error Corrected— Albert Barnes — Plant 
 one Grain of Corn— Mere Social Position — Do not Covet it — A 
 Worldly Marriage — Mere Personal Attractions — Abigail — Make 
 Yourself Attractive — Not Ashamed of Age — Culture your Heart — 
 At the Hospital— "Seven Days"— "Hold My Hand"— Flatteries of 
 Men — An Angel — Discipleship of Fashion — Fashion Plates — Bibli- 
 cal Fashion— A Beautiful Attire— A Bright World 160 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE BINS OP SUMMER "WATERING PLACES. 
 
 An Ancient Watering Place— Tradition Concerning it— Modern 
 Watering Places — A Picture— The First Temptation— Sacred Parade 
 — Crack Sermons — Quartette — Air Bewitched — Horse Racing — De- 
 ceptive Titles — Saratoga— Bets Run High — Greenhorns Think all is 
 Fair— Sacrifice of Physical Strength — Fashionable Idiots — "Do 
 Thyself no Harm" — Hasty Alliances — Domestic Infelicities — Twenty 
 Blanks to One Prize — Load of Life— The Fop — Baneful Literature 
 — Its Popularity at Watering Places — The Intoxicating Beverage.. 170 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE TIDES OP MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 Intense Excitement — The Stranger's Reception — A Wild Laugh 
 — Temptations to Commercial Fraud — "This Rivalry is Awful" — 
 Decide for Yourself — One with God is a Majority — Political Life 
 — Allurements to an Impure Life — Cormorants of Darkness — Six 
 Rainbows— A Thousand of Them— "Tick, Tick 1"— An Enraptured 
 Vision 183 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 Ancient Tyre — A Majestic City— Its Magnificence— Its Present Po- 
 sition— Character of a City— Cities Hold the World's Sceptre — If an 
 Unprincipled Mayoralty or Common Council, there will be Unlim- 
 ited License for all kinds of Trickery and Sin— Questions that In- 
 terest the Merchant— Educational Interests— Some Cities these In- 
 terests are Settled in the Low Caucus— Character of Officials Affects 
 the Domestic Circle— Even Religious Interests Affected— John Mor- 
 rissey!— Pray for your Mayor— And all in Authority— Perils and 
 Temptations of the Police— An Affecting Incident 193 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 xi 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 SAFEGUARDS FOR YOUNG MEN. 
 
 David and Absalom — A Bad Boy— A Broken-hearted Father — " la- 
 the Young Man Safe?" — Same Question must-be Asked To-day— Not 
 as Other Men are — Win. M. Tweed — His Strong Nature — Success — 
 Failure — Who would Live such a Life? — Love of Home — Can never 
 Forget it — A Second Home — Nothing Coarse or Gross at Home — 
 Industrious Habits — The First Horticulturist — Work or Die — A 
 ETigh Ideal of Life — Aim High — Respect for the Sabbath — An Inci- 
 dent—The Greatest Safeguard— The Great Want — "I am the Young 
 Man"— The Turning Point 207 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE VOICES OF TOE STREET. 
 
 Voices of Nature — This Life is a Scene of Toil and Struggle — In- 
 dustry — All Classes and Conditions of Society Must Commingle — 
 Democratic Principle of the Gospel — Hard to Keep the Heart Right 
 —The Man of War— The Victorious Veteran of Thirty Years' Con 
 flict — Life is Full of Pretension and Sham — How few People are 
 Natural — A Great Field for Charity— Poor Wanderers — Strong Faith 
 of Childhood— All the People Looking Forward— No Census — 
 Twelve Gates 221 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 HEROES IN COMMON LIFE. 
 
 Great Military Chieftains — Unrolling a Scroll of Heroes — Heroes 
 of the Sick Room — Heroes of Toil — Sword vs. Needle — Great Battle 
 Fields — Domestic Injustice — No Bitter Words— Peabody — Grinnell 
 —Missionaries at the West — Sacrificing Parents — Melrose Abbey — 
 fhe Atkins Family — "Fire!" — Who are those Paupers? — Corona- 
 tion Day — Do not Envy Anyone — The Great Captain's Cheer 230 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN. 
 
 A Dead City — Midnight Witchery — Melrose Abbey — Alhambra — 
 Jerusalem in Ruins — The Midnight Ride — Midnight Exploration — 
 Jerusalem Rebuilt — Plato— Demosthenes — Church Affection — The 
 Church — Sacrifices for It— Secret of Backsliding — Building without 
 •Secure Foundation — Old-fashioned Way — Does it Hurt?— New-fash- 
 ioned Way — Wants a Ride — Reason People are Angered — M You're 
 
xii 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 a Pauper "—Triumphant Sadness— Palace of Shushan— Its Immen. 
 sity — Home-sickness — The Blacksmith — A Bereaved Mother — A 
 Parlor in Philadelphia— Never Give Up— Our Refuge..... 241 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 Wild Pigeons— Call Bird— Two Classes of Temptation— Superfi- 
 cial and Subterraneous — Generous Young Men — Stingy and Mean 
 Young Men — The Skeptic — Jonah — Progress, Sir! — Light of Nature 
 — Burke — Raphael — Mozart — Milton — Hold on to It — Dishonest Em- 
 ployers — Terrible and Crushing Fact — Eight Lies — Drug Clerk — 
 The Moral— The Dissolute— Self Righteous— Trumpet of Warning 
 —The World's Bridal 253 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 STRANGERS WARNED. 
 
 Solomon Recognizing Strangers — Great Immigration — Hotels of 
 this Country — " I must Join that Procession " — To the Academy — 
 The Picture Gallery — The Young Men's Christian Association 
 Rooms — Up Broadway — A Gettysburg — Underground Life — Country 
 Oustomer and City Merchant — "Drummers" — Mt. Washington — 
 Seven Apples — "Slicing off Pieces" — French Sabbaths — Only an 
 Explorer — Sharp Business Man — Strangers Welcome — Edward 
 Stanley 265 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 Breaking in upon God's Heritage— Uprooting and Devouring 
 -Classes of Society — Public Criminals — Their Immense Cost — Con- 
 flagration of Morals—" Stop Thief!" — Society has a Grudge against 
 Criminals — Punishment Hardens Them — More Potential Influences 
 Needed — Raymond Street Jail — Black Hole of Calcutta — Old and 
 Hardened O Senders— Young Men who have Committed their First 
 Crime — Sir William Blackstone — Unworthy Officials— " Whisky 
 Ring "— 44 Tammany Ring " — " Erie Ring" — Fences— Skinners— •Con- 
 fidence Men— The Idle Classes— Useless and Dangerous— Oppressed 
 p oor — Army of Honest Poor — Children's Aid Society — Dorcas So- 
 ciety 275 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 
 
 A God of Some Kind — Aaron and the Golden Calf— Moses' Re- 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 xiii 
 
 turn— When a Man gets Mad he is apt to Break all the Ten Com- 
 mandments — Modern Idolatry — AVall Street — Bank of England — 
 Michigan Wheat — Maryland Peaches — Immensity of its Temple — 
 Every God its Temple and its Sacrifice — Its Victims — Solomon's 
 Sacrifice — Clinking Gold and Silver — Destruction of the Golden Calf 
 Certain — The Golden Calf* Made of Borrowed Gold — Borrowing, the 
 Ruin of the American People — Nothing Heavier than the Spirit, 
 Crosses the Jordan— Fool ! Fool! Fool! Change your Temples.... 291 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 DRY GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 First Wardrobe — The Prodigal — Goddess of Fashion — Men as Idol- 
 aters — Tobacco — Animated Checkerboards — Benedict Arnold — Sell 
 his Country to Clothe his Wife — Expensive Establishments the Busi- 
 ness Man's Ruin — Extravagance of Clerks — Tragedy of Human 
 Clothes — Fashion the Foe of all Christian Alms Giving — Ninety 
 Cents on the Dollar— Theft of Ten Per Cent.—" What a Love of a 
 Bonnet!"— "What a Perfect Fright!"— Fashion Belittles the Intel- 
 lect — French Roof on the M House of Many Mansions " — Countess 
 of Huntington — Beau Brummel — Vashti 802 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 THE RESERVOIRS SALTED. 
 
 Good Water — Jericho — Municipal Corruption — Cleansing Our 
 Cities — Work for Broom and Shovel — Character Illustrated by the 
 Purity or Filth of Surroundings — First thing a Converted Man Does 
 — Power of a Christian Printing Press — Publisher and Bookseller — 
 Our Common Schools — Ignorance the Mother of Hydra-headed Crime 
 — Ignorance in New England — Pennsylvania — New York — The 
 United States — Reformatory Societies Important Elements — Antietam 
 — The Greatest Remedial Influence — Homeless Children — " The 
 Perlice, Sir;" Inebriates' Children — Neglected Children — Their Faces 
 —Five Points — The Merchant — "Lend Me Five Dollars" — Mary 
 Lost— Mary Found 313 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 
 
 The Ornithology of the Bible— Elijah— The Ravens— The Great 
 Conflict To-day — The Great Question with a Vast Majority of People 
 — A Morning Hunt for Ravens — Supply Immeasurable — Be Content 
 
 \ 
 
xiv 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 — Recourses Infinite — Rochelle — Drought in Connecticut — Biography 
 of a Life — Relief by an Unexpected Conveyance. — White Providence 
 — Black Providence — White Angel — One of Three Scourges — Dark 
 Shadow on the Nursery — Mrs. Jane Pithey — The Two Lives 325 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
 
 The Insect World — The Persians — Hittites — Great Behemoths of 
 Trouble — The Insectile Annoyances of Life — "Only a Little Nervous" 
 — The Wheel Must Keep Going Round — Friends Always Saying 
 Disagreeable Things — Harvest Field of Discouragement — Local 
 Physical Trouble — Domestic Irritation — Business Annoyances — The 
 Family of Wasps — Nest of "Yellow Jackets " — The Gymnasium — 
 Homoeopathic Doses — Knock-down Doses — Hamelin — Painting of 
 Cotopaxi— Fools and Sluggards— Polycarp — "All Things Work To- 
 gether for Good." 338 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 No Monopoly— Apple-Orchard— Severe Guards— Other Sheep— 
 MacDonald— Non-Church Goers — Safe Side— Complete Armor — 
 Wreck of the Atlantic — Launch the Boat! — Saved! — Fishing — Posi- 
 tive Rejectors — An Insufficient Portion— An Experiment — Try It — 
 Newton — Boyle — Doubting — Hope — Peace — Love — Evil Habit — 
 Good Templars— Rebuild your Home— No Hope— Early Days — The 
 Bars Down 348 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 THE ACIDS OP TniS LIFE. 
 
 The Brigands of Jerusalem — Years of Maltreatment— Thirst — 
 Vinegar — Wine — Life in Sunshine — Acid in Lives of Prominent 
 People — No Sympathy Expected — Betrayal of Friends — Sourness of 
 Pain — The Ashes- Compressed in One Sour Cup — Sourness of Pov- 
 erty — Wilkie — Glorious Company — Privation — Sourness of Bereave- 
 ment—Charmed Circle Broken — Jesus Wept— Vacant Chair — Sour- 
 ness of the Death Hour — Curiosity — Clean the Lens— Vessel without 
 Water—" Dip Your Buckets"— Fighting their Own Battles— Nana 
 — Sahib— Gem of Great Value — Break the Infatuation 361 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 XV 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 TITE DIVISION OP SPOILS. 
 
 Allegory — Metaphor — The Hunter's Return— The FascinatinirLife 
 of a Hunter — Hunting in England — India — Western Plains— Hunt- 
 ing the World — Edgar A. Poe— World's Plaudits— A Change— Finan- 
 cial Success — Dollar Hunt — Northern Pacific Bonds — Ralston — 
 Higher Treasures— Heartfelt Satisfaction — Glorious Divisions of 
 SpoilsAFolly of Worldly Hunt— A Bare Hand— Census of Old Peo- 
 ple — No Division of Spoils — Death in the Chase — Sudden and Radi- 
 cal Change— Instantaneous— One Touch of Electricity — What is 
 Religion? 373 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 TIIE BLACKSMITH'S CAPTIVITY. 
 
 A Scalding Subjugation — Mines of Iron and Brass — Only Two 
 Swords Left — Weaponless People — Reduced to a File — Keep Weap- 
 ons out of the hands of Your Enemies — The World has Gobbled 
 up Everything — Infidelity — Capture Science — Capture Scholarship — 
 Capture Philosophy — A Learned Clergy — Recapture your Weapons. 
 — Resources Hidden and Undeveloped — '-Forward, the Whole Line!" 
 — Take Advantage of the World's Sharpening Instruments — Get 
 She Best Grindstones-Small Allowance Iniquity Puts a Man — Bitter 
 O-'-p— Dark Night — Deep Pangs— Terrible End — Warning Bell on 
 Inchcape Rock — A Sad Loss — Going to Vindicate the Truth — No 
 Newspaper Assaults for Six Weeks — Go Ahead — Clap your Hands. 
 383 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI.' 
 
 THE DIET OF ASHES. 
 
 A Great Feast — Guests sit down Amid Outbursts of Hilarity — 
 Ashes — Testimony of those who have been Magnificently Success- 
 ful — Testimony of Kings — Commercial Adepts— Come up, ye Mil- 
 lionaires — Sinful Pleasurists — A Troop of Infidels— Placid Skeptic 
 — Lord Chesterfield — What now of all your Sarcasm — Hungry — 
 Where Found— The Antwerp Merchant and Charles V. — Mortgage 
 —Only One Word— Take Bread— Great Fire— Echo and Re-Echo— 
 Departure Sudden — The Spaniard and the Moor — The Swiftest 
 Horse— Escape— Fly 1 Fly ! 394 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 KEEPING BAD COMPANY. 
 
 No One goes to Ruin Alone — A Convicted Criminal's Words — 
 Bad Company — Olden Times — Places of Business — A Challenge — 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 A Reward Offered — New Clerk — Show ITim the City — Forgotten 
 his Pocket-book — Familiarity — Broken In — Beware — Glance of Pu- 
 rity—Shun the Skeptic— "Explain That"— Take them All— He has 
 Gone! — Shun Idlers — His Touch is Death — "I Want You, Sir" — 
 Self-Improvements — The Harvest Gathered in Old Age — Avoid Per- 
 petual Pleasure-Seekers — Life Occupation to Sport — A Beauty in 
 Sports — Declaration of Bruuimell — Review— Always be Polite — A 
 Beautiful Daughter 403 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 THE PRINCESS IN DISGUISE. 
 
 A Sick Child — Skill Exhausted — Princess in Disguise — An Em- 
 peror in Disguise — Could not be Deceived — Wickedness Disposed to 
 Involve Others — Iniquity a Great Coward — Aaron Burr — Blenncr- 
 hassett — Benedict Arnold Secures Money and Position — Major Andre, 
 Brave and Brilliant, Sutlers Death — Only Satellites of some Adroit 
 Villain — Ignominious Fiaud a Juggler — Stand oil" from Chicaners 
 — Royalty Sometimes Passes in Disguise— Kings Without a Crown 
 — Poverty — A Pauper — A Grander Disguise — Sympathy and Help 
 — The Amazed Doctors — A Pilgrim— People put Masks On — The 
 Lord Tears them Ofi— Mask Torn Oil— The Tragedy of the Pill- 
 Box — Indian Mixtures — Nostrums that are Choking the Cemetery — 
 Exact, Minute and Precise 413 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 HELP FOR THOSE OFF TRACK. 
 
 Help for the Multitude— "When Shall I Awake?"— Elegant Lit- 
 erature — Complete Maps Showing all the Rocks, Shoals and Quick, 
 sands — A Field Comparatively Untouched— Force of Moral Gravi- 
 tation — Easier to go Down than to go Up — Power of Evil Habit — 
 Hard to Row Again-t the Current— Seventeen Years Ago — Tobacco 
 —Return to Old Habits— A Hard Task Master — A Brilliant Scene- 
 One Round More — Two Greetings— Tip-end of your Fingers — 
 Hearty, Honest, Hand-shake— Thrill of Pleasure— " Isn't it Shock- 
 ing"? — A Special Train — A Hindrance — How Hannibal may Scale 
 the Alps— Help! Help!— Hospital at Antietam— No Questions 
 Asked— A Letter — Seek Advice— Sparta has Conquered — A Holiday 
 Gift — Proudest Moment of Life 423 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 TTIE REPROACHFUL OUTCRY. 
 
 Rubicund Lad— Sympathetic for Physical Disaster— A Sister's 
 Letter — The Postscript— The Card— Every Man for Himself— Not a 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 xvij 
 
 Worldling— Not One Word in Ten Years— Insolvency— One Hun- 
 dred Cents or Your Lite — Protest after Protest— Every One Against 
 You — Another Occasion — Great Awakening — Lile Boat in the Surf 
 — A Startling Revelation Made— Competition of Earth, Hell and 
 Heaven— Signal of Distress — Whose Fault?— Fire! Fire! — Entire 
 business of Some Men — A Journey for You — After Seven Years — 
 Patient Waiting— The Good Old Way— Just Arrived— The Sailor— 
 "Settled— A Sad Catastrophe 435 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 THE VACANT CHAIR. 
 
 A State Dinner— A Son-in-law and a Celebrated Warrior — A Vr 
 cant Chair at a King's Banquet — A Living Personality — Fond Rr ^. 
 ollections — Have they any Lessons? — A Father's Chair — Probabil- 
 ity — No Admiration for New Fangled Notions — A Father's 
 Reprimand — In the Way — A Sacred Place — A Throne of Influence 
 —A Mother's Chair — A Safe Deposit Bank— One Scolded, the Other 
 Cried- A Queenly Power Yet— Another Victory — The Invalid's 
 Chair — A Story of Endurance — Payson — Baxter— Hall — The Most 
 Conspicuous Thing — A High Chair — Will Pay its Way — Do not 
 Like Children— A Thrilling Western Incident — Give Him a Chance 
 —A Pastor's Chair— What will it Testify?— No Vacant Chairs.. 446 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 OUR AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 Courage to Look Upon the Sins o!' Cities— Laughed for Six Weeks 
 — American Clergy Covering the S:\s Probed — A Good, Stout Dose 
 — No Apology or Closing up — Mission of the Clergy— As the Cities 
 go, so goes the Land — Every City a Mission — Every City has Certain 
 Characteristics — Planting the Capital — You have an Interest — City 
 of Palaces— Old 1 Masters— Go See the Work of New Masters- 
 Westward Ho! — Historical with Footsteps — Its Morals— Men Better 
 at Home — Henry Wilson — Clerks of Departments— Members of 
 Congress — A Vast Improvement — Never a Higher Personal Morality 
 — Man of Morals — A Law Breaker— Statue Laws — We Need no Re- 
 ligious Test — Lookout Mountain — Resumption — Incense of Praise 
 — Transitory and Unsatisfactory — Call the Roll — Will Never Forgive 
 —The Last Chord 456 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
 
 HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 Population of the World— Double Anniversary —Autobiograph- 
 ical—Old Fashioned Family— Twelve of Us— Legal Study— Chief 
 
xviii 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Ambition— The Oldest Religion— War of Twenty-five Years- N© 
 Retreat — Rest at Greenwood — "Excoriate Talmage" — "That's Tal- 
 mage" — Mounteback — Kind Wishes — Two Ways to Answer — Same 
 Spirit — Ministers Fighting — Build Up, Not Pull Down — Laymen — 
 Our Great Congregation— Good, no Bad Advice Given — Metaphys- 
 ical — Logical — Anecdotal — Illustrative — Go Ahead — Jealousies — 
 Misrepresentation — Rowland Hill Incident — "Morning Star" — 
 "Shoo Fly"— Working Classes— Did you Really Say that V— Theatri- 
 cal Abuse — In War-Paint— Outrage— Things Spicy — Secular Press 
 —Enemies — 8,000,000 Curiosity — Falsehoods — Sailing — Wife 
 Drowned— Saved her Sister — Sixty Days — Invoking the Law to Help 
 me — Ignorant of Topography of Philadelphia — Carried Over Fair- 
 mount Dam — Disappeared — Desolated Home — Reward of $100— 
 Full Force of the Law— Sympathy— Ten Years of Rapture— "Help" 
 —Comfort— 25,000 Men in Combat— Who Shall H*ve It? 463 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 SENSATION AGAINST STAGNATION. 
 
 Upset Everything— $9,000 Bonfire— Temple of Diana— Stock of 
 Trinkets Ruined — Disturber of his Age— Sensation after Sensation 
 — Definition — Stupidity — A Compliment — Wide Awake at Political 
 Meetings — Vigilant where Financial Interests are Discussed — Som- 
 nolent at Church Services — Court Rooms Agitated — Radically 
 Wrong — Old-Fashion ed Sleep Killers— Seven Elders and Seven 
 Sleepers — No use of Hiding the Fact— Scotch Pastor and Deacon — 
 Missed his Profession — A Banquet — Make a Big Stir— Will go 
 Where there is Help — Everything Beautiful — A Refreshing Slum- 
 ber—The Great Danger is Stagnation — The Best Clerical Critic — 
 A Heavily Armed Chaplain— Clear as a Scotch or San Francisco Fog 
 —Stir up the Fire— Who is the First to Howl— Will Visit the 
 Theater Before again Preaching Against It — Will Seize upon the 
 most Startling Things that can be Found — Attorney for the Plain- 
 tiff—Not Left in the Lurch— Not a Part of the way only— That is 
 the Track 514 
 
T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D. D. 
 
 Thomas DeWitt Talmage was born in 1S32, in Bound 
 Brook, Somerset County, !N". J. His father was a farmer 
 of much vigor and consistency of character; his mother 
 a woman of noted energy, hopefulness and equanimity. 
 Both parents were in marked respects characteristic. 
 Differences of disposition and methods blended in them 
 into a harmonious, consecrated, benignant and cheery 
 life. The father won all the confidence and the best of 
 the honors a hard-sensed truly American community had 
 to yield. The mother was that counseling and quietly 
 provideno force which made her a helpmeet indeed and 
 her home the center and sanctuary of the sweetest influ- 
 ences that have fallen on the path of a large number of 
 ■children, of whom four sons are all ministers of the 
 Word. From a period ante-dating the Revolution, the 
 ancestors of our subject were members of the Reformed 
 Dutch Church, in which Dr Talmage's father was the 
 leading lay office bearer through a life extended beyond 
 fourscore years. The youngest of the children, it seemed 
 doubtful at first whether De Witt would follow his broth- 
 ers into the ministry. His earliest preference was the 
 
 law, the studies of which he pursued for a year after his 
 21 
 
22 BIOGRAPHICAL. 
 
 graduation with honors from the University of the City 
 of New York. The faculties which would have made 
 him the greatest jury advocate of the age were, however,, 
 preserved for and directed toward the pulpit by an un- 
 rest which took the very sound of a cry within him for 
 months, 44 Woe is me if I preach not the gospel." When 
 he submitted to it the always ardent but never urged 
 hopes of his honored parents were realized. lie entered 
 the ministry from the New Brunswick Seminary of The- 
 ology. As his destiny and powers came to manifestation 
 in Brooklyn, his pastoral life prior to that was but a 
 preparation for it. It can, therefore, be indicated as an? 
 incidental stage in his career rather than treated at length 
 as a principal part of it. Ilis first settlement was at 
 Belleville, on the beautiful Passaic, in New Jersey. For 
 three years there he underwent an excellent practical 
 education in the conventional ministry. Ilis congrega- 
 tion was about the most cultivated and exacting in the 
 rural regions of the sterling little state. ■ Historically, it 
 was known to be about the oldest society of Protestant- 
 ism in .New Jersey. Its records, as preserved, run back 
 over 200 years, but it is known to have had a strong life 
 the better part of a century more. Its structure is re- 
 garded as one of the finest of any country congregation 
 in the United States. No wonder: it stands within rifle- 
 shot of the quarry from which Old Trinity in New 
 York was hewn. The value (and the limits) of stereo- 
 typed preaching and what he did not know came as an 
 instructive and disillusionizing force to the theological 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL. 
 
 23 
 
 tyro at Belleville. There also came and remained strong 
 friendships, inspiring revivals, and sacred counsels. 
 
 By natural promotion three years at Syracuse suc- 
 ceeded three at Belleville. That cultivated, critical city 
 furnished Mr. Talmage the value of an audience in which 
 professional men were predominant in influence. His 
 preaching there grew tonic and free. As Mr. Pitt ad- 
 vised a young friend, he "risked himself." The church 
 grew from lew to many — from a state of coma to ath- 
 letic life. The preacher learned to go to school to hu- 
 manity and his own heart. The lessons they taught him 
 agreed with what was boldest and most compelling in 
 the spirit of the revealed Word. Those whose claims 
 were sacred to him found the saline climate of Syracuse 
 a cause of un health. Otherwise it is likely that that 
 most delightful region in the United States — Central 
 New York — for men of letters who equally love nature 
 and culture, would have been the home of Mr. Talmage 
 for life. 
 
 The next seven years of Mr. Talmage's life were spent 
 in Philadelphia. There his powers got "set." He learned 
 what it was he could best do. He had the courage of 
 his consciousness and he did it. Previously he might 
 have felt it incumbent on him to give to pulpit traditions 
 the homage of compliance — though at Syracuse "the 
 more excellent way," any man's own way, so that he 
 have the divining gift of genius and the nature a-tnne 
 to all high sympathies and purposes — had in glimpses 
 come to him. lie realized that it was his duty and mis- 
 
24 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL. 
 
 sion in the world to make it hear the gospel. The chn rch 
 was not to him in numbers a select few, in organization 
 a monopoly. It was meant to be the conqueror and 
 transformer of the world. For seven years he wrought 
 with much success on this theory, all the time realizing 
 that his plans could come to fullness only under condi- 
 tions that enabled him to build from the bottom up an 
 organization which could get nearer to the masses and 
 which would have no precedents to be afraid of as ghosts 
 in its path. Hence he ceased from being the leading 
 preacher in Philadelphia to become in Brooklyn the lead- 
 ing preacher in the world. 
 
 His work for nine years here, know all our readers. 
 It began in a cramped brick rectangle, capable of hold- 
 ing 1,200, and he came to it on "the call" of nineteen. 
 In less than two years that was exchanged for an iron 
 structure, with raised seats, the interior curved like a 
 horse-shoe, the pulpit a platform bridging the ends. 
 That held 3,000 persons. It lasted just long enough to 
 revolutionize church architecture in cities into harmony 
 with common sense. Smaller duplicates of it started in 
 every quarter, three in Brooklyn, two in New York, one in 
 Montreal, one in Louisville, any number in Chicago, two 
 in San Francisco, like numbers abroad. Then it burnt up, 
 that from its ashes the present stately and most sensible 
 structure might rise. Gothic, of brick and stone, cathe- 
 dral-like above, amphitheatre-like below, it holds 5,000 
 as easily as one person, and all can hear and see equally 
 well. In a large sense the people built these edifices. 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL. 
 
 25 
 
 Their architects were Leonard Yaux and John Welch 
 respectively. It is sufficiently indicative to say in gen- 
 eral of Dr. Talmage's work in the Tabernacle, that his 
 audiences are always as many as the place will hold; 
 that twenty-three papers in Christendom statedly publish 
 his entire sermons and Friday-night discourses, exclu- 
 sive of the dailies of the United States; that the papers 
 girdle the globe, being published in London, Liverpool, 
 Manchester, Glasgow, Belfast, Toronto, Montreal, St. 
 John's, Sidney, Melbourne, San Francisco, Chicago, 
 Boston, Raleigh, New York, and many others. To pul- 
 pit labors of this responsibility should be added consid- 
 erable pastoral work, the conduct of the Lay College, 
 and constantly recurring lecturing and literary work, to 
 fill out the public life of a very busy man. 
 
 The multiplicity, large results and striking progress 
 of the labors of Dr. Talmage have made the foregoing 
 more of a brief narrative of the epochs of his career 
 than an account of the career itself. It has had to be 
 so. Lack of space requires it. His work has had rather 
 to be intimated in generalities than told in details. The 
 filling in must come either from the knowledge of the 
 reader or from intelligent inferences and conclusions, 
 drawn from the few principal facts stated, and stated 
 with care. This remains to be said: No other preacher 
 addresses so many constantly. The words of no other 
 preacher were ever before carried by so many types or 
 carried so far. Types give him three continents for a 
 church, and the English-speaking world for a congrega- 
 
28 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL. 
 
 tion. The judgment of his generation will of course be 
 divided upon him just as that of the next will not. 
 That he is a topic in every newspaper is much more sig- 
 nificant than the fact of what treatment it gives him. 
 Only men of genius are universally commented on. The 
 universality of the comment makes friends and foes 
 alike prove the fact of the genius. That is what is im- 
 pressive. As for the quality of the comment, it will, in 
 nine cases out of ten, be much more a revelation of the 
 character behind the pen which writes it than a true view 
 or review of the man. This is necessarily so. The press 
 and the pulpit in the main are defective judges of one 
 another. The former rarely enters the inside of the lat- 
 ter's work. There is acquaintanceship, but not intimacy 
 between them. Journals find out the fact of a preacher's 
 power in time. Then they go looking for the causes 
 Long before, however, the masses have felt the causes 
 and have realized, not merely discovered, the fact. The 
 penalty of being the leaders of great masses has, from 
 Whitetield and Wesley to Spurgeon and Talinage, been 
 to serve as the target for small wits. A constant source 
 of attack on men of such magnitude always has been 
 and will be the presses, which, by the common consent 
 of mankind, are described and dispensed from all consid- 
 eration, when they are rated Satanic. Their attacks 
 confirm a man's right to respect and reputation, and are 
 a proof of his influence and greatness. It can be truly 
 said that while secular criticism in the United States 
 favorably regards our subject in proportion to its intel- 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL. 27 
 
 ligence and uprightness, the judgment of foreigners on 
 him has long been an index to the judgment of poster- 
 ity here. No other American is read so much and so 
 constantly abroad. His extraordinary imagination, ear- 
 nestness, descriptive powers and humor, his great art in 
 grouping and arrangement, his wonderful mastery of 
 words to illumine and alleviate human conditions and to 
 interpret and inspire the harmonies of the better nature? 
 are appreciated by all who can put themselves in sym- 
 pathy with his originality of methods and his high con- 
 secration of purpose. His manner mates with his nature. 
 It is each sermon in action. He presses the eyes, hands, 
 his entire body, into the service of the illustrative truth. 
 Gestures are the accompaniment of what he says. As 
 he stands out before the immense throng, without a 
 scrap of notes or manuscript before him, the effect pro- 
 duced can not be understood by those who have never 
 seen it. The solemnity, the tears, the awful hush, as 
 though the audience couid not breathe again, are oft- 
 times painful. 
 
 His voice is peculiar, not musical, but productive of 
 startling, strong effects, such as characterize no preacher 
 on either side of the Atlantic. His power to grapple 
 an audience and master it from text to peroration has no 
 equal. No man was ever less self-conscious in his work. 
 He feels a mission of evangelization on him as by the 
 imposition of the Supreme. That mission he responds 
 to by doing the duty that is nearest to him with all his 
 might — as confident that he is under the care and order 
 
2& BIOGRAPHICAL. 
 
 of a Divine Master as those who hear him are that they 
 are tinder the spell of the greatest prose-poet that ever 
 made the gospel his song and the redemption of the race 
 the passion of his heart. 
 
 The following discourses were taken down by steno- 
 graphic reporters and revised by Mr. Talmage specially 
 for this work. On the occasion of their delivery the 
 church was thronged beyond description, the streets 
 around blockaded with people so that carriages could 
 not pass, Mr. Talmage himself gaining admLiuoii only 
 by the help of the police. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 
 
 "When said he unto me, Son of man, dig now in the wall ; and 
 when 1 had digged in the wall, behold a door. And he said unto 
 me, Go in and behold the wicked abominations that they do here. So I 
 went in and saw ; and behold every form of creeping things and 
 abomina'tle beasts. "—Ezekiel, viii: 8, 9, 10. 
 
 So this minister of religion, Ezekiel, was commanded 
 to the exploration of the sin of his day. He was not to 
 stand outside the door guessing what it was, but was to 
 go in and see for himself. He did not in vision say: 
 " O Lord, I don't wan't to go in ; I dare not go in ; if I 
 go in I might be criticised ; O Lord, please let me off?" 
 "When God told Ezekiel to go in he went in, " and saw, 
 and behold all manner of creeping things and abomin- 
 able beasts." I, as a minister of religion, felt I had a 
 Divine commission to explore the iniquities of our 
 cities. I did not ask counsel of my session, or my Pres- 
 bytery, or of the newspapers, but asking the companion- 
 ship of three prominent police officials and two of the 
 elders of my church, I unrolled my commission, and 
 it said : " Son of man, dig into the wall ; and when I 
 had digged into the wall, behold a door ; and he said, 
 Go in and see the wicked abominations that are done 
 here ; and I went in, and saw, and behold !" Brought 
 up in the country and surrounded by much parental 
 care, I had not until this autumn seen the haunts of 
 iniquity. By the grace of God defended, I had never 
 29 
 
30 A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 
 
 sowed any " wild oats." I had somehow been able to 
 tell from various sources something about the iniquities 
 of the great cities, and to preach against them ; but I 
 saw, in the destruction of a great multitude of the peo- 
 ple, that there must be an infatuation and a temptation 
 that had never been spoken about, and I said, " I will 
 explore." I saw tens of thousands of men going down, 
 and if there had been a spiritual percussion answering to 
 the physical percussion, the whole air Would have been 
 full of the rumble, and roar, and crack, and thunder of 
 the demolition, and this moment, if we should pause in 
 our service, we should hear the crash, crash ! Just as in 
 the sickly season you sometimes hear the bell at the gate 
 of the cemetery ringing almost incessantly, so I found 
 that the bell at the gate of the cemetery where lost souls 
 are buried was tolling by day and tolling by night. I 
 said, " I will explore." I went as a physician goes into 
 a small-pox hospital, or a fever lazzaretto, to see what 
 practical and useful information I might get. That 
 would be a foolish doctor who would stand outside the 
 door of an invalid writing a Latin prescription. When 
 the lecturer in a medical college is done with his lecture 
 he takes the students into the dissecting room, and he 
 shows them the reality. I am here this morning to report 
 a plague, and to tell you how sin dissects the body, and 
 dissects the mind, and dissects the soul. " Oh !" say 
 you, u are you not afraid that in consequence of your 
 exploration of the inquities of the city other persons 
 may make exploration, and do themselves damage ?" I 
 reply: "If, in company with the Commissioner of 
 Police, and the Captain of Police, and the Inspector of 
 Police, and the company of two Christian gentlemen, 
 and not with the spirit of curiosity, but that you may 
 see sin in order the better to combat it, then, in the name 
 
A PERSONAL EXPIXXBATFON IX HAUNTS OF VICE. 31 
 
 of the eternal God, go ? But, if not, then stay away, 
 "Wellington, standing in the battle of Waterloo when 
 the bullets were buzzing around his head, saw a civilian 
 on the field. He said to him, fci Sir, what are you 
 doing here I Be off V 9 " Why," replied the civilian, 
 "there is no more danger here for me than there is for 
 you." Then Wellington flushed up and said, u God and 
 my country demand that I be here, but you have no 
 errand here." Now I, as an officer in the army of Jesus 
 Christ, went on this exploration, and on to this battle- 
 field. If you bear a like commission, go ; if not, 
 stay away. But you say, " Don't you think that some- 
 how your description of these places will induce people 
 to go and see for themselves V I answer, yes, just as 
 much as the description of the yellow fever at Grenada 
 would induce people to go down there and get the pesti- 
 lence. It was told us there were hardly enough people 
 alive to bury the dead, and I am going to tell you a 
 story in these Sabbath morning sermons of places where 
 they are all dead or dying. And I shall not gild iniqui- 
 ties. I shall play a dirge and not an anthem, and while 
 I shall not put faintest blush on fairest cheek, I will 
 kindle the cheeks of many a man into a conflagration, 
 and I will make his ears tingle. But you say, " Don't 
 you know that the papers are criticising you for the 
 position you take?" I say, yes ; and do you know how 
 I feel about it ! There is no man who is more indebted 
 to the newspaper press than I am. My business is to 
 preacli the truth, and the wider the audience the news- 
 paper press gives me, the wider my field is. As the 
 secular and religious press of the United States and the 
 Canadas, and of England and Ireland and Scotland and 
 Australia and Xew Zealand, are giving me every week 
 nearly three million souls for an audience, I say I am 
 
32 A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 
 
 indebted to the press, anyhow. Go on ! To the day of 
 my death I cannot pay them what I owe them. So slash 
 away, gentlemen. The more the merrier. If there is 
 anything I despise, it is a dull time. Brisk criticism is 
 a coarse Turkish towel, with which every public man 
 needs every day to be rubbed down, in order to keep 
 healthful circulation. Give my love to all the secular 
 and religious editors, and full permission to run their 
 steel pens clear through my sermons, from introduction 
 to application. 
 
 It was ten o'clock of a calm, clear, star-lighted night 
 when the carriage rolled with us from the bright part of 
 the city down into the region where gambling and crime 
 and death hold high carnival. When I speak of houses 
 of dissipation, I do not refer to one sin, or five sins, but 
 to all sins. As the horses halted, and, escorted by the 
 officers of the law, we went in, we moved into a world 
 of which we were as practically ignorant as though it 
 had swung as far off from us as Mercury is from Saturn. 
 "No shout of revelry, no guffaw of laughter, but compar- 
 ative silence. Not many signs of death, but the dead 
 were there. As I moved through this place I said, 
 "This is the home of lost souls." It was a Dante's 
 Inferno; nothing to stir the mirth, but many things to 
 fill the eyes with tears of pity. Ah ! there were moral 
 corpses. There were corpses on the stairway, 
 corpses in the gallery, corpses in the gardens. Leper 
 met leper, but no bandaged mouth kept back the 
 breath, I felt that I was sitting on the iron coast against 
 which Euroclydon had driven a hundred dismasted 
 hulks — every moment more blackened hulks rolling in. 
 And while I stood and waited for the going down of the 
 storm and the lull of the sea, I bethought myself, this 
 is an everlasting storm, and these billows always rage, 
 
A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 33 
 
 and on each carcass that strewed the beach already had 
 alighted a vulture — the long-beaked, filthy vulture of 
 unending dispair — now picking into the corruption, and 
 now on the black wing wiping the blood of a soul ! 
 lark, no robin, no chaffinch, but vultures, vultures, vul- 
 tures. I was reading of an incident that occurred in 
 Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, where a naturalist had 
 presented to him a deadly serpent, and he put it in a 
 bottle and stood it in his studio, and one evening, 
 while in the studio with his daughter, a bat flew in the 
 window, extinguished the light, struck the bottle con- 
 taining the deadly serpent, and in a few moments there 
 was a shriek from the daughter, and in a few hours she 
 was dead. She had been bitten of the serpent. Amid 
 these haunts of death, in that midnight exploration I 
 saw that there were lions and eagles and doves for in- 
 signia; but I thought to myself how inappropriate. 
 Better the insignia of an adder and a bat. 
 
 First of all, I have to report as a result of this raid- 
 night exploration that all the sacred rhetoric about the 
 costly magnificence of the haunts of iniquity is apocry- 
 phal. We were shown what was called the costliest and 
 most magnificent specimen. I had often heard that the 
 walls were adorned with masterpieces; that the fountains 
 were bewitching in the gaslight; that the music was like 
 the touch of a Thalbergor a Gottschalk; that the uphol- 
 stery was imperial; that the furniture in some places 
 was like the throne-room or the Tuilleries. It is all false. 
 Masterpieces! There was not a painting worth S5, leav- 
 ing aside the frame. Great daubs of color that no 
 intelligent mechanic would put on his wall. A cross- 
 breed between a chromo and a splash of poor paint! 
 Music! Some of the homeliest creatures I ever saw 
 squawked discord, accompanied by pianos out of tune! 
 3 
 
34 A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 
 
 Upholstery! Two characteristics; red and cheap. You 
 have heard so much about the wonderful lights — blue 
 and green and yellow and orange flashing across the 
 dancers and the gay groups. Seventy-five cents' worth 
 of chemicals would produce all that in one night. Tinsel 
 gewgaws, tawdriness frippery, seemingly much of it 
 bought at a second-hand furniture store and never paid 
 for! For the most part, the inhabitants were repulsive. 
 Here and there a soul on whom God had put the crown 
 of beauty, but nothing comparable with the Christian 
 loveliness and purity which you may see any pleasant 
 afternoon on any of the thoroughfares of our great cities. 
 Young man, you are a stark fool if you go to places of 
 dissipation to see pictures, and hear music, and admire 
 beautiful and gracious countenances. From Thomas's, or 
 Dodworth's, or Gilmore's Band, in ten minutes you will 
 hear more harmony than in a whole year of the racket 
 and bang of the cheap orchestras of the dissolute. Come 
 to me, and I will give you a letter of introduction to 
 any one of five hundred homes in Brooklyn and New 
 York, where you will see finer pictures and hear more 
 beautiful music— music and pictures compared with which 
 there is nothing worth speaking of in houses of dissi- 
 pation. Sin, however pretentious, is almost always poor. 
 Mirrors, divans, Chickering grand she cannot keep. The 
 sheriff is after it with uplifted mallet, ready for the ven- 
 due. " Going ! going ! gone ! 
 
 But, my friends, I noticed In all the. haunts of dissi- 
 pation that there was an attempt at music, however poor. 
 The door swung open and shut to music; they stepped to 
 music; they danced to music; they attempted nothing 
 without music, and I said to myself, "If such inferior 
 music has such power, and drum, and fife, and orchestra 
 are enlisted in the service of the devil, what multipotent 
 
A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 35 
 
 power there must be in music ! and is it not high time 
 that in all our churches and reform associations we 
 tested how much charm there is in it to bring men 
 off the wrong road to the right road?" Fifty times that 
 night I said within myself, " If poor music is so power- 
 ful in a bad direction, why cannot good music be almost 
 omnipotent in a good direction?" Oh! my friends, we 
 want to drive men into the kingdom of God with a mus- 
 ical staff. We want to shut off the path of death with 
 •a musical bar. We want to snatch all the musical instru- 
 ments from the service of the devil, and with organ, and 
 cornet, and base viol, and piano and orchestra praise the 
 Lord. Good Richard Cecil when seated in the pulpit, 
 said that when Doctor Wargan was at the organ, he, Mr. 
 Cecil, was so overpowered with the music that he found 
 himself looking for the first chapter of Isaiah in the 
 prayer book, wondering he could not find it. Oh! holy 
 bewilderment. Let us send such men as Phillip Phillips, 
 the Christian vocalist, all around the world, and 
 Arbuckle, the cornest, with his " Robin Adair " set to 
 Christian melody, and George Morgan with his Hallelu- 
 ah Chorus, and ten thousand Christian men with up- 
 lifted hosannas to capture this whole earth for God. Oh! 
 my friends, we have had enough minor strains in the 
 church; give us major strains. We have had enough 
 dead marches in the church; play us those tunes which 
 are played when an army is on a dead run to overtake an 
 enemy. Give us the double-quick. We are in full 
 gallop of cavalry charge. Forward, the whole line! 
 Many a man who is unmoved by Christian argument 
 surrenders to a Christian song. 
 
 Many a man under the power of Christian music has 
 had a change take place in his soul and in his life equal 
 to that which took place in the life of a man in Scot- 
 
36 A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 
 
 land, who for fifteen years had been a drunkard. Com- 
 ing home late at night, as he touched the doorsill, his 
 wife trembled at his coming. Telling the story after- 
 ward, she said, "I didn't dare go to bed lest he violently 
 drag me forth. When he came home there was only 
 about the half inch of the candle left in the socket. 
 When he entered, he said: 'Where are the children?' 
 and I said, 'They are up stairs in bed.' He said, 'Go 
 and fetch them,' and I went up and I knelt down and I 
 prayed God to defend me and my children from their 
 cruel father. And then I brought them down. He 
 took up the eldest in his arms and kissed her and said, 
 'My dear lass, the Lord hath sent thee a father home to- 
 night.' And so he did with the second, and then he 
 took up the third of the children and said, 'My dear boy,, 
 the Lord hath sent thee home a father to-night.' And 
 then he took up the babe and said, 'My darling babe, the' 
 Lord hath sent thee home a father to-night.' And then 
 he put his arm around me and kissed me, and said, 'My 
 dear lass, the Lord hath sent thee home a husband 
 to-night.' Why, sir, I had na' heard anything like that 
 for fourteen years. And he prayed and he was com- 
 forted, and my soul was restored, for 1 didn't live as I 
 ought to have lived, close to God. My trouble had 
 broken me down." Oh! for such a transformation in 
 some of the homes of Brooklyn to-day. By holy con- 
 spiracy, in the last song of the morning, let us sweep 
 every prodigal into the kingdom of our God. Oh! ye 
 chanters above Bethlehem, come and hover this morning 
 and give us a snatch of the old tune about "good will to 
 men." 
 
 But I have, also to report of that midnight ex- 
 ploration, that I saw something that amazed me more 
 than I can tell. I do not want to tell it, for it will 
 
A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 37 
 
 take pain to many hearts tar away, and 1 cannot comfort 
 them. But I must tell it. In all these haunts of 
 iniquity I found young men with the ruddy color of 
 country health on their cheek, evidently just come to 
 town for business, entering stores, and shops, and offices. 
 They had helped gather the summer grain. There they 
 were in haunts of iniquity, the look on their cheek which 
 is never on the cheek except when there has been hard 
 work on the farm and in the open air. Here were these 
 young men who had heard how gayly a boat dances on 
 the edge of a maelstrom, and they were venturing. O 
 God! will a few weeks do such an awful work for a 
 young man? O Lord! hast thou forgotten what trans- 
 pired when they knelt at the family altar that morning 
 when he came away, and how lather's voice trembled in 
 the prayer, and mother and sister sobbed as they lay on 
 the floor? I saw that young man when he first con- 
 fronted evil. I saw it was the first night there. I saw 
 on him a defiant look, as much as to say, "I am mightier 
 than sin." Then I saw him consult with iniquity. 
 Then I saw him waver and doubt. Then I saw going 
 over his countenance the shadow of sad reflections, and 
 I knew from his looks there was a powerful memory 
 stirring his soul. I think there was a whisper going 
 out from the gaudy upholstery, saying, "My son, go 
 home/' I think there was a hand stretched out from 
 under the curtains — a hand tremulous with anxiety, a 
 hand that had been worn with work, a hand partly 
 wrinkled with age, that seemed to beckon him away, 
 and so goodness and sin seemed to struggle in that 
 jonng man's soul; but sin triumphed, and he surren- 
 dered to darkness and to death — an ox to the slaughter. 
 Oh! my soul, is this the end of all the good advice? Is 
 this the end of all the prayers that have been made? 
 
38 A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 
 
 Have the clusters of the country vineyard been thrown? 
 into this great wine-press where Despair and Anguish 
 and Death trample, and the vintage is a vintage of blood?' 
 I do not feel so sorry for that young man who, brought 
 up in city life, knows beforehand what are all the sur- 
 rounding temptations; but God pity the country lad 
 unsuspecting and easily betrayed. Oh! young man 
 from the farmhouse among the hills, what have your 
 parents done that you should do this against them? 
 Why are you bent on killing with trouble her who gave, 
 you birth? Look at her fingers — what makes them so 
 distort? Working for you. Do you prefer to that hon- 
 est old face the berouged cheek of sin? Write home 
 to-morrow morning by the first mail, cursing your 
 mother's white hair, cursing her stooped shoulder, curs- 
 ing her old arm-chair, cursing the cradle in which she 
 rocked you. "Oh!" you say, "I can't, I can't." You 
 are doing it already. There is something on your hands,, 
 on your forehead, on your feet. It is red. What is it? 
 The blood of a mother's broken heart! When you were 
 threshing the harvest apples from that tree at the corner 
 of the field lasc summer, did yon think you would, 
 ever come to this? Did you think that the sharp- 
 sickle of death would cut you down so soon? If I 
 thought I could break the infatuation I would corner 
 down from the pulpit and throw my arms around you 
 and beg you to stop. Perhaps I am a little more sym- 
 pathetic with such because I was a country lad. It was- 
 not until fifteen years of age that I saw a great city. I 
 remember how stupendous New York looked as I arrived 
 at Cortlandt Ferry. And now that I look back and 
 remember that I had a nature all awake to hilarities and 
 amusements, it is a wonder that I escaped. I was say- 
 ing this to a gentleman in New York a few days ago* 
 
A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 39 
 
 and he said, "Ah! sir, I guess there were some prayers 
 hovering about." When I see a young man coming 
 from the tame life of the country and going down in the 
 city ruin, I am not surprised. My only surprise is that 
 any escape, considering the allurements. I was a few 
 days ago on the St. Lawrence river, and I said to the 
 captain, "What a swift stream this is." ''Ok!" ke 
 replied, " seventy-five miles from kere it is ten times 
 swifter. Why, we have to employ an Indian pilot, and 
 we give him $1,000 for his summer's work, just to con- 
 duct our boats through between the rocks and the islands, 
 so swift are the rapids." Well, my friends, every man that 
 comes into New York and Brooklyn life comes into the 
 rapids, and the only question is whether he shall have 
 safe or unsafe pilotage. Young man, your bad habits 
 will be reported at the homestead. You cannot hide 
 them. There are people who love to carry bad news, 
 and there will be some accursed old gossip who will wend 
 her infernal step toward the old homestead, and she will 
 sit down, and, after she has a while wriggled in the 
 chair, she will say to your old parents, "Do you know 
 your son drinks?" Then your parents will get white 
 about the lips, and your mother will ask to have the 
 door set a little open for the fresh air, and before that 
 old gossip leaves the place she will have told your parents 
 all about the places where you are accustomed to go. 
 Then your mother will come out, and she will sit down 
 on the step where you used to play, and she will cry and 
 cry. Then she will be sick, and the gig of the country 
 doctor will come up the country lane, and the horse will 
 be tied at the swing-gate, and the prescription will fail, 
 and she will get worse and worse, and in her delirium 
 she will talk about nothing but you. Then the farmers 
 will come to the funeral, and tie the horses at the rail 
 
40 A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 
 
 fence about the house, and they will talk about what 
 ailed the one that died, and one will say it was inter- 
 mittent, and another will say it was congestion, and 
 another will say it was premature old age; but it will be 
 neither intermittent, nor congestion, nor old age. In the 
 ponderous book of Almighty God it will be recorded for 
 everlasting ages to read that } t ou killed her. Our lan- 
 guage is very fertile in describing different kinds of 
 crime. Slaying a man is homicide. Slaying a brother 
 is fratricide. Slaying a father is patricide. Slaying a 
 mother is matricide. It takes two words to describe 
 your crime — patricide and matricide. 
 
 I must leave to other Sabbath mornings the unrolling 
 of the scroll which I have this morning only laid on 
 your table. We have come only to the vestibule of the 
 subject. I have been treating of generals. I shall come 
 to specifics. I have not told you of all the styles of peo- 
 ple I saw in the haunts of iniquity. Before I get 
 through with these sermons and next Sabbath morning 
 I will answer the question everywhere asked me, why 
 does municipal authority allow these haunts of iniquity? 
 
 I will show all the obstacles in the way. Sirs, before 
 I get through with this course of Sabbath morning ser- 
 mons, by the help of the eternal God, I will save ten 
 thousand men! And in the execution of this mission I 
 defy all earth and hell. 
 
 But I was going to tell you of an incident. I said to 
 the officer, " Well, let us go; I am tired of this scene;" 
 and as we passed out of the haunts of iniquity into the 
 fresh air, a soul passed in. What a face that was! Sor- 
 row only half covered up with an assumed joy. It was 
 a woman's face. I saw as plainly as on the page of a 
 book the tragedy. You know that there is such a thing 
 as somnambulism, or walking in one's sleep. Well, in 
 
A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 41 
 
 a fatal somnambulism, a soul started off from her father's 
 house. It was very dark, and her feet were cut of the 
 rocks; but on she went until she came to the verge of a 
 chasm, and she began to descend from bowlder to 
 bowlder down over the rattling shelving — for you know 
 while walking in sleep people will go where they would 
 not go when awake. Further on down, and farther, 
 where no owl of the night or hawk of the day would 
 venture. On down until she touched the depth of the 
 chasm. Then, in walking sleep, she began to ascend 
 the other side of the chasm, rock above rock, as the roe 
 boundeth. Without having her head to swim with the 
 awful steep, she scaled the height. No eye but the 
 sleepless eye of God watched her as she went down one 
 side the chasm and came up the other side the chasm. 
 It was an August night, and a storm was gathering, and 
 a loud burst of thunder awoke her from her somnambu- 
 lism, and she said, " Whither shall I fly?" and with an 
 affrighted eye she looked back upon the chasm she had 
 crossed, and she looked in front, and there was a deeper 
 chasm before her. She said, "What shall I do? Must 
 I die here?" And as she bent over the one chasm, she 
 heard the sighing of the past; and as she bent over the 
 other chasm, she heard the portents of the future. Then 
 she sat down on the granite crag, and cried: u O! for my 
 father's house! O! for the cottage, where I might die 
 amid embowering honeysuckle! O! the past! O! the 
 future! O! father! oi mother! O! God!" But the 
 storm that had been gathering culminated, and wrote 
 with finger of lightning on the sky just above the hori- 
 zon, ''The way of the transgressor is hard." And then 
 thunder-peal after thunder-peal uttered it: ""Which for- 
 saketh the guide of her youth and forgetteth the cove- 
 nant of her God. Destroyed without remedy!" And 
 
42 A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 
 
 the cavern behind echoed it, " Destroyed without rem- 
 edy!" And the chasm before echoed it, "Destroyed 
 without remedy!" There she perished, her cut and 
 bleeding feet on the edge of one chasm, her long locks 
 washed of the storm dripping over the other chasm. 
 
 But by this time our carriage had reached the curb- 
 stone of my dwelling, and I awoke, and behold it was a 
 dream ! 
 
THE LEPERS OF HIUH LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 "Policeman, what of the night ?" — Isaiah xxi: It 
 
 The original of the text may be translated either 
 "watchman " or u policeman." I have chosen the latter 
 word. The olden- time cities were all thus guarded. 
 There were roughs, and thugs, and desperadoes in Jeru- 
 salem, as well as there are in New York and Brooklyn. 
 The police headquarters of olden time was on top of the 
 city wall. King Solomon, walking incognito through 
 the streets, reports in one of his songs that he met these 
 officials. King Solomon must have had a large posse of 
 police to look after his royal grounds, for he had twelve 
 thousand blooded horses in his stables, and he had mil- 
 lions of dollars in his palace, and he had six hundred 
 wives, and, though the palace was large, no house was 
 ever large enough to hold two women married to the 
 same man; much less could six hundred keep the peace. 
 Well, the night was divided into three watches, the first 
 watch reaching from sundown to 10 o'clock; the second 
 watch from 10 o'clock to two in the morning; the third 
 watch from two in the morning to sunrise. An Idumean, 
 anxious about the prosperity of the city, and in regard 
 to any danger that might threaten it, accosts an officer 
 just as you might any night upon our streets, saying,, 
 "Policeman, what of the night?" Policemen, more 
 than any other people, understand a city. Upon them. 
 
44 
 
 THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 are vast responsibilities for small pay. The police officer 
 of your city gets $1,100 salary, but he may spend only 
 one night of an entire month in his family. The detect- 
 ive of your city gets §1,500 salary, but from January to 
 January there is not an hour that he may call his own. 
 Amid cold and heat and tempest, and amid the perils of 
 the bludgeon of the midnight assassin, he does his work. 
 The moon looks down upon nine-tenths of the iniquity 
 of our great cities. What wonder, then, that a few 
 weeks ago, in the interest of morality and religion, I 
 asked the question of the text, u Policeman, what of the 
 night?" In addition to this powerful escortage, I asked 
 two elders of the church to accompany me; not because 
 they were any better than the other elders of the church, 
 but because they were more muscular, and I was resolved 
 that in any case where anything more than spiritual 
 defense was necessary, to refer the whole matter to their 
 hands! I believe in muscular Christianity. I wish that 
 our theological seminaries, instead of sending out so 
 many men with dyspepsia and liver complaint and all 
 out of breath by the time they have climbed to the top 
 of the pulpit stairs, would, through gymnasiums and 
 other means, send into the pulpit physical giants as well 
 as spiritual athletes. I do wish I could consecrate to the 
 Lord two hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois weight? 
 But, borrowing the strength of others, I started out on 
 the midnight exploration. I was preceded in this work 
 by Thomas Chalmers, who opened every door of iniquity 
 in Edinburgh before he established systematic ameliora- 
 tion, and preceded by Thomas Guthrie, who explored all 
 the squalor of the city before he established the ragged 
 schools, and by every man who has done any thing to 
 balk crime, and help the tempted and the destroyed. 
 Above all, I followed in the footsteps of Him who was 
 
THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 45 
 
 derided by the hypocrities and the sanhedrims of his 
 day, because he persisted in exploring the deepest moral 
 slush of his time, going down among demoniacs and 
 paupers and adulteresses, never so happy as when lie 
 had ten lepers to cure. Some of you may have been 
 surprised that there was a great hue and cry raised be- 
 fore these sermons were begun, and sometimes the hue 
 and cry was made by professors of religion. I was not .sur- 
 prised. The simple fact is that in all our churches there 
 are lepers who do not want their scabs touched, and they 
 foresaw that before I got through with this series of ser- 
 mons I would show up some of the wickedness and 
 rottenness of what is called the upper class. The devil 
 howled because he knew I was going to hit him hard! 
 Now, I say to all such men, whether in the church or 
 out of it, M Ye hypocrites, ye generation of vipers, how 
 can ye escape the damnation of hell ?" 
 
 I noticed in my midnight exploration with these high 
 officials that the haunts of sin are chiefly supported by 
 men of means and men of wealth. The young men 
 recently come from the country, of whom I spoke last 
 Sabbath morning, are on small salary, snd they have- 
 but little money to spend in sin, and if they go into lux- 
 uriant iniquity the employer finds it out by the inflamed 
 eye and tiie marks of dissipation, and they are discharged. 
 The luxuriant places of iniquity are supported by men,, 
 who come down from the fashionable avenues of Xew York, 
 and cross over from some of the finest mansions of Brook- 
 lyn. Prominent business men from Boston, Philadelphia, 
 and Chicago, and Cincinnati patronize these places of 
 crime. I could call the names of prominent men in 
 our cluster of cities who patronize these places of in- 
 iquity, and I may call their names before I get through 
 this course of sermons, though the fabric of iSTew York 
 
46 
 
 THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 and Brooklyn society tumble into wreck. Judges of 
 courts, distinguished lawyers, officers of the churchy 
 political orators standing on Republican and Democratic 
 and Greenback platforms talking about God and good 
 morals until you might suppose them to be evangelists 
 expecting a thousand converts in one night. Call the 
 roll of dissipation in the haunts of iniquity any night, 
 and if the inmates will answer, you will find there stock- 
 brokers from Wall street, large importers from Broad- 
 way, iron merchants, leather merchants, cotton mer- 
 chants, hardware merchants, wholesale grocers, repre- 
 sentatives from all the commercial and wealthy classes. 
 Talk about the heathenism below Canal street! There 
 is a worse heathenism above Canal street. I prefer 
 that kind of heathenism which wallows in filth and dis- 
 gusts the beholder rather than that heathenism which 
 covers up its walking putrefaction with camel's-hair 
 shawl and point lace, and rides in turnouts worth $3,000, 
 liveried driver ahead and rosetted flunky behind. "We 
 have been talking so much about the gospel for the 
 masses; now let us talk a little about the gospel for the 
 lepers of society, for the millionaire sots, for the portable 
 lazzarettos of upper-tendom. It is the iniquity that 
 comes down from the higher circles of society that sup- 
 ports the haunts of crime, and it is gradually turning 
 our cities into Sodoms and Gomorrahs waiting for the 
 lire and brimstone tempest of the Lord God who 
 whelmed the cities of the plain. We want about five 
 hundred Anthony Com stocks to go forth and explore 
 and expose the abominations of high life. For eight or 
 ten years there stood within sight of the most fashionable 
 New York drive a Moloch temple, a brown -stone hell on 
 earth, which neither the Mayor, nor the judges, nor the 
 police dared touch, when Anthony Comstock, a Christian 
 
THE LEPERS OF HIGH LTFE. 
 
 47 
 
 man of less than average physical stature, and with 
 cheek scarred by the knife of a desperado whom he had 
 arrested, walked into that palace of the damned on Fifth 
 avenue, and in the name of God put an end to 
 to it, the priestess presiding at the orgies retreating by 
 suicide into the lost world, her bleeding corpse found in 
 her own bath-tub. May the eternal God have mercy on 
 our cities. Gilded sin comes down from these high 
 places into the upper circles of iniquity, and then on 
 gradually down, until in five years it makes the whole 
 pilgrimage, from the marble pillar on the brilliant 
 avenue clear down to the cellars of Water street. The 
 officer on that midnight exploration said to me: "Look 
 at them now, and look at them three years from now 
 when all this glory has departed; they'll be a heap of 
 rags in the station-house." Another of the officers said 
 tome: " That is the daughter of one of the wealthiest 
 families on Madison square." 
 
 But I have something more amazing to tell you than 
 that the men of means and wealth support these haunts 
 of iniquity, and that is,that they are chiefly supported 
 by heads of families — fathers and husbands, with the 
 awful perjury of broken marriage vows upon them, with 
 a niggardly stipend left at home for the support of their 
 families, going forth with their thousands for the dia- 
 monds and wardrobe and equipage of iniquity. In the 
 name of heaven, I denounce this public iniquity. Let 
 such men be hurled out of decent circles. Let them be 
 hurled out from business circles. If they will not 
 repent, overboard with them! I life one-half the bur- 
 den of malediction from the unpitied head of offending 
 woman, and hurl it on the blasted pate of offending man ! 
 Society needs a new division of its anathema. By what 
 law of justice does burning excoriation pursue offending 
 
48 
 
 THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 woman down off the precipices of destruction, while 
 offending man, kid-gloved, walks in refined circles, 
 invited up if he have money, advanced into political 
 recognition, while all the doors of high life open at the 
 first rap of his gold-headed cane? I say, if you let one 
 come back, let them both come back. If one must go 
 down, let both go down. I give you as my opinion that 
 the eternal perdition of all other sinners will be a heaven 
 compared with the punishment everlasting of that man 
 who, turning his back upon her whom he swore to pro- 
 tect and defend until death, and upon his children, whose 
 destiny may be decided by his example, goes forth to 
 seek affectional alliances elsewhere. For such a man the 
 portion will be fire, and hail, and tempest, and darkness, 
 and blood, and anguish, and despair forever, forever, for- 
 ever! My friends, there has got to be a reform in this 
 matter, or American society will go to pieces. Under 
 the head of " incompatibility of temper," nine-tenths of 
 the abomination goes on. What did you get married 
 for if your dispositions are incompatible? "Oh!" you 
 say, "I rushed into it without thought " Then you 
 ought to be willing to suffer the punishment for making 
 a fool of yourself I Incompatibility of temper! You 
 are responsible for at least a half of the incompatibility 
 Why are you not honest and willing to admit either that 
 you did not control your temper, or that you had already 
 broken your marriage oath ? In nine hundred and ninety- 
 nine cases out of the thousand, incompatibility is a 
 phrase to cover up wickedness already enacted. I declare 
 in the presence of this city and in the presence of the 
 world that heads of families are supporting these haunts 
 of iniquity. I wish there might be a police raid lasting 
 a great while, that they would just go down through all 
 these places of sin and gather up all the prominent busi- 
 
THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 49 
 
 ness men of the city, and inarch them down through the 
 street followed by about twenty reporters to take their 
 names and put them in full capitals in the next day's 
 paper! Let such a course be undertaken in our cities, 
 and in six months there would be eighty per cent, off 
 your public crime. It is not now the young men ard 
 the boys that need so much looking after; it is theU 
 fathers and mothers. Let heads of families cease to pat- 
 ronize places of iniquity, and in a short time the} would 
 crumble to ruin. 
 
 But you meet me with the question, "Why don't the 
 city authorities put an end to such places of iniquity r" 
 I answer in regard to Brooklyn, the work has already 
 been done. Six years ago there were in the radius of 
 your City Hall thirty-eight gambling saloons. They 
 are all broken up. The ivory and wooden "chips" 
 that came from the gambling-hells into the Police Head- 
 quarters came in by the peck. How many inducements 
 were offered to our officials, such as: "This will be worth 
 a thousand dollars to you if you will let it go on." "This 
 will be worth five thousand if you will only let it go on." 
 But our commissioners of police, mightier than any 
 bribe, pursued their work until, while beyond the city 
 limits there may be exceptions, within the city limits of 
 Brooklyn there is not a gambling-hell, or policy-shop, 
 or a house of death so pronounced. There are under- 
 ground iniquities and hidden scenes, but none so pro- 
 nounced. Every Monday morning all the captains of 
 the police make reports in regard to their respective pre- 
 cincts. When the work began, the police in authoritv 
 at that time said: "Oh! it cair t be done: we can't eret 
 into these places of iniquity to see them, and hence we 
 can't break them up." "Then," said the commissioners 
 of police, "break in the doors;" and it is astonishing how 
 4 
 
60 
 
 THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 soon ijter the shoulders of a stout policeman goes against 
 the dior, it gets off its hinges. Some of the captains of 
 police said: "This thing has been going on so long, it 
 cannot he crashed." "Then," said the commissioners 
 of police, "we'll get other captains of police." The 
 work went on until now, if a reformer wants the com- 
 missioners of police to show him the haunts of iniquity 
 in Brooklyn, there are none to show him. If you know 
 a single case that is an exception to what I say, report 
 it to me at the close of this service at the foot of this 
 plqSbrm, and I will warrant that within two hours after 
 you .eport the case Commissioner Jourdan, Superin- 
 tendent Campbell, Inspector AVaddy, and as many of the 
 twenty-live detectives and of the five hundred and fifty 
 policemen as are necessary will come down on it like an 
 Alpine avalanche. If yon do not report it, it is because 
 you are a coward, or else because you are in the sin your- 
 self, and you do not want it shown up. You shall bear 
 the whole responsibility, and it shall not be thrown on 
 the hard-working and heroic detective and police force. 
 But you say: "How has this general clearing out of 
 gambling-hells and places of iniquity been accom- 
 plished?" Our authorities have been backed up by a 
 high public sentiment. In a city which has on its judi- 
 cial bench such magnificent men as Neilson, and 
 Reynolds, and McCue, and Moore, and Pratt, and others 
 whom I am not fortunate enough to know, there must 
 be a mighty impulse upward toward Cod and good mor- 
 als. We have in the high places of this city men not 
 only with great heads, but with great hearts. A young 
 man disappeared from his father's house about the time 
 the Brooklyn Theater burned, and it was supposed that 
 he had been destroyed in that ruin. The father, broken- 
 hearted, sold his property in Brooklyn, and in desolation 
 
THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 51 
 
 left the city. Recently the wandering son came back. 
 He could not find his father, who, in departing, had 
 given no idea of his destination. The case was reported 
 to a man high in official position, and he sat down and 
 wrote a letter to all the chiefs of police in the United 
 States, in order that he might deliver that prodigal son 
 into the arms of his broken-hearted father. A few days 
 ago it was found that the father was in California. I 
 understand that son is now on the way to meet him, and 
 it will be the parable of the prodigal son over again 
 when they embrace each other, and the father says: 
 "Rejoice with me, for this my son was dead and is alive 
 again, was lost and is found.'' I have forgotten the 
 uame of the father, I have forgotten the name of his son; 
 but I have not forgotten the name of the officer whose 
 sympathetic heart beats so loud under his badge of office. 
 It was Patrick Campbell, Superintendent of the Brook- 
 lyn police. I do not mention these things as a matter of 
 city pride, nor as a matter of exultation, but of gratitude 
 to God that Brooklyn to-day stands foremost among 
 American cities in its freedom from places of iniquity. 
 But Brooklyn has a larire share of sin. Where do the 
 people of Brooklyn go when they propose to commit 
 abomination? To New York. I was told in the mid- 
 night exploration in Xew York with the police that 
 there are some places almost entirely supported by men 
 and women from Brooklyn. We are one city after all — 
 one now before the bridge is completed, to be more 
 thoroughly one when the bridge is done. 
 
 Well, then, you press me with another question : u Why 
 don't the public authorities of New York extirpate these 
 haunts of iniquity ?" Before I give you a definite answer 
 I want to say that the obstacles in that city are greater 
 than in any city on this continent. It is so vast. It is 
 
52 
 
 THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 the landing-place of European immigration. Its wealth 
 is mighty to establish and defend places of iniquity. 
 Twice a year there are incursions of people from all 
 parts of the land coming on the spring and the fall trade. 
 It requires twenty times the municipal energy to keep 
 order in New York that it does in any city from Port- 
 land to San Francisco. But still you pursue me with 
 the question, and I am to answer it by telling you that 
 there is infinite fault and immensity of blame to be 
 divided between three parties. First, the police of New 
 York city. So far as I know them they are courteous 
 gentlemen. They have had great discouragement, they 
 tell me, in the fact that when they arrest crime and 
 bring it before the courts the witnesses will not appear 
 lest they criminate themselves. They tell me also that 
 they have been discouraged by the tact that so many 
 suits have been brought against them for damages. But 
 after all, my friends, they must take their share of blame. 
 I have come to the conclusion, after much research and 
 investigation, that there are captains of police in New 
 York w T ho are in complicity with crime — men who 
 make thousands of dollars a year for the simple 
 fact that they will not tell, and will permit places of 
 iniquity to stand month after month, and year after year. 
 I am told that there are captains of police in New York 
 who get a percentage on every bottle of wine sold in the 
 haunts of death, and that they get a revenue from all the 
 shambles of sin. What a state of things this is! In the 
 Twenty-ninth precinct of New Y r ork there are one hun- 
 dred and twenty-one dens of death. Night after night, 
 month after month, year after year, untouched. In West 
 Twenty-sixth street and West Twenty-seventh street and 
 West Thirty-first street there are whole blocks that are 
 a pandemonium. There are between five and six hun- 
 
THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 53 
 
 a/ed dens of darkness in the city of Xew York, where 
 there are 2.500 policemen. Not long ago there was a 
 masquerade ball in which the masculine and feminine 
 offenders of society were the participants, and some of 
 the police danced in the masquerade and distributed the 
 prizes! There is the grandest opportunity that has ever 
 opened, for any American. open now. It is for that man 
 in high official position who shall get into his stirrups 
 and say, "Men, follow ? ? ' and who shall in one night 
 sweep around and take all of these leaders of iniquity, 
 whether on suspicion or on positive proof, saying, " I'll 
 take the responsibility, come on! I put my private 
 property and my political aspirations and my life into 
 this crusade against the powers of darkness." That man 
 would be Mayor of the city of Xew York. That man 
 would be tit to be President of the United States. 
 
 But the second part of the blame I must put at the 
 door of the District Attorney of Xew York. I under- 
 stand he is an honorable gentleman, but he has not time 
 to attend to all these cases. Literally, there are thousands 
 of cases unpursued for lack of time. Xow, I say, it is 
 the business of Xew York to give assistants, and clerks, 
 and help to the District Attorney until all these places 
 shall go down in quick retribution. 
 
 But the third part of the blame, and the heaviest part 
 of it, I put on the moral and Christian people of our 
 cities, who are guilty of most culpable indifference on 
 this whole subject. When Tweed stole his millions 
 large audiences were assembled in indignation, Charles 
 O'Conor was retained, committees of safety and investi- 
 gation were appointed, and a great stir made; but night 
 by night there is a theft and a burglary of city morals 
 as much worse than Tweed's robberies as his were worse 
 than common shop-lifting, and it has very little opposi- 
 
54 THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 tion. I tell you what New York wants ; it wants indig- 
 nation meetings in Cooper Institute and Academy of 
 Music and Chickering and Irving Halls to compel the 
 public authorities to do their work and to send the police, 
 with clubs and lanterns and revolvers, to turn off the 
 colored lights of the dance -houses, and to mark for con- 
 fiscation the trunks and wardrobes and furniture and 
 scenery, and to gather up all the keepers, and all the in- 
 mates, and all the patrons, and march them out to the 
 Tombs, fife and drum sounding the Rogue's March. 
 
 While there are men smoking their cigarettes, with 
 their feet on Turkish divans, shocked that a minister of 
 religion should explore and expose the iniquity of city 
 life, there are raging underneath our great cities a Coto- 
 paxi, a Stroniboli,a Vesuvius, ready to bury us in ashes and 
 scoria deeper than that which overwhelmed Pompeii and 
 Herculaneum. Oh! I wish the time would come for the 
 plowshare of public indignation to push through and 
 rip up and turn under those parts of New York which 
 are the plague of the nation. Now is the time to hitch 
 up the team to this plowshare. In this time, when Mr. 
 Cooper is Mayor, and Mr. Kelly is Comptroller, and Mr. 
 Nichols is Police Commissioner, and Superintendent 
 Walling wears the badge of office, and there is on the 
 judicial benches of New York an array of the best men 
 that have ever occupied those positions since the founda- 
 tion of the city — Recorder Hackett, Police Magistrates 
 Kilbreth, Wandell, Morgan and Duffy ; such men as 
 Gildersleeve, and Sutherland, and Davis, and Curtis ; 
 and on the United States Court bench in New York 
 such men as Benedict, and Blatchford, and Choate — now 
 is the time to make an extirpation of iniquity. Now is 
 the time for a great crusade, and for the people of our cities 
 in great public assemblages to say to police authority: 
 
THE LEPEKS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 55 
 
 " Go ahead, and we will back you with our lives, our for- 
 tunes, and our sacred honor." 
 
 I must adjourn until next Sabbath morning much of 
 what I wanted to say about certain forms of iniquity 
 which I saw rampant in the night of my exploration 
 with the city officials. But before I stop this morning 
 I want to have one word with a class of men with whom 
 people have so little patience that they never get a kind 
 word of invitation. I mean the men who have forsaken 
 their homes. Oh! my brother, return. You say: "I 
 can't ; I have no home ; my home is broken up." Re- 
 establish your home. It has been done in other cases, 
 why may it not be done in your case? " Oh," you say, 
 " we parted for life ; we haVe divided our property ; we 
 have divided our effects." I ask you, did you divide the 
 marriage ring of that bright day when you started life 
 together ? Did you divide your family Bible? If so, 
 where did you divide it 2 Across the Old Testament, 
 where the Ten Commandments denounce your sin, or 
 across the New Testament, where Christ says : " Blessed 
 are the pure in heart?" Or did you divide it between 
 the Old and the New Testaments, right across the family 
 record of weddings and births and deaths ? Did you 
 divide the cradle in which you rocked your first born? 
 Did you divide the little grave in the cemetery, over 
 which you stood with linked arms, looking down in awful 
 bereavement ? Above all, I ask you, did you divide your 
 hope for heaven, so that there is no full hope left for 
 either of you? Go back! There maybe a great gulf 
 between you and once happy domesticity; but Christ 
 will bridge that gulf. It may be a bridge of sighs. Turn 
 toward it. Put your foot on the over-arching span. 
 Hear it ! It is a voice unrolling from the throne: " He 
 that overcometh shall inherit all things, and I will be 
 
56 
 
 THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
 
 unto him a God, and he shall be my son ; but the un- 
 believing, and the sorcerers, and the whoremongers, and 
 the adulterers, and the idolators, and all liars shall have 
 their part in the lake which burnetii with fire and brim, 
 stone — which is the second deathP' 
 
THE OATES Oh HELL. 
 
 57 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 "The gates of hell shall not prevail against it. "-St. Matthew xvi : 18. 
 
 ;t It is only 10 o'clock," said the officer of the law, as 
 we got into the carriage for the midnight exploration — 
 " it is only 10 o'clock, and it is too early to see the places 
 that we wish to see, for the theaters have not yet let out." 
 I said, " What do you mean by that ?" " Well," he said, 
 44 the places of iniquity are not in full blast until the 
 people have time to arrive from the theaters." So we 
 loitered on, and the officer told the driver to stop on a 
 street where is one of the costliest and most brilliant 
 gambling-houses in the city of New York. As we came 
 up in front all seemed dark. The blinds were down ; 
 the door was guarded ; but after a whispering of the 
 officer with the guard at the door, we were admitted into 
 the hall, and thence into the parlors, around one table 
 finding eight or ten men in mid-life, well-dressed — all 
 the work going on in silence, save the noise of the 
 rattling " chips " on the gaming-table in one parlor, and 
 the revolving ball of the roulette table in the other par- 
 lor. Some of these men, we were told, had served terms 
 in prison; some were ship-wrecked bankers and brokers 
 and money-dealers, and some were going their first 
 rounds of vice — but all intent upon the table, as large or 
 small fortunes moved up and down before them. Oh! 
 there was something awfully solemn in the silence — the 
 intense gaze, the suppressed emotion of the players. No 
 
58 
 
 THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 one looked up. They all had money in the rapids, and 
 I have no doubt some saw, as they sat there, horses and 
 carriages, and houses and lands, and home and family 
 rushing down into the vortex. A man's life would not 
 have been worth a farthing in that presence had he not 
 been accompanied by the police, if he had been supposed 
 to be on a Christian errand of observation. Some of 
 these men went by private key, some went in by careful 
 introduction, some were taken in by Vhe patrons of the 
 establishment. The officer of the law told me: " None 
 get in here except by police mandate, or by some letter 
 of a patron.*' While we were there a young man came 
 in, put his money down on the roulette-table, and lost; 
 put more money down on the roulette-table, and lost ; 
 put more money down on the roulette- table, and lost; 
 then feeling in his pockets for more money, finding none, 
 in severe silence he turned his back upon the scene and 
 passed out. All the literature about the costly magnifi- 
 cence of such places is untrue. Men kept their hats on 
 and smoked, and there was nothing in the upholstery or 
 the furniture to forbid. While we stood there men lost 
 their property and lost their souls. Oh ! merciless place. 
 Not once in all the history of that gaming-house has 
 there been one word of sympathy uttered for the losers 
 at the game. Sir Horace Walpole said that a man 
 dropped dead in front of one of the club-houses of Lon- 
 don; his body was carried into the club-house, and the 
 members of the club began immediately to bet as to 
 whether he were dead or alive, and when it was proposed 
 to test the matter by bleeding him, it was only hindered 
 by the suggestion that it would be unfair to some of the 
 players! In these gaming-houses of our cities, men have 
 their property wrung away from them, and then they 
 go out, some of them to drown their grief in strong 
 
THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 drink, some to ply the counterfeiter's pen, and so restore 
 their fortunes, some resort to the suicide's revolver, but 
 all going down, and that work proceeds day by day, and 
 night by night, until it is estimated that every day in 
 Christendom eighty million dollars pass from hand to 
 hand through gambling practices, and every year in 
 Christendom one hundred and twenty-three billion, one 
 hundred million dollars change hands in that way. 
 
 " But," I said, " it is 11 o'clock, and we must be off." 
 We passed out into the hallway and so into the street, 
 the burly guard slamming the door of the house after us,, 
 and we got into the carriage and rolled on toward the 
 gates of hell. You know about the gates of heaven. 
 You have often heard them preached about. There are 
 three to each point of the compass. On the north, three 
 gates; on the south, three gates; on the east, three 
 gates; on the west, three gates; and each gate is of solid 
 pearl. Oh ! gate of heaven ; may we all get into it. But 
 who shall describe the gates of hell spoken of in my text? 
 These gates are burnished until they sparkle and glisten 
 in the gas-light. They are mighty, and set in sockets 
 of deep and dreadful masonry. They are high, so that 
 those who are in may not clamber over and get out. 
 They are heavy, but they swing easily in to let those go 
 in who are to be destroyed. Well, my friends, it is 
 always safe to go where God tells you to go, and God 
 had told me to go through these gates of hell, and ex- 
 plore and report, and, taking three of the high police 
 authorities and two of the elders of my church, I went 
 in, and I am here this morning to sketch the gates of 
 hell. I remember, when the Franco-German war was 
 going on, that I stood one day in Paris looking at the 
 gates of theTuilleries, and I was so absorbed in the sculp- 
 turing at the top of the gates — the masonry and the 
 
60 
 
 THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 bronze — that I forgot myself, and after awhile, looking 
 down, I saw that there were officers of the law scrutinizing 
 me, supposing, no doubt, I was a German, and looking 
 at those gates for adverse purposes. But, my friends, 
 we shall not stand looking at the outside of the gates of 
 hell. Through this midnight exploration I shall tell 
 you of both sides, and I shall tell you what those gates 
 are made of. With the hammer of God's truth I shall 
 pound on the brazen panels, and with the lantern of 
 God's truth I shall flash a light upon the shining 
 hinges. 
 
 Gate the first: Impure literature. Anthony Com- 
 stock seized twenty tons of bad books, plates, and letter- 
 press, and when our Professor Cochran, of the Poly- 
 technic Institute, poured the destructive acids on those 
 plates, they smoked in the righteous annihilation. And 
 yet a great deal of the bad literature of the day is not 
 gripped of the law. It is strewn in your parlors; it is 
 in your libraries. Some of your children read it at night 
 after they have retired, the gas-burner swung as near as 
 possible to their pillow. Much of this literature is un- 
 der the title of scientific information. A book agent 
 with one of these infernal books, glossed over with scien- 
 tific nomenclature, went into a hotel and sold in one day 
 a hundred copies, and sold them all to women! It is 
 appalling that men and women who can get through 
 their family physician all the useful information they 
 may need, and without any contamination, should wade 
 chin deep through such accursed literature under the 
 plea of getting useful knowledge, and that printing- 
 presses, hoping to be called decent, lend themselves to 
 this infamy. Fathers and mothers, be not deceived b} r 
 the title, "medical works." Nine-tenths of those books 
 come hot from the lost world, though they may have on 
 
THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 61 
 
 them the names of the publishing-houses of New York 
 and Philadelphia. Then there is all the novelette litera- 
 ture of tlie day flung over the land by the million. As 
 there are good novels that are long, so I suppose there 
 may be good novels that are short, and so there may be 
 a good novelette, but it is the exception. No one — mark 
 this — no one systematically reads the average novelette 
 of this day and keeps either integrity or virtue. The 
 most of these novelettes are written by broken-down 
 literary men for small compensation, on the principle 
 that, having failed in literature elevated and pure, they 
 hope to succeed in the tainted and the nasty. Oh! this 
 is a wide gate of hell. Every panel is made out of a bad 
 book or newspaper. Every hinge is theinterjoined type 
 of a corrupt printing-press. Every bolt or lock of that 
 gate is made out of the plate of an unclean pictorial. In 
 other words, there are a million men and women in the 
 United States to-day reading themselves into hell ! When 
 in your own beautiful city a prosperous family fell into 
 ruins through the misdeeds of one of its members, the 
 amazed mother said to the officer of the law: k< Why, I 
 never supposed there was anything wrong. I never 
 thought there could be anything wrong." Then she sat 
 weeping in silence for some time, and said: u Oh! I 
 have got it now! I know, I now! I .found in her 
 bureau after she went away a bad book. That's what 
 slew her." These leprous booksellers have gathered up 
 the catalogues of all the male and female seminaries in 
 the United States, catalogues containing the names and 
 the residences of all the students, and circulars of death 
 are sent to every one, without any exception. Can you 
 imagine anything more deathful? There is not a young 
 person, male or female, or an old person, who has not 
 had offered to him or her a bad book or a bad picture. 
 
62 
 
 THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 Scour your house to find out whether there are any of 
 these adders coiled on jour parlor center-table, or coiled 
 amid the toilet set on the dressing-case. I adjure you 
 before the sun goes down to explore your family nbraries 
 with an inexorable scrutiny. Remember that >ne bad 
 book or bad picture may do the work for eternity. I 
 want to arouse all your suspicions about novelettes. I 
 want to put you on the watch against everything that 
 may seem like surreptitious correspondence through the 
 post'office. I want you to understand that impure litera- 
 ture is one of the broadest, highest, mightiest gates of 
 the lost. 
 
 Gate the second: The dissolute dance. You shall not 
 divert me to the general subject of dancing. Whatever 
 you may think of the parlor dance, or the methodic mo- 
 tion of the body to sounds of music in the family or 
 the social circle, I am not now discussing that question. 
 I want you to unite with me this morning in recogniz- 
 ing the fact that there is a dissolute dance. You know 
 of what I speak. It is seen not only in the low haunts 
 of death, but in elegant mansions. It is the first step to 
 eternal ruin for a great multitude of both sexes. You 
 know, my friends, what postures, and attitudes, and fig- 
 ures are suggested of the devil. They who glide into 
 the dissolute dance glide over an inclined plane, and the 
 dance is swifter and swifter, wilder and wilder, until 
 with the speed of lightning they whirl off the edges of 
 a decent life into a fiery future. This gate of hell swings 
 across the Axminster of many a fine parlor, and across 
 the ball-room of the summer watering-place. You have 
 no right, my brother, my sister — you have no right to 
 take an attitude to the sound of music which would be 
 unbecoming in the absence of music. No Ckickering 
 grand of city parlor or fiddle of mountain picnic can 
 consecrate that which (rod hath cursed. 
 
Til K GATES OF HELL. 
 
 63 
 
 Gate the third: Indiscreet apparel. The attire of 
 woman for the last four or live years has been beautiful 
 and graceful beyond anything I have known ; but there 
 are those who Will always carry that which is right into 
 the extraordinary and indiscreet. I am told that there 
 is a fashion about to come in upon us that is shocking 
 to all righteousness. I charge Christian women, neither 
 by style of dress nor adjustment of apparel, to become 
 administrative of evil. Perhaps none else will dare to 
 tell you, so I will tell you that there are multitudes of 
 men who owe their eternal damnation to the boldness 
 of womanly attire. Show me the fashion-plates of any 
 age between this and the time of Louis XVI., of France, 
 and Henry VIII., of England, and I will tell you the 
 type of morals or immorals of that age or that year. 
 No exception to it. Modest apparel means a righteous 
 people. Immodest apparel always means a contaminated 
 and depraved society. You wonder that the city of Tyre 
 was destroyed with such a terrible destruction. Have 
 you ever seen the fashion-plate of the city of Tyre? I 
 will show it to you: 
 
 " Moreover, the Lord saith. because the daughters of Zion are 
 haughty and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, walk- 
 ing and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet, 
 in that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling 
 ornaments about their feel, and their cauls, and their round tires like 
 the moon, the rings and nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, 
 and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping-pins." 
 
 That is the fashion-plate of ancient Tyre. And do 
 you wonder that the Lord God in His indignation 
 blotted out the city, so that fishermen to-day spread their 
 nets where that city once stood? 
 
 Gate the fourth: Alcoholic beverage. In our mid- 
 night exploration we saw that all the scenes of wicked- 
 ness were under the enchantment of the wine-cup. That 
 
64 
 
 THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 was what the waitresses carried on the platter. That 
 was what glowed on the table. That was what shone in 
 illuminated gardens. That was what flushed the cheeks 
 of the patrons who came in. That was what staggered 
 the step of the patrons as they went out. Oh! the wine- 
 cup is the patron of impurity. The officers of the law 
 that night told us that nearly all the men who go into 
 the shambles of death go in intoxicated, the mental and 
 the spiritual abolished, that the brute may triumph. 
 Tell me that a young man drinks, and I know the whole 
 story. If he become a captive of the wine-cup, he will 
 become a captive of all other vices; only give him time. 
 ~No one ever runs drunkenness alone. That is a car- 
 rion-crow that goes in a flock, and when you see that 
 beak ahead, you may know the other beaks are coming. 
 In other words, the wine-cup unbalances and dethrones 
 one's better judgment, and leaves one the prey of all evil 
 appetites that may choose to alight upon his soul. 
 There is not a place of any kind of sin in the United 
 States to-day that does not find its chief abettor in the 
 chalice of inebriacy. There is either a drinking-bar 
 before, or one behind, or one above, or one underneath. 
 The officers of the law said to me that night: "These 
 people escape legal penalty because they are all licensed 
 to sell liquor." Then I said within myself, "The courts 
 that license the sale of strong drink, license gambling- 
 houses, license libertinism, license disease, license death, 
 license all sufferings, all crimes, all despoliations, all 
 disasters, all murders, all woe. It is the conrts and the 
 Legislature that are swinging wide open this grinding, 
 creaky, stupendous gate of the lost." 
 
 But you say, "You have described these gates of hell 
 and shown us how they swing in to allow the entrance 
 of the doomed. Will you not, please, before you get 
 
THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 65 
 
 through the sermon, tell us how these gates of hell may 
 swing out to allow the escape of the penitent?" I reply, 
 but very few escape. Of the thousand that go in nine 
 hundred and ninety-nine perish. Suppose one of these 
 wanderers should knock at your door, would you admit 
 her? Suppose you knew where she came from, would 
 you ask her to sit down at your dining-table? Would 
 you ask her to become the governess of your children? 
 Would you introduce her among your acquaintanceships? 
 Would you take the responsibility of pulling on the out- 
 side of the gate of hell while she pushed on the inside of 
 that gate trying to get out? You would not, not one of 
 a thousand of you that would dare to do it. You write 
 beautiful poetry over her sorrows and w r eep over her 
 misfortunes, but give her practical help you never will. 
 There is not one person out of a thousand that will — 
 there is not one out of five thousand that has — come so 
 near the heart of the Lord' Jesus Christ as to dare to 
 help one of these fallen souls. But you say, "Are there 
 no ways by which the wanderer may escape?" Oh, yes; 
 three or four. The one way is the sewing-girl's garret, 
 dingy, cold, hunger-blasted. But you say, "Is there no 
 other way for her to escape?" Oh, yes. Another way 
 is the street that leads to the East river, at midnight, the 
 end of the city dock, the moon shining down on the 
 water making it look so smooth she wonders if it is deep 
 enough. It is. No boatman near enough to hear the 
 plunge. No watchman near enough to pick her out 
 before she sinks the third time. No other way? Yes. 
 By the curve of the Hudson River Railroad at the point 
 where the engineer of the lightning express train cannot 
 see a hundred yards ahead to the form that lies across 
 the track. He may whistle "down brakes," but not soon 
 enough to disappoint the one who seeks her death. But 
 5 
 
66 
 
 THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 you say, "Isn't God good, and won't he forgive?" Yes; 
 but man will not, woman will not, society will not. The 
 church of God says it will, but it will not. Our work, 
 then, must be prevention rather than cure. Standing here 
 telling this story to-day, it is not so much in the hope that 
 I will persuade one who has dashed down a thousand 
 feet over the rocks to crawl up again into life and light, 
 but it is to alarm those who are coming too near the 
 edges. Have you ever listened to hear the lamentation 
 that rings up from those far depths? 
 
 "Once I was pure as the snow, but [ fell, 
 Fell like a snowflake, from heaven to hell ; 
 Fell, to be trampled as filth of the street ; 
 Fell, to be scoffed at, be spit on, and beat. 
 Pleading, cursing, begging to die, 
 Selling my soul to whoever would buy ; 
 Dealing in shame for a morsel of bread, 
 Hating the living and fearing the dead." 
 
 But you say. u What can be the practical use of this 
 course of sermons?" I say, much everywhere. I am 
 greatly obliged to those gentlemen of the press who have 
 fairly reported what I have said on these occasions, and 
 the press of this city and New York, and of the other 
 prominent cities. I thank you- for the almost universal 
 fairness with which you have presented what I have had 
 to say. Of course, among the educated and refined 
 journalists who sit at these tables, and have been sitting 
 here for four or five years, there will be a fool or two 
 that does not understand his business, but that ought 
 not to discredit the grand newspaper printing-press. I 
 thank also, those who have by letters cheered me in this 
 work — letters coming from all parts of the land, from 
 Christian reformers telling me to go on in the work 
 which I have undertaken. Never so many letters in my 
 life have I received. Perhaps one out of the hundred 
 
THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 67 
 
 condemnatory, as one I got yesterday from a man who 
 said he thought my sermons would do great damage in 
 the fact that they would arouse the suspicion of domestic 
 circles as to where the head of the family was spending 
 his evenings! I was sorry it was an anonymous letter 
 for I should have written to that man's wife telling her 
 to put a detective on her husband's track, for I knew 
 right away he was going to bad places! My friends, 
 you say, " It is not possible to do anything with these 
 stalwart iniquities; you cannot wrestle them down." 
 Stupid man, read my text: "The gates of hell shall not 
 prevail against the church." Those gates of hell are to 
 be prostrated just as certainly as God and the Bible are 
 true, but it will not be done until Christian men and 
 women, quitting their prudery and squeamishness in 
 this matter, rally the whole Christian sentiment of the 
 church and assail these great evils of society. The Bible 
 utters its denunciation in this direction again and again, 
 and yet the piety of the day is such a namby-pamby, 
 emetic sort of a thing that you cannot even quote Scrip- 
 ture without making somebody restless. As long as 
 this holy imbecility reigns in the church of God, sin will 
 laugh you to scorn. I do not know but that before the 
 church wakes up matters will get worse and worse, and 
 that there will have to be one lamb sacrificed from each 
 of the most carefully-guarded folds, and the wave of 
 uncleanness dash to the spire of the village church and 
 the top of the cathedral pillar. Prophets and patriarchSj 
 and apostles and evangelists,and Christ himself have thun- 
 dered against these sins as against no other, and yet there 
 are those who think we ought to take, when we speak of 
 these subjects, a tone apologetic. I put my foot on all 
 the conventional rhetoric on this subject, and I tell you 
 plainly that unless you give up that sin your doom is 
 
68 
 
 THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 sealed, and world without end you will be chased by the 
 anathemas of an incensed God. I rally you under the 
 cheerful prophecy of the text; I rally you to a besiege- 
 ment of the gates of hell. We want in this besieg- 
 ing host no soft sentimentalists, but men who are willing 
 to give and take hard knocks. The gates of Gaza were 
 carried off, the gates of Thebes were battered down, the 
 gates of Babylon were destroyed, and the gates of hell 
 are going to be prostrated. The Christianized printing- 
 press will be rolled up as the chief battering-ram. Then 
 there will be a long list of aroused pulpits, which shall 
 be assailing fortresses, and God's red-hot truth shall be 
 the flying ammunition of the contest; and the sappers 
 and the miners will lay the train under these foundations 
 of sin, and at just the right time God, who leads on the 
 fray, will cry, " Down with the gates!" and the explo- 
 sion beneath will be answered by all the trumpets of God 
 on high celebrating universal victory. But there may be 
 in this house one wanderer that would like to have a 
 kind word calling homeward, and I cannot sit down until 
 I have uttered that word. I have told you that society 
 has no mercy. Did I hint, at an earlier point in this 
 subject, that God will have mercy upon any wanderer 
 who would like to come back to the heart of infinite 
 love? 
 
 A cold Christmas night in a farm-house. Father 
 comes in from the barn, knocks the snow from his shoes, 
 and sits down by the fire. The mother sits at the stand 
 knitting. She says to him: " Do you remember it is 
 anniversary to-night?" The father is angered. He never 
 wants any allusion to the fact that one had gone away, 
 and the mere suggestion that it was the anniversary of 
 that sad event made him quite rough, although the tears 
 ran down his cheeks. The old house-dog, that had played 
 
THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 69 
 
 with the wanderer when she was a child, came up and 
 put his head on the old man's knee, but he roughly 
 repulsed the dog. He wants nothing to remind him of 
 the anniversary day. The following incident was told me. 
 It was a cold winter night in a city church. It is Christ- 
 mas night. They have been decorating the sanctuary. A 
 lost wanderer of the street, with thin shawl about her, at- 
 tracted by the warmth and light, comes in and sits near 
 the door. The minister of religion is preaching or' Him 
 who was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for 
 our iniquities, and the poor soul by the door said: "Why, 
 that must mean me; 'mercy for the chief of sinners; 
 bruised for our iniquities ; wounded for our transgres- 
 sions.' " The music that night in the sanctuary brought 
 back the old hymn which she used to sing when with 
 father and mother she worshiped God in the village 
 church. The service over, the minister went down the 
 aisle. She said to him: " Were those words for me? 
 * Wounded for our transgressions.' Was that for me?" 
 The man of God understood her not. He knew not 
 how to comfort a shipwrecked soul, and he passed on and 
 he passed out. The poor wanderer followed into the 
 street. "What are you doing here, Meg?" said the 
 police. u What are you doing here to-night?" "Oh!" 
 she replied, " I was in to warm myself;" and then the 
 rattling cough came, and she held to the railing until 
 the paroxysm was over. She passed on down the street, 
 falling from exhaustion; recovering herself again, until 
 after a while she reached the outskirts of the city and 
 passed on into the country road. It seemed so familiar, 
 she kept on the road, and she saw in the distance a light 
 in the window. Ah! that light had been gleaming there 
 every night since she went away. On that country 
 road she passed until she came to the garden gate. She 
 
70 
 
 THE GATES OF HELL. 
 
 opened it and passed up the path where she played in 
 childhood. She came to the steps and looked in at the 
 fire on the hearth. Then she put her fingers to the latch. 
 Oh! if that door had been locked she would have per- 
 ished on the threshold, for she was near to death. But 
 that door had not been locked since the time she went 
 away. She pushed open the door. She went in and laid 
 down on the hearth by the fire. The old house-dog 
 growled as he saw her enter, but there was something in 
 the voice he recognized, and he frisked about her until 
 he almost pushed her down in 'his joy. In the morning 
 the mother came down, and she saw a bundle of rags on 
 the hearth; but when the face was uplifted, she knew it, 
 and it was no more old Meg of the street. Throwing 
 her arms around the returned prodigal, she cried, "Oh! 
 Maggie." The child threw her arms around her mother's 
 neck, and said: ''Oh! Mother," and while they were 
 embraced a rugged form towered above them. It was 
 the father. The severity all gone out of his face, he 
 stooped and took her up tenderly and carried her to 
 mother's room, and laid her down on mother's bed, for 
 she was dying. Then the lost one, looking up into her 
 mother's face, said: " 'Wounded for our transgressions 
 and bruised for our iniquities!" Mother, do you think 
 that means me ?" " Oh, yes, my darling," said the 
 mother, " if mother is so glad to get you back, don't you 
 think God is glad to get you back?" And there she 
 lay dying, and all her dreams and all her prayers were 
 filled with the words, "Wounded for our transgressions, 
 bruised for our iniquities," until just before the moment 
 of her departure, her face lighted up, showing the pardon 
 of God had dropped upon her soul. And there she slept 
 away on the bosom of a pardoning Jesus. So the Lord 
 took back one whom the world rejected. 
 
WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 
 
 7] 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 WHOM I SAW AXD WHOM I MISSED. 
 
 "And the vale of Siddim. was full of slime-pits."— Genesis xiv-. 10. 
 About six months ago, a gentleman in Augusta, Geor- 
 gia, wrote me asking me to preach from this text, and 
 the time has come for the subject. The neck of an army 
 had been broken by falling into these half-hidden slime- 
 pits. How deep they were, or how vile, or how hard to 
 get out of, we are not told; but the whole scene is so far 
 distant in the past that we have not half as much inter- 
 est in this statement of the text as we have in the 
 announcement that our American cities are full of slime- 
 pits, and tens of thousands of people are falling in them 
 night by night. Recently, in the name of God, I ex- 
 plored some of these slime-pits. Why did I do so? In 
 April last, seated in the editorial rooms of one of the 
 chief daily newspapers of Xew York, the editor said to 
 me: *'Mr. Talmage, you clergymen are at great disad- 
 vantage when you come to battle iniquity, for you don't 
 know what you are talking about, and we laymen are 
 aware of the fact that you don't know of what you are 
 talking; now, if you would like to make a personal inves- 
 tigation, I will see that you shall get the highest official 
 escort." I thanked him, accepted the invitation, and 
 told him that this autumn I would begin the tour. The 
 fact was that I had for a long time wanted to say some 
 words of warning and invitation to che young men of 
 this country, and I felt if my course of sermons was 
 preceded by a tour of this sort I should not only be bet- 
 
72 
 
 WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 
 
 ter acquainted with the subject, but I should have the 
 whole country for an audience; and it has been a delib- 
 erate plan of my ministry, whenever I am going to try 
 to do anything especial for God, or humanity, or the 
 church, to do it in such a way that the devil will always 
 advertise it free gratis for nothing! That was the reason 
 I gave two weeks' previous notice of my pulpit inten- 
 tions. The result has been satisfactory. 
 
 Standing within those purlieus of death, under the 
 command of the police and in their company, I was as 
 much surprised at the people whom I missed as at the 
 people whom I saw. I saw bankers there, and brokers 
 there, and merchants there, and men of all classes and 
 occupations who have leisure, there; but there was one 
 class of persons that I missed. I looked for them all 
 up and down the galleries, and amid the illumined 
 gardens, and all up and down the staircases of death. 
 I saw not one of them. I mean the hard-working classes, 
 the laboring classes, of our great cities. You tell me 
 they could not afford to go there. They could. Entrance, 
 twenty-five cents. They could have gone there if they 
 had a mind to; but the simple fact is that hard work is 
 a friend to good morals. The men who toil from early 
 morn until late at night when they go home are tired 
 out, and want to sit down and rest, or to saunter out with 
 their families along the street, or to pass into some quiet 
 place of amusement where they will not be ashamed to 
 take wife or daughter. The busy populations of these 
 cities are the moral populations. I observed on the 
 night of our exploration that the places of dissipation 
 are chiefly supported by the men who go to business at 
 9 and 10 o ? clock in the morning and get through at 3 
 and 4 in the afternoon. They have plenty of time to go 
 to destruction in and plenty of money to buy a through 
 
WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 
 
 73 
 
 ticket on the Grand Trunk Railroad to perdition, stop- 
 ping at no depot until they get to the eternal smash-up! 
 Those are the fortunate and divinely-blessed young men 
 who have to breakfast early and take supper late, and 
 have the entire interregnum filled up with work that blis- 
 ters the hands, and makes the legs ache and the brain 
 weary. There is no chance for the morals of that young 
 man who has plenty of money and no occupation. You, 
 may go from Central Park to the Battery, or you may 
 go from Fulton Street Ferry, Brooklyn, out to South 
 Bushwick, or out to Hunter's Point, or out to Gowanus, 
 and you will not find one young man of that kind who 
 has not already achieved his ruin, or who is not on the 
 way thereto at the rate of sixty miles the hour. Those are 
 not the favored and divinely-blessed young men who 
 come and go as they will, and who have their pocket- 
 case full of the best cigars, and who dine at Delmonico's, 
 and who dress in the tip- top of fashion, their garments 
 a little tighter or looser or broader striped than others, 
 their mustaches twisted with stiffer cosmetic, and their 
 hair redolent with costly pomatum, and have their hat 
 set farthest over on the right ear, and who have boots 
 fitting the foot with exquisite torture, and who have 
 handkerchief soaked with musk, and patchouli, and white 
 rose, and new-mown hay, and "balm of a thousand flow- 
 ers;'' but those are the fortunate young men who have 
 to work hard for a living. Give a young man plenty of 
 wines, and plenty of cigars, and plenty of fine horses, 
 and Satan has no anxiety about that man's coming out 
 at his place. He ceases to watch him, only giving direc- 
 tions about his reception when he shall arrive at the end 
 of the journey. If, on the night of our exploration, I 
 had called the roll of all the laboring men of these cities, 
 I would have received no answer, for the simple reason 
 
74 
 
 WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 
 
 they were not there to answer. I was not more surprised 
 at the people whom I saw there than I was surprised at 
 the people whom I missed. Oh! man, if you have an 
 occupation by which you are wearied every night of your 
 life, thank God, for it is the mightiest preservative 
 against evil. 
 
 But by that time the clock of old Trinity Church was 
 striking one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 
 "ten, eleven, twelve — midnight ! And with the police and 
 two elders of my church we sat down at the table in the 
 galleries and looked off upon the vortex of death. The 
 music in full blast; the dance in wildest whirl; the wine 
 foaming to the lip of the glass. Midnight on earth is 
 mid noon in hell. All the demons of the pit were at 
 that moment holding high carnival. The blue calcium 
 light suggested the burning brimstone of the pit. Seated 
 there, at that hour, in that awful place, you ask me, as I 
 have frequently been asked, "What were the emotions 
 that went through your heart?" And I shall give the 
 rest of my morning's sermon to telling you how I felt. 
 
 First of all, as at no death-bed or railroad disaster did 
 I feel an overwhelming sense of pity. Why were we 
 there as Christian explorers, while those lost souls were 
 there as participators? If they had enjoyed the same 
 healthful and Christian surroundings which we have had 
 all our days, and we had been thrown amid the contamin- 
 ations which have destroyed them, the case would have 
 been the reverse, and they would have been the specta- 
 tors and we the actors in that awful tragedy of the 
 damned. As I sat there I could not keep back the 
 tears — tears of gratitude to God for his protecting 
 grace — tears of compassion for those who had fallen so 
 low. The difference in moral navigation had been the 
 difference in the way the wind blew. The wind of temp- 
 
WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 
 
 75 
 
 tation drove them on the rocks. The wind of God's 
 mercy drove us out on a fair sea. There are men and 
 women so merciless in their criticism of the fallen that 
 you might think that God had made them in an especial 
 mold, and that they have no capacity for evil, and yet if 
 they had been subjected to the same allurements, instead 
 of stopping at the up- town haunts of iniquity, they 
 wo aid at this hour have been wallowing amid the hor- 
 rors of Arch Block, or shrieking with delirium tremens 
 in the cell of a police station. Instead of boasting over 
 your purity and your integrity and your sobriety, you 
 had better be thanking God for his grace, lest sometime 
 the Lord should let you loose and you find out how 
 much better you are than others naturally. I will take 
 the best-tempered man in this house, the most honest 
 man in this city, and I will venture the opinion in regard 
 to him that, surround him with all the adequate circum- 
 stances of temptation, and the Lord let him loose, he 
 would become a thief, a gambler, a sot, a rake, a wharf- 
 rat. Instead of boasting over our superiority, and over 
 the fact that there is no capacity in us of evil, I would 
 rather have for my epitaph that one word which Duncan 
 Matthewson, the Scotch evangelist, ordered chiseled on 
 his tombstone, the name, and the one word, "Kept." 
 
 Again : Seated in that gallery of death, and looking 
 out on that maelstrom of iniquity, I thought to myself, 
 "There! that young man was once the pride of the city 
 home. Paternal care watched him ; maternal love bent 
 over him; sisterly affection surrounded him. He was 
 once taken to the altar and consecrated in the name 
 of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy 
 Ghost; but he went away. This very moment, 
 I thought to myself, there are hearts aching for that 
 young man's return. Father and mother are sitting up 
 
76 
 
 WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 
 
 for him." You say, "He lias a night-key, and he can 
 get in without their help. Why do not 'those parents 
 go sound to sleep?" What! Is there any sleep for 
 parents who suspect a son is drifting up and down amid 
 the dissipations of a great city ? They may weep, they 
 may pray, they may wring their hands, but sleep they 
 cannot. All! they have done and suffered too much for 
 that boy to give him up now. They turn up the light 
 and look at the photograph of him when he was young 
 and untempted. They stand at the window to see if he 
 is coming up the street. They hear the watchman's 
 rattle, but no sound of returning boy. I felt that night 
 as if I could put my hand on the shoulder of that young 
 man, and, with a voice that would sound all through 
 those temples of sin, say to him, "Go home, young man; 
 your father is waiting for you. Your mother is waiting 
 for you. God is waiting for you. All heaven is wait- 
 ing for you. Go home! By the tears wept over your 
 waywardness, by the prayers offered for your salvation, 
 by the midnight watching over you when you had scarlet 
 fever and diphtheria, by the blood of the Son of God, by 
 the judgment day when you must give answer for what 
 you have been doing here to-night, go home!" But I did 
 not say this, lest it interfere with my work, and I waited 
 to get on this platform, where, perhaps, instead of saving 
 one young man, God helping me, I might save a thousand 
 young men; and the cry of alarm which I suppressed 
 that night, I let loose to-day in the hearing of this 
 people. 
 
 Seated in that gallery of death, and looking off upon 
 the destruction, I bethought myself also, "These are 
 the fragments of broken homes." A home is a com- 
 plete thing, and if one member of it wander off, then the 
 home is broken. And sitting there, I said: "Here they 
 
WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 77 
 
 are, broken family altars, broken wedding-rings, broken 
 vows, broken anticipations, broken hearts." And, as I 
 looked off, the dance became wilder and more unre- 
 strained, until it seemed as if the floor broke through 
 and the revelers were plunged into a depth from which 
 they may never rise, and all these broken families came 
 around the brink and seemed to cry out: " Come back, 
 father! Come back, mother! Come back, my son! Come 
 back, my daughter ! Come back, my sister !" But no voices 
 returned, and the sound of the feet of the dancers grew 
 fainter and fainter, and stopped, and there was thick 
 darkness. And I said, "What does all this mean?" 
 And there came up a great hiss of whispering voices, 
 saying, " This is the second death!" 
 
 But seated there that night, looking off upon that 
 scene of death, I bethought myself also, " This is only a 
 miserable copy of European dissipations." In London 
 they have what they call the Argyle, the Cremorne, the 
 Strand, the beer-gardens, and a thousand places of 
 infamy, and it seems to be the ambition of bad people 
 in this country to copy those foreign dissipations. Toady- 
 ism when it bows to foreign pretense and to foreign 
 equipage and to foreign title is despicable; but toadyism 
 is more despicable when it bows to foreign vice. Why, 
 you might as well steal the pillow-ease of a small-pox 
 hospital, or the shovels of a scavenger's cart, or the 
 cofiin of a leper, as to make theft of these foreign plagues. 
 If you want to destroy the people, have some originality 
 of destruction ; have an American trap to catch the 
 bodies and souls of men, instead of infringing on the 
 patented inventions of European iniquity. 
 
 Seated there that night, I also felt that if the good 
 people of our cities knew what was going on in these 
 haunts of iniquity, they would endure it no longer. 
 
78 WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 
 
 The foundations of city life are rotten with iniquity, 
 and if the foundations give way the whole structure 
 must crumble. If iniquity progresses in the next one 
 hundred years in the same ratio that it has pro- 
 gressed in the century now closed, there will not be 
 a vestige of moral or religious influence left. It is only 
 a question of subtraction and addition. If the people 
 knew how the virus is spreading they would stop it. I 
 think the time has come for action. I wish that the next 
 Mayor of New York whether he be Augustus Schell or 
 Edward Cooper, may rise up to the height of this posi- 
 tion. Revolution is what we want, and that revolution 
 would begin to-morrow if the moral and Christian peo- 
 ple of our cities knew of the fires that slumber beneath 
 them. Once in a while a glorious city missionary or 
 reformer like Mr. Brace or Mr. Yan Meter tells to a 
 well-dressed audience in church the troubles that lie 
 under our roaring metropolis, and the conventional 
 church-goer gives his five dollars for bread, or gives his 
 fifty dollars to help support a ragged school, and then 
 goes home feeling that the work is done. Oh! my 
 friends, the work will not be accomplished until by the 
 force of public opinion the officers of the law shall be 
 compelled to execute the law. "We are told that the 
 twenty-five hundred police of New York cannot put 
 down the five or six hundred dens of infamy, to say 
 nothing of the gambling-houses and the unlicensed grog- 
 shops. I reply, swear me in as a special police and give 
 me two hundred police for two nights, and I would 
 break up all the leading haunts of iniquity in these two 
 cities, and arrest all their leaders and send such conster- 
 nation in the smaller places that they would shut up of 
 themselves! I do not think I should be afraid of law- 
 suits for damages for false imprisonment. What we 
 
WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 
 
 79 
 
 want in these cities is a Stonewall Jackson's raid through 
 all the places of iniquity. I was persuaded by what I 
 saw on that night of my exploration that -the keepers of 
 all these haunts of iniquity are as afraid as they are of 
 death of the police star, and the police club, and the 
 police revolver. Hence, I declare that the existence of 
 these abominations are to be charged either to police 
 cowardice or to police complicity. 
 
 At the close of our journey that night, we got in the 
 carriage, and we came out on Broadway, and as we came 
 down the street everything seemed silent save the clatter- 
 ing hoofs and the wheels of our own conveyance. Look- 
 ing down the long line of gaslights, the pavement seemed 
 very solitary. The great sea of metropolitan life had 
 ebbed, leaving a dry beach! New York asleep! No! no! 
 Burglary wide awake. Libertinism wide awake. Mur- 
 der wide awake. Ten thousand city iniquities wide 
 awake. The click of the decanters in the worst hours of 
 the debauch. The harvest of death full. Eternal woe 
 the reaper. 
 
 What is that I Trinity clock striking, one — two. 
 "Good night/' said the officers of the law, and I re- 
 sponded "good night," for they had been very kind, and 
 very generous and very helpful to us. "Good night." 
 And yet, was there ever an adjective more misapplied \ 
 Good night! Why, there was no expletive enough 
 scarred and blasted to describe that night. Black night. 
 Forsaken night. Night of man's wickedness and woman's 
 overthrow. Night of awful neglect on the part of those 
 who might help but do not. For many of those whom 
 we had been watching, everlasting night. No hope. 
 No rescue. No God. Black night of darkness forever. 
 As far off as hell is from heaven was that night distant 
 from being a good night. Oh, my friends, what^are you 
 
80 
 
 WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 
 
 going to do in this matter ? Punish the people ? That 
 is not my theory. Prevent the people, warn the people, 
 hinder the people before they go down. The first phi- 
 lanthropist this country ever knew was Edward Living- 
 ston, and he wrote these remarkable words in 1833: 
 
 " As prevention in the diseases of the body is less painful, less ex- 
 pensive, and more efficacious than the most skillful cure, so in the 
 moral maladies of society, to arrest the vicious before the profligacy 
 assumes the shape of crime, to take away from the poor the cause or 
 pretense of relieving themselves by fraud or theit, to reform them by 
 education, and make their own industry contribute to their support, 
 although difficult and expensive, will be found more effectual inthe 
 suppression of offenses, and more economical, than the best organized 
 system of punishment." 
 
 Next Sabbath morning I shall tell you of my second 
 night of exploration. I have only opened the door of 
 this great subject with which I hope to stir the cities. 
 I have begun, and, God helping me, I will go through. 
 Whoever else may be crowded or kept standing, or kept 
 outside the doors, I charge the trustees and the ushers 
 of this church that they give full elbow-room to all these 
 journalists, since each one is another church five times, 
 or ten times, or twenty times larger than this august 
 assemblage, and it is by the printing-press that the Gos- 
 pel of the Son of God is to be yet preached to all the 
 world. May the blessing of the Lord God come down 
 upon all the editors, and all the reporters, and all the 
 compositors, and all the proof-readers, and all the type- 
 setters ! 
 
 But, my friends, before the iniquities of our cities 
 are closed, my tongue may be silent in death, and 
 many who are here this morning may have gone so far 
 in sin they cannot get back. You have sometimes been 
 walking on the banks of a river, and you have seen a 
 man struggling in the water, and you have thrown off 
 
WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 81 
 
 your coat and leaped in for the rescue. So this morning 
 I throw off the robe of pulpit conventionality, and I 
 plunge in for your drowning soul. I have no cross 
 words for you. I have only cross words for those who 
 would destroy you. I am glad God has not put in my 
 hand any one of the thunderbolts of His power, lest I 
 might be tempted to hurl it at those who are plotting 
 your ruin. I do not give you the tip end of the lo g 
 fingers of the left hand, but I take your hand, hot with 
 the fever of indulgences and trembling with last night's 
 debauch, into both my hands, and give the heartiest 
 grip of invitation and welcome. " Oh," you say, " you 
 would not shake hands with me if you met me." I 
 would. Try me at the foot of this platform and see if I 
 will not. I have sometimes said that I would like to die 
 with my hand in the hand of my family and my kin- 
 dred; but I revoke that wish this morning and say I 
 would like to die with my hand in the hand of a return- 
 ing sinner, when, with God's help, I am trying to pull 
 him up into the glorious liberty of the Gospel. I would 
 like that to be my last work on earth. Oh! my brother, 
 come back! Do you know that God made Richard Bax- 
 ters and John Bunyans and Robert Newtonsout of such 
 as you are? Come back! and wash in the deep fountain 
 of a Savior's mercy. I do not give you a cup, or a chal- 
 ice, or a pitcher with a limited supply to effect your ab- 
 lutions. I point you to the five oceans of God's mercy. 
 Oh! that the Atlantic and Pacific surges of divine for- 
 giveness might roll over your soul. I do not say to you, 
 as we said to the officers of the law when we left them 
 on Broadway, ''Good night." Oh, no. But, as the 
 glorious sun of God's forgiveness rides on toward the 
 mid heavens, ready to submerge you in warmth and 
 light and love, I bid you good morning! Morn^g of 
 6 
 
82 
 
 WHOM T SAW, AND WHOM T MTSSED. 
 
 peace for all jour troubles. Morning of liberation for 
 all your incarcerations. Morning of resurrection for 
 jour soul buried in sin. Good morning! Morning for 
 the resuscitated household that has been waiting for 
 jour return. Morning for the cradle and the crib 
 alreadj disgraced with being that of a drunkard's child. 
 Morning for the daughter that has trudged off to hard 
 work because 3*011 did not take care of home. Morning 
 for the wife who at forty or fifty jears has the wrinkled 
 face, and the stooped shoulder, and the white hair. Morn- 
 ing for one. Morning for all. Good morning ! In 
 God's name, good morning. 
 
 In our last dreadful war the Federals and the Con- 
 federates were encamped on opposite sides of the Rappa- 
 hannock, and one morning the brass band of the North- 
 ern troops plajed the national air, and all the Northern 
 troops cheered and cheered. Then on the opposite side 
 of the Rappahannock the brass band of the Confederates 
 played Mj Maryland" and " Dixie," and then all the 
 Southern troops cheered and cheered. But after awhile 
 one of the bands struck up " Home, Sweet Home," and 
 the band on the opposite side of the river took up the 
 strain, and when the tune was done the Confederates 
 and the Federals all together united, as the tears rolled 
 down their cheeks, in one great huzza! huzza! Well, 
 my friends, heaven comes very near to-daj. It is only 
 a stream that divides us — the narrow stream of death — 
 and the voices there and the voices here seem to com- 
 mingle, and we join trumpets, aud hosannahs, and halle- 
 lujahs, and the chorus of the united song of earth and 
 heaven is, " Home, Sweet Home." Home of bright 
 domestic circle on earth. Home of forgiveness in the 
 great heart of God. Home of eternal rest in heaven. 
 Home! Home! Home! 
 
CHAPTER Y. 
 
 UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 The destruction of the poor is their poverty. — Proverbs x : 15. 
 
 On an island nine miles long by two and a half wide 
 stands the largest city on this continent — a city mightiest 
 for virtue and for vice. Before I get through with this 
 6eries of Sabbath morning discourses, I shall show you 
 the midnoon of its magnificent progress and philan- 
 thropy, as well as the midnight of its crime and sin. 
 Twice in every twenty-four hours our City Hall and old 
 Trinity clocks strike twelve — once while business and 
 art are in full blast, and once while iniquity is doing its 
 uttermost. Both stories must be told. It is pleasanter 
 to put on a plaster than to thrust in a probe; but it is 
 absurd to propose remedies for disease until we have 
 taken a diagnosis of that disease. The patient may 
 squirm and cringe, and fight back, and resist; but the 
 surgeon must go on. Before I get through with these 
 Sabbath morning sermons, I shall make you all smile at 
 the beautiful things I will say about the grandeur and 
 beneficence of this cluster of cities; but my work now is 
 excavation and exposure. I have as much amusement 
 as any man of my profession can afford to indulge in at 
 any one time, in seeing some of the clerical "reformers" 
 of this day mount their war- charger, dig in their spurs, 
 and with glittering lance dash down upon the iniquities 
 of cities that have been three or four thousand years 
 dead. These men will corner an old sinner of twenty or 
 thirty centuries ago, and scalp him, and hang him, and 
 83 
 
 ; 
 
84 
 
 UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 cut him to pieces, and then say: " Oh! what great things 
 have been done." With amazing prowess, they throw 
 sulphur at Sodom, and fire at Gomorrah, and worms at 
 Herod, and pitch Jezebel over the wall, but wipe off their 
 gold spectacles, and put on their best kid gloves, and 
 unroll their morocco-covered sermon, and look bashful 
 when they begin to speak about the sins of our day, as 
 though it were a shame even to mention them. The 
 hypocrites! They are afraid of the libertines and the 
 men who drink too much, in their churches, and those 
 who grind the face of the poor. Better, I say, clear out 
 all our audiences from pulpit to storm-door, until no one 
 is left but the sexton, and he staying merely to lock up, 
 than to have the pulpit afraid of the pew. The time has 
 come when the living Judases and Herods and Jezebels 
 are to be arraigned. There is one thing I like about a 
 big church; a dozen people may get mad about the truth 
 and go off, and you don't know they are gone until about 
 the next year. The cities standing on the ground are 
 the cities to be reformed, and not the Herculaneums 
 buried under volcanic ashes, or the cities of the plain 
 fifty feet under the Dead Sea. 
 
 I unroll the scroll of new revelations. With city mis- 
 sionary, and the police of New York and Brooklyn, I 
 have seen some things that I have not yet stated in this 
 series of discourses on the night side of city life. The 
 night of which I speak now is darker than any other. 
 No glittering chandelier, no blazing mirror adorns it. It 
 is the long, deep exhaustive night of city pauperism. 
 "We won't want a carriage to-night," said the detectives. 
 a A carriage would hinder us in our work; a carriage 
 going through the streets where we are going would only 
 bring out the people to see what was the matter." So on 
 foot we went up the dark lanes of poverty. Everything 
 
UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 85 
 
 revolting to eye, and ear, and nostril. Population un- 
 washed, uncombed. Rooms unventilated. Three mid- 
 nights overlapping each other — midnight of the natural 
 world, midnight of crime, midnight of pauperism. Stairs 
 oozing with filth. The inmates, nine-tenths of the jour- 
 ney to their final doom, traveled. They started in some 
 unhappy home of the city or of the country. They 
 plunged into the shambles of death within ten minutes' 
 walk of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, and then 
 came on gradually down until they have arrived at the 
 Fourth Ward. When they move out of the Fourth 
 Ward they will move into Bellevue Hospital; when they 
 move out of Bellevue Hospital they will move to Black- 
 well's Island; when they move from Blackwell's Island 
 they will move to the Potter's Field; when they move 
 from the Potter's Field they will move into hell! Belle- 
 vue Hospital and Blackwell's Island take care of 18,000 
 patients in one year. As we passed on, the rain pattering 
 on the street and dripping around the doorways made 
 the night more dismal. I said, " Xow let the police go 
 ahead," and they flashed their light, and there were four- 
 teen persons trying to sleep, or sleeping, in one room- 
 Some on a bundle of straw; more with nothing under 
 them and nothing over them. "Oh!" yon say, "this is 
 exceptional." It is not. Thousands lodge in that way. 
 One hundred and seventy thousand families living in 
 tenement houses, in more or less inconvenience, more or 
 less squalor. Half a million people in New York city — 
 five hundred thousand people living in tenement-houses; 
 multitudes of these people dying by inches. Of the 
 twenty-four thousand that die yearly in 2s ew York four- 
 teen thousand die in tenement-houses. No lungs that 
 God ever made could for a long while stand the at- 
 mosphere we breathed for a little while. In the Fourth 
 
86 
 
 UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 Ward, 17,000 people within the space of thirty acres. 
 You say, "Why not clear them out? Why not, as at 
 Liverpool, where 20,000 of these people were cleared out 
 of the city, and the city saved from a moral pestilence, 
 and the people themselves from being victimized?" 
 There will be no reformation for these cities until the 
 tenement-house system is entirely broken up. The city 
 authorities will have to buy farms, and will have to put 
 these people on those farms, and compel them to work. 
 By the strong arm of the law, by the police lantern con- 
 joined with Christian charity, these places must be ex- 
 posed and must be uprooted. Those places in London 
 which have become historical for crowded populations — 
 St. Giles, Whitechapel, Holborn, the Strand — have their 
 match at last in the Sixth Ward, Eleventh Ward, Four- 
 teenth Ward, Seventeenth Ward of New York. No 
 purification for our cities until each family shall have 
 something of the privacy and seclusion of a home circle. 
 As long as they herd like beasts, they will be beasts. 
 
 Hark! What is that heavy thud on the wet pavement? 
 Why, that is a drunkard who has fallen, his head striking 
 against the street — striking very hard. The police try 
 to lift him up. Ring the bell for the city ambulance. 
 No. Only an outcast, only a tatterdemalion — a heap of 
 sores and rags. But look again. Perhaps he has some 
 marks of manhood on his face; perhaps he may have 
 been made in the image of God; perhaps he has a soul 
 which will live after the dripping heavens of this dismal 
 night have been rolled together as a scroll; perhaps he 
 may have been died for, by a king; perhaps he may yet 
 be a conqueror charioted in the splendors of heavenly 
 welcome. But we must pass on. We cross the street, 
 and, the rain beating in his face, lies a man entirely un- 
 conscious. I wonder where he came from. I wonder if 
 
UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 87 
 
 any one is waiting for him. I wonder if he was ever 
 rocked in a Christian cradle. I wonder if that gashed 
 and bloated forehead was ever kissed by a fond mother's 
 lips. I wonder if he is stranded for eternity. But we 
 cannot stop. We passed on down, the air loaded with 
 blasphemies and obscenities, until I heard something 
 that astounded me more than all. I said, "What is 
 that?" It was a loud, enthusiastic Christian song, rolling 
 out on the stormy air. I went up to the window and 
 looked in. There was a room filled with all sorts of 
 people, some standing, some kneeling, some sitting, some 
 singing, some praying, some shaking hands as if to give 
 encouragement, some wringing their hands as though 
 over a wasted life. What was this? Oh! it was Jerry 
 McAuley's glorious Christian mission. There he stood, 
 himself snatched from death, snatching others from death. 
 That scene paid for all the nausea and fatigue of the mid- 
 night exploration. Our tears fell with the rain — tears 
 of sympathy for a good man's work; tears of gratitude 
 to God that one lifeboat had been launched on that wild 
 sea of sin and death; tears of hope that there might be 
 lifeboats enough to take off all the wrecked, and, that, 
 after a while, the Church of God, rousing from its fas- 
 tidiousness, might lay hold with both hands of this 
 work, which must be done if our cities are not to go 
 down in darkness and fire and blood. 
 
 This cluster of cities have more difficulty than any 
 other cities in all the land. You must understand that 
 within the last twenty- eight years five millions of for- 
 eign population have arrived at our port. The most of 
 those who had capital and means passed on to the greater 
 openings at the West. Many however, stayed and have be- 
 come our best citizens, and best members of our churches; 
 but we know also that, tarrying within our borders, there 
 
88 
 
 UNDER THE POLICE ULNTEKN. 
 
 has been a vast criminal population ready to be manipu- 
 lated by the demagogue, ready to hatch out all kinds of 
 criminal desperation. The vagrancy and the beggary 
 of our cities, augmented by the very worst populations 
 of London and Edinburg, and Glasgow, and Berlin, and 
 Belfast, and Dublin and Cork. We had enough vaga- 
 bondage, and enough turpitude in our American cities 
 before this importation of sin was dumped at Castle 
 Garden. Oh! this pauperism, when will it ever be alle- 
 viated? How much we saw! How much we could not 
 see! How much none but the eye of Almighty God 
 will ever see! Flash the lantern of the police around to 
 that station-house. There they come up, the poor crea- 
 tures, tipping their torn hats, saying, " Night's lodging, 
 sir?" And then they are waived away into the dormi- 
 tories. One hundred and forty thousand such lodgers 
 in the city of New York every year. The atmosphere 
 unbearable. What pathos in the fact that many families 
 turned out of doors because they cannot pay their rent, 
 come in here for shelter, and after struggling for decency, 
 and struggling for a good name, are flung into this 
 loathsome pool. The respectable and the reprobate. In- 
 nocent childhood and vicious old age. The Lord's poor 
 and Satan's desperadoes. There is no report of alms- 
 house and missionary that will ever tell the story of New 
 York and Brooklyn pauperism. It will take a larger 
 book, a book with more ponderous lids, a book made of 
 p:iper other than that of earthly manufacture. The book 
 of God's remembrance! At my basement door we aver- 
 age between fifty and one hundred calls every day for 
 help. Beside that, in my reception room, from 7 o'clock 
 in the morning until 10 o'clock at night, there is a con- 
 tinuous procession of people applying for aid, making a 
 demand which an old-fashioned silken purse, caught at 
 
UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 89 
 
 the middle with a ring, the wealth of Vanderbilt in one 
 end and the wealth of William B. Astor in the other end, 
 could not satisfy. Of coarse, I speak of those men's 
 wealth while they lived. We have more money now than 
 they have since they have their shroud on. But even 
 the shroud and the grave, we find, are to be contested for. 
 Cursed be the midnight jackals of St. Mark's Church- 
 yard! But I must go on with the fact that the story of 
 Brooklyn and Xew York pauperism needs to be written 
 in ink, black, blue and red — blue for the stripes, red for 
 the blood, black for the infamy. In this cluster of cities 
 20,000 people supported by the bureau for the outdoor 
 sick; 20,000 people taken care of by the city hospitals; 
 70,000 provided for by private charity ; 80,000 taken care 
 of by reformatory institutions and prisons. Hear it, ye 
 churches, and pour out your benefaction. Hear it, you 
 ministers of religion, and utter words of sympathy for 
 the suffering, and thunders of indignation against the 
 cause of all this wretchedness. Hear it, mayoralties and 
 judicial bench, and constabularies. Unless we wake up, 
 the Lord will scourge us as the vellow fever never 
 scourged New Orleans, as the plague never smote Lon- 
 don, as the earthquake never shook Carraccas, as the fire 
 never overwhelmed Sodom. I wish I could throw a bomb- 
 shell of arousal into every city hall, meeting-house and 
 cathedral on the continent. The factories at Fall River 
 and at Lowell sometimes stop for lack of demand, and for 
 lack of workmen, but this million-roomed factory of sin 
 and death never stops, never slackens a band, never ar- 
 rests a spindle. The great wheel of that factory keeps 
 on turning, not by such floods as those of the Merrimac or 
 the Connecticut, but crimson Hoods rushing forth from 
 the groggeries, and the wine-cellars, and the drinking 
 saloons of the land, and the faster the floods rush the 
 
90 
 
 UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 faster the wheel turns; and the band of that wheel is 
 woven from broken heart-strings, and every time the 
 wheel turns, from the mouth of the mill come forth 
 blasted estates, squalor, vagrancy, crime, sin, woe — 
 individual woe, municipal woe, national woe — and the 
 creaking and the rumbling of the wheels are the shrieks 
 and the groans of men and women lost for two worlds, 
 and the cry is, "Bring on more fortunes,more homes, more 
 States, more cities, to make up the awful grist of this stu- 
 pendous mill." "Oh," you say, "the wretchedness and 
 the sin of the city will go out from lack of material after 
 awhile." No, it will not. The police lantern flashes in 
 another direction. Here come 15,000 shoeless, hatless, 
 homeless children of the street, in this cluster of cities. 
 They are the reserve corps of this great army of wretch- 
 edness and crime that are dropping down into the Morgue, 
 the East river, the Potter's Field, the prison. A phi- 
 lanthropist has estimated that if these children were 
 placed in a great procession, double-file, three feet apart, 
 they would make a procession eleven miles long. Oh! 
 what a pale, coughing, hunger-bitten, sin-cursed, opthal- 
 mic throng — the tigers, the adders, the scorpions ready 
 to bite and sting society, which they take to be their 
 natural enemy. Howard Mission has saved many. Chil- 
 dren's Aid Society has saved many. Industrial Schools 
 have saved many. One of these societies transported 
 30,000 children from the streets of our cities, to farms 
 at the West, by a stratagem of charit}', turning them from 
 vagrancy into useful citizenship, and out of 21,000 chil- 
 dren thus transported from the cities to farm? only 
 twelve turned out badly. But still the reserve corps of 
 sin and wretchedness marches on. There is the regi- 
 ment of boot-blacks. They seem jolly, but they have 
 more sorrow than many an old man has had. All kinds 
 
UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 91 
 
 of temptation. Working on, making two or three dol- 
 lars a week. At fifteen years of age sixty years old in 
 sin. Pitching pennies at the street corners. Smoking 
 fragments of castaway cigars. Tempted by the gamblers. 
 Destroyed by the top gallery in the low play house. 
 Blacking shoes their regular business. Between times 
 blackening their morals. "Shine your boots, sir?" they 
 call out with merry voices, but there is a tremor in their 
 accentuation. Who cares for them? You put your foot 
 thoughtlessly on their stand, and you whistled or 
 smoked, when God knows you might have given them 
 one kind word. They never had one. Whoever prayed 
 for a bootblack? Who, finding the wind blowing under 
 the short jacket, or reddening his bare neck, ever asked 
 him to warm? Who, when he is wronged out of his ten 
 cents, demands justice for him? God have mercy on 
 the bootblacks. The newsboys, another regiment — the 
 smartest boys in all the city. At work at four o'clock in 
 the morning. At half-past three, by unnatural vigilance, 
 awake themselves, or pulled at by rough hands. In the 
 dawn of the day standing before the folding-rooms of 
 the great newspapers, taking the wet, damp sheets over 
 their arms, and against their chests already shivering 
 with the cold. Around the bleak ferries, and up and 
 down the streets on the cold days, singing as merrily as 
 though it were a Christmas carol; making half a cent 
 on each paper, some of them working fourteen hours for 
 fifty cents! Nine thousand of these newsboys applied 
 for aid at the Newsboys' Lodging-house on Park place, 
 New York, in one year. About one thousand of them 
 laid up in the savings bank connected with that institu- 
 tion, a little more than $3,000. But still this great 
 army marches on, hungry, cold, sick, toward an early 
 grave, or a quick prison. I tell you there is nothing 
 
92 
 
 UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 that so moves my compassion as on a cold winter morn- 
 ing to see one of these newsboys, a fourth clad, newspa- 
 pers on his arm that he cannot seem to sell, face or hands 
 bleeding from a fall, or rubbing his knee to relieve it 
 from having been hit on the side of a car, as some ''gen- 
 tleman," with furs around his neck and gauntlets lined 
 with lamb's wool, shoved him off, saying: "You miser- 
 able rat!" Yet hawking the papers through the streets, 
 papers full of railroad accidents and factory explosions, 
 and steamers foundering at sea in the last storm, yet say- 
 ing nothing, and that which is to him worse than all the 
 other calamities and all the other disasters, the calamity 
 that he was ever born at all. Flash the police lantern 
 around, and let us see these poor lads cuddled up under 
 the stairway. Look at them! Now for a little while 
 they are unconscious of all their pains and aches, and of 
 the storm and darkness, once in awhile struggling in 
 their dreams as though some one were trying to take the 
 papers away from them. Standing there I wondered if 
 it would be right to wish that they might never wake up. 
 God pity them! There are other regiments in this 
 reserve corps — regiments of rag-pickers, regiments of 
 match-sellers, regiments of juvenile vagrants. Oh! if 
 these lads are not saved, what is to become of our cities? 
 
 But I said to the detective, "I have had enough of this 
 <o-night; let us go." But by that time I had lost the 
 points of the compass, for we had gone down stairways 
 and up stairways, and wandered down through this street 
 and that street, and all I knew was that I was bounded 
 on the north by want, and on the south by squalor, and 
 on the east by crime, and on the west by despair. The 
 fact was that everything had opened before us; for these 
 detectives pretended to be searching for a thief, and they 
 took me along as the man who had lost the property! 
 
UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 93 
 
 The stratagem was theirs, riot mine. But I thought 
 coming home that rainy night, I wished I could make 
 pass before my congregation, as in a panorama, all that 
 scene of suffering, that I might stir their pity and arouse 
 their beneficence, and make them the everlasting friends 
 of city evangelization. "Why," you say, "I had no 
 idea things were so bad. Why, I get in my carriage at 
 Forty-fifth street and I ride clear down to my banking- 
 house in Wall street, and I don't see anything." No, 
 you do not want to see! The King and the Parliament 
 of England did not know that there were thirty-six bar- 
 rels of gunpowder rolled into the vaults under the Par- 
 liament House. They did not know Guy Fawkes had 
 his touchwood and matches all ready — ready to dash the 
 Government of England into atoms. The conspiracy 
 was revealed, however. I tell you I have explored the 
 vaults of city life, and I am here this morning to tell 
 you that there are deathful and explosive influences under 
 all our cities, ready to destroy us with a great moral con- 
 vulsion. Some men say: "I don't see anything of this, 
 and I am not interested in it." You ought to be. You 
 remind me of a man who has been shipwrecked with a. 
 thousand others. lie happens to get up on the shore, 
 and the others are all down in the surf. He goes up in 
 a fisherman's cabin, and sits down to warm himself. The 
 fisherman says: "Oh! this won't do. Come out and 
 help me to get these others out of the surf." "Oh, no!" 
 says the man; "it's my business now to warm myself." 
 "But," says the fisherman, "these men are dying; are 
 yon not going to give them help?" "Oh, no! I've got 
 ashore myself, and I must warm myself!" That is what 
 people are doing in the church to-day. A great multi- 
 tude are out in the surf of sin and death, going down 
 forever; but men sit by the fire of the church, warming 
 
94 
 
 UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 their Christian graces, warming their faith, warming 
 their hope for heaven, and I say, "Come out, and work 
 to-day for Christ." "Oh, no," they say; "my sublime 
 duty is to warm myself!" Such men as that will not 
 come within ten thousand miles of heaven! Help for- 
 eign missions. Those of my own blood are toiling in 
 foreign lands with Christ's Word. Send a million dol- 
 lars for the salvation of the heathen — that is right — but 
 look after the heathen also around the mouths of the 
 Hudson and East rivers. Send missionaries if you will 
 to Borioboola-gha, but send missionaries also through 
 Houston street, Mercer street, Greene street, Navy street, 
 Fulton street, and all around about Brooklyn Atlantic 
 Docks. If you will, send quilted coverlets to Central 
 Africa to keep the natives warm in summer-time, and 
 send ice-cream freezers to Greenland, but do have a little 
 common sense and practical charity, and help these cities 
 here that want hats, want clothes, want shoes, want fire, 
 want medicines, want instruction, want the Gospel, want 
 Christ. 
 
 I must adjourn to another Sabbath morning much of 
 what I have to say in regard to this city midnight ex- 
 ploration, and also the proposing of remedies; for I am 
 not the man to stand here Sabbath by Sabbath talking of 
 ills when I have no panacea. There is an almighty res- 
 cue for the city, and in due time I will speak of these 
 things. 
 
 You have seen often a magic lantern. You have seen 
 the room darkened, and then the magic lantern throwing 
 a picture on the canvas. Well, this morning I wish I 
 could darken these three great emblazoned windows, and 
 have all the doors darkened, and then I could bring out 
 two magic lanterns — the magic lantern of the home, and 
 the magic lantern of the police. Here is the magic lau- 
 
UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 95 
 
 tern of the home. Look now upon the canvas. Mother 
 putting the little children to bed, trying to hush the 
 frisky and giggling group for the evening prayer; their 
 foreheads against the counterpane, they are trying to 
 say their evening prayer; their tongue is so crooked 
 that none but God and the mother can understand it. 
 Then the children are lifted into bed, and they are cov- 
 ered up to the chin. Then the mother gives them a warm 
 good-night kiss, and leaves them to the guardian angels 
 that spread wings of canopy over the trundle-bed. Mid- 
 night lantern of the police. Look now on the canvas. 
 A boy kenneled for the night underneath the stairway 
 in a hall through which the wind sweeps, or lying on the 
 cold ground. He had no parentage. He was pitched 
 into the world by a merciless incognito. He does not 
 go to bed ; he has no bed. His cold fingers thrust through 
 his matted hair his only pillow. He did not sup last 
 night; he will not breakfast to-morrow. An outcast; a 
 ragamuffin. He did not say his prayers when he retired; 
 he knows no prayer; he never heard the name of God or 
 Christ, except as something to swear by. The wings 
 over him, not the wings of angels, but the dark, bat-like 
 wings of penury and want. Magic lantern of the home. 
 Look now on the canvas. Family gathered around the 
 argand burner. Father, feet on ottoman, mother sewing 
 a picturesque pattern. Two children pretending to study, 
 but chiefly watching other children who are in unre- 
 strained romp, so many balls of fun and frolic in full 
 bounce from room to room. Background of pictures 
 and upholstery and musical instrument, from which jew- 
 eled fingers sweep "Home, Sweet Home." Magic lantern 
 of the police. Look now on the canvas. A group in- 
 toxicated and wrangling, cursing God, cursing each 
 other; the past all shame, the future all suffering. Chil- 
 dren fleeing from the missile flung by a father's hand. 
 
96 
 
 UNDER THE POLICE LANTEBN. 
 
 Fragments of a chair propped against the wall. Frag- 
 ments of a pitcher standing on the mantle. A pile of 
 refuse food brought in from some kitchen, torn by the 
 human swine plunging into the trough. Magic lantern 
 of the home. Look now upon the canvas. A Christian 
 daughter has just died. Carriages rolling up to the 
 door in sympathy. Flowers in crowns and anchors and 
 harps covering the beautiful casket, the silver plate 
 marked, "aged 18." Funeral services intoned amid the 
 richly-shawled and gold-braceleted. Long procession 
 going out this way to unparalleled Greenwood to the 
 beautiful family plot where the sculptor will raise the 
 monument of burnished Aberdeen with the inscription, 
 ''She is not dead, but sleepeth." Oh! blessed is that home 
 which has a consecrated Christian daughter, whether on 
 earth or in heaven. Magic lantern of the police. Look 
 now on the canvas. A poor waif of the street has just 
 expired. Did she have any doctor? No. Did she have 
 any medicine? No. Did she have any hands to close 
 her eyes and fold her arms in death? No. Are there 
 no garments in the house fit to wrap her in for the tomb? 
 None. Those worn-out shoes will not do for these feel 
 in their last journey. Where are all the good Christians? 
 Oh! some of them are rocking-chaired, in morning 
 gowns, in tears over Bulwer Lytton's account of the last 
 days of Pompeii; they are so sorry for that girl that got 
 petrified! Others of the Christians are in church, kneel- 
 ing on a soft rug, praying for the forlorn Hottentots! 
 Come, call in the Coroner — call in the Charity Commis- 
 sioner. The carpenter unrolls the measuring-tape, and 
 decides she will need a box five and a half feet long. 
 Two men lift her into the box, lift the box into the 
 wagon, and it starts for the Potter's Field. The excavation 
 is not large enough for the box, and the men are in a 
 
UNDER THE POLICE LANTERN. 
 
 97 
 
 hurry, and one of them gets on the lid and cranches it 
 down to its place in the ground. Stop! Wait for the 
 city missionary until he can come and read a chapter, or 
 say, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." "No," say the men 
 of the spade, "we have three or four more cases just 
 like this to bury before night." "Well," I say, "how, 
 then, is the grave to be filled up?" Christ suggests a 
 way. Perhaps it had better be filled up with stones. 
 "Let those who are without sin come and cast a stone at 
 her," until the excavation is filled. Then the wagon 
 rolls off, and I see a form coming slowly across the Pot- 
 ter's Field. He walks very slowly, as his feet hurt. 
 He comes to that grave, and there he stands all day and 
 all night, and I come out and I accost him, and I say ? 
 "Who art thou?" And he says, "I am the Christ of 
 Mary Magdalen!" And then I thought that perhaps 
 there might have been a dying prayer, and that there 
 might have been penitential tears, and around that mis- 
 erable spot at the last there may be more resurrection 
 pomp than when Queen Elizabeth gets out of her mauso- 
 leum in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 But I must close the two lanterns. 
 7 . 
 
98 
 
 SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 " The devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because 
 he knoweth he hath but a short time.'' — Revelation xii: 12. 
 
 Somehow the enemy of all good has found out what 
 will be the hour of his dismissal from this world. He 
 cried out to Christ: "Hast thou come to torment us 
 before the time?" It is a healthful symptom that Satan 
 is so active now in all our cities. It is the indication 
 that he is going out of business. From the way that he 
 flies around, he is practically saying: rf Give me 500,000 
 souls; give me New York and Brooklyn; give me Boston 
 and Philadelphia and Cincinnati; give me all the cities, 
 and give them to me quickly, or I will never get them 
 at all." That Satan is in paroxysm of excitement is cer- 
 tain. His establishments are nearly bankrupted. That 
 the powers of darkness are nervous, knowing their time 
 is short, is evident from the fact that, if a man stand in a 
 pulpit speaking against the great iniquities of the day, 
 they all begin to flutter. 
 
 A few nights ago, riding up Broadway, I asked the 
 driver to stop at a street-lamp that I might better 
 examine my memorandum (it happened to be in front of 
 a place of amusement), when a man rushed, out with 
 great alarm and excitement, and said to the driver, "Is 
 that Talmage you have inside there?" Men write me 
 with commercial handwriting, protesting, evidently be- 
 
SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 99 
 
 cause they fear that sometimes in their midnight carousal 
 the} 7 may meet a Christian reformer and explorer. I had 
 thought to preach three or four sermons on the night 
 side of city life ; but now that I find that all the powers 
 of darkness are so agitated and alarmed and terrorized, I 
 plant the battery for new assault upon the castles of sin, 
 and shall go on from Sabbatli morning to Sabbath morn- 
 ing, saying all I have to say, winding up this subject by «. 
 several sermons on the glorious daybreak of Christian 
 reform and charity which have made this cluster of cities 
 the best place on earth to live in. Meanwhile, under- 
 stand that whatever Satanic excitement may be abroad 
 is only in fulfillment ot the words of my text: "The 
 devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, be- 
 cause he knoweththat he hath but a short time." 
 
 A few nights ago, passing over from Brooklyn by 
 South Ferry, our great metropolis looked like a mountain 
 of picturescjueness and beauty. There were enough stars 
 scattered over the heavens to suggest the street-lamps 
 of that city which hath no need of the sun. The masts 
 of the shipping against the sky brought to us the cos- 
 mopolitan feeling, and I said, "All the world is here." 
 The spires of St. Paul's, and St. George's, and of Trinity 
 pointed up through the starlight toward the only rescue 
 for the dying populations of our great cities. Long rows 
 of lamps skirted the city with fire. More than ten thous- 
 and gaslights, united with those kindled in towers and 
 in the top stories of establishments which ply great in- 
 dustries in perpetual motion, threw on the sky from 
 horizon to horizon the radiance of a vast illumination. 
 Landing on New York side, the first thing that confront- 
 ed us was the greatest nuisance and the grandest relief 
 which New York has experienced in the last thirty years, 
 the elevated railway, which, while it has commercial 
 
100 
 
 SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 significance, has more moral meaning. Ruin and death 
 to the streets through which it runs, it is the means of 
 moral salvation to the crowded and smothered tenement- 
 houses, which have been slaying their thousands year by 
 year. Was there ever such a disfigurement and scarifi- 
 cation of carpentry and engineering that wrought such 
 a blissful result? The great obstacle to New York morals 
 is the shape of the island. More than nine miles long, 
 in some places it is only a mile and a half wide. While 
 this immense water frontage of twenty miles is grand 
 for commerce, it gives crowded residence to the popula- 
 tion, unless, by some rapid mode of transit they can be 
 whirled to distant homes at night, and whirled back 
 again in the morning. These people must be near their 
 work. Some of them do not like ferriage. Many of 
 them are afraid of water. From the looks of some of 
 their hands and faces, you find it proved that they are 
 afraid of water. Hence they are huddled together in 
 tenement-houses, which are the destruction of all health, 
 all modesty, and the highest style of morals. For the 
 last thirty years New York has been crowded to death. 
 Hence, when on the night of our exploration we saw the 
 rail-train flying through the air, I said to myself, u This 
 is the first practical alleviation of the tenement-house 
 system." People of small means will have an oppor- 
 tunity of getting to the better air and the better morals 
 and the better accomodations of the country. But let 
 not this style of improvement be made at the expense of 
 those whose property is destroyed by the clatter and bang 
 and wheeze of mid-air locomotive. Let cities, like indi- 
 viduals, pay for damages wrought, and for horses fright- 
 ened out of their harness, and for carriages smashed 
 against the curbstone. New York and Brooklyn and all 
 our great cities need what London has already gained — 
 
SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 101 
 
 underground railroads which shall, without hindrance 
 and without danger and without nuisance, put down our 
 great populations just where they want to be, morning 
 and night. 
 
 Passing up through the city, on the left was Castle 
 Garden, now comparatively unattractive; but as we went 
 past, my boyhood memory brought back to me the time 
 when all that region was crowded with the finest equi- 
 pages of New York and Brooklyn, and Castle Garden 
 was thronged with a great multitude, many of whom 
 had paid $14 for a seat to hear Jenny Lind sing. While 
 God might make a hundred such artists in a year, He 
 makes only one for a century. He who heard her sing 
 would have no right to complain if he never heard any 
 more music until he heard the doxology of the one hun- 
 dred and forty and four thousand. There was the music 
 of two worlds in her voice. While surrounded by those 
 who almost deified her, she wrote in a private album a 
 verse which it may not be wrong to quote: 
 
 In vain I seek for rest 
 
 In all created good; 
 It leaves me still unblest 
 
 And makes me cry for God. 
 And sure at rest I cannot be 
 Until my heart finds rest in Thee. 
 
 That was the secret of her music, and never, either 
 day or night, do I pass Castle Garden, but I think of 
 the Swedish cantatrice and the excited and vociferating 
 assemblage, the majority of whom have joined the larger 
 assemblages of the next world. 
 
 Passing on up into !New York, we left on the right 
 hand, the once fashionable Bowling Green, around which 
 the wealth of New York congregated — the once elegant 
 drawing-rooms, now occupied by steamship companies, 
 
102 
 
 SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 where passengers get booked for Glasgow and Liverpool; 
 the inhabitants of those once elegant drawing-rooms long 
 ago booked for a longer voyage. Passing on up, we 
 heard only the clatter of the horses' hoofs until we came 
 to the head of Wall street, and by the two rows of gas- 
 lights, saw that on all that street there was not a foot 
 stirring. And yet there seemed to come up on the night 
 air the cachinnation of those on whose hands the stocks 
 had gone up, and the sighing of jobbers ou whose hands 
 the stocks had gone down. The street, only half a mile 
 long, and yet the avenue of fabulous accumulation, and 
 appalling bankruptcy, and wild swindle, and suicide, and 
 catastrophe, and death! While the sough of the wind 
 came up from Wall street toward old Trinity, it seemed 
 to say: "Where is Ketcham ? Where is Swartwout ? 
 Where is Gay? Where is Fisk ? Where is Cornelius 
 Yanderbilt ? Where is the Black Friday?'' Then the 
 tower of Trinity tolled nine times — three for the bank- 
 rupted, three for the suicided, three for the dead! 
 "Hurry up, George," I said, "and get past this place:" 
 for though I do not believe in ghosts, I wanted to get 
 past that forsaken and all-suggestive night-scene of Wall 
 street. Under the flickering gaslight one of active im- 
 agination might almost imagine he saw the ghosts of 
 ten thousand fortunes dead and damned. Hastening on 
 up a few blocks, we came where, on the right side, we 
 saw large establishments ablaze from foundation to cap- 
 stone. These were the great printing-houses of the New 
 York dailies. We got out. We went in. We went up 
 from editorial rooms to type-setters' and proof-readers' 
 loft. These are the foundries where the great thunder- 
 bolts of public opinion are forged. How the pens 
 scratched! How the types clicked! How the scissors 
 cut! How the wheels rushed, all the world's news roll- 
 
SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 103 
 
 ing over the cylinder like Niagara at Table Rock. Great 
 torrents of opinion, of crimes; of accidents, of destroyed 
 reputations, of avenged character. Who can estimate 
 the mightiness for good or evil of a daily newspaper ? 
 Fingers of steel picking off the end of telegraphic wire, 
 facts of religion and philosophy and science, and infor- 
 mation from the four winds of heaven! In 1850 the 
 Associated Press began to pay $200,000 a year for news. 
 Some of the individual sheets paying $50,000 extra for 
 dispatches. Some of them, independent of the Asso- 
 ciated Press, with a wire rake gathering up sheaves of 
 news from all the great harvest fields of the world. It 
 is high time that good men understood that the print- 
 ing press is the mightiest engine of all the centuries. 
 The high -water mark of the printers type-case shows the 
 ebb or flow of the great oceanic tides of civilization or 
 Christianity. Just think of it! In 1835 all the daily 
 newspapers of New York issued but 10,000 copies. Now 
 there are 500,000, and taking the ordinary calculation 
 that five people read a newspaper, two million, five hun- 
 dred thousand people reading the daily newspapers of 
 New York! I once could not understand how the Bible 
 statement could be true when it says that " nations shall 
 be born in a day." I can understand it now. Get the 
 telegraph operators and the editors converted, and in 
 twenty-four hours the whole earth will hear the salvation 
 call. Nothing more impressed me in the night explora- 
 tion than the power of the press. But it is carried on with 
 oh! what aching eyes, and what exhaustion of health. 
 I did not find more than one man out of ten who had 
 anything like brawny health in the great newspaper 
 establishments of New York. The malodor of the ink, 
 however complete the ventilation ; the necessity of toiling 
 at hours when God has drawn the curtain of the night 
 
104 
 
 SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 for natural sleep; the pressure of daily publication what- 
 ever breaks down ; the temptation to intoxicating stim- 
 ulants in order to keep the nervous energy up, a tempta- 
 tion which only the strongest can resist — all these make 
 newspaper life something to be sympathized with. Do 
 not begrudge the three or five cents you give for the 
 newspaper. You buy not only intelligence with that, 
 but you help pay for sleepless nights, and smarting eye- 
 balls, and racked brain, and early sepulchre. 
 
 Coming out of these establishments, my mind full of 
 the bewildering activities of the place, I stopped on the 
 street and I said, " Now drive up Broadway, and turn 
 down Chambers street to the left, and let us see what 
 New York will be twenty years from now." The proba- 
 bility is that those who are criminal will stay criminal; 
 the vast majority of those who are libertines will remain 
 libertines; the vast majority of those who are thieves 
 will stay thieves; the vast majority of those who are 
 drunkards will stay drunkards. " What," say you, "no 
 hope for the cities?" Ah! my heart was never so full 
 of high and exhilarant hope as now. We turned down 
 Chambers street until we came to the sign " Newsboys' 
 Lodging-house," and we went in. Now, if there is 
 anything I like it is boys. Not those brought up by 
 registers, with the house heated by furnaces, and lads 
 manipulated by some over-indulgent aunt, until their 
 hair has been curled until they have got to be girls; but 
 I mean genuine boys, such as God makes, with extra 
 romp and hilarity, so that after they have been pounded 
 by the world they shall have some exuberance left. Boys, 
 genuine boys, who cannot keep quiet five minutes. Boys 
 who can skate, and swim, and rove, and fly kites, and 
 strike balls, and defend sickly playmates when they are 
 imposed on, and get hungry in half an hour after they 
 
SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 105 
 
 have dined, and who keep things stirred up and lively. 
 Matthew Arnold's boys. 
 
 We entered the Newsboys' Lodging-house, and there 
 we found them. I knew them right away, and they 
 knew me, by a sort of instinct of friendliness. Their 
 coats off; for, although outside it was biting cold, inside 
 the room Christian charity had flooded everything with 
 glorious summer. Over the doorway were written the 
 words: "No boys that have homes can stop here." 
 " What," I said, "can it be possible that all these bright 
 and happy lads have been swept up from the street?" 
 First, they are plunged into the bath, and then they pass 
 under the manipulations of the barber, and then they are 
 taken to the wardrobe, and in the name of Him who 
 said, " I was naked and ye clothed me," they are arrayed 
 in appropriate attire, each one paying, if he can, so there 
 shall be no sense of pauperism; some of them paying 
 one penny for all the privileges of a bountiful table, and 
 the most extravagant paying only six cents. Gymna- 
 sium to straighten and invigorate the pinched bodies. 
 Books for the mind. Religion for the soul. I said, 
 "Can these boys sing?" and the answer came back in an 
 anthem that shook the room: 
 
 Ring the bells of heaven, 
 For there's joy to-day. 
 
 I said, " What is this long, broad box with so many 
 numbers nailed by a great many openings?" "Oh," 
 they said, "this is the savings bank; the boys put their 
 money here, and each one has a bank-book, and he gets 
 his money at the beginning of the month." Meanwhile, 
 if under urgency for a new top, or attractive confection- 
 ery, or any one of those undetiuable things which crowd 
 a boy's pockets, he wants money, he cannot get it. He 
 must wait until the first of the month, and so thrift and 
 
106 
 
 SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 economy are cultivated. I know statistics are generally 
 very dry, but here is a statistic which has in it as much 
 spirit as anything that Thackeray ever wrote, and as 
 much sublimity as anything John Milton ever wrote: 
 One hundred and forty-three thousand boys have been 
 assembled in these newsboys' lodging-houses since the 
 establishment of the institution; twelve thousand have 
 been returned to friends, and fifteen thousand have 
 deposited in this great box over $12,000; while many 
 of the lads have been prepared for usefulness, becoming 
 farmers, mechanics, merchants, bankers, clergymen, law- 
 yers, doctors, judges of courts even, and many of them 
 prepared for heaven, where some have already entered, 
 confronting, personally, that Christ in whose compassion 
 the institution was established. And this society all the 
 time transporting the lads to Western farms. No 
 reformation for them while they stay in the dens of New 
 York. ' What must be the sensation of a lad who has 
 lived all his days in Elm street, or Water street, when 
 he wakes up on the Iowa prairie, with one hundred miles 
 room on all sides? One of these lads, getting out West, 
 wrote a letter, descriptive of the place, and urging others 
 to come. He said: 
 
 " I am getting along first rate. I am on probation in the Methodist 
 Church. I will be entered as a member the first of next month. I 
 now teach a Sunday-school class of eleven boys. I get along first rate 
 with it. This is a splendid country to make a living in. If the boys 
 running around the street with a blacking-box on their shoulder or a 
 bundle of papers under their arms only knew what high old times we 
 boys have out here they wouldn't hesitate about coming West, but 
 come the first chance they got." 
 
 And to show the brightness of some of these lads, one 
 of them made a little speech to his comrades just as he 
 was about to start West, saying to his friends whom he 
 was about to leave: 
 
SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 107 
 
 "Boys and gentlemen, perhaps you would like to hear sum'at 
 about the West, the great West, you know, where so many of our old 
 friends are settled down and going to be great men; some of the 
 greatest men in the great Republic. Boys, that's the place for grow- 
 ing Congressmen, and Governors, and Presidents. Do you want to 
 be newsboys always, and shoeblacks, and timber merchants in a 
 small way, by selling matches ? If you do, you will stay in New 
 York, but if you don't, you will go out West and begin to be farmers; 
 for the beginning of a farmer, my boys, is the making of a Congress- 
 man and a President. If you want to be loafers all your days, you 
 will hang up your caps, and play around the groceries, and join lire- 
 engine and truck companies ; but if you want to be the man who will 
 make his mark in the country, you will get up steam and go ahead. 
 There is lots of the prairies waiting for you. You haven't any idea 
 of what you may be yet, if you will take a bit of my advice. How 
 do you know but if you are honest and good and industrious, you 
 may get so much up in the ranks that you will not have a general or 
 a judge your boss ? You will be lifted on horseback when you go to 
 take a ride on the prairies, and if you choose to go in a wagon, or on 
 an excursion, you will find that the hard times don't touch you 
 there, and the best of all will be that if it is good to-day it will be 
 better to-morrow." 
 
 Is not a lad like that worth saving? There are thou- 
 sands of them in New York. God have mercy on 
 them ! 
 
 As I came down off the steps of that benevolent insti- 
 tution, I said, "Surely, the evils of our cities are not more 
 wonderful than their charities." Then I started out 
 through New Bowery, and I came to the sign of the 
 Howard Mission, famous on earth and in heaven for the 
 fact that through it so many Christian merchants and 
 bankers, and philanthropists have saved multitudes of 
 boys and girls from eternal calamity. Last summer 
 that institution, taking some children one or two hun- 
 dred miles into the country to be taken care of gratui- 
 tously for two or three weeks on farms, the train stopped 
 at the depot, and one lad, who had never seen a green 
 field, rushed out and gathered up the grass and the 
 
108 
 
 SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 flowers, and came back, and then took out a penny, his 
 entire fortune, and handed it to the overseer, and said, 
 "Here, take that penny and bring out more boys to see 
 the flowers and the country." Seated on the platform 
 of the Howard Mission that night, looking off upon these 
 rescued children, I said within myself, "Who can esti- 
 mate the reward for both worlds to these people who put 
 their energies in such a Christ-like undertaking ?" What 
 a monument for Joseph Hoxie and Mr. Yan Meter, the 
 counselors of the institution in the past, and for A. S. 
 Hatch and H. E. Tompkins, its advisers at the present, 
 and thousands of people who in giving food through 
 that institution have fed Christ, and in donating gar- 
 ments have clothed Christ, and in sheltering the wan- 
 dering have housed Christ! God will pursue such men 
 and women with His mercy to the edge of the pillow on 
 which they die, and then, on the other side of the gate, 
 He will give them a reception that will make all heaven 
 echo and re-echo with their deeds. But oh ! how much 
 work — herculean, yea, omnipotent work — before all this 
 vagrancy is ended ! It is an authentic statistic that in 
 this cluster of cities there are eighty thousand peoplo 
 over ten years of age who cannot write their names. 
 Then what must be the ignorance of the multitudes 
 under that age ? 
 
 But 1 said to the driver, "We must hasten out on 
 Broadway, for it is just the time when all the righteous 
 and unrighteous places of amusement will be disband- 
 ing, and we shall see the people going up and down the 
 streets. Coming from all sides, these are the great tides 
 of life and death. . The last orchestra had played. The 
 curtain had dropped at the end of the play. The 
 audiences of the concerts in the churches and the acade- 
 mies had all dispersed, moving up and down the street. 
 
8ATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 109 
 
 Good amusements are very good. Bad amusements are 
 very bad. He who paints a fine picture, or who sculp- 
 tures a beautiful statue, or sings a healthful song, or 
 rouses an innocent laugh, or in any way cuts the strap of 
 the burden of care on the world's shoulder, is a bene- 
 factor, and in the name of God I bless him; but between 
 Canal street and Fourteenth street there are enough 
 places of iniquitous amusement to keep all the world of 
 darkness in perpetual holiday. In fifteen minutes, on 
 any street almost of our city, you may find enough vicious 
 amusements to invoke all the sulphur and brimstone 
 that overwhelmed Sodom. The more than three hun- 
 dred miles of Croton water pipes underlying New York 
 city, emptied on these polluted places, could not wash 
 them clean ! You see the people coming out flushed 
 with the strychnine wine taken in the recesses of the 
 programme — some of the people in companionship that 
 insures their present and eternal discomfiture, turning 
 off from Broadway on the narrow streets running off 
 either side! The recording angel shivered with horror 
 as he penned their destiny. 
 
 Looking out of the carriage, I saw a tragedy on the 
 corner of Broadway and Houston street. A young man, 
 evidently doubting as to which direction he had better 
 take, his hat lifted high enough so you could see he had 
 an intelligent forehead, stout chest; he had a robust 
 development. Splendid young man. Cultured young man. 
 Honored young man. Why did he stop there while 
 so many were going up and down ? The fact is, that 
 every man has a good angel and a bad angel contending 
 for the mastery of his spirit, and there was a good angel 
 and a bad angel struggling with that young man's soul 
 at the corner of Broadway and Houston street. "Come 
 with me," said the good angel; " I will take you home; 
 
110 
 
 SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 I will spread my wing over your pillow; I will lovingly 
 escortyou all through life under supernatural protection; 
 I will bless every cup you drink out of, every couch you 
 rest on, every doorway you enter; I will consecrate your 
 tears when you weep, your sweat when you toil, and at 
 the last I will hand over your grave into the hand of the 
 bright angel of a Christian resurrection. In answer to 
 your father's petition and your mother's prayer, I have 
 been sent of the Lord out of heaven to be your guardian 
 spirit. Come with me," said the good angel, in a voice 
 of unearthly symphony. It was music like that which 
 drops from a lute of heaven when a seraph breathes on 
 it. " No, no," said the bad angel, " come with me; I 
 have something better to offer; the wines I pour are from 
 chalices of bewitching carousal; the dance I lead is over 
 floor tessellated with unrestrained indulgencies; there is 
 no God to frown on the temples of sin where I worship. 
 The skies are Italian. The paths I tread are through 
 meadows, daisied and primrosed. Come with me." The 
 young man hesitated at a time when hesitation was ruin, 
 and the bad angel smote the good angel until it departed, 
 spreading wings through the starlight upward and away, 
 until a door flashed open in the sky and forever the wings 
 vanished. That was the turning point in that young 
 man's history; for, the good angel flown, he hesitated no 
 longer, but started on a pathway which is beautiful at 
 the opening, but blasted at the last. The bad angel, 
 leading the way, opened gate after gate, and at each gate 
 the road became rougher and the sky more lurid, and 
 what was peculiar, as the gate slammed shut it came to 
 with a jar that indicated that it would never open. Passed 
 each portal, there was a grinding of locks and a shoving 
 of bolts; and the scenery on either side the road changed 
 from gardens to deserts, and the June air became a cut- 
 ting December blast, and the bright wings of the bad 
 
SATANIC AGITATION. 
 
 Ill 
 
 angel turned to sackcloth, and the eyes of light became 
 hollow with hopeless grief, and the fountains, that at the 
 start had tossed with wine, poured forth bubbling tears 
 and foaming blood, and on the right side the road there 
 was a serpent, and the man said to the bad angel, u What 
 is that serpent?" and the answer was, "That is the ser- 
 pent of stinging remorse." On the left side the road 
 there was a lion, and the man asked the bad angel, 
 " What is that lion ?" and the answer was, " That is the 
 lion of all-devouring despair." A vulture flew through 
 the sky, and the man asked the bad angel, " What is that 
 vulture?" and the answer was, "That is the vulture 
 waiting for the carcasses of the slain." And then the 
 man began to try to pull off of him the folds of some- 
 thing that had wound him round and round, and he said 
 to the bad angel, " What is it that twists me in this awful 
 convolution?" and the answer was, "That is the worm 
 that never dies!" And then the man said to the bad 
 angel, " What does all this mean? I trusted in what you 
 said at the corner of Broadway and Houston street; I 
 trusted it all, and why have you thus deceived me?" 
 Then the last deception fell off the charmer, and it said, 
 "I was sent forth from the pit to destroy your soul; I 
 watched my chance for many a long year; when you 
 hesitated that night on Broadway I gained my triumph; 
 now you are here. Ha! ha! You are here. Come, now, 
 let us fill these two chalices of fire, and drink together 
 to darkness and woe and death. Hail! Hail!" Oh! 
 young man, will the good angel sent forth by Christ, or 
 the bad angel sent forth by sin, get the victory over 
 your soul? Their wings are interlocked this moment 
 above you, contending for your destiny, as above the 
 Appenines, eagle and condor fight mid-sky. This hour 
 may decide your destiny. God help you. To hesitate 
 is to die! 
 
112 
 
 AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 A certain man went down from J erusalem to Jericho, and fell 
 among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment and wounded him, 
 and departed, leaving him half dead.— St. Luke x: 30. 
 
 This attack of highwaymen was in a rocky ravine, 
 which gives to robbers a first-rate chance. So late as 
 1820, on that very road, an English traveler was shot 
 and robbed. This wayfarer of the text not only lost his 
 money and his apparel, but nearly lost his life. His 
 assailants were not only thieves, but assassins. The 
 scene of this lonely road from Jerusalem to Jericho is 
 repeated every night in onr great cities — men falling 
 among thieves, getting wounded, and left half dead. In 
 this series of Sabbath morning discourses on the 
 night side of city life, as I have recently explored it> 
 I have spoken to you of the night of pauperism, the 
 night of debauchery and shame, the night of official 
 neglect and bribery, and now I come to speak to 
 you of the night of theft, the night of burglary, the 
 night of assassination, the night of pistol and dirk 
 and bludgeon. You say, what can there be in such a 
 subject for me? Then you remind me of the man who 
 asked Christ the question, "Who is my neighbor?" and 
 in the reply of the text, Christ is setting forth the idea 
 that wherever there is a man in trouble, there is your 
 neighbor; and before I get through this morning, if the 
 Lord will help me, I will show you that you have some 
 very dangerous neighbors, and I will show you also what 
 
AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 113 
 
 is your moral responsibility before God in regard to 
 them. 
 
 I said to the chief official, "G ive me two stout detec- 
 tives for this night's work — men who are not only mus- 
 cular, but who iook muscular." I said to these detec- 
 tives before we started on our midnight exploration, 
 "Have you loaded pistols?" and they brought forth 
 their firearms and their clubs, showing that they were 
 ready for anything. Then I said, "Show me crime; 
 show me crime in the worst shape, the most villainous 
 and outrageous crime. In other words show me the 
 worst classes of people to be saved by the power of 
 Christ's gospel." I took with me only two officers of 
 the law, for I want no one to run any risk in my behalf, 
 and, having undertaken to show up the lowest depths of 
 society, I felt I must go on until I had completed the 
 work. One of the officers proposed to me that I take a 
 disguise lest I be assailed. I said, " !No; I am going on 
 a mission of Christian work, and I am going to take the 
 risks, and I shall go as I am." And so I went. You say to 
 me, k *Why didn't you first look after the criminal classes 
 in Brooklyn?" I answer, it was not for any lack of mate- 
 rial. Last year, in the city of Brooklyn, there were 
 nearly 27,000 arrests for crime. Two hundred burglaries. 
 Thirteen homicides. Twenty-seven highway robberies. 
 Forty thousand lodgers in the station houses. Three 
 hundred and thirty-six scoundrels who had their pictures 
 taken for the Rogues Gallery, without any expense to 
 those who sat for the pictures! Two hundred thousand 
 dollars' worth of property stolen. Every kind of crime, 
 from manslaughter to chicken thief. Indeed, I do not 
 think there is any place in the land where you can more 
 easily get your pocket picked, or your house burglarized, 
 or your signature counterfeited, or your estate swindled, 
 8 
 
114 
 
 AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 than in Brooklyn; but crime here is on a comparatively 
 6mall scale, because we are a smaller city. The great 
 depots of crime for this cluster of cities are in New York. 
 It is a better hiding-place, the city is so vast, and all 
 officers tell us that when a crime is committed in Jersey 
 City, or is committed in Brooklyn, the villain attempts 
 immediately to cross the ferry. While Brooklyn's sin 
 is as enterprising as is possible for the number of in- 
 habitants, crowd one million people on an island, and 
 you have a stage and an audience on which and before 
 whom crime may enact its worst tragedies. 
 
 There was nothing that more impressed me on that 
 terrible night of exploration than the respect which 
 crime pays to law when it is really confronted. Why 
 do those eight or ten desperadoes immediately stop their 
 blasphemy and their uproar and their wrangling? It is 
 because an officer of the law calmly throws back the lap- 
 pel of his coat and shows the badge of authority. The 
 fact is that government is ordained of heaven, and just 
 so far as the police officer does his duty, just so far is he 
 a deputy of the Lord Almighty. That is the reason 
 Inspector Murray, of New York, sometimes goes in and 
 arrests four or five desperadoes. He is a man of com- 
 paratively slight stature, yet when one is backed up by 
 omnipotent justice he can do anything. I said, ''What 
 is this glazed window, and who are these mysterious 
 people going in and then coming out and passing down 
 the street, looking to the pavement, and keeping a regu- 
 lar step until they hear a quick step behind them, and 
 then darting down an alley?" This place, in the night 
 of our exploration, was what the Bible calls "a den of 
 thieves." They will not admit it. You cannot prove 
 it against them, for the reason that the keeper and the 
 patrons are the acutest men in the city. No sign of 
 
AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 115 
 
 6tolen goods, no loud talk about misdemeanors, but here 
 a table surrounded by three or four persons whispering; 
 yonder a table surrounded by three or four more per- 
 sons whispering; before each man a mug of beer or 
 stronger intoxicant. He will not drink to unconscious- 
 ness; he will only drink to get his courage up to the 
 point of recklessness, all the while managing to keep his 
 eye clear and his hand steady. These men around this 
 table are talking over last night's exploit; their narrow 
 escape from the basement door; how nearly they fell 
 from the window-ledge of the second story; how the bul- 
 let grazed the hair. What is this bandaged hand you 
 see in that room? That was cut by the window-glass as 
 the burglar thrust his hand through to the inside fasten- 
 ing. How did that man lose his eye? It was destroyed 
 three years ago by a premature flash of gunpowder in a 
 store lock. Who are these three or four surrounding 
 this other table? They are planning for to-night's vil- 
 lainy. They know just what hour the last member of 
 the family will retire. They are in collusion with the 
 servant, who has promised to leave one of the back win- 
 dows open. They know at what time the man of wealth 
 will leave his place of dissipation and start for home, 
 and they are arranging it how they shall come out of 
 the dark alley and bring him down with a slungshot. 
 No sign of desperation in this room of thieves, and yet 
 how many false keys, how many ugly pocket-knives, 
 how many brass knuckles, how many revolvers! A few 
 vulgar pictures on the wall, and the inevitable bar. Rum 
 they must have to rest them after the exciting maraud- 
 ing. Rum they must have before they start on the new 
 expedition of arson and larceny and murder. But not 
 ordinary rum. It is poisoned four times. Poisoned 
 first by the manufacturer; poisoned secondly by the 
 
116 
 
 AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 wholesale dealer; poisoned thirdly by the retail dealer; 
 poisoned fourthly by the saloon-keeper. Poisoned four 
 times, it is just right to fit one for cruelty and despera- 
 tion. These men have calculated to the last quarter of 
 a glass how much they need to take to qualify them for 
 their work. They must not take a drop too much nor a 
 drop too little. These are the professional criminals of 
 the city, between twenty-three and twenty-four hundred 
 of them, in this cluster of cities. They are as thoroughly 
 drilled in crime as, for good purposes, medical colleges 
 ■ train doctors, law colleges train lawyers, theological 
 seminaries train clergymen. These criminals have been 
 apprentices and journeymen; but now they are boss 
 workmen. They have gone through the freshman, 
 sophomore, junior and senior classes of the great uni- 
 versity of crime, and have graduated with diplomas 
 signed by all the faculty of darkness. They have no 
 ambition for an easy theft, or an unskilled murder, or a 
 blundering blackmail. They must have something dif- 
 ficult. They must have in their enterprise the excite- 
 ment of peril. They must have something that will give 
 them an opportunity of bravado. They must do some- 
 thing which amateurs in crime dare not do. These are 
 the bank robbers, about sixty of them in this cluster of 
 cities — men who somehow get in the bank during the 
 daytime, then at night spring out upon the watchman, 
 fasten him, and for the whole night have deliberate 
 examination of the cashier's books to see whether he 
 keeps his accounts correctly. These are the men who 
 come in to examine the directory in the back part of 
 your store while their accomplices are in the front part 
 of the store engaging you in conversation, then drop- 
 ping the directory and investigating the money safe. 
 These are the forgers who get one of your canceled 
 
AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 117 
 
 checks and one of your blank checks, and practice on the 
 writing of yonr name until the deception is as perfect as 
 the counterfeit check of Cornelius Vanderbilt, indorsed 
 by Henry Keep, in 1870, for $75,000, which check was im- 
 mediately cashed at the City Bank. These are the pick- 
 pockets, six hundred of them in this cluster of cities, 
 who sit beside you in the stage and help you pass up the 
 change! They stand beside you when you are shopping, 
 and help you examine the goods, and weep beside you at 
 the funeral, and sometimes bow their heads beside you 
 in the house of God, doing their work with such adroit- 
 ness that your affliction at the loss of the money is some- 
 what mitigated by your appreciation of the skill of the 
 operator! The most successful of these are females, 
 and, I suppose, on the theory that if a woman is good 
 she is better than man, and if she is bad she is worse. 
 She stands so much higher up than man that when she 
 falls she falls further. Some of these criminals, pick- 
 pockets, and thieves also take the garb of clergymen. 
 They look like doctors of divinity. With coats buttoned 
 clear up to the chin, and white cravated, they look as if 
 they were just going to pronounce the benediction, 
 while they are all the time wondering where your watch 
 is, or your portmonnaie is. 
 
 A thousand of the professional criminals do nothing 
 but snatch things. They go in pairs, one of them keep- 
 ing your attention in one part of the store, the other 
 doing a lively business in another part of the store. At 
 one end of the establishment the proprietor is smiling 
 graciously on one who seems to be an exquisite lady, 
 while in another part of the same establishment a roll of 
 goods is taken up by a copartner in crime and put in a 
 crocodile pocket, large enough to swallow everything. 
 These professional criminals are the men who break in, 
 
118 
 
 AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 the windows of jewelry stores and snatch the jewels, and 
 before the clerks have an opportunity of knowing what 
 is the excitement are a block away, looking innocent, 
 ready to come back and join in the pursuit of the offend- 
 er, shouting with stentorian voice, "Stop, thief!" You 
 wonder whether these people get large accumulation. 
 No. Of the largest haul they get only a fifth, or a sixth, 
 or a seventh part, It is the receiver of stolen goods that 
 gets the profit. If these men during the course of their 
 lives should get $50,000 they will live poor, and die 
 poor, and be poor to all eternity. Among these profes- 
 sional criminals in our cities are the blackmailers — those 
 who would have you pay a certain amount of money or 
 have your character tarnished. If you are guilty I have 
 no counsel to give in this matter; but if you are innocent 
 'let me say that no one of integrity need ever fear the 
 blackmailer. All you have to do is to put the case im- 
 mediately in the hands of Superintendent Walling of the 
 New York police, or Superintendent Campbell of the 
 Brooklyn police, and you will be vindicated. Depend 
 upon it, however, that every dollar you pay to a black- 
 mailer is toward your own everlasting enthrallment. A 
 man in a cavern fighting a tigress might as well consent 
 to give the tigress his right hand, letting her eat it up, 
 with the supposition that she would let him off with the 
 rest of his body, as for you to pay anything to a black- 
 mailer with the idea of getting your character cleared. 
 The thing to be done is to have the tigress shot, and that, 
 the law is willing to do. Let me lay down a principle 
 you can put in your memorandum books, and put in the 
 front part of your Bible, and in the back part of your 
 Bible, and put in your day-book, and put in your ledger — 
 this principle: that no man's character is ever sacrificed 
 until he sacrifices it himself. But you surrender your 
 
AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 119 
 
 reputation, your fortune, your home, and your immortal 
 soul, when you pay a farthing to a blackmailer. 
 
 Who are these men in this room at Hook Dock, or at 
 the foot of Roosevelt street? They are professional crimi- 
 nals. Under the cover of the night they go down through 
 the bay, or up and down the rivers. Finding two men 
 in a row boat going to some steamer, or to one of the ad- 
 joining islands, they board the boat, rob the two men of 
 their money, and, if they seem unreasonably opposed to 
 giving up their money, taking their lives and giving 
 them watery graves. These are the men who lounge 
 around the solitary pier at night, and who clamber up on 
 the side of the vessel lying at wharf, and, finding the 
 captain asleep give him chloroform to help him sleep, 
 and then knock the watchman overboard and take the 
 valuables. Of this class were Howlett and Saul, who by 
 twenty-one years of age had become the terror of the 
 twenty-one miles of New York city water front, and who 
 wound up their piracy by a murder on the bark "Thomas 
 Watson," and crossed the gallows, relieving the world of 
 their existence. 
 
 But in all these dens of thieves we find those who ex- 
 cite only our pity — people flung off the steeps of decent 
 society. Having done wrong once, in despair they went 
 to the bottom. Of such was that man who last Wednes- 
 day, in New York, stole a roll of goods, went to the sta- 
 tion-house, said he was hungry, and asked to be sent to 
 prison. Of such are those young men who make false 
 entries in the account-book, resolved to "fix it up;" or 
 who surreptitiously borrow from the commercial estab- 
 lishment, expecting to "fix it up;" but sickness comes, 
 or accident comes, or a conjunction of unexpected circum- 
 stances, and they never "fix it up." 
 
 In disgrace they go down. Oh! how many, by force of 
 
120 
 
 AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 circumstances, and at the start with no very bad idea, get 
 off the track and perish. A gentleman sitting in this 
 assemblage this morning told me of an incident which 
 occurred in a large commercial establishment,! believe the 
 fourth in size in the whole country. The employer said 
 to a young lady in the establishment, "You must dress 
 better." She said, "I cannot dress better; I get $6 a 
 week, and I pay $4: for my board, and I have $2 for dress 
 and for my car fare; I cannot dress better." Then he 
 said, "You must get it in some other way." Well, I 
 suppose she could steal. I do not know how that inci- 
 dent affects you; but when it was told to me it made 
 every drop of my blood, from scalp to heel, tingle with 
 indignation. The fact is that there are thousands of men 
 and women dropping into dishonesty and crime by force 
 of circumstances, and by their destitution. Under the 
 same kind of pressure you and I would have perished. 
 It is despicable to stand on shore laughing at the ship- 
 wrecked struggling in the breakers when we ought to be 
 getting out the rockets and the lifeboat and the ropes 
 from the wrecking establishment. How much have you 
 ever done to get this class ashore? In our city of Brook- 
 lyn we grip them of the police. Then we hustle them 
 into a court room amid a great crowd of gaping specta- 
 tors. Then we throw them into the worst jail on the 
 continent — Raymond Street Jail. We put them in there 
 with three or four confirmed criminals, and then actu- 
 ally deny $500 to the chaplain, who is giving his time 
 for the alleviation of their condition, and putting our 
 refusal of the $500 on the ground that if we support 
 that thing in the penitentiary, and if we have religious 
 services there it will be so much like uniting church and 
 State! 
 
 "But," says some one at this point in my discourse, 
 
AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 121 
 
 "where does all this crime come from?" Let me tell 
 you that New York is now paying for the political dis- 
 honesties of ten years ago. Do yon believe that the 
 political iniquities of 1868, 1869, 1870, and 1871 could 
 be enacted in any city without demoralizing the com- 
 munity from top to bottom? Look at the sham elec- 
 tions of 1S68 and 1869. Think of those times when a 
 criminal was auditor of public accounts, and honorable 
 gentlemen in the legal profession were put out of sight 
 by shyster lawyers, and some of the police magistrates 
 were worse than the criminals arraigned before them, 
 and when the most notorious thief since the creation of 
 the world, was a State Senator, holding princely levee at 
 the Delevan House at Albany. Ah! my friends, those 
 were the times when thousands of men were put on the 
 wrong track. They said: "Why, what's the use of 
 honest work when knavery declares such large divi- 
 dends? What's the use of my going afoot in shoes I 
 have to pay for myself, when 1 can have gilded livery 
 sweeping through Broadway supported by public funds?" 
 The rule was, as far as I remember it: Get an office 
 with a large salary; if you cannot get an office with a 
 large salary, get an office with a small salary, and then 
 steal all you can lay your hands on, and call them "per- 
 quisites;" and then give subordinate offices to your 
 friends, and let them help you on with the universal 
 swindle, and get more "perquisites." Many of the young 
 men of the cities were then eighteen years of age. They 
 saw their parents hard at work with trowel and yard- 
 stick and pen, getting only a cramped living, while those 
 men who were throwing themselves on their political 
 wits had plenty of money and no work. Do you wonder 
 that thousands adopted a life of dissipated indolence? 
 Ten years having passed, they are now twenty-eight 
 
122 
 
 AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 years of age, and in full swing of vagabondism. The 
 putrid politics of ten years ago sowed much of the crop 
 which is now being harvested by the almshouse and the 
 penitentiary. But you say, "What is the practical use 
 of this subject this morning? Have I any relation to 
 it?" You have. In the last judgment you will have to 
 give answer for your relation to it. Through all eternity 
 you will feel the consequences of your relation to it. I 
 could not waste my time, nor your time, in a discussion 
 if there were not some practical significance to it. First 
 of all, I give you a statistic which ought to make every 
 office- table, and every counting-room desk, and every 
 money-safe quake and tremble. It is the statistic that 
 larcenies in New York city, directly and indirectly, cost 
 that city §6,000,000 per year. There are all the moneys 
 taken, in the first place. Then there are the prisons and 
 the station-houses. Then there are the courts. Then 
 there is the vast machinery of municipal government for 
 the arraignment and treatment of villainy. "Why, the 
 Court of Sessions and the police courts cost the city of 
 New York about $200,000 per year. The police force 
 directly and indirectly costs the city of New York over 
 $j?,000,000 a year, and all that expenditure puts its tax 
 on every bill of lading, on every } T ard of goods, on every 
 parlor, every nursery, every store, every shop, every brick 
 from foundation to capstone, every foot of ground from 
 the south side of Castle Garden to the north side of Cen- 
 tral Park, and upon all Brooklyn, and upon all Jersey 
 City, for the reason that the interests of these cities are 
 so interlocked that what is the prosperity of one is the 
 prosperity of all, and what is the calamity of one is the 
 calamity of all. But I do not, this morning, address you 
 as financiers. I address you as moralists and Christian 
 men and women, who before God have a responsibility 
 
AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 123 
 
 for all this turpitude and scoundrelism, unless in every 
 possible way you try to stop it and redeem it. "Oh!" 
 says some one in the house, "such criminals as that can- 
 not be reformed." I reply: Then you are stupidly ig- 
 norant of Christianity. Who was the man on the right- 
 hand cross when Jesus was expiring? A thief — a dying 
 thief. Where did he go to? To heaven. Christ said to 
 him: "This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise." 
 In that most conspicuous moment of the world's history, 
 Christ demonstrating to all ages that the worst criminal 
 can be saved. Who is that man in the Fourth Ward, 
 New York, preaching the gospel every night of the 
 week, and preaching it all the year round, and bringing 
 more drunkards and thieves and criminals to the heart 
 of a pardoning God than any twenty churches in Brook- 
 lyn or New York. Jerry McAuley, the converted river 
 thief. That man took me to his front window the other 
 evening, and he said, "Do you see that grog-shop over 
 there?" I said, "Yes; I see it." "Well," he said, "I 
 once was pitched out of that by the proprietor for being 
 drunken and noisy. The grace of God has done a great 
 deal for me. I was going along the street the other day, 
 and that man who owned that groggery then, and who 
 owns it now, wanted a favor of me, and he called to me. 
 He did not call me drunken Jerry; but he said Mister 
 McAuley — Mister McAuley !" 
 
 O! if the grace of God could do as much for that man 
 it can save any outcast. If not, then what is the use of 
 Paul's address when he says, ''Let him that stole, steal 
 no more"? I will tell you something — I do not care 
 whether you like it or not — that at last, in heaven, there 
 will be five hundred thousand converted thieves, pick- 
 pockets, gamblers, debauchees, murderers and outcasts, 
 all saved by the grace of God, washed clean and prepared 
 
124 
 
 AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 for glory. That exquisite out there gives a twitch to his 
 kid glove, and that lady brings the skirt of her silk dress 
 nearer her, as though she were afraid of having that 
 truth tarnish her. "Why," says some one in the house, 
 "are you going to make heaven such a common place as 
 that?" I do not make it common. God makes it com- 
 mon. It is to be the most common place in the whole 
 universe. By that I mean they are going to come up 
 from all classes and conditions, and from the very lowest 
 depths of society, washed clean by the grace of God, and 
 entering heaven. "But," say some people, "what am I to 
 do 3" I will tell you three things, anyhow, you can do. 
 First, avoid putting people in your employ amid too 
 great temptation. You can take a young man in your 
 employ and put him in a position where nine hundred 
 and ninety-nine chances out of a thousand are that he 
 will do wrong. Now, I say you have no right to do that. 
 If you have any mercy on the criminal classes, and if 
 you do not want to multiply their number, look out how , 
 you put people under temptation. In the second place, 
 you can do this: you can speak a cheerful word when a 
 man wants to reform. What chance is there for those 
 who have gone astray? Here they are in the lowest 
 depths of society, first of all, with their evil proclivities; 
 then, with their evil associations. But suppose they 
 conquer these evil proclivities, and break away from 
 them. Now, they have come up to the door of society. 
 Who will let them in? Will you? No; you dare not. 
 They will go all around these doors of decent society, 
 and find five hundred, and knock — no admittance; and 
 knock — no admittance; and knock — no admittance. Now, 
 I say it is your duty as a Christian man to help these 
 people when they want to come up and come back. 
 There is a third thing you can do, and that is, be the 
 
AMONG THIEVES ANT) ASSASSINS. 
 
 125 
 
 stanch friends of prison reform associations, home mis- 
 sionary societies, children's aid societies, and all those 
 beneficent institutions which are trying to save our cities. 
 But perhaps I ought to do my own work now, leaving 
 yours for you to do some other time. I will now do 
 that work. Yery probably there is not in all this house 
 one person who is known as a criminal, and yet I sup- 
 pose there are scores of persons in this house who have 
 done wrong. Now, perhaps I may meet their case 
 healthfully and encouragingly when I tell them what I 
 said to two young men. One young man said to me: 
 "I have taken from my employer $2,500 in small amounts, 
 but amounting to that. What shall I do?" I said, 
 "Pay it back." He said, "I can't pay it back." Then 
 I said, "Get your friends to help you pay it." He 
 said, "I have no friends that will help me." Then I 
 said, "I will give you two items of advice: First, go 
 home and kneel down before God and ask his pardon. 
 Then, to-morrow morning, when you go over to the store, 
 get the head men of the firm in the private office, and 
 tell them you have something very important to com- 
 municate, and let the door be locked. Then tell the 
 whole story and ask their pardon. If they are decent 
 men — not to say any thing about their being Christians 
 or not Christians — if they are decent men, they will for- 
 give you and help you to start again." "But," he said, 
 "suppose they don't?" "Then," I said, "you have the 
 Lord Almighty to see you through, and no man ever 
 flung himself at Christ's feet but he was helped and de- 
 livered." Another young man came to me and said, "I 
 have taken money from my employer. What shall I 
 do?" I said, "Pay it back." "Well," he said, "I took 
 a very large amount — I nearly paid it all back." I said, 
 "JS T ow, how long before you can pay it all back?" "Well," 
 
126 
 
 AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 he said, "I can in two weeks, but my conscience disturb* 
 me very much, and I want your counsel." It was a del- 
 icate case. I said to him, "You are sure you can pay it 
 in two weeks?" "Yes; but," he said, "suppose I die?" I 
 said to him: "If you can pay that all up, every farthing 
 of it, in two weeks, pay it, and God don't ask you to dis- 
 grace yourself, or your family, and you won't die in two 
 weeks. I see by the way you have been paying this up 
 that you are going to be delivered. Ask God's pardon 
 for what you have done, and never do so again." 
 
 It is very easy to be hard in making a rule, but I say 
 the Gospel of Jesus Christ i3 a gospel of mercy, and 
 wherever you find anybody in trouble, get him out. 
 "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous 
 man his thoughts." You see, I am preaching a verj 
 practical sermon this morning. I know what are all the 
 temptations of business life, and I did not come on this 
 platform this morning to discourage anybody. I come 
 to speak a word of good cheer to all the wandering and 
 the lost, and I believe I am speaking it. The fact is, 
 these cities are going to be redeemed. You know there 
 is going to be another deluge. "Why," you say, "I 
 thought the rainbow at the end of the great deluge, 
 and the rainbow after every shower, was a sign that 
 there would never be a deluge again !" But there 
 will be another deluge. It will rain more than forty 
 days and forty nights. The ark that will float that 
 deluge will be immeasurably larger than Noah's ark, for 
 it will hold a quadrillion of passengers. It will be the 
 deluge of mercy, and the ark that floats that deluge will 
 have five doors — one at the north to let in the frozen 
 populations; one at the south to let in the sweltering 
 and the sunburned; one at the east to let all China come 
 in; one at the west, to let America in; one at the top, 
 
AMONG THIEVES AND ASSASSINS. 
 
 127 
 
 to let Christ, with all Lis flashing train of cherubim and 
 archangel enter. And, as the rainbow of the ancient 
 deluge gave sign that there would never be a deluge of 
 destruction again, so the rainbow of this last deluge will 
 give sign that the deluge will never depart. " For the 
 knowledge of God shall cover the earth, as the waters 
 cover the sea." Oh! ship of salvation, sail on. With all 
 thy countless freight of immortals, put for the eternal 
 shore. The thunders of the last day shall be the can- 
 nonade that will greet you into the harbor. Church 
 triumphant, stretch down your arms of light across the 
 gangway to welcome into port, church militant. " Hal- 
 lelujah I for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth." Hal- 
 lelujah I Amen! 
 
128 
 
 CLUB-HOUSES. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 CLUB-HOUSES— LEGITIMATE AND ILLEGITIMATE. 
 
 Let the young men now arise and play before us. — II. Samuel ii : 14 
 
 There are two armies encamped by the pool of Gibeon. 
 The time hangs heavily on their hands. One army pro- 
 poses a game of sword- fencing. Nothing could be more 
 healthful and innocent. The other army accepts the 
 challenge. Twelve men against twelve men, the sport 
 opens. But something went adversely. Perhaps one 
 of the swordsmen got an unlucky clip, or in some way 
 had his ire aroused, and that which opened in sportful- 
 ness ended in violence, each one taking his contestant by 
 the hair, and then with the sword thrusting him in the 
 side; so that that which opened in innocent fun ended in 
 the massacre of all the twenty-four sportsmen. Was 
 there ever a better illustration of what was true then, 
 and is true now, that that which is innocent may be made 
 destructive? 
 
 In my explorations of the night side of city life, I 
 have found out that there is a legitimate and an ille^iti- 
 mate use of the club-house. In the one case it may be- 
 come a heathful recreation, like the contest of the twenty- 
 four men in the text when they began their play; in the 
 other case it becomes the massacre of body, mind, and 
 soul, as in the case of these contestants of the text when 
 they had gone too far with their sport. All intelligent 
 ages have had their gatherings for political, social, ar- 
 tistic, literary purposes — gatherings characterized by the 
 blunt old Anglo-Saxon designation of "club." If you 
 
CLUB-HOUSES. 129 
 
 have read history, you know that there was a King's 
 Head Club, a Ben Jonson Club; a Brothers' Club, to 
 which Swift and Bolingbroke belonged; a Literary Club, 
 which Burke and Goldsmith and Johnson and Boswell 
 made immortal ; a Jacobin Club, a Benjamin Franklin . 
 Junto Club. Some of these to indicate justice, some to 
 favor the arts, some to promote good manners, some to 
 despoil the habits, some to destroy the soul. If one will 
 write an honest history of the clubs of England, Ireland, 
 Scotland, France, and the United States for the last one 
 hundred years, he will write the history of the world. 
 The club was an institution born on English soil, but it 
 has thrived well in American atmosphere. We have in 
 this cluster of cities a great number of them, with sev- 
 enty thousand members, so called, so known; but who 
 shall tell how many belong to that kind of club where , 
 men put purses together and open house, apportioning 
 the expense of caterer and servants and room, and hav- 
 ing a sort of domestic establishment — a style of club- 
 house which in my opinion is far better than the ordi- 
 nary hotel or boarding-house? But my object now is to 
 speak of club-houses of a different sort, such as the Union 
 League, which was established during the war, having 
 patriotic purposes, which has now between thirteen and 
 fourteen hundred members, which is now also the head- 
 quarters of Republicanism; likewise the Manhattan, 
 with large admission fee, four or five hundred members, 
 the headquarters of the Democracy; like the Union Club, 
 established in 1836, when Xew York had only a little 
 over three hundred thousand inhabitants, their present 
 building having cost $250,000 — they have a membership 
 of between eight and nine hundred people, among them 
 some of the lending merchant princes of the land; like 
 the Lotos, where journalists, dramatists, sculptors, paint- 
 
130 CLUB-HOUSES. 
 
 ers and artists, from all branches, gather together to ai»- 
 cass newspapers, theatres, and elaborate art; like the 
 Americas, which camps out in summer time, dimpling 
 the pool with its hook and arousing the forest with its 
 stag hunt; like the Century Club, which has its large 
 group of venerable lawyers and poets; like the Army 
 and Navy Club, where those who engaged in warlike ser- 
 vice once on the land or the sea now come together to 
 talk over the days of carnage; like the New York Yacht 
 Club, with its floating palaces of beauty upholstered with 
 velvet and paneled with ebony, having all the advantages 
 of electric bell, and of gaslight, and of king's pantry, 
 one pleasure-boat costing three thousand, another fifteen 
 thousand, another thirty thousand, another sixty-five 
 thousand dollars, the fleet of pleasure-boats belonging to 
 the club having cost over two million dollars; like the 
 American Jockey Club, to which belong men who have 
 a passionate fondness for horses, fine horses, as had Job 
 when, in the Scriptures, he gives us a sketch of thot 
 king of beasts, the arch of its neck, the nervousness of 
 its foot, the majesty of its gait, the whirlwind of its 
 power, crying out: "Hast thou clothed his neck with 
 thunder? The glory of his nostrils is terrible; lie paw- 
 eth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength, he saith 
 among the trumpets ha! ha! and he smelleth the battle 
 afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting;" 
 like the Travelers' Club, the Blossom Club, the Palette 
 Club, the Commercial Club, the Liberal Club, the Stable 
 Gang Club, the Amateur Boat Club, the gambling clubs, 
 the wine clubs, the clubs of all sizes, the clubs of all 
 morals, clubs as good as good can be, and clubs as bad as 
 bad can be, clubs innumerable. No series of sermons 
 on the night side of city life would be complete without a 
 sketch of the clubs, which, after dark, are in full blast. 
 
\ 
 
 CLUB-HOUSES. 131 
 
 During the day they are comparatively lazy places. 
 Here and there an aged man reading a newspaper, or an 
 employee dusting a sofa, or a clerk writing up the ac- 
 counts; but when the curtain of the night falls on the 
 natural day, then the curtain of the club-house hoists 
 for the entertainment. Let us hasten up, now, the mar- 
 ble stairs. "What an imperial hallway! See! here are 
 parlors on this side, with the upholstery of the Kremlin 
 and the Tuilleries; and here are dining-halls that chal- 
 lange you to mention any luxury that they cannot afford; 
 and here are galleries with sculpture, and paintings, and 
 lithographs, and drawings from the best of artists, Crop- 
 sey, and Bierstadt, and Church, and Hart, and Gifford — 
 pictures for every mood, whether you are impassioned or 
 placid; shipwreck, or sunlight over the sea; Sheridan's 
 Ride, or the noonday party of the farmers under the 
 tree; foaming deer pursued by the hounds in the Adiron- 
 dacks, or the sheep on the lawn. On this side there are 
 reading-rooms where you find all newspapers and maga- 
 zines. On that side there is a library, where you find all 
 books, from hermeneutics to the fairy tale. Coming in 
 and out there are gentlemen, some of whom stay ten 
 minutes, others stay many hours. Some of these are 
 from luxuriant homes, and they have excused themselves 
 for a while from the domestic circle that they may enjoy 
 the larger sociability of the club-house. These are from 
 dismembered households, and they have a plain lodging 
 somewhere, but they come to this club-room to have their 
 chief enjoyment. One blackball amid ten votes will de- 
 feat a man's becoming a member. For rowdyism, for 
 drunkenness, for gambling, for any kind of misdemeanor, 
 a member is dropped out. Brilliant club-house from top 
 to bottom. The chandeliers, the plate, the furniture, the 
 
132 
 
 CLUB-HOUSES. 
 
 companionship, the literature, the social prestige, a com- 
 plete enchantment. 
 
 But the evening is passing on, and so we hasten 
 through the hall and down the steps, and into the street, 
 aud from block to block until we come to another style 
 of club-house. Opening the door, we find the fumes 
 of strong drink and tobacco something almost intolera- 
 ble. These young men at this table, it is easy to under- 
 stand what they are at, from the flushed cheek, the intent 
 look, the almost angry way of tossing the dice, or of 
 moving the "chips." They are gambling. At another 
 table are men who are telling vile stories. They are 
 three-fourths intoxicated, and between 12 and 1 o'clock 
 they will go staggering, hooting, swearing, shouting on 
 their way home. That is an only son. On him all kind- 
 ness, all care, all culture has been bestowed. He is pay- 
 ing his parents in this way for their kindness. That is 
 a young married man, who, only a few months ago, at the 
 altar, made promises of kindness and fidelity, every one 
 of which he has broken. "Walk through and see for your- 
 self. Here are all the implements of dissipation and of 
 quick death. As the hours of the night go away, the con- 
 versation becomes imbecile and more debasing. Now it 
 is time to shut up. Those who are able to stand will get 
 out on the pavement and balance themselves against the 
 lamp-post, or against the railings of the fence. The 
 young man who is not able to stand will have a bed im- 
 provised for him in the club-house, or two not quite so 
 overcome with liquor will conduct him to his father's 
 house, and they will ring the door-bell, and the door will 
 open, aud the two imbecile escorts will introduce into 
 the hallway the ghastliest and most hellish spectacle that 
 ever enters a front door — a drunken son. If the dissi- 
 pating club-houses of this country would make a contract 
 
CLUB-HOUSES. 
 
 133 
 
 with the Inferno to provide it ten thousand men a year 
 and for twenty years, on the condition that no more 
 should be asked of them, the club-houses could afford to 
 make that contract, for they would save homesteads, save 
 fortunes, save bodies, minds, and souls. The ten thou- 
 sand men who would be sacrificed by that contract would 
 be but a small part of the multitude sacrificed without 
 the contract. But I make a vast difference between 
 clubs. I have belonged to four clubs: A theological 
 club, a ball club, and two literary clubs. I got from 
 them physical rejuvenation and moral health. What 
 shall be the principle? If God will help me, I will lay 
 down three principles by which you may judge whether 
 the club where you are a member, or the club to which 
 you have been invited, is a legitimate or an illegitimate 
 cl ub-house. 
 
 First of all I want you to test the club by its influences 
 on home, if you have a home. I have been told by a 
 prominent gentleman in club life that three-fourths of 
 the members of the great clubs of these cities are mar- 
 ried men. That wife soon loses her influence over her 
 husband who nervously and foolishly looks upon all even- 
 ing absence as an assault on domesticity. How are the 
 great enterprises of art and literature and beneficence 
 and public weal to be carried on if every man is to have 
 his world bounded on one side by his front door-step, and 
 on the other side by his back window, knowing nothing 
 higher than his own attic, or nothing lower than his own 
 cellar? That wife who becomes jealous of her husband's 
 attention to art, or literature, or religion, or charity, is 
 breaking her own sceptre of conjugal power. I know in 
 this church an instance where a wife thought that her 
 husband was giving too many nights to Christian ser- 
 vice, to charitable service, to prayer- meetings, and to- 
 
134 
 
 CLUB-HOUSES. 
 
 religious convocation. She sytematically decoyed hira 
 away until now he attends neither this nor any other 
 church, and is on a rapid way to destruction, his morals 
 gone, his money gone, and, I fear, his soul gone. Let 
 any Christian wife rejoice when her husband consecrates 
 evenings to the service of God, or to charity, or to art, or 
 to anything elevated; but let not men sacrifice home life 
 to club life. I have the rolls of the members of a great 
 many of the prominent clubs of these cities, and I can 
 point out to you a great many names of men who are guilty 
 of this sacrilege. They are as genial as angels at the club- 
 house, and as ugly as sin at home. They are generous 
 on all subjects of wine suppers, yachts, and fast horses, 
 but they are stingy about the wife's dress and the chil- 
 dren's shoes. That man has made that which might be 
 a healthful recreation an usurper of his affections, and 
 he has married it, and he is guilty of moral bigamy. 
 Under this process the wife, whatever her features, be- 
 comes uninteresting and homely. He becomes critical 
 of her, does not like the dress, does not like the way she 
 arranges her hair, is amazed that he ever was so unro- 
 m antic as to offer her hand and heart. She is always 
 wanting money, money, when she ought to be discussing 
 Eclipses, and Dexter, and Derby Day, and English drags 
 with six horses, all answering the pull of one "ribbon." 
 
 I tell you, there are thousands of houses in Brooklyn 
 and New York being clubbed to death! There are club- 
 houses in these cities where membership always involves 
 domestic shipwreck. Tell me that a man has joined a 
 certain club, tell me nothing more about him for ten 
 years, and I will write his history if he be still alive. 
 The man is a wine-guzzler, his wife broken-hearted or 
 prematurely old, his fortune gone or reduced, and his 
 home a mere name in a directory. Here are six secular 
 
CLUB-HOUSES. 
 
 135 
 
 nights in the week. " What shall I do with them?" says 
 the father and the husband. " I will give four of those 
 nights to the improvement and entertainment of my fam- 
 ily, either at home or in good neighborhood; I will 
 devote one to charitable institutions; I will devote one 
 to the club." I congratulate you. Here is a man who 
 says, "I will make a different division of the six nights. 
 I will take three for the club and three for other pur- 
 poses." I tremble. Here is a man who says, " Out of 
 the six secular nights of the week, I will devote five to 
 the club-house and one to the home, which night I will 
 spend in scowling like a March squall, wishing I was out 
 spending it as I had spent the other five." That man's 
 obituary is written. JSTot one out of ten thousand that 
 ever gets so far on the wrong road ever stops. Gradu- 
 ally his health will fail, through late hours and through 
 too much stimulus. He will be first-rate prey for erysip- 
 elas and rheumatism of the heart. The doctor coming 
 in will at a glance see it is not only present disease he 
 must fight, but years of fast living. The cler£jvman, for 
 the sake of the feelings of the family, on the funeral day 
 will only talk in religious generalities. The men who 
 got his yacht in the eternal rapids will not be at the 
 obsequies. They will have pressing engagements that 
 day. They will send flowers to the coffin-lid, and send 
 their wives to utter words of sympathy, but they will 
 have engagements elsewhere. They never come. Bring 
 me mallet and chisel, and I will cut on the tombstone 
 that man's epitaph, " Blessed are the dead who die in the 
 Lord." " No," you say, " that would not be appropriate." 
 " Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last 
 end be like his." " No," you say, " that would not be 
 appropriate." Then give me the mallet and the chisel, 
 and I will cut an honest epitaph: -'Here lies the victim 
 
 ♦ 
 
136 
 
 CLUB-HOUSES. 
 
 of a dissipating club-house!" I think that damage is 
 often done by the scions of some aristocratic family, who 
 belong to one of these dissipating club-houses. People 
 coming up from humbler classes feel it an honor to be- 
 long to the same club, forgetting the fact that many of 
 the sons and grandsons of the large commercial estab- 
 lishments of the last generation are now, as to mind, 
 imbecile; as to body, diseased; as tn morals, rotten. 
 They would have got through their property long ago if 
 they had had full possession of it; but the wily ancestors, 
 who got the money by hard knocks, foresaw how it was to 
 be, and they tied up everything in the will. Now, there 
 is nothing of that unworthy descendant but his grand- 
 father's name and roast beef rotundity. And yet how 
 many steamers there are which feel honored to lash fast 
 that worm-eaten tug, though it drags them straight into 
 the breakers. 
 
 Another test by which you can find whether your club 
 is legitimate or illegitimate — the effect it has on your 
 secular occupation. I can understand how through such 
 an institution a man can reach commercial successes. 
 I know some men have formed their best business rela- 
 tions through such a channel. If the club has advan- 
 taged you in an honorable calling it is a legitimate club. 
 But has your credit failed? Are bargain-makers more 
 cautious how they trust you with a bill of goods? Have 
 the men whose names were down in the commercial 
 agency A 1 before they entered the club, been going down 
 since in commercial standing? Then look out! You 
 and I every day know of commercial establishments going 
 to ruin through the social excesses of one or two mem- 
 bers. Their fortunes beaten to death with ball-players' 
 bat, or cut amidships by the front prow of the regatta, 
 or going down under the swift hoofs of the fast horses, 
 
CLUB-HOUSES. 
 
 13T 
 
 or drowned in large potations of Cognac and Mononga- 
 hela. Their club-house was the " Loch Earn." Their 
 business house was the rt Yille du Havre." They struck, 
 and the "Yille du Havre" went under. Or, to take 
 illustration from last Monday night's disaster: Their 
 club-house was the " Eilion," and their business house 
 was the " Pommerania." They struck, and the fo Pom- 
 merania" went under. 
 
 A third test by which you may know whether the club 
 to which you belong, or the club to whose membership 
 you are invited, is a legitimate club or an illegitimate 
 club, is this: What is its effect on your sense of moral 
 and religious obligation? Xow, if I should take the 
 names of all the people in this audience this morning, 
 and put them on a roll and then I should lay that roll 
 back of this organ, and a hundred years from now 
 some one should take that roll and call it from A to Z, 
 there would not one of you answer. I say that any 
 association that makes me forget that fact is a bad 
 association. When I go to Chicago I am sometimes 
 perplexed at Buffalo, as I suppose many travelers 
 are, as to whether it is better to take the Lake Shore 
 route or the Michigan Central, equally expeditious and 
 equally safe, getting at the destination at the same time; 
 but suppose that I hear that on one route the track is 
 torn up, and the bridges are torn down, and the switches 
 are unlocked? It will not take me a great while to de- 
 cide which road to take. Kow, here are two roads into 
 the future, the Christian and the unchristian, the safe 
 and the unsafe. Any institution or any association that 
 confuses my idea in regard to that fact is a bad institu- 
 tion and a bad association. I had prayers before I joined 
 the club. Did I have them after? I attended the house 
 of God before I connected myself with the club. Since 
 
138 
 
 CLUB-HOLSES. 
 
 that union with the club do I absent myself from reli- 
 gious influences? Which would jou rather have in your 
 hand when you come to die, a pack of cards or a Bible? 
 Which would you rather have pressed to your lips in the 
 closing moment, the cup of Belshazzarean wassail or the 
 chalice of Christian communion ? Who would you rather 
 have for your pall-bearers, the eiders of a Christian 
 church, or the companions whose conversation was full 
 of slang and innuendo? Who would you rather have for 
 your eternal companions, those men who spend their 
 evenings betting, gambling, swearing, carousing, and 
 telling vile stories, or your little child, that bright girl 
 whom the Lord took? Oh! you would not have been 
 away so much nights, would you, if you had known she 
 was going away so soon ? Dear me, your house has never 
 been the same place since. Your wife has never bright- 
 ened up. She has nut got over it; she never will get 
 over it. How long the evenings are, with no one to put 
 to bed, and no one to tell the beautiful Bible story! 
 What a pity it is that you cannot spend more evenings 
 at home in trying to help her bear that sorrow! You 
 can never drown that grief in the wine cup. You can 
 never break away from the little arms that used to be 
 flung around your neck when she used to say, " Papa, 
 do stay home to-night — do stay home to-night." You 
 will never be able to wipe from your lips the dying kiss 
 of your little girl. The fascination of a dissipating club- 
 house is so great that sometimes a man has turned his 
 back on his home when his child was dying of scarlet 
 fever. He went away. Before he got back at midnight 
 the eyes had been closed, the undertaker had done his 
 work, and the wife, worn out with three weeks watching, 
 lay unconscious in the next room. Then there is a rat- 
 tling of the night-key in the door, and the returned father 
 
CLUB-HOUSES. 
 
 139 
 
 comes up stairs, and he sees the cradle gone, and the 
 windows up, and says, M What's the matter?" In the 
 judgment day he will find out what was the matter. 
 Oh! man astray, God help you! I am going to make a 
 very stout rope. You know that sometimes a rope- 
 maker will take very small threads, and wind them to- 
 gether until, after a while, they become ship-cable. And 
 I am going to take some very small, delicate threads, 
 and wind them together until they make a very stout 
 rope. I will take all the memories of the marriage day, 
 a thread of laughter, a thread of light, a thread of music, 
 a thread of banqueting, a thread of congratulation, and 
 I twist them together, and I have one strand. Then I 
 take a thread of the hour of the first advent in your house, 
 a thread of the darkness that preceded, and a thread of* 
 the light that followed, and a thread of the beautiful 
 scarf that little child used to wear when she bounded out 
 at eventide to greet you, and then a thread of the beau- 
 tiful dress in which you laid her away for the resurrec- 
 tion. And then I twist all these threads together, and 
 I have another strand. Then I take a thread of the 
 scarlet robe of a suffering Christ, and a thread of the 
 white raiment of your loved ones before the throne, and a 
 string of the harp cherubic, and a string of the harp 
 seraphic, and I twist them all together, and I have a third 
 strand. " Oh!" you say, " either strand is strong enough 
 to hold fast a world." No. I will take these strands, 
 and I will twist them together, and one end of that 
 rope I will fasten, not to the communion table for it shall 
 be removed — not to a pillar of the organ, for that will 
 crumble in the ages, but I wind it 'round and 'round 
 the cross of a sympathizing Christ, and having fastened 
 one end of the rope to the cross I throw the other end 
 to you. Lay hold of it! Pull for your life! Pull for 
 heaven ! 
 
140 
 
 POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 " O thou man of God, there is death m the pot." — II. Kings iv: 10. 
 
 Elisha had gone down to lecture to the theological 
 students in the seminary at Gilgal. He found the stu- 
 dents very hungry. Students are apt to be. In order 
 that he might proceed with his lectures successfully, he 
 sends out some servants to gather food for these hungry 
 students. The servants are somewhat reckless in their 
 work, and while they gather up some healthful herbs, 
 they at the same time gather coloquintida, a bitter, pois- 
 onous, deathful weed, and they bring all the herbs to 
 the house and put them in a caldron and stir them up, 
 and then bring the food to the table, where are seated 
 the students and their professor. One of the students 
 takes some of the mixture and puts it to his lips, and 
 immediately tastes the coloquintida, and he cries out to 
 the professor: u O thou man of God, there is death in the 
 pot." What consternation it threw upon the group. 
 What a fortunate thing it was he found out in time, so 
 as to save the lives of his comrades. 
 
 Well, there are now in the world a great many caldrons 
 of death. The coloquintida of mighty temptations tills 
 them. Some taste and quit, and are saved; others taste 
 and eat on, and die. Is not that minister of Christ 
 doing the right thing when he points out these caldrons 
 of iniquity and cries the alarm, saying: " Beware! There 
 is death in the pot"? 
 
 In a palace in Florence there is a fresco of Giotto. 
 
POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 
 141 
 
 For many years that fresco was covered up with two 
 inches thickness of whitewash, and it has only been in 
 recent times that the hand of art has restored that fresco. 
 "What sacrilege," you say, " to destroy the work of such 
 a great master." But there is no sadness in that com- 
 pared with the fact that the image of God in the soul 
 has been covered up and almost obliterated so that no 
 human hand can restore the Divine lineaments. 
 
 Iniquity is a coarse, jagged thing, that needs to be 
 roughly handled. You have no right to garland it with 
 fine phrase or lustrous rhetoric. You cannot catch a 
 buffalo with a silken lasso. Men have no objections to 
 having their sin looked at in a pleasant light. They 
 will be very glad to sit for their photographs if you mak 
 a handsome picture. But every Christian philanthropist* 
 must sometimes go forth and come in violent collision 
 with transgression. I was in a whaling port, and I saw 
 a vessel that had been on a whaling cruise come into the 
 harbor, and it had patched sail and spliced rigging and 
 bespattered deck, showing hard times and rough work. 
 And so I have seen Christian philanthropists come back 
 from some crusade against public iniquities. They have 
 been compelled to acknowledge that it has not been 
 yachting over summer lakes, but it has been outriding a 
 tempest and harpooning great Behemoths. 
 
 A company of emigrants settle in a wild region. The 
 very first day a beast from the mountains comes down 
 and carries off one of the children, and the next day 
 another beast comes and carries off another child. 
 Forthwith all the neighbors band together, and with 
 torch in one hand and gun in the other they go down 
 into the caverns where those wild beasts are secreted, 
 and slay them. 
 
 Now, my Christian friends, this morning I want to go 
 
U2 
 
 POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 
 back of all public iniquity and find out its hiding-place. 
 I want to know what are the sources of its power, or, to 
 resume the figure of my text, I want to know what are 
 the caldrons from which these iniquities are dipped out. 
 
 Unhappy and undisciplined homes are the source of 
 much iniquity. A good home is deathless in its influ- 
 ences. Parents may be gone. The old homestead may 
 be sold and have passed out of the possession of the 
 family. The house itself may be torn down. The 
 meadow brook that ran in front of the house may have 
 changed its course or have dried up. The long line of 
 old-fashioned sunflowers and the hedges of wild rose may 
 have been graded, and in place thereof are now the beau- 
 ties of modern gardening. The old poplar tree may have 
 cast down its crown of verdure and may have fallen. 
 You say you would like to go back a little while and see 
 that home, and you go, and oh, how changed it is! Yet 
 that place will never lose its charm over your soul. 
 That first earthly home will thrill through your ever- 
 lasting career. The dew-drops that you dashed from the 
 chickweed as you drove the cows afield thirty years ago; 
 the fire flies that flashed in your father's home on sum- 
 mer nights when the evenings were too short for a can- 
 dle; the tinged pebbles that you gathered in your apron 
 on the margin of the brook; the berries that you strung 
 into a necklace, and the daisies that you plucked for 
 your hair, — all have gone into your sentiments and 
 tastes, and you will never get over them. The trundle 
 bed where you slept; the chair where you sat; the blue- 
 edged dish out of which you ate; your sister's skipping- 
 rope; your brother's ball; your kite; your hoop; your 
 mother's smile; your father's frown, — they are all part 
 of the fibre of your immortal nature. The mother of 
 missionary Schwartz threw light on the dusky brow of 
 
POISON IX THE CALDRON. 
 
 143 
 
 the savages to whom he preached long after she was 
 dead. The mother of Lord Byron pursued him, as with 
 a fiend's fury, into all lands, stretching gloom and death 
 into "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan," and hovering 
 in darkness over the lonely grave of Missolonghi. 
 
 Kascally and vagabond people for the most part come 
 forth from unhappy homes. Parents harsh aud cruel ou 
 the one hand, or on the other lenient to perfect looseness, 
 are raising up a generation of vipers. A home in which 
 scolding and fault-finding predominate is blood relation 
 to the gallows and penitentiary. Petulance is a reptile 
 that may crawl up into the family nest and crush it. 
 There are parents who disgust their children even with 
 religion. They scold their little ones for not loving 
 God. They go about even their religious duties in an 
 exasperating way. Their house is full of the war-whoop 
 of contention, and from such scenes husbands and child- 
 ren dash out into places of dissipation to find their lost 
 peace, or the peace they never had. O, is there some 
 mother here, like Hagar, leading her Ishmael into the 
 desert to be smitten of the thirst and parched in the 
 sand? In the solemn birth-hour a voice fell straight 
 from the skies into that dwelling, saying: " Take this 
 child and nurse it for Me, and I will give thee thy 
 wages." When angels of God at nightfall hover over that 
 dwelling, do they hear the little ones lisp the name of 
 Jesus? O, traveller for eternity, with your little ones 
 gathered up under your robes, are you sure' you are on 
 the right road, or are you leading them on a dangerous 
 and winding bridle path, off which their inexperienced 
 feet may slip, and up which comes the howling of the 
 wolf and the sound of loosening ledge and tumbling 
 avalanche? Blessed the family altar where the children 
 kneel. Blessed the cradle where the Christian mother 
 
POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 
 rocks the Christian child. Blessed the song the little 
 one sings at nightfall when sleep is closing the eyes and 
 roosening the hand from the toy on the pillow. Blessed 
 the mother's heart whose every throb is a prayer to God 
 for the salvation of her children. The world grows old, 
 and soon the stars will cease to illuminate it, and the 
 herbage to clothe it, and the mountains to guard it, and 
 the waters to refresh it, and the heavens to overspan it, 
 and the long story of its sin, and shame, and glory, and 
 triumph will turn into ashes; but parental influences, 
 starting in the early home, will roll on and up into the 
 great eternity, blooming in all the joy, waving in all the 
 triumph, exulting in all the song of heaven, or groaning 
 in all the pain, and shrinking back into all the shame, 
 and frowning in all the darkness of the great prison 
 house. O, father! O, mother! in which direction is 
 your influence tending? 
 
 I verily believe that three-fourths of the wickedness 
 of the great city runs out rank and putrid from undisci- 
 plined homes. Sometimes I know there is an exception. 
 From a bright, beautiful, cheerful Christian home a 
 husband or a son will go off to die. How long you have 
 had that boy in } r our prayer. He does not know the 
 tears you have shed. He knows nothing about the 
 sleepless nights you have passed about him. He started 
 on the downward road, and will not stop, call you never 
 so tenderly. O, it is hard, it is very hard, after having 
 expended so much kindness and care to get such pay of 
 ingratitude. There is many a young man, proud of his 
 mother, who would strike into the dust the dastard who 
 would dare to do her wrong, whose hand this morning, 
 by his first step in sin, is sharpening a dagger to plunge 
 through that mother's heart. I saw it. The telegram 
 summoned him. I saw him come in scarred and bloated, 
 
POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 
 145 
 
 to look upon the lifeless form of his mother — those grey 
 locks pushed back over the wrinkled brow he had whit- 
 ened by his waywardness. Those eyes had rained 
 floods of tears over his iniquity. That still, white hand 
 had written many a loving letter of counsel and invita- 
 tion. He had broken that old heart. When he came in 
 he threw himself on the coffin and sobbed outright and 
 cried: "Mother! mother!" but the lips that kissed him 
 in infancy and that had spoken so kindly on other days 
 when he came home, spake not. They were sealed for- 
 ever. Bather than such a memory in my soul, I would 
 have rolled on me now the Alps and the Himalayas. 
 " The eye that mocketh its father, and refuseth to obey 
 its mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and 
 the young eagles shall eat it." 
 
 The second caldron of iniquity to which I point you 
 is an indolent life. There are young men coming to our 
 city with industrious habits, and yet they see in the city 
 a great many men who seem to get along without any 
 work. They have no business, and yet they are better 
 dressed than industrious men, and they seem to have 
 more facilities of access to amusements. They have 
 plenty of time to spare to hang around the engine house, 
 or the Pierrepont House, or the Saint Nicholas, or the 
 other beautiful hotels; or lounge around the City Hall, 
 their hands in their pockets, a tooth-pick in their mouth, 
 waiting for some crumb to fall from the office-holder's 
 table; or gazing at the criminals as they come up in the 
 morning from the station-houses, jeering at them as they 
 leap from the city van to the Court House steps. Ah, I 
 would as soon think of standing at the gate of Green- 
 wood to enjoy a funeral as to stand at the City Hall in 
 the morning, when the city van drives up, to look at the 
 carcasses of men and women slain for both worlds. The 
 10 
 
U6 
 
 POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 
 industrious people see these idlers standing about, and 
 they wonder how they make their living. I wonder, too. 
 They have plenty of money for the ride; they have 
 plenty of money to bet on the boat race or the horse race; 
 they can discuss the flavor of the costliest wines; they 
 they have the best seats at Booth's Theater. But still 
 you ask me: "How do they get their money?" Well, 
 my friends, there are four ways of getting money — -just 
 four. By inheritance; by earning it; by begging it; by 
 stealing it. Now, there are many people in our com- 
 munity who seem to have plenty of money, who did not 
 inherit it, and who did not earn it, and who did not beg 
 it. You must take the responsibility of saying how 
 they got it. There are men who get tired of the drudg- 
 ery of life, and see these prosperous idlers; and they con- 
 sort with them, and they learn the same tricks, and they 
 go to the same ruin — at death their departure causing 
 no more mourning than is felt for the fast horse that 
 they foundered and killed by a too hasty watering at 
 '* Tunison's." O, the pressure on the industrious young 
 men is tremendous when they see people all around 
 them full of seeming success but doing nothing. The 
 multitude of those who get their living by sleight of 
 hand is multiplying. What is the use of working in the 
 store, or office, or shop, or on the scaffold, or by the 
 forge, when you can get your living by your wits? A 
 merchant in New York was passing along the street one 
 evening, and he saw one of his clerks, half disguised, 
 going into one of the low theaters. He said within him- 
 self: " I must look out for that young man." One morn- 
 ing the merchant came to his store, and this clerk of 
 whom I have been speaking came up, in assumed con- 
 sternation, and said: "The store has been on fire. I have 
 got it put out; but many of the goods are gone." The 
 
POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 
 147 
 
 merchant instantly seized the young man by the collar, 
 and said: "I have had enough of this. You can't de- 
 ceive me. Where are the goods you stole V y And the 
 clerk confessed it instantly. The young man had gone 
 into the plan of making money by sleight of hand and 
 by his wits. 
 
 You will get out of this world just so much as, under 
 God, you earn by your own hand and brain. Horatius 
 was told he might have so much land as he could plough 
 around in one day with a yoke of oxen, and I have no- 
 ticed that men get nothing in this world, that is worth 
 possessing, of a financial, moral, or spiritual nature, save 
 they get it by their own hard work. It is just so much 
 as, from the morning to the evening of your life, you 
 can plough around by your own continuous and hard- 
 sweating industries. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, 
 consider her ways, and be wise." 
 
 Another caldron of iniquity is the dram shop. Surely 
 there is death in the pot. Anacharsis said that the vine 
 had three grapes: pleasure, drunkenness, misery. Rich- 
 ard III. drowned his own brother Clarence in a butt of 
 wine — these two incidents quite typical. Every saloon 
 built above ground, or dug underground is a center of 
 evil. It may be licensed, and for some time it may con- 
 duct its business in elegant style; but after awhile the 
 cover will fall off, and you will see the iniquity in its 
 right coloring. Plant a grog shop in the midst of the 
 finest block of houses in your city, and the property will 
 depreciate five, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty per cent. Men en- 
 gaged in the ruinous traffic sometimes say: u You don't 
 appreciate the fact that the largest revenues paid to the 
 Government are by our business.' 1 Then I remember 
 what Gladstone, the prime minister of England, said to 
 a committee of men engaged in that traffic when they 
 
148 
 
 POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 
 came to him 10 deplore that they were not treated with 
 more consideration: "Gentlemen, don't be uneasy about 
 the revenue. Give me thirty million sober people, and 
 I will pay all the revenue, and have a large surplus." 
 But, my friends, the ruin to property is a very small 
 part of the evil. It takes everything that is sacred in 
 the family, everything that is holy in religion, everything 
 that is infinite in the soul, and tramples it into the mire. 
 
 The marriage day has come. The happy pair at the 
 altar. The music sounds. The gay lights flash. The 
 feet bound up and down the drawing-room. Started on 
 a bright voyage of life. Sails all up. The wind is abaft. 
 You prophesy everything beautiful. But the scene 
 changes. A dingy garret. No fire. On a broken chair 
 sits a sorrowing woman. Her last hope gone. Poor, 
 disgraced, trodden underfoot — she knows the despair of 
 being a drunkard's wife. The gay barque that danced 
 off on the marriage morning has become a battered hulk, 
 dismasted and shipwrecked. <4 0," she says, "he was as 
 good a man as ever lived. He was so kind, he was so 
 generous — no one better did God ever create than he; 
 but the drink, the drink did it." 
 
 A young man starts from the country home for the 
 city. Through the agency of metropolitan friends he 
 has obtained a place in a store or a bank. That morning, 
 in the farm house, the lights are kindlebl very early, and 
 the boy's trunk is on the wagon. " I put a Bible in 
 your trunk," says the mother, as she wipes the tears 
 away with her apron. "My dear, I want you to read it 
 when you get to town." "O," he says, " mother, don't 
 you be worried about me. I know what I am about. I 
 am old enough to take care of myself. Don't you be 
 worried about me." The father says: "Be a good boy 
 and write home often. Your mother will want to hear 
 
POISON IN THE CALDRON. 149 
 
 from you." Crack! goes the whip, and away over the 
 hills goes the wagon. The scene changes. Five years 
 after and there is a hearse coming up the old lane in 
 front of the farm house. Killed in a porter house fight, 
 that son has come home to disgrace the sepulchre of his 
 fathers. When the old people lift the coffin lid, and see 
 the changed face, and see the gash in the temples where 
 the life oozed out, they will wring their withered hands 
 and look up to heaven and cry: "Cursed be rum! Cursed 
 be rum!" 
 
 Lorenzo de Medici was sick, and his friends thought 
 that if they could dissolve some pearls In his cup, and 
 then get him to swallow them, he would he cured. And 
 so these valuable pearls were dissolved in his cup, and he 
 drank them. What an expensive draught! But do you 
 know that drunkenness puts into its cup the pearl of 
 physical health, the pearl of domestic happiness, the 
 pearl of earthly usefulness, the pearl of Christian hope, 
 the pearl of an everlasting heaven, and then presses it to 
 the lips? And oh, what an expensive draught! The 
 dram shop is the gate of hell. While I speak there are 
 some of you in the outer circles of this terrible mael- 
 strom, and in the name of God I cry the alarm: "Put 
 back now or never!'' You say you are kind, and genial^ 
 and generous. I do not doubt it; but so much more the 
 peril. Mean men never drink, unless some one else 
 treats them. But the men who are in the front rank of 
 this destructive habit are those who have a nne educa- 
 tion, large hearts, genial natures and splendid prospects. 
 This sin chooses the fattest lambs for sacrifice. What 
 garlands of victory this carbuncled hand of drunkenness 
 hath snatched from the brow of the orator and poet. 
 What gleaming lights of generosity it has put out in 
 midnight darkness. Come with me and look over — 
 
150 
 
 POISON IN THE CALDRON. 
 
 come and hang over — look down into it while I lift off 
 the cover, and you may see the loathsome, boiling seeth- 
 ing, groaning, agonizing, blaspheming hell of the drunk- 
 ard. There is everlasting death in the pot. 
 
 I have thought it might be appropriate at this season 
 of the year, when we all mingle in hilarities, to warn our 
 young friends not to put the cup of intoxication to their 
 lips, and not to make these glorious seasons of family 
 reunion and neighborhood congratulation the beginning 
 of a long road of dissipation and sorrow. Young man! 
 by the grace of God, be master of your appetites and 
 passions. Frederick the Great, before he became "the 
 Great," was seated with his roystering companions, and 
 they were drinking, and hallooing, and almost imbecile, 
 when word came to him that his father was dead, and 
 consequently the crown was to pass to him. He rose up 
 from among the boisterous crew, and stepped out and 
 cried: "Stop your fooling; I am emperorl" Would to 
 God that this day you might bring all your appetites 
 and all your passions in subjection. "Better is he that 
 ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city." Be emperor! 
 Yea, you are called this morning to be kings and to be 
 priests unto God for ever. In the solemn hours of this 
 closing year, and about to enter upon another year, if the 
 Lord shall spare your lives for a few days longer, resolve 
 that you will serve Him. Soon all the days and years 
 of your life will have passed away, and then, the great 
 eternity. "Rejoice, O, young man, in thy youth; let 
 thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk 
 thou in the sight of thine own eyes, and in the way of 
 thine own heart; but know thou that for all these things 
 God will bring thee into judgment." 
 
 i 
 
A CAHT-KOPE INIQUITY. 
 
 151 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 A CART-ROPE INIQUITY 
 
 •'Woe unto them that sin as i t were with a cart-rope." — Isaiah v: 18. 
 
 There are some iniquities that only nibble at the heart. 
 After a lifetime of their work, the man still stands up- 
 right, respected and honored. These vermin have not 
 strength enough to gnaw through a man's character. 
 But there are other transgressions that lift themselves 
 up to gigantic proportions, and seize hold of a man and 
 bind him with thongs for ever. There are some iniqui- 
 ties that have such great emphasis of evil that he who com- 
 mits them may be said to sin as with a cart-rope. I suppose 
 jou know how they make a great rope. The stuff out of 
 which it is fashioned is nothing but tow which you pull 
 apart without any exertion of your fingers. This is spun 
 into threads, any one of which you could easily snap, 
 but a great many of these threads are interwound — then 
 you have a rope strong enough to bind an ox, or hold a 
 ship in a tempest. I speak to you of the sin of gambling. 
 A cart-rope in strength is that sin, and yet I wish more 
 especially to draw your attention to the small threads of 
 influence out of which that mighty iniquity is twisted. 
 This crime is on the advance, so that it is well not only 
 that fathers, and brothers, and sons, be interested in such 
 a discussion, but that wives, and mothers, and sisters, and 
 daughters look out lest their present home be sacrificed, 
 or their intended home be blasted. No man, no woman, 
 can stand aloof from such a subject as this and say: "It 
 has no practical bearing upon my life;" for there may be 
 
 9 
 
152 
 
 A CART-ROPE INIQUITY. 
 
 in a short time in your history an experience in which 
 you will find that the discussion involved three worlds — 
 earth, heaven, hell. There are in this cluster of cities 
 about eight hundred confessed gambling establishments. 
 There are about three thousand five hundred professional 
 gamblers. Out of the eight hundred gambling establish- 
 ments, how many of them do you suppose profess to be 
 honest? Ten. These ten professing to be honest because 
 they are merely the ante-chamber to the seven hundred 
 and ninety that are acknowledged fraudulent. There are 
 first-class gambling establishments. You step a little 
 way out of Broadway. You go up the marble stairs. 
 You ring the bell. The liveried servant introduces you. 
 The walls are lavendar tinted. The mantles are of Ver- 
 mont marble. The pictures are "Jephtha's Daughter," 
 and Dore's " Dante's and Yirgil's Frozen Region of 
 Hell," a most appropriate selection, this last, for the place. 
 There is the roulette table, the finest, costliest, most ex- 
 quisite piece of furniture in the United States. There 
 is the banqueting-room where, free of charge to the 
 guests, you may find the plate, and viands, and winet, 
 and cigars, sumptuous beyond parallel. Then you come 
 to the second-class gambling-establishment. To it you 
 are introduced by a card through some "roper in." 
 Having entered, you must either gamble or fight. Sand- 
 ed cards, dice loaded with quicksilver, poor drinks mixed 
 wit 1 ^oor drinks, will soon help you to get rid of 
 
 all yo'ir money to a tune in short metre without staccato 
 passages. You wanted to see. You saw. The low vil- 
 lains of that place watch you as you come in. Does not 
 the panther, squat in the grass, know a calf when he sees 
 it ? "Wrangle not for your rights in that place, or your 
 body will be thrown bloody into the street, or dead into 
 the East River. 
 
A CART-ROPE INIQUITY. 
 
 153 
 
 You go along a little further and find the policy estab- 
 lishment. In that place you bet on numbers. Betting 
 on two numbers is called a " saddle;" betting on three 
 numbers is called a "gig;" betting on four numbers is 
 called a "horse;" and there are thousands of our young 
 men leaping into that " saddle," and mounting that 
 "gig," and behind that "horse," riding to perdition. 
 There is alwa} T s one kind of sign on the door — u Ex- 
 change; " a most appropriate title for the door, for there, 
 in that room, a man exchanges health, peace, and heaven, 
 for loss of health, loss of home, loss of family, loss of im- 
 mortal soul. Exchange sure enough and infinite enough. 
 
 Now you acknowledge that is a cart-rope of evil, but 
 you want to know what are the small threads out of which 
 it is made. There is, in many, a disposition to hazard. 
 They feel a delight in walking near a piecipice because 
 of the sense of danger. There are people who go upon 
 Jungfrau, not for the largeness of the prospect, but for the 
 feeling that they have of thinking; "What would hap- 
 pen if I should fall off? " There are persons who have 
 their blood filliped and accelerated by skating very near 
 an air hole. There are men who find a positive delight 
 in driving within two inches of the edge of a bridge. It 
 is this disposition to hazard that finds development in 
 gaming practices. Here are five hundred dollars. I may 
 stake them. If I stake them I may lose them; but I 
 may win five thousand dollars. Whichever way it turns, 
 I have the excitement. Shuffle the cards. Lost! Heart 
 thumps. Head dizzy. At it again — -just to gratify this 
 desire for hazard. 
 
 Then there are others who go into thi3 sin through 
 sheer desire for gain. It is especially so with profes- 
 sional gamblers. They always keep cool. They never 
 drink enough to unbalance their judgment. They do not 
 
 \ 
 
154 
 
 A CART-llOPE INIQUITY. 
 
 see the dice so touch as they see the dollar beyond the 
 dice, and for that they watch as the spider in the web, 
 looking as if dead until the fly passes. Thousands of 
 young men in the hope of gain go into these practices. 
 They say: "Well, my salary is not enough to allow this 
 luxuriance. I don't get enough from my store, office, or 
 shop. I ought to have finer apartments. I ought to have 
 better wines. I ought to have more richly flavored 
 cigars. I ought to be able to entertain my friends more 
 expensively. I wont stand this any longer. I can with 
 one brilliant stroke make a fortune. Now, here goes, 
 principle or no principle, heaven or hell. Who cares?" 
 When a young man makes up his mind to live beyond 
 his income, Satan ha3 bought him out and out, and it is 
 only a question of time when the goods are to be deliv- 
 ered. The thing is done. You may plant in the way all 
 the batteries of truth and righteousness, that man is bound 
 to go on. When a man makes one thousand dollars a 
 year and spends one thousand two hundred dollars; when 
 a young man makes one thousand five hundred dollars 
 and spends one thousand seven hundred dollars, all the 
 harpies of darkness cry out: "Ha! ha ! we have him," 
 and they have. How to get the extra five hundred dol- 
 lars or the extra two thousand dollars is the question. 
 He says: " Here is my friend who started out the other 
 day with but little money, and in one night, so great was 
 his luck, he rolled up hundreds and thousands of dollars. 
 If he got it, why not I? It is such dull work, this adding 
 up of long lines of figures in the counting-house; this 
 pulling down of a hundred yards of goods and selling a 
 remnant; this always waiting upon somebody else, when 
 I could put one hundred dollars on the ace, and pick up 
 a thousand." This sin works very insidiously. 
 
 Other sins sound the drum, and flaunt the flag, and 
 
A CAKT-ROPE INIQUITY. 
 
 155 
 
 gather their recruits with wild huzza, but this marches 
 its procession of pale victims in dead of night, in sileuce, 
 and when they drop into the grave there is not so much 
 sound as the click of a dice. O, how many have gone 
 down under it. Look at those men who were once highly 
 prospered. Now, their forehead is licked by a tongue of 
 flame that will never go out. In their souls are plunged 
 the beaks that will never be lifted. Swing open the door 
 of that man's heart and you see a coil of adders wrig- 
 gling their indescribable horror until you turn away 
 and hide your face and ask God to help you to forget it. 
 The most of this evil is unadvertised. The community 
 does not hear of it. Men defrauded in gamino: establish- 
 ments are not fools enough to tell of it. Once in a while, 
 however, there is an exposure, as when in Boston the 
 police swooped upon a gaming establishment and found 
 in it the representatives of all classes of citizens, from the 
 first merchants on State street to the low Ann street 
 gambler ; as when Bullock, the cashier of the Central 
 Railroad of Georgia, was found to have stolen one hun- 
 dred and three thousand dollars for the purpose of carry- 
 ing on gaming practices; as when a young man in one 
 of the savings' banks of Brooklyn, many years ago, was 
 found to have stolen forty thousand dollars to carry on 
 gaming practices; as when a man connected with a Wall 
 street insurance company was found to have stolen one 
 hundred and eighty thousand dollars to carry on his gam- 
 ing practices. But that is exceptional. Generally the 
 money leaks silently from the merchant's till into the 
 gamester's wallet. I believe that one of the main pipes 
 leading to this sewer of iniquity is the excitement of busi- 
 ness life. It is not a significant fact that the majority of 
 the day gambling-houses in New York are in proximity 
 to Wall street? Men go into the excitement of stock 
 
156 
 
 A CART-ROPE INIQUITY. 
 
 gambling, and from that they plunge into the gam- 
 bling-houses, as, when men are intoxicated, they go into 
 a liquor saloon to get more drink. The howling, scream- 
 ing, stamping, Bedlamitish crew in the " Gold Room" 
 dr«p into the gaming-houses to keep up their frenzy. The 
 agitation that is witnessed in the stock market when the 
 chair announces the word " North-western," or " Fort 
 Wayne," or " Rock Island," or "New York Central," 
 and the rat! tat! tat! of the auctioneer's hammer, and the 
 excitement of making "corners," and getting up "pools," 
 and " carrying stock," and a " break " from eighty to 
 seventy, and the excitement of rushing about in curb- 
 stone brokerage, and the sudden cries of "Buyer three! " 
 "Buyer ten!" "Take 'em!" "How many?" and the 
 making or losing of ten thousand dollars by one opera- 
 tion, unfits a man to go home, and so he goes up the 
 flight of stairs, amid business offices, to the darkly-cur- 
 tained, wooden -shuttered room, gaily furnished inside, 
 and takes his place at the roulette or the faro table. But 
 I cannot tell all the process by which men get into this 
 evil. One man came to our city of New York. He was 
 a Western merchant. He went into a gaming-house on 
 Park-place. Before morning he had lost all his money 
 save one dollar, and he moved around about with that 
 dollar in his hand, and after awhile, caught still more 
 powerfully under the infernal infatuation, he came up and 
 put down the dollar and cried out until they heard him 
 through the saloon: "One thousand miles from home, 
 and my last dollar on the gaming table." 
 
 Says some young man here this morning: " That cart- 
 rope has never been wound around my soul." My 
 brother, have not some threads of that cart-rope been 
 twisted until after awhile they may become strong enough 
 to bind you for ever? 
 
A CART- ROPE INIQUITY. 157 
 
 I arraign before God the gift enterprises of our cities,, 
 which have a tendency to make this a nation of gam- 
 blers. "Whatever you get, young man, in such a place 
 as that, without giving a proper equivalent, is a robbery 
 of your own soul, and a robbery of the community. 
 Yet, how we are appalled to see men who have failed in 
 other enterprises go into gift concerts, where the chief 
 attraction is not music, but the prizes distributed among 
 the audience; or to sell books where the chief attraction 
 is not the book, but the package that goes with the book. 
 Tobacco dealers advertise that on a certain day they will 
 put money into their papers, so that the purchaser of 
 this tobacco in Cincinnati or New York may unexpect- 
 edly come upon a magnificent gratuity. Boys hawking 
 through the cars packages containing nobody knows 
 what, until you open them and find they contain noth- 
 ing. Christian men with pictures on their wall gotten 
 in a lottery, and the brain of community taxed to find 
 out some new way of getting things without paying for 
 them. O, young men, these are the threads that make 
 the cart rope, and when a young man consents to these 
 practices, he is being bound hand and foot by a habit 
 which has already destroyed : ' a great multitude that no 
 man can number." Sometimes these gift enterprises 
 are carried on in the name of charity; and you remem- 
 ber at the close of the late war how many gift enter- 
 prises were on foot, the proceeds to go to the orphans 
 and the widows of the soldiers and sailors. "What did 
 the men who had charge of those gift enterprises care 
 for the orphans and the widows? Why, thev would have 
 allowed them to freeze to death upon their steps. I have 
 no faith in a charity which, for the sake of relieving 
 present suffering, opens a gaping jaw that has swallowed 
 down so much of the virtue and good principle of com- 
 
158 
 
 A CART-ROPE INIQUITY. 
 
 munity. Young man, have nothing to do with these 
 things. They only sharpen your appetite for games of 
 chance. Do one of two things: be honest or die. 
 
 I have accomplished my object if I put the men in my 
 audience on the look out. It is a great deal easier to 
 fall than it is to get up again. The trouble is that when 
 men begin to go astray from the path of duty, they are 
 apt to say, " There's no use of my trying to get back. 
 I've sacrificed my respectability, I can't return;" and 
 they go on until they are utterly destroyed. I tell you, 
 my friends, that God this moment, by His Holy Spirit, 
 can change your entire nature, so that you .will go out 
 of this Tabernacle a far different man from what you 
 were when you came in. Your great want — what is it? 
 More salary? Higher social position? No; no. I will 
 tell you the great want of every man in this house, if 
 he has not already obtained it. It is the grace of God. 
 Are there any here who have fallen victims to the sin 
 that I have been reprehending? You are in a prison. 
 You rush against the wall of this prison, and try to get 
 out, and you fail; and you turn around and dash against 
 the other wall until there is blood on the grates, and 
 blood on your soul. You will never get out in this way. 
 There is only one way of getting out. There is a key 
 that can unlock that prison-house. It is the key of the 
 house of David. It is the key that Christ wears at His 
 girdle. If you will allow Him this morning to put that 
 key to the lock, the bolt will shoot back, and the door 
 will swing open, and you will be a free man in Christ 
 Jesus. O, prodigal, what a business this is for you, 
 feeding swine, when your father stands in the front door, 
 straining his eyesight to catch the first glimpse of your 
 return ; and the calf iG as fat as it will be, and the harps 
 of heaven are all strung, and the feet free. There are 
 
A CART- HOPE INIQUITY. 159 
 
 converted gamblers in heaven. The light of eternity 
 flashed upon the green baize of their billiard-saloon. In 
 the laver of God's forgiveness they washed off all their 
 sin. They quit trying for earthly stakes. They tried 
 for heaven and won it. There stretches a hand from 
 heaven toward the head of the worst man in all this 
 audience. It is a hand, not clenched as if to smite, but 
 outspread as if to drop a benediction. Other seas have 
 a shore and may be fathomed, but the sea of God's love 
 — eternity, has no plummet to strike the bottom, and 
 immensity no iron-bound shore to confine it. Its tides 
 are lifted by the heart of infinite compassion. Its waves 
 are the hosannahs of the redeemed. The argosies that 
 sail on it drop anchor at last amid the thundering salvo 
 of eternal victory. But alas for that man who sits down 
 to the final game of life and puts his immortal soul on 
 the ace. while the angels of God keep the tally-board; 
 and after the kings and queens, and knaves, and spades, 
 are "shuffled" and "cut," and the game is ended, hov- 
 ering and impending worlds discover that he has lost it, 
 the faro-bank of eternal darkness clutching down into 
 its wallet all the blood-stained wager*. 
 
160 
 
 THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 
 She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth. — I. Tim. t: 6- 
 
 It is a strong way of putting the truth, that a woman 
 who seeks in worldly advantage her chief enjoyment, 
 will come to disappointment and death. 
 
 My friends, you all want to be happy. Fou have had 
 a great many recipes by which it is proposed to give you 
 satisfaction — solid satisfaction. At times you feel a 
 thorough unrest. You know as well as older people 
 what it is to be depressed. As dark shadows sometimes 
 fall upon the geography of the school-girl as on the page 
 of the spectacled philosopher. I have seen as cloudy 
 daj T s in May as in November. There are no deeper sighs 
 breathed by the grandmother than by the granddaughter. 
 I correct the popular impression that people are happier 
 in childhood and youth than they ever will be again. If 
 we live aright, the older we are the happier. The happiest 
 woman that I ever knew was a Christian octogenarian; 
 her hair white as white could be; the sunlight of heaven 
 late in the afternoon gilding the peaks of snow. I have 
 to say to a great many of the young people of this church 
 that the most miserable time you are ever to have is 
 just now. As you advance in life, as you come out into 
 the world and have your head and heart all full of good, 
 honest, practical, Christian work, then you will know 
 what it is to begin to be happy. There are those who 
 would have us believe that life is chasing thistle-down 
 
THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 
 
 161 
 
 and grasping bubbles. ^Ve have not found it so. To 
 many of us it has been discovering diamonds larger than 
 the Kohinoor, and I think that our joy will continue to 
 increase until nothing short ot' the everlasting jubile t 
 heaven will be able to express it. 
 
 Horatio Greenongh, at the close of the baldest life a 
 man ever lives — the life of an American artist — wrote: 
 "I don't want to leave this world until I give some sign 
 that, born by the grace of God in this land, I have found 
 life to be a very cheerful thing, and not the dark and 
 bitter thing with which my early prospects were 
 clouded." 
 
 Albert Barnes, the good Christian, known the world 
 over, stood in his pulpit in Philadelphia, at seventy or 
 eighty years of age, and said: "This world is so very 
 attractive to me. I am very sorry I shall have to leave it." 
 
 I know that Solomon said some very dolorous things 
 about this world, and three times declared: "Vanity of 
 vanities, all is vanity. ,, I suppose it was a reference to 
 those times in his career when his seven hundred wives 
 almost pestered the life out of him! But I would rather 
 turn to the description he has gi ven of religion, when he 
 says in another place: "Her ways are ways of pleasant- 
 ness, and all her paths are peace." It is reasonable 
 to expect it will be so. The longer the fruit hangs on 
 the tree, the riper and more mello w it ought to pw. 
 You plant one grain of corn, and it will send Up a stalk 
 with two ears, each having nine hundred and fifty grains, 
 so that one grain planted will produce nineteen hundred 
 grains. And ought not the implantation of a grain of 
 Christian principle in a youthful soul develop into a large 
 crop of gladness on earth and to a harvest of eternal Joy 
 in heaven? Hear me, then, this morning, while I dis- 
 course upon some of the mistakes which young people 
 11 
 
162 
 
 THE WOMAN OF PLKASUKE. 
 
 make in regard to happiness, and point out to the young 
 women of this church what I consider to be the sources 
 of complete satisfaction. 
 
 And, in the first place, I advise you not to build your 
 happiness upon mere social position. Persons at your 
 age, looking off upon life, are apt to think that if, by 
 some stroke of what is called good-luck, you could arrive 
 in an elevated and affluent position, a little higher than 
 that in which God has called you to live, you would be 
 completely happy. Infinite mistake! The palace floor 
 of Ahasuerus is red with the blood of Yashti's broken 
 heart. There have been no more scalding tears wept 
 than those which coursed the cheeks of Josephine. If 
 the sobs of unhappy womanhood in the great cities could 
 break through the tapestried wall, that sob would come 
 along your streets to-day like the simoon of the desert. 
 Sometimes I have heard in the rustling of the robes on 
 the city pavement the hiss of the adders that followed in 
 the wake. You have come out from your home, and you 
 have looked up at the great house, and covet a life under 
 those arches, when, perhaps, at that very moment, within 
 that house, there may have been the wringing of hands, 
 the start of horror, and the very agony of hell. I knew 
 such an one. Her father's house was plain, most of the 
 people who came there were plain; but, by a change in 
 fortune such as sometimes comes, a hand had been 
 offered that led her into a brilliant sphere. All the 
 neighbors congratulated her upon her grand prospects; 
 but what an exchange! On her side it was a heart full 
 of generous impulse and affection. On his side it was a 
 soul dry and withered as the stubble of the field. On 
 her side it was a father's house, where God was honored 
 and the Sabbath light flooded the rooms with the very 
 mirth of heaven. On his side it was a gorgeous resi- 
 
THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 
 
 163 
 
 dence, and the coming of mighty men to be entertained 
 there; but within it were revelry and godlessness. 
 Hardly had the orange blossoms of the marriage feast 
 lost their fragrance, than the night of discontent began 
 to cast here and there its shadow. The ring on the fin- 
 ger was only one link of an iron chain that was to bind 
 her eternally captive. Cruelties and unkindness changed 
 all those splendid trappings into a hollow mockery. The 
 platters of solid silver, the caskets of pure gold, the head- 
 dress of gleaming diamonds, were there; but no God, no 
 peace, no kind words, no Christian sympathy. The festive 
 music that broke on the captive's car turned out to be a 
 dirge, and the wreath in the plush was a reptile coil, and 
 the upholstery that swayed in the wind was the wing of 
 a destroying angel, and the bead-drops on the pitcher 
 were the sweat of everlasting despair. O, how many 
 rivalries and unhappinesses among those who seek in 
 social life their chief happiness! It matters not how fine 
 you have things; there are other people who have it 
 finer. Taking out your watch to tell the hour of day, 
 some one will correct your time-piece by pulling out a 
 watch more richly chased and jeweled. Ride in a car- 
 riage that cost you eight hundred dollars, and before you 
 get around the park you will meet witli one that cost two 
 thousand dollars. Have on your wall a picture by Cop- 
 ley, and before night you will hear of some one who has 
 a picture fresh from the studio of Church or Bierstadt. 
 All that this world can do for you in ribbons, in silver, 
 in gold, in Axminster plush, in Gobelin tapestry, in wide 
 halls, in lordly acquaintanceship, will not give you the 
 ten-thousandth part of a grain of solid satisfaction. The 
 English lord, moving in the very highest sphere, was 
 one day found seated, with his chin on his hand, and his 
 elbow on the window-sill, looking out, and saying: "O, 
 
THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 
 
 I wish I could exchange places with that dog." Mere 
 social position will never give happiness to a woman's 
 soul. I have walked through the halls of those who des- 
 
 CD 
 
 pise the common people; I have sat at their banquets; 
 I have had their friendship; yea, I have heard from their 
 own lips the story of their disquietude; and I tell the 
 young women of this church that they who build on 
 mere social position their soul's immortal happiness, are 
 building on the sand. 
 
 I go further, and advise you not to depend for enjoy- 
 ment upon mere personal attractions. It would be 
 sheer hypocrisy, because we may not have it ourselves, 
 to despise, or affect to despise, beauty in others. When 
 God gives it, He gives it as a blessing and as a means of 
 usefulness. David and his army were coming down from 
 the mountains to destroy Nabal and his flocks and vine- 
 yards. The beautiful Abigail, the wife of Nabal, went 
 out to arrest him when he came down from the moun- 
 tains, and she succeeded. Coming to the foot of the hill, 
 she knelt. David with his army of sworn men came 
 down over the cliffs, and when he saw her kneeling at 
 the foot of the hill, he cried: "Halt!" to his men, and 
 the caves echoed it: "Halt! halt!" That one beautiful 
 woman kneeling at the foot of the cliff had arrested all 
 those armed troops. A dew-drop dashed back Niagara. 
 The Bible sets before us the portraits of Sarah and 
 Rebecca, and Abishag, Absalom's sister, and Job's 
 'daughters, and says: "They were fair to look upon." 
 By out-door exercise, and by skillful arrangement of ap- 
 parel, let women make themselves attractive. The sloven 
 lias only one mission, and that to excite our loathing and 
 disgust. But alas I for those who depend upon personal 
 charms for their happiness. Beauty is such a subtle 
 thing, it does not seem to depend upon facial propor- 
 
THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 165 
 
 tions, or upon the sparkle of the eye, or upon the flush 
 of the cheek. You sometimes find it among irregular 
 features. It is the soul shining through the face that 
 makes one beautiful. But alas! for those who depend 
 upon mere personal charms. They will come to disap- 
 pointment and to a great fret. There are so many dif- 
 ferent opinions about what are personal charms; and then 
 sickness, and trouble, and age, do make such ravages. 
 The poorest god that a woman ever worships is her own 
 face. The saddest sight in all the world is a woman who 
 has built everything on good looks, when the charms 
 begin to vanish. O, how they try to cover the wrinkles 
 and hide the ravages of time! When Time, with iron- 
 shod feet, steps on a face, the hoof-marks remain, and 
 you cannot hide them. It is silly to try to hide them. 
 I think the most repulsive fool in all the world is a*n old 
 fool! 
 
 Why, my friends, should you be ashamed to be get- 
 ting old? It is a sign — it is prima facie evidence, that 
 you have behaved tolerably well or you would not have 
 lived to this time. The grandest thing, I think, is eter- 
 nity, and that is made up of countless years. When the 
 Bible would set forth the attractiveness of Jesus Christ, 
 it says: "His hair was white as snow." But when the 
 color goes from the cheek, and the lustre from the eye, 
 and the spring from the step, and the gracefulness from 
 the gait, alas! for those who have built their time and 
 their eternity upon good looks. But all the passage of 
 years cannot take out of one's face benignity, and kind- 
 ness, and compassion, and faith. Culture your heart and 
 you culture your face. The brightest glory that ever 
 beamed from a woman's face is the religion of Jesus 
 Christ. In the last war two hundred wounded soldiers 
 came to Philadelphia one night, and came unheralded, 
 
THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 
 
 and they had to extemporize a hospital for them, and the 
 Christian women of my church, and of other churches, 
 went out that night to take care of the poor wounded 
 fellows. That night I saw a Christian woman go through 
 the wards of the hospital, her sleeves rolled up, ready for 
 hard work, her hair dishevelled in the excitement of the 
 hour. Her face was plain, very plain; but after the 
 wounds were washed and the new bandages were put 
 round the splintered limbs, and the exhausted boy fell 
 off into his first pleasant sleep, she put her hand on his 
 brow, and lie started in his dream, and said: *0, I 
 thought an angel touched me!" There may have been 
 no classic elegance in the features of Mrs. Harris, who 
 came into the hospital after the "Seven Days" awful fight 
 before Richmond, as she sat down by a wounded drum- 
 mer-boy and heard him soliloquize: "A ball through 
 my body, and my poor mother will never again see her 
 boy. What a pity it is!" And she leaned over him and 
 said: "Shall I be your mother, and comfort you?" And 
 he looked up and said: "Yes, I'll try to think she's 
 here. Please to write a long letter to her, and tell her 
 all about it, and send her a lock of my hair and comfort 
 her. But I would like to have you tell her how much I 
 suffered — yes, I would like you to do that, for she would 
 feel so for me. Hold my hand while I die." There may 
 have been no classic elegance in her features, but all the 
 hospitals of Harrison's Landing and Fortress Monroe 
 would have agreed that she was beautiful; and if any 
 rough man in all that ward had insulted her, some 
 wounded soldier would have leaped from his couch, on 
 his best foot, and struck him dead with a crutch. 
 
 Again: I advise you not to depend for happiness 
 upon the flatteries of men. It is a poor compliment tc 
 your sex that so many men feel obliged in your presence 
 
THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 
 
 167 
 
 to offer unmeaning compliments. Men capable of ele- 
 gant and elaborate conversation elsewhere sometimes feel 
 called upon at the door of the drawing-room to drop their 
 common sense and to dole out sickening flatteries. They 
 say things about your dress, and about your appearance, 
 that you know, and they know, are false. They say you 
 are an angel. You know you are not. Determined to 
 tell the truth in office, and store, and shop, they consider 
 it honorable to lie to a woman. The same thing that 
 they told you on this side of the drawing-room, three 
 minutes ago they said to some on the other side of the 
 drawing-room. O, let no one trample on your self-res- 
 pect. The meanest thing on which a woman can build 
 her happiness is the flatteries of men. 
 
 Again: I charge you not to depend for happiness 
 upon the disoipleship of fashion. Some men are just as 
 proud of being out of the fashion as others are of being 
 in it. I have seen men as vain of their old fashioned 
 coat, and their eccentric hat, as your brainless fop is proud 
 of his dangling fooleries. Fashion sometimes makes a 
 reasonable demand of us, and then we ought to yield to it. 
 The daisies of the field have their fashion of . color and 
 leaf^the honeysuckles have their fashion of ear-drop; 
 and the snowflakes Hung out of the winter heavens have 
 their fashion of exquisiteness. After the summer shower 
 the sky weds the earth with ring of rainbow. And I do 
 not think we have a right to despise all the elegancies and 
 fashions of this world, especially if they make reasonable 
 demands upon us; but the discipleship and worshipof fash- 
 ion is death to the body, and death to the soul. I am glad 
 the world is improving. Look at the fashion plates of the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and j-ou will find 
 that the world is not so extravagant and extraordinary now 
 as it was then, and all the marvellous things that the 
 
168 
 
 THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 
 
 granddaughter will do will never equal that done by the 
 grandmother. Go still further back to the Bible times, 
 and you find that in those times fashion wielded a more 
 terrible scepter. You have only to turn to the third 
 chapter of Isaiah. 
 
 Only think of a woman having all that on! I am glad 
 that the world is getting better, and that fashion which 
 has dominated in the world so ruinously in other days 
 has for a little time, for a little degree at any rate, re- 
 laxed its energies. Oh, the danger of the disciplesliip of 
 fashion. All the splendors and the extravaganza of this 
 world dyed into your robe and flung over your shoulder 
 cannot wrap peace around your heart for a single moment. 
 The gayest wardrobe will utter no voice of condolence in 
 the day of trouble and darkness. That woman is grand- 
 ly dressed, and only she, who is wrapped in the robe of a 
 Savior's righteousness. The home may be very hum- 
 ble, the hat may be very plain, the frock may be very 
 coarse; but the halo of heaven settles in the room when 
 she wears it, and the faintest touch of the resurrection 
 angel will change that garment into raiment exceeding 
 white, so as no fuller on earth could whiten it. I come 
 to you, young woman, to-day, to say that this world can- 
 not make you happy. I know it is a bright world, with 
 glorious sunshine, and golden rivers, and fire-worked 
 sunset, and bird orchestra, and the darkest cave has its 
 crystals, and the wrathiest wave its foam-wreath, and the 
 coldaet midnight its flaming aurora; but God will put 
 out all these lights with the blast of his own nostrils, and 
 the glories, of this world will perish in the final confla- 
 gration. You will never be happy until you get vour 
 sins forgiven and allow Christ Jesus to take full posses- 
 sion of your soul. He will be your friend in every per- 
 plexity. He will be your comfort in every trial. He 
 
THE WOMAN OF PLEASURE. 
 
 169 
 
 will be your defender in every strait. I do not ask you 
 to bring, like Mary, the spices to the scpulcher of a dead 
 Christ, but to bring your all to the feet of a living Jesus. 
 His word is peace. His look is love. His hand is help. 
 His touch is life. His smile is heaven. Oh, come, then, 
 in flocks and groups! Come, like the south wind over 
 banks of myrrh. Come, like the morning light tripping 
 over the mountains. Wreathe all your affections for 
 Christ's brow, set all your gems in Christ's coronet, pour 
 all your voices into Christ's song, and let this Sabbath 
 air rustle with the wings of rejoicing angels, and the 
 towers of God ring out the news of souls saved ! 
 
 "This world its fancied pearl may crave, 
 
 'Tis not the pearl tor me; 
 'Twill dim its luster in the grave 
 
 'Twill perish in the sea. 
 But there's a pearl of price untold, 
 Which never can be bought with gold; 
 
 Oh, that's the pearl for me." 
 
170 
 
 WAT-LKIKG PLACES. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE SINS OF SUMMER WATERING PLACES. 
 
 A pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having 
 five porches. In these lay a multitude of blind, halt, withered, wait- 
 ing for the moving of the water. — John v : 2, 3. 
 
 Outside of the city of Jerusalem, there was a sensi- 
 tive watering-place, the popular resort for invalids. To 
 this day, there is a dry basin of rock which shows that 
 there must have been a pool there three hundred and 
 sixty feet long, one hundred and thirty feet wide, and 
 seventy-five feet deep. This pool was surrounded by five 
 piazzas, or porches, or bathing-houses, where the patients 
 tarried until the time when they were to step into the 
 water. So far as reinvigoration was concerned, it must 
 have been a Saratoga and a Long Branch on a small scale; 
 a Leamington and a Brighton combined — medical and 
 therapeutic. Tradition says that at a certain season of 
 the year there wa3 an officer of the government who 
 would go down to that water and pour in it some heal- 
 ing quality, and after that the people would come and 
 get the medication; but I prefer the plain statement of 
 Scripture, that at a certain season, an angel came down 
 and stirred up or troubled the water; and then the peo- 
 ple came and got the healing. That angel ot God that 
 stirred up the Judean watering-place had his counter- 
 part in the angel of healing that, in our day, steps into 
 the mineral waters of Congress, or Sharon, or Sulphur 
 Springs, or into the salt sea at Cape May and Nahant, 
 where multitudes who are worn out with commercial and 
 
WATERING PLACES. 
 
 m 
 
 professional anxieties, as well as those who are afflicted 
 with rheumatic, neuralgic, and splenetic diseases, go, 
 and are cured by the thousands. These Bethesdas are 
 scattered all up and down our country, blessed be God! 
 
 We are at a season of the year when railway trains are 
 being laden with passengers and baggage on their way to 
 the mountains, and the lakes, and the sea-shore. Mul- 
 titudes of our citizens are packing their trunks for a 
 restorative absence. The city heats are pursuing the 
 people with torch and fear of sunstroke. The long silent 
 halls of sumptuous hotels are all abuzz with excited ar- 
 rivals. The crystalline surface of Winnipiseogee is shat- 
 tered with the stroke of steamers laden with excursion- 
 ists. The antlers of Adirondack deer rattle under the 
 shot of city sportsmen. The trout make fatal snap at 
 the hook of adroit sportsmen, and toss their spotted bril- 
 liance into the game basket. Soon the baton of the 
 orchestral leader will tap the music-stand on the hotel 
 green, and American life will put on festal array, and the 
 rumbling of the tenpin alley, and the crack of the ivory 
 balls on the green-baized billiard tables, and the jolting 
 of the bar-room goblets, and the explosive uncorking of 
 champagne bottles, and the whirl and the rustle of the 
 ball-room dance, and the clattering hoofs of the race- 
 courses, will attest that the season for the great Ameri- 
 can watering-places is fairly inaugurated. Music! Flute, 
 and drum, and cornet-a-piston, and clapping cymbals, 
 will wake the echoes of the mountains. Glad I am that 
 fagged-out American life, for the most part, will have an 
 opportunity to rest, and that nerves racked and destroyed 
 will find a Bethesda. 
 
 I believe in watering-places. I go there sometimes. 
 Let not the commercial firm begrudge the clerk, or the 
 employer the journeyman, or the patient the physician, 
 
172 
 
 WATERING PLACES. 
 
 or the church its pastor, a season of inoccupation. Lu- 
 ther used to sport with his children; Edmund Burke 
 used to caress his favorite horse; Thomas Chalmers, in 
 the dark hour of the Church's disruption, played kite 
 for recreation — so I was told by his own daughter — and 
 the busy Christ said to the busy apostles: "Come ye 
 apart awhile into the desert, and rest yourselves." And 
 I have observed that they who do not know how to rest, 
 do not know how to work. 
 
 But I have to declare this truth to-day, that some of 
 our fashionable watering-places are the temporal and 
 eternal destruction of "a multitude that no man can num- 
 ber;" and amid the congratulations of this season, and 
 the prospect of the departure of many of you for the 
 country, I must utter a note of warning, plain, earnest, 
 and unmistakable. The first temptation that is apt to 
 hover in this direction, is to leave your piety all at home. 
 You will send the dog, and cat, and canary-bird to be 
 well cared for somewhere else; but the temptation will 
 be to leave your religion in the room with the blinds 
 down and the door bolted, and then you will come back 
 in the autumn to find that it is starved and suffocated, 
 lying stretched on the rug, stark dead. There is no sur- 
 plus of piety at the watering-places. I never knew any 
 one to grow very rapidly in grace at the Catskill Moun- 
 tain House, or Sharon Springs, or the Falls of Montmo- 
 rency. It is generally the case that the Sabbath is more 
 of a carousal than any other day, and there are Sunday 
 walks, and Sunday rides, and Sunday excursions. 
 Elders, and deacons, and ministers of religion, who are 
 entirely consistent at home, sometimes when the Sab- 
 bath dawns on them at Niagara Falls, or the White 
 Mountains, take the day to themselves. If they go to 
 the church, it is apt to be a sacred parade, and 
 
WATERING PLACES. 
 
 173 
 
 the discourse, instead of being a plain talk about the 
 soul, is apt to be what is called a crack sermon 
 — that is, some discourse picked out of the effusions of 
 the year as the one most adapted to excite admiration ; 
 and in those churches, from the way the ladies hold their 
 fans, you know that they are not so much impressed 
 with the heat as with the picturesqueness of half dis- 
 closed features. Four puny souls stand in the organ loft 
 and squall a tune that nobody knows, and worshippers, 
 with two thousand dollars worth of diamonds on the 
 right hand, drop a cent into the poor-box, and then the 
 benediction is pronounced, and the farce is ended. The 
 toughest thing I ever tried to do was to be good at a 
 watering, pi ace. 
 
 The air is bewitched with the "world, the flesh, and 
 devil." There are Christians who, in three or four weeks 
 in such a place, have had such terrible rents made in 
 their Christian robe, that they had to keep darning it 
 until Christmas to get it mended! The health of a great 
 many people makes an annual visit to some mineral 
 spring an absolute necessity; but, my dear people, take 
 your Bible along with you, and take an hour for secret 
 prayer every day, though you be surrounded by guffaw 
 and saturnalia. Keep holy the Sabbath, though they 
 deride you as a bigoted Puritan. Stand off from John 
 Morrissey's gambling hell, and those other institutions 
 which propose to imitate on this side the water the in- 
 iquities of Baden-Baden. Let } r our moral and your im- 
 mortal health keep pace with your physical recuperation 
 and remember that all the waters of Hathorne, and sul- 
 phur and chalybeate springs cannot do you so much 
 good as the mineral, healing, perrennial flood that breaks 
 forth from the "Rock of Ages." This may be your last 
 summer. If so, make it a fit vestibule of heaven. ' 
 
174 
 
 WATERING PLACES. 
 
 Another temptation, however, around nearly all onr 
 watering-places, is the horse-racing business. We all 
 admire the horse; but we do not think that its beauty, 
 or speed, ought to be cultured at the expense of human 
 degradation. The horse-race is not of such importance 
 as the human race. The Bible intimates that a man is 
 better than a sheep, and I suppose he is better than a 
 horse, though, like Job's stallion, his neck be clothed with 
 thunder. 
 
 Horse-races in olden times were under the ban of 
 Christian people; and in our day the same institution 
 has come up under fictitious names. And it is called a 
 "Summer Meeting," almost suggestive of positive relig- 
 ious exercises. And it is called an "Agricultural Fair," 
 suggestive of everything that is improving in the art of 
 farming. But under these deceptive titles are the same 
 cheating, and the same betting, and the same drunken- 
 ness, and the same vagabondage, and the same abomina- 
 tions that were to be found under the old horse-racing 
 system. I never knew a man yet who could give him- 
 self to the pleasures of the turf for a long reach of time 
 and not be battered in morals. They hook up their 
 spanking team, and put on their sporting cap, and light 
 their cigar, and take the reins, and dash down the road 
 to perdition! The great day at Saratoga and Long 
 Branch, and Cape May, and nearly all the other water- 
 ing-places, is the day of the races. The hotels are 
 thronged, every kind of equipage is taken up at an 
 almost fabulous price; and there are many respectable 
 people mingling with jockies and gamblers, and liber- 
 tines, and foul-mouthed men and flashy women. The 
 bar-tender stirs up the brandy smash. The bets run 
 high. The greenhorns, supposing all is fair, put in their 
 money, soon enough to lose it. Three weeks before 
 
WATERING PLACES. 
 
 175 
 
 the race takes place the struggle is decided, and the men 
 in the secret know on which steed to bet their money. 
 The two men on the horses riding around, long before 
 arranged who shall beat. Leaning from the stand or 
 from the carriage, are men and women so absorbed in 
 the struggle of bone and muscle, and mettle, that they 
 make a grand harvest for the pickpockets who carry off 
 the pocket-books and portmonnaies. Men looking on see 
 only two horses with two riders flying around the ring; 
 but there is many a man on that stand whose honor, and 
 domestic happiness, and fortune — white mane, white 
 foot, white flank — are in the ring, racing with in- 
 ebriety, and with fraud, and with profanity, and with 
 ruin — black neck, black foot, black flank. Neck and 
 neck, they go in that moral Epsom. White horse of 
 honor; black horse of ruin. Death says: U I will bet 
 on the black horse." Spectator says: "I will bet on the 
 white horse." The white horse of honor a little way 
 ahead. The black horse of ruin, Satan mounted, all the 
 time gaining on him. Spectator breathless. Put on the 
 lash. Dig in the spurs. There! They are past the 
 stand. Sure. Just as I expected it. The black horse 
 of ruin has won the race, and all the galleries of dark- 
 ness "huzza! huzza!" and the devils come in to pick up 
 their wagers. Ah, my friends, have nothing to do with 
 horse-racing dissipations this summer. Long ago the Eng- 
 lish government got through looking to the turf for the 
 dragoon and light cavalry horse. They found the turf de- 
 preciates the stock; and it is yet worse for men. Thomas 
 Hughes, the member of Parliament, and the author 
 known all the world over, hearing that a new turf enter- 
 prise was being started in this country, wrote a letter in 
 which he said: " Heaven help you, then; for of all the 
 cankers of our old civilisation, there is nothing in this 
 
176 
 
 WATERING PLACES. 
 
 country approaching in unblushing meanness, in rascality 
 holding its head high, to this belauded institution of the 
 British turf. 5 Another famous sportsman writes: "How 
 many fine domains have been shared among these hosts 
 of rapacious sharks during the last two hundred years; 
 and unless the system be altered, how many more are 
 doomed to fall into the same gulf!" The Duke of Ham- 
 ilton, through his horse-racing proclivities, in three 
 years got through his entire fortune of £70,000; and I 
 will say that some of you are being undermined by it. 
 With the bull-fights of Spain and the bear-baitings of 
 the pit, may the Lord God annihilate the infamous and 
 accursed horse-racing of England and America. 
 
 I go further and speak of another temptation that 
 hovers over the watering place; and this is the temptation 
 to sacrifice physical strength. The modern Bethesda, 
 just like this Bethesda of the text, was intended to re- 
 cuperate the physical health; and yet how many come 
 from the watering-places, their health absolutely de- 
 stroyed. 
 
 New York and Brooklyn idiots, boasting of having 
 imbibed twenty glasses of congress water before break- 
 fast. Families accustomed to goin^ to bed at ten o'clock 
 at night, gossiping until one or two o'clock in the morn- 
 ing. Dyspeptics, usually very cautious about their 
 health, mingling ice-creams, and lemons, and lobster- 
 salads, and cocoanuts until the gastric juices lift up all 
 their voices of lamentation and protest. Delicate women 
 and brainless young men chassezing themselves into 
 vertigo and catalepsy. Thousands of men and women 
 coming back from our watering-places in the autumn 
 with the foundations laid for ailments that will last them 
 all their life long. You know as well as I do that this 
 is the simple truth. In the summer, you say to your 
 
WATERING PLACES. 
 
 .77 
 
 good health: "Good-b} 7 ; I am going to have a good time 
 for a little while; I will be very glad to see you again in 
 the autumn." Then in the autumn, when you are hard 
 at work in your office, or store, or shop, or counting- 
 room, Good Health will come in and say: "Good-by; I 
 am going." You say: u "Where are you going?" "O!" 
 says Good Health, "I am going to take a vacation." It 
 is a poor rule that will not work both ways, and your 
 good health will leave you choleric, and splenetic, and 
 exhausted. You coquetted with your good health in the 
 summer-time, and your good health is coquetting with 
 you in the winter- time. A fragment of Paul's charge 
 .to the jailer would be an appropriate inscription for the 
 hotel register in every watering-place: "Do thyself no 
 harm." 
 
 Another temptation hovering around the watering- 
 place is to the formation of hasty and life-long alliances. 
 The watering-places are responsible for more of the do- 
 mestic infelicities of this country than all other things 
 combined. Society is so artificial there that no sure 
 judgment of character can be formed. They who form 
 companionships amid such circumstances, go into a lot- 
 tery where there are twenty blanks to one prize. In the 
 severe tug of life you want more than glitter and splash. 
 Life is not a ball-room, where the music decides the step, 
 and bow, and prance, and graceful swing of long trail 
 can make up for strong common sense. Y r ou might as 
 well go among the gaily-painted yachts of a summer 
 regatta to find war vessels, as to go among the light 
 spray of the summer watering-place to find character 
 that can stand the test of the great struggle of human 
 life. Ah, in the battle of life you want a stronger weapon 
 than a lace fan or a croquet mallet! The load of life is 
 so heavy that in order to draw it you want a team 
 12 
 
17S 
 
 W A T ERI NO rL AC E8. 
 
 stronger than one made up of a masculine grasshopper 
 and a feminine butterfly. If there is an) 7 man in the 
 community that excites my contempt, and that ought to 
 excite the contempt of every man and woman, it is the 
 soft-handed, soft-headed fop, who, perfumed until the 
 air is actually sick, spends his summer in taking killing 
 attitudes, and waving sentimental adieus, and talking 
 infinitesimal nothings, and finding his heaven in the set 
 of a lavender kid-glove. Boots as tight as an inquisition. 
 Two hours of consummate skill exhibited in the tie of a 
 flaming cravat. His conversation made up of "Ahs!" 
 and "Ohs!" and "Ile-hes!" It would take five hundred 
 of them stewed down to make a teaspoonful of calfs- 
 foot jelly. There is only one counterpart to such a man 
 as that, and that is the frothy young woman at the water- 
 ing-place; her conversation made up of French moon- 
 shine; what she has on her head only equalled by what 
 she has on her back; useless ever since she was born, and 
 to be useless until she is dead; and what they will do 
 with her in the next w r orld I do not know, except to set 
 her up on the banks of the River of Life, for eternity, to 
 look sweet! God intends us to admire music, and fair 
 faces and graceful step; but amid the heartlessness, and 
 the inflation and the fantastic influences of our modern 
 watering-places, beware how you make life-long cove- 
 nants. 
 
 Another temptation that will hover over the watering- 
 place is that to baneful literature. Almost everyone 
 starting off for the summer takes some reading matter. 
 It is a book out of the library, or olf the bookstand, or 
 bought of the boy hawking books through the cars. I 
 really believe there is more pestiferous trash read among 
 the intelligent classes in July and August than in all the 
 other ten months of the year Men and women who at 
 
WATERING PLACES. 
 
 17U 
 
 home would not be satisfied with a book that was not 
 really sensible, I found sitting on hotel piazza, or under 
 the trees, reading books, the index of which would make 
 them blush if they knew that you knew what the book 
 was. "0." they say, "you must have intellectual recrea- 
 tion." Yes. There is no need that you take along into 
 a watering-place, "Hamilton's Metaphysics," or some 
 thunderous discourse on the eternal decrees, or "Fara- 
 day's Philosophy. " There are many easy books that are 
 good. You might as well say: "I propose now to give 
 a little rest to my digestive organs, and instead of eat- 
 ing heavy meat and vegetables, I will, for a little while, 
 take lighter food— a little strychnine and a few grains of 
 ratsbane." Literary poison in August is as bad as liter- 
 ary poison in December. Mark that. Do not let the 
 frogs and the lice of a corrupt printing-press jump and 
 crawl into your Saratoga trunk or White Mountain va- 
 lise. Would it not be an awful thing for you to be struck 
 with lightning some day when you had in your hand one 
 of these paper-covered romances — the hero a Parisian 
 roue, the heroine an unprincipled flirt — chapters in the 
 book that you would not read to your children at the 
 rate of a hundred dollars a line. Throw out all that stuff 
 from your summer baggage. Are there not good books 
 that are easy to read — books of entertaining travel; 
 books of congenial history; books of pure fun; books of 
 poetry, ringing with merry canto; books of fine engrav- 
 ing; books that will rest the mind as svell as purify the 
 heart and elevate the whole life? My hearers, there will 
 not be an hour between this and the day of your death 
 when you can afford to read a book lacking in moral 
 principle. 
 
 Another temptation hovering ail around our watering- 
 places, is to intoxicating beverage. I am told that it is 
 
180 
 
 WATERING PLACES. 
 
 becoming more and more fashionable for women, to 
 drink; and it is not very lung ago that a lady of great 
 respectability, in this city, having taken two glasses of 
 wine away from home, became violent, and her friends, 
 ashamed, forsook her, and she was carried to a police 
 station, and afterward to her disgraced home. I care 
 not how well a woman may dress, if she has taken enough 
 of wine to flush her cheek and put a glassiness on her 
 eye, she is intoxicated. She maybe handed into a 2500 
 dollar carriage, and have diamonds enough to confound 
 the Tiffany's — she is intoxicated. She may be a gradu- 
 ate of Packer Institute, and the daughter of some man 
 in danger of being nominated for the Presidency — she 
 is drunk. You may have a larger vocabulary than I 
 have, and you may say in regard to her that she is ''con- 
 vivial," or she is "merry," or she is "festive," or she is 
 ''exhilarated;" but you cannot, with all your garlands of 
 verbiage, cover up the plain fact that it is an old-fash- 
 ioned case of drunk. !Now the watering-places are full 
 of temptations to men and women to tipple. At the 
 close of the tenpin or billiard game, they tipple. At 
 the close of the cotillion, they tipple. Seated on the 
 piazza cooling themselves off, they tipple. The tinged 
 glasses come around with bright straws, and they tipple. 
 First, they take " light wines" as they call them; but 
 "light wines," are heavy enough to debase the appetite. 
 There is not a very long road between champagne at five 
 dollars a bottle and whisky at five cents a glass. Satar. 
 has three or four grades down which he takes men tr 
 destruction. One man he takes up, and through one 
 spree pitches him into eternal darkness. That is a rare 
 Case. Yery seldom, indeed, can you find a man who 
 will be such a tool as that. Satan will take another man 
 to a grade, to a descent at an angle about like the Penn- 
 
WATERING PLACES. 
 
 181 
 
 sylvania coal-sbute, or the Blount Washington lail track, 
 and shove him off. But that is very rare. When a man 
 goes down to destruction, Satan brings him to a plane. 
 It is almost a level. The depression is so slight that 
 you can hardly see it. The man does not actually know 
 that he is on the down grade, and it tips only a little 
 toward darkness — just a little. And the first mile it is 
 claret, and the second mile it is sherry, and the third 
 mile it is punch, and the fourth mile it is ale, and the 
 fifth mile it is porter, and the sixth mile it is brandy, 
 and then it gets steeper, and steeper, and steeper, and 
 the man gets frightened, and says: "O, let me get off." 
 "No," says the conductor, "this is an express-train, and 
 it don't stop until it gets to the Grand Central depot of 
 Smashupton!" Ah, "Look not thou upon the wine when 
 it is red, when it giveth its color in the cup, when it 
 moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like a serpent, 
 and stingeth like an adder." And if any young man of 
 my congregation should get astray this summer in this 
 direction, it will not be because I have not given him 
 fair warning. 
 
 My friends, whether you tarry at home — which will be 
 quite as safe and perhaps quite as comfortable — or go 
 into the country, arm yourself against temptation. The 
 grace of God is the only safe shelter, whether in town or 
 country. There are watering-places accessible to all of 
 us. You cannot open a book of the Bible without find- 
 ing out some such watering-place. Fountains open for 
 sin and uncleanness. Wells of salvation. Streams from 
 Lebanon. A flood struck out of the rock by Moses. 
 Fountains in the wilderness discovered by Hagar. Water 
 to drink and water to bathe in. The river of God which 
 is full of water. Water of which if a man drink, he 
 shall never thirst. Wells of water in the Valley of Baca. 
 
182 
 
 WATERING PLACES. 
 
 Living fountains of water. A pure river of water as 
 clear as crystal from under the throne of God. These 
 are watering-places accessible to all of us. We do not 
 have a laborious packing up before we start — only the 
 throwing away of our transgressions. No expensive 
 hotel bills to pay; it is "without money and without 
 price." No long and dusty travel before we get there; 
 it is only one step away. In California, in five minutes 
 I walked around and saw ten fountains all bubbling up, 
 and they were all different; and in five minutes I can go 
 through this Bible parterre and find you fifty bright, 
 sparkling fountains bubbling up into eternal life — heal- 
 ing and therapeutic. A chemist will go to one of these 
 summer watering-places and take the water, and analyze 
 it, and tell you that it contains so much of iron, and so 
 much of soda, and so much of lime, and so much of 
 magnesia. I come to this Gospel well, this living foun- 
 tain, and analyze the water; and I find that its ingredi- 
 ents are peace, pardon, forgiveness, hope, comfort, life, 
 heaven. "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye" to this 
 watering-place. Crowd around this Bethesda this morn- 
 ing. O, you sick, you lame, you troubled, you dying — 
 crowd around this Bethesda. Step in it, oh, step in it! 
 The angel of the covenant this morning stirs the water! 
 Why do you not step in it? Some of you are too weak 
 to take a step in that direction. Then we take you up 
 in the arms of our closing prayer, and plunge you clean 
 under the wave, hoping that the cure may be as sudden 
 and as radical as with Captain Naaman, who, blotched 
 and carbuncled, stepped into the Jordan, and after the 
 seventh dive came up, his skin roseate complexioned as 
 the flesh of a little child. 
 
THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 183 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 He beheld the city, and wept over it. — Luke xix: 41. 
 
 The citizens of Old Jerusalem are in the tip- top of 
 excitement. A country man has been doing some won- 
 derful works and asserting very high authority. The 
 police court has issued papers for his arrest, for this 
 thing must be stopped, as the very government is im- 
 perilled. News comes that last night this stranger 
 arrived at a suburban village, and that he is stopping at 
 the house of a man whom he had resuscitated after four 
 days' sepulture. Well, the people rush out into the 
 streets, some with the idea of helping in the arrest of 
 this stranger when he arrives, and others expecting that 
 on the morrow he will come into the town, and by some 
 supernatural force oust the municipal and royal authori- 
 ties and take everything in his own hands. They pour 
 out of the city gates until the procession reaches to the 
 village. They come all around about the house where the 
 stranger is stopping, and peer into the doors and windows 
 that they may get one glimpse of him or hear the hum of 
 his voice. The police dare not make the arrest because he 
 has, somehow, won the affections of all the people. O, 
 it is a lively night in Bethany. The heretofore quiet 
 village is tilled with uproar, and outcry, and loud discus- 
 sion about the strange acting countryman. I do not 
 think there was any sleep in that house that night where 
 the stranger was stopping. Although he came in weary 
 he finds no rest, though for once in his lifetime he had 
 
184 
 
 THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 a pillow. But the morning dawns, the olive gardens 
 wave in the light, and all along the road, reaching over 
 the top of Olivet toward Jerusalem, there is a vast sway- 
 ing crowd of wondering people. The exciiement around 
 the door of the cottage is wild, as the stranger steps out 
 beside an unbroken colt that had never been mounted, 
 and after his friends had strewn their garments on the 
 beast for a saddle, the Saviour mounts it, and the popu- 
 lace, excited, and shouting, and feverish, push on back 
 toward Jerusalem. Let none jeer now or scoff at this 
 rider, or the populace will trample him under foot in an 
 instant. .There is one long shout of two miles, and as 
 far as the eye can reach you see wavings of demonstra- 
 tions and approval. There was something in the rider's 
 visage, something in his majestic brow, something in 
 his princely behavior, that stirs up the enthusiasm of 
 the people. They run up against the beast and try to 
 pull off into their arms, and carry on their shoulders, the 
 illustrious stranger. The populace are so excited that 
 they hardly know what to do with themselves, and some 
 rush up to the roadside trees and wrench off branches 
 and throw them in his way; and others doff their gar- 
 ments, what though they be new and costly, and spread 
 them for a carpet for the conqueror to ride over. " Ho- 
 sanna!" cry the people at the foot of the hill. "Ho- 
 sanna!" cry the people all up and down the mountain. 
 The procession has now come to the brow of Olivet. 
 Magnificent prospect reaching out in every direction — 
 vineyards, olive groves, jutting rock, silvery Siloam, and 
 above all, rising on its throne of hills, the most highly 
 honored city of all the earth, Jerusalem. Christ there, 
 in the midst of the procession, looks off, and sees here 
 fortressed gates, and yonder the circling wall, and here 
 the towers blazing in the sun, Phasrelus and Mariamne. 
 
THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 1S5 
 
 Yonder is Hippicus, the king's castle. Looking along 
 in the range of the larger branch of that olive tree }^ou 
 see the mansions of the merchant princes. Through 
 this cleft in the limestone rock you see the palace of the 
 richest trafficker in all the earth. He has made his 
 money by selling Tyrian purple. Behold now the Tem- 
 ple! Clouds of smoke lifting from the shimmering 
 roof, while the building rises up beautiful, grand,' ma- 
 jestic, the architectural skill and glory of the earth lift- 
 ing themselves there in one triumphant doxology, the 
 frozen prayer of all nations. 
 
 The crowd looked around to see exhilaration and 
 transport in the face of Christ. O, no! Out from amid 
 the gates, and the domes, and the palaces there arose a 
 vision of that city's sin, and of that city's doom, which 
 obliterated the landscape from horizon to horizon, and 
 he burst into tears. u He beheld the city, and wept 
 over it." 
 
 Standing in some high tower of the beloved city ot 
 our residence, we might look off upon a wondrous scene 
 of enterprise, and wealth, and beauty; long streets faced 
 by comfortable homes, here and there rising into afflu- 
 ence, while we might find thousands of people who 
 would be glad to cast palm branches in the way of him 
 who comes from Bethany to Jerusalem, greeting him 
 with the vociferation: " Hosanna! to the Son of David." 
 And yet how much there is to mourn over in our cities. 
 Passing along the streets to-day are a great multitude. 
 Whither do they go? To church. Thank God for 
 that. Listen, this morning, and you hear multitudi- 
 nous voices of praise. Thank God for that. When the 
 evening falls you will find Christian men and women 
 knocking at hovels of poverty, and finding no light, 
 taking the matches from their pocket, and by a 
 
186 
 
 THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 momentary glance revealing wan faces, and wasted 
 hands, and ragged bed, sending in before morning, can- 
 dles and vials of medicine, and Bibles and loaves of 
 bread, and two or three flowers from the hot-house. 
 Thank God for all that. But listen again, and you hear 
 the thousand-voiced shriek of blasphemy tearing its way 
 up from the depths of the city. You see the uplifted de- 
 canters emptied now, but uplifted to fight down the 
 devils they have raised. Listen to that wild laugh at 
 the street corner, that makes the pure shudder and say: 
 " Poor thing, that's a lost soul!" Hark! to the click of 
 the gambler's dice and the hysteric guffaw of him who 
 has pocketed the last dollar of that young man's estate. 
 This is the banquet of Bacchus. That young man has 
 taken his first glass. That man has taken down three- 
 fourths of his estate. This man is trembling with last 
 night's debauch. This man has pawned everything save 
 that old coat. This man is in delirium, sitting pale and 
 unaware of anything that is transpiring about him — 
 quiet until after awhile he rises up with a shriek, 
 enough to make the denizens of the pit clap to the door 
 and put their fingers in their ears, and rattle their 
 chains still louder to drown out the horrible outcry. 
 You say : " Is it not strange that there should be so 
 much suffering and sin in our cities?" No, it is not 
 strange. When I look abroad and see the temptations 
 that are attempting to destroy men for time and eter- 
 nity, I am surprised in the other direction that there are 
 any true, upright, honest, Christian people left. There 
 is but little hope for any man in these great cities who 
 has not established in his soul, sound, thorough Chris- 
 tian principle. 
 
 First, look around you and see the temptations to 
 commercial frauds. Here is a man who starts in busi- 
 
THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 187 
 
 ness. He says: "I'm going to be honest;" but on the 
 same street, on the same block, in the same business, 
 are Shylocks. Those men, to get the patronage of any 
 one, will break all understandings with other merchants, 
 and will sell at ruinous cost, putting their neighbors at 
 great disadvantage, expecting to make up the deficit in 
 something else. If an honest principle could creep into 
 that man's soul, it would die of sheer loneliness! The 
 man twists about, trying to escape the penalty of the 
 law, and despises God, while he is just a little anxious 
 about the sheriff. The honest man looks about him and 
 says: " Well, this rivalry is awful. Perhaps I am more 
 scrupulous than I need be. This little bargain I am 
 about to enter is a little doubtful; but then they all do 
 it." And so I had a friend who started in commercial 
 life, and as a book merchant, with a high resolve. He 
 said: "In my store there shall be no books that I would 
 not have my family read." Time passed on, and one 
 day I went into his store and found some iniquitous 
 books on the shelf, and I said to him: " How is it possi- 
 ble that you can consent to sell such books as these?" 
 "Oh," he replied: "I have got over those puritanical 
 notions. A man cannot do business in this day unless 
 he does it in the way other people do it." To make a 
 long story short, he lost his hope of heaven, and in a 
 little while he lost his morality, and then he went into a 
 mad-house. In other words, when a man casts off God, 
 God casts him off. 
 
 One of the mightiest temptations in commercial life, 
 in all our cities, to-day, is in the tact that many professed 
 Christian men are not square in their bargains. Such 
 men are in Baptist, and Methodist, and Congregational 
 Churches, and our own denomination is as largely rep- 
 resented as any of them. Our good merchants are fore- 
 
188 
 
 THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 most in Christian enterprises; they are patronizers of 
 art, philanthropic and patriotic. God will attend to 
 them in the day of His coronation. I am not speak- 
 ing of them, but of those in commercial life who 
 are setting a ruinous example to our young merchants. 
 Go through all the stores and offices in the city, and tell 
 me in how many of those stores and offices are the prin- 
 ciples of Christ's religion dominant? In three-fourths 
 of them? No. In half of them? No. In one-tenth 
 of them? No. Decide for yourself. 
 
 The impression is abroad, somehow, that charity can 
 consecrate iniquitous gains, aud that if a man give to 
 God a portion of an unrighteous bargain, then the Lord 
 will forgive him the rest. The secretary of a benevolent 
 society came tome and said: "Mr. So-and-So has given 
 a large amount of money to the missionary cause," men- 
 tioning the sum. I said: " I can't believe it." He said: 
 "It is so." Well, I went home, staggered and con- 
 founded. I never knew the man to give to anything; 
 but after awhile I found out that he had been engaged in 
 the most infamous kind of an oil swindle, and then he 
 proposed to compromise the matter with the Lord, say- 
 ing: "Now, here is so much for Thee, Lord. Please to 
 let me off!" I want to tell you that the Church of God is 
 not a shop for receiving stolen goods, and that if you 
 have taken anything from your fellows, you had better 
 return it to the men to whom it belongs. If, from the 
 nature of the circumstances, that be impossible, you had 
 better get your stove red hot, and when the flames are at 
 their fiercest, toss in the accursed spoil. God does not 
 want it. The commercial world to-day is rotten through 
 and through, and many of you know better than I can 
 tell you that it requires great strength of moral charac- 
 tor to withstand the temptations of business dishones- 
 
THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 189 
 
 ties. Thank God, a great many of you have withstood 
 the temptations, and are as pure, and upright, and 
 honest as the day when you entered business. But you 
 are the exceptions in the case. God will sustain a man, 
 however, amid all the excitements of business, if he will 
 only put his trust in Rim. In the drug-store, in Phila- 
 delphia, a young man was told that he must sell blacking 
 on the Lord's day. He said to the head man of the firm: 
 "I can't possibly do that. I am willing to sell medi- 
 cines on the Lord's day, for I think that is right and 
 necessary: but I can't sell this patent blacking." He 
 was discharged from the place. A Christian man hear- 
 ing of it, took him into his employ, and he went on from 
 one success to another, until he was known all over the 
 land for his faith in God and his good works, as well as 
 for his worldly success. When a man has sacrificed any 
 temporal, financial good for the sake of his spiritual in- 
 terests, the Lord is on his side, and one with God is a 
 majority. 
 
 Again: Look around you and see the pressure of 
 political life. How many are going down under this 
 influence. There is not one man out of a thousand that 
 can stand political life in our cities. Once in awhile a 
 man comes and says: "Now I love my city and my 
 country, and, in the strength of God, I am going in as a 
 sort of missionary to reform politics." The Lord is on 
 his side. He comes out as pure as when he went in, and, 
 with such an idea, I believe he will be sustained; but he 
 is the exception. When such an upright, pure man 
 does step into politics, the first thing, the newspapers 
 take the job of blackening him all over, and they review 
 all his past life, and distort everything that he has done, 
 until, from thinking himself a highly respectable citizen, 
 he begins to contemplate what a mercy it is that he has- 
 
190 
 
 THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 been so long out of gaol. The most hopeless, God-for- 
 saken people in all our cities are those who, not in a 
 missionary spirit, but with the idea of sordid gain, have 
 gone into political life. I pray for the prisoners in gaol, 
 and think they may be converted to God, but I never 
 have any faith to pray for an old politician. 
 
 Then look around and see the allurements to an im- 
 pure life. Bad books, unknown to father and mother, 
 vile as the lice of Egypt, creeping into some of the best 
 of families of the community; and boys read them 
 while the teacher is looking the other way, or at recess, 
 or on the corner of the street when the groups are gath- 
 ered. These books are read late at night. Satan finds 
 them a smooth plank on which he can slide down into 
 perdition some of your sons and daughters. Reading 
 bad books — one never gets over it. The books may be 
 burned, but there is not enough power in all the apoth- 
 ecary's preparations to wash out the stain from the soul. 
 Father's hands, mother's hands, sister's hands, will not 
 wash it out. None but the hand of the Lord God can 
 wash it out. And what is more perilous in regard to 
 these temptations, we may not mention them. While 
 God in this Bible, from chapter to chapter, thunders His 
 denunciation against these crimes, people expect the 
 pulpit and the printing-press to be silent on the subject, 
 and just in proportion as people are impure are they 
 fastidious on the theme. They are so full of decay and 
 death they do not want their sepulchres opened. But I 
 shall not be hindered by them. I shall go on in the 
 name of the Lord Almighty, before whom you and I 
 must at last come in judgment, and I shall pursue that 
 vile sin, and thrust it with the two edged-sword of God's 
 truth, though I find it sheltered under the chandeliers of 
 some of your beautiful parlors. God will turn into des- 
 
THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 191 
 
 truction all the unclean, and no splendors ol surround- 
 ing can make decent that which He has smitten. God 
 will not excuse sin merely because it has costly array, 
 and beautiful tapestry, and palatial residence, any more 
 than He will excuse that which crawls, a blotch of sores, 
 through the lowest cellar. Ever and anon, through some 
 law-suit there flashes upon the people of our great cities 
 what is transpiring in seemingly respectable circles. You 
 call it "High life," you call it ''Fast living," you call it 
 "People's eccentricity. " And while we kick off the 
 sidewalk the poor wretch who has not the means to gar- 
 nish his iniquity, these lords and ladies, wrapped in 
 purple and fine linen, go un whipped of public justice. 
 Ah, the most dreadful part of the whole thing is that 
 there are persons abroad whose whole business it is to 
 despoil the young. Salaried by infamous establishments, 
 these cormorants of darkness, these incarnate fiends, 
 hang around your hotels, and your theatres, and they 
 insinuate themselves among the clerks of your stores, 
 and, by adroitest art, sometimes get in the purest circles. 
 Oh, what an eternity such a man as that will have I As 
 the door opens to receive him, thousands of voices will 
 cry out: "See here what you have done;" and the wretch 
 will wrap himself with fiercer flame and leap into deeper 
 darkness, and the multitudes he has destroyed will pur- 
 sue him, and hurl at him the long, bitter, relentless, 
 everlasting curse of their own anguish. If there be one 
 cup of eternal darkness more bitter than another, they 
 will have to drink it to the dregs. If, in all the ocean 
 of the lost world that comes billowing up, there be one 
 wave more fierce than another, it will dash over them. 
 "God will wound the hairy scalp of him who goeth on 
 still in his trespasses." 
 
 I think you are persuaded there is but little chance 
 
192 
 
 THE TIDES OF MUNICIPAL SIN. 
 
 here in Brooklyn, or in New York, or Philadelphia, or 
 Boston, for any young man without the grace of God. I 
 will even go further and make it more emphatic, and say 
 there is no chance for any young man who has not above 
 him, and beneath him, and before him, and behind him, 
 and on the right of him, and on the left of him, and 
 within him, the all-protecting grace of God. My word 
 of warning is to those who have recently come to the 
 city; some of them entering our banking institutions, 
 and some of them our stores and shops. Shelter your- 
 selves in God. Do not trust yourselves an hour without 
 the defences of Christ's religion. 
 
 I stood one day at Niagara Falls, and I saw what you 
 may have seen there, six rainbows bending over that tre- 
 mendous plunge. I never saw anything like it before 01 
 since. Six beautiful rainbows arching that great cat- 
 aract! And so over the rapids and the angry precipices 
 of sin, where so many have been dashed down, God's beau- 
 tiful admonitions hover, a warning arching each peril — 
 six of them, fifty of them — a thousand of them. Be^ 
 ware! beware! beware! This afternoon, young men, 
 while you have time to reflect upon these things, and 
 before the duties of the office and the store, and the shop 
 come upon you again, look over this whole subject, and 
 after the day has passed, and you hear in the nightfall 
 the voices and the footsteps of the city dying from your 
 ear, and it gets so silent that you can hear distinctly 
 your watch under your pillow going "tick, tick!" then 
 open your eyes, and look out upon the darkness, and see 
 two pillars of light, one horizontal, the other perpendi- 
 cular, but changing their direction until they come to- 
 gether, and your enraptured vision beholds it — the okoss! 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 193 
 
 CHAPTER XIY. 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 O thou that art situate at the entry of the sea. — Ezek. xxvii : 8. 
 
 This is a part of an impassioned apostrophe to the city 
 of Tyre. It was a beautiful city — a majestic city. At 
 the east end of the Mediterranean, it sat with one hand 
 beckoning the inland trade, and with the other the com- 
 merce of foreign nations. It swung a monstrous boom 
 across its harbor to shut out foreign enemies, and then 
 swung back that boom to let in its friends. The air of 
 the desert was fragrant with the spices brought by caravans 
 to her fairs, and all seas were cleft into foam by the keel 
 of her laden merchantmen. Her markets were rich with 
 horses, and 'mules, and camels from Togarmah; with 
 upholstery, and ebony, and ivory from Dedan; with 
 emeralds, and agate, and coral from Syria; with wine 
 from Helbon; with finest needlework from Ashur and 
 Chilmad. Talk about the splendid state-rooms of your 
 White Star and French lines of international steamers. 
 — why the benches of the state-rooms in those Tyrian 
 ships were all ivory, and instead of our coarse canvas on 
 the masts of the shipping, they had the finest linen, quilted 
 together, and inwrought with embroideries almost mirac- 
 ulous for beauty. Its columns overshadowed all nations. 
 Distant empires felt its heart beat. Majestic city 1 "situate 
 at the entry of the sea." 
 
 But where now is the gleam of her towers, the roar of 
 her chariots, the masts of her shipping? Let the fisher- 
 men who dry their nets on the place where she once 
 13 
 
194 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 stood; let the sea that rashes upon the barrenness where 
 she once challenged the admiration of all nations; let the 
 barbarians who build their huts on the place where her 
 palaces glittered, answer the question. Blotted out for 
 ever! She forgot God, and God forgot her. And while 
 our modern cities admire her -glory, let them take warn- 
 ing at her awful doom. 
 
 Cain was the founder of the first city, and I suppose it 
 took after him in morals. It is a long while before a city 
 can get over the character of those who founded it. 
 Were they criminal exiles, the filth, and the prisons, and 
 the debauchery are the shadows of such founders. New 
 York will not for two or three hundred years escape 
 from the good influences of its founders, — the pious set- 
 tlers whose prayers went up from the very streets where 
 now banks discount, and brokers shave, and companies 
 declare dividends, and smugglers swear Custom-house 
 lies; and above the roar of the drays, and the crack of 
 auctioneers' mallets is heard the ascription — "We worship 
 thee, O thou almighty dollar!" The church that once 
 stood on Wall-street still throws its blessing over all the 
 scene of traffic, and upon the ships that fold their white 
 wings in the harbor. Originally men gathered in cities 
 from necessity. It was to escape the incendiary's torch 
 or the assassin's dagger. Only the very poor lived in 
 the country, those who had nothing that could be stolen, 
 or vagabonds who wanted to be near their place of busi- 
 ness; but since civilization and religion have made it 
 safe for men to live almost anywhere, men congregate in 
 cities because of the opportunity for rapid gain. Cities 
 are not necessarily evils, as has sometimes been argued. 
 They have been the birth-place of civilization. In them 
 popular liberty ha3 lifted up its voice. Witness Genoa, 
 and Pisa, and Venice. The entrance of the representa- 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY BULEES. 195 
 
 tives of the cities in the legislatures of Europe was the 
 death-blow to feudal kingdoms. Cities are the patron- 
 izers of art and literature, — architecture pointing to its 
 British Museum in London, its Royal Library in Paris, 
 its Yatican in Rome. Cities hold the world's sceptre. 
 Africa was Carthage, Greece was Athens, England is 
 London, France is Paris, Italy is Rome, and the cluster 
 of cities in which God has cast our lot will yet decide 
 the destiny of the American people. 
 
 The particular city in which God has given us a resi- 
 dence is under especial advantage. I may this morning 
 apostrophize it in the words of my text, and say: "O 
 thou that art situate at the entrv of the sea!" Standing 
 at the gates of the continent, we try to keep that which 
 is worth keeping, and we try to pass on that which is of 
 no use. The best pictures are in our galleries for exhi- 
 bition, and foreign orators stop long enough to speak in 
 our halls. The finest equipages may be seen on our 
 Broadway, and making the circuit of our Central and 
 Prospect Parks, — places fascinating with mosque, and 
 fountains, and sculptured bridges, embowered walks, and 
 menageries of wild animals, for the amusement of the 
 people; while our Croton and Ridge wood acqueducts 
 pour their brightness and refreshment into the hot lips 
 of the thirsty cities. Thanking God this morning for 
 the pleasant place in which He has cast our lot; and at 
 this season of the year when so many of the offices of the 
 city are changing hands, and so many new men are com- 
 ing into positions of public trust, I have thought it might 
 be useful to talk a little while about the moral responsi- 
 bility resting upon the office-bearers in the city — a theme 
 as appropriate to those who are governed as to the gov- 
 ernors. The moral characters of those who rule a city 
 has much to do with the character of the city itself. Men, 
 
196 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 women, and children are all interested in national politics. 
 When the great Presidential election comes, every patriot 
 wants to be found at the ballot box. We are all inter- 
 ested in the discussion of national reconstruction, national 
 finance, national debt, and we read the laws of Congress, 
 and we are wondering who will sit next in the Presiden- 
 tial chair. Now, that may be all very well — is very well; 
 but it is high time that we took some of the attention 
 which we have been devoting to national affairs and 
 brought it to the study of municipal government. This 
 it seems to me now is the chief point to be taken. Make 
 the cities right, and the nation will be right. I have 
 noticed that according to their opportunities there has 
 really been more corruption in municipal governments 
 in this country than in the State and national Legisla- 
 tures. Now, is there no hope? With the mightiest 
 agent in our hand, the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ, 
 shall not all our cities be reformed, and purified, and re- 
 deemed? I believe the day will come. I am in full 
 sympathy with those who are opposed to carrying politics 
 into religion ; but our cities will never be reformed and 
 purified until we carry religion into politics. I look 
 over this city and I see that all our great interests are to 
 be affected in the future, as they have been affected in the 
 past, by the character of those who in the different de- 
 partments rule over us, and I propose this morning to 
 classify some of those interests. 
 
 In the first place I remark: Commercial ethics are 
 always affected by the moral or immoral character of 
 those who have municipal supremacy. Officials that 
 wink at fraud, and that have neither censure or arraign- 
 ment for glittering dishonesties, always weaken the pulse 
 of commercial honor. Every shop, every store, every 
 bazaar, every factory in your city feels the moral charac- 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 197 
 
 ter of your City Hall. If in any city there be a dishonest 
 mayoralty, or an unprincipled Common Council, or a 
 Court susceptible to bribes, in that city there will be 
 unlimited license for all kinds of trickery and sin; while, 
 on the other hand, if officials are faithful to their oath of 
 office, if the laws are promptly executed, if there is vigi- 
 lance in regard to the outbranchiugs of crime, there is 
 the highest protection for all bargain making. A mer- 
 chant may stand in his store and say: "Now I'll have 
 nothing to do with city politics; I will not soil my hands 
 with the slush;" nevertheless the most insignificant trial 
 in the police court will affect that merchant directly or 
 indirectly. What style of clerk issues the writ; what 
 style of constable makes the arrest; what style of attor- 
 neys issue the plea; what style of judge charges the 
 jury; what style of sheriff executes the sentence — these 
 are questions that strike your counting-rooms to the 
 centre. You may not throw it off. In the city of New 
 York Christian merchants for a great while said: "We'll 
 have nothing to do with the management of public 
 affairs," and they allowed everything to go at loose ends 
 until there rolled up in that city a debt of nearly 120,000,- 
 000 dollars. The municipal government became a hissing 
 and a by-word in the whole earth, and then the Christian 
 merchants saw their foil}', and they went and took posses- 
 sion of the ballot boxes. I wish all commercial men to 
 understand that they are not independant of the moral 
 character of the men who rule over them, but must be 
 thoroughly, mightily affected by them. 
 
 So, also, of the educational interests of a city. Do you 
 know that there are in this country sixty -live thousand 
 common schools, and that there are over seven millions 
 of pupils, and that the majority of those schools and the 
 majority of those pupils are in our cities? Now, this 
 
198 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 great multitude of children will be affected by the intel- 
 ligence or ignorance, the virtue or the vice, of Boards of 
 Education and Boards of Control. There are cities — I 
 am glad ours is not one of them — but there are cities 
 where educational affairs are settled in the low caucus in 
 the abandoned parts of the cities, by men full of igno- 
 rance and rum. It ought not to be so; but in many 
 cities it is so. I hear the tramp of the coming genera- 
 tions. What that great multitude of youth shall be for 
 this world and the next will be affected very much by 
 the character of your public schools. You had better 
 multiply the moral and religious influences about the 
 common schools rather than subtract from them. Instead 
 of driving the Bible out, you had better drive the Bible 
 further in. May God defend our glorious common school 
 system, and send into rout and confusion all its sworn 
 enemies. 
 
 I have also to say that the character of officials in a 
 city affects the domestic circle. In a city where grog- 
 shops have their own way, and gambling hells are not 
 interfered with, and for fear of losing political influence 
 officials close their eyes to festering abominations — in all 
 those cities, the home interests need to make imploration. 
 The family circles of the city must inevitably be affected 
 by the moral character or the immoral character of those 
 who rule over them. 
 
 I will go further and say that the religious interests 
 of a city are thus affected. The church to-day has to 
 contend with evils that the civil law ought to smite; and 
 while I would not have the civil government in any wise 
 relax its energy in the arrest and punishment of crime, 
 I would have a thousand-fold more energy put forth in 
 the drying np of the fountains of iniquity. The Church 
 of God asks no pecuniary aid from political power; but 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 199 
 
 does ask that in addition to all the evils we must necessa- 
 rily contend against we shall not have to fight also munic- 
 ipal negligence. O, that in all our cities Christian people 
 would rise up, and that they would put their hand on the 
 helm before piratical demagogues have swamped the ship. 
 Instead of giving so much time to national politics, give 
 some of your attention to municipal government. 
 
 I am glad to know that recently our city has been 
 cleansed of a great deal of political vermin, and yet it is 
 not all gone. I see them still crawling around your City 
 Hall — the disgust of all good men. Somehow, in the grind- 
 ing of the political machine, they come on the top of the 
 wheel. They electioneer hard at the polls, and they 
 must have some crumbs of office or they will change 
 their politics. The Democratic party would have us be- 
 lieve that that kind of men belong to the Republican 
 party, and the Republican party would have us believe 
 that that kind of men belong to the Democratic party. 
 They are both wrong. They belong to both. It was 
 well illustrated at the last election in New York City, 
 where the two political parties, rousing themselves up to 
 the fact that they ought to have some great reformer, 
 some large-hearted reformer, some unimpeachable re- 
 former — the two political parties joined together and 
 elected to the Senatorial chair — John Morrissey! O, I 
 demand that the Christian people who have been stand- 
 ing aloof from public affairs come back, and in the might 
 of God try to save our cities. If things are or have been 
 bad, it is because you have let them be bad. That Chris- 
 tian man who merely goes to the polls and casts his vote 
 does not do his duty. It is not the ballot box that de- 
 cides the election, it is the political caucus; and if at the 
 primary meetings of the two political parties unfit and 
 bad men are nominated, then the ballot box has nothing 
 
200 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 to do save to take its choice between two thieves! In 
 our churches, by reformatory organization, in every way 
 let us try to tone up the moral sentiment in these cities. 
 The rulers are those whom the people choose, and depend 
 upon it that in all the cities, as long as pure-hearted men 
 stand aloof from politics because they despise hot parti- 
 sanship, just so long in many of our cities will rum make 
 the nominations, and rum control the ballot box, and rum 
 inaugurate the officials. 
 
 I take a step further this morning, and I ask that all 
 those of you who believe in the omnipotence of prayer, 
 day by day, and every day, present your city officials 
 before God for a blessing. Pray for your mayor. The 
 chief magistrate of five hundred thousand souls is in a 
 position of great responsibility. Many of the kings, and 
 queens, and emperors of other days had no such domin- 
 ion. With the scratch of a pen he may advance a benefi- 
 cent institution or baulk an elevated steam railway 
 confiscation. By appointments he may bless or curse 
 every hearth-stone in the city. If in the Episcopal 
 churches, by the authority of the Litany, and in our non- 
 Episcopate churches, we every Sabbath pray for the 
 President of the United States, why not, then, be just as 
 hearty in our supplications for the chief magistrate of 
 our cities, for their guidance, for their health, for their 
 present and their everlasting morality? 
 
 But go further, and pray for your Common Council. 
 They hold in their hands a power splendid for good or 
 terrible for evil. Thej 7 have many temptations. In 
 many of the cities whole Boards of Common Council- 
 men have gone down in the maelstrom of political cor- 
 ruption. They could not stand the power of the bribe. 
 Corruption came in and sat beside them, and sat behind 
 them, and sat before them. They recklessly voted away 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 201 
 
 the liard-earned moneys of the people. They were bought 
 out, body, mind, and soul, so that at the end of their 
 term of office they had not enough of moral remains left 
 to make a decent funeral. They went into office with 
 the huzza of the multitude. They came out with the 
 anathema of all decent people. There is not one man 
 out of a hundred that can endure the temptations of the 
 Common Council men in our great cities. And if a man 
 in that position have the courage of a Cromwell, and the 
 independence of an Andrew Jackson, and the public 
 spiritedness of a John Frederick Oberlin,,and the piety 
 of an Edward Payson, he will have no surplus to throw 
 away. Pray, for these men. Every man likes to be 
 prayed for. Do you know how Dr. Norman McLeod 
 became the Queen's chaplain? It was by a warm-hearted 
 prayer in the Scotch kirk, in behalf of the Royal Family, 
 one Sabbath when the Queen and her son were present 
 incognito. 
 
 Yes, go further, my friends, and pray for your police. 
 Their perils, and temptations, best known to themselves. 
 They hold the order and the peace of your city in their 
 grasp. But for their intervention you would not be safe 
 for an hour. They must lace the storm. They must 
 rush in where it seems to them almost instant death. 
 They must put the hand of arrest on the armed maniac, 
 and corner the murderer. They must refuse large re- 
 wards for withdrawing complaints. They must unravel 
 intricate plots, and trace dark labyrinths of crime, and 
 develop suspicions into certainties. They must be cool 
 while others are frantic. They must be vigilant while 
 others are somnolent, impersonating the very villainy 
 they want to seize. In the police forces of our great 
 cities are to-day men of as thorough character as that of 
 the old detective of New York, addressed to whom there 
 
202 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 came letters from London asking for help ten years after 
 he was dead — letters addressed to "Jacob Hayes, High 
 Constable of New York." Your police need your appre- 
 ciation, your sympathy, your gratitude, and, above all, 
 your prayers. And there is no church more indebted 
 to that class of men than this. When, last year, we were 
 arraigning some public iniquities, and the wrath of all 
 the powers of darkness seemed to be stirred up, the police 
 came in — not at our invitation, but voluntarily — and 
 sixty of them sat in every service in this church, for six 
 weeks, that there might be neither interruption nor 
 bloodshed. We thank them. We sympathize with 
 them. We pray for them. 
 
 Yea, I want you to go further, and pray every day for 
 your prison inspectors and your jail-keepers, — work 
 awful and beneficent. Rough men, cruel men, im- 
 patient men, are not fit for those places. They have 
 under their care men who were once as good as you, but 
 they got tripped up. Bad company, or strong drink, or 
 a strange conjunction of circumstances, flung them head- 
 long. Go down that prison corridor and ask them how 
 they got in, and about their families, and what their 
 early prospects in life were, and you will find that they 
 are very much like yourself, except in this: that God 
 kept you while He did not restrain them. Just one false 
 step made the difference between them and you. They 
 want more than prison bars, more than jail fare, more 
 than handcuffs and hopplers, more than a vermin-cov- 
 ered couch to reform them. PrayGod day by day that 
 the men who have these unfortunates in charge may be 
 merciful, Christianly strategic, and the means of reforma- 
 tion and rescue. Some years ago a city pastor in New 
 York was called to the city prison to attend a funeral. 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 203 
 
 A young woman had committed a crime, and was incar- 
 cerated, and her mother came to visit her, and died on 
 the visit. The mother, having no home, was buried from 
 her daughter's prison-cell. After the service was over, 
 the imprisoned daughter came up to the minister of 
 Christ, and said: "Wouldn't you like to see my poor 
 mother?" And while they stood at the coffin, the min- 
 ister of Christ said to that imprisoned soul: "Don't you 
 feel to-day, in the presence of your mother's dead body, 
 as if you ought to make a vow before God that you will 
 do differently and live a better life?" She stood for a 
 few moments, and then the tears rolled down her cheeks, 
 and she pulled from her right hand the worn-out glove 
 that she had put on in honor of the obsequies, and, hav- 
 ing bared her right hand, she put it upon the chill brow 
 of her dead mother, and said: "By the help of God I 
 swear I will do differently. God help me." And she 
 kept her vow. And years after, when she was told of 
 the incident, she said: "When that minister of the Gos- 
 pel said: 'God bless you and help you to keep the vow 
 that you have made,' I cried out, and I said : 'You bless 
 me! Do you bless me? Why, that's the first kind 
 word I've heard in ten years;' and it thrilled through 
 my soul, and it was the means of my reformation, and 
 ever since, by the grace of God, I've tried to live a 
 Christian life." O yes, there are many amid the crimi- 
 nal classes that may be reformed. Pray for the men 
 who have these unfortunates in charge; and who knows 
 but that, when you are leaving this world, you may hear 
 the voice of Christ dropping to your dying pillow, say- 
 ing: "I was sick and in prison, and you visited me.' r 
 Yea, I take the suggestion of the Apostle Paul, and ask 
 you to pray for all who are in authority, that we may 
 lead quiet and peaceable lives in godliness and honesty. 
 
204 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RCLKK9. 
 
 My word this morning now is to all in this assembly 
 and to those whom these words shall come who hold any 
 public position of trust -in our midst. You are God's 
 representatives. God the King, and Ruler, and Judge, 
 sets you in His place. O, be faithful in the discharge of 
 all your duties, so that when Brooklyn is in ashes, and 
 the world itself is a red scroll of flame, you may be in 
 the mercy and grace of Christ rewarded for your faith- 
 fulness. It was that feeling which gave such eminent 
 qualifications for office to Neal Dow, Mayor of Portland, 
 and to Judge McLean, of Ohio, and to Benjamin F. 
 Butler, Attorney-General of New York, and to George 
 Briggs, Governor of Massachusetts, and to Theodore 
 Frelinghuysen, Senator of the United States, and to 
 "William Wilberforce, member of the British Parliament. 
 You may make the rewards of eternity the emoluments 
 of your office. What care you for adverse political criti- 
 cism if you have God on your side? The one, or the 
 two, or the three years of your public trust will pass 
 away, and all the years of your earthly service, and then 
 the tribunal will be lifted, before which you and I must 
 appear. May God make you so faithful now that the 
 last scene shall be to you exhilaration and rapture. I 
 wish this morning to exhort all good people, whether 
 they are the governors or the governed, to make one 
 grand effort for the salvation, the purification, the re- 
 demption of Brooklyn. Do you not know that there are 
 multitudes going down to ruin, temporal and eternal, 
 dropping quicker than words drop from my lips? Grog- 
 shops swallow them up. Gambling hells devour them. 
 Houses of shame are damning them. O, let us toil, and 
 pray, and preach, and vote until all these wrongs are 
 righted. "What we do we must do quickly. Soon you 
 will not sit there, and I will not stand here. With our 
 
RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 205 
 
 rulers, and on the same platform, we must at last come 
 before the throne of God to answer for what we have 
 done for the -bettering of the condition of the five hun- 
 dred thousand people in Brooklyn. Alas! if on that day 
 it be found that your hand has been idle and my pulpit 
 has been silent. O, ye who are pure, and honest, and 
 Christian, go to work and help me to make this city pure, 
 and honest, and Christian. 
 
 Lest it may have been thought that I am this morning 
 preaching only to what are called the better classes, my 
 final word is to some dissolute soul that has strayed here 
 to-day. Though you may be covered with all crimes, 
 though you may be smitten with all leprosies, though 
 you may have gone through the whole catalogue of 
 iniquity, and may not have been in church for twenty 
 years before to-day — before you leave this house you 
 may have your nature entirely reconstructed, and upon 
 your brow, hot with infamous practices and besweated 
 with exhausting indulgences, God will place the Hashing 
 coronet of a Saviour's forgiveness. "O, no!" you say, 
 "if you knew who I am and where I came from this 
 morning, you wouldn't say that to me. I don't believe 
 the Gospel you are preaching speaks of my case." Yes 
 it does, my brother. And then when you tell me that, 
 I think of what St. Teresa said when reduced to utter 
 destitution, having only two pieces of money left, she 
 jingled the two pieces of money in her hand and said: 
 "St. Teresa and two pieces of money are nothing; but St. 
 Teresa and two pieces of money and God are all things." 
 And I tell you to-day that while a sin and a sinner are 
 nothing, a sin and a sinner and an all-forgiving and all- 
 compassionate God are everything. 
 
 Who is that that I see coming? I know his step. I 
 know his rags. Who is it? A prodigal. Come, people 
 
206 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY OF CITY RULERS. 
 
 of God, let us go out and meet him. Get the best robe 
 you can find in all this house. Let the angels of God 
 fill their chalices and drink to his eternal rescue. Come, 
 people of God, let us go out to meet him. The prodigal 
 is coming home. The dead is alive again, and the lost 
 is found. Hallelujah! 
 
 "Pleased with the news, the saints below 
 In songs their tongues employ; 
 Beyond the skies the tidings go, 
 And Heaven is filled with joy. 
 
 "Nor angels can their joy contain, 
 
 But kindle with new fire ; 
 The sinner lost is found,' they sing, 
 
 And strike the sounding lyre." 
 
SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 207 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 " Is the young man Absalom safe ? " — II. Sam. xviii : 29. 
 
 The heart of David, the father, was wrapped up in his 
 boy Absalom. He was a splendid boy, judged by the 
 rules of worldly criticism. From the crown of his head 
 to the sole of his foot there was not a single blemish. 
 The Bible says that he had such a luxuriant shock of 
 hair, that when once a year it was shorn, what was cut 
 off weighed over three pounds. But, notwithstanding 
 all his brilliancy of appearance, he was a bad boy, and 
 broke his father's heart. He was plotting to get the 
 throne of Israel. He had marshalled an army to over- 
 throw his father's government. The day of battle had 
 come. The conflict was begun. David, the father, sat 
 between the gates of the palace waiting for the tidings 
 of the conflict. Oh, how rapidly his heart beat with 
 emotion. Two great questions were to be decided: the 
 safety of his boy, and the continuance of the throne of 
 Israel. After awhile, a servant, standing on the top of 
 the house, looks off, and he sees some one running. He 
 is coming with great speed, and the man on the top of 
 the house announces the coming of the messenger, and 
 the father watches and waits, and as soon as the messen- 
 ger from the field of battle comes within hailing distance 
 the father cries out. Is it a question in regard to the 
 establishment of his throne? Does he say: "Have the 
 armies of Israel been victorious? Am I to continue in my 
 
203 
 
 SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG- MEN. 
 
 imperial authority? Have I overthrown my enemies?" 
 Oh ! no. There is one question that springs from his heart 
 to the lip, and springs from the lip into the ear of the 
 besweated and bedusted messenger flying from the battle- 
 field — the question, ''Is the young man Absalom safe?" 
 When it was told to David, the King, that, though his 
 armies had been victorious, his son had been slain, the 
 father turned his back upon the congratulations of the 
 nation, and went up the stairs of his palace, his heart 
 breaking as he went, wringing his hands sometimes, and 
 then again pressing them against his temples as though 
 he would press them in, crying: "O Absalom! my son! 
 my son! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom! 
 my son! my son!" 
 
 My friends, the question which David, the King, asked 
 in regard to his son is the question that resounds to-day 
 in the hearts of hundreds of parents. Yea, there are a 
 great multitude of young men here who know that the 
 question of the text is appropriate when asked in regard 
 to them. They know the temptations by which they are 
 surrounded ; they see so many who started life with as 
 good resolutions as they have who have fallen in the 
 path, and they are ready to hear me ask the question of 
 my text: "Is the young man Absalom safe?" The fact 
 is that this life is full of peril. He who undertakes it 
 without the grace of God and a proper understanding 
 of the conflict into which he is going must certainly be 
 defeated. Just look off upon society to-day. Look at 
 the shipwreck of men for whom fair things were prom- 
 ised, and who started life with every advantage. Look 
 at those who have dropped from high social position, 
 and from great fortune, disgraced for time, disgraced 
 for eternity. To prove that this life is an awful peril 
 unless a man has the grace of God to defend him, I point 
 
SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 209 
 
 to that wreck of Friday at Ludlow street Jail, showing 
 on what a desolate coast a strong craft may crash and 
 part. Let there be no exhilaration over that man's fate. 
 Instead of the chuckle of satisfaction, let there be in 
 every Christian soul a deep badness. The fact is, that 
 there are tens of thousands of men in this country who, 
 under the same pressure of temptation, would have 
 fallen as low. Instead of bragging and boasting how 
 you have maintained your integrity, you had better get 
 down on your knees and thank God that His Almighty 
 grace has kept you from the same moral catastrophe. 
 There is no advice more appropriate to you and this 
 whole country this morning than the advice of the 
 Scripture, which says: u Let him that standeth. take heed 
 lest he fall." All my sympathies are for the afflicted 
 family of that dead prisoner. For the last seven years 
 some of them I know have endured an inquisition of 
 torture. May the God of all comfort help them in this 
 day when there are so few to pray for them. In the 
 presence of this Christian assemblage ] invoke the God 
 of all compassion to have mercy upun those bereft chil- 
 dren. It is hard to see our friends die, even when they 
 die in Christian triumph and with all blissful surround- 
 ings; but alas! when to the natural anguish is added the 
 anguish of a moral and a lifetime shipwreck. Ah I my 
 friends, let us remember that that man made full expia- 
 tion to society for his crimes against it. Let us remem- 
 ber that by pangs of body that no doctor could arrest, 
 and by horrors of soul which no imagination can describe, 
 he fully paid the price of his iniquity. Let others do as 
 they may, I will not throw one nettle or one thistle on 
 that man's grave. But, my friends, no minister of 
 religion, no man who stands as I do, Sabbath morning 
 and Sabbath night and Friday night, before a great 
 U 
 
210 
 
 SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 multitude of young men, trying to help them and edu- 
 cate them for time and eternity, can allow that event of 
 the past week to go by without drawing from it a lesson 
 of the fact that life is an awful peril without the religion 
 of Jesus Christ, and that "the way of the transgressor 
 is hard." 'No stouter nature ever started out on this 
 world than William M. Tweed. He conquered poverty; 
 he conquered lack of education ; he achieved an alder- 
 manic chair in the metropolis of this country; he gained 
 a position in the Congress at Washington, and then he 
 took his position on a financial throne of power at Albany, 
 his frown making legislative assemblages tremble, while 
 he divided the notoriety with James Fisk, Jr., of being 
 the two great miscreants of the nineteenth century. 
 Alas! Alas! Young man, look at the contrast — in ele- 
 gant compartment of Wagner's palace-car, surrounded 
 by wines and cards and obsequious attendants, going to 
 the Senatorial place in Albany; then look again at the 
 plain box in the undertaker's wagon at three o'clock of 
 last Friday at the door of a prison. Behold the contrast 
 — the pictured and bouqueted apartments at the Delavan, 
 liveried servants admitting millionaires and Senators 
 who were flattered to take his hand; then see the almost 
 friendless prisoner on a plain cot, throwing out his dying 
 hand to clutch that of Luke, his black attendant. Be- 
 hold the wedding party at the mansion, the air bewitched 
 with crowns, and stars, and harps of tuberoses and jap- 
 onicas; among the wedding presents, forty complete 
 sets of silver; fifteen diamond sets, one set of diamonds 
 worth $15,000; the wedding dress at the expense of 
 $4,000, with trimmings that cost another $1,000; two 
 baskets of silverware, representing icebergs, to contain 
 the ices, while Polar bears of silver lie down on the 
 handles of the baskets; the banquet, the triumph of 
 
SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 211 
 
 Delmonico's lifetime; the whole scene a bewilderment 
 of costliness and magnificence. And then behold the 
 low-ceiling room, looking out on a dingy street, where 
 poor, exhausted, forsaken, betrayed, sick William M. 
 Tweed lies a dying. From how high up to how low 
 down! There were many common people in !N"ew York 
 who for years were persuaded by what they saw that an 
 honest and laborious life did not pay. As the carriage 
 swept by containing the jewelled despoil er of public 
 funds, men felt like throwing their burdens down and 
 trying some other way of getting a livelihood; but where 
 is the clerk on $500 salary a year, where is the porter 
 who will to-morrow sweep out the store, where is the 
 scavenger of the street who would take Tweed's years of 
 fraudulent prosperity if he must also take Tweed's suf- 
 ferings, and Tweed's dishonor, and Tweed's death? All! 
 there never was such an illustration for the young men 
 of New York and Brooklyn of the fact that dishonesty 
 wijl not pay. Take a dishonest dollar and bury it in 
 the centre of the earth, and heap all the rocks of the 
 mountain on the top of it; then cover these rocks with 
 all the diamonds of Golconda,and all the silver of Nevada, 
 and all the gold of California and Australia, put on the 
 top of these all banking and moneyed institutions, and 
 they cannot keep down that one dishonest dollar. That 
 one dishonest dollar in the centre of the earth will begin 
 to heave and rock and upturn itself until it comes to the 
 resurrection of damnation. "As a partridge sitteth on 
 eggs and hatcheth them not, so riches got by fraud, a 
 man shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at 
 the end he shall be a fool." You tell me that in the last 
 days the man of whom I speak read his Bible three times 
 a day. I cast no slur on such a thing as that. It was 
 beautiful, and it was appropriate. God could save that 
 
212 
 
 SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 man as easily as He could save you or me. Had I been 
 called to do so, I should have knelt by his cot in the 
 prison and prayed for his soul with as much confidence 
 as I would kneel by your bedside. Oh! the Lord, long- 
 suffering, merciful, and gracious; height above all height, 
 depth below all depth, and any man who cries for mercy 
 shall get it. But who would want to live a life hostile 
 to the best interests of society, even though in his last 
 moments he could make his peace with God and enter 
 heaven? So I stand here before the young men, and I 
 am going to have a plain talk with you, and I am going 
 to offer you some safeguards. I shall not preach to you 
 as a minister preaches to a formalistic congregation. I 
 have no gown, or bands, or surplice; but I take you by 
 both hands, my dear brother, and from what I know of 
 life, and from what I know of God, and from what I 
 know of the promises of Divine grace, I shall solemnly 
 yet cheerfully address you. God gives me a great many 
 young men here Sabbath by Sabbath, and it is my great 
 ambition not only to reach heaven myself, but to take 
 them all along with me. And I will, I will, God help- 
 ing me. 
 
 The first safeguard of which I want to speak is a love 
 of home. There are those who have no idea of the 
 pleasures that concentrate around that word "home." 
 Perhaps your early abode was shadowed with vice 01 
 poverty. Harsh words, and petulance, and scowling 
 may have destroyed all the sanctity of that spot. Love, 
 kindness, and self-sacrifice, which have built their altars 
 in so many abodes, were strangers in your father's house. 
 God pity you, young man; you never had a home. But 
 a multitude in this audience can look back to a spot that 
 they can never forget. It may have been a lowly roof, 
 but you cannot think of it this morning without a dash 
 
SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 213 
 
 of emotion. You have seen nothing on earth that so 
 stirs your soul. A stranger passing along that place 
 might see nothing remarkable about it; but oh! how 
 much it means to you. Fresco on palace wall does not 
 mean so much to you as those rough-hewn rafters. Parks 
 and bowers and trees on fashionable watering-place or 
 country-seat do not mean so much to yon as that brook 
 that ran in front of the plain farm-house, and singing 
 under the weeping willows. The barred gateway swung 
 open by porter in full dress, does not mean as much to 
 you as that swing-gate, your sister on one side of it, and 
 you on the other; she gone fifteen years ago into glory. 
 That scene coming back to you to-day, as you swept 
 backward and forward on the gate, singing the songs of 
 your childhood. But there are those here who have 
 their second dwelling-place. It is your adopted home. 
 That also is sacred forever. There you established the 
 first family altar. There your children were born. In 
 that room flapped the wing of the death angel. Under 
 that roof, when your work is done, you expect to lie 
 down and die. There is only one word in all the lan- 
 guage that can convey your idea of that place, and that 
 word is " home." Now, let me say that I never knew 
 a man who was faithful to his early and adopted home 
 who was given over at the same time to any gross form 
 of wickedness. If you find more enjoyment in the club- 
 room, in the literary society, in the art-saloon, than you 
 do in these unpretending home pleasures, you are on 
 the road to ruin. Though you may be cut off fror* 1 vour 
 early associates, and though you may be . epa^ ,f*^ from 
 all your kindred, young man, is there '.,ot a . • • ,rji some- 
 where tliat* yon can call your own? Though it be the 
 fourth story of a third-class boardin.'. : ^use, into that 
 room gather books, and pictures, aua a harp. Hang 
 
214 
 
 SAFEGUAKDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 your mother's portrait over the mantle. Bid unholy 
 mirth stand back from that threshhold. Consecrate some 
 spot in that room with the knee of prayer. J3y the 
 memory of other days, a father's counsel, a mother's 
 love, and a sister's confidence, call it home. 
 
 Another safeguard for these young men is industrious 
 habit. There are a great many people trying to make 
 their way through the world with their wits instead of 
 by honest toil. There is a young man who comes from 
 the country to the city. He fails twice before he is as 
 old as his father w T as when he first saw the spires of the 
 great town. At twenty-one years of age he knows Wall 
 Street from Trinity Church to East river docks. He is 
 seated in his room at a rent of $2,000 a year, waiting for 
 the banks to declare their dividends and the stocks to 
 run up. After awhile he gets impatient. He tries to 
 improve his penmanship by making copy-plates of other 
 merchants' signatures! Never mind — all is right in 
 business. After awhile he has his estate. Now is the 
 time for him to retire to the country, amid the flocks 
 and the herds, to culture the domestic virtues. Now 
 the young men who were his schoolmates in boyhood 
 will come, and with their ox-teams draw him logs, and 
 with their hard hands will help to heave up the castle. 
 That is no fancy sketch; it is every-day life. I should 
 not wonder if there were a rotten beam in that palace. 
 I should not wonder if God should smite him with dire 
 sicknesses, and pour into his cup a bitter draught that 
 will thrill him with unbearable agony. I should not 
 wonder if that man's children grew up to be to him a 
 disgrace, and to make his life a shame. I should not 
 wonder if that man died a dishonorable death, and were 
 tumbled into a dishonorable grave, and then went into 
 the gnashing of teeth. The way of the ungodly shall 
 
SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 215 
 
 perish. Oh! young man, you must have industry of 
 head, or hand, or foot, or perish. Do not have the idea 
 that you can get along in the world by genius. The 
 curse of this country to-day is genius — men with large 
 self-conceit and nothing else. The man who proposes to 
 make his living by his wits probably has not any. I 
 should rather be an ox, plain, and plodding and useful, 
 than to be an eagle, high-flying and good-for-nothing but 
 to pick out the eyes of carcasses. Even in the Garden of 
 Eden, it was not safe for Adam to be idle, so God made 
 him an horticulturist; and if the married pair had kept 
 busy dressing the vines, they would not have been saun- 
 tering under the trees, hankering after fruit that ruined 
 them and their posterity! Proof positive of the fact that 
 when people do not attend to their business they get into 
 mischief. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her 
 ways and be wise; which, having no overseer or guide, 
 provideth her food in the summer and gathereth her 
 meat in the harvest." Satan is a roaring lion, and you 
 can never destroy him by gun or pistol or sword. The 
 weapons with which you are to beat him back are ham- 
 mer, and adze, and saw, and pickaxe, and yardstick, and 
 the weapon of honest toil. Work, work, or die. 
 
 Another safeguard that I want to present to these 
 young men is a high ideal of life. Sometimes soldiers 
 going into battle shoot into the ground instead of into 
 the hearts of their enemies. They are apt to take aim 
 too low, and it is very often that the captain, going into 
 conflict with his men, will cry out, u Kow, men, aim 
 high!" The fact is that in life a great many men take 
 no aim at all. The artist plans out his entire thought 
 before he puts it upon canvas, before he takes up the 
 crayon or the chisel. An architect thinks out the 
 entire building before the workmen begin. Although 
 
216 
 
 SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 everything may seem to be unorganized, that arch- 
 itect has in his mind every Corinthian column, 
 every Gothic arch, every Byzantine capital. A poet 
 thinks out the entire plot of his poem before he 
 begins to chime the cantos of tinkling rhythms. And 
 yet there are a great many men who start the important 
 structure of human life without knowing whether it is 
 going to be a rude Tartar's hut or a St. Mark's Cathedral, 
 and begin to write out the intricate poem of their life 
 without knowing whether it is to be a Homer's "Odyssey" 
 or a rhymester's botch. Out of one thousand, nine hun- 
 dred and ninety-nine have no life-plot. Booted and 
 spurred and caparisoned, they hasten along, and I run 
 out and I say: "Hallo, man! Whither away?" "No- 
 where!" they say. Oh! young man, make every day's 
 duty a filling up of the great life-plot. Alas ! that there 
 should be on this sea of life so many ships that seem 
 bound for no port. They are swept every whither by 
 wind and wave, up by the mountains and down by the 
 valleys. They sail with no chart. They gaze on no 
 star. They long for no harbor. Oh! young man, have 
 a high ideal and press to it, and it will be a mighty safe- 
 guard. There never were grander opportunities opening 
 before young men than are opening now. Young men 
 of the strong arm, and of the stout heart, and of the 
 bounding step, I marshal you to-day for a great achieve- 
 ment. 
 
 Another safeguard is a respect for the Sabbath. Tell 
 me how a young man spends his Sabbath, and I will tell 
 you what are his prospects in business, and I will tell 
 you what are his prospects for the eternal world. God has 
 thrust into our busy life a sacred day when we are to 
 look after our souls. Is it exorbitant, after giving six 
 days to the feeding and the clothing of these perishable 
 
SAFEGUAKDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 217 
 
 bodies, that God should demand one day for the feeding 
 and the clothing of the immortal soul? Our bodies are 
 seven-day clocks, and they need to be wound up, and if 
 they are not wound up they run down into the grave. 
 ~No man can continuously break the Sabbath and keep 
 his physical and mental health. Ask those aged men, 
 and they will tell you they never knew men who continu- 
 ously broke the Sabbath who did not fail either in mind, 
 body or moral principle. A manufacturer gave this as 
 his experience. He said: "I owned a factory on the 
 Lehigh. Everything prospered. I kept the Sabbath, 
 and everything went on well. But one Sabbath morning 
 I bethought myself of a new shuttle, and I thought I 
 would invent that shuttle before sunset; and I refused 
 all food and drink until I had completed that shuttle. 
 By sundown I had completed it. The next day, Monday, 
 I showed to my workmen and friends this new shuttle. 
 They all congratulated me on my great success. I put 
 that shuttle into play. I enlarged my business; but, sir, 
 that Sunday's work cost me $30,000. From that day 
 everything went wrong. I failed in business, and I lost 
 my mill." Oh, my friends, keep the Lord's day. You 
 may think it old-fogy advice, but I give it to you now: 
 "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six 
 days shalt thou labor and do all thy work; but the sev- 
 enth is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou 
 shalt not do any work." A man- said that he would 
 prove that all this was a fallacy, and so he said: "I shall 
 raise a Sunday crop." And he ploughed the field on the 
 Sabbath, and then he put in the seed on the Sabbath 
 and he cultured the ground on the Sabbath. When the 
 harvest was ripe he reaped it on the Sabbath, and he car- 
 ried it into the mow on the Sabbath, and then he stood 
 out defiant to his Christian neighbors and said: "There, 
 
218 
 
 SAFEGUAKDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 that is my Sunday crop, and it is all garnered." After 
 awhile a storm came up, and a great darkness, and the 
 lightnings of heaven struck the barn, and away went his 
 Sunday crop! 
 
 There is one safeguard that I want to present. I have 
 saved it until the last because I want it to be the more 
 emphatic. The great safeguard for every young man is the 
 Christian religion. Nothing can take the place of it. You 
 may have gracefulness enough to put to the blush Lord 
 Chesterfield, you may have foreign languages dropping 
 from your tongue, you may discuss laws and literature, 
 you may have a pen of unequaled polish and power, you 
 may have so much business tact that you can get the 
 largest salary in a banking house, you may be as sharp 
 as Herod and as strong as Samson, and with as long 
 locks as those which hung Absalom, and yet you have 
 no safety against temptation. Some of you look forward 
 to life with great despondency. I know it. I see it 
 in your faces from time to time. You say: "All the 
 occupations and professions are full, and there's no 
 chance for me." Oh! young man, cheer up, I will tell 
 you how you can make your fortune. Seek first the 
 kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all other 
 things will be added. I know you do not want to be 
 mean in this matter. You will not empty the brimming 
 cup of life, and then pour the dregs on God's altar. To 
 a generous Saviour you will not act like that; you have 
 not the heart to act like that. That is not manly. That 
 is not honorable. That is not brave. Your great want 
 is a new heart, and in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ 
 I tell you so to-day, and the blessed Spirit presses 
 through the solemnities of this hour to put the cup of 
 life to your thirsty lips. Oh! thrust it not back. Mercy 
 presents it- -bleeding mercy, long-suffering Mercy. Pe- 
 
SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 219 
 
 spise till other friendships, prove recreant to all other 
 bargains, but despise God's love for your dying soul — do 
 not do that. There comes a crisis in a man's life, and the 
 trouble is he does not know it is the crisis. I got a letter 
 this week I thought to have brought it with me to 
 church and read you a portion of it — in which a man 
 says to me: 
 
 "I start out now to preach the gospel of righteousness 
 and temperance to the people. Do you remember me? 
 I am the man who appeared at the close of the service 
 when you were worshipping in the chapel after you 
 came from Philadelphia. Do you remember at the close 
 of the service a man coining up to you all a tremble with 
 conviction, and crying out for mercy, and telling you he 
 had a very bad business, and he thought he would change 
 it? That was the turning point in my history. I gave 
 up my bad business. I gave my heart to God, and the 
 desire to serve Him has grown upon me all these years, 
 until now woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel." 
 
 That Sunday night, in the chapel, now the Lay College 
 was the turning point in that young man's history. This 
 very Sabbath hour will be the turning point in the his- 
 tory of a hundred young men in this house. God help 
 us. I once stood on an anniversary platform with 
 a clergyman who told this marvelous story. He said: 
 
 "Thirty years ago two young men started out to attend 
 Park Theater, New York, to see a play which made religion 
 ridiculous and hypocritical. They had been brought up 
 in Christian families. They started for the theater to 
 see that vile play, and their early convictions came back 
 upon them. They felt it was not right to go, but still 
 they went. They came to the door of the theatre. One 
 of the young men stopped and started for home, but re- 
 turned and came up to the door, but had not the courage 
 
220 SAFEGUARDS OF YOUNG MEN. 
 
 to go in. He again started for home, and went home. 
 The other young man went in. He went from one degree 
 of temptation to another. Caught in the whirl of frivol- 
 ity and sin, he sank lower and lower. He lost his busi- 
 ness position. He lost his morals. He lost his soul. He 
 died a dreadful death, not one star of mercy shining on 
 it. I stand before you to-day," said that minister, 
 "to thank God that for twenty years I have been per- 
 mitted to preach the Gospel. I am the other young 
 man." 
 
 Oh! you see that was the turning point — the one went 
 back, the other went on. That great roaring world of 
 New York life will soon break in upon you, young men. 
 Will the wild wave dash out the impressions of this day 
 as an ocean billow dashes letters out of the sand on the 
 beach? You need something better than this world can 
 give you. I beat on your heart and it sounds hollow. 
 You want something great and grand and glorious to fill 
 it, and here is the religion that can do it God save you! 
 
THE VOICES OE THE STREET. 
 
THE VOICES OF THE STREET. 
 
 221 
 
 CHAPTER XYL 
 
 THE VOICES OF THE STREET. 
 
 Wisdom crieth without, she uttereth her voice in the streets. — 
 Prov. i: 20 
 
 We are all ready to listen to the voices of nature — the 
 voices of the mountain, the voices of the sea, the voices 
 of the storm, the voices of the star. As in some of the 
 cathedrals in Europe, there is an organ at either end of 
 the building, and the one instrument responds musically 
 to the other, so in the great cathedral of nature, day 
 responds to day, and night to night, and flower to flower, 
 and star to star, in the great harmonies of the universe. 
 The spring time is an evangelist in blossoms preaching 
 of God's love; and the winter is a prophet — white 
 bearded — denouncing woe against our sins. We are all 
 ready to listen to the voices of nature; but how few of 
 us learn anything from the voices of the noisy and dusty 
 street. You go to your mechanism, and to your work, 
 and to your merchandise, and you come back again — and 
 often with how different a heart you pass through the 
 streets. Are there no things for us to learn from 
 these pavements over which we pass? Are there no 
 tufts of truth growing up between these cobblestones, 
 beaten with the feet of toil, and pain, and pleasure, the 
 slow tread of old age, and the quick step of childhood? 
 Aye, there are great harvests to be reaped; and this 
 morning I thrust in the sickle because the harvest is ripe. 
 "Wisdom crieth without, she uttereth her voice in the 
 streets." 
 
222 
 
 THE VOICES OF THE STREET. 
 
 In the first place, the street impresses me with the 
 fact that this life is a scene of toil and struggle. By 
 ten o'clock every day the city is jarring with wheels, and 
 shuffling with feet, and humming with voices, and cov- 
 ered with the breath of smoke-stacks, and arush with 
 traffickers. Once in awhile you find a man going along 
 with folded arms and with leisure step, as though he had 
 nothing to do; but for the most part, as you find men 
 going down these streets on the way to business, there is 
 anxiety in their faces, as though they had some errand 
 which must be executed at the first possible moment. 
 You are jostled by those who have bargains to make and 
 notes to sell. Up this ladder with a hod of bricks, out 
 of this bank with a roll of bills, on this dray with a load 
 of goods, digging a cellar, or shingling a roof, or shoeing 
 a horse, or building a wall, or mending a watch, or bind- 
 ing a book. Industry, with her thousand arms and 
 thousand eyes, and thousand feet, goes on singing her 
 song of work! work! work! while the mills drum it, and 
 the steam-whistles fife it. All this is not because men 
 love toil. Some one remarked: "Every man is as lazy 
 as he can afford to be." But it is because necessity with 
 stern brow and with uplifted whip, stands over you 
 ready whenever you relax your toil to make your should- 
 ers sting with the lash. Can it be that passing up and 
 down these streets on your way to work and business 
 that you do not learn anything of the world's toil, and 
 anxiety, and struggle? Oh! how many drooping hearts, 
 how many eyes on the watch, how many miles traveled, 
 how many burdens carried, how many losses suffered, 
 how many battles fought, how many victories gained, 
 how many defeats suffered, how many exasperations en- 
 dured — what losses, what hunger, what wretchedness, 
 what pallor, what disease, what agony, what despair! 
 
THE VOICES OF THE STREET. 223 
 
 Sometimes I have stopped at the corner of the street as 
 the multitudes went hither and yon, and it has seemed 
 to be a great pantomiue, and as I looked upon it my 
 heart broke. This great tide of human life that goes 
 down the street is a rapid, tossed, and turned aside, and 
 dashed ahead, and driven back — beautiful in its confu- 
 sion, and confused in its beauty. In the carpeted aisles 
 of the forest, in the woods from which the eternal shadow 
 is never lilted, on the shore of the sea over whose iron 
 coast tosses the tangled foam sprinkling the cracked 
 cliffs with a baptism of whirlwind and tempest, is the 
 best place to study God; but in the rushing, swarming 
 raving street is the best place to study man. Going down 
 to your place of business and coming home again, I 
 charge you look about — see these signs of poverty, of 
 wretchedness, of hunger, of sin, of bereavement — and 
 as you go through the streets, and come back through 
 the streets, gather up in the arms of your prayer all the 
 sorrow, all the losses, all the sufferings, all the bereave- 
 ments of those whom you pass, and present them in 
 prayer before an all -sympathetic God. In the great day 
 of eternity there will be thousands of persons with whom 
 you in this world never exchanged one word, will rise 
 up and call you blessed; and there will be a thousand 
 fingers pointed at you in heaven, saying: "That is the 
 man, that is the woman, who helped me when I was hun- 
 gry, and sick, and wandering, and lost, and heart-broken. 
 That is the man, that is the woman," and the blessing 
 will come down upon you as Christ shall say: "I was 
 hungry and ye fed me, I was naked and ye clothed me, 
 I was sick and in prison and ye visited me; inasmuch 
 as ye did it to these poor waifs of the streets, ye did it 
 to Me." 
 
 Again, the street impresses me with the fact that all 
 
224 
 
 THE VOICES OF THE STREET. 
 
 classes and conditions of society must commingle. We 
 sometimes culture a wicked exclusiveness. Intellect 
 despises ignorance. Refinement will have nothing to do 
 with boorishness. Gloves hate the sunburned hand, and 
 the high forehead despises the flat head; and the trim 
 hedgerow will have nothing to do with the wild copse- 
 wood, and the Athens hates Nazareth. This ought not 
 so to be. The astronomer must come down from his 
 starry revelry and help us in our navigation. The sur- 
 geon must come away from his study of the human 
 organism and set our broken bones. The chemist must 
 come away from his laboratory, where he has been study- 
 ing analysis and synthesis, and help us to understand 
 the nature of the soils. I bless God that all classes of 
 people are compelled to meet on the street. The glitter- 
 ing coach-wheel clashes against the scavenger's cart. 
 Fine robes run against the pedlar's pack. Robust health 
 meets wan sickness. Honesty confronts fraud. Every 
 class of people meets every other class. Impudence and 
 modesty, pride and humility, purity and beastliness, 
 frankness and hypocrisy, meeting on the same block, in 
 the same street, in the same city. Oh! that is what 
 Solomon meant when he said: "The rich and the poor 
 meet together; the Lord is the Maker of them all." I 
 like this democratic principle of the Gospel of Jesus 
 Christ which recognizes the fact that we stand before 
 God on one and the same platform. Do not take on any 
 airs; whatever position you have gained in society, you 
 are nothing but a man, born of the same parent, regen- 
 erated by the same Spirit, cleansed in the same blood, to 
 lie down in the same dust, to get up in the same resur- 
 rection. It is high time that we all acknowledged not 
 only the Fatherhood of God, but the brotherhood of man. 
 Again, the street impresses me with the fact that it is 
 
THE VOICES OF THE STliEET. 
 
 225 
 
 a very hard thing for a man to keep his heart right and 
 to get to heaven. Infinite temptations spring upon us 
 from these places of public concourse. Amid so much 
 affluence how much temptation to covetousness, and to 
 be discontented with our humble lot. Amid so many 
 opportunities for over-reaching, what temptation to ex 
 tortion. Amid so much display, what temptation to 
 vanity. Amid so many saloons of strong drink, what 
 allurement to dissipation. In the maelstroms and hell 
 gates of the street, how many make quick and eternal 
 shipwreck. If a man-of-war comes back from a battle, 
 and is towed into the navy-yard, we go down to look at 
 the splintered spars and count the bullet-holes, and look 
 with patriotic admiration on the flag that floated in vic- 
 tory from the masthead. But that man is more of a 
 curiosity who has gone through thirty years of the sharp- 
 shooting of business life, and yet sails on, victor over the 
 temptations of the street. Oh! how many have gone 
 down under the pressure, leaviag not so much as the 
 patch of canvas to tell where they perished. They never 
 had any peace. Their dishonesties kept tolling in their 
 ears. If I had an axe, and could split open the beams 
 of that fine house, perhaps I would find in the very 
 heart of it a skeleton. In his very best wine there is a 
 smack of poor man's sweat. Oh ! is it strange that when 
 a man has devoured widows' houses, he is disturbed with 
 indigestion? All the forces of nature are against him. 
 The floods are ready to drown him, and the earthquake 
 to swallow him, and the fires to consume him, and the 
 lightnings to smite him. Aye, all the armies of God 
 are on the street, and in the da when the crowns of 
 heaven are distributed, some of the brightest of them 
 will be given to those men who were faithful to God and 
 faithful to the souls of others amid the marts of busi- 
 15 
 
226 
 
 THE VOICES OF THE STREET. 
 
 ness, proving themselves the heroes of the street. Mighty 
 were their temptations, mighty was their deliverance, 
 and mighty shall he their triumph. 
 
 Again, the street impresses me with the fact that life 
 is full of pretension and sham. What subterfuge, what 
 double dealing, what two-facedness. Do all people who 
 wish you good morning really hope for you a happy day? 
 Do all the people who shake hands love each other? 
 Are all those anxious about your health who inquire con. 
 cerning it? Do all want to see you who ask you to call? 
 Does all the world know half as much as it pretends to 
 know? Is there not many a wretched stock of goods 
 with a brilliant store window? Passing up and down 
 these streets to your business and your work, are you not 
 impressed with the fact that society is hollow, and that 
 there are subterfuges and pretensions? Oh! how many 
 there are who swagger and strut, and how few people 
 who are natural and walk. While fops simper, and fools 
 chuckle, and simpletons giggle, how few people are 
 natural and laugh. The courtesan and the libertine go 
 down the street in beautiful apparel, while within the 
 heart there are volcanoes of passion consuming their life 
 away. I say these things not to create in you incredulity 
 or misanthropy, nor do I forget there are thousands of 
 people a great deal better than they seem ; but I do not 
 think any man so prepared for the conflict of this life 
 until he knows this particular peril. Ehud comes pre- 
 tending to pay his tax to kingEglon, and while he stands 
 in front of the king, stabs him through with a dagger 
 until the haft went in after the blade. Judas Iscariot 
 kissed Christ. 
 
 Again, the street impresses me with the fact that it is 
 a great field for Christian charity. There are hunger 
 and suffering, and want and wretchedness, in the coun- 
 
THE VOICES OF THE STREET. 
 
 227 
 
 try; but these evils chiefly congregate in our great cities. 
 On every street crime prowls, and drunkenness staggers, 
 and shame winks, and pauperism thrusts out its hand 
 asking for alms. Here, want is most squalid and hun- 
 ger is most lean. A Christian man, going along a street 
 in New York, saw a poor lad, and he stooped and said: 
 ic My boy, do you know how to read and write?" The 
 boy made no answer. The man asked the question twice 
 and thrice: "Can you read and write?" and then the 
 boy answered, with a tear plashing on the hack of his 
 hand. He said in defiance: " No, sir; I can't read nor 
 write, neither. God, sir, don't want me to read and 
 write. Didn't He take away my father so long ago I 
 never remember to have seen him? and haven't I had to 
 go along the streets to get something to fetch home to 
 eat for the folks? and didn't I, as soon as I could carry 
 a basket, have to go out and pick up cinders, and never 
 have no schooling, sir? God don't want me to read, sir. 
 I can't read, nor write neither." Oh, these poor wan- 
 derers I They have no chance. Born in degradation, as 
 they get up from their hands and knees to walk, they take 
 their first step on the road to despair. Let us go forth in 
 the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to rescue them. Let us 
 ministers not be afraid of soiling our black clothes while 
 we go down on that mission. While we are tying an 
 elaborate knot in our cravat, or while we are in the 
 study rounding off some period rhetorically, we might 
 be saving a soul from death, and hiding a multitude of 
 sins. O Christian laymen, go out on this work. If you 
 are not willing to go forth yourself, then give of your 
 means; and if you are too lazy to go, and if you are too 
 stingy to help, then get out of the way, and hide your- 
 self in the dens and caves of the earth, lest, when 
 Christ's chariot comes along, the horses' hoofs trample 
 
228 
 
 THE VOICES OF THE STREET. 
 
 you into the mire. Beware lest the thousands of the 
 destitute of your city, in the last great day, rise up and 
 curse your stupidity and your neglect. Down to work I 
 Lift them up! One cold winter's day, as a Christian 
 man was going along the Battery in New York, he saw 
 a little girl seated at the gate, shivering in the cold. He 
 said to her: " My child, what do you sit there for, this 
 cold day?" "Oh," she replied, "I am waiting — I am 
 waiting for somebody to come and take care of me." 
 " Why," said the man, " what makes yon think any- 
 body will come and take care of you?" " Oh," she said, 
 "my mother died last week, and I was crying very 
 much, and she said: 'Don't cry, dear; though I am gone 
 and your father is gone, the Lord will send somebody to 
 take care of you.' My mother never told a lie; she said 
 some one would come and take care of me, and I am 
 waiting for them to come." O yes, they are waiting for 
 you. Men who have money, men who have influence, 
 men of churches, men of great hearts, gather them in, 
 gather them in. It is not the will of your Heavenly 
 Father that one of these little ones should perish. 
 
 Lastly, the street impresses me with the fact that all 
 the people are looking forward. I see expectancy writ- 
 ten on almost every face I meet between here and Ful- 
 ton ferry, or walking the whole length of Broadway. 
 Where you find a thousand people walking straight on, 
 you only find one man stopping and looking back. The 
 fact is, God made us all to look ahead, because we are 
 immortal. In this tramp of the multitude on the 
 streets, I hear the tramp of a great host, inarching and 
 marching for eternity. Beyond the office, the store, the 
 shop, the street, there is a world, populous and tremen- 
 dous. Through God's grace, may you reach that blessed 
 place. A great throng fills those boulevards, and the 
 
THE VOICES OF THE STKEET. 
 
 229 
 
 6treets are arush with the chariots of conquerors. The 
 inhabitants go up and down, but they never weep and 
 they never toil. A river flows through that city, with 
 rounded and luxurious banks, and trees of life laden with 
 everlasting fruitage bend their branches to dip the crys- 
 tal. No plumed hearse rattles over that pavement, for 
 they are never sick. "With immortal health glowing in 
 every vein they know not how to die. Those towers of 
 strength, those palaces of beauty, gleam in the light of 
 a sun that never sets. Oh, heaven, beautiful heaven! 
 Heaven, where our friends are. They take no census in 
 that city, for it is inhabited by " a multitude which no 
 man can number." Hank above rank. Host above host. 
 Gallery above gallery, sweeping all around the heavens. 
 Thousands of thousands. Millions of millions. Quad- 
 rillions of quadrillions. Quintillions of quintillions. 
 Blessed are they who enter in through the gate into that 
 city. Oh! start for it this morning. Through the blood 
 of the great sacrifice of the Son of God/take up your march 
 for heaven. The spirit and the bride say come, and who- 
 soever will, let him come and take of the water of life 
 " freely." Join this great throng who this morning, for 
 the first time, espouse their faith in Christ. All the 
 doors of invitation are open. "And I saw twelve gates 
 and they were twelve pearls." 
 
230 
 
 BLEEOES IN COMMON LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 HEROES IN COMMON LIFE. 
 Thou, therefore, endure hardness. — II. Timothy ii: 3. 
 
 Historians are not slow to acknowledge the merits of 
 great military chieftains. We have the full-length por- 
 traits of the Cromwells, the Washingtons, the Napoleons, 
 and the Wellingtons of the world. History is not writ- 
 ten in black ink, but with red ink of human blood. The 
 gods of human ambition do not drink from bowls made 
 out of silver, or gold, or precious stones, but out of the 
 bleached skulls of the fallen. But I am now to unroll 
 before you a scroll of heroes that the world has never 
 acknowledged; those who faced no guns, blew no bugle- 
 blast, conquered no cities, chained no captives to their 
 chariot- wheels, and yet, in the great day of eternity, will 
 stand higher than those whose names startled the nations; 
 and seraph, and rapt spirit, and archangel will tell their 
 deeds to a listening universe. - I mean the heroes of 
 common, e very-day life. 
 
 In this roll, in the first place, I find all the heroes of 
 the sick room. When Satan had failed to overcome 
 Job, he said to God. "Put forth thy hand and touch his 
 bones and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face." 
 Satan had found out what we have all found out, that 
 sickness is the greatest test of one's character. A man 
 who can stand that can stand anything. To be shut in 
 a room as fast as though it were a bastile. To be so 
 nervous you cannot endure the tap of a child's foot. To 
 
HEl-tOES IN COMMON LIFE. 
 
 231 
 
 have luxuriant fruit, which tempts the appetite of the 
 robust and healthy, excite our loathing and disgust when 
 it first appears on the platter. To have the rapier of 
 pain strike through the side, or across the temples, like a 
 razor, or to put the foot into a vice, or throw the whole 
 body into a blaze of fever. Yet there have been men 
 and women, but more women than men, who have cheer- 
 fully endured this hardness. Through years of exhaust- 
 ing rheumatisms and excruciating neuralgias they have 
 gone, and through bodily distresses that rasped the 
 nerves, and tore the muscles, and paled the cheeks, and 
 stooped the shoulders. By the dim light of the sick 
 room taper they saw on their wall the picture of that 
 land where the inhabitants are never sick. Through the 
 dead silence of the night they heard the chorus of the 
 angels. The cancer ate away her life from week to week 
 and day to day, and she became weaker and weaker, and 
 every "good night" was feebler than the "good night" 
 before — yet never sad. The children looked up into her 
 face and saw suffering transformed into a heavenlv smile. 
 Those who suffered on the battle-field, amid shot and 
 shell, were not so much heroes and heroines as those who 
 in the field hospital and in the asylum had fevers which 
 no ice could cool and no surgery could cure. No shout 
 of comrade to cheer them, but numbness, and aching, 
 and homesickness — yet willing to suffer, confident in 
 God, hopeful of heaven. Heroes of rheumatism. He- 
 roes of neuralgia. Heroes of spinal complaint. Heroes 
 of sick headache. Heroes of lifelong invalidism. He- 
 roes and heroines. They shall reign fur ever and for ever. 
 
 Hark! I catch just one note of the eternal anthem: 
 "There shall be no more pain." Bless God for that. 
 
 In this roll I also find the heroes of toil, who do their 
 work uncomplainingly. It is comparatively easy to lead 
 
232 
 
 HEROES IN COMMON LIFE. 
 
 a regiment into batt'e when yon know that the whole 
 nation will applaud the victory; it is comparatively easy 
 to doctor the sick when you know that your skill will be 
 appreciated by a large company of friends and relatives; 
 it is comparatively easy to address an audience when in 
 the gleaming eyes and the flushed cheeks you know that 
 your sentiments are adopted; but to do sewing where 
 you expect that the employer will come and thrust his 
 thumb through the work to show how imperfect it is, or 
 to have the whole garment thrown back on you to be 
 done over again; to build a wall and know there will be 
 no one to say you did it well, but only a swearing em- 
 ployer howling across the scaffold; to work until your 
 eyes are dim and your back aches, and your heart faints, 
 and to know that if you stop before night your children 
 will starve. Ah! the sword has not slain so many as 
 the needle. The great battle-fields of our last war were 
 not Gettysburg and Shiloh and South Mountain. The 
 great battle-fields of the last war were in the arsenals, 
 and in the shops and in the attics, where women made 
 army jackets for a sixpence. They toiled on until they 
 died. They had no funeral eulogiura, but in the name 
 of my God, this morning, I enroll their names among 
 those of whom the world was not worthy. Heroes of 
 the needle. Heroes of the sewing-machine. Heroes of 
 the attic. Heroes of the cellar. Heroes and heroines. 
 Bless God for them. 
 
 In this roll I also find the heroes who have uncom- 
 plainingly endured domestic injustices. There are men 
 who for their toil and anxiety have no sympathy in their 
 homes. Exhausting application to business gets them a 
 livelihood, but an unfrugal wife scatters it. He is fret- 
 ted at from the moment he enters the door until he 
 comes out of it. The exasperations of business life 
 
HEROES IN COMMON LIFE. 
 
 233 
 
 augmented by the exasperations of domestic life. Such 
 men are laughed at, but they have a heart-breaking 
 trouble, and they would have long ago gone into appal- 
 ling dissipations but for the grace of God. Society to- 
 day is strewn with the wrecks of men who under the 
 north-east storm of domestic infelicity have been driven 
 on the rocks. There are tens of thousands of drunkards 
 in this country to-day, made such by their wives. That 
 is not poetry! That is prose! But the wrong ia gener- 
 ally in the opposite direction. You would not have to 
 go far to find a wife whose life is a perpetual martyrdom. 
 Something heavier than a stroke of the fist; unkind 
 words, staggerings home at midnight, and constant mal- 
 treatment, which have left her only a wreck of what she 
 was on that day when in the midst of a brilliant assem- 
 blage the vows were taken, and full organ played the 
 wedding march, and the carriage rolled away with the 
 benediction of the people. What was the burning of 
 Latimer and Eidley at the stake compared with this ? 
 Those men soon became unconscious in the fire, but here 
 is a fifty years' martyrdom, a fifty years' putting to death, 
 yet uncomplaining. No bitter words when the rollicking 
 companions at two o'clock in the morning pitch the hus- 
 band dead drunk into the front entry. No bitter words 
 wh<m wiping from the swollen brow the blood struck 
 out in a midnight carousal. Bending over the battered 
 and bruised form of him who, when he took her from 
 her fathei 's home, promised love, and kindness, and pro- 
 tection, yet nothing but sympathy, and prayers, and 
 forgiveness before they are asked for. No bitter words 
 when the family Bible goes for rum, and the pawn- 
 broker's shop gets the last decent dress. Some day, de- 
 siring to evoke the story of her sorrows, you say: "Well, 
 how are you getting along now?" and rallying her trera- 
 
234: 
 
 KEK0E i IN COMMON LIFE. 
 
 bling voice, and quieting her quivering lip, she says: 
 "Pretty well, I thank yon, pretty well." She never will 
 tell you. In the delirium of her last sickness she may 
 tell all the secrets of her lifetime, but she will not tell 
 that. Not until the books of eternity are opened on the 
 thrones of judgment will ever be known what she has 
 suffered. Oh! ye who are twisting a garland for the 
 victor, put it on that pale brow. When she is dead the 
 neighbors will beg linen to make her a shroud, and she 
 will be carried out in a plain box with no silver plate to 
 tell her years, for she has lived a thousand years of trial 
 and anguish. The gamblers and swindlers who destroyed 
 her husband will not come to the funeral. One carriage 
 will be enough for that funeral — one carriage to carry 
 the orphans and the two Christian women who presided 
 over the obsequies. But there is a flash, and the open- 
 ing of a celestial door, and a shout: "Lift up your head, 
 ye everlasting gate, and let her come in!" And Christ 
 will step forth and say: "Come in! ye suffered with 
 me on earth, be glorified with me in heaven." "What is 
 the highest throne in heaven? You say: u The throne 
 of the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb." No doubt 
 about it. What is the next highest throne in heaven? 
 While I speak it seems to me that it will be the throne 
 of the drunkard's wife, if she, with cheerful patience, 
 endured all her earthly torture. Heroes and heroines. 
 
 I find also in this roll the heroes of Christian charity. 
 We all admire the George Peabodys and the James 
 Lenoxes of the earth, who give tens and hundreds of 
 thousands of dollars to good objects. A few days ago 
 Moses H. Grinnell was buried, and the most significant 
 thing about the ceremonies, as I read them, was that 
 there was no sermon and no oration; a plain hymn, a 
 prayer, and a benediction. Well, I said, that is very 
 
HERCKS IN COMMON LIFE. 
 
 235 
 
 beautiful. All Christendom pronounces the eulogium 
 of Moses £L. Grinnell, and the icebergs that stand as 
 monuments to Franklin and his men will stand as 
 the monuments of this great merchant, and the sunlight 
 that plays upon the glittering cliff will write his epitaph. 
 Bat I am speaking this morning of those who, out of 
 their pinched poverty, help others — of such men as those 
 Christian missionaries at the West, who are living on 
 $250 a year that they may proclaim Christ to the peo- 
 ple, one of them, writing to the secretary in Xew York, 
 saying: "I thank you for that $25. Until yesterday we 
 have had no meat in our house for three months. We 
 have suffered terribly. My children have no shoes this 
 winter." And of those people who have only a half loaf 
 of bread, but give a piece of it to others who are hun- 
 grier; and of those who have only a scuttle of coal, but 
 help others to fuel; and of those who have only a dollar 
 in their pocket, and give twenty-five cents to somebody 
 else; and of that father who wears a shabby coat, and of 
 that mother who wears a faded dress, that their children 
 may bo well apparelled. You call them paupers, or rag- 
 in iiffins, or emigrants. I call them heroes and heroines. 
 You and I may not know where they live, or what their 
 name is. God knows, and they have more angels hover- 
 ing over them than you and I have, and they will have a 
 higher seat in heaven. 
 
 They may have only a enp of cold water to give a poor 
 traveler, or may have only picked a splinter from under 
 the nail of a child's finger, or have put on]y two mites 
 into the treasury, but the Lord knows them. Consider- 
 ing what they had, they did more than we have ever 
 done, and their faded dress will become a white robe, 
 and the small room will be an eternal mansion, and the 
 old hat will be a coronet of victory, and all the applause 
 
236 
 
 HEROES IX COMMON LIFE. 
 
 of earth and all the shouting of heaven will be drowned 
 out when God rises up to give his reward to those hum- 
 ble workers in his kingdom, and to say to them: "Well 
 done, good and faithful servant." You have all seen or 
 heard of the rum of Melrose Abbey. I suppose in some 
 respects it is the most exquisite ruin on earth. And yet, 
 looking at it I was not so impressed — you may set it down 
 to bad taste — but I was not so deeply stirred as I was at 
 a tombstone at the foot of that abbey — the tombstone 
 placed by Walter Scott over the grave of an old man 
 who had served him for a good many years in his house 
 — the inscription most significant, and I defy any man 
 to stand there and read it without tears coming into his 
 eyes — the epitaph: "Well done, good and faithful ser- 
 vant." Oh! when our work is over, will it be found that 
 because of anything we have done for God, or the church, 
 or suffering humanity, that such an inscription is appro- 
 priate for us? God grant it. 
 
 Who are those who were bravest and deserved the great- 
 est monument — Lord Claverhouse and his burly soldiers, 
 or John Erown, the Edinburgh carrier, and his wife? 
 Mr. Atkins, the persecuted minister of Jesus Christ in 
 Scotland, was secreted by John Brown and his wife, and 
 Claverhouse rode up one day with his armed men and 
 shouted in front of the house. John Brown's little girl 
 came out. He said to her: "Well, miss, is Mr. Atkins 
 here?" She made no answer, for she could not betray the 
 minister of the Gospel. "Ha!" Claverhouse said, "then 
 you are a chip of the old block, are you? I have some- 
 thing in my pocket for you. It is a nosegay. Some 
 people call it a thumbscrew, but I call it a nosegay." 
 And he got off his horse, and he put it on the little girl's 
 hand, and began to turn it until the bones cracked, and 
 she cried. He said, "Don't cry, don't cry; this isn't a 
 
HEBOES IX CO^Mu-N LIFE. 
 
 237 
 
 thumbscrew; this is a nosegay." And they heard the 
 child's cry, and the father and mother came out, and 
 Claverhouse said, ''Ha! it seems that you three have 
 laid your holy heads together determined to die like all 
 the rest of your hypocritical, canting, snivelling crew; 
 rather than give up good Mr. Atkins, pious Mr. Atkins, 
 you would die. I have a telescope with me that will 
 improve your vision, n and he pulled out a pistol. '\Xow," 
 he said, "you old pragmatical, lest you should catch 
 cold in this cold morning of Scotland, and for the honor 
 and safety of the king, to say nothing of the glory of 
 God and the good of our souls, I will proceed simply 
 and in the neatest and most expeditious style possible to 
 blow your brains out." John Brown fell upon his knees 
 and began to pray. "Ah!" said Claverhouse, "look out, 
 if you are going to pray; steer clear of the king, the 
 council, and Richard Cameron." M 0! Lord," said John 
 Brown, "since it seems to be thy will that I should leave 
 this world for a world where I can love thee better and 
 serve thee more, I put this poor widow woman and these 
 helpless, fatherless children into thy hands. We have 
 been together in peace a good while, but now we must 
 look forth to a better meeting in heaven, and as for these 
 poor creatures, blindfolded and infatuated, that stand 
 before me, convert them before it be too late, and may 
 they who have sat in judgment in this lonely place on 
 this blessed morning, upon me, a poor, defenceless fel- 
 low-creature — may they, in the last judgment find that 
 mercy which they have refused to me, thy most unwor- 
 thy, but faithful servant. Amen." He rose up and said, 
 "Isabel, the hour has come of which I spoke to you on 
 the morning when I proposed hand and heart to you; 
 and are you willing now, for the love of God, to let me 
 die?" She put her arms around him and said: — "The 
 
"238 HEROES IN COMMON LIFE. 
 
 Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be 
 the name of the Lord!" "Stop that snivelling," said 
 Claverhouse. "I have had enough of it. Soldiers, do 
 your work. Take aim! Fire!" and the head of John 
 Brown was scattered on the ground. While the wife 
 was gathering up in her apron the fragments of her hus- 
 band's head — gathering them up for burial — Claverhouse 
 looked into her face and said, "Now, my good woman, 
 how do you feel now about your bonnie man?" "Oh!" 
 she said, "I always thought weel of him; he has been 
 very good to me; I had no reason for thinking anything 
 but weel of him, and I think better of him now." Oh! 
 what a grand thing it will be in the last day to see God 
 pick out his heroes and heroines. Who are those pau- 
 pers of eternity trudging off from the gates of heaven? 
 Who are they? The Lord Claverhouses and the Herods 
 and those who had sceptres, and crowns, and thrones, 
 but they lived for their own aggrandisement, and they 
 broke the heart of nations. Heroes of earth, but pau- 
 pers in eternity. I beat the drums of their eternal des- 
 pair. Woe! woe! woe! 
 
 But there is great excitement in heaven. Why those 
 long processions? Why the booming of that great bell 
 in the tower? It is coronation day in heaven. 
 
 Who are those rising on the thrones, with crowns of 
 eternal royalty? They must have been great people on 
 earth, world-renowned people. ~No. They taught in a 
 ragged school. Taught in a ragged school! Is that all? 
 That is all. Who are those souls waving sceptres of 
 eternal dominion? Why, they were little children who 
 waited on invalid mothers. That all? That is all. She 
 was called "Little Mary" on earth. She is an empress 
 now. Who are that great multitude on the highest 
 thrones of heaven ? Who are they ? Why, they fed the 
 
HEROES IX COMMON LIFE. 
 
 239 
 
 hungry, they clothed the naked, they healed the sick, they 
 comforted the heart-broken. They never found any rest 
 until they put their head down on the pillow of the sep- 
 ulchre. God watched them. God laughed defiance at 
 the enemies who put their heels hard down on these His 
 dear children; and one day the Lord struck His hand so 
 hard on His thigh that the omnipotent sword rattled in 
 the buckler, as He said: "I am their God, and no weapon 
 formed against them shall prosper." What harm can 
 the world do you when the Lord Almighty with un- 
 sheathed sword fights for you? 
 
 I preach this sermon this morning in comfort. Go 
 home to the place just where God has put you to play 
 the hero or the heroine. Do not envy any man his 
 money, or his applause, or his social position. Do not 
 envy any woman her wardrobe, or her exquisite appear- 
 ance. Be the hero or the heroine. Tf there be no flour 
 in the house, and you do not know where your children 
 are to get bread, listen, and you will hear something 
 tapping against the window-pane. Go to the window 
 and you will find it is the beak of a raven, and open the 
 window, and there will fly in the messenger that fed 
 Elijah. Do you think that the God who grows the cot- 
 ton of the South will let you freeze for lack of clothes? 
 Do you think that the God who allowed the disciples on 
 Sunday morning to go into the grain-field, and then take 
 the grain and rub it in their hands and eat — do you 
 think God will let you starve? Did you ever hear the 
 experience of that old man: "I have been young, and 
 now am I old, yet have I never seen the righteous for- 
 saken, or his seed begging bread"? Get up out of your 
 discouragement, O! troubled soul, O! sewing woman, 
 O! man, kicked and cuffed by unjust employers, O! je 
 who are hard beset in the battle of life and know not 
 
240 
 
 HEROES IN COMMON LIFE. 
 
 which way to turn, O! you bereft one, O! you sick one 
 with complaints you have told to no one, come and get 
 the comfort of this subject. Listen to our great Cap- 
 tain's cheer: "To him that overcometh will I give to 
 eat of the fruit of the tree of life which is in the midst 
 of the Paradise of God." 
 
THii, MIDNIGHT HOKSEMA^. 
 
 241 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN. 
 
 Then I went up in the night by the brook and viewed the wall, 
 and turned back, and entered by the gate of the valley, and so re- 
 turned. — Nehemiah ii: 15. 
 
 A dead city is more suggestive than a living city — 
 past Rome than present Rome — ruins rather than 
 newly frescoed cathedral. But the best time to visit a 
 ruin is by moonlight. The Coliseum is far more fascin- 
 ating to the traveler after sundown than before. You 
 may stand by daylight amid the monastic ruins ot Mel- 
 rose Abbey, and study shafted oriel, and rosetted stone 
 and mullion, but they throw their strongest witchery by 
 moonlight. Some of you remember what the enchanter 
 of Scotland said in the u Lay of the Last Minstrel:" 
 
 " Wbuldst thou view fair Melrose aright, 
 Go visit it by the pale moolight" 
 
 "Washington Irving describes the Andalusian moon- 
 light upon the Alhambra ruins as amounting to an, en- 
 chantment. My text presents you Jerusalem in ruins. 
 The tower down. The gates down. The walls down. 
 Everything down. Xehetniah on horseback, by moon- 
 light looking upon the ruins. While he rides, there are 
 some friends on foot going with him, for they do not 
 want the many horses to disturb the suspicions of the 
 people. These people do not know the secret of N*ehe- 
 miah's heart, but thev are going as a sort of body-guard. 
 16 
 
2-1-2 
 
 THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN. 
 
 I hear the clicking hoofs of the horse on which Nche 
 miah rides, as he guides it this way and that, into this 
 gate and out of that, winding through that gate amid 
 the debris of once great Jerusalem. Now the horse 
 comes to a dead halt at the tumbled masonry where he 
 cannot pass. Now he shies off at the charred timbers. 
 Now he comes along where the water under the moon- 
 light flashes from the mouth of the brazen dragon after 
 which the gate was named. Heavy-hearted Nehemiah! 
 Hiding in and out, now by his old home desolated, now 
 by the defaced Temple, now amid the scars of the city 
 that had gone down under battering-ram and conflagra- 
 tion. The escorting party knows not what Nehemiah 
 means. Is he gutting crazy? Have his own personal 
 sorrows, added to the sorrows of the nation, unbalanced 
 his intellect? Still the midnight exploration goes on. Ne- 
 hemiah on horseback rides through the fish gate, by the 
 tower of the furnaces, by the king's pool,by the dragon well, 
 in and out, in and out, until the midnight ride is com- 
 pleted, and Nehemiah dismounts from his horse, and to 
 the amazed aud confounded and incredulous body-guard, 
 declares the dead secret of his heart when he says: 
 " Come, now, let us build Jerusalem." " What, Nehe- 
 miah, have yon any money?" u No." ** Have you any 
 kingly authority? 1 ' "No." "Have you any eloquence?" 
 "No." Yet that midnight, moonlight ride of Nehemiah 
 resulted in the glorious rebuilding of the ei ty of Jerusalem. 
 The people knew not how the thing was to be done, but 
 with great enthusiasm they cried out: " Let us rise up 
 now and build the city.'' Some people laughed and said 
 it could not be done. Some people were infuriate and 
 offered physical violence, saying the thing should not be 
 done. But the workmen went right on, standing on the 
 wall, trowel in one hand, sword in the other, until the 
 
THE MIDXIG-HT HORSEMAN. 
 
 work was gloriously completed. At that very time, in 
 Greece, Xenopbon was writing a history, and Plato was 
 making philosophy, and Demosthenes was rattling his 
 rhetorical thunder; but all of them together did not do 
 so much for the world as this midnight, moonlight ride 
 of praying, courageous, homesick, close-mouthed Xe- 
 hemiah. 
 
 My subject first impresses me with the idea what an 
 intense thing is church affection. Seize the bridle of that 
 horse and stop Xehemiah. Tv~hy are you risking your 
 life here in the night? Your horse will stumble over 
 these ruins and fall on yon. Stop this useless exposure 
 of your life. No; Xehemiah will not stop. He at last 
 tells us the whole story. He lets us know he was an 
 exile in a far distant land, and he was a servant, a cup- 
 bearer in the palace of Artaxerxes Longimanus, and one 
 day, while he was handing the cup of wine to the king, 
 the king said to him, ki What is the matter with you? 
 You are not sick. I know you must have some great 
 trouble. What is the matter with you?" Then he told 
 the king how that beloved Jerusalem was broken down; 
 how that his father's tomb had been desecrated; how 
 that the Temple had been dishonored and defaced : how 
 that the walls were scattered and broken. "Well," says 
 King Artaxerxes, " what do you want?" " Well," said 
 the cup-bearer Nehemiah, " I want to go home. I want 
 to fix up the grave of my father. I want to restore the 
 beauty of the Temple. I want to rebuild the masonry 
 of the city wall. Besides, I want passports so that I 
 shall not be hindered in my journey. And besides that," 
 as you will find in the context, " I want an order on the 
 man who keeps your forest for just so much timber as I 
 may need for the rebuilding of the city." "How long 
 shall you be gone?" said the king. The time of absence 
 
THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN. 
 
 is arranged. In hot haste this seeming adventurer comes 
 to Jerusalem, and in my text we find him on horseback, 
 in the midnight, riding around the ruins. It is through 
 the spectacles of this scene that we discover the ardent 
 attachment of Nehemiah for sacred Jerusalem, which in 
 all ages has been the type of the church of God, our 
 Jerusalem, which we love just as much as Nehemiah 
 loved his Jerusalem. The fact is that you love the 
 church of God so much that there is no spot on earth so 
 sacred, unless it be your own fireside. The church has 
 been to you so much comfort and illumination that there 
 is nothing that makes you so irate as to have it talked 
 against. If there have been times when you have been 
 carried into captivity by sickness, you longed for the 
 Church, our holy Jerusalem, just as much as Nehemiah 
 longed for his Jerusalem, and the first day you came out 
 you came to the house of the Lord. When the temple 
 was in ruins, as ours was five years ago, like Nehemiah, 
 you walked around and looked at it, and in the moon- 
 light you stood listening if you could not hear the voice 
 of the dead organ, the psalm of the expired Sabbaths. 
 What Jerusalem was to Nehemiah, the Church of God 
 is to you. Sceptics and infidels may scoff at the Church 
 as an obsolete affair, as a relic of the dark ages, as a con- 
 vention of goody-goody people, but all the impression 
 they have ever made on your mind against the Church of 
 God is absolutely nothing. You would make more sac- 
 rifices for it to-day than for any other institution, and if 
 it were needful you would die in its defence. You can 
 take the words of the kingly poet as he said: "If I 
 forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her 
 cunning." You understand in your own experience the 
 pathos, the home-sickness, the courage, the holy enthu- 
 
THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN. 
 
 245 
 
 siasm of Nehemiah ia his midnight moonlight ride 
 around the ruins of his beloved Jerusalem. 
 
 Again, my text impresses me with the fact that, before 
 reconstruction, there must be an exploration of ruins. 
 "Why was not Nehemiah asleep under the covers? Why 
 was not his horse stabled in the midnight? Let the police 
 of the city arrest this midnight rider, out on some mis- 
 chief. No. Nehemiah is going to rebuild the city, and 
 he is making the preliminary exploration. In this gate, 
 out that gate, east, west, north, south. All through the 
 ruins. The ruins must be explored before the work of 
 reconstruction can begin. The reason that so man j 
 people in this day, apparently converted, do not stay 
 converted is because they did not first explore the ruins 
 of their own heart. The reason that there are so many 
 professed Christians who in this day lie and forge and 
 steal, and commit adultery, and go to the penitentiary, 
 is because they first do not learn the ruin of their own 
 heart. They have not found out that " the heart is de- 
 ceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." They 
 had an idea that they were almost right, and they built 
 religion as a sort of extension, as an ornamental cupola. 
 There was a superstructure of religion built on a sub- 
 stratum of unrepented sins. The trouble with a good 
 deal of modern theology is that instead of building on 
 the right foundation, it builds on the debris of an nnre- 
 regenerated nature. They attempt to rebuild Jerusalem 
 before, in the midnight of conviction, they have seen 
 the ghastliness of the ruin. They have such a poor 
 foundation for their religion that the first north-east 
 storm of temptation blows them down. I have no faith 
 in a man's conversion if he is not converted in the old- 
 fashioned way — John Bunyan's way, John Wesley's way, 
 John Calvin's way, Paul's way, Christ's way, God's way. 
 
246 
 
 THE MIDNIGHT HOUSEMAN. 
 
 A dentist said to me a few days ago, " Does that hurt!" 
 Said I, u Of course it hurts. It is in your business as 
 my profession. We have to hurt before we can help." 
 You will never understand redemption until you under- 
 stand ruin. A man tells me that some one is a member 
 of the church. It makes no impression on my mind at 
 all. I simply want to know whether he was converted 
 in the old-fashioned way, or whether he was converted in 
 the new-fashioned way. If he was converted in the old- 
 fashioned way he will stand. If he was converted in the 
 new-fashioned way he will not stand. That is all there is 
 about it. A man comes to me to talk about religion. 
 The first question I ask him is, " Do you feel yourself 
 to be a sinner?" If he say, "Well, I — yes," the hesi- 
 tancy makes me feel that that man wants a ride on ~Ne- 
 hemiah's horse by midnight through the ruins — in by 
 the gate of his affections, out by the gate of his will; and 
 before he has got through with that midnight ride he 
 will drop the reins on the horse's neck, and will take his 
 right hand and smite on his heart and say, "God be mer- 
 ciful to me a sinner;" and before he lias stabled his 
 horse he will take his feet out of the stirrups, and he 
 will slide down on the ground, and he will kneel, crying, 
 " Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy loving- 
 kindness, according unto the multitude of thy tender 
 mercies; blot out my transgressions, for I acknowledge 
 my transgressions, and my sins are ever before thee." 
 Ah, my friends, you see this is not a complimentary gos- 
 pel. That is what makes some people so mad. It conies 
 to a man of a million dollars, and impenitent in his sins, 
 and says, u You're a pauper." It comes to a woman of 
 fairest cheek, who has never repented, and says, "You're 
 a sinner." It comes to a man priding himself on his 
 independence, and says, "You're bound hand and foot by 
 
THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN. 
 
 247 
 
 the devil." It comes to oar entire race and says. 
 " You're a ruin, a ghastly ruin, an illimitable ruin." 
 Satan sometimes says to me, u Why do you preach that 
 truth? Why don't you preach a gospel with no repen- 
 tance in it? Why don't you flatter men's hearts so that 
 you make them feel all right? Why don't you preach a 
 humanitarian gospel with no repentance in it, saying 
 nothing ahout the ruin, talking all the time about 
 redemption? Instead of preaching to live thousand 
 you might preacli to twenty thousand, for there would 
 be four times as many who would come to hear 
 a popular truth as to hear an unpopular truth, and you 
 have voice enough to make them hear." I say, "Get 
 thee behind me, Satan." I would rather lead five souls 
 into heaven than twenty thousand into hell. The re- 
 demption of the gospel is a perfect farce if there is no 
 ruin. " The whole need not a physician, but they that 
 are sick." "If any one, though he be an angel from 
 heaven, preach any other gospel than this," says the 
 apostle, " let him be accursed." There must be the mid- 
 night ride over the ruins before Jerusalem can be built 
 There must be the clicking of the hoofs before there can 
 be the ring of the trowels. 
 
 Again. My subject gives me a specimen of busy and 
 triumphant sadness. If there was any man in the 
 world who had a right to mope and give up everything 
 as lost, it was Nehemiah. You say, a He was a cup- 
 bearer in the palace of Shushan, and it was a grand 
 place." So it was. The hall of that palace was two hundred 
 feet square, and the roof hovered over thirty-six marble 
 pillars, each pillar sixty feet high; and the intense blue 
 of the sky, and the deep green of the forest foliage, and 
 the white of the driven snow, all hung trembling in the 
 upholstery. But, my friends, you know very well that fine 
 
243 
 
 THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN. 
 
 architecture will not put down home-sickness. Yet Nehe- 
 miah did not give up. Then when you see him going 
 among these desolated streets, and by these dismantled 
 towers, and by the torn-up grave of his father, you 
 would suppose that he would have been disheartened, 
 and that he would have dismounted from his horse and 
 gone to his room and said: u Woe is me! My father's 
 grave is torn up. The temple is dishonored. The walls 
 are broken down. I have no money with which to 
 rebuild. I wish I had never been born. I wish I were 
 dead." Not so says Nehemiah. Although he had a grief 
 so intense that it excited the commentary of his king, 
 yet that penniless, expatriated Nehemiah rouses himself 
 up to rebuild the city. He gets his permission of ab- 
 sence. He gets his passports. He hastens away to 
 Jerusalem. By night on horseback he rides through the 
 ruins. He overcomes the most ferocious opposition. He 
 arouses the piety and patriotism of the people, and in 
 less than two months, namely, in fifty-two days, Jerusa- 
 lem was rebuilt. That's what I call busy and triumpant 
 sadness. 
 
 My friends, the whole temptation is with you when 
 you have trouble, to do just the opposite to the behavior 
 of Nehemiah, and that is to give up. You say: "I 
 have lost my child and can never smile again." Yon 
 say, "I have lost my property, and I never can repair my 
 fortunes." You say, "I have fallen into sin, and I never can 
 start again for a new life." If Satan can make you form 
 that resolution, and make you keep it, he has ruined you. 
 Trouble is not sent to crush you, but to arouse you, to 
 animate you, to propel you. The blacksmith does not 
 thrust the iron into the forge, and then blow away with 
 the bellows, and then bring the hot iron out on the anvil 
 and beat with stroke after stroke to ruin the iron, but to 
 
THE MIDNIGHT HOKSEMAN. 
 
 249 
 
 prepare it for a better use. Oh that the Lord God oi 
 ETehemiah would rouse up all broken-hearted people to 
 rebuild. Whipped, betrayed, shipwrecked, imprisoned, 
 Paul went right on. The Italian martyr Algerius sits 
 in his dungeon writing a letter, and he dates it "From 
 the delectable orchard of the Leonine prison." That is 
 what 1 call triumphant sadness. I knew a mother who 
 buried her babe on Friday and on Sabbath appeared in 
 the house of God and said: "Give me a class; give me a 
 Sabbath-school class. I have no child now left me, and 
 I would like to have a class of little children. Give me 
 real poor children. Give me a class off the back street." 
 That, I say, is beautiful. That is triumphant sadness- 
 At three o'clock this afternoon, in a beautiful parlor in 
 Philadelphia — a parlor pictured and statuetted — there will 
 be from ten to twenty destitute children of the street. 
 It has been so every Sabbath afternoon at three o'clock 
 for sixteen years. These destitute children receive re- 
 ligious instruction, concluding with cakes and sand- 
 wiches. How do I know that that has been going on 
 for sixteen years? 1 know it in this way. That was the 
 first home in Philadelphia where I was called to comfort 
 a great sorrow. They had a splendid boy, and he had 
 been drowned at Long Branch. The father and mother 
 almost idolized the boy, and the sob and shriek of that 
 father and mother as they hung over the coffin resound 
 in my ears to-day. There seemed to be no use of pray- 
 ing, for when I knelt down to pray, the outcry in the 
 room drowned out all the prayer. But the Lord com- 
 forted that sorrow. They did not forget their trouble. 
 If you should go this snowy afternoon into Laurel Hill, 
 you would find a monument with the word "Walter" 
 inscribed upon it, and a wreath of fresh flowers 
 around the name. I think there has not been an hour 
 
250 
 
 THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN". 
 
 in sixteen years, winter or summer, when there was not 
 a wreath of fresh flowers around Walter's name. But 
 the Christian mother who sends those flowers there, hav- 
 ing no child left, Sabbath afternoons mothers ten or 
 twenty of the lost ones of the street. That is beautiful 
 That is what I call busy and triumphant sadness. Here 
 is a man who has lost his property. He does not go to 
 hard drinking. He does not destroy his own life. He 
 comes and says, "Harness me for Christian work. My 
 money's gone. I have no treasures on earth. I want 
 treasures in heaven. I have a voice and a heart to serve 
 God." You say that that man has failed. He has not 
 failed — he has triumphed. Oh, I wish I could persuade 
 all the people who have any kind of trouble never to 
 give up. I wish they would look at the midnight rider 
 of the text, and that the four hoofs of that beast on 
 which Nehemiah rode might cut to pieces all your dis- 
 couragements, and hardships, and trials. Give up! 
 Who is going to give up, when on the bosom of God he 
 can have all his troubles hushed? Give up! Never 
 think of giving up. Are you borne down with poverty? 
 A little child was found holding her dead mother's hand 
 in the darkness of a tenement-house, and some one com- 
 ing in, the little girl looked up, while holding her dead 
 mother's hand, and said: "Oh, I do wish that God had 
 made more light for poor folks." My dear, God will be 
 your light, God will be your shelter, God will be your 
 home. Are you borne down with the bereavements of 
 life? Is the house lonely now that the child is gone? 
 Do not give up. Think of what the old sexton said 
 when the minister asked him why he put so much care 
 on the little graves, in the cemetery — so much more care 
 than on the larger graves, and the old sexton said "Sir, 
 you know that 'of such is the kingdom of heaven,' and 
 
THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN. 251 
 
 I think the Savior is pleased when He sees so much 
 white clover growing around these little graves." But 
 when the minister pressed the old sexton for a more sat- 
 isfactory answer, the old sexton said: "Sir, about these 
 * larger graves, I doirt know who are the Lord's saints 
 and who are not; but you know, sir, it is clean different 
 with the bairns." Oh, if you have had that keen, ten- 
 der, indescribable sorrow that comes from the loss of a 
 child, do not give up. The old sexton was right. It is 
 all well with the bairns. Or, if you have sinned, if you 
 have sinned grievously — sinned until you have been cast 
 out by the Church, sinned until you have been cast out 
 by society, do not give up. Perhaps there may be in 
 this house one that could truthfully utter the lamenta- 
 tion of another: 
 
 "Once I was pure as the snow, but I fell — 
 Fell like a snowflake, from heaven to hell — 
 Fell, to be trampled as filth in the street — 
 Fell, to be scoffed at, spit on, and beat; 
 Praying, cursing, wishing to die. 
 Selling my soul to whoever would buy, 
 Dealing in shame for a morsel of bread, 
 Hating the living, and fearing the dead." 
 
 Do not give up. One like unto the Son of God comes 
 to you to-day, saying, "Go and sin no more;" while He 
 cries out to your assailants, "Let him that is without sin 
 cast the first stone at her." Oh! there is no reason why 
 any one in this house, by reason of any trouble or sin, 
 should give up. Are you a foreigner, and in a strange 
 ]and? jNTehemiah was an exile. Are you penniless? 
 Kehemiah was poor. Are you homesick? Nehemiah 
 was homesick. Are you broken-hearted? Nehemiah 
 was broken-hearted. But just see him in the text, riding 
 along the sacrileged grave of his father, and by the 
 
252 
 
 THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN. 
 
 dragon well, and through the fish gate, and by the king's 
 pool, in and out, in and out, the moonlight falling on 
 the broken masonry, which throws a long shadow at 
 which the horse shies, and at the same time that moon- 
 light kindling up the features of this man till you see 
 not only the mark of sad reminiscence, but the courage 
 the hope, the enthusiasm of a man who knows that Jeru- 
 salem will be rebuilded. I pick you up to-day, out oi 
 your sins and out of your sorrow, and I put you against 
 the warm heart of Christ. "The eternal God is thy 
 refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms." 
 
r ONCE WAS PITCHED OUT OF THAT GROG SHOP. 
 
TEAPS FOE MEN. 
 
 254 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 " Surely in vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird."— 
 Proverbs vi ; 9. 
 
 Early in the morning I went out with a fowler to 
 catch wild pigeons. We hastened through the mountain 
 gorge and into the forest. We spread out the net, and 
 covered up the edges of it as well as we could. We 
 arranged the call-bird, its feet fast, and its wings flap- 
 ping in invitation to all fowls of heaven to settle down 
 there. We retired into a booth of branches and leaves 
 and waited. After a while, looking out of the door of 
 the booth, we saw a flock of birds in the sky. They 
 came nearer and nearer, and after a while were about to 
 swoop into the net, when suddenly they darted away. 
 Again we waited. After awhile we saw another flock of 
 birds. They r came nearer and nearer until just at the 
 moment when they were about to swoop they darted 
 away. The fowler was very much disappointed as well 
 as myself. We said to each other, u What is the matter?" 
 and " Why were not these birds caught?" We went out 
 and examined the net, and by a flutter of a branch of a 
 tree part of the net had been conspicuously exposed, 
 and the birds coming very near had seen their peril and. 
 darted away. When I saw that, I said to the old fowler, 
 "That reminds me of a passage of Scripture: ' Surely in 
 vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird.' " Now 
 the net in my text stands for temptation. 
 
254 
 
 TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 Thecal] -bird of sin tempts men on from point to point 
 and from branch to branch until they are about to drop 
 into the net. If a man finds out in time that it is the 
 temptation of the devil, or that evil men are attempting 
 to capture his soul for time and for eternity 9 the man 
 steps back, lie says, u I am not to be caught in that 
 way: I see what you are about: surely in vain is the 
 net spread in the sight of any bird." 
 
 There are two classes of temptations — the superficial 
 and the subterraneous — those above ground, those under 
 ground. If a man could see sin as it is, he would no 
 more embrace it than lie would embrace a leper. Sin is 
 a daughter of hell, yet she is garlanded and robed and 
 trinketed. Her voice is a warble. Her cheek is the 
 setting sun. Her forehead is an aurora. She says to 
 men: " Come, walk this path with me; it is thymed and 
 primrosed, and the air is bewitched with the odors of 
 the hanging gardens of heaven; the rivers are rivers of 
 wine, and all yon have to do is to drink them up in 
 chalices that sparkle with diamond and amethyst and 
 crysoprasus. See ! It is all bloom and roseate cloud 
 and heaven." Oh! my friends, if for one moment the 
 choiring of all these concerted voices of sin could be 
 hushed, we should see the orchestra of the pit with hot 
 breath blowing through fiery flute, and the skeleton arms 
 on drums of thunder and darkness beating the chorus: 
 k> The end thereof is death." 
 
 I want this morning to point out the insidious temp- 
 tations that are assailing more especially our young men. 
 The only kind of nature comparatively free from tempta- 
 tion, so far as I can judge, is the cold, hard, stingy, mean 
 temperament. What would Satan do with such a man 
 if he got him ? Satan is not anxious to get a man who, 
 after a while, may dispute with him the realm of ever- 
 
TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 255 
 
 lasting meanness. It is the generous young man, the 
 ardent young man, the warm-hearted young man, the 
 social young man, that is in especial peril. A pirate goes 
 out on the sea, and one bright morning he puts the glass 
 to his eye and looks off, and sees an empty vessel floating 
 from port to port. He says: "Never mind; that's no 
 prize for us." But the same morning lie puts the glass 
 to his eye, and he sees a vessel coming from'Australia laden 
 with gold, or a vessel from the Indies laden with spices. 
 He says: ''That's our prize; bear down on it!" Across 
 that unfortunate ship the grappling-hooks are thrown. 
 The crew are blindfolded and are compelled to walk the 
 plank. It is not the empty vessel, but the laden merchant- 
 man that is the temptation to the pirate. And a young 
 man empty of head, empty of heart, empty of life — you 
 want no Young Men's Christian Association to keep him 
 safe; he is safe. He will not gamble unless it is with some- 
 body else's stakes. He will not break the Sabbath unless 
 somebody else pays the horse hire. He will not drink 
 unless some one else treats him. He will hang around 
 the bar. hour after hour, waiting for some generous young 
 man to come in. The generous young man comes in 
 and accosts him and says: " Well, will you have a drink 
 with me to-day V The man, as though it were a sudden 
 thing for him, says: "Well, well, if you insist on it I 
 will— I will." 
 
 Too mean to go to perdition unless somebody else 
 pays his expenses! For such young men we will not 
 tight. We would no more contend for them than Tartary 
 and Ethiopia would fight as to who should have the great 
 Sahara Desert; but for those young men who arc 
 buoyant and enthusiastic, those who are determined to 
 do something for time and for eternity — for them we 
 will tight, and we now declare everlasting war against 
 
256 
 
 TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 all the influences that assail them, and we ask all good 
 men and philanthropists to wheel into line, and all the 
 armies of Heaven to bear down upon the foe, and we pray 
 Almighty God that with the thunderbolts of his wrath 
 he will strike down and consume all these influences^ that 
 are attempting to destroy the young men for whom 
 Christ died. 
 
 The first class of temptations that assaults a young man 
 is led on by the skeptic. He will not admit he is an 
 infidel or atheist. Oh, no! he is a "freethinker;" he is 
 one of your "liberal" men; he is free and easy in 
 religion. O! how liberal he is; he so "liberal" that he 
 will give away his Bible; he is so "liberal " that he will 
 give away the throne of eternal justice; he is so "liberal" 
 that he would be willing to give God out of the universe; 
 he is so "liberal " that he would give up his own soul 
 and the souls of all his friends. Now, what more could 
 you ask in the way of liberality? The victim of this 
 skeptic has probably just come from the country. 
 Through the intervention of. friends he has been placed 
 in a shop. On Saturday the skeptic says to him, •"Well, 
 what are you going to do to-morrow?" He says, " I am 
 going to church." "Is it possible?" says the skeptic, 
 " Well, I used to do those things; I was brought up, I 
 suppose, as you were, in a religious family, and I be- 
 lieved all those things, but I got over it; the fact is, since 
 I came to town I have read a great deal, and I have 
 found that there are a great many things in the Bible 
 that are ridiculous. Now, for instance, all that about 
 the serpent being cursed to crawl in the garden of Eden 
 because it had tempted our first parents; why you see 
 how absurd it is ; you can tell from the very organiza- 
 tion of the serpent that it had to crawl; it crawled before 
 it was cursed just as well as it crawled afterwards; you. 
 
TRA PS FOR MEN. 
 
 25T 
 
 can tell from its organization that it crawled. Then all 
 that story about the whale swallowing Jonah, or Jonah 
 swallowing the whale, which was it? It don't make any 
 difference, the thing is absurd; it is ridiculous to sup- 
 pose that a man could have gone down through the jaws 
 of a sea monster and yet kept his life; why, his respira- 
 tion would have been hindered; he would have been 
 digested; the gastric juice would have dissolved the 
 fibrine and coagulated albumen, and Jonah would have 
 been changed from prophet into chyle. Then all that 
 story about the miraculous conception — why, it is per- 
 fectly disgraceful. O! sir, I believe in the light of 
 nature. This is the nineteenth century. Progress, sir, 
 progress. I don't blame you, but after you have been in 
 town as long as I have, you will think just as I do." 
 
 Thousands of young men are going down under that 
 process day by day, and there is only here and there a 
 young man who can endure this artillery of scorn. They 
 are giving up their Bibles. The light of nature! They 
 have the light of nature in China; they have it in Iiin- 
 dostan; they have it in Ceylon. Flowers there, stars 
 there, waters there, winds there; but no civilization, no 
 homes, no happiness. Lancets to cut, and Juggernauts 
 to fall under, and hooks to swing on; but no happiness. 
 I tell you, my young brother, w T e have to take a religion 
 of some kind. We have to choose between four or five. 
 Shall it be the Koran of the Mohammedan, or the 
 Shaster of the Hindoo, or the Zendavesta of the Persian, 
 or the Confucius writings of the Chinese, or the Holy 
 Scriptures? Take what you will; God helping me, I will 
 take the Bible. Light for ail darkness; rock for all 
 foundation; balm for all wounds. A glory that lifts its 
 pillars of fire over the wilderness march. Do not give 
 up your Bibles. If these people scoff at you as though 
 17 
 
258 
 
 TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 religion and the Bible were fit only fur weak-minded 
 people, you just tell them you are not ashamed to be in 
 the company of Burke the statesman, and Raphael the 
 painter, and Thorwaldsen the sculptor, and Mozart the 
 musician, and Blackstone the lawyer, and Bacon the 
 philosopher, and Harvey the physician, and John 
 Milton the poet. Ask them what infidelity has ever 
 done to lift the fourteen hundred millions of the race 
 out of barbarism. Ask them when infidelity ever insti- 
 tuted a sanitary commission; and, before you leave their 
 society once and for ever, tell them that they have in- 
 sulted the memory of your Christian father, and spit 
 upon the death-bed of your mother, and with swine's 
 snout rooted up the grave of your sister who died believ- 
 ing in the Lord Jesus. 
 
 Young man, hold on to your Bible? It is the best 
 book you ever owned. It will tell you how to dress, how 
 to bargain, how to walk, how to act, how to live, how to 
 die. Glorious Bible! whether on parchment or paper, 
 in octavo or duodecimo, on the center table of the draw- 
 ing-room or in the counting-room of the banker. Glo- 
 rious Bible! Light to our feet and lamp to our path. 
 Hold on to it! 
 
 The second class of insidious temptations that comes 
 upon our young men is led on by the dishonest employer. 
 Every commercial establishment is a school. In nine 
 cases out of ten, the principles of the employer become 
 the principles of the employe. I ask the older mer- 
 chants to bear me out in these statements. If, when you 
 were just starting in life, in commercial life, you were 
 told that honesty was not marketable, that though you 
 might sell all the goods in the shop, you must not sell 
 your conscience, that while you were to exercise all 
 industry and tact, you were not to sell your conscience — 
 
TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 259 
 
 if yon were taught that gains gotten by sin were com- 
 bustible, and at the moment of ignition would be blown 
 on by the breath of God until all the splendid estate 
 would vanish into white ashes scattered in the whirl- 
 wind — then that instruction has been to you a precaution 
 and a help ever since. There are hundreds of commer- 
 cial establishments in our great cities which are edu- 
 cating a class of young men who will be the honor of 
 the land, and there are other establishments which are 
 educating young men to be nothing but sharpers, What 
 chance is there for a young man who was taught in an 
 establishment that it is right to lie, if it is smart, and 
 that a French label is all that is necessary to make a thing 
 French, and that you ought always to be honest when it 
 pays, and that it is wrong to steal unless you do it well? 
 Suppose, now, a young man just starting in life enters a 
 place of that kind where there are ten young men, all 
 drilled in the infamous practices of the establishment. 
 He is ready to be taught. The young man has no theory 
 of commercial ethics. Where is he to get his theory? 
 He will get the theory from his employers. One day he 
 pushes his wit a little beyond what the establishment 
 demands of him, and he fleeces a customer until the 
 clerk is on the verge of being seized by the law. What 
 is done in the establishment? He is not arraigned. 
 The head man of the establishment says to him: "Now, 
 be careful; be careful, young man, you might be caught; 
 but really that was splendidly done; you will get along 
 in the world, I warrant you." Then that young man 
 goes up until he becomes head clerk. He has found 
 there is a premium on iniquity. 
 
 One morning the employer comes to the establishment. 
 He goes into his counting-room and throws up his hands 
 end shouts: "Why, the safe has been robbed!" What 
 
260 
 
 TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 is the matter? Nothing, nothing; only the clerk who 
 had been practicing a good while on customers is prac- 
 ticing a little on the employer. No new principle intro- 
 duced into that establishment. It is a poor rule that 
 will not work both ways. You must never steal unless 
 you can do it well. He did it well. I am not talking 
 an abstraction ; I am talking a terrible and a crushing 
 fact. 
 
 Now here is a young man. Look at him to-day. 
 Look at him five years from now, after he has been 
 under trial in such an establishment. Here he stands 
 in the shop to-day, his cheeks ruddy with the breath of 
 the hills. He unrolls the goods on the counter in gen- 
 tlemanly style. He commends them to the purchaser. 
 He points out all the good points in the fabric. He 
 effects the sale. The goods are wrapped up, and he dis- 
 misses the customer with a cheerful u good morning," 
 and the country merchant departs so impressed with the 
 straightforwardness of that young man that he will come 
 again and again, every spring and every autumn unless 
 interfered with. The young man has been now in that 
 establishment five years. He unrolls the goods on the 
 counter. He says to the customer, "Now those are the 
 best goods we have in our establishment;" they have bet- 
 ter on the next shelf. He says: u We are selling these 
 goods less than cost;" they are making twenty percent. 
 He says: "There is nothing like them in all the city;" 
 there are fifty shops that want to sell the same thing. 
 He says: "Now, that is a durable article, it will wash;" 
 yes, it will wash out. The sale is made, the goods are 
 wrapped up, the country merchant goes off feeling that 
 he has an equivalent for his money, and the sharp clerk 
 goes into the private room of the counting-house, and 
 he says: "Well, I got rid of those goods at last; I really 
 
TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 261 
 
 thought we never would sell them; I told him we were 
 selling them less than cost, and lie thought he was 
 getting a good bargain; got rid of them at last." And 
 the head of the firm sa3 r s: "That's well done, splendidly 
 done; let's go over to Delmonico's." Meanwhile, God 
 had recorded eight lies — four lies against the young man, 
 four lies against his employer, for I undertake to say that 
 the employer is responsible for all the iniquities of his 
 clerks, and all the iniquities of those who are clerks of 
 these clerks, down to the tenth generation, if those em- 
 ployers inculcated iniquitous and damning principles. I 
 stand before young men this morning who are under this 
 pressure. I say, come out of it. "Oh!" you say, "I 
 can't; I have my widowed mother to support, and if a 
 man loses a situation now he can't get another one." I 
 say, come out of it. Go home to your mother and say 
 to her, "Mother, I can't stay in that shop and be upright; 
 what shall I do?" and if she is worthy of you she will 
 say, "Come out of it, my son — we will just throw our- 
 selves on him who hath promised to be the God of the 
 widow and the fatherless; he will take care of us." And 
 I tell you no young man ever permanently suffered by 
 such ;i course of conduct, In Philadelphia, in a drug 
 shop, ;i young man said to his employer: "I want to 
 please you, really, and I am willing to sell medicines on 
 Sunday; but I can't sell this patent shoe-blacking on 
 Sunday." "Well," said the head man, "you will have 
 to do it, or else you will have to go away/' The young 
 man said: "I can't do it; I am willing to sell medicines, 
 but not shoe-blacking." "Well, then, go! Go now." 
 The young man went away. The Lord looked after him. 
 The hundreds of thousands of dollars he won in this 
 world were the smallest part of his fortune. God hon- 
 ored him. By the course he took he saved his soul as 
 
262 
 
 TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 well as his fortunes in the future. A man said to his 
 employer: "I can't wash the wagon on Sunday morning; 
 I am willing to wash it on Saturday afternoon; but, sir. 
 you will please excuse me, I can't wash the wagon on 
 Sunday morning." His employer said: "You must 
 wash it; my carriage comes in every Saturday night, and 
 you have got to wash it on Sunday morning." "I can't 
 do it," the man said. They parted. The Lord looked 
 after him, grandly looked after him. He is worth to-day 
 a hundred-fold more than his employer ever was or ever 
 will be, and he saved his soul. Young man, it is safe to 
 do right. There are young men in this house to-day 
 who, under this storm of temptation, are striking deeper 
 and deeper their roots, and spreading out broader their 
 branches. They are Daniels in Babylon, they are Josephs 
 in the Egyptian court, they are Pauls amid the wild 
 beasts at Ephesus. I preach to encourage them. Lay 
 hold of God and be faithful. 
 
 There is a mistake we make about young men. We 
 put them in two classes: the one class is moral, the other 
 is dissolute. The moral are safe. The dissolute cannot 
 be reclaimed. I deny both propositions. The moral are 
 not safe unless they have laid hold of God, and the dis- 
 solute may be reclaimed. I suppose there are self- 
 righteous men in this house who feel no need of God, 
 and will not seek after him, and they will go out in the 
 world and they will be tempted, and they will be flung 
 down by misfortune, and they will go down, down, down, 
 until some night you will see them going home hooting, 
 raving, shouting blasphemy — going home to their mother? 
 going home to their sister, going home to the young 
 companion to whom, only a little while ago, in the pres- 
 ence of a brilliant assemblage, flashing lights and orange 
 blossoms, and censers swinging in the air, they promised 
 
TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 263 
 
 fidelity and parity, and kindness perpetual. As that 
 man reaches the door, she will open it, not with an out- 
 cry, but she will stagger back from the door as he comes 
 in, and in her look there will be the prophecy of woes 
 that are coming: want that will shiver in need of a fire, 
 hunger that will cry in vain for bread, cruelties that will 
 not leave the heart when they have crushed it, but pinch 
 it again, and stab it again, until some night she will open 
 the door of the place where her companion was ruined, 
 and she will fling out her arm from under her ragged 
 shawl and say, with almost omnipotent eloquence, "Give 
 me back my husband! Give me back my protector! 
 Give me back my all! Him of the kind heart and gentle 
 w T ords, and the manly brow — give him back to me!" 
 And then the wretches, obese and filthy, will push back 
 their matted locks, and they will say, u Put her out! 
 Put her out!" Oh! self-righteous man, without God 
 you are in peril. Seek after him to-day. Amid the ten 
 thousand temptations of life there is no safety for a man 
 without God. 
 
 But I may be addressing some who have gone astray, 
 and so I assault that other proposition that the dissolute 
 cannot be reclaimed. Perhaps you have only gone a 
 little astray. While I speak are you troubled? Is there 
 a voice within you saying, " What did you do that for? 
 Why did you go there ? What did you mean by that ?" 
 Is there a memory in your soul that makes you tremble 
 this morning? God only knows all our hearts. Yea, 
 if you have gone so far as to commit iniquities, and have 
 gone through the whole catalogue, I invite you back 
 this morning. The Lord waits for you. " Rejoice! 
 O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer 
 thee in the days of thy youth ; but know thou that for 
 all these things God will bring thee into judgment." 
 
264 
 
 TRAPS FOR MEN. 
 
 Come home, young man, to your father's God. Come 
 home, young man, to your mother's God. O! I wish 
 that all the batteries of the Gospel could to-day be un- 
 limbered against all those influences which are taking 
 down so many of our young men. I would like to blow 
 a trumpet of warning, and recruit until this whole 
 audience would march out on a crusade against the evils 
 of society. But let none of us be disheartened. O! 
 Christian workers, my heart is high with hope. The 
 dark horizon is blooming into the morning of which 
 prophets spoke, and of which poets have dreamed, and 
 of which painters have sketched. The world's bridal 
 hour advances. The mountains will kiss the morniug 
 radiant and effulgent, and all the waves of the sea will 
 become the crystal keys of a great organ, on which the 
 fingers of everlasting joy shall play the grand march of 
 a world redeemed. Instead of the thorn there shall come 
 up the fir tree, and instead of the briar there shall come 
 up the myrtle tree, and the mountains and the hills shall 
 break forth into singing, and all the trees of the wood 
 shall clap their hands! 
 
STRANGERS WARNEIX 
 
 265 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 STRANGERS WARNED. 
 
 "And Solomon numbered all the strangers that were in the land of 
 Israel."— 2 Chron. ii : 17. 
 
 If, in the time when people traveled afoot or on camel- 
 back, and vacillation from city to city was seldom, it was 
 important that Solomon recognize the presence of stran- 
 gers, how much more important, now in these days, when 
 by railroad and steamboat the population of the earth 
 are always in motion, and from one years end to the 
 other, our cities are crowded with visitors. Every morn- 
 ing, on the Hudson River railroad track, there come in, 
 I think, about six trains, and on the New Jersey railroad 
 track some thirteen passenger trains ; so that all the 
 depots and the wharves are a-rumble and a-clang with 
 the coming iu of a great immigration of strangers. 
 Some of them come for purposes of barter, some for 
 mechanism, some for artistic gratification, some for sight- 
 seeing. A great many of them go out on the evening 
 trains, and consequently the city makes but little im- 
 pression upon them; but there are multitudes who, in 
 the hotels and boarding-houses, make temporary resi- 
 dence. They tarry here for three or four days, or as 
 many weeks. They spend the days in the stores and the 
 evenings in sight-seeing. Their temporary stay will 
 make or break them, not only financially but morally, 
 for this world and the world that is to come. Multitudes 
 of them come into our morning and evening services. 
 I am conscious that I stand in the presence of many 
 
:266 
 
 STRANGERS WARNED. 
 
 of them now. I desire more especially to speak to 
 them. May God give me the right word and help me to 
 utter it in the right way. 
 
 There have glided into this house those unknown to 
 others, whose history, if told, would be more thrilling 
 than the deepest tragedy, more exciting than Nilsson's 
 song, more bright than a spring morning, more awful 
 than a wintry midnight. If they could stand up here 
 and tell the story of their escapes, and their temptations, 
 and their bereavements, and their disasters, and their 
 victories, and their defeats, there would be in this house 
 such a commingling of groans and acclamations as would 
 make the place unendurable. 
 
 There is a man who, in infancy, lay in a cradle satin- 
 lined. There is a man who was picked up, a foundling, 
 on Boston Common. Here is a man who is coolly ob- 
 serving this day's service, expecting no advantage, and 
 caring for no advantage for himself ; while yonder 
 is a man who has been for ten years in an awful confla- 
 gration of evil habits, and he is a mere cinder of a 
 destroyed nature, and he is wondering if there shall be 
 in this service any escape or help for his immortal soul. 
 Meeting you only once, perhaps, face to face, I strike 
 hands with you in an earnest talk about your present 
 condition, and your eternal well-being. St. Paul's ship 
 at Melita went to pieces where two seas meet ; but we 
 stand to-day at a point where a thousand seas converge, 
 and eternity alone can tell the issue of the hour. 
 
 The hotels of this country, for beauty and elegance, 
 are not surpassed by the hotels in any other land ; but 
 those that are most celebrated for brilliancy of tapestry 
 and mirror cannot give to the guest any costly apart- 
 ment, unless he can afford a parlor in addition to his 
 lodging. The stranger, therefore, will generally find as- 
 
STRANGERS WARNED. 267 
 
 signed to him a room without any pictures, and perhaps 
 any rocking chair! He will find a box of matches on a 
 bureau .and an old newspaper left by the previous occu- 
 pant, and that will be about all the ornamentation. At 
 seven o'clock in the evening, after having taken his re- 
 past, he will look over his memorandum -book of the 
 day's work ; he will write a letter to his home, and then 
 a desperation will seize upon him to get out. You hear 
 the great city thundering under your window.-, and you 
 say: "I must join that procession," and in ten minutes 
 you have joined it. Where are you going? " Oh," you 
 say, "I haven't made up my mind yet." Better make 
 up your mind before you start. Perhaps the very way 
 you go now you will always go. Twenty years ago there 
 were young men who came down the Astor House steps, 
 and started out in a wrong direction, where they have 
 been going ever since. 
 
 " Well, where are you going ?" says one man. " I 
 am going to the Academy to hear some music." Good. 
 I would like to join you at the door. At the tap of the 
 orchestral baton, all the gates of harmony and beauty 
 will open before your soul. I congratulate you. Where 
 are you going ? " Well," you say, " I am going up to 
 see some advertised pictures." Good. 1 should iike to- 
 go along with you and look over the same catalogue, and 
 study with you Kensett, and Bierstadt, and Church, and 
 Moran. Nothing more elevating than good pictures. 
 Where are you going ? u Well," you say, u I am going 
 up to the Young Men's Christian Association rooms," 
 Good. You will find there gymnastics to strengthen 
 the muscles, and books to improve the mind, and Chris- 
 tian influence to save the soul. I wish every city in the 
 United States had as tine a palace for its Young Men's 
 Christian Association as New York has. Where rtra 
 
268 
 
 STRANGERS WAKNED. 
 
 you going ? u Well," yon say, " I am going to take a 
 long walk up Broadway, and so turn around into the 
 Bowery. I am going to study human life.'' Good. A 
 walk through Broadway at eight o'clock at night is inter- 
 esting, educating, fascinating, appalling, exhilarating to 
 the last degree. Stop in front of that theater, and see 
 who goes in. Stop at that saloon, and see who comes 
 out. See the great tides of life surging backward and 
 forward, and beating against the marble of the curbstone, 
 and eddying down into the saloons. What is that mark 
 on the face of that debauchee? It is the hectic flush of 
 eternal death. What is that Woman's laughter ? It is 
 the shriek of a lost soul. Who is that Christian man 
 going along with a phial of anodyne to the dying pauper 
 on Elm street? Who is that belated man on the way to 
 a prayer-meeting ? Who is that city missionary going 
 to take a box in which to bury a child? Who are all 
 these clusters of bright and beautiful faces? They are 
 going to some interesting place of amusement. Who is 
 that man going into the drug-store? That is the man 
 who yesterday lost all his fortune on Wall street. He 
 is going in for a dose of belladonna, and before morning 
 it will make no difference to him whether stocks are up 
 or down. I tell you that Broadway, between seven and 
 twelve o'clock at night, between the Battery and Union- 
 square, is an Austerlitz, a Gettysburg, a Waterloo, where 
 kingdoms are lost or won, and three worlds mingle in the 
 strife. 
 
 I meet another coining down off the hotel steps, and I 
 say: " Where are you going?" You say: "I am 
 going with a merchant of New York who has promised 
 to-night to show me the underground life of the city. I 
 am his customer, and he is going to oblige me very 
 much." Stop! A business house that tries to get or 
 
ONLY A DRUNKARD. 
 
STRANGERS WARNED. 
 
 269 
 
 keep your custom through such a process as that, is not 
 worthy of you. There are business establishments in 
 our cities which have for years been sending to eternal 
 destruction hundreds and thousands of merchants. They 
 have a secret drawer in the counter, where money is kept, 
 and the clerk goes and gets it when he wants to take 
 these visitors to the city through the low slums of the 
 place. Shall I mention the names of some of these great 
 commercial establishments? I have them on my lip. 
 Shall I ? Perhaps I had better leave it to the young 
 men who, in that process, have been destroyed themselves 
 while they have been destroying others. I care not how 
 high-sounding the name of a commercial establishment, 
 if it proposes to get customers or to keep them by such 
 a process as that; drop their acquaintance. They will 
 cheat you before you get through. They will send to 
 you a style of goods different from that which you bought 
 by sample. They will give you under-weight. There 
 will be in the package half-a-dozen less pairs of sus- 
 penders than you paid for. They will rob you. Oh, you 
 feel in your pockets and say: "Is my money gone ?" 
 They have robbed you of something for which pounds 
 and shillings can never give you compensation. When 
 one of these Western merchants has been dragged by one 
 of these commercial agents through the slums of the 
 city, he is not fit to go home. The mere memory of 
 what he has seen will be moral pollution, unless he go 
 on positive Christian errand.^ I think you had better 
 let the city missionary and the police and the Christian 
 reformer attend to the exploration of New York and 
 underground life. You do not go to a small-pox hospital 
 lor the purpose of exploration. You do not go there, 
 because you are afraid of the contagion. And yet, you 
 go into the presence of a moral leprosy that is as much 
 
L>70 
 
 STRANGERS WARNED. 
 
 more dangerous to you as the death of the soul is worse 
 than the death of the body. I will undertake to say that 
 nine-tenths of the men who have been ruined in our cities 
 have been ruined by simply going to observe without 
 any idea of participating. The fact is that underground 
 city life is a filthy, fuming, reeking, pestiferous depth 
 whicli may blast the eye that looks at it. In the Heign 
 of Terror, in 1792, in Paris, people, escaping from the 
 officers of the law, got into the sewers of the city, and 
 crawled and walked through miles of that awful labyrinth, 
 stifled with the atmosphere and almost dead, some of 
 them, when they came out to the river Seine, where they 
 washed themselves and again breathed the fresh air. 
 But I have to tell you that a great many of the men who 
 go on the work of exploration through the underground 
 gutters of Kew York life never come out at any Seine 
 river where they can wash off the pollution of the moral 
 sewerage. Stranger, if one of the "drummers" of the 
 •city, as they are called — if one of the K drummers" pro- 
 pose to take you and show you the " sights 99 of the town 
 and underground New York, say to him: "Please, sir, 
 what part do you propose to show me?" 
 
 Sabbath morning conies. You wake up in the hotel. 
 You have had a longer sleep than usual. You say: 
 "Where am 1 1 a thousand miles from home ! I have no 
 family to take to church to-day. My pastor will not expect 
 my presence. I think I shall look over my accounts and 
 study my memorandum-book. Then I will write a few 
 business letters, and talk to that merchant who came in 
 on the same train with me." Stop! you cannot afford to 
 do it. 
 
 "But." you say, "I am worth five hundred thousand 
 dollars." You cannot afford to do it. You say: "I am 
 worth a million dollars. 99 You cannot afford to do it. All 
 
STRANGERS WARNED. 
 
 271 
 
 you gain by breaking the Sabbath you will lose. You 
 will lose one of three things: your intellect, your morals, 
 or your property, and you cannot point in the whole earth 
 to a single exception to this rule. God gives us six days 
 and keeps one for himself Now if we try to get the 
 seventh, he will upset the work of all the other six. 
 
 I remember going up Mount Washington, before the 
 railroad had been built, to the Tip-Top House, and the 
 guide would come around to our horses and stop us when 
 we were crossing a very steep and dangerous place, and 
 he would tighten the girdle of the horse, and straighten 
 the saddle. And I have to tell you that this road of life 
 is so steep and full of peril we must, at least one day in 
 seven, stop and have the harness of life readjusted, and 
 our souls re-equipped. The seven days of the week are 
 like seven business partners, and you must give to each 
 one his share, or the business will be broken up. God is 
 so generous with us ; he has given you six days to his 
 one. Now, here is a father who has seven apples, and he 
 gives six to his greedy boy, proposing to keep one for 
 himself. The greedy boy grabs for the other one and loses 
 all the six. 
 
 How few men there are who know how to keep the 
 Lord's day away from home. A great many who are con- 
 sistent on the banks of the St. Lawrence, or the Alabama, 
 or the Mississippi, are not consistent when they get so 
 far off as the East River. I repeat — though it is putting 
 it on a low ground — you cannot financially afford to break 
 the Lord's day. It js only another way of tearing up 
 your government securities, and putting down the price 
 of goods, and blowing up your store. I have friends who 
 are all the time slicing off pieces of the Sabbath. They cut 
 a little of the Sabbath off that end, and a little of the Sab- 
 bath off this end. They do not keep the twenty-four hours. 
 
272 
 
 STRAJKOERS WARNED. 
 
 The Bible says: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it 
 holy." I have good friends who are quite accustomed to 
 leaving Albany by the midnight train on Saturday night, 
 and getting home before church. Now, there may be 
 occasions when it is right, but generally it is wrong. 
 How if the train should run off the track into the North 
 River? I hope your friends will not send for me to preach 
 your funeral sermon. It would be an awkward thing for 
 me to stand up by your side and preach — you a Christian 
 man killed on a rail-train traveling on a Sunday morn- 
 ing. <fc Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. " 
 What does that mean? It means twenty-four hours. 
 A man owes you a dollar. You don't want him to pay 
 you ninety cents; you want the dollar. If God demands 
 of us twenty-four hours out of the week, he means twenty- 
 four hours and not nineteen. Oh, we want to keep vig- 
 ilantly in this country the American Sabbath, and not 
 have transplanted here the German or the French Sab- 
 bath. If any of you have been in Paris you know that 
 on Sabbath morning the vast population rush out toward 
 the country with baskets and bundles, and toward night, 
 they come back fagged out, cross, and intoxicated. May 
 God preserve to us our glorious, quiet American Sab- 
 baths. 
 
 And so men come to the verge of city life and say : 
 " Now we'll look off. Come, young man, don't be afraid. 
 Come near, let's look off." He looks and looks, until, 
 after a while, Satan comes and puts a hand on each of his 
 shoulders and pushes him off. ^ociety says it is evil 
 proclivity on the part of that young man. Oh, no, he 
 was simply an exploror, and sacrificed his life in dis- 
 covery. A young man comes in from the country brag- 
 ging that nothing can do him any harm. He knows 
 ;,' - -in all the tricks of city life. "Why," he says, "didn't 
 
STRANGERS WARNED. 
 
 273 
 
 I receive a circular in the country telling me that some- 
 how they found out I was a sharp business man, and if I 
 would only send a certain amount of money by mail or 
 express, charges prepaid, they would send a package with 
 which I could make a fortune in two months; but I didn't 
 believe it. My neighbors did, but I didn't. Why, no 
 man could take my money. I carry it in a pocket inside 
 my vest. No man could take it. No man could cheat 
 me at the faro table. Don't I know all about the 'cue- 
 box,' and the 'dealer's-box,' and the cards stuck together 
 as though they were one, and when to hand in my 
 cheques? Oh, they can't cheat me. I know what I am 
 about." While, at the same time, that very moment, 
 such men are succumbing to the worst Satanic influences, 
 
 CD r 
 
 in the simple fact that they are going to observe. Now, 
 if a man or woman shall go down into a haunt of iniquity 
 for the purpose of reforming men and women — if, as did 
 John Howard, or Elizabeth Fry, or Tan Meter, they go 
 down among the abandoned for the sake of saving souls — 
 or as did Chalmers and Guthrie to see sin, that they 
 might better combat it, then they shall be God-protected, 
 and they will come out better than when they went in. 
 But if you go on this work of exploration merely for 
 the purpose of satisfying a morbid curiosity, I will take 
 twenty per cent, off your moral character. O strangers, 
 welcome to the great city. May you find Christ here, 
 and not any physical or moral damage. Men coming 
 from inland, from distant cities, have here found God and 
 found him in our service. May that be your case 
 now. You thought you were brought to this place merely 
 for the purpose of sight-seeing. Perhaps God brought 
 you to this roaring city for the purpose of working out 
 your eternal salvation. Go back to your homes and tell 
 them how you met Christ here — the loving, patient, par- 
 18 
 
274 
 
 STRANGERS WARNED. 
 
 doning, and sympathetic Christ. Who knows but the 
 -city which has been the destruction of so many may be 
 your eternal redemption? 
 
 A good many years ago, Edward Stanley, the English 
 •commander, with his regiment, took a fort. The fort was 
 manned by some three hundred Spaniards. Edward 
 Stanley came close up to the fort, leading his men, when 
 a Spaniard thrust at him with a spear, intending to 
 destroy his life; but Stanley caught hold of the spear, 
 and the Spaniard in attempting to jerk the spear away 
 from Stanley, lifted him up into the battlements. No 
 sooner had Stanley taken his position on the battlements, 
 than he swung his sword and his whole regiment leaped 
 aip after him and the fort was taken. So may it be with 
 you, O stranger. The city influences which have destroyed 
 so many and dashed them down for ever, shall be the 
 means of lifting you up into the tower of God's mercy 
 and strength, your soul more than conqueror through the 
 grace of Ilirn who hath promised an especial benediction 
 to those who shall treat you well, saying : " I was a 
 stranger and ye took me in." 
 
PEOPLE TO BE FEAJJED. 
 
 275 
 
 CHAPTER XXL 
 
 PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 *' Why hast thou then broken down her hedges, so that ill they 
 ^vhich pass by the way do pluck her? The boar out of the wooa 
 doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it" — Psalms 
 Sxxx : 12, 13. 
 
 By this homely but expressive figure, the text sets 
 forth the bad influences which in olden time broke in 
 upon God's heritage, as with swine's foot trampling, and 
 as with swine's snout uprooting the vineyards of pros- 
 perity. AVhat was true then is true now. There have 
 been enough trees of righteousness planted to overshadow 
 the whole earth, had it not been for the axe- men who 
 hewed them down. The temple of truth would long 
 •ago have been completed, had it not been for the icono- 
 clasts who defaced the walls and battered down the pil- 
 lars. The whole earth would have been an Eshcol of 
 ripened clusters, had it not been that " the boar has 
 wasted it and the wild beast of the field devoured it." 
 
 I propose to point out to you those whom I consider 
 to be the 'uprooting and. devouring classes of society. 
 First, the public criminals. You ought not to be surprised 
 that these people make up a large portion in many com- 
 munities. The vast majority of the criminals who take 
 ship from Europe come into our own port. In 1869, of 
 the forty-nine thousand people who were incarcerated in 
 the prisons of the country, thirty-two thousand were of 
 foreign birth. Many of them were the very desperadoes 
 of society, oozing into the slums of our cities, waiting 
 
276 
 
 PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 for an opportunity to riot and steal and debauch, joining; 
 the large gang of American thugs and cut-throats. There 
 are in this cluster of cities — New York, Jersey City,, 
 and Brooklyn — four thousand people whose entire busi- 
 ness in life is to commit crime. That is as much their 
 business as jurisprudence or medicine or merchandise is 
 your business. To it they bring all their energies of 
 body, mind, and soul, and they look upon the interreg- 
 nums which they spend in prison as so much unfortunate 
 loss of time, just as you look upon an attack of influenza 
 or rheumatism which fastens you in the house for a few 
 days. It is their lifetime business to pick pockets, and 
 blow up safes, and shoplift, and ply the panel game, and 
 they have as much pride of skill in their business as you 
 have in yours when you upset the argument of an 
 opposing councilor cure a gunshot fracture which other 
 surgeons have given up, or foresee a turn in the market 
 so you buy goods just before they go up twenty per cent. 
 It is their business to commit crime, and I do not sup- 
 pose that once in a year the thought of the immorality 
 strikes them. Added to these professional criminals, 
 American and foreign, there is a large class of men who 
 are more or less industrious in crime. In one year the 
 police in this cluster of cities arrested ten thousand 
 people for theft, and ten thousand for assault and battery, 
 and fifty thousand for intoxication. Drunkenness is 
 responsible for much of the theft, since it confuses a 
 man's ideas of property, and he gets his hands on things 
 that do not belong to him. Rum is responsible for 
 much of the assault and battery, inspiring men to sudden 
 bravery, which they must demonstrate though it be on 
 the face of the next gentleman. 
 
 Seven million dollars' worth of property stolen in 
 this cluster of cities in one year. You cannot, as good 
 
PEOPLE TO BE FEAKED. 
 
 277 
 
 citizens, be- independent of that fact. It will touch your 
 pocket, since I have to give you the fact that these three 
 cities pay seven million dollars' worth of taxes a year to 
 arraign, try, and support the criminal population. You 
 help to pay the board of every criminal, from the sneak- 
 thief that snatches a spool of cotton, up to some man 
 who enacts a " Black Friday/ 5 More than that, it 
 touches your heart in the moral depression of the com- 
 munity. You might as well think to stand in a closely 
 •confined room where there are fifty people and yet not 
 breathe the vitiated air, as to stand in a community where 
 there is such a great multitude of the depraved without 
 .somewhat being contaminated. What is the tire that 
 burns your store down compared with the conflagration, 
 which consumes your morals? What is the theft of the 
 gold and silver from your money safe compared with the 
 .theft of your children's virtue? 
 
 We are all ready to arraign criminals. We shout at 
 the top of our voice, u Stop thief!'' and when the police 
 get on the track we come out, hatless and in our slippers, 
 and assist in the arrest. We come around the bawling 
 ruffian and hustle him off to justice, and when he gets in 
 prison, what do we do for him? With great gusto we 
 put on the handcuffs and the hopples; but what prepara- 
 tion are we making for the day when the handcuffs and 
 the hopples come off? Society seems to say to these 
 •criminals, " Villain, go in there and rot," when it ought 
 to say, " You are an offender against the law, but we 
 mean to give you an opportunity to repent; we mean to 
 help you. Here are Bibles and tracts and Christian in- 
 fluences. Christ died for you. Look, and live." 
 
 Vast improvements have been made by introducing 
 industries into the prison; but we want something more 
 than hammers and shoe lasts to reclaim these people. 
 
278 
 
 PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 Aye, we want more than sermons on the Sabbath dayv 
 Society must impress these men with the fact that it 
 does not enjoy their suffering, and that it is attempt- 
 ing to reform and elevate them. The majority of 
 criminals suppose that society has a grudge against 
 them, and they in turn have a grudge against society. 
 
 They are harder in heart and more infuriate when they 
 come out of jail than when they went in. Many of the 
 people who go to prison go again and again and again. 
 Some years ago, of fifteen hundred prisoners who during 
 the year had been in Sing Sing, four hundred had been 
 there before. In a house of correction in the country, 
 where during a certain reach of time there had been five- 
 thousand people, more than three thousand had been there 
 before. So, in one case the prison, and in the other case 
 the house of correction, lei't them just as bad as they were 
 before. The secretary of one of the benevolent societies 
 of New York saw a lad fifteen years of age who had 
 spent three years of his life in prison, and he said to the 
 lad, " What have they done for you to make yon better?"" 
 "Well," replied the lad, " the first time I was brought 
 up before the judge he said, ' You ought to be ashamed 
 of yourself.' And then I committed a crime again, and 
 I was brought up before the same judge, and he said, 
 * You rascal!' And after a while I committed some 
 other crime, and I was brought before the same judge, 
 and he said, i You ought to be hanged.' " That is all they 
 had done for him in the way of reformation and salva- 
 tion. "Oh," you say, u these people are incorrigible." I 
 suppose there are hundreds of persons this day lying in 
 the prison bunks who would leap up at the prospect of 
 reformation, if society would only allow them away into 
 decency and respectability. "Oh," you say, " I have no 
 patience with these rogues." I ask you in reply, How 
 
PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 2T9 
 
 much better would you have been under the same circum- 
 stances? Suppose your mother had been a blasphemer 
 and your father a sot, and you had started life with a 
 body stuffed with evil proclivities, and you had spent 
 much of your time in a cellar amid obscenities and curs- 
 ing, and if at ten years of age you had been compelled 
 to go out and steal, battered and banged at night if you 
 came in without any spoils, and suppose your early man- 
 hood and womanhood had been covered with rags and 
 filth, and decent society had turned its back upon you^ 
 and left you to consort with vagabonds and wharf- rats — 
 how much better would you have been? I have no sym- 
 pathy with that executive clemency which would let 
 crime run loose, or which would sit in the gallery of a. 
 court-room weeping because some hard-hearted wretch, 
 is brought to justice; but I do say that the safety and 
 life of the community demand more potential influences, 
 in behalf of public offenders. 
 
 Within live minutes' walk of where I now stand, there 
 is a prison, enough to bringdown the wrath of Almighty 
 God on this city of Brooklyn. It is the Raymond Street 
 Jail. It would not be strange if the jail fever should 
 start in that horrible hole, like that which raged in Eng- 
 land during the session of the Black Assize, when three 
 hundred perished — judges, jurors, constables, and law- 
 yers. Alas, that our fair city should have such a pest- 
 house. I understand the sheriff and the jail -keeper da 
 all they can, under the circumstances, for the comfort of 
 these people; but five and six people are crowded into a 
 place where there ought to be but one or two. The air 
 is like that of the Black Hole of Calcutta. As the air 
 swept through the wicket, it almost knocked me down* 
 No sunlight. Young men who had committed their 
 first crime crowded in among old offenders. I saw there* 
 
2S0 
 
 PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 one woman, with a child almost blind, who had been 
 arrested for the crime of povertv, who was waiting until 
 the slow law could take her to the almshouse, where she 
 rightfully belonged; but she was thrust in therewith her 
 child amid the most abandoned wretches of the town. 
 Many of the offenders in that prison sleeping on the 
 fioor, with nothing but a vermin-covered blanket over 
 them. Those people crowded and wan and wasted and 
 half suffocated and infuriated. I said to the men, "How 
 do you stand it here?" "God knows," said one man, 
 "we have to stand it." Oh, they will pay you when they 
 get out. Where they burned down one house they will 
 burn three. They will strike deeper the assassin's knife. 
 The}- are this minute plotting worse burglaries. Ray- 
 mond Street Jail is the best place I know of to manu- 
 facture foot-pads, vagabonds, and cut throats. Yale 
 College is not so well calculated to make scholars, nor 
 Harvard so well calculated to make scientists, nor Prince- 
 ton so well calculated to make theologians, as Raymond 
 Street Jail is calculated to make criminals. All that 
 those men do not know of crime after they have been in 
 that dungeon for some time, Satanic machination cannot 
 teach them. Every hour that jail stands, it challenges 
 the Lord Almighty to smite this city. I call upon the 
 people to rise in their wrath and demand a reformation. 
 I call upon the judges of our courts to expose that 
 infamy. I call upon the Legislature of the State of New 
 York, now in session, to examine and appease that out- 
 rage on Oi-od and human society. I demand, in behalf 
 of those incarcerated prisoners, fresh air and clear sun- 
 light, and, in the name of him who had not where to lay 
 his head, a couch to rest on at night. In the insuffer- 
 able stench and sickening surroundings of that Raymond 
 Street Jail there is nothing but disease for the body, 
 
PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 2S1 
 
 idiocy for the mind, and death for the soul. Stifled air 
 and darkness and vermin never turned a thief into an 
 honest man. 
 
 "We want men like John Howard and Sir "William 
 Blackstone, and women like Elizabeth Fry, to do for the 
 prisons of the United States what those people did in 
 other days for the prisons of England. I thank God for 
 what Isaac T. Hopper and Dr. Wines and Mr. Harris 
 and scores of others have done in the way of prison 
 reform; but we want something more radical before 
 upon this city will come the blessing of him who said : 
 " I was in prison, and ye came unto me.*' 
 
 Again, in this class of uprooting and devouring popu- 
 lation are untrustworthy officials. " Woe unto thee, O 
 land, when thy kings and child, and thy princes drink 
 in the morning." It is a great calamity to a citv when 
 bad men get into public authority. Why was it 
 that in Xew York there was such unparalleled crime 
 between 1S66 and 1S71 \ It was because the judges of 
 police in that city, for the most part, were as corrupt as 
 the vagabonds fhat came before them for trial. Those 
 were the days of high carnival for election frauds, assas- 
 sination and forgery. "We had the ** AVhisky Ring," and 
 the *' Tammany Kino:,'' and the "Erie Rin^.'' There 
 was one man during those years that got one hundred 
 and twenty-eight thousand dollars in one year for serving 
 the public. In a few years it was estimated that there 
 were fifty millions of public treasure squandered. In 
 those times the criminal had only to wink to the judge, 
 or his lawyer would wink for him, and the question was 
 decided for the defendant. Of the eight thousand people 
 arrested in that city in one year, only three thousand 
 were punished. These little matters were ts fixed up," 
 while the interests of society were "fixed down." »You 
 
282 
 
 PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 know as well as I that a criminal who escapes only opens- 
 the door for other criminalities. When the two pick- 
 pockets snatched the diamond pin from the Brooklyn 
 gentleman in a Broadway stage, and the villains were 
 arrested, and the trial was set down for the General Ses- 
 sions, and then the trial never came, and never anything' 
 more was heard of the case, the puhlic officials were only 
 bidding higher for more crime. It is no compliment to 
 public authority when we have in all the cities of the 
 country, walking abroad, men and women notorious for 
 criminality, unwhipped of justice. They are pointed 
 out to you in the street day by day. There you find 
 what are called the ''fences," the men who stand between 
 the thief and the honest man, sheltering the thief and 
 at a great price handing over the goods to the owner to 
 whom they belong. There you will find those who are 
 called the "skinners," the men who hover around Wall 
 street, with great sleight of hand in bonds and stocks. 
 There you find the funeral thieves, the people who go 
 and sit down and mourn with families and pick their 
 pockets. And there you find the "confidence men,'* 
 who borrow money of you because they have a dead 
 child in the house and want to bury it, when they never 
 had a house nor a family; or they want to go to England 
 and get a large property there, and they want you to pay 
 their way, and they will send the money back by the 
 very next mail. There are the "harbor thieves," the 
 "shoplifters," the "pickpockets," famous all over the 
 cities. Hundreds of them with their faces in the 
 "Rogues' Gallery," yet doing nothing for the last five 
 or ten years but defraud society and escape justice. 
 When these people go unarrested and unpunished, it is 
 putting a high premium upon vice, and saying to the 
 young criminals of this country, "What a safe thing it is 
 
PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 to be a great criminal." Let. the law swoop upon them. 
 Let it be known in this country that crime will have no- 
 quarter, that the detectives are after it, that the police 
 club is being brandished, that the iron door of the prison 
 is being opened, that the judge is ready to call on the- 
 £ase. Too great leniency to criminals is too great 
 severity to society. When the President pardoned the 
 wholesale dealer in obscene books he hindered the cru- 
 sade against licentiousness; but when Governor Dix 
 refused to let go Foster, the assassin, who was condemned 
 to the gallows, he grandly vindicated the laws of God 
 and the dignity of the State of New York. 
 
 Again: among the uprooting and devouring classes in 
 our midst are the idle. Of course, I do not refer to peo- 
 ple who are getting old, or to the sick, or to those who 
 cannot get work ; but 1 tell you to look out for those ath- 
 letic men and women who will not work. When the 
 French nobleman was asked why he kept busy when he 
 had so large a property, he said, "I keep on engraving- 
 so I may not hang myself." I do not care who the man 
 is, you cannot afford to be idle. It is from the idle classes 
 that the criminal classes are made up. Character, like 
 water, gets putrid if it stands still too long. Who can 
 wonder that in this world, where there is so much to do». 
 and all the hosts of earth and heaven and hell are plung- 
 ing into the conflict, and angels are flying, and God 
 is at work, and the universe is a-quake with the march- 
 ing and counter-marching, that G<>d lets his indignation 
 fall upon a man who chooses idleness ? I have watched 
 these do-nothings who spend their time stroking their 
 beard, and retouching their toilette, and criticising 
 industrious people, and pass their days and nights in bar- 
 rooms and club houses, lounging and smoking and chew- 
 ing and card-playing. They are not only useless, but they 
 
-284 
 
 PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 are dangerous. How hard it is for them to while away 
 the hours? 
 
 Alas! for them. If they do not know how to while away 
 an hour, what will they do when they have all eternity 
 on their hands ? These men for a while smoke the best 
 cigars, and wear the best broadcloth, and move in the 
 highest spheres; but I have noticed that very soon they 
 come down to the prison, the almshouse, or stop at the 
 gallows. 
 
 The police stations of this cluster of cities furnish 
 annually two hundred thousand lodgings. For the most 
 part, these two hundred thousand lodgings are furnished 
 to able-bodied men and women — people as able to work 
 as you and I are. When they are received no longer at 
 one police station, because they are "repeaters," they go 
 to some other station, and so they keep moving around. 
 They get their food at house doors, stealing what they 
 can lay their hands on in the front basement while the 
 servant is spreading the bread in the back basement. 
 They will not work. Time and again, in the country 
 districts, they have wanted hundreds and thousands of 
 laborers. These men will not go. They do not want to 
 work. I have tried them. I have see them to sawing 
 wood in my cellar, to see whether they wanted to work. 
 I offered to pay them well for it. I have heard the saw 
 going for about three minutes, and then I went down, 
 and lo, the wood, but no saw ! They are the pest of so- 
 ciety, and they stand in the way of the Lord's poor, who 
 ought to be helped, and must be helped, and will be 
 helped. While there are thousands of industrious men 
 who cannot get any work, these men who do not want 
 any work come in and make that plea. I am in favor of 
 the restoration of the old-fashioned whipping-post for 
 just this one class of men who will not work; sleeping at 
 
PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 285 
 
 night at public expense in tlie station house; during the 
 day, getting their food at your door-step. Imprison- 
 ment does not scare them. They would like it. Black- 
 well's Island or Sing Sing would be a comfortable home 
 for them. They would have no objection to the alms- 
 house, for they like thin soup, if they cannot get mock- 
 turtle. I propose this for them: on one side of them put 
 some healthy work; on the other side put a raw -hide, and 
 let them take their choice. I like for that class of peo- 
 ple the scant bill of fare that Paul wrote out for the 
 Thessalonian loafers: u If any work not, neither should 
 he eat." By what law of God or man is it right that 
 you and I should toil day in and day out, until our hands 
 are blistered and our arms ache and our brain gets numb, 
 and then be called upon to support, what in the United 
 States are about two million loafers! They are a very 
 dangerous class. Let the public authorities keep their 
 eyes on them. 
 
 Again: among the uprooting classes I place the op- 
 pressed poor. Poverty to a certain extent is chastening; 
 but after that, when it drives a man to the wall, and he 
 hears his children cry in vain for bread, it sometimes 
 makes him desperate. I think that there are thousands of 
 honest men lacerated into vagabondism. There are men 
 crushed under burdens for which they are not half paid. 
 While there is no excuse for criminality, even in oppres- 
 sion, I state it as a simple fact, that much of the scoun- 
 drel ism of the community is consequent upon ill-treat- 
 ment. There are many men and women battered and 
 bruised and stung until the hour of despair has come, and 
 they stand with the ferocity of a wild beast which, pur- 
 sued until it can run no longer, turns round, foaming 
 and bleeding, to fight the hounds. 
 
 There is a vast underground New York and Brooklyn 
 
286 
 
 PEOrLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 life that is appalling and shameful. It wallows and 
 steams with putrefaction. You go down the stairs, 
 which are wet and decayed with filth, and at the bottom you 
 find the poor victims on the floor, cold, sick, three-fourths 
 dead, slinking into a still darker corner under the gleam 
 of the lantern of the police. There has not been a breath 
 of fresh air in that room for five years, literally. The 
 broken sewer empties its contents upon them, and they 
 lie at night in the swimming filth. There they are, men, 
 women, children; blacks, whites; Mary Magdalen with- 
 out her repentance, and Lazarus without his God : 
 These are " the dives" into which the pick-pockets and 
 the thieves go, as well as a great many who would like a 
 different life but cannot get it. These places are the sores 
 of the city, which bleed perpetual corruption. They are 
 the underlying volcano that threatens us with aCaraccas 
 earthquake. It roils and roars and surges and heaves 
 and rocks and blasphemes and dies. And there are only 
 two outlets for it: the police court and the Potter's Field. 
 In other words, they must either go to prison or to hell. 
 Oh, you never sawit,you say. You never will see it until 
 on the day when those staggering wretches shall come 
 up in the light of the judgment throne, and while all 
 hearts are being revealed God will ask you what you did 
 to help them. 
 
 There is another layer of poverty and destitution, not 
 so squalid, but almost as helpless. You hear the inces- 
 sant wailing for bread and clothes and fire. Their eyes 
 are sunken. Their cheek-bones stand out. Their hands 
 are damp with slow consumption. Their flesh is puffed 
 up with dropsies. Their breath is like that of the char- 
 nel-house. They hear the roar of the wheels of fashion 
 over head, and the gay laughter of men and maidens, and 
 wonder why God gave to others so much and to them so 
 
PEOPLE TO BE FEARKD. 
 
 2S7 
 
 little. Some of them thrust into an infidelity like that of 
 the poor German girl who, when told in the midst of her 
 wretchedness that God was good, said; "No, no good 
 God. Just look at me. No good God." 
 
 In this cluster of cities, whose cry of want I this day 
 interpret, there are said to be, as far as I can figure it up 
 from the reports, about two hundred and ninety thous- 
 and honest poor who are dependent upon individual, city, 
 and state charities. If all their voices could come up at 
 once, it would be a groan that would shake the founda- 
 tions of the city, and brincr all earth and heaven to the 
 rescue. But, for the most part, it suffers unexpressed. 
 It sits in silence, gnashing its teeth, and sucking the 
 blood of its own arteries, waiting for the judgment day. 
 Oh, I should not wonder if on that day it would be found 
 out that some of us had some things that belonged to 
 them; some extra garment which might have made them 
 comfortable in these cold days; some bread thrust into 
 the ash-barrel that might have appeased their hunger 
 for a little while; some wasted candle or gas-jet that 
 might have kindled up their darkness; some fresco on 
 the ceiling that would have given them a roof; some 
 jewel which, brought to that orphan girl in time, might 
 have kept her from being crowded off the precipices of 
 an unclean life; some New Testament that would have 
 told them of him who u came to seek and save that 
 which was lost." Oh, this wave of vagrancy and hunger 
 and nakedness that dashes against our front door step; 
 I wonder if you hear it and see it as much as I hear it 
 and see it. This last week I have been almost frenzied 
 with the perpetual cry for help from all classes and from 
 all nations, knocking, knocking, ringing, ringing, until 
 I dare not have more than one decent pair of shoes, nor 
 more than one decent coat, nor more than one decent 
 
2S8 
 
 PEOPLE TO BE FEA.RED. 
 
 hat, lest in the last day it be found that I have some- 
 thing that belongs to them, and Christ shall turn to me 
 and say: " Inasmuch as ye did it not to these, ye did it 
 not to me." If the roofs of all the houses of destitution 
 could be lifted so we could look down into them just as 
 God looks, whose nerves would be strong enough to 
 stand it? And yet there they are. The forty-five thous- 
 and sewing- women in these three cities, some of them in 
 hunger and cold, working night after night, until some- 
 times the blood spurts from nostril and lip. How well 
 their grief was voiced by that despairing woman who 
 stood by her invalid husband and invalid child, and said 
 to the city missionary: ''I am down-hearted. Every- 
 thing's against us ; and then there are other things." 
 u What other things?" said the city missionary. u Oh," 
 she replied, " my sin." " What do you mean by that?" 
 41 Well," she said, " I never hear or see anything good. 
 It's work from Monday morning to Saturday night, and 
 then when Sunday comes I can't go out, and I walk the 
 floor, and it makes me tremble to think that I have got to 
 meet God. O sir, it's so hard for us. We have to work 
 60, and then we have so much trouble, and then we are 
 getting along so poorly; and see this wee little thing 
 growing weaker and weaker; and then to think we are 
 not getting nearer to God, but floating away from him. 
 O sir, I do wish I was ready to die.*' 
 
 I should not wonder if they had a good deal better 
 time than we in the future, to make up for the fact that 
 they had such a bad time here. It would be just like 
 Jesus to say: " Come up and take the highest seats. 
 You suffered with me on earth; now be glorified witli 
 me in heaven." O thou weeping One of Bethany! O 
 thou dying One of the cross! Have mercy on the starv- 
 ing, freezing, homeless poor of these great cities! 
 
PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 
 
 289 
 
 I have preached this sermon for four or five practical 
 reasons: Because I want you to know who are the up- 
 rooting classes of society. Because I want you to be 
 more discriminating in your charities. Because I want 
 your hearts open with generosity, and your hands open, 
 with charity. Because I want you to be made the sworn 
 friends of all city evangelization, and all newsboys' 
 lodging houses, and all Howard Missions, and Children's 
 Aid Societies. Aye, I have preached it because I want 
 you this week to send to the Dorcas Society all the cast- 
 off clothing, that under the skillful manipulation of our 
 wives and mothers and sisters and daughters, these gar- 
 ments may be fitted on the cold, bare feet, and on the 
 shivering limbs of the destitute. I should not wonder if 
 that hat that you give should come back a jeweled coronet, 
 of if that garment that you this week hand out from 
 your wardrobe should mysteriously be whitened, and 
 somehow wrought into the jSavior's own robe, so in the 
 last day he would run his hand over it, and say: " I was 
 naked, and ye clothed me." That would be putting your 
 garments to glorious uses. 
 
 But more than that, I have preached the sermon be- 
 cause I thought in the contrast you would see how very 
 kindly God had dealt with you, and I thought that 
 thousands of you would go to-day to your comfortable 
 homes, and sit at your well-filled tables, and at the warm 
 registers, and look at the round faces of your children, 
 and that then you would burst into tears at the review 
 of God's goodness to you, and that you would go to your 
 room this afternoon and lock the door, and kneel down, 
 and say: ik O Lord, I have been an ingrate; make me 
 thy child. O Lord, there are so many hungry and un- 
 clad and unsheltered to-day, I thank thee that all my life 
 thou hast taken such good care of me. O Lord, there 
 19 
 
290 
 
 PEOPLE TO BE FEAEED. 
 
 are su many sick and crippled children to-day, I thank 
 thee mine are well, some of them on earth, some of them 
 in heaven. Thy goodness, O Lord, breaks me down. 
 Take me once, and forever. Sprinkled as I was many 
 years ago at the altar, while my mother held me, now I 
 consecrate my soul to thee in a holier baptism of repent- 
 ing tears. 
 
 " For sinners, Lord, Thou cam'st to bleed, 
 And I'm a sinner vile indeed; 
 Lord, I believe Thy grace is free, 
 O magnify that grace in me. " 
 
 / 
 
THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 291 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 -tUV WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 
 
 " And \e took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the 
 fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water, and 
 made the children of Israel drink of it."— Exodus xxxii: 20. 
 
 People will have a god of some kind, and they prefer 
 one of their own making. Here come the Israelites, 
 breaking off their golden earrings, the men as well as 
 the women, for in those times there were masculine as 
 well as feminine decorations. Where did they get these 
 beautiful gold earrings, coming up as they did from the 
 desert? Oh, they "borrowed" them of the Egyptians 
 v when they left Egypt. These earrings are piled up into 
 
 a pyramid of glittering beauty. " Any more earrings 
 to bring V says Aaron. None. Fire is kindled ; the 
 earrings are melted and poured into a mold, not of an 
 eagle or a war charger, but of a calf ; the gold cools off; 
 the mold is taken away, and the idol is set up on its 
 four legs. An altar is built in front of the shining calf. 
 Then the people throw up their arms, and gyrate, and 
 shriek, and dance mightily, and worship. Moses has 
 been six weeks on Mount Sinai, and he comes back and 
 hears the howling and sees the dancing of these golden- 
 calf fanatics, and he loses his patience, and he takes the 
 two plates of stone on which were written the Ten Com- 
 mandments and flings them so hard against a rock that 
 they split all to pieces. When a man gets mad he is 
 very apt to break all the Ten Commandments! Moses 
 rushes in and he takes this calf-god and throws it into a 
 
292 
 
 THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 
 
 hot fire, until it is melted all out of shape, and then 
 pulverizes it — not by the modern appliance of nitro- 
 muriatic acid, but by the ancient appliance of nitre, or 
 by the old-fashioned file. He makes for the people a 
 most nauseating draught. lie takes this pulverized 
 golden calf and throws it in the only brook which is ac- 
 cessible, and the people are compelled to drink of that 
 brook or not drink at all. But they did not drink all the 
 glittering stuff thrown on the surface. Some of it flows 
 on down the surface of the brook to the river, and then 
 flows on down the river to the sea, and the sea takes it 
 up and bears it to the mouth of all the rivers, and when 
 the tides set back, the remains of this golden calf are car- 
 ried up into the Hudson, and the East river, and the 
 Thames, and the Clyde, and the Tiber, and men go out 
 and they skim the glittering surface, and they bring it 
 ashore and they make another golden calf, and California 
 and Australia break off their golden earrings to augment 
 the pile, and in the fires of financial excitement and 
 struggle all these things are melted together* and while 
 we stand looking and wondering what will come of it, 
 lo! we find that the golden calf of Israelitish worship 
 has become the golden calf of European and American 
 worship. 
 
 I shall describe to you the god spoken of in the text, 
 his temple, his altar of sacrifice, the music that is made 
 in his temple, and then the final breaking up of the whole 
 congregation of idolaters. 
 
 Put aside this curtain and you see the golden calf of 
 modern idolatry. It is not like other idols, made out of 
 stocks or stone, but it has an ear so sensitive that it can 
 hear the whispers on Wall street and Third street and 
 State street, and the footfalls in the Bank of England, 
 and the flutter of a Frenchman's heart on the Bourse. 
 
THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 
 
 293 
 
 It has an eye so keen that it can see the rust on the farm 
 of Michigan wheat and the insect in the Maryland 
 peach -orchard, and the trampled grain under the hoof of 
 the .Russian war charger. It is so mighty that it swings 
 any way it will the world's shipping. It has its foot on 
 all the merchantmen and the steamers. It started the 
 American Civil War, and under God stopped it, and it 
 decided the Turko-Russian contest. One broker in 
 September, 1869, in New York, shouted, "One hundred 
 and sixty for a million!" and the whole continent shiv- 
 ered. This golden calf of the text lias its right front 
 foot in New York, its left front foot in Chicago, its right 
 back foot in Charleston, its left back foot in New Orleans, 
 and when it shakes itself it shakes the world. Oh! this 
 is a mighty god — the golden calf of the world's worship. 
 
 But every god must have its temple, and this golden 
 calf of the text is no exception. Its temple is vaster 
 than St. Paul's of the English, and St. Peter's of the 
 Italians, and the Alhambra of the Spaniards, and the 
 Parthenon of the Greeks, and the Mahal Taj of the 
 Hindoos, and all the other cathedrals put together. Its 
 pillars are grooved and fluted with gold, and its ribbed 
 arches are hovering gold, and its chandeliers are descend- 
 ing gold, and its floors are tesselated gold, and its vaults 
 are crowded heaps of gold, and its spires and domes are 
 soaring gold, and its organ pipes are resounding gold, 
 and v its pedals are tramping gold, and its stops pulled 
 out are flashing gold, while standing at the head < »f the 
 temple, as the presiding deity, are the hoofs and shoul- 
 ders and eyes and ears and nostrils of the calf of gold. 
 
 Further: every god must have not only its temple, but 
 its altar of sacrifice, and this golden calf of the text is 
 no exception. Its altar is not made out of stone as other 
 altars, but out of counting-room desks and fire-proof 
 
294 THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN UALF. 
 
 safes, and it is a broad, a long, a high altar. The vic- 
 tims sacrificed on it are the Swartouts, and the Ketchanis, 
 and the Fisks, and the Tweeds, and the Mortons, and ten 
 thousand other people who are slain before this golden 
 calf. What does this god care about the groans and 
 struggles of the victims before it? With cold, metallic 
 eye it looks on and yet lets them suffer. Oh ! heaven 
 and earth, what an altar! what a sacrifice of body, mind, 
 and soul! The physical health of a great multitude is 
 flung on this sacrificial altar. They cannot sleep, and 
 they take chloral and morphine and intoxicants. Some 
 of them struggle in a nightmare of stocks, and at one 
 o'clock in the morning suddenly rise up shouting: "A 
 thousand shares of New York Central — one hundred 
 and eight and a- half ! take it!" until the whole family is 
 affrighted, and the speculators fall back on their pillows 
 and sleep until they are awakened again by a " corner " 
 in the Pacific Mail, or a sudden "rise" of Rock Island. 
 Their nerves gone, their digestion gone, their brain 
 gone, they die. The clergyman comes in and reads the 
 funeral service: " Blessed are the dead who die in the 
 Lord." Mistake. They did not " die in the Lord;" the 
 golden calf kicked them! 
 
 The trouble is, when men sacrifice themselves on this 
 altar suggested in the text, they not only sacrifice them- 
 selves, but they sacrifice their families. If a man by an 
 ill course is determined to go to perdition, I suppose 
 you will have to let him go; but he puts his wife and 
 children in an equipage that is the amazement of the 
 avenues, and the driver lashes the horses into two whirl- 
 winds, and the spokes flash in the sun, and the golden 
 headgear of the harness gleams, until Black Calamity 
 takes the bits of the horses and stops them, and shouts 
 to the luxuriant occupants of the equipage: "Get out!" 
 
THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 295 
 
 They get oat. They get down. That husband and 
 father flung his family so hard they never got up again. 
 There was the mark on them for life — the mark of a 
 split hoof — the death-dealing hoof of the golden calf. 
 
 Solomon offered in one sacrifice, on one occasion, 
 twenty-two thousand oxen and one hundred and twenty 
 thousand sheep; but that was a tame sacrifice compared 
 with the multitude of men who are sacrificing them- 
 selves on this altar of the golden calf, and sacrificing 
 their families with them. The soldiers of General 
 Havelock, in India, walked literally ankle deep in the 
 blood of the " house of massacre," where two hun- 
 dred women and children had been slain by the Sepoys; 
 but the blood around about this altar of the golden calf 
 flows up to the knee, flows to the girdle, flows to the 
 shoulder, flows to the lip. Great God of heaven and 
 earth, have mercy! The golden calf has none. 
 
 Still the degrading worship goes on, and the devotees 
 kneel and kiss the dust, and count their golden beads, 
 and cross themselves with the blood of their own sacri- 
 fice. The music rolls on under the arches; it is made 
 of clinking silver and clinking gold, and the rattling 
 specie of the banks and brokers' shops, and the voices 
 of all the exchanges. The soprano of the worship is 
 carried by the timid voices of men who have just begun 
 to speculate; while the deep bass rolls out from those 
 who for ten years of iniquity have been doubly damned. 
 Chorus of voices rejoicing over what they have made. 
 Chorus of voices wailing over what they have lost. 
 This temple of which I speak stands open day and 
 night, and there is the glittering god with his four feet 
 on broken hearts, and there is the smoking altar of sac- 
 rifice, new victims every moment on it, and there are 
 the kneeling devotees; and the doxology of the worship 
 
296 
 
 THE WORSHIP OF THE OOLDEN CALF. 
 
 rolls on, while Death stands with mouldy and skeleton 
 arm beating time for the chorus — " More! more! more!" 
 
 Some people are very much surprised at the actions 
 of folk in the Stock Exchange, New York. Indeed, it 
 is a scene sometimes that paralyzes description, and is 
 beyond the imagination of any one who has never looked 
 in. What snapping of finger and thumb and wild ges- 
 ticulation, and raving like hyenas, and stamping like 
 buffaloes, and swaying to and fro, and jostling and run- 
 ning one upon another, and deafening uproar, until the 
 president of the Exchange strikes with his mallet four 
 or five times, crying, " Order! order!" and the aston- 
 ished spectator goes out into the fresh air feeling that he 
 has escaped from pandemonium. What does it all 
 mean? I will tell you what it means. The devotees of 
 every heathen temple cut themselves to pieces, and yell 
 and gyrate. This vociferation and gyration of the Stock 
 Exchange is all appropriate. This is the worship of the 
 golden calf. 
 
 But my text suggests that this worship must be broken 
 up, as the behavior of Moses in my text indicated. 
 There are those who say that this golden call* spoken of 
 in my text was hollow, and merely plated with gold; 
 otherwise, they say, Moses could not have carried it. I 
 do not know that ; but somehow, perhaps by the assist- 
 ance of his friends, he takes up this golden calf, which 
 is an open insult to God and man, and throws it into the 
 fire, and it is melted, and then it comes out and is cooled 
 off, and by some chemical appliance, or by an old-fash- 
 ioned file, it is pulverized, and it is thrown into the 
 brook, and, as a punishment, the people are compelled 
 to drink the nauseating stuff. So, my hearers, you may 
 depend upon it that God will burn and he will grind to 
 pieces the golden calf of modern idolatry, and he will 
 
THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 297 
 
 compel the people in their agony to drink it. If not 
 before, it will be so on the last day. I know net where 
 the fire will begin, whether at the " Battery " or Central 
 Park, whether at Fulton Ferry or at Bushwick, whether 
 atShoreditch, London, or West End; but it will be a very 
 hot blaze. All the Government securities of the United 
 States and Great Britain will curl up in the first blast. 
 All the money safes and depositing vaults will melt 
 under the first touch. The sea will burn like tinder, 
 and the shipping will be abandoned forever. The melt- 
 ing gold in the broker's window will burst through the 
 melted window-glass and into the street; but the flying 
 population will not stop to scoop it up. The cry of 
 "Fire" from the mountain will be answered by the cry 
 of "Fire" in the plain. The conflagration will burn 
 out from the continent toward the sea, and then burn in 
 from the sea toward the land. New York and London 
 with one cut of the red scythe of destruction will go 
 down. Twenty-five thousand miles of conflagration! 
 The earth will wrap itself round and round in shroud of 
 flame, and lie down to perish. What then will become 
 of your golden calf ? Who then so poor as to worship 
 it? Melted, or between the upper and the nether mill- 
 stone of falling mountains ground to powder. Dagon 
 down. Moloch down. Juggernaut down. Golden calf 
 down. 
 
 But, my friends, every day is a day of judgment, and 
 God is all the time grinding to pieces the golden calf. 
 Merchants of New York and London, what is the char- 
 acteristic of this time in which we live? " Bad," you 
 say. Professional men, what is the characteristic of the 
 times in which we live ? u Bad," you say. Though I 
 should be in a minority of one, I venture the opinion 
 that these are the best times we have had in fifteen 
 
298 
 
 THE WOliSJITP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 
 
 years, for the reason that God is teacfiing the world, as 
 never before, that old-fashioned honesty is the only thing 
 that will stand. In the past few months we have learned 
 as never before that forgeries will not pay; that the 
 watering of stock will not pay; that the spending of fifty 
 thousand dollars on country seats and a palatial city resi- 
 dence, when there are only thirty thousand dollars income, 
 will not pay; that the appropriation of trust funds to our 
 own private speculation will not pay. "We had a great na- 
 tional tumor, in the shape of fictitious prosperity. We 
 called it national enlargement; instead of calling it en- 
 largement, we might better have called it a swelling. It 
 has been a tumor, and God is cutting it out — has cut it 
 out, and the nation will get well and will come back to the 
 principles of our fathers and grandfathers when twice 
 three made six instead of sixty, and when the apples at 
 the bottom of the barrel were just as good as the apples 
 on the top of the barrel, and a silk handkerchief was not 
 half cotton, and a man who wore a five-dollar coat paid 
 for was more honored than a man who wore a fifty-dollar 
 coat not paid for. 
 
 The golden calf of our day, like the one of the text, is 
 very apt to be made out of borrowed gold. These 
 Israelites of the text borrowed the earrings of the Egyp- 
 tians, and then melted them into a god. That is the 
 way the golden calf is made nowadays. A great many 
 housekeepers, not paying for the articles they get, bor- 
 row of the grocer and the baker and the butcher and 'the 
 dry-goods seller. Then the retailer borrows of the whole- 
 sale dealer. Then the wholesale dealer borrows of the 
 capitalist, and we borrow, and borrow, and borrow, until 
 the community is divided into two classes, those who 
 borrow and those who are borrowed of; and after a 
 while the capitalist wants his money and he rushes upon 
 
THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 
 
 299 
 
 the wholesale dealer, and the wholesale dealer wants his 
 money and he rushes upon the retailer, and the retailer 
 wants his money and he rushes upon the consumer, and 
 we all go down together. There is many a man in this 
 day who rides in a carriage and owes the blacksmith for 
 the tire, and the wheelwright for the wheel, and the 
 trimmer for the curtain, and the driver for unpaid wages, 
 and the harness-maker for the bridle, and the furrier for 
 the robe, while from the tip of the carriage tongue clear 
 back to the tip of the camel's-hair shawl fluttering out 
 of the back of the vehicle, everything is paid for by notes 
 that have been three times renewed. 
 
 I tell you, sirs, that in this country we will never get 
 things right until we stop borrowing, and pay as we go. 
 It is this temptation to borrow, and borrow, and borrow, 
 that keeps the people everlastingly praying to the golden 
 calf for help, and just at the minute they expect the help 
 the golden calf treads on them. The judgments of God, 
 like Moses in the text, will rush in and break up this 
 worship; and I say, let the work go on until every man 
 shall learn to speak truth with his neighbor, and those 
 who make engagements shall feel themselves bound to 
 keep them, and when a man who will not repent of his 
 business iniquity, but goes on wishing to satiate his can- 
 nibal appetite by devouring widows' houses, shall, by 
 the law of the land, be compelled to exchange the brown 
 stone front on Madison Avenue or Beacon Hill for New- 
 gate or Sing Sing. Let the golden calf perish! 
 
 But, my friends, if we have made this world our god, 
 when we come to die we will see our idol demolished. 
 How much of this world are you going to take with you 
 into the next % Will you have two pockets — one in each 
 side of your shroud ? Will you cushion your coffin with 
 bonds and mortgages and certificates of stock? Ah! 
 
300 
 
 THE WORSHIP OF TilE GULDEN CALF. 
 
 The ferry-boat that crosses this Jordan takes no baggage 
 — nothing heavier than a spirit. You may, perhaps, 
 take five hundred dollars with you two or three miles, 
 in the shape of funeral trappings, to Greenwood, but you 
 will have to leave them there. It would not be safe for 
 you to lie down there with a gold watch or a diamond 
 ring; it would be a temptation to the pillagers. Ah, 
 my friends ! if we have made this world our god, when 
 we die we will see our idol ground to pieces by our 
 pillow, and we will have to drink it in bitter regrets for 
 the wasted opportunities of a lifetime. Soon we will be 
 gone. O! this is a fleeting world, it is a dying world. 
 A man who had worshiped it all his days in his dying 
 moment described himself when he said: "Fool! fool I 
 fool!" 
 
 I want you to change temples, and to give up the wor- 
 ship of this unsatisfying and cruel god for the service of 
 the Lord Jesus Christ. Here is the gold that will never 
 crumble. Here are securities that will never fail. Here 
 are banks that will never break. Here is an altar on 
 which there has been one sacrifice once for all. Here is 
 a God who will comfort you when you are in trouble, 
 and soothe you when you are sick, and save you when 
 you die. When your parents have breathed their last, 
 and the old, wrinkled, and trembling hands can no more 
 be put upon your head for a blessing, he will be to you 
 father and mother both, giving you the defense of the one 
 and the comfort of the other ; and when your children 
 go away from you, the sweet darlings, you will not kiss 
 them good-by for ever. He only wants to hold them for 
 you a little while. He will give them back to you again, 
 and lie will have them all waiting for you at the gates 
 of eternal welcome. Oh! what a God he is! He will 
 allow you to come so close this morning that you can 
 
THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 
 
 301 
 
 put your arms around his neck, while he in response 
 will put his arms around your neck, and all the windows 
 of heaven will be hoisted to let the redeemed look out 
 and see the spectacle of a rejoicing Father and a returned 
 prodigal locked in glorious embrace. Quit worshiping 
 the golden calf, and bow this day before him in whose 
 presence we must all appear when the world has turned 
 to ashes and the scorched parchment of the sky shall be 
 rolled together like an historic scrolL 
 
Z02 
 
 DRY-GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 DRY-GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 "Whose adorning, let it not be. . . .putting on of apparel." — 
 
 1 Peter iii : 3. 
 
 My subject is dry goods religion. That we should all 
 be clad, is proved by the opening of the first wardrobe in 
 Paradise, with its apparel of dark green. That we should 
 all, as far as our means allow us, be beautifully and grace- 
 fully appareled, is proved by the fact that God never 
 made a wave but he gilded it with golden sunbeams, or 
 a tree but he garlanded it with blossoms, or a sky but 
 he studded it with stars, or allowed even the smoke of a 
 furnace to ascend but he columned and turreted and 
 domed and scrolled it into outlines of indescribable 
 gracefulness. When I see the apple-orchards of the 
 spring and the pageantry of the autumnal forests, I come 
 to the conclusion that if nature ever does join the Church, 
 while she may be a Quaker in the silence of her worship, 
 she never will be a Quaker in the style of her dress. 
 Why the notches of a fern leaf, or the stamen of a water 
 lily? Why, when the day departs, does it let the folding 
 doors of heaven stay open so long, when it might go in 
 so quickly? One summer morning I saw an army of a 
 million spears, each one adorned with a diamond of the 
 first water — I mean the grass with the dew on it. When 
 the prodigal came home his father not only put a coat 
 on his back, but jewelry on his hand. Christ wore a 
 beard. Paul, the bachelor apostle, not afflicted with any 
 sentimentality, admired the arrangement of a woman's 
 
DRY— GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 303 
 
 hair when he said, in hid epistle, " if a woman have long 
 hair, it is a glory unto her." There will be fashion in 
 heaven as on earth, b - it will be a different kind of 
 fashion. It will decide the color of the dress; and the 
 population of that country, by a beautiful law, will wear 
 white. I say these things as a background to my ser- 
 mon, to show you that I have no prim, precise, prudish, 
 or cast-iron theories on the subject of human apparel. 
 But the goddess of fashion has set up her throne in this 
 country and at the sound of the timbrels we are all ex- 
 pected to fall down and worship. The old and new tes- 
 tament of her bible are Madame Demoresfs Magazine 
 and Harper- s Bazar. Her altars smoke with the sac- 
 rifice of tho bodies, minds, and souls of ten thousand vic- 
 tims. In her temple four people stand in the organ-loft, 
 and from them there comes down a cold drizzle of music, 
 freezing on the ears of her worshipers. This goddess 
 of fashion has become a rival of the Lord of heaven and 
 earth, and it is high time that we unlimbered our bat- 
 teries against this idolatry. When I come to count the 
 victims of fashion I find as many masculine as feminine. 
 Men make an easy tirade against woman, as though she 
 were the chief worshiper at this idolatrous shrine, and 
 no doubt some men in the more conspicuous part of tho 
 pew have already cast glances at the more retired part 
 of the pew, their look a prophecy of a generous distribu- 
 My sermon shall be as appropriate for one end of the 
 pew as for the other. 
 
 Men are as much the idolators of fashion as women, 
 but they sacrifice on a different part of the altar. With 
 men, the fashion goes to cigars and club-rooms and yacht- 
 ing parties and wine suppers. In the United States the 
 men chew up and smoke one hundred millions of dol- 
 
304 
 
 DRY-GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 lars' worth of tobacco every year. That is their fashion. 
 In London, not long ago, a man died who started in life 
 with seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but he ate 
 it all up in gluttonies, sending his agents to all parts of 
 the earth for some rare delicacy for the palate, some- 
 times one plate of food costing him three or four hun- 
 dred dollars. He ate up his whole fortune, and had only 
 one guinea left; with that he bought a woodcock, and 
 had it dressed in the very best style, ate it, gave two 
 hours for digestion, then walked out on Westminster 
 Bridge and threw himself into the Thames, and died, 
 doing on a large scale what you and I have often seen 
 done on a small scale. But men do not abstain from 
 millinery and elaboration of skirt through any superi- 
 ority of humility. It is only because such appendages 
 would be a blockade to business. What would sashes 
 and trains three and a half yards long do in a stock mar- 
 ket? And yet men are the disciples of fashion just as 
 much as women. Some of them wear boots so tight they 
 can hardly walk in the paths of righteousness. And 
 there are men who buy expensive suits of clothes and 
 never pay for them, and who go through the streets in 
 great stripes of color like animated checker-boards. Then 
 there are multitudes of men who, not satisfied with the 
 bodies the Lord gave them, are padded so that their 
 shoulders shall be square, carrying around a small cot- 
 ton plantation. And I understand a great many of them 
 now paint their eyebrows and their lips, and I have heard 
 from good authority that there are multitudes of men in 
 Brooklyn and New York — men — things have got to such 
 an awful pass — multitudes of men wearing corsets! I 
 eay these things because I want to show you that I am 
 impartial in my discourse, and that both sexes, in the 
 language of the Surrogate's office, shall "share and share 
 
DRY- GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 305 
 
 alike." As God may help me, I shall show you what 
 are the destroying and death ful influences of inordinate 
 fashion. 
 
 The first baleful influence I notice is in fraud, ill- 
 imitable and ghastly. Do you know that Arnold of 
 the Revolution proposed to sell his country in order to 
 get money to support his wife's wardrobe? I declare 
 here before God and this people that the effort to keep 
 up expensive establishments in this country is sending 
 more business men to temporal perdition than all other 
 causes combined. What was it that sent Gilman to the 
 penitentiary, and Philadelphia Morton to the watering 
 of stocks, and the life insurance presidents to perjured 
 statements about their assets, and has completely upset 
 our American finances? What was it that overthrew 
 Belknap, the United States Secretary at Washington, the 
 crash of whose fall shook the continent? But why should 
 I go to these famous defaultings to show what men will 
 do in order to keep up great home style and expensive 
 wardrobe, when you and I know scores of men who are 
 put to their wit's end, and are lashed from January to 
 December in the attempt. Our Washington politicians 
 may theorize until the expiration of their terms of office 
 as to the best way of improving our monetary condition 
 in this country; it will be of no use, and things will be 
 no better until we learn to put on our heads, and backs, 
 and feet, and hands no more than we can pay for. 
 
 There are clerks in stores and banks on limited sal- 
 aries, who, in the vain attempt to keep the wardrobe of 
 their family as showy as other folk's wardrobes, are 
 dying of muffs, and diamonds, and camel's hair shawls, 
 and high hats, and they have nothing left except what 
 they give to cigars and wine suppers, and they die before 
 their time and they will expect us ministers to preach 
 
306 
 
 DKY— GOODS KKLIOION. 
 
 about them as though they were the victims oi early 
 piety, and after a high-class funeral, with silver handles 
 at the side of their coffin, of extraordinary brightness, it 
 will be found out that the undertaker is cheated out of 
 his legitimate expenses! Do not send to me to preach 
 the funeral sermon of a man who dies like that. I will 
 blurt out the whole truth, and tell that he was strangled 
 to death by his wife's ribbons! The country is dressed 
 to death. You are not surprised to find that the put- 
 ting up of one public building in New York cost mil- 
 lions of dollars more than it ought to have cost, when 
 you find that the man who gave out the contracts paid 
 more than five thousand dollars for his daughter's wed- 
 ding dress. Cashmeres of a thousand dollars each are 
 not rare on Broadway. It is estimated that there are 
 five thousand women in these two cities who have ex- 
 pended on their personal array two thousand dollars a 
 year. 
 
 What are men to do in order to keep up such home 
 wardrobes? Steal — that is the only respectable thing 
 they can do! During the last fifteen years there have 
 been innumerable fine businesses shipwrecked on the 
 wardrobe. The temptation comes in this way: A man 
 thinks more of his family than of all the world outside, 
 and if they spend the evening in describing to him the 
 superior wardrobe of the family across the street, that 
 they cannot bear the sight of, the man is thrown on his 
 gallantry and his pride of family, and, without translat- 
 ing his feelings into plain language, he goes into extor- 
 tion and issuing of false stock, and skillful penmanship 
 in writing somebody else's name at the foot of a prom- 
 issory note; and they all go down together — the husband 
 to the prison, the wife to the sewing machine, the chil- 
 dren to be taken care of by those who were called poor 
 
DRY-GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 relations. O! for some new Shakespeare to arise and 
 write the tragedy of human clothes. 
 
 Act the first of the tragedy. — A plain but beautiful 
 home. Enter, the newly-married pair. Enter, sim- 
 plicity of manner and behavior. Enter, as much hap- 
 piness as is ever found in one home. 
 
 Act the second. — Discontent with the humble home. 
 Enter, envy. Enter, jealousy. Enter, desire of display. 
 
 Act the third. — Enlargement of expenses. Enter, all 
 the queenly dressmakers. Enter, the French milliners. 
 
 Act the fourth. — The tip-top of society. Enter, princes 
 and princesses of New York life. Enter, magnificent 
 plate and equipage. Enter, everything splendid. 
 
 Act the fifth, and last. — Winding up of the scene. 
 Enter, the assignee. Enter, the sheriff. Enter, the 
 creditors. Enter, humiliation. Enter, the wrath of God. 
 Enter, the contempt of society. Enter, death. Now, 
 let the silk curtain drop on the stage. The farce is 
 ended, and the lights are out. 
 
 Will you forgive me if I say in tersest shape possible 
 that some of the men in this country have to forge and 
 to perjure and to swindle to pay for their wives' dresses! 
 I will say it, whether you forgive me or not! 
 
 Again, inordinate fashion is the foe of all Christian 
 alms-giving. Men and women put so much in personal 
 display that they often have nothing for God and the 
 cause of suffering humanity. A Christian man cracking 
 his Palais Royal glove across the back by shutting up 
 his hand to hide the one cent he puts into the poor-box! 
 A Christian woman, at the story of the Hottentots, cry- 
 ing copious tears into a twenty-five dollar handkerchief, 
 and then giving a two-cent piece to the collection, 
 thrusting it down under the bills so people will not 
 know but it was a ten-dollar gold piece! One hundred 
 
308 
 
 DEY-GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 dollars for incense to fashion. Two cents for God. God 
 gives us ninety cents out of every dollar. The other ten 
 cents by command of His Bible belong to Him. Is not 
 God liberal according to this tithing system laid down 
 in the Old Testament — is not God liberal in giving us 
 ninety cents out of a dollar, when he takes but ten? We 
 do not like that. We want to have ninety-nine cents for 
 ourselves and one for God. 
 
 Now, I would a great deal rather steal ten cents from 
 you than God. I think one reason why a great many 
 people do not get along in worldly accumulation faster 
 is because they do not observe this divine rule. God 
 says: " Well, if that man is not satisfied with ninety 
 cents of a dollar, then I will take the whole dollar, and I 
 will give it to the man or woman who is honest with 
 me." The greatest obstacle to charity in the Christian 
 church to-day is the fact that men expend so much 
 mone} 7 on their table, and women so much on their 
 dress, they have got nothing left for the work of God and 
 the world's betterment. In my first settlement at Belle- 
 ville, New Jersey, the cause of missions was being pre- 
 sented one Sabbath, and a plea for the charity of the 
 people was being made, when an old Christian man in 
 the audience lost his balance, and said right out in the 
 midst of the sermon: "Mr. Talmage, how are we to 
 give liberally to these grand and glorious causes when 
 our families dress as they do?" I did not answer that 
 question. It was the only time in my life when I had 
 nothing to say!_ 
 
 Again, inordinate fashion is distraction to public wor- 
 ship. You know very well there are a good many peo- 
 ple who come to church just as they go to the races, to 
 see who will come out first. What a flutter it makes in 
 church when some woman with extraordinary display of 
 
DRY-GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 309 
 
 fashion comes in. "What a love of a bonnet!" says 
 someone. " What a perfect fright!" say five hundred. 
 For the most merciless critics in the world are fashion 
 critics. Men and women with souls to be saved passing 
 the hour in wondering where that man got his cravat, or 
 what store that woman patronizes. In many of our 
 churches the preliminary exercises are taken up with the 
 discussion of wardrobes. It is pitiable. Is it not won- 
 derful that the Lord does not strike the meeting-houses 
 with lightning! What distraction of public worship! 
 Dying men and women, whose bodies are soon to be 
 turned into dust, yet before three worlds strutting like 
 peacocks, the awful question of the soul's destiny sub- 
 merged by the question of Creed mo re polonaise, and 
 navy blue velvet and long fan train skirt, long enough 
 to drag up the church aisle, the husband's store, office, 
 shop, factory, fortune, and the admiration of half the 
 people in the building. Men and women come late to 
 church to show their clothes. People sitting down in a 
 pew or taking up a hymn book, all absorbed at the same 
 time in personal array, to sing: 
 
 " Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings. 
 
 Thy better portion trace ; 
 Rise from transitory things, 
 
 Toward heaven, thy native place!" 
 
 I adopt the Episcopalian prayer and say: " Good Lord 
 deliver us!" 
 
 Insatiate fashion also belittles the intellect. Our 
 minds are enlarged or they dwindle just in proportion 
 to the importance of the subject on which we constantly 
 dwell. Can you imagine anything more dwarfing to 
 the human intellect than the study of fashion? I see 
 men on the street who, judging from their elaboration, 
 I think must have taken two hours to arrange their 
 
310 DKY— GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 apparel. After a few years of that kind of absorption, 
 which one of McAllister's magnifying glasses will be 
 powerful enough to make the man's character visible? 
 What will be left of a woman's intellect after giving 
 years and years to the discussion of such questions as 
 the comparison between knife-pleats and box-pleats, and 
 borderings of grey fox fur or black martin, or the com- 
 parative excellence of circulars of repped Antwerp silk 
 lined with blue fox fur or with Hudson Bay sable? They 
 all land in idiocy. I have seen men at the summer water- 
 ing-places, through fashion the mere wreck of what they 
 once were. Sallow of cheek. Meagre of limb. Hollow 
 at the chest. Showing no animation save in rushing 
 across a room to pick up a lady's fan. Simpering along 
 the corridors, the same compliments they simpered 
 twenty years ago. A New York lawyer last summer 
 at United States Hotel, Saratoga, within our hearing, 
 rushed across a room to say to a sensible woman, kt You 
 are as sweet as peaches!" The fools of fashion are 
 myriad. Fashion not only destroys the body, but it 
 makes idiotic the intellect. 
 
 Yet, my friends, I have given you only the milder 
 phase of this evil. It shuts a great multitude out of 
 heaven. The first peal of thunder that shook Sinai 
 declared: " Thou shalt have no other God before me," 
 and you will have to choose between the goddess of 
 fashion and the Christian God. There are a great many 
 seats in heaven, and they are all easy seats, but not one 
 seat for the devotee of fashion. Heaven is for meek and 
 quiet spirits. Heaven is for those who think more of 
 their souls than of their bodies. Heaven is for those 
 who have more joy in Christian charity than in dry- 
 goods religion. Why, if you with your idolatry of 
 fashion should somehow get into heaven, you would be 
 
DRY-GOODS RELIGION. 
 
 311 
 
 for putting a French roof on the "house of many man- 
 sions," and making plaits and Hamburg embroidery 
 and flounces in the robes, and yon would be for intro- 
 ducing the patterns of Butterick's Quarterly Delineator. 
 Give up this idolatry of fashion, or give up heaven. 
 What would you do standing beside the Countess of 
 Huntington, whose joy it was to build chapels for the 
 poor, or with that Christian woman of Boston, who fed 
 fifteen hundred children of the street at Faneuil Hall on 
 New Year's Day, giving out as a sort of doxology at the 
 end of the meeting a pair of shoes to each one of them; 
 or those Dorcases of modern society who have conse- 
 crated their needles to the Lord, and who will get eternal 
 reward for every stitch they take. O! men and women, 
 give up the idolatry of fashion. The rivalries and the 
 competitions of such a life are a stupendous wretched- 
 ness. You will always find some one with brighter array 
 and with more, palatial residence, and with lavender kid 
 gloves that make a tighter fit. And if you buy this 
 thing and wear it you will wish you had bought some- 
 thing else and worn it. And the frets of such a life will 
 bring the crows' feet to your temples before they are due, 
 and when you come to die you will have a miserable 
 time. I have seen men and women of fashion die, and 
 [ never saw one of them die well. The trappings off, 
 there they lay on the tumbled pillow, and there were just 
 two things that bothered them — a wasted life and a com- 
 ing eternity. I could not pacify them, for their body* 
 mind, and soul, had been exhausted in the worship of 
 fashion, and they could not appreciate the gospel. When 
 I knelt by their bedside they were mumbling out their 
 regrets and saying, " O God! O God!" Their garments 
 hung up in the wardrobe, never again to be seen by them. 
 Without any exception, so far as my memory serves me, 
 
312 
 
 DRY -GOODS KELIGION. 
 
 they died without hope, and went into eternity unpre- 
 pared. The two most ghastly death- beds on earth are, 
 the one where a man dies of delirium tremens, and the 
 other where a woman dies after having sacrificed all 
 her faculties of body, mind, and soul in the worship of 
 fashion. My friends, we must appear in judgment to 
 answer for what we have worn on our bodies as well as 
 for what repentances we have exercised with our souls. 
 On that day I see coming in, Beau Brummel of the last 
 century, without his cloak, like which all England got a 
 cloak; and without his cane, like which all England got 
 a cane; without his snuff-box, like which all England 
 got a snuff-box — he, the fop of the ages, particular about 
 everything but his morals; and Aaron Burr, without 
 the letters that down to old age he showed in pride, to 
 prove his early wicked gallantries; and Absalom without 
 his hair; and Marchioness Pompadour without her titles; 
 and Mrs. Arnold, the belle of Wall street, when that 
 was the center of fashion, without her fripperies of 
 vesture. 
 
 And in great haggardness they shall go away into 
 eternal expatriation; while among the queens of heaven- 
 ly society will be found Yashti, who wore the modest 
 veil before the palatial bacchanalians; and Hannah, who 
 annually made a little coat for Samuel at the temple; and 
 Grandmother Lois, the ancestress of Timothy, who imi- 
 tated her virtue; and Mary, who gave Jesus Christ to 
 the world; and many of you, the wives and mothers and 
 sisters and daughters of the present Christian Church, 
 who through great tribulation are entering into the 
 kingdom of God. Christ announced who would make 
 up the royal family of heaven when he said, " Whoso- 
 ever doeth the will of God, the same is my brother, my 
 sister, my mother." 
 
THE BESERV0IR8 SALTED. 
 
 313 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 THE RESERVOIRS SALTED. 
 
 " And the men of the city said unto Elisha, Behold, I pray thee, the 
 situation of this city is pleasant, as my Lord seeth; but the water is 
 naught, and the ground barren And he said, Bring me a new cruse, 
 and put salt therein. And they brought it to him. And he went 
 forth unto the spring of the waters, and east the salt in there, and said, 
 Thus saith the Lord, I have healed these waters; there shall not be 
 from thence any more death or barren land. So the waters were 
 healed unto this day." — 2 Kings ii ; 19-22. 
 
 It is difficult to estimate how much of the prosperity 
 and health of a city are dependent upon good water. 
 The day when, through well-laid pipes and from safe 
 reservoir, an abundance of water, from Croton or Ridge- 
 wood, is brought into the city, is appropriately celebrated 
 with oration and pyrotechnic display. Thank God every 
 day for clear, bright, beautiful, sparkling water, as it 
 drops in the shower, or tosses up in the fountain, or 
 rushes out at the hydrant. 
 
 The city of Jericho, notwithstanding all its physical 
 and commercial advantages, was lacking in this impor- 
 tant clement. There was enough water, but it was dis- 
 eased, and the people were crying out by reason thereof. 
 Elisha the prophet comes to the rescue. He says: " Get 
 me a new cruse; fill it with salt and bring it to me. v 
 So the cruse of salt was brought to the prophet, and I 
 see him walking out to the general reservoir, and he 
 takes that salt and throws it into the reservoir, and lo! 
 all the impurities depart, through a supernatural and 
 
314 
 
 THE RESERVOIRS SALTED. 
 
 divine influence, and the waters are good and fresh and 
 clear, and all the people clap their hands and lift up 
 their faces in their gladness. Water for Jericho — clear, 
 bright, beautiful, God-given water! 
 
 For several Sabbath mornings I have pointed out to 
 you the fountains of municipal corruption, and this 
 morning I propose to show you what are the means for 
 the rectification of those fountains. There are four or 
 five kinds of salt that have a cleansing tendency. So far 
 as God may help me this morning, 1 shall bring a cruse 
 of salt to the work, and empty it into the great reservoir 
 of municipal crime, sin, shame, ignorance, and abomina- 
 tion. 
 
 In this work of cleansing our cities, I have first to re- 
 mark that there is a vjork for the broom and the shovel 
 that nothing else can do. There always has been an inti- 
 mate connection between iniquity and dirt. The filthy 
 parts of the great cities are always the most iniquitous 
 parts. The gutters and the pavements of the Fourth 
 Ward, New York, illustrate and symbolize the character 
 of the people in the Fourth Ward. 
 
 The first thing that a bad man does when he is con- 
 verted is thoroughly to wash himself. There were, this 
 morning, on the way to the different churches, thousands 
 of men in proper apparel who, before their conversion, 
 were unfit in their Sabbath dress. When on the Sab- 
 bath I see a man uncleanly in his dress, my suspicions 
 in regard to his moral character are aroused, and they 
 are always well lounded. So as to allow no excuse for 
 lack of ablution, God has cleft the continents with rivers 
 and lakes, and has sunk five great oceans, and all the 
 world ought to be clean. Away, then, with the dirt from 
 our cities, not only because the physical health needs an 
 ablution, but because all the great moral and religious 
 
THE RESERVOIRS 8ALTKD. 
 
 315 
 
 interests of the cities demand it as a positive necessity. 
 A filthy city always has been and always will be a wicked 
 city. 
 
 Another corrective influence that we would bring to 
 bear upon the evils of our great cities is a Christian 
 printing-press. The newspapers of any place are the 
 test of its morality or immorality. The newsboy who 
 runs along the street with a roll of papers under his arm 
 is a tremendous force that cannot be turned aside nor 
 resisted, and at his every step the city is elevated or de- 
 graded. This hungry, all-devouring American mind 
 must have something to read, and upon editors and 
 authors and book-publishers and parents and teachers 
 rest the responsibility of what they shall read. Almost 
 every man you meet has a book in his hand or a news- 
 paper in his pocket. What book is it you have in your 
 hand? What newspaper is it you have in your pocket ? 
 Ministers may preach, reformers may plan, philan- 
 thropists may toil for the elevation of the suffering and 
 the criminal, but until all the newspapers of the land 
 and all the booksellers of the land set themselves against 
 an iniquitous literature — until then we will be fighting 
 against fearful odds. Every time the cylinders of Har- 
 per or Appleton or Ticknor or Peterson or Lippincott 
 turn, they make the earth quake. From them goes forth 
 a thought like an angel of light to feed and bless the 
 world, or like an angel of darkness to smite it with cor- 
 ruption and sin and shame and death. May God by His 
 omnipotent Spirit purify and elevate the American 
 printing-press! 
 
 I go on further and say that ice must depend upon the 
 school for a great deal of correcting influence. Com- 
 munity can no more afford to have ignurant men in its 
 midst than it can afford to have uncaged hyenas. Igner- 
 
316 
 
 THE RESERVOfRS SALTED. 
 
 ance is the mother of hydra-headed crime. Thirty-one 
 per cent, of all the criminals of New York State can 
 neither read nor write. Intellectual darkness is generally 
 the precursor of moral darkness. I know there are edu- 
 cated outlaws — men who, through their sharpness of in- 
 tellect, are made more dangerous. They use their fine 
 penmanship in signing other people's names, and their 
 science in ingenious burglaries, and their fine manners 
 in adroit libertinism. They go their round of sin with 
 well-cut apparel, and dangling jewelry, and watches of 
 eighteen karats, and kid gloves. They are refined, edu- 
 cated, magnificent villains. But that is the exception. 
 It is generally the case that the criminal classes are as 
 ignorant as they are wicked. For the proof of what I 
 say, go into the prisons and the penitentiaries, and look 
 upon the men and women incarcerated. The dishonesty 
 in the eye, the low passion in the lip, are not more con- 
 spicuous than the ignorance in the forehead. The igno- 
 rant classes are always the dangerous classes. Dema- 
 gogues marshal them. They are helmless, and are driven 
 before the gale. 
 
 It is high time that all city and State authority, as well 
 as the Federal Government, appreciated the awful sta- 
 tistic that while years ago in this country there was set 
 apart forty-eight millions of acres of land for school pur- 
 poses, there are now in New England one hundred and 
 ninety-one thousand people who can neither read nor 
 write, and in the State of Pennsylvania two hundred and 
 twenty-two thousand who can neither read nor write, 
 and in the State of New York two hundred and forty- 
 one thousand who can neither read nor write, while in 
 the United States there are nearly six millions who can 
 neither read nor write. A statistic enough to stagger 
 and confound any man who loves his God and his country. 
 
THE RESERVOIRS SALTEE, 
 
 317 
 
 Now, in view of this fact, I am in favor of compulsory 
 education. The Eleventh ward, in New York, has five 
 thousand children who are not in school. When parents 
 are so bestial as to neglect this duty to the child, I say 
 the law, with a strong hand, at the same time with a 
 gentle hand, ought to lead these little ones into the light 
 of intelligence and good morals. It was a beautiful tab- 
 leau when in our city a few weeks ago, a swarthy police- 
 man having picked up a lost child in the street, was 
 found appeasing its cries by a stick of candy he had 
 bought at the apple-stand. That was well done, and 
 beautifully done. But, oh! these thousands of little ones 
 through our streets, who are crying for the bread of 
 knowledge and intelligence. Shall we not give it to them ? 
 The officers of the law ought to go down into the cellars, 
 and up into the garrets, and bring out these benighted lit- 
 tle ones, and put them under educational inflences; after 
 they have passed through the bath and under the comb, 
 putting before them the spelling-book, and teaching them 
 to read the Lord's Prayer and the sermon on the Mount: 
 "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom 
 of heaven." Our city ought to be lather and mother 
 both to these outcast little ones. As a recipe for the cure 
 of much of the woe and want and crime of our city, I 
 give the words which Thorwaldsen had chiseled on the 
 open scroll in the hand of the statue of John Gutenberg, 
 the inventor of the art of printing: " Let there be light!" 
 
 Still further: reformatory societies are an important 
 element in the rectification of the public fountains. 
 Without calling any of them by name, I refer more 
 especially to those which recognize the physical as well 
 as the moral woes of the world. There was pathos and 
 a great deal of common sense in what the poor woman 
 said to Dr. Guthrie when he was telling her what a very 
 
318 
 
 THE RESERVOIRS SALTED. 
 
 good woman she ought to be. " Oh," she said, " if you 
 were as hungry and cold as I am, you could think of 
 nothing else." I believe the great want of our city is 
 the G-ospel and something to eat! Faith and repentance 
 are of infinite importance; but they cannot satisfy an 
 empty stomach! You have to go forth in this work with 
 the bread of eternal life in your right hand, and the bread 
 of this life in your left hand, and then you can touch 
 them, imitating the Lord Jesus Christ, who first broke 
 the bread and fed the multitude in the wilderness, and 
 then began to preach, recognizing the fact that while 
 people are hungry they will not listen, and they will not 
 repent. We want more common sense in the distribu- 
 tion of our charities; fewer magnificent theories, and 
 more hard work. In the last war, a few hours after the 
 battle of Antietam, I had a friend who was moving over 
 the field, and who saw a good Christian man distributing 
 tracts. My friend said to him: " This is no time to dis- 
 tribute tracts. There are three thousand men around 
 here who are bleeding to death, who have not had ban- 
 dages put on. Take care of their bodies, then give them 
 tracts." That was well said. Look after the woes of 
 the body, and then you will have some success in look- 
 ing after the woes of the soul. 
 
 Still further: the great remedial influence is the Gos- 
 pel of Christ. Take that down through the lanes of 
 suffering. Take that down amid the hovels of sin. Take 
 that up amid the mansions and palaces of your city. That 
 is the salt that can cure all the poisoned fountains of pub- 
 lic iniquity. Do you know that in this cluster of three 
 cities, New York, Jersey City, and Brooklyn, there are 
 a great multitude of homeless children ? You see I speak 
 more in regard to the youth and the children of the 
 country, because old villains are seldom reformed, and 
 
THE RESERVOIRS SALTED. 
 
 319 
 
 therefore I talk more about the little ones. They sleep 
 under the stoops, in the burned-out safe, in the wagons 
 in the streets, on the barges, wherever they can get a 
 board to cover them. And in the summer they sleep all 
 night long in the parks. Their destitution is well set 
 forth by an incident. A city missionary asked one of 
 them: "Where is your home?'' Said he: "I don't have 
 no home, sir." "Well, where are your father and 
 mother?" "They are dead, sir." " Did you ever hear 
 of Jesus Christ?" "No, I don't think I ever heard of 
 him." "Did you ever hear of God. Yes, I've heard of 
 God. Some of the poor people think it kind of lucky 
 at night to say something over about that before they 
 goto sleep. Yes, sir, I've heard of him." Think of a 
 conversation like that in a Christian city. 
 
 How many are waiting for you to come out in the 
 spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ and rescue them from 
 the wretchedness here ! A man was trying to talk with 
 a group of these outcasts, and read the Bible, and trying 
 to comfort them, and he said: "My dear boys, when your 
 father and your mother forsake you, who will take you 
 up?" They shouted "The perlice, sir; the perlice? " Oh 
 that the Church of God had arms lon^ enough and hearts 
 warm enough to take them up. How many of them 
 there are! As I was thinking of the subject this morning, 
 it seemed to me as though there was a great brink, and 
 that these little ones with cut and torn feet were coming 
 on toward it. And here is a group of orphans. O fathers 
 and mothers, what do you think of these fatherless and 
 motherless little ones ? No hand at home to take care 
 of their apparel, no heart to pity them. Said one little 
 one, when the mother died: "Who will take care of my 
 clothes now ? " The little ones are thrown out in this 
 great, cold world. They are shivering on the brink like 
 
320 
 
 THE RESERVOIRS SALTED. 
 
 lambs on the verge of a precipice. Does not your blood 
 run cold as they go over it ? 
 
 And here is another group that come on toward the 
 precipice. They are the children of besotted parents. 
 They are worse off than orphans. Look at that pale 
 cheek: woe bleached it. Look at that gash across the 
 forehead; the father struck it. Hear that heart-piercing 
 cry: a drunken mother's blasphemy compelled it. And we 
 come out and we say: "O ye suffering, peeled and 
 blistered ones, we come to help you." " Too late!" cry 
 thousands of voices. " The path we travel is steep down, 
 and we can't stop. Too late!" and we catch our breath 
 and we make a terrific outcry. " Too late!" is echoed 
 from the garret to the cellar, from the gin-shop and 
 from the brothel. " Too late!" It is too late, and they 
 go oyer. 
 
 Here is another group, an army of neglected children. 
 They come on toward the brink, and every time they 
 step ten thousand hearts break. The ground is red with 
 the blood of their feet. The air is heavy with their 
 groans. Their ranks are being filled up from all the 
 houses of iniquity and shame. Skeleton Despair pushes 
 them on toward the brink. The death-knell has already 
 begun to toll, and the angels of God hover like birds 
 over the plunge of a cataract. While these children 
 are on the brink they halt, and throw out their hands, 
 and cry: "Help! help!" O church of God, will you 
 help? Men and women bought by the blood of the Son 
 of God, will you help? while Christ cries from the 
 heavens: " Save them from going down; I am the 
 ransom." 
 
 I stopped the other day on the street and just looked 
 at the face of one of those little ones. Have you ever 
 examined the faces of the neglected children of the 
 
X 
 
 THE RESERVOIRS SALTED. 
 
 321 
 
 poor? Other children have gladness in their faces. 
 When a group of them rush across the road, it seems as 
 though a spring gust had unloosened an orchard of apple 
 blossoms. But these children of the poor. There is but 
 little ring in their laughter, and it stops quick, as though 
 some bitter memory tripped it. They have an old walk. 
 They do not skip or run up on the lumber just for the 
 pleasure of leaping down. They never bathed in the 
 mountain stream. They never waded in the brook for 
 pebbles. They never chased the butterfly across the 
 lawn, putting their hat right down where it was. 
 Childhood has been dashed out of them. Want waved 
 its wizard wand above the manger of their birth, and 
 withered leaves are lying where God intended a budding 
 giant of battle. Once in a while one of these children 
 gets out. Here is one, for instance. At ten years of age 
 he is sent out by his parents, who say to him; "Here 
 is a basket — now go off and beg and steal." The boy 
 says: " I can't steal/' They kick him into a corner. 
 That night he puts his swollen head into the straw; but 
 a voice comes from heaven, saying, " Courage, poor boy, 
 courage." Covering up his head from the bestiality, 
 and stopping his ears from the cursing, he gets on up 
 better and better. He washes his face clean at the public 
 hydrant. With a few pennies got at running errands, 
 he gets a better coat. Rough men, knowing that he 
 comes from the Five Points, say: " Back with you, you 
 little villain, to the place wheje you came from." But 
 that night the boy says: u God help me, I can't go 
 back;" and quicker than ever mother new at the cry of 
 a child's pain, the Lord responds from the heavens, 
 "Courage, poor boy, courage." His bright face gets 
 him a position. After awhile he is second clerk. Years 
 pass on, and he is first clerk. Years pass on. Th^ 
 21 
 
322 
 
 THE fctKSEKVOIRS SALTED. 
 
 glory ot' young manhood is on him. He coines into the 
 firm. He goes on from one business success to another. 
 He has achieved great fortune. He is the friend of the 
 church of God, the friend of all good institutions, and 
 one day he stands talking to the Board of Trade or to 
 the Chamber of Commerce. People say: " Do you know 
 who that is? Why, that is a merchant prince, and he 
 was born in the Five Points. " But God says in regard to 
 him something better than that: " These are they 
 which came out of great tribulation, and had their 
 robes washed and made white in the blood of the 
 Lamb." Oh, for some one to write the history of boy 
 heroes and girl heroines who have triumphed over want 
 and starvation and filth and rags. Yea, the record has 
 already been made — made by the hand of God; and 
 when these shall come at last with songs and rejoicing, 
 it will take a very broad banner to hold the names of all 
 the battle-fields on which they got the victory. 
 
 Some years ago, a roughly-clad, ragged boy came into 
 my brother's office in Xew York, and said: " Mr. Tal- 
 mage, lend me five dollars." My brother said: " Who 
 are you?" The boy replied: " I am nobody. Lend me 
 five dollars." "What do you want to do with five 
 dollars?" " Well." the boy replied, " my mother is sick 
 and poor, and I want to go into the newspaper business, 
 and I shall get a home for her, and I will pay you back." 
 My brother gave him the five dollars, of course never 
 expecting to see it again; but he said: " When will you 
 pay it?" The boy said: "I will pay it in six months, 
 sir." Time went by, and one day a lad came into my 
 brother's office, and said: * 4 There's your five dollars." 
 " What do you mean? What five dollars?" inquired my 
 brother. " Don't you remember that a boy came in here 
 six months ago and wanted to borrow five dollars to go 
 
THE RESERVOIRS SALTED. 
 
 323 
 
 into the newspaper business?" "Oh, yes, I remember. 
 Are you the lad?" "Yes," he replied. "I have got 
 along nicely. I have got a nice home for my mother 
 (she is sick yet), and I am as well clothed as you are, and 
 there's your five dollars." Oh, was he not worth saving? 
 "Why, that lad is worth fifty such boys as I have some- 
 times seen moving in elegant circles, never put to any 
 use for God or man. Worth saving! I go farther than 
 that, and tell you they are not only worth saving, but 
 they are being saved. In one reform school, through 
 which two thousand of these little ones passed, one 
 thousand nine hundred and ninety-five turned out well. 
 In other words, only five of the two thousand turned out 
 badly. There are thousands of them who, through Chris- 
 tian societies, have been transplanted to beautiful homes 
 all over this land, and there are many who, through the 
 rich grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, have already won 
 the crown. A little girl was found in the streets of Bal- 
 timore and taken into one of the reform societies, and 
 they said to her, " What is your name?" She said, " My 
 name is Mary." " What is } T our other name?" She said, 
 * 1 don't know." So they took her into the reform 
 society, and as they did not know her last name they 
 always called her " Mary Lost," since she had been 
 picked up out of the street. But she grew on, and after 
 a while the Holy Spirit came to her heart, and she be- 
 came a Christian child, and she changed her name; and 
 when anybody asked her what her name was, she said, 
 " It used to be Mary Lost; but now, since I have become 
 a Christian, it is Mary Found." 
 
 For this vast multitude, are we willing to go forth 
 from this morning's service and see what we can do, 
 employing all the agencies I have spoken of for the recti- 
 fication of the poisoned fountains ? We live in a beautiful 
 
324 
 
 THE RESEKVOIRS SALTED. 
 
 city. The lines have fallen to us in pleasant places, and 
 we have a goodly heritage; and any man who does not 
 like a residence in Brooklyn, must be a most uncom- 
 fortable and unreasonable man. But, my friends, the 
 material prosperity of a city is not its chief glory. There 
 may be fine houses and beautiful streets, and that all be 
 the garniture of a sepulcher. Some of the most pros- 
 perous cities of the world have gone down, not one stone 
 left upon another. But a city may be in ruins long be- 
 fore a tower has fallen, or a column has crumbled, or a 
 tomb has been defaced. When in a city the churches of 
 God are full of cold formalities and inanimate religion; 
 when the houses of commerce are the abode of fraud and 
 unholy traffic; when the streets are filled with crime un- 
 arrested and sin unenlightened and helplessness unpitied 
 — that city is in ruins, though every church were a St. 
 Peter's, and every moneyed institution were a Bank of 
 England, and every library were a British Museum, and 
 every house had a porch like that of Rheims and a roof 
 like that of Amiens and a tower like that of Antwerp, 
 and traceried windows like those of Freiburg. 
 
 My brethren, our pulses beat rapid^ the time away, 
 and soon we will be gone; and what we have to do for 
 the city in which we live we must do right speedily, or 
 never do it at all. In that day, when those who have 
 wrapped themselves in luxuries and despised the poor, 
 shall come to shame and everlasting contempt, I hope it 
 may be said of you and me that we gave bread to the 
 hungry, and wiped away the tear of the orphan, and upon 
 the wanderer of the street we opened the brightness and 
 benediction of a Christian home; and then, through our 
 instrumentality, it shall be known on earth and in heaven, 
 that Mary Lost became Mary Found! 
 
THESE WERE THE GREAT PRINTING HOUSES OF THE 
 
 NEW YORK DAILIES. 
 
THE BATTLE FOE BREAD. 
 
 325 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 
 
 "And the ravens brought bread and flesh in the morning, and bread 
 and flesh in the evening." — 1 Kings xvii : 6. 
 
 The ornithology of the Bible is a very interesting 
 study. The stork which knoweth her appointed time. 
 The common sparrows teaching the lesson of God's 
 providence. The ostriches of the desert, by careless 
 incubation illustrating the recklessness of parents who 
 do not take enough pains with their children. The 
 ea^le symbolizing riches which take wings and fly away. 
 The pelican, emblemizing solitude. The bat, a flake of 
 the darkness. The night hawk, the ossiirage, the cuckoo, 
 the lapwing, the osprey, by the command of God in 
 Leviticus, flung out of the world's bill of fare. I would 
 like to have been with Audubon as he went through the 
 woods, with gun and pencil bringing down and sketch- 
 ing the fowls of heaven, his unfolded portfolio thrilling 
 all Christendom. What wonderful creatures of God the 
 birds are! Some of them this morning, like the songs 
 of heaven let loose, bursting through the gates of heaven. 
 Consider their feathers, which are clothing and convey- 
 ance at the same time; the nine vertebra?: of the neck, 
 the three eyelids to each eye, the third ej T elid an extra 
 curtain for graduating the light of the sun. Some of 
 these birds scavengers and some of them orchestra. 
 Thank God for quail's whistle, and lark's carol, and the 
 twitter of the wren, called by the ancients the king of 
 
326 
 
 THE BATTLE FOli BREAD. 
 
 birds, because when the fowls of heaven went into a con- 
 test as to who could fly the highest, and the eagle swung 
 nearest the sun, a wren on the back of the eagle, after 
 the eagle was exhausted, sprang up much higher, and so 
 was called by the ancients the king of birds. Consider 
 those of them that have golden crowns and crests, show- 
 ing them to be feathered imperials. And listen to the 
 humming-bird's serenade in the ear of the honeysuckle. 
 Look at the belted kingfisher, striking like a dart from 
 sky to water. Listen to the voice of the owl, giving the 
 key-note to all croakers. And behold the condor, among 
 the Andes, battling with the reindeer. I do not know 
 whether an aquarium or aviary is the best altar from 
 which to worship God. 
 
 There is an incident in my text that baffles all the 
 ornithological wonders of the world. The grain crop 
 had been cut off. Famine was in the land. In a cave 
 by the brook Cherith sat a minister of God, Elijah, 
 waiting for something to eat. Why did he not go to 
 the neighbors? There were no neighbors, it was a wil- 
 derness. Why did he not pick some of the berries? 
 There were none. If there had been, they would have 
 been dried up. Seated, one morning at the mouth of his 
 cave, the prophet looks into the dry and pitiless heavens, 
 and he sees a flock of birds approaching. Oh! if they 
 were only partridges, or if he only had an arrow with I 
 which to bring them down. But as they come nearer 
 he finds they are not comestible, but unclean, and the 
 eating of them would be spiritual death. The strength 
 of their beak, the length of their wings, the blackness of 
 their color, their loud, harsh "cruck! cruck!" prove 
 them to be ravens. They whirr around about the 
 prophet's head, and then they come on fluttering wing 
 and pause on the level of his lips, and one of the ravens 
 
THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 
 
 327 
 
 brings bread, and another raven brings meat, and after 
 they have discharged their tiny cargo they wheel past, 
 and others come, until after a while the prophet has 
 enough, and these black servants of the wilderness table 
 are gone. For six months, and some say a whole year, 
 morning and evening, the breakfast and supper bell 
 sounded as these ravens rang out on the air their "cruck! 
 cruek!" Guess where they got the food from. The old 
 Rabbins say they got it from the kitchen of King Ahab. 
 Others say that the ravens got the food from pious Oba- 
 diah, who was in the habit of feeding the persecuted. 
 Some say that the ravens brought the food to their 
 young in the trees, and that Elijah had only to climb up 
 and get it. Some say that the whole story is improb- 
 able; for these were carnivorous birds, and the food they 
 carried was the torn flesh of living beasts, and that cere- 
 monially unclean, or it was carrion, and it would not 
 have been fit for the prophet. Some say they were not 
 ravens at all, but that the word translated " ravens " in 
 my text ought to have been translated "Arabs; " so it 
 would have read: "The Arabs brought bread and flesh 
 in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening." 
 Anything but admit the Bible to be true. Hew away at 
 this miracle until all the miracle is gone. Go on with 
 the depleting process; but know, my brother, that you 
 are robbing only one man — and that is yourself — of one 
 of the most comforting, beautiful, pathetic, and tri- 
 umphant lessons in all the ages. I can tell you who 
 these purveyors were: they were ravens. I can tell you 
 who freighted them with provisions. God. I can tell 
 you who launched them. God. I can tell yon who 
 taught them which way to fly. God. I can tell you 
 who told thein at what cave to swoop. God. I can tell 
 you who introduced raven to prophet, and prophet to 
 
32S 
 
 THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 
 
 raven. God. There is one passage I will wliisper in 
 your ear, for I would not want to utter it aloud, lest 
 some one should drop down under its power: "If any 
 man shall take away from the words of the prophesy of 
 this book, God shall take away his part out of the book 
 of life and out of the holy city." While, then, this 
 morning we watch the ravens feeding Elijah, let the 
 swift dove of God's Spirit sweep down the sky with 
 Divine food, and on outspread wing pause at the lip of 
 every soul hungering for comfort. 
 
 If I should ask you where is the seat of war to-day, 
 you would say on the Danube. No. That is compara- 
 tively a small conflict, even if all Europe should plunge 
 into it. The great conflict to-day is on the Thames, on 
 the Hudson, on the Mississippi, on the Rhine, on the 
 Nile, on the Ganges, on the Hoang Ho. It is a battle 
 that has been going on for six thousand years. The 
 troops engaged in it are twelve hundred millions, and 
 those who have fallen are vaster in numbers than those 
 who march. It is a battle for bread. Sentimentalists 
 sit in a cushioned chair, in their pictured study, with 
 their slippered feet on a damask ottoman, and say that 
 this world is a great scene of avarice and greed. It does 
 not seem so to me. If it were not for the absolute 
 necessities of the cases, nine-tenths of the stores, facto- 
 ries, shops, banking-houses, of the land would be closed 
 to-morrow. Who is that man delving in the Black 
 Hills? or toiling in a New England factory? or going 
 through a roll of bills in the bank? or measuring a fab- 
 ric on the counter? He is a champion sent forth in 
 behalf of some home circle that has to be cared for — in 
 behalf of some church of God that has to be supported — 
 in behalf of some asylum of mercy that has to be sus- 
 tained. Who is that woman bending over the sewing 
 
THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 
 
 329 
 
 machine? or carrying the bundle? or sweeping the room? 
 or mending the garment? or sweltering at the wash-tub? 
 That is Deborah, one of the Lord's heroines, battling 
 against Amalekitish want, which comes down with iron 
 chariot to crush her and hers. The great question with 
 the vast majority of people to-day is not whether Presi- 
 dent Hayes treated South Carolina and Louisiana as he 
 
 ou^ht — not whether the Turkish Sultan or the Russian 
 □ 
 
 Czar ought to be helped in this conflict — the great ques- 
 tion with the vast majority of people is: "How shall I 
 support my family ? How shall I meet my notes? How 
 shall I pay my rent? How shall I give food, clothing, 
 and education to those who are dependent upon me?" 
 Oh! if God would help me to-day to assist you in the 
 solution of that problem, the happiest man in this house 
 would be your preacher. I have gone out on a cold 
 morning with expert sportsmen to hunt for pigeons; I 
 have gone out on the meadows to hunt for quail; I have 
 gone out on the marsh to hunt for reed birds; but this 
 morning I am out for ravens. 
 
 Xotice, in the first place, in the story of my text, that 
 these winged caterers came to Elijah directly from God. 
 " I have commanded the ravens that they feed thee," we 
 find God saying in an adjoining passage. They did not 
 come out of some other cave. They did not just happen 
 to alight there. God freighted them, God launched 
 them, and God told them by what cave to swoop. That 
 is the same God that is going to supply you. He is 
 your Father. You would have to make an elaborate 
 calculation before you could tell me how many pounds 
 of food and how many yards of clothing would be neces- 
 sary for you and your family; but God knows without 
 any calculation. You have a plate at his table, and you 
 are going to be waited on, unless you act like a naughty 
 
330 
 
 THE BATTLE FOR "BREAD. 
 
 child, and kick, and scramble, and pound saucily the 
 plate", and try to upset things. God has a vast family, 
 and everything is methodized, and you are going to be 
 served, if you will only wait your turn. God has already 
 ordered all the suits of clothes you will ever need down 
 to the last suit in which you shall be laid out. God has 
 already ordered all the food you will ever eat down to 
 the last crumb that will be put in your mouth in the 
 dying sacrament. It may not be just the kind of food 
 or apparel we would prefer. The sensi ble parent depends 
 on his own judgment as to what ought to be the apparel 
 and the food of the minor in the family. The child 
 would say: "Give me sugars and confections." "Oh! 
 no," says the parent. " You must have something 
 plainer first." The child would say: "Oh! give me 
 these great blotches of color in the garment." " No," 
 says the parent; "that wouldn't be suitable." Now, 
 God is our Father, and we are minors, and he is going 
 to clothe us and feed us, although he may not always 
 yield to our infantile wish for sweets and glitter. These 
 ravens of the text did not bring pomegranates from the 
 glittering platter of King Ahab. They brought bread 
 and meat. God had all the heavens and the earth before 
 him and under him, and yet he sends this plain food 
 because it was best for Elijah to have it! Oh! be strong, 
 my hearer, in the fact that the same God is going to 
 supply you. It is never "hard times " with him. His 
 ships never break on the rocks. His banks never fail. 
 He has the supply for you, and he has the means for 
 sending it. He has not only the cargo, but the ship. If 
 it were necessary he would swing out from the heavens 
 a flock of ravens reaching from his gate to yours, until 
 the food would be flung down the sky from beak to beak 
 and from talon to talon. 
 
TIIE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 
 
 332 
 
 Notice, again, in this story of the text, that the ravens 
 did not allow Elijah to hoard up a surplus. They did 
 not bring enough on Monday to last all the week. They 
 did not bring enough one morning to last until the next 
 morning. They came twice a day, and brought jnst 
 enough for one time. You know as well as I that the 
 great fret of the world is that we want a surplus — we 
 want the ravens to bring enough for fifty years. You 
 have more confidence in the Loug Island Bank than you 
 have in the royal bank of heaven. You say: "All that 
 is very poetic, but you may have the black ravens — give 
 me the gold eagles." We had better be content with 
 just enough. If, in the morning, your family eat up all 
 the food there is in the house, do not sit down, and cry, 
 and say: " I don't know where the next meal is coming 
 from." About five, or six, or seven o'clock in the even- 
 ing just look up, and you will see two black spots on the 
 sky, and you will hear the flapping of wings, and, 
 instead of Edgar A. Poe's insane raven " alighting on 
 the chamber-door, only this, and nothing more, ' you 
 will find Elijah's two ravens, or the two ravens o 1 the 
 Lord, the one bringing bread and the other bringing 
 meat — plumed butcher and baker. 
 
 God is infinite in resource. When the city of Rochelle 
 was besieged, and the inhabitants were dying of the fam- 
 ine, the tides washed up on the beach as never before, 
 and as never since, enough shell-fish to feed the whole 
 city. God is good. There is no mistake about that. 
 History tells us that, in 1555, in England, there was a 
 great drought. The crops failed, but in Essex, on the 
 rocks, in a place where they had neither sown nor cul- 
 tured, a great crop of peas grew, until they filled a hun- 
 dred measures; and there were blossoming vines enough 
 promising as much more. But why go so far ? I c?.!x 
 
332 
 
 THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 
 
 give you a family incident. I will tell you a secret that 
 has never been told. Some generations back there was 
 a great drought in Connecticut, New England. The 
 water disappeared from the hills and the farmers living 
 on the hills drove their cattle down toward the valleys, 
 and had them supplied at the wells and fountains of the 
 neighbors. But these after awhile began to fail, and the 
 neighbors said to Mr. Birdseje, of whom I shall speak: 
 "You must not send your flocks and herds down here 
 any more; our wells are giving out." Mr. Birdseye, the 
 old Christian man, gathered his family at the altar, and 
 with his family he gathered the slaves of the household — 
 for bondage was then in vogue in Connecticut — and on 
 their knees before God they cried for water; and the 
 family story is, that there was weeping and great sobbing 
 at that altar, that the family might not perish for lack of 
 water, and that the herds and flocks might not perish. 
 The family rose from the altar. Mr. Birdseye, the old 
 man, took his staff and walked out over the hills, and in 
 a place where he had been snores of times without notic- 
 ing anything particular, he saw the ground was very 
 dark, and he took his staff, and turned up the ground, 
 and the water started; and he beckoned to his servants 
 and they came, and they brought pails and buckets until 
 all the family, and all the flocks and the herds, were 
 cared for, and then they made troughs reaching from 
 that place down to the house and barn, and the water 
 flowed, and it is a living fountain to-day! Now, I call 
 that old grandfather, Elijah, and I call that brook that 
 began to roll then, and is rolling still, the brook Cherith; 
 and the lesson to me, and to all who hear it, is, when 
 you are in great stress of circumstances, pray and dig, 
 dig and pray, and pray and dig. How does that passage 
 ito? — u The mountains shall depart, and the hills be 
 
THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 
 
 333 
 
 removed, but my loving-kindness shall not fail." If 
 jour merchandise, if your mechanism, fail, look out for 
 ravens. If you have, in your despondency, put God on 
 trial, and condemned him as guilty of cruelty, I move, 
 this morning for a new trial. If the biography of your 
 life is ever written, I will tell you what the first chapter, 
 and the middle chapter, and the last chapter will be 
 about, if it is written accurately. The first about mercy, 
 the middle chapter about mercy, the last chapter about 
 mercy. The mercy that hovered over your cradle. The 
 mercy that will hover over your grave. The mercy that 
 will cover all between. 
 
 Again, this story of the text impresses me that relief 
 came to this prophet with the most unexpected, and with 
 seemingly impossible, conveyance. If it had been a rob- 
 in red-breast, or a musical meadow-lark, or a meek turtle- 
 dove, or a sublime albatross that had brought the food 
 to Elijah, it would not have been so surprising. But no. 
 It was a bird so fierce and inauspicate that we have fash- 
 ioned one of our most forceful and repulsive words out 
 of it — ravenous. That bird has a passion for picking out 
 the eyes of men and animals. It loves to maul the sick 
 and the dying. It swailows, with vulturous guggle, 
 everything it can put its beak on; and yet all the food 
 Elijah gets for six months or a year is from the ravens. 
 So your supply is going to come from an unexpected 
 source. You think some great-hearted, generous man 
 will come along and give you his name on the back of 
 your note, or he will go security for you in some great 
 enterprise. No, he will not. God will open the heart 
 of 6ome Shylock toward you. Your relief will come 
 from the most unexpected quarter. The Providence 
 that seemed ominous will be to you more than that 
 which seemed auspicious. It will not be a chaffinch with 
 
334 
 
 THE BATTLE FOR BliEAD. 
 
 breast and wing dashed with white, and brown, and 
 chestnut: it will be a black raven. 
 
 Here is where we all make our mistake, and that is in 
 regard to the color of God's providence. A white provi- 
 dence comes to us, and we say: "O! it is mercy." Then 
 a black providence comes toward us, and we say: 4£ 0! 
 that is disaster." The white providence comes to you, 
 and you have great business success, and you have fifty 
 thousand dollars, and you get proud, and you get inde- 
 pendent of God, and you begin to feel that the prayer 
 "Give me this day my daily bread" is inappropriate for 
 you, for you have made provision for a hundred years. 
 Then a black providence comes, and it sweeps everything 
 away, and then you begin to pray, and you begin to feel 
 your dependence, and begin to be humble before God, 
 and you cry out for treasures in heaven. The black 
 providence brought you salvation. The white provi- 
 dence brought you ruin. That which seemed to be 
 harsh, and fierce, and dissonant, was your greatest mer- 
 cy. It was a raven. 
 
 There was a child born in your house. All your 
 friends congratulated you. The other children of the 
 family and of the neighborhood stood amazed looking at 
 the new-comer, and asked a great many questions, gene- 
 alogical and chronological. You said — and you said 
 truthfullv — that a white angel flew through the room 
 and left the little one there. That little one stood with 
 its two feet in the very center of your sanctuary of affec- 
 tion, and with its two hands it took hold of the altar 
 of your soul. But one day there came one of the three 
 scourges of children — scarlet fever, or croup, or diph- 
 theria — and all that bright scene vanished. The chatter- 
 ing, the strange questions, the pulling at the dresses as 
 you crossed the floor — all ceased. As the great friend of 
 
THE BATTLE FOR BKEAD. 
 
 335 
 
 children stooped down and leaned toward that cradle, 
 and took the little one in His arms, and walked away 
 with it into the bower of eternal summer, your eye be- 
 gan to follow Him, and you followed the treasure He car- 
 ried, and you have been following them ever since; and, 
 instead of thinking of heaven only once a week, as form- 
 erly, you are thinking of it all the time, and you are 
 more pure and tender-hearted than you used to be, and 
 you are patiently waiting for the day-break. It is not 
 self-righteousness in you to acknowledge that you are a 
 better man than you used to be — you are a better woman 
 than you used to be. What was it that brought you the 
 sanctifying blessing? O! it was the dark shadow on the 
 nursery; it was the dark shadow on the short grave; it 
 was the dark shadow on your broken heart; it was the 
 brooding of a great black trouble; it was a raven — it was 
 a raven. Dear Lord, teach this people that white provi- 
 dences do not always mean advancement, and that black 
 providences do not always mean retrogression. 
 
 Children of God, get up out of your despondency. 
 The Lord never had so many ravens as he has this morn- 
 ing. Fling your fret and worry to the winds. Some- 
 times, under the vexations of life, you feel like my little 
 girl of four years last week, who said, under some child- 
 ish vexations: "Oh, I wish I could go to heaven, and see 
 God, and pick flowers!" He will let you go when the 
 right time comes to pick flowers. Until then, whatever 
 you want, pray for. I suppose Elijah prayed pretty much 
 all the time. Tremendous work behind him. Tremend- 
 ous work before him. God has no spare ravens for idlers, 
 or for people who are prayerless. I put it in the boldest 
 shape possible, and I am willing to risk my eternity on 
 it: ask God in the right way for what you want, and you 
 shall have it, if it is best for you. Mrs. Jane Pithev, of 
 
330 
 
 THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 
 
 Chicago, a well-known Christian woman, was left by her 
 husband a widow with one half dollar and a cottage. She 
 was palsied, and had a mother, ninety years of age, to sup- 
 port. The widowed soul every day asked God for all that 
 was needed in the household, and the servant even was 
 astonished at the precision with which God answered the 
 prayers of that woman item by item, item by item. One 
 day, rising Irom the family altar, the servant said: "You 
 have not asked for coal, and. the coal is out." Then they 
 stood and prayed for the coal. One hour after that, the 
 servant threw open the door and said: "The coal has 
 come." A generous man, whose name I could give you, 
 had sent — as never before and never since — a supply of 
 coal. You cannot understand it. I do. Havens! Ravens! 
 
 My friend, you have a right to argue from precedent 
 that God is going to take care of you. Has he not done 
 it two or three times every day? That is most marvel- 
 ous. I look back and I wonder that God has given me 
 food three times a day regularly all my life- time, never 
 missing but once, and then I was lost in the mountains; 
 but that very morning and that very night I met the 
 ravens. 
 
 O! the Lord is so good that I wisli all this people 
 would trust Him with the two lives — the life you are now 
 living and that which every tick of the watch and every 
 stroke of the clock informs you is approaching. Bread 
 for your immortal soul comes to-day. See! They alight 
 on the platform. They alight on the backs of all the 
 pews. They swing among the arches. Ravens! Ravens! 
 "Blessed are they that hunger after righteousness, for 
 they shall be filled." To all the sinning, and the sor- 
 rowing, and the tempted deliverance comes this hour. 
 Look down, and you see nothing but spiritual deformi- 
 ties. Look back, and you see nothing but wasted oppor- 
 
THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 
 
 tr iitv. Cast your eve forward, and you have a fearful 
 looking-for of judgment and liery indignation, which 
 shall devour the adversary. But look up, and you behold 
 the whipped shoulders of an interceding Christ, and the 
 face of a pardoning God, and the irradiation of an open- 
 ing heaven. I hear the whir of their wings. Do you 
 not feel the rush of the air on your- cheek? Ravens! 
 Ravens! 
 
 There is only one question I want to ask: how many 
 of this audience are willing to trust God for the supply 
 of their bodies, and trust the Lord Jesus Christ for the 
 redemption of their immortal souls? Amid the clatter 
 of the hoofs and the clang of the wheels of the judg- 
 ment chariot, the whole matter will be demonstrated 
 22 
 
33S 
 
 THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
 
 CHAPTER XXYI. 
 
 THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
 "And the Lord will send the hornet." — Dear, vii: 20. 
 
 It seems as if the insect world were determined to 
 war against the human race. It is attacking the grain- 
 fields and the orchards and the vineyards. The Colora- 
 do beetle, the Nebraska grasshopper, the New Jersey lo- 
 cust, the universal potato destroyer, seem to carry on the 
 work which was begun ages ago when the iusects buzzed 
 out of Noah's ark as the door was opeued. 
 
 In my text the hornet flies out on its mission. It is a 
 species of wasp, swift in its motion and violent in its 
 sting. Its touch is torture to man or beast. We have 
 all seen the cattle run bellowing from the cut of its lan- 
 cet. In boyhood we used to stand cautiously looking at 
 the globular nest hung from the tree branch, and while 
 we were looking at the wonderful pasteboard covering 
 we were struck with something that sent us shrieking 
 away. The hornet goes in swarms. It has captains 
 over hundreds, and twenty of them attacking one man 
 will produce certain death. The Persians attempted to 
 conquer a Christian city, but the elephants and the beasts 
 on which the Persians rode were assaulted by the hornet, 
 so that the whole army was broken up and the besieged 
 city was rescued. This burning and noxious insect stung 
 out the Hittites and the Canaanites from their country. 
 What the gleaming sword and chariot of war could not 
 
THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
 
 accomplish was done by the puncture of an insect. The 
 Lord sent the hornet. 
 
 My friends, when we are assaulted by behemoths of 
 trouble — great behemoths of trouble — we become chival- 
 ric, and we assault them; we get on the high-mettled 
 steed of our courage, and we make a cavalry charge at 
 them, and, if God be with us, we come out stronger and 
 better than when we went in. .But, alas! for these in- 
 sectile annoyances of life — these foes too small to shoot— 
 these things without any avoirdupois weight — the gnats, 
 and the midges, and the flies, and the wasps, and the 
 hornets. In other words, it is the small stinging annoy- 
 ances of our life which drive us out and use us up. In- 
 to the best conditioned life, for some grand and glorious 
 purpose, God sends the hornet. 
 
 I remark in the first place that these small stinging 
 annoyances may come in the shape of a sensitive nerv- 
 ous organization. People who are prostrated under 
 typhoid fevers or with broken bones get plenty of 
 sympathy, but who pities anybody that is nervous? 
 The doctors say, and the family says, and everybody says, 
 " Oh! she 's only a little nervous; that 's all." The sound 
 of a heavy foot, the harsh clearing of a throat, a discord 
 in music, a want of harmony between the shawl and the 
 glove on the same person, a curt answer, a passing slight, 
 the wind from the east, any one of ten thousand annoy- 
 ances, opens the door for the hornet. The fact is, that 
 the vast majority of the people in this country are over- 
 worked, and their nerves are the first to give up. A 
 great multitude are under the strain of Leyden, who, 
 when he was told by his physician that if he did not stop 
 working while he was in such poor physical health he 
 would die, responded, " Doctor, whether I live or die the 
 wheel must keep going around." These persons of whom 
 
340 
 
 THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
 
 1 speak have a bleeding sensitiveness. The flies love to 
 light on anything raw, and these people are like the 
 Canaanites spoken of in the text or in the context — they 
 have a very thin covering and are vulnerable at all 
 points. "And the Lord sent the hornet." 
 
 Again, these small insect annoyances may come to us 
 in the shape of friends and acquaintances who are always 
 saying disagreeable things. There are some people you 
 cannot be with for half an hour but you feel cheered and 
 comforted. Then there are other people you cannot be 
 with for five minutes before you feel miserable. They 
 do not mean to disturb you. but they sting you to the 
 bone. They gather up all the yarn which the gossips 
 spin, and peddle- it. They gather up all the adverse crit- 
 icisms about your person, about your business, about 
 your home, about your church, and they make your ear 
 the funnel into which they pour it. They laugh heartily 
 when they tell you, as though it were a crood joke, and 
 you laugh too — outside. These people are brought to 
 our attention in the Bible, in the Book of Rath: Xaomi 
 went forth beautiful and with the finest of worldly pros- 
 pects into another land, but after awhile she came back 
 widowed, and sick, and poor. What did her friends do 
 when she came back to the city? They all went out, 
 and, instead of giving her common-sense consolation, 
 what did they do? Read the book of Ruth and find out. 
 They threw up their hands and said, Is this Xaomi?" 
 as much as to say How very bad you look! " Wliea I 
 entered the ministry I looked very pale for years, and 
 every year, for four or five years, a hundred times a year, 
 I was asked if I was not in a consumption! And pass- 
 ing through the room I would sometimes hear people 
 ^igh and say, "A-ah! not long for this world !'* I resolved 
 in those times that I never, in any conversation, would 
 
THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
 
 341 
 
 say anything depressing, and by the help of G-od I have 
 kept the resolution. These people of whom I speak reap 
 and bind in the great harvest-field of discouragement. 
 Some days you greet them with a hilarious "Good 
 morning,'' and they come buzzing at you with some de- 
 pressing information. "The Lord sent the hornet." It 
 is astonishing how some people prefer to write and to 
 say disagreeable things. That was the case when four 
 or five years ago Henry M. Stanley returned after his 
 magnificent exploit of finding Doctor David Livingstone, 
 and when Mr. Stanley stood before the savans of Europe, 
 and many of the small critics of the day, under pretence 
 of getting geographical information, put to him most in- 
 solent questions, he folded his arms and refused to an- 
 swer. At the very time when you would suppose all de- 
 cent men would have applauded the heroism of the man, 
 there were those to hiss. "The Lord sent the hornet." 
 And now at this time, when that man sits down on the 
 western coast of Africa, sick and worn perhaps in the 
 grandest achievement of the age in the way of geograph- 
 ical discovery, there are small critics all over the world to 
 buzz and buzz, and caricature and deride him, and after a 
 while he will get the London papers, and, as he opens them, 
 out will fly the hornet. When I see that there are so 
 many people in the world who like to say disagreeable 
 things, and write disagreeable things, I come almost in 
 my weaker moments to believe what a man said to me in 
 Philadelphia one Monday morning. I went to get the 
 horse that was at the livery, and the hostler, a plain man, 
 said to me: "Mr. Talmage, I saw that you preached to 
 the young men yesterday." I said, " Yes." He said, 
 "No use, no use; man's a failure." 
 
 The small insect annoyances of life sometimes come in 
 the shape of a local physical trouble, which dues not 
 
342 
 
 THE UOKNKt's MISSION. 
 
 amount to a positive prostration, but which bothers you 
 when you want to feel the best. Perhaps it is a sick 
 headache which has been .the plague of your life, and 
 you appoint some occasion of mirth, or sociality, or use- 
 fulness, aud when the clock strikes the hour you cannot 
 make your appearance. Perhaps the trouble is between 
 the ear and the forehead, in the shape of a neuralgic 
 twinge. Nobody can sec it or sympathize with you; but 
 just at the time when you want your intellect clearest, 
 and your disposition brightest, you feel a sharp, keen, 
 disconcerting thrust. "The Lord sent the hornet." 
 
 Perhaps these small insect annoyances will come in 
 the shape of a domestic irritation. The parlor and the 
 kitchen do not always harmonize. To get good service 
 and to keep it is one of the great questions of the coun- 
 try. Sometimes it may be the arrogancy and inconsid- 
 erateness of employers; but whatever be the fact, we all 
 admit there are these insect annoyances winging their 
 way out from the culinary department. If the grace of 
 God be not in the heart of the housekeeper, she cannot 
 maintain her equilibrium. The men come home at night 
 and hear the story of these annoyances, and say: a Oh! 
 these home troubles are very little things." They are 
 small, small as wasps, but they sting. Martha's nerves 
 were all unstrung when she rushed in asking Christ to 
 reprove Mary, and there are tens of thousands of women 
 who are dying, stung to death by these pestiferous do- 
 mestic annoyances. "The Lord sent the hornet." 
 
 These small insect disturbances may also come in the 
 shape of business irritations. There are men here who 
 went through 1857 and Sept. 24, 1S69, without losing 
 their balance, who arc every day unhorsed by little an- 
 noyances — a clerk's ill-manners, or a blot of ink on a bill 
 of lading, or the extravagance of a partner who over- 
 
THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
 
 313 
 
 draws his account, or the underselling by a business 
 rival, or the whispering of business confidences in the 
 street, or the making of some little bad debt which was 
 against your judgment, just to please somebody else. It 
 is not the panics that kill the merchants. Panics come 
 only once in ten or twenty years. It is the constant din 
 of these every-day annoyances which is sending so many 
 of our best merchants into nervous dyspepsia and paraly- 
 sis and the grave. When our national commerce fell flat 
 on its face, these men stood up and felt almost defiant; 
 but their life is giving way now under the swarm of 
 these pestiferous annoyances. " The Lord sent the 
 hornet." 
 
 I have noticed in the history of some of my congre- 
 gation that their annoyances are -multiplying, and that 
 they have a hundred there they used to have ten. The 
 naturalist tells us that a wasp sometimes has a family of 
 twenty thousand wasps, and it does seem as if every an- 
 noyance of your life bred a million. By the help of 
 God to-day I want to show you the other side. The 
 hornet is of no use? Oh, yes! The naturalists tell us 
 they are very important in the world's economy; they 
 kill spiders and they clear the atmosphere; and I really 
 believe God sends the annoyances of our life upon us 
 to kill the spiders of the soul and to clear the atmos- 
 phere of our skies. These annoyances are sent on us, I 
 think, to wake us up from our lethargy. There is noth- 
 ing that makes a man so lively as a nest of "yellow 
 jackets," and I think that these annoyances are intended 
 to persuade us of the fact that this is not a world for us 
 to stop in. If we had a bed of everything that was at- 
 tractive and soft and easy, what would we want of 
 heaven? You think that the hollow tree sends the hor- 
 
THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
 
 net, or yon think the deviL sends the hornet. I want to 
 correct jour opinion. " The Lord sent the hornet.' 1 
 
 Then I also think these annoyances come upon us to 
 culture our patience. In the gymnasium you find upright 
 parallel bars — bars with holes over each other for pegs 
 to be put in.* Then the gymnast takes a peg in each 
 hand and he begins to climb, one inch at a time, or two 
 inches, and getting his strength cultured, reaches after a 
 while the ceiling. And it seems to me that these annoy- 
 ances in life are a moral gymnasium, each worry a peg 
 by which we are to climb higher and higher in Christian 
 attainment. We all love to see patience, but it cannot 
 be cultured in fair weather. It is a child of the storm. 
 If you had everything desirable and there was nothing 
 more to get, what would you want with patience? The 
 only time to culture it is when you are slandered and 
 cheated, and sick and half dead. "Oh," you say, "if I 
 only had the circumstances of some well-to-do man I 
 would be patient too." You might as well say, " If it 
 were not for this water I would swim;" or, "I could 
 shoot this gun if it were not for the caps." When you 
 stand chin-deep in annoyances is the time for you to swim 
 out toward the great headlands of Christian attainment, 
 and when your life is loaded to the muzzle with repul- 
 sive annoyances — that is the time to draw the trigger. 
 ^Nothing but the furnace will ever burn out of us the 
 clinker and the slag. I have formed this theory in re- 
 gard to small annoyances and vexations: It takes just so 
 much trouble to fit us for usefulness and for heaven. 
 The only question is, whether we shall take it in the 
 bulk, or pulverized and granulated. Here is one man 
 who takes it in the bulk. His back is broken, or his 
 eyesight put out, or some other awful calamity befalls 
 him; while the vast majority of people take the thing piece- 
 
THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
 
 3-45 
 
 meal. Which way would you rather have it? Of course in 
 piecemeal. Better have five aching teeth than one broken 
 jaw. Better ten fly-blisters than an amputation. Better 
 twenty squalls than one cyclone. There may be a differ- 
 ence of opinion as to allopathy and homoepathy; but in 
 this matter of trouble I like homoeopathic doses — small 
 pellets of annoyance rather than some knock-down dose 
 of calamity. Instead of the thunderbolt give us the hor- 
 net. If you have a bank you would a great deal rather 
 that fifty men should come in with cheques less than a 
 hundred dollars than to have two depositors come in the 
 same day each wanting his ten thousand dollars. In 
 this latter case, you cough and look down at the floor 
 and up at the ceiling before 3 t ou look into the safe. 
 Now, my friends, would you not rather have these small 
 drafts of annoyance on your bank of faith than some all- 
 staggering demand upon your endurance? I want to 
 make you strong, that you will not surrender to small 
 annoyances. In the village of Hamelin, tradition says, 
 there was an invasion of rats, and these small creatures 
 almost devoured the town and threatened the lives of the 
 population, and the story is that a piper came out one 
 day and played a very sweet tune, and all the vermin 
 followed him — followed him to the banks of the Weser 
 and then he blew a blast and they dropped in and disap- 
 peared forever. Of course this is a fable, but I wish I 
 could, on the sweet flute of the Gospel, draw forth all the 
 nibbling and burrowing annoyances of your life, and play 
 them down into the depths forever. How many touches 
 did the artist give to his picture of 'Ootopaxi," or his 
 "Heart of the Andes?" I suppose about fifty thousand 
 touches. I hear the canvas saving, "Why do you keep 
 me trembling with that pencil so long? Why don't you 
 put it on in one dash?" " No," says the artist, "I know 
 
346 
 
 the hornet's mission. 
 
 how to make a painting; it will take fifty thousand of 
 these touches." And I want you 3 my friends, to under- 
 stand that it is these ten thousand annoyances which 
 under God, are making up the picture of your life, to be 
 hung at last in the galleries of heaven, fit for angels to 
 look at. God knows how to make a picture. 
 
 If I had my way with you I would have you possess 
 all possible worldly prosperity. I would have you each 
 one a garden — a river running through it, geraniums 
 and shrubs on the sides, and the grass and flowers as 
 beautiful as though the rainbow had fallen. I would 
 have you a house, a splendid mansion, and the bed 
 should be covered with upholstery dipped in the setting 
 sun. I would have every hall in your house set with stat- 
 ues and statuettes, and then I would have the four quart- 
 ers of the globe pour in all their luxuries on your table, 
 and you should have forks of silver and knives of gold, 
 inlaid with diamonds and amethysts. Then you should 
 each one of you have the finest horses, and your pick of 
 the equipages of the world. Then I would have you 
 live a hundred and fifty years, and you should not have 
 a pain or ache until the last breath. " 'Not each one of 
 us?*' you say. Yes, each one of you. "Not to your 
 enemies?" Yes; the only difference I would make with 
 them would be that I would put a little extra gilt on 
 their walls and a little extra embroidery on their slippers. 
 But you say, "Why does not God give us all these 
 things?" Ah! I bethink myself. He is wiser. It would 
 make fools and sluggards of us if we had our way. No 
 man puts his best picture in the portico or vestibule of 
 his house. God meant this world to be only the vesti- 
 bule of heaven, that great gallery of the universe toward 
 which we are aspiring. We must not have it too good 
 in this world, or we would want no heaven. You are 
 
THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
 
 317 
 
 surprised that aged people are so willing to go out of 
 this world. I will tell you the reason. It is not only 
 because of the bright prospects in heaven, but it is be- 
 cause they feel that seventy years of annoyance is 
 enough. They would have lain down in the soft mead- 
 ows of this world forever, but " God sent the hornet." 
 
 My friends, I shall not have preached in vain if I have 
 shown you that the annoyances of life, the small annoy- 
 ances, may be subservient to your present and eternal ad- 
 vantage. Poly carp was condemned to be burned at the 
 stake. The stake was planted. He was fastened to it, 
 the faggots were placed round about the stake, they were 
 kindled, but, by some strange current of the atmosphere, 
 history tells us, the flames bent outward like the sails of 
 a ship under a strong breeze, and then far above they 
 came together, making a canopy; so that instead of being 
 destroyed by the flames, there he stood in a flamboy- 
 ant bower planted by his persecutors. They had to take 
 his life in another way, by the point of the poinard. 
 And I have to tell you this morning that God can make 
 all the flames of your trial a wall of defense and a cano- 
 py for the soul. God is just as willing to fulfill to you as 
 he was to Polycarp the promise, " When thou passest 
 through the fire thou shalt not be burned." In heaven 
 you will acknowledge the fact that you never had one 
 annoyance too many, and through all eternity you will 
 be grateful that in this world the Lord did send the hor- 
 net. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh 
 in the morning." "All things work together for good to 
 those who love God." The Lord sent the sunshine. 
 "The Lord sent the hornet." 
 
348 
 
 THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 Other sheep I have which are not of this fold. — John x: 16. 
 
 There is no monopoly in religion. The grace of God 
 is not a little property that we may fence of! and 
 have all to ourselves. It is not a king's park at which 
 we look through a barred gate-way, wishing that we 
 might go in and see the deer and the statuary, and pluck 
 the flowers and fruits in the royal conservatory. "No, it 
 is the Father's orchard, and everywhere there are bars 
 that we may let down and gates that we may swing 
 open. 
 
 In my boyhood, next to the country school-house, 
 there was an orchard of apples, owned by a very lame 
 man, who, although there were apples in the place per- 
 petually decaying, and by scores and scores of bushels, 
 never would allow any of us to touch the fruit. One 
 day, in the sinfulness of a nature inherited from our 
 first parents, who were ruined by the same temptation, 
 some of us invaded that orchard ; but soon retreated, for 
 the man came after us at a speed reckless of making his 
 lameness worse, and cried out: "Boys, drop those apples, 
 or I'll set the dog on you!" 
 
 Well, my friends, there are Christian men who have 
 the Church under severe guard. There is fruit in this 
 orchard for the whole world; but they have a rough and 
 unsympathetic way of accosting outsiders, as though 
 they had no business here, though the Lord wants them 
 
THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 349 
 
 all to come and take the largest and the lipest fruit on 
 the premises. Have you an idea that because you were 
 baptized at thirteen months of age, and because you have 
 all your life been under hallowed influences, that there- 
 fore you have a right to one whole side of the Lord's 
 table, spreading yourself out and taking up the entire 
 room? I tell you no. You will have to haul in your 
 elbows, for I shall to-night place on either side of you 
 those whom you never expected would sit there; for, as 
 Christ said to the Jews long ago, so he says to you and 
 to me to-night: "Other sheep I have which are not of 
 this fold." 
 
 ]\lacDona!d, the Scotchman, has four or five dozen 
 head of sheep. Some of them are browsing on the 
 heather, some of them are lying down under the trees, 
 some of them are in his yard; they are scattered around 
 in eight or ten different places. Cameron, his neighbor, 
 comes over and says: "I see you have thirty sheep; I 
 have just counted them." "No," says MacDonald, "I 
 have a great many more sheep than that. Some are 
 here, and some are elsewhere. They are scattered all 
 around about. I have four or five thousand in my flocks. 
 Other sheep I have, which are not in this fold.' " 
 
 So Christ says to us. Here is a knot of Christians 
 and there is a knot of Christians, but they make up a 
 small part of the flock. Here is the Episcopal fold, the 
 Methodist fold, the Lutheran fold, the Congregational 
 fold, the Presbyterian fold, the Baptist and the Pedo-Bap- 
 tist fold, the only difference between these last two being 
 the mode of sheep- washing; and so they are scattered all 
 over; and we come with our statistics, and say there are so 
 many thousand of the Lord's sheep; but Christ responds: 
 "Xo, no; you have not seen more than one out of a 
 thousand of my flock. They are scattered all over the 
 
350 THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 earth. 'Other sheep I have which are not of this fold.* " 
 Christ, in my text, was prophesying the conversion of 
 the Gentiles with as much confidence as though they 
 were already converted, and he is, to-night, in the words 
 of my text, prophesying the coming of a great multi- 
 tude of outsiders that you never supposed would come 
 in, saying to you and saying to me: "Other sheep I have 
 which are not of this fold." 
 
 In the first place, I remark, that the heavenly Shep- 
 herd will find many of his sheep amid the non-church- 
 goers. There are congregations where they are all Chris- 
 tians, and they seem to be completely finished, and they 
 remind one of the skeleton-leaves which, by chemical 
 preparation, have had all the greenness and verdure 
 taken off of them, and are left cold, and white, and del- 
 icate, nothing wanting but a glass case to put over them. 
 The minister of Christ has nothing to do with such 
 Christians but to come once a week, and with ostrich 
 feather dust off the accumulation of the last six days, 
 leaving them bright and crystalline as before. But the 
 other kind of a Church is an armory, with perpetual 
 sound of drum and fife, gathering recruits for the Lord 
 of hosts. We say to every applicant: "Do you want to 
 be on God's side, the safe side and the happy side? If 
 so, come in the armory and get equipped. Here is a 
 bath in which to be cleansed. Here are sandals to put 
 upon your feet. Here is a helmet for your brow. lie e 
 is a breast-plate for your heart. Here is a sword for 
 your right arm, and yonder is the battle-field. Quit 
 yourselves like men!" 
 
 There are some here to-night, who say: "I stopped 
 going to church ten or twenty years ago." My brother, 
 is it not strange that you should be the first man I 
 should talk to to-night? I know all your case; I know 
 
THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 351 
 
 it very well. You have not been accustomed to come 
 into the house of God, but I have a surprising announce- 
 ment to make to you: you are going to become one of 
 the Lord's sheep. "Ah," you say, "it is impossible. 
 You don't know how far I am from anything of that 
 kind." I know all about it. I have wandered up and 
 down the world, and I understand .your case. I have a 
 still more startling announcement to make in regard to 
 you: you are not only going to become one of the Lord's 
 sheep, but you will become one to-night. You will stay 
 after this service to be talked with about your soul. 
 People of God, pray for that man! That is the only use 
 for you to-night. I shall not break off so much as a 
 crumb for you, Christians, in this sermon, for I am going 
 to give it all to the outsiders. "Other sheep I have 
 which are not of this fold." 
 
 When the Atlantic went to pieces on Mars' Rock, 
 and the people clambered up on the beach, why did 
 not that heroic minister of the Gospel, of whom we 
 have all read, sit down and take care of those men on 
 the beach, wrapping them in flannels, kindling fire for 
 them, seeing that they got plenty of food? Ah, he knew 
 that there were others who would do that. He says: 
 "Yc ader are men and women freezing in the rigging of 
 that wreck. Boys, launch the boat!" And now I see 
 the oar-blades bend under the strong pull; but before 
 they reached the rigging a woman was frozen and dead. 
 She was washed off, poor thing! But lie says: "There 
 is a man to save;" and he cries out: "Hold on five min- 
 utes longer, and I will save you. Steady! Steady! Give 
 me j our hand. Leap into the life-boat. Thank God, he 
 is saved!" So there are those here to-night who are 
 sale on the shore of God's mercy. I will not spend any 
 time with them at all; but I see there are some who are 
 
352 
 
 THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 freezing in the r'^ging of sin, and surrounded by peri 
 lous storms. Pull away, my lads! Let us reach them! 
 Alas! one is washed off and gone. There is one more 
 to be saved. Let us push out for that one. Clutch the 
 rope. Oh! dying man, clutch it as with a death-grip. 
 Steady, now, on the slippery places. Steady. There! 
 Saved! Saved! Just as I thought. For Christ has de- 
 clared that there are some still in the breakers who 
 shall come ashore. "Other sheep I have which are not 
 of this fold." 
 
 Christ commands his ministers to be fishermen; and 
 when I go fishing I do not want to go among other 
 churches, but into the wide world; not sitting along 
 Hohokus Creek, where eight or ten other persons are 
 sitting with hook and line, but, like the fishermen of 
 Newfoundland, sailing off and dropping net away out- 
 side, forty or fifty miles from shore. Yes, there are non- 
 church-goers here who will come in. Next Sabbath 
 morning and evening they will be here again, or in some 
 better church. They are this moment being swept into 
 Christian associations. Their voice will be heard in 
 public prayer. They will die in peace, their bed sur- 
 rounded by Christian sympathies, and be carried out by 
 devout men to be buried, and on their grave be chiseled 
 the words: "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the 
 death of his saints." And on Resurrection day yon 
 will get up with the dear children you have already 
 buried and with your Christian parents who have already 
 won the palm. And all that grand and glorious history 
 begins to-night. "Other sheep I have which are not of 
 this fold." 
 
 I remark again, ' the Heavenly Shepherd is going to 
 find a great many of his sheep among those who are 
 positive rejectors of Christianity. I do not know how 
 
THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 353 
 
 you came to reject Christianity. It may have been 
 through hearing Theodore Parker preach, or through 
 reading Kenan's "Life of Jesus," or through the infidel 
 talk of some young man in your store. It may have 
 been through the trickery of some professed Christian 
 man who disgusted you with religion. I do not ask you 
 how you became so; but you frankly tell me to-night 
 that you do reject it. You do not believe that Christ is 
 a Divine being, although you admit that he was a very 
 good man. You do not believe that the Bibie was in- 
 spired of God, although you think that there are some 
 very fine things in it. You believe that the Scriptural 
 description of Eden was only an allegory. There are 
 fifty things that I believe that you do not believe And 
 yet you are an accommodating man. Everybody that 
 knows you says that of you. If 1 should ask you to do 
 a kindness for me, or if any one else should ask of you a 
 kinv.-iess, you would do it. Now, I have a kindness to 
 ask of you to-night. It is something that will cost you 
 nothing and will give me great delight. I want you by 
 experiment to try the power of Christ's religion. If I 
 should come to you, and you were very sick, and doctors 
 had given you up, and said there was no chance for you, 
 and I should take out a bottle, and say: "Here is a med- 
 icine that will cure you; it has cured fifty people, and it 
 will cure you." You would say: "I have no confidence 
 in it." I would say: "Won't you take it to oblige me?" 
 "Well," you would say, "If it's any accommodation to 
 yon, I'll take it." My friend, will you be just as accom- 
 modating in matters of religion? There are some of you 
 who have found out that this world cannot satisfy your 
 soul. You are like the man who told me last Sabbath 
 night, after the service was over, "I have tried thi- 
 world and found it an insufficient portion. Tell me o' 
 23 
 
354 
 
 THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 something better." You have come to that. You are 
 sick for the need of Divine medicament. Now, I come 
 and tell you of a Physician who will cure yon, who has 
 <?ured hundreds and hundreds who were sick as you are. 
 "Oh," you say, "I have no confidence in him." But 
 will you not try him? Accommodate me in this matter; 
 oblige me in this matter; just try him. I am very cer- 
 tain he will cure you. You reply: "I have no especial 
 confidence in him; but if you ask me as a matter of ac- 
 commodation, introduce him." So I do introduce him 
 — Christ, the Physician, who has cured more blind eyes, 
 and healed more ghastly wounds, and bound up more 
 broken hearts, than all the doctors since the time of 
 iEsculapius. That Divine Physician is here. Are you 
 not ready to try him? Will you not, as a pure matter 
 of experiment, try him, and state your case before him 
 to-night? Hold nothing back from him. If you can- 
 not pray, if yon do not know how to pray any other way, 
 say "O Lord Jesus Christ, this is a strange thing for 
 me to do. I know nothing about the formulas of relig- 
 ion. These Christian people have been talking so long 
 about what thou canst do for me. I am ready to do 
 whatever thou commandest me to do. I am ready to 
 take whatever thou commandest me to take. If there 
 be any power in religion, as these people say, let me 
 have the advantage of it." "Will you try that experi- 
 ment to-night? I do not at this point of my dis- 
 course say that there is anything in religion; but I 
 simply say, try it — try it. Do not take my counsel or 
 the counsel of any clergyman, if you despise clergymen. 
 Perhaps we may be talking professionally; perhaps we 
 may be prejudiced in the matter; perhaps we may be 
 hypocritical in our utterances; perhaps we may preach 
 because we are paid to preach: perhaps our advice is not 
 
THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 355 
 
 worth taking. Then take the counsel of some very re- 
 spectable laymen, as John Milton, the poet; as "William 
 Wilberforce, the statesman ; as Isaac Newton, the astron- 
 omer; as Robert Boyle, the philosopher; as Locke, the 
 metaphysician. They never preached or pretended to 
 preach; and yet putting down, one his telescope, and 
 another his parliamentary scroll, and another his electri- 
 cian's wire, they all declare the adaptedness of Christ's 
 religion to the wants and troubles of the world. If you 
 will not take the recommendation of ministers of the 
 Gospel, then take the recommendations of highly respect- 
 able laymen. Oh men, sceptical and struck through 
 with unrest, would you not like to have some of the 
 peace which broods over our souls to-night? I know all 
 about your doubts. I have been through them all. I 
 have gone through all the curriculum. I have doubted 
 whether there is a God, whether Christ is God. I have 
 doubted whether the Bible was true, I have doubted 
 the immortality of the soul, I have doubted my own ex- 
 istence, I have doubted everything; and yet, out of that 
 hot desert of doubt I have come into the broad, luxuri- 
 ant, sunshiny land of Gospel hope, and peace, and com- 
 fort; and so I have confidence in preaching to you and 
 asking you to come in. However often you may have 
 spoken against the Bible, or however much you may 
 have caricatured religion, step ashore from that rocking 
 "and tumultuous sea. If you go home to-night adhering 
 to your infidelities, you will not sleep one wink. You 
 do not want your children to come up with your skepti- 
 cism. You cannot afford to die in that midnight dark- 
 ness, can you? If you do not believe in anything else, 
 you believe in love — a father's love, a mother's love, a 
 wife's love, a child's love. Then let me tell you that 
 God loves you more than thorn all. Oh, you must come 
 
356 
 
 THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 in. You will come in. The great heart of Christ aches 
 to have you come in, and Jesus this very moment — 
 whether you sit or stand — looks into your eyes and says: 
 "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold." 
 
 Again I remark, that the Heavenly Shepherd is going 
 to find a great many sheep among those who have been 
 flung of evil habit. It makes me mad to see Christian 
 people give up a prodigal as lost. There are those who 
 talk as though the grace of God were a chain of forty or 
 fifty links, and after they had run out, there was nothing 
 to touch the depth of a very bad case. If they were 
 hunting and got off the track of the deer, they would 
 look longer among the brakes and bushes for the lost 
 game than they have been looking for that lost soul. 
 People tell us that if a man has delirium tremens twice, 
 he cannot be reclaimed; that after a woman has fallen 
 from her integrity, she cannot be restored. The Bible 
 has distinctly intimated that the Lord Almighty is ready 
 to pardon four hundred and ninety times; that is, sev- 
 enty times seven. There are men before the throne of 
 God who have wallowed in every kind of sin; but, saved 
 by the grace of Jesus, and washed in his blood, they 
 stand there radiant now. There are those who plunged 
 into the very lowest hell of Elm-street, New York, who 
 have for the tenth time been lifted up, and finally, by 
 the grace of God, they stand in heaven gloriously res- 
 cued by the grace promised to the chief of sinners. I 
 want to tell you that God loves to take hold of a very 
 bad case. When the Church casts you off, and when the 
 club-room casts you off, and when society casts you off, 
 and when business associates cast you off, and when 
 father casts you off, and when mother casts you off, and 
 when everybody casts you off, your first cry for help will 
 bend the Eternal God clear down into the ditch of your 
 
THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 357 
 
 suffering and shame. The Good Templars cannot save 
 you, although they are a grand institution. The Sons 
 of Temperance cannot save you, although they are 
 mighty for good. Signing the temperance pledge can- 
 not save you, although I believe in it. Nothing but the 
 grace of the Eternal God can save you, and that will if 
 you will throw yourself on it. There is a man in this 
 house to-night who said to me during the week: ''Unless 
 God helps me I cannot be delivered. I have tried every- 
 thing, sir; but now I have got in the habit of prayer, 
 and when I come to a drinking saloon I pray that God 
 will take me sate past, and I pray until I am past. He 
 does help me." For every man given to strong drink 
 there are scores of traps set ; and when he goes out oh 
 business to-morrow, with his bill of goods, on Broadway, 
 or John-street, or Walter-street, or Fulton-avenue, or 
 Atlantic-avenue, he will be in infinite peril, and no one 
 but the everywhere present God can see that man through. 
 Oh! they talk about the catacombs of Naples, and the 
 catacombs of Home, and the catacombs of Fgypt — the 
 burial places under the city where the dust of a great 
 multitude lie; but 1 tell you Brooklyn has its catacombs, 
 and New York its catacombs, and Boston its catacombs, 
 and Philadelphia its catacombs. They are the under- 
 ground restaurants, full of dead men's bones and all un- 
 cleanness. Young man, you know it. God help you. 
 There is no need of going into the art gallery to see in 
 skillful sculpture that wonderful representation of a man 
 and his sons wound around with serpents. There are 
 families represented in this house to-night that are 
 wrapped in the martyrdom of fang and scale and venom 
 — a living Laocoon of ghastliness and horror. What 
 are you to do? I am not speaking into the air. I am 
 talking to-night to hundreds of men who must be saved 
 
358 
 
 THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 by Christ's Gospel, or never saved at all. What are you 
 going to do? Do not put your trust in bromide of po- 
 tassium, or in Jamaica ginger, or anything that apothe- 
 caries can mix. Put your trust only in the Eternal God, 
 and he will see you through. Some of you do not have 
 temptations every day. It is a periodic temptation that 
 comes every six weeks, or every three months, when it 
 seems as if the powers of darkness kindle around about 
 your tongue the fires of the pit. It is well enough, at 
 such a time, as some of you do, to seek medical counsel; 
 but your first and most importunate cry must be to God. 
 If the fiends will drag you to the slaughter, make them 
 do it on your knees. O God! now that the paroxysm of 
 thirst is coming again upon that man, help him! Fling 
 back into the pit of hell the fiend that assaults his soul 
 this moment. Oh! my heart aches to see men go on in 
 this fearful struggle without Christ. 
 
 There are to-night in this house those whose hands so 
 tremble from dissipation that they can hardly hold a 
 book; and yet I have to tell you that they will yet preach 
 the Gospel, and on communion days carry around the 
 consecrated bread, acceptable to everybody, because of 
 their holy life, and their consecrated behavior. The 
 Lord is going to save you. Your home has got to be 
 rebuilt. Your physical health has got to be restored. 
 Your worldly business has got to be reconstructed. The 
 Church of God is going to rejoice over your disci pleship. 
 "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold." 
 
 While I have hope for all prodigals, there are some 
 people in this house to-night whom I give up as lost. I 
 mean those who have been church-goers all their life, 
 who have maintained outward morality, but who, not- 
 withstanding twenty, thirty, forty years of Christian 
 advantages, have never yielded their heart to Christ 
 
THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 359 
 
 They are Gospel hardened. I could call their names now, 
 and if they would rise up thej would rise up in scores. 
 Gospel hardened! A sermon has no more effect upon 
 them than the shining of the moon on the city pave- 
 ment. As Christ says: 'The publicans and harlots will 
 go into the kingdom of God before them." They have 
 resisted all the importunity of Divine mercy, and have 
 gone, during these thirty years, through most powerful 
 earthquakes of religious feeling, and they are farther 
 away from God than ever. After awhile they will lie 
 down sick, and some day it will be told that they are 
 dead. No hoj.e! 
 
 But I turn to outsiders with a hope that thrills through 
 my body and soul. "Other sheep I have which are not 
 of this fold." You are not Gospel hardened. You have 
 not heard or read many sermons during the last few 
 years. As you came in to-night everything was novel, 
 and all the services are suggestive of your early days. 
 How sweet the opening hymn sounded in your ears, and 
 how blessed it is in tin's place! Everything suggestive 
 of heaven. You do not weep, but the shower is not tar 
 off. You sigh, and you have noticed that there is al- 
 waj 7 s a sigh in the wind before the rain falls. There are 
 those here who would give anything if they could find 
 relief in tears. They say: "Oh, my wasted life! Oh, 
 the bitter past! Oh, the graves over which I have stum- 
 bled! Whither shall I fly? Alas for the future! Every- 
 thing is dark — so dark, so dark. God help me! God 
 pity me!" Thank the Lord for that last utterance. You 
 have begun to pray, and when a man begins to petition, 
 that sets all heaven flying this way, and God steps in 
 and beats back the hounds of temptation to their kennel^ 
 and around about the poor wounded soul puts the covert 
 of his pardoning mercy. Hark! I hear something fall. 
 
360 
 
 THE OUTSIDE SHEEP. 
 
 What was that? It is the bars of the fence around the 
 sheep-fold. The shepherd lets them down, and the 
 hunted sheep of the mountain bound in; some of them 
 their fleece torn with the brambles, some of them their 
 feet lame with the dogs; but bounding in. Thank God! 
 "Other sheep I have which are nut of this fold." 
 
THE ACIDS OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 361 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 THE ACIDS OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 When Jesus, therefore, had received the vinegar — John xix: 30. 
 
 The brigands of Jerusalem had done their work. It 
 was almost sundown, and Jesus was dying. Persons in 
 crucifixion often lingered on from day to day — crying, 
 begging, and cursing; but Christ had been exhausted by 
 years of maltreatment. Pillowless, poorly fed, flogged 
 — as bent over and tied to a low post, his bare back was 
 inflamed with the scourges intersticed with pieces of 
 lead and bone — and now for whole hours, the weight of 
 his body hung on delicate tendons, and, according to cus- 
 tom, a violent stroke under the armpits had been given 
 by the executioner. Dizzy, swooning, nauseated, fever- 
 ish — a world of agony is compressed in the two words: 
 "I thirst!'' O skies of Judea, let a drop of rain strike 
 on his burning tongue! world, with rolling rivers, 
 and sparkling hikes, and spraying fountains, give Jesus 
 something to drink! If there be any pity in earth, or 
 heaven, or hell, let it now be demonstrated m behalf of 
 this royal sufferer. The wealthy women of Jerusalem 
 used to have a fund of money with which they provided 
 wine for those people who died in crucifixion — a power- 
 ful opiate to deaden the pain; but Christ would not take 
 it. He wanted to die sober, and so he refused the wine. 
 But afterward they go to a cup of vinegar, and soak a 
 sponge in it, and put it on a stick of hyssop, and then 
 press it against the hot lips of Christ. You say the 
 
362 
 
 THE ACIDS OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 wine was an anaesthetic, and intended to relieve or deaden 
 the pain. But the vinegar was an insult. I am dis- 
 posed to adopt the theory of the old English commenta- 
 tors, who believed that instead of its being f,n opiate to 
 soothe, it was vinegar to insult. Malaga and Burgundy 
 for grand dukes and duchesses, and costly wines from 
 royal vats for bloated imperials; but stinging acids for 
 a dying Christ. He took the vinegar. 
 
 In some lives the saccharine seems to predominate. 
 Life in sunshine on a bank of flowers. A thousand 
 hands to clap approval. In December or in January, 
 looking across their table, they see all their family pres- 
 ent. Health rubicund. Skies flamboyant. Days resil- 
 ient. But in a great many cases there are not so many 
 sugars as acids. The annoyances, and the vexations, and 
 the disappointments of life overpower the successes. 
 There is a gravel in almost every shoe. An Arabian 
 legend says that there was a worm in Solomon's staff, 
 gnawing its strength away; and there is a weak spot in 
 every earthly support that a man leans on. King George 
 of England forgot all the grandeurs of his throne be- 
 cause, one day in an interview, Beau Brommell called 
 him by his first name, and addressed him as a servant, 
 crying: "George, ring the bell!" Miss Langdon, hon- 
 ored all the world over for her poetic genius, is so wor- 
 ried with the evil reports set afloat regarding her, that 
 she is found dead, with an empty bottle of prussic acid 
 in her hand. Goldsmith said that his life was a wretched 
 being, and that all that want and contempt could bring to 
 it had been brought, and cries out: "What, then, is there 
 formidable in a jail?" Correggio's fine painting is hung 
 up for a tavern sign. Hogarth cannot sell his best paint- 
 ings except through a raffle. Andrew Delsart makes the 
 great fresco in the Church of the Annunciata, at Flor- 
 
THE ACIDS OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 303 
 
 ence, aDd gets for pay a sack of corn; and there are an- 
 noyances and vexations in high places as well as in low- 
 places, showing that in a great many lives the sours are 
 greater than the sweets. "When Jesus, therefore, had 
 received the vinegar." 
 
 It is absurd to suppose that a man who has alwayg 
 been well can sympathize with those who are sick; or 
 that one who has always been honored can appreciate the 
 sorrow of those who are despised; or that one who has 
 been born to a great fortune can understand the distress 
 and the straits of those who are destitute. The fact that 
 Christ himself took the vinegar makes him able to sym- 
 pathize to-day and forever with all those whose cup is 
 filled with sharp acids of this life. He took the vinegar! 
 
 In the first place, there is the sourness of betrayal. 
 The treachery of Judas hurt Christ's feelings more than 
 all the friendship of his disciples did him good. You 
 have had many friends; but there was one friend upon 
 whom you put especial stress. You feasted him. You 
 loaned him money. You befriended him in the darli 
 passes of life, when he especially needed a friend. After- 
 ward, he turned upon you, and he took advantage of 
 your former intimacies. Pie wrote against you. He 
 talked against you. He microscopized your faults. He 
 fiung contempt at you when you ought to have received 
 from him nothing but gratitude. At first, you could 
 not sleep at night. Then you went about with a sense 
 of having been stung. That difficulty will never be 
 healed, for though mutual friends may arbitrate in the 
 matter until you shall shake hands, the old cordiality 
 will never come back. Now, 1 commend to all such the 
 sympathy of a betrayed Christ! Why, they sold him 
 for less than our twenty dollars! They all forsook him, 
 
THE CITY VAN OR BLACK MARIA. 
 
THE ACIDS OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 365 
 
 There is also the sourness of poverty. Your income 
 does not meet your outgoings, and that always gives an 
 honest man anxiety. There is no sign of destitution 
 about you — pleasant appearance, and a cheerful home for 
 you; but God only knows what a time you have had to 
 manage your private finances. J ust as the bills run up, 
 the wages seem to run down. But you are not the only 
 one who has not been paid for hard work. The great 
 Wilkie sold his celebrated piece — "The Blind Fiddler" — 
 for fifty guineas, although afterwards it brought its 
 thousands. The world hangs in admiration over the 
 sketch of Gainsborough, yet that very sketch hung for 
 years in the shop- window because there was not any 
 purchaser. Oliver Goldsmith sold his "Vi car of Wake- 
 field" for a few pounds, in order to keep the bailiff out of 
 the door; and the vast majority of men in all occupa- 
 tions and professions are not fully paid for their work. 
 i r ou may say nothing, but life to you is a hard push; 
 and when you sit down with your wife and talk over the 
 expenses, you both rise up discouraged. You abridge 
 here, and you abridge there, and yon get things snug for 
 smooth sailings, and lo! suddenly there is a large doc- 
 tor's bill to pay, or you have lost your pocket-book, or 
 some creditor has failed, and you are thrown a-beam end 
 Well, brother, you are in glorious company. Christ 
 owned not the house in which he stopped, or the colt on 
 which he rode, or the boat in which he sailed. He lived 
 in a borrowed house; he was buried in a borrowed grave. 
 Exposed to all kinds of weather, yet he had only one 
 suit of clothes. He breakfasted in the morning, and no 
 one could possibly tell where he could get anything to 
 eat before night. He would have been pronounced a 
 financial failure. He had to perform a miracle to get 
 money to pay a tax-bill. Not a dollar did he own. Pri- 
 
866 
 
 THE ACIDS OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 vation of domesticity; privation of nutritious food; 
 privation of a comfortable couch on which to sleep; pri- 
 vation of all worldly resources. The kings of the earth 
 had chased chalices out of which to drink; but Christ 
 had nothing but a plain cup set before him, and it was 
 very sharp, and it was very sour. He took the vinegar. 
 
 There also is the sourness of bereavement. There 
 were years that passed along before your family circle 
 was invaded by death; but the moment the charmed 
 circle was broken, everything seemed to dissolve. Hardly 
 have you put the black apparel in the wardrobe, before 
 you have again to take it out. Great and rapid changes 
 in your family record. You got the house and rejoiced 
 in it, but the charm was gone as soon as the crape hung 
 on the door-bell. The one upon whom you most de- 
 pended was taken away from you. A cold marble slab 
 lies on your heart to-day. Once, as the children romped 
 through the house, you put your hand over your aching 
 head, and said: "Oh, if I could only have it still." Oh, 
 itis^too still now. You lost your patience when the 
 tops, and the strings, and the shells were left amid floor; 
 but oh, you would be willing to have the trinkets scat- 
 tered all over the floor again, if they were scattered by 
 the same hands. With what a ruthless ploughshare be- 
 reavement rips up the heart. But Jesus know T s all about 
 that. You cannot tell him anything new in regard to 
 bereavement. He had only a few friends, and when he 
 lost one it brought tears to his eyes. Lazarus had often 
 entertained him at his house. Now Lazarus is dead 
 and buried, and Christ breaks down with emotion — the 
 convulsion of grief shuddering through all the ages of 
 bereavement. Christ knows what it is to go through 
 the house missing a familiar inmate. Christ knows 
 what it is to see an unoccupied place at the table. Were 
 
THE ACIDS OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 367 
 
 there not four of them — Mary, and Martha, and Christ, 
 and Lazarus? Four of them. But where is Lazarus? 
 Lonely and afflicfed Christ, his great loving eyes filled 
 with tears, which drop from eye to cheek, and from cheek 
 to beard, and from beard to robe, and from robe to floor. 
 Oh, yes, yes, he knows all about the loneliness and the 
 heartbreak. He took the vinegar! 
 
 Then there is the sourness of the death-hour. What- 
 ever else we may escape, that acid- sponge will be pressed 
 to our lips. I sometimes have a curiosity. to know how 
 I will behave when I come to die. Whether I will be 
 calm or excited — whether I will be filled with reminis- 
 cence or with anticipation. I cannot say. But come to 
 the point, I must and you must. In the six thousand years 
 that have passed, only two persons have got into the 
 eternal world without death, and I do not suppose that 
 God is going to send a carriage for us with horses of 
 flame, to draw us up the steeps of heaven; but I sup- 
 pose we will have to go like the preceding generations. 
 An officer from the future world will knock at the door 
 of our heart and serve on us the writ of ejectment, and 
 we will have to surrender. And we will wake up after 
 these autumnal, and wintry, and vernal, and summery 
 glories havt vanished from our vision — we will wake up 
 into a realm which has only one season, and that the 
 season of everlasting love. But you say: "I don't want 
 to breakout from my present associations. It is so chilly 
 and so damp to go down the stairs of that vault. I 
 don't want anything drawn so tightly over my eyes. If 
 there were only some way of breaking through the par- 
 tition between worlds without tearing this body all to 
 shreds. I wonder if the surgeons and the doctors can- 
 not compound a mixture by which this body and soul 
 can all the time be kept together? Is there no escape 
 
tffH THE ACID8 OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 from this separation?" None; absolutely none. So I 
 look over this audience to-day — the vast majority of you 
 seeming in good health and spirits — and yet I realize 
 that in a short time, all of us will be gone — gone from 
 earth, and gone for ever. A great many men tumble 
 through the gates of the future, as it were, and we do 
 not know where they have gone, and they only add gloom 
 and mystery to the passage; but Jesns Christ so might- 
 ily stormed the gates of that future world, that they 
 have never since been closely shut. Christ knows what 
 it is to leave this world, of the beauty of which he was 
 more appreciative than we ever could be. He knows 
 the exquisiteness of the phosphorescence of the sea; he 
 trod it. He knows the glories of the midnight heavens; 
 for they were the spangled canopy of his wilderness pil- 
 low. He knows about the lilies; he twisted them into 
 his sermon. He knows about the fowls of the air; they 
 whirred their way through his discourse. He know3 
 about the sorrows of leaving this beautiful world. Not 
 a taper was kindled in the darkness. He died physician- 
 less. He died in cold sweat, and dizziness, and hem- 
 orrhage, and agony that have put him in sympathy with 
 all the dying. He goes through Christendom, and he 
 gathers up the stings out of all the death pillows, and 
 he puts them under his own neck and head. He gathers 
 on his own tongue the burning thirsts of many genera- 
 tions. The sponge is soaked in the sorrows of all those 
 who have died in their beds as well as soaked in the sor- 
 rows of all those who perished in icy or fiery martyrdom. 
 While heaven was pitying, and earth was mocking, and 
 hell was deriding, he took the vinegar. 
 
 To all those in this audience to whom life has been an 
 acerbity — a dose they could not swallow, a draught that 
 set their teeth on edge and a-rasping — I preach the oro- 
 
THE ACLD3 OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 36 ( J 
 
 nipotent sympathy of Jesns Christ. The sister of Her- 
 schel the astronomer used to help him in his work. 
 He got all the credit; she got none. She used to spend 
 much of her time polishing the telescopes through which 
 he brought the distant worlds nigh, and it is my ambi- 
 tion now, this hour, to clear the lens of your spiritual 
 vision, so that looking through the dark night of jour 
 earthly troubles you may behold the glorious constella- 
 tion of a Savior's mercy and a Savior's love. Oh, my 
 friends, do not try to carry all your ills alone. Do not 
 put your poor shoulder under the Appenines when the 
 Almighty Christ is ready to lift up all your burdens. 
 When you have a trouble of any kind, you rush this 
 way, and that way; and you wonder what this man will 
 say about it, and what that man will say about it; and 
 you try this prescription, and that prescription, and the 
 other prescription. Oh, why do you not go straight to 
 the heart of Christ, knowing that for our own sinning 
 and suffering race he took the vinegar! 
 
 There was a vessel that had been tossed on the seas 
 for a great many weeks, and been disabled, and the sup- 
 ply of water gave out, and the crew were dying of thirst. 
 After many days, they saw a sail against the sky. They 
 signaled it. When the vessel came nearer, the people 
 on the suffering ship cried to the captain of the other 
 vessel: "Send us some water. We are dying for lack of 
 water." And the captain on the vessel that was hailed 
 responded: "Dip your buckets where you are. You are 
 in the mouth of the Amazon, and there are scores of 
 miles of fresh water all around about you, and hundreds 
 of feet deep." And then they dropped their biwkets 
 over the side of the vessel, and brought up the clear, 
 bright, fresh water, and put out the fire of their thirst. 
 So I hail you to-day, after a long and perilous voyage, 
 24 
 
 4 
 
370 
 
 THE ACIDS OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 thirsting as you are for pardon, and thirsting for com- 
 fort, and thirsting for eternal life; and I ask you, What is 
 the use of your going in that death-struck state, while 
 all around you is the deep, clear, wide, sparkling flood 
 of God's sympathetic mercy? Oh, dip your buckets, and 
 drink, and live forever. "Whosoever will, let him come 
 and take of the water of life freely." 
 
 Yet my utterance i6 almost choked at the thought that 
 there are people here who will refuse this Divine sym- 
 pathy; and they will try to fight their own battles, and 
 drink their own vinegar, and carry their own burdens; 
 and their life, instead of being a triumphal march from 
 victory to victory, will be a hobbling-on from defeat to 
 defeat, until they make final surrender to retributive 
 disaster. Oh, I wish I could this morning gather up in 
 mine arms all the woes of men and women — all their 
 heartaches — all their disappointments — all their chagrins 
 — and just take them right to the feet of a sympathizing 
 Jesus. He took the vinegar. 
 
 Nana Sahib, after he had lost his last battle in India, 
 fell back into the jungles of Iheri — jungles so full of 
 malaria that no mortal can live there. He carried with 
 him also a ruby of great lustre and of great value. He 
 died in those jungles; his body was never found, and 
 the ruby has never yet been discovered. And I fear that 
 to-day there are some who will fall back from this sub- 
 ject into the sickening, killing jungles of their sin, car- 
 rying a gem of intinite value — a priceless soul — to be 
 lost forever. Oh, that that ruby might flash in the eter- 
 nal coronation. But no. There are some, I fear, in this 
 audience who turn away from this offered mercy, and 
 comfort, and Divine sympathy; notwithstanding that 
 Christ, for all who would accept his grace, trudged the 
 long way, and suffered the lacerating thongs, and received 
 
THE ACIDS OF THIS LIFE. 
 
 371 
 
 in his face the expectorations of the filthy mob, and for 
 the guilty, and the discouraged, and the discomforted of 
 the race, took the vinegar. May God Almighty break 
 the infatuation, and lead you out into the strong hope> 
 and the good cheer, and the glorious sunshine of thii 
 triumphant GospeH 
 
 / 
 
THE DIVISION OF SPOILS, 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 THE DIVISION OF SPOILS. 
 
 In the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall di 
 vide the spoil. — Gen. xlix: 27. 
 
 There is in this chapter such an affluence of simile 
 and allegory, such a mingling of metaphors, that there 
 are a thousand thoughts in it not on the surface. Old 
 Jacob, dying, is telling the fortunes of his children. 
 He prophesies the devouring propensities of Benjamin 
 and his descendants. With his dim old eyes he looks 
 off and sees the hunters going out to -the fields, ranging 
 them all day, and at nightfall coming home, the game 
 slung over the shoulder, and reaching the door of the 
 tent, the hunters begin to distribute the game, and one 
 takes a coney, and another a rabbit, and another a roe. 
 "In the morning lie shall devour the prey, and at night 
 he shall divide the spoil." Or it may be a reference to 
 the habits of wild beasts that slay their prey, and then 
 drag it back to the cave or lair, and divide it among the 
 young. 
 
 There is nothing more fascinating than the life of a 
 hunter. On a certain day in all England you can hear 
 the crack of the sportsman's gun, because grouse hunt- 
 ing has begun; and every man that can afford the time 
 and ammunition, and can draw a bead, starts for the 
 fields. On the 20th of October our woods and forests 
 will resound with the shock of firearms, and will be 
 tracked of pointers and setters, because the quail will 
 
THE DIVISION OF SPOILS. 
 
 373 
 
 then be a lawful prize for the sportsman. Xenophon 
 grew eloquent in regard to the art of hunting. In the 
 far East, people, elephant-mounted, chase the tiger. The 
 American Indian darts his arrow at the buffalo until the 
 frightened herd tumble over the rocks. European nobles 
 are often found in the fox-chase and at the stag-hunt. 
 Francis I. was called the father of hunting. Moses de- 
 clares of Nimrod: "He was a mighty hunter before the 
 Lord." Therefore, in all ages of the world, the imag- 
 ery of my text ought to be suggestive, whether it means 
 a wolf after a fox, or a man after a lion. "In the morn- 
 ing he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall di- 
 vide the spoils." 
 
 I take my text, in the first place, as descriptive of 
 those people who in the morning of their life give them- 
 selves up to hunting the world, but afterward, by the 
 grace of God, in the evening of their life divide among 
 themselves the spoils of Christian character. There are 
 aged Christian men and women in this house who, if 
 tffey gave testimony, would tell you that in the morning 
 of their life they were after the world as intense as a 
 hound after a 1 are, or as a falcon swoops upon a gazelle. 
 They wanted the world's plaudits and the world's gains. 
 They felt that if they could get this world they would 
 have everything. Some of them started out for the 
 pleasures of the world. They thought that the man who 
 laughed loudest was happiest. They tried repartee, and 
 conundrum, and burlesque, and madrigal. They thought 
 they would like to be Tom Hoods, or Charles Lambs, or 
 Edgar A. Poes. They mingled wine, and music, and 
 the spectacular. They were worshippers of the harle- 
 quin, and the merry Andrew, and the buffoon, and the 
 jester. Life was to them foam, and bubble, and cachin- 
 nation, and roystering, and grimace. They were so full 
 
374 
 
 THE DIVISION OF SPOILS. 
 
 of glee they could hardly repress their mirth, even on 
 solemn occasions, and they came near bursting out hilar- 
 iously even at the burial, because there was something 
 so dolorous in the tone or countenance of the undertaker. 
 After awhile misfortune struck them hard on the back. 
 They found there was something they could not laugh 
 at. Under their late hours their health gave way, or 
 there was a death in the house. Of every green thing 
 their soul was exfoliated. They found out that life was 
 more than a joke. From the heart of God there blazed 
 into their soul an earnestness they had never felt before. 
 They awoke to their sinfulness and their immortality, 
 and here they sit to-night, at sixty or seventy years of 
 age, as appreciative of all innocent mirth as they ever 
 were, but they are bent on a style of satisfaction which 
 in early life they never hunted ; the evening of their 
 days brighter than the morning. In the morning they 
 devoured the prey, but at night they divided the spoils. 
 
 Then there are others who started out for financial 
 success. They see how limber the rim of a man's hat is 
 when he bows down before some one transpicuous. They 
 felt they would like to see how the world looked from 
 the window of a three thousand dollar turn-out. They 
 thought they would like to have the morning sunlight 
 tangled in the head-gear of a dashing span. They 
 wanted the bridges in the park to resound under the 
 rataplan of their swift hoofs. They wanted a gilded 
 baldrick, and so they started on the dollar hunt. They 
 chased it up one street and chased it down another. 
 They followed it when it burrowed in the cellar. They 
 treed it in the roof. Wherever a dollar was expected to 
 be, they were. They chased it across the ocean. They 
 chased it across the land. They stopped not for the 
 night. Hearing that dollar, even in the darkness, 
 
THE DIVISION OF SPoILS. 
 
 375 
 
 thrilled them as an Adirondack sportsman is thrilled at 
 midnight by a loon's laugh. They chased that dollar to 
 the money -vault. They chased it to the government 
 treasury. They routed it from under the counter. All 
 the hounds were out — all the pointers and the setters. 
 They leaped the hedges for that dollar, and they cried: 
 "Hark away! a dollar! a dollar!" And when at last 
 they came upon it and had actually captured it, their 
 excitement was like that of a falconer who has success- 
 fully flung his first hawk. In the morning of their life, 
 oh, how they devoured the prey! But there came a bet- 
 ter time to their soul. They found out that an immoral 
 nature cannot live on "greenbacks." They took up a 
 Northern Pacific bond, and there was a hole in it through 
 which they could look into the uncertainty of all earthly 
 treasures. They saw some Ralston, living at the rate of 
 twenty-five thousand dollars a month, leaping from San 
 Francisco wharf because he could not continue to live at 
 the same ratio. They saw the wizen and paralytic bank- 
 ers who had changed their souls into molten gold 
 stamped with the image of the earth, earthy. They saw 
 some great souls by avarice turned into homuncuU, and 
 they said to themselves: "I will seek after higher treas- 
 ure." From that time they did not care whether they 
 walked or rode, if Christ walked with them; nor whether 
 they lived in a mansion or in a hut, if they dwelt under 
 the shadow of the Almighty; nor whether they were 
 robed in French broadcloth or in a homespun, if they 
 had the robe of the Savior's righteousness; nor whether 
 they were sandalled with morocco or calf-skin, if they 
 were shod with the preparation of the gospel. Now you 
 see peace on their countenance. Now that man says: 
 "What a fool I was to be enchanted with this world. 
 Why, I have more satisfaction in five minutes in the 
 
376 
 
 THE DIVISION OF SPOILS. 
 
 service of God than I had in all the first years of ray 
 life while I was gain getting. I like this evening of my 
 day a great deal better than I did the morning. In the 
 morning I greedily devoured the prey; but now it is 
 evening, and I am gloriously dividing the spoil." 
 
 My friends, this world is a poor thing to hunt. It is 
 healthful to go out in the woods and hunt. It rekindles 
 the lustre of the eye. It strikes the brown of the au- 
 tumnal leaf into the cheek. It gives to the rheumatic 
 limbs a strength to leap like the roe. Christopher 
 North's pet gun, the muckle-mounted-Meg, going off in 
 the summer in the forests, had its echo in the winter- 
 time in the eloquence that rang through the university 
 halls of Edinburgh. It is healthy to go hunting in the 
 fields; but I tell you that it is belittling and bedwarfing 
 and belaming for a man to hunt this world. The ham- 
 mer comes down on the gun-cap, and the barrel explodes 
 and kills you instead of that which you are pursuing. 
 When you turn out to hunt the world, the world turns 
 out to hunt you; and as many a sportsman aiming his 
 gun at a panther's heart has gone down under the striped 
 claws, so, while you have been attempting to devour 
 this world, the w T orld has been devouring you. So it 
 was with Lord Byron. So it was with Coleridge. So it 
 was with Catherine of Russia^ Henry II. went out 
 hunting for this world, and its lances struck through his 
 heart. Francis I. aimed at the w r orld, but the assassin's 
 dagger put an end to his ambition "and his life w T ith one 
 stroke. Mary Queen of Scots wrote on the window of 
 her castle: 
 
 "From the top of all my trust 
 Mishap hath laid me in the dust." 
 
 The Queen Dowager of Navarre was offered for her 
 wedding day a costly and beautiful pair of gloves, and 
 
THE DIVISION OF SPOILS. 
 
 377 
 
 she put them on; but thej were poisoned gloves, and 
 they took her life. Better a bare hand of cold privation 
 than a warm and poisoned glove of ruinous success. 
 "Oh," says some young man in the audience, "I believe 
 what you are preaching. I am going to do that very 
 thing. In the morning of my life I am going to devour 
 the prey, and in the evening I shall divide the spoils of 
 Christian character. I only want a little while to sow 
 my wild oats, and then I will be good." Young man, 
 did you ever take the census of all the old people? How 
 many old people are there in your house? One, two, or 
 none? How many in a vast assemblage like this? Only 
 here and there a gray head, like the patches of snow here 
 and there in the fields on a late April day. The fact is 
 that the tides of the years are so strong, that men go 
 down under them before they get to be sixty, before they 
 get to be fifty, before they get to be forty, before they 
 get to be thirty; and if you, my young brother, resolve 
 now that you will spend the morning of your days in 
 devouring the prey, the probability is that you will 
 never divide the spoils in the evening hour. He who 
 postpones until old age the religion of Jesus Christ, post- 
 pones it forever. Where are the men who, thirty years 
 ago, resolved to become Christians in old age, putting it 
 off a certain number of years? They are in the lost 
 world to-night. They never got to be old. The railroad 
 collision, or the steamboat explosion, or the slip on the 
 ice, or the falling ladder, or the sudden cold put an end 
 to their opportunities. They have never had an oppor- 
 tunity since, and never will have an opportunity again. 
 They locked the door of heaven against their soul, and they 
 threw away the key; and if they could to-night break 
 jail and come up shrieking to this audience, I do not 
 think they would take two minutes to persuade us all to 
 
378 
 
 THE DIVISION OF SPOILS. 
 
 repentance. They chased the world, and they died in 
 the chase. The wounded tiger turned on them. They 
 failed to take the game that they pursued. Mounted on 
 a swift courser, they leaped the hedge, but the courser 
 fell on them and crushed them. Proposing to barter 
 their soul for the world, they lost both and got neither. 
 
 While this is an encouragement to old people who are 
 to-night unpardoned, it is no encouragement to the 
 young who are putting off the day of grace. This doc- 
 trine that the old may be repentant is to be taken cau- 
 tiously. It is medicine that kills or cures. The same 
 medicine, given to different patients, in one case it saves 
 life, and in the other it destroys it. This possibility of 
 repentance at the close of life may cure the old man 
 while it kills the young. Be cautions in taking it. 
 
 Again: my subject is descriptive of those who come 
 to a sudden and a radical change. You have noticed 
 how short a time it is from morning to night — only 
 seven or eight hours. You know that the day has a very 
 brief life. Its heart beats twenty-four times, and then 
 it is dead. How quick this transition in the character 
 of these Benjaminites! "In the morning they shall de- 
 vour the prey, and at night they shall divide the spoils." 
 Is it possible that there shall be such a transformation 
 in any of our characters? Yes, a man may be at seven 
 o'clock in the morning an all-devouring worldling, and 
 at seven o'clock at night he may be a peaceful, distribu- 
 tive Christian. Conversion is instantaneous. A man 
 passes into the kingdom of God quicker than down the 
 sky runs zig-zag lightning. A man may be anxious 
 about his soul for a great many years; that does not make 
 him a Christian. A man may pray a great while; that 
 does not make him a Christian. A man may resolve on 
 the reformation of his character, and have that resolu- 
 
THE DIVISION OF SPOILS. 
 
 379 
 
 tion going on a great while; that does not make him a 
 Christian. But the very instant when he flings his soul 
 on the mercy of Jesus Christ, that instant is lustration, 
 emancipation, resurrection. Up to that point he is going 
 in the wrong direction; after that point he is going in 
 the right direction. Before that moment he is a child 
 of sin; after that moment he is a child of God. Before 
 that moment hellward; after that moment heavenward. 
 Before that moment devouring the pre}*; after that mo- 
 ment dividing the spoil. Five minutes is as good as 
 five years. My hearer, you know very well that the best 
 things you have done you have done in a flash. You 
 made up your mind in an instant to buy, or to sell, or to 
 invest, or to stop, or to start. If you had missed that 
 one chance, you would have missed it forever. Now 
 just as precipitate, and quick, and spontaneous will be 
 the ransom of your soul. This morning you were mak- 
 ing a calculation. You got on the track of some finan- 
 cial or social game. With your pen or pencil you were 
 pursuing it. This very morning you were devouring the 
 prey; but to-night you are in a different mood. You 
 find that all heaven is* offered you. You wonder how 
 you can get it for yourself and for your family. You 
 wonder what resources it will give you now and here- 
 after. You are dividing peace, and comfort, and satis- 
 faction, and Christian reward in your soul. You are 
 dividing the spoil. 
 
 Last Sabbath-night, at the close of the service, I said 
 to some persons: "When did you first become serious 
 about your soul?" And they told me: "To-night." And 
 I said to others: "When did you give your heart to 
 God?" And they said: "To-night." And I said to still 
 others: "When did you resolve to serve the Lord all the 
 days of your life?" And they said: "To-night." I saw 
 
380 
 
 THE DIVISION OF SPOILS. 
 
 by the gaiety of their apparel that when the grace of 
 God struck them they were devouring the prey; but I 
 saw also, in the flood of joyful tears, and in the kindling 
 raptures on their brow, and in their exhilarant and trans- 
 porting utterances, that they were dividing the spoil. If 
 any of you were in this building when these lights were 
 struck to-night, you know that with one touch of elec- 
 tricity they all blazed. Oh, I would to God that the 
 darkness of your souls might be broken up, and that by 
 one quick, overwhelming, instantaneous flash of illumin- 
 ation you might be brought into the light and the lib- 
 erty of the sons of God! 
 
 You see that religion is a different thing from what 
 some of you people supposed. You thought it was de- 
 cadence; you thought religion was maceration; you 
 thought it was highway robbery; that it struck one 
 down and left him half dead; that it plucked out the 
 eyes; that it plucked out the plumes of the soul; that 
 it broke the wing and crushed the beak as it came claw- 
 ing with its black talons through the air. No, that is 
 not religion. What is religion? It is dividing the spoils. 
 It is taking a defenceless soul and panoplying it for 
 eternal conquest. It is the distribution of prizes by the 
 king's hand, every medal stamped with a coronation. 
 It is an exhilaration, an expansion. It is imparadisa- 
 tion. It is enthronement. Religion makes a man mas- 
 ter of earth, and death, and hell. It goes forth to gather 
 the medals of victory won by Prince Emanuel, and the 
 diadems of heaven, and the glories of realms terrestrial, 
 and celestial, and then, after ranging all worlds for every- 
 thing that is resplendent, it divides the spoil. What was it 
 that James Turner, the famous English evangelist, was do- 
 ing when in his dying moment he said: "Christ is all! 
 Christ is all!" Why, he was entering into light; he was 
 
thh: division of spuils. 
 
 381 
 
 rounding the Cape of Good Hope; he was dividing the 
 spoil. What was the aged Christian Quakeress doing when 
 at eighty years of age she arose in the meeting one day and 
 said: "The time of my departure is come. My grave 
 clothes are falling off'? She was dividing the spoil. 
 
 "She longed with wings to fly away, 
 And mix with that eternal day." 
 
 What is Daniel now doing, the lion tamer? and Elijah 
 who was drawn by the flaming coursers? and Paul, the 
 rattling of whose chains made kings quake? and all the 
 other victims of flood, and tire, and wreck, and guillotine 
 — where are they? Dividing the spoil. 
 
 "Ten thousand times ten thousand, 
 
 In sparkling raiment bright, 
 The armies of the ransomed saints 
 Throng up the steeps of light. 
 
 " Tis finished, all is finished, 
 
 Their fight with death and sin; 
 Lift high your golden gates, 
 And let the victors in." 
 
 Oh, what a grand thing it is to be a Christian! We 
 begin to-night to divide the spoil, but the distribution 
 will not be completed to all eternity. There is a poverty- 
 struck soul, there is a business-despoiled soul, there is a 
 sin-struck soul, there is a bereaved soul — why do you 
 not come and get the spoils of Christian character, the 
 comfort, the joy, the peace, the salvation that I am sent 
 to offer you in my Master's name? Though your knees 
 knock together in weakness, though your hand tremble 
 in fear, though your eyes rain tears of uncontrollable 
 weeping — come and get the spoils. Rest for all the 
 weary. Pardon for all the guilty. Labor for all the 
 bestormed. Life for all the dead. I verily believe that 
 there are some who have come in here outcast because 
 
382 
 
 THE DIVISION OF SPOILS. 
 
 the world is against them, and because they feel God is 
 against them, who will go away to-night, saying: 
 
 "I came to Jesus as I was, 
 Weary and worn and sad; 
 I found in him a resting place, 
 And he has made me glad." 
 
 Though you came in children of the world, you may 
 go away heirs of heaven. Though this very autumnal 
 morning you were devouring the prey, to-night, all 
 worlds witnessing, you may divide the spoil. 
 
THE BLACKSMITHS' CAPTIVITY. 
 
 383 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 THE BLACKSMITHS' CAPTIVITY. 
 
 Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel : 
 for the Philistines said, lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears. 
 But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines to sharpen every 
 man his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock. Yet 
 they had a file for the mattocks, and for the coulters, and for the 
 forks, and for the axes, and to sharpen the goads. — I. Samuel 
 xiii : 19-21. 
 
 What a scalding subjugation f or the Israelites! The 
 Philistines had carried off all the blacksmiths, and torn 
 down all the blacksmiths' shops, and abolished the black- 
 smith's trade in the land of Israel. The Philistines 
 would not even allow these parties to work their valua- 
 ble mines of brass and iron, nor might they make any 
 swords or spears. There were only two swords left in 
 all the land. Yea, these Philistines went on until they 
 had taken all the grindstones from the land of Israel, so 
 that if an Israeli tish farmer wanted to sharpen his 
 plough or his axe, he had to go over to the garrison of 
 the Philistines to get it done. There was only one 
 sharpening instrument left in the land, and that was a 
 file. The farmers and the mechanics having nothing to 
 whet up the coulter, and the goad, and the pickaxe, save 
 a simple file, industry was hindered, and work practically 
 disgraced. The great idea of these Philistines was to 
 keep the Israelites disarmed. They might get iron out 
 of the hills to make swords of, but they would not have 
 any blacksmiths to weld this iron. If they got the iron 
 welded, they would have no grindstones on which to 
 
384 
 
 THE BLACKSMITHS' CAPTIVITY. 
 
 bring the instruments of agriculture or the military 
 weapons up to an edge. Oh, you poor, weaponless Israel- 
 ites, reduced to a file, how I pity you! But these Phil- 
 istines were not for ever to keep their heel on the neck 
 of God's children. Jonathan, on his hands and knees, 
 climbs up a great rock beyond which were the Philis- 
 tines; and his armor-bearer, on his hands and knees, 
 climbs up the same rock, and these two men, with their 
 two swords, hew to pieces the Philistines, the Lord throw- 
 ing a great terror npon them. So it was then; so it is 
 now. Two men of God on their knees, mightier than a 
 Philistine host on their feet. 
 
 I learn first from this subject, how dangerous it is for 
 the Church of God to allow its weapons to stay in the 
 hands of its enemies. These Israelites might again and 
 again have obtained a supply of swords and weapons, as 
 for instance when they took the spoils of the Ammon- 
 ites; but these Israelites seemed content to have no 
 swords, no spears, no blacksmiths, no grindstones, no 
 active iron mines, until it was too late for them to make 
 any resistance. I see the farmers tugging along with 
 their pickaxes and ploughs, and I say: "Where are you 
 going with those things?" They say: "Oh, we are going 
 over to the garrison of the Philistines to get these things 
 sharpened." I say: "You foolish men, why don't yon 
 sharpen them at home?" "Oh," they say, "the black- 
 smiths' shops are all torn down, and we have nothing 
 left us but a file." 
 
 So it is in the Church of Jesus Christ to-day. We are 
 too willing to give up our weapons to the enemy. The 
 world boasts that it has gobbled up the schools, and the 
 colleges, and the arts, and the sciences, and the literature, 
 and the printing press. Infidelity is making a mighty 
 attempt to get all our weapons in its hand, and then tu 
 
THE BLACKSMITHS' CAPTIVITY. 385 
 
 keep them. You know it is making this boast all the 
 time; and after a while, when the great battle between 
 sin and righteousness has opened, if we do not look out 
 we will be as badly off as these Israelites, without any 
 swordsto fight with, and without any sharpening instru- 
 ments. I call upon the superintendents of literary in- 
 stitutions to see to it that the men who go into the class- 
 rooms to stand beside the Leyden jars, and the electric 
 batteries, and the microscopes and telescopes, be children 
 of God, not Philistines. The Carlylian, Emerson, and 
 Tyndallean thinkers of this day are trying to get all the 
 intellectual weapons of this century in their own grasp. 
 What we want is scientific Christians to capture the sci- 
 ence, and scholastic Christians to capture the scholar- 
 ship, and philosophic Christians to capture the philoso- 
 plry, and lecturing Christians, to take back the lecturing 
 platform. We want to send out against Schenkel and 
 Strauss and Renan, a Theodore Christlieb of Bonn; and 
 against the infidel scientists of the day, a God-worship- 
 ing Silliman and Hitchcock and Agassiz. We want to 
 capture all the philosophical apparatus, and swing around 
 the telescopes on the swivel, until through them we can 
 see the morning star of the Redeemer, and with mineral- 
 ogical hammer discover the u Rock of ages," and amid 
 tile flora of the realms find the "Rose of Sharon and the 
 lily of the valley." We want a clergy learned enough 
 to discourse of the human eye, showing it to be a micro- 
 scope and telescope in one instrument, with eight hun- 
 dred wonderful contrivances, and lids closing 30,000 or 
 40,000 times a day; all its muscles and nerves and bones 
 showing the infinite skill of an infinite God, and then 
 winding up with the peroration: "He that formed the 
 eye, shall he not see?" And then we want to discourse 
 about the buman ear, its wonderful integuments, mem- 
 25 
 
3S6 
 
 THE BLACKSMTHS' CAPTIVITY. 
 
 branes, and vibration, and its chain of small bones, and 
 its auditory nerve, closing with the question : "He that 
 planted the ear, shall he not hear?" And we want some 
 one able to expound the first chapter of Genesis, bring- 
 ing to it the geology and the astronomy of the world, 
 until, as Job suggested, "the stones of the field shall be 
 in league" with the truth, and "the stars in their course 
 shall fight against Sisera." Oh, Church of God, go out 
 and recapture these weapons. Let men of God go out 
 and take possession of the platform. Let the debauched 
 printing-press of this country be recaptured for Christ, 
 and the reporters, and the type-setters, and the editors, 
 and publishers be made to swear allegiance to the Lord 
 God of truth. Ah, my friend, that day must come, and 
 if the great body of Christian men have not the faith, 
 or the courage, or the consecration to do it, then let 
 some Jonathan, on his busy hands and on his praying 
 knees, climb up on the rock of hindrance, and in the 
 name of the Lord God of Israel slash to pieces those lit- 
 erary Philistines. If these men will not be converted 
 to God, then they must be destroyed. 
 
 As:ain, I learn from this subject what a large amount 
 of the Churches resources is actually hidden, and buried, 
 and undeveloped. The Bible intimates that that was a 
 very rich land — this land of Israel. It says: u The stones 
 are iron, and out of the hills thou shalt dig brass," and 
 yet hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of this metal 
 was kept under the hills. Well, that is the difficulty 
 with the Church of God at this day. Its talent is not 
 developed. If one-half of its energy could be brought 
 out, it might take the public iniquities of the day by the 
 throat and make them bite the dust. If human elo- 
 quence were consecrated to the Lord Jesus Christ, it 
 could in a few years persuade this whole earth to sur- 
 
THE BLACKSMITHS' CAPTIVITY. 
 
 387 
 
 render to God. There is enough undeveloped eneigy in 
 this one Church to bring all Brooklyn to Christ— enough 
 undeveloped Christian energy in the City of Brooklyn 
 to bring all the United States to Christ — enough unde- 
 veloped Christian energy in the United States to bring 
 the whole world to Christ; but it is buried under strata 
 of indifference and under whole mountains of sloth. 
 Now is it not time for the mining to begin, and the 
 pickaxes to plunge, and for this buried metal to be 
 brought out and put into the furnaces, and be turned 
 into howitzers and carbines for the Lord's host? The 
 vast majority of Christians in this day are useless. The 
 most of the Lord's battalion belong to the reserve corps. 
 The most of the crew are asleep in the hammocks. The 
 most of the metal is under the hills. Oh, is it not time 
 for the Church of God to rouse up and understand that 
 we want all the energies, all the talent, and all the wealth 
 enlisted for Christ's sake? I like the nickname that the 
 English soldiers gave to Blucher, the Commander. They 
 called him u 01d Forwards." We have had enough re- 
 treats in the Church of Christ; let us have a glorious 
 advance. And I say to you to-night, as the General said 
 when his troops were affrighted. Rising up in his stir- 
 rups, his hair flying in the wind, he lifted up his voice 
 until 20,000 troops heard him, crying out: "Forward, 
 the whole line!" 
 
 Again: I learn from this subject, that we sometimes 
 do well to take advantage of the world's sharpening 
 instruments. These Israelites were reduced to a file, 
 and so they went over to the garrison of the Philistines 
 to get their axes and their goads, and their ploughs 
 sharpened. The Bible distinctly states it — the text 
 which I read at the beginning of the service — that they 
 had no other instruments now with which to do this 
 
388 
 
 THE BLACKSMITHS' CAPTIVITY. 
 
 work, and the Israelites did right when they went over 
 to the Philistines to use their grindstones. My friends, 
 is it not right for us to employ the world's grindstones? 
 If there be art, if there be logic, if there be business 
 faculty on the other side, let us go over and employ it 
 for Christ's sake. The fact is, we fight with too dull 
 weapons, and we work with too dull implements. We 
 hack and we maul when we ought to make a keen stroke. 
 Let us go over among sharp business men, and among 
 sharp literary men, and find out what their tact is, and then 
 transfer it to the cause of Christ. If they have science 
 and art it will do us good to rub against it. In* other 
 words: let us employ the world's grindstones. We will 
 listen to their music, and we will watch their acumen, 
 and we will use their grindstones; and we will borrow 
 their philosophical apparatus to make our experiments, 
 and we will borrow their printing-presses to publish our 
 Bibles, and we will borrow their rail-trains to carry our 
 Christian literature, and we will borrow their ships to 
 transport our missionaries. That was what made Paul 
 such a master in his day. He not only got all the learn- 
 ing he could get of Doctor Gamaliel, but afterward, 
 standing on ^lars Hill, and in crowded thoroughfare, 
 quoted, their poetry, and grasped their logic, and wielded 
 their eloquence, and employed their mythology, until 
 Dionysius the Areopagite, learned in the schools of 
 Athens and Heliopolis, went down under his tremendous 
 powers. That was what gave Thomas Chalmers his 
 power in his day. He conquered the world's astronomy 
 and compelled it to ring out the wisdom and greatness 
 of the Lord, until for the second time, the morning stars 
 sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. 
 That was what gave to Jonathan Edwards his influence 
 in his day. He conquered the world's metaphysics and 
 
THE BLACKSMITHS' CAPTIVITY. 
 
 3S9 
 
 forced it into the service of God, until not only the old 
 meeting-house at Northampton, Massachusetts, but all 
 Christendom felt thrilled by his Christian power. Well, 
 now, my friends, we all have tools of Christian useful- 
 ness. Do not let them lu?e their edges. "We want no 
 rusty blades in this fight. We want no coulter that can- 
 not rip up the glebe. We want no axe that cannot fell 
 the trees. We want no goad that cannot start the lazy 
 team. Let us get the very best grindstones we can find, 
 though they be in the possession of the Philistines, 
 compelling them to turn the crank while we bear down 
 with all our might on the swift-revolving wheel until all 
 our energies and faculties shall be brought up to a bright, 
 keen, sharp, glittering edge. 
 
 Again: my subject teaches us on what a small allow- 
 ance Philistine iniquity puts a man. Yes; these Phil- 
 istines shut up the mines, and then they took the spears 
 and the swords, then they took the blacksmiths, then 
 they took the grindstones, and they took everything but 
 a file. Oh, that is the way sin works; it grabs every- 
 thing. It begins with robbery, and it ends with robbery. 
 It despoils this faculty and that faculty, and keeps on 
 until the whole nature is gone. Was the man eloquent 
 before, it generally thickens his tongue. Was he fine in 
 personal appearance, it mars his visage. Was he afflu- 
 ent, it sends the sheriff to sell him out. Was he influen- 
 tial, it destroys his popularity. Was he placid, and genial, 
 and loving, it makes him splenetic and cross; and so 
 utterly is he changed that you can see he is sarcastic and 
 rasping, and that the Philistines have left him nothing 
 but a file. Oh, "the way of the transgressor is hard." 
 His cup is bitter. His night is dark. His pangs are 
 deep. His end is terrific. Philistine iniquity says to 
 that man: "Now, surrender to me, and I will give you 
 
 I 
 
390 
 
 THE BLACKSMITHS' CAPTIVITY. 
 
 all you want — music for tlie dance, swift steeds for the 
 race, imperial couch to slumber on, and you shall be re- 
 freshed with the rarest fruits, in baskets of golden fila- 
 gree." He lies. The music turns out to be a groan. 
 The fruits burst the rind with rank poison. The filagree 
 is made up of twisted snakes. The couch is a grave- 
 Small allowance of rest; small allowance of peace; small 
 allowance of comfort. Cold, hard, rough — nothing but 
 a file. So it was with Voltaire, the most applauded man 
 of his day: 
 
 "The Scripture was his jest-book, whence he drew 
 Bon mots to gull the Christian and the Jew. 
 Aji infidel when well, but what when sick ? 
 Oh, then a text would touch him to the quick." 
 
 Seized with hemorrhage of the lungs in Paris, where 
 he had gone to be crowned in the theater as the idol of 
 all France, he sends a messenger to get a priest, that he 
 may be reconciled to the Church before he dies. A 
 great terror falls upon him. lie makes the place all 
 round about him so dismal that the nurse declares that 
 she would not for all the wealth of Europe see another 
 infidel die. Philistine iniquity had promised him all the 
 world's garlands, but in the last hour of his life, when 
 he needed solacing, sent tearing across his conscience 
 and his nerves a file, a file. So it was with Lord Byron, 
 his uncleanness in England only surpassed by his -un- 
 cleanness in Venice, then going on to end his brilliant 
 misery at Missolonghi, fretting at his nurse Fletcher, 
 fretting at himself, fretting at the world, fretting at God; 
 and he who gave to the world "Childe Harold," and 
 "Sardanapalus," and "The Prisoner of Chillon," and 
 "The Siege of Corinth," reduced to nothing but a file! 
 Oh, sin has great facility for making promises, but it 
 has just as great facility for breaking them. A Chris- 
 
THE BLACKSMITHS* CAPTIVITY. 
 
 391 
 
 tian life is the only cheerful life, while a life of wicked 
 surrender is remorse, ruin, and death. Its painted glee 
 is sepulchral ghastiiuess. In the brightest days of the 
 Mexican Empire, Montezuma said he felt gnawing at his 
 heart something like a canker. Sin, like a monster wild 
 beast of the forest, sometimes licks all over its victim in 
 order that the victim may be more easily swallowed; but 
 generally sin rasps, and galls, and tears, and upbraids, 
 and files. Is it not so, Herod? Is it not so, Ilildebrand? 
 Is it not so, Robespierre? Aye! aye! it is so; it is so. 
 "The way of the wicked he turneth upside down.'' His- 
 tory tells us that when Rome was founded, on that day 
 there were twelve vultures flying through the air; but 
 when a transgressor dies, the sky is black with whole 
 flocks of them. Vultures! When I see sin robbing so 
 many of my hearers, and I see them going down day by 
 day, and week by week, I must give a plain warning. I 
 dare not keep it back lest I risk the salvation of my own 
 soul. Rover and Pirate pulled down the warning bell 
 on Inchcape Rock, thinking that he would have a chance 
 to despoil vessels that were crushed on the rocks; but 
 one night his own ship crashed down on this very rock, 
 and he went down with all his cargo. God declares: 
 " When I say to the wicked, thou shalt surely die, and 
 thou givest him not warning, that same man shall die 
 in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy 
 hands." 
 
 I learn from this subject, what a sad thing it is when 
 the Church of God loses its metal. These Philistines 
 saw that if they could only get all the metallic weapons 
 out of the hands of the Israelites, all would be well, and, 
 therefore, they took the swords and the spears. They 
 did not want them to have a single metallic weapon. 
 When the metal of the Israelites was gone, their strength 
 was gone. This is the trouble with the Church of God 
 
392 
 
 THE BLACKSMITHS' CAPTIVITY. 
 
 to-day. It is surrendering its courage. It has not got 
 enough metal. How seldom it is that you see a man 
 taking his position in pew, or in pulpit, or in a religous 
 society, and holding that position against all oppression^ 
 and all trial, and all persecution, and all criticism. The 
 Church of God to-day wants more backbone, more defi- 
 ance, more consecrated bravery, more metal. How often 
 you see a man start out in some good enterprise, and at 
 the first blast of newspaperdom he has collapsed, and all 
 his courage gone, forgetful of the fact that if a man be 
 right, all the newspapers of the earth, with all their col- 
 umns pounding away at him, cannot do him any perma- 
 nent damage. It is only when a man is wrong that he can 
 be damaged. Why, God is going to vindicate his truth, 
 and he is g<>ing to stand by you, my friends, in every 
 effort } 7 ou make for Christ's cause and the -salvation of 
 men. I sometimes say to my wife: "There is something 
 wrong; the newspapers have not assaulted me for six 
 weeks! I have not done my duty against public iniqui- 
 ties, and I will stir them up next Sunday." 'ihen I stir 
 them up, and all the following week the devil howls, and 
 howls, showing that I have hit him very hard. Go 
 forth in the service of Christ and do your whole duty. 
 You have one sphere. I have another sphere. "The 
 Lord of Hosts is with us, and the God of Jacob is our 
 refuge. Selah." We want more of the determination 
 of Jonathan. I do not suppose he was a very wonderful 
 man; but he got on his knees and clambered up the 
 rock, and with the help of his armor-bearer he hewed 
 down the Philistines; and a man of very ordinary intel- 
 lectual attainments, on his knees, can storm anything 
 for God and for the truth. We want something of the 
 determination of the general who went into the war, 
 and as he entered his first battle, his knees knocked to- 
 gether, his physical course not quite up to his moral 
 
THE blacksmiths' captivity. 
 
 393 
 
 courage; and he looked down at his knees, and said: 
 u Ah, if you knew where I was going to take you, you 
 would shake worse than that!" There is only one ques- 
 tion for you to ask and for me to ask. What does God 
 want me to do? Where is the field? Where is the 
 work? Where is the anvil? Where is the prayer-meet- 
 ing? Where is the pulpit? And, finding out what God 
 wants us to do, go ahead and do it — all the energies of 
 our body, mind, and soul enlisted in the undertaking. 
 Oh, my brethren, we have but little time in which to 
 tight for God. You will be dead soon. Put in the 
 Christian cause every energy that God gives you. 'What 
 thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might, for there 
 is neither wisdom nor device in the grave whither we 
 are all hastening." Here we are at the end of the eccle- 
 siastical year, our congregation partially dispersed, and 
 others to go. Opportunities of usefulness gone forever; 
 souls that might have been benefited three months ago 
 never again coming under our Christian influence. Oh, 
 is it not high time that we awake out of sleep? Church 
 of God, lift up your head at the coming victory ! The 
 Philistines will go down, and the Israelites will go up. 
 We are on the winning side. Hear that — on the win- 
 ning side. I think just now the King's horses are being 
 hooked up to the chariot, and when he does ride down 
 the sky there will be such a hosanna among his friends, 
 and such a wailing among his enemies, as will make the 
 earth tremble and the heavens sing. I see now the 
 plumes of the Lord's cavalrymen tossing in the air. 
 The archangel before the throne has .already burnished 
 his trumpet, and then he will put its golden lips to his 
 own, and he will blow the long, loud blast that will 
 make all the nations free. Clap your hands, all ye peo- 
 ple! Hark! I hear the falling thrones, and the dashing 
 down of demolished iniquities. 
 
31)4 
 
 THE DIET OF ASLLE&. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXXI. 
 
 THE DIET OF ASHES. 
 He feedeth ou ashes. — Isa. xliv: 20. 
 
 Here is a description of the idolatry and worldliness 
 of people in Isaiah's time, and of a very prevalent style 
 of diet in our time. The world spreads a great feast, 
 and invites the race to sit at it. Platters are heaped up. 
 Chalice? are full. Garlands wreathe the wall. The 
 guests sit down amid outbursts of hilarity. They take 
 the fruit and it turns into ashes. They uplift the tank- 
 ards and their contents prove to be ashes. They touch 
 the garlands and they scatter into ashes. I do not know 
 any passage of Scripture which so apothegmatically sets 
 forth the unsatisfactory nature of this world for eye, and 
 tongue, and lip, and heart, as this particular passage, 
 describing the votary of the world, when it says: "He 
 feedeth on ashes." 
 
 I shall not take the estimate by those whose life has 
 been a failure. A man may despise the world simply 
 because he cannot win it. Having failed, in his chagrin 
 he may decry that which he would like to have had as 
 his bride. I shall, therefore, take only the testimony of 
 those who have been magnificently successful. 
 
 In the first place, I shall ask the kings of the earth to 
 stand up and give testimony, telling of the long story of 
 sleepless nights, and poisoned cups, and threatened in- 
 vasion, and dreaded rebellion. Ask the Georges, ask the 
 Henrys, ask the Marys, ask the Louises, ask the Cnther- 
 
THE DIET OF ASHES. 
 
 ir.es, whether they found the throne a safe seat, and the 
 crown a pleasant covering. Ask the French guillotine 
 in Madam Tussaud's Museum about the queenly necks 
 it has dissevered. Ask the Tower of London and its 
 headsman's block. Ask the Tuilleries, and Henry VIII., 
 and Cardinal Wolsey to rise out of the dust and say 
 what they think of worldly honors. Ghastly with the 
 first and the second death, they rise up with eyeless 
 sockets and grinning skeletons, and stagger forth, unable 
 at first to speak at all, but afterward hoarsely whisper- 
 ing: "Ashes! ashes!" 
 
 I call up also a group of commercial adepts to give 
 testimony; and here again, those who have been only 
 moderately successful may not testify. All the witnesses 
 must be millionaires. What a grand thing it must be to 
 own a railroad, to control a bank, to possess all the 
 houses on one street, to have vast investments tumbling in 
 upon you day after day, whether you work or not. No; 
 no. William B. Astor, a few days before his death, sits 
 in his office in New York, grieving almost until he is 
 sick, because rents have gone down. A. T. Stewart finds 
 his last days full of foreboding and doubt. When a 
 Christian man proposes to talk to him about the matters 
 of the soul, he cries: "Go away from me! Go away from 
 me;" not satisfied until the man has got outside the 
 door. Come up, ye millionaires, from various cemeter- 
 ies and graveyards, and tell us now what you think of 
 banks, and mills, and factories, and counting-houses, and 
 marble palaces, and presidential banquets. They stag- 
 ger forth and lean against the cold slab of the tomb, 
 mouthing with toothless gums and gesticulating with 
 fieshless hands and shivering with the chill of sepulchral 
 dampness, while they cry out: "Ashes!" 
 
 I must call up now, also, a group of sinful pleasurists, 
 
396 
 
 THE DIET OF ASHES. 
 
 and here again I will not take the testimony of those 
 who had merely the ordinary gratifications of life. The 
 witnesses must have had excess of delight. Their pleas- 
 ures were pyramidal. They bloomed paradisaically. If 
 they drank wine, it must be the best that was ever pressed 
 from the vineyards of Hockheimer. If they listened to 
 music, it must be the costliest opera, with a world re- 
 nowned prima donna. If they sinned, they chased 
 polished uncleanness, and graceful despair, and glittering 
 damnation. Stand up, Alcibiades, and Aaron Burr, and 
 Lord Byron, and Charles the second — what think yon 
 now of midnight revel, and sinful carnival, and damask- 
 curtain abomination? Answer! The color goes out of 
 the cheek, the dregs are serpent-twisted in the bottom of 
 the wine-cup, the bright lights quenched in blackness of 
 darkness. They jingle together the broken glasses, and 
 rend the faded silks, and shut the door of the deserted 
 banqueting hall, while they cry: "Ashes! ashes!" 
 
 A troop of infidels: There are a great many in this 
 day who try to feed their soul on infidelity mixed with 
 truth. Their religion is made up of ten degrees of 
 humanitarianism, and ten degrees of transcendentalism, 
 and ten degrees of egotism with one degree of Gospel 
 truth, and with that mixture they make the poor, miser- 
 able cud which their immortal souls chew, while the 
 meadows of God's Word are green and luxuriant with 
 well-watered pastures. Did you ever see a bright infi- 
 del? Did you ever meet a placid skeptic? Did you ever 
 find a contented atheist? Not one. From the days of 
 Gibbon and Voltaire down, not one. They quarrel 
 about God. They quarrel about the Bible. They quar- 
 rel about each other. They quarrel with themselves. 
 They gather all the Divine teachings, and under them 
 the fires of their own wit, and scorn, and sarcasm, and 
 
FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY. 
 
THE DIET OF ASHES. 
 
 397 
 
 then they dance in the light of that blaze, and they 
 scratch amid the rubbish for something with which to 
 help them in the days of trouble, and something to com- 
 fort them in the days of death, finding for their dis- 
 traught and destroyed souls, ashes — ashes. Voltaire 
 declared: "Tliis globe seems to me more like a collection 
 of carcasses than of men. I wish I had never been born." 
 Hume says: U I am like a man who has run on rocks and 
 quicksands, and yet I contemplate putting out on the sea 
 in the same leaky and weather-beaten craft." Chester- 
 field says: "I have been behind the scenes, and I. have 
 noticed the clumsey pulleys and the dirty ropes by which 
 all the scene is managed, and I have seen and smelt the 
 tallow candles which throw the illumination on the 
 stage, and I am tired and sick." Get np, then, Francis 
 Newport, and Hume, and Voltaire, and Tom Paine, and 
 all the infidels who have passed out of this world into 
 the eternal world — get up now and tell what you think 
 of all your grandiloquent derision at our holy religion. 
 What do you think now of all your sarcasm at holy 
 things? They come shrieking up from the lost world to 
 the graveyards where their bodies were entombed, and 
 point down to the white dust of dissolution, and cry: 
 Ashes! ashes! 
 
 Oh, what a poor diet for an immortal soul. The fact 
 is, the soul is hungry. What is that unrest that some- 
 times comes across you! Why is it that, surrounded by 
 friends, and even the luxuries of life, you wish you 
 were somewhere else, or had something you have not 
 yet gained? The world calls it ambition. The physi- 
 cians call it nervousness. Your friends call it the fidgets. 
 I call it hunger — deep, grinding, unappeasable hunger. 
 It starts with us when we are born, and goes on with us 
 until the Lord God himself appeases it. It is seeking, 
 
39S 
 
 THE DIET OF ASHES. 
 
 and delving, and striving, and planning to get something 
 we cannot get. Wealth says: "It is not in me." Sci- 
 ence says: "It is not in me." Worldly applause says. 
 "It is not in me." Sinful indulgence says: "It is not 
 in me." Where, then, is it? On the banks of what 
 stream? Slumbering in what grotto? Marching in 
 what contest? Expiring on what pillow? Tell me, for 
 this winged and immortal spirit, is there nothing but 
 ashes? 
 
 In communion with God, and everlasting trust of him, 
 is complete satisfaction. Solomon described it when he 
 compared it to cedar houses, and golden chains, and 
 bounding reindeer, and day-break, and imperial conch; 
 to saffron, to calamus, to white teeth, and hands heavy 
 with gold rings, and towers of ivory and ornamental fig- 
 ures; but Christ calls it bread! O famished, yet im- 
 mortal soul, why not come and get it? Until our sins 
 are pardoned, there is no rest. We know not at what 
 moment the hounds may bay at us. Yv 7 e are in a castle, 
 and know not at what hour it may be besieged; but 
 when the soothing voice of Christ comes across our per- 
 turbation, it is hushed for ever. A merchant in Ant- 
 werp loaned Charles Y. a vast sum of money, taking 
 for it a bond. One day this Antwerp merchant invited 
 Charles Y. to dine with him, and while they were seated 
 at the table, in the presence of the guests, the merchant 
 had a fire built on a platter in the centre of the table. 
 Then he took the bond which the King had given him 
 for the vast sum of money, and held it in the blaze until 
 it was consumed, and the king congratulated himself, 
 and all the guests congratulated the king. There was 
 gone at last the final evidence of his indebtedness. 
 Mortgaged to God, we owe a debt we can never pay, 
 but God invites us to the Gospel feast, and in the fires of 
 
THE DIET OF ASITES. 
 
 309 
 
 crucifixion agony he puts the last record of our indebt- 
 edness, and it is consumed forever. It was so in the 
 case of the dying thief expiring in dark despair, with 
 the judgment to come staring him in the face, and the 
 terrors of hell laying hold of his soul. He had faith in 
 the Crucified One, and his faith won for him an immedi- 
 ate entrance into paradise. 
 
 Oh, to have all the sins of our past forgiven, and to 
 have all possible security for the future — is not that 
 enough to make a man happy? What makes that old 
 Christian so placid? Most of his family lie in the vil- 
 lage cemetery. His health is undermined. His cough 
 will not let him sleep at night. From the day he came 
 to town and he was a clerk, until this the day of his old 
 age, it has been a hard fight for bread. Yet how happy 
 he looks. Why? It is because he feels that the same 
 God who watched him when he lay in his mother's arms 
 is watching him in the time of old age, and unto God he 
 has committed all his dead, expecting after a while to 
 see them again. He has no anxiety whether he go this 
 summer or next summer — whether he be carried out 
 through the snowbanks or through the daisies. Fifty 
 years ago, he learned that all this world could give was 
 ashes, and he reached up and took the fruits of eternal 
 life, You see his face is very white now. The crimson 
 currents of life seem to have departed from it; but under 
 that extreme whiteness of the old man's face is the flash 
 of the day-break. There is only one word in all our 
 language that can describe his feelings, and that is the 
 word that slipped off the angel's harp above Bethlehem 
 — peace! And so there are hundreds of souls here to- 
 night who have felt this Almighty comfort. Their repu- 
 tation was pursued; their health shattered; their home 
 was almost if not quite broken up; their fortune went 
 
400 
 
 THE DIET OF ASHES. 
 
 away from them. Why do they not sit down and give 
 it up? Ah, they have no disposition to do that. They 
 are saying while I speak: "It is my Father that mixed 
 this bitter cup, and I will cheerfully drink it. Every- 
 thing will be explained after awhile. I shall not always 
 be under the harrow. There is something that makes 
 me think I am almost home. God will yet wipe away 
 all tears from my eyes." So say these bereft parents. 
 So say these motherless children. So say a great many 
 in this house to-night. 
 
 Now, am I not right in these circumstances, in trying 
 to persuade this entire audience to give up ashes and 
 take bread? To give up the unsatisfactory things of this 
 world, and take the glorious things of God and eternity? 
 Why, my friends, if you kept this world as long as it lasts, 
 you would have, after awhile, to give it up. There will be 
 a great fire breaking out from the sides of the hills; there 
 will be falling flame, and ascending flame; in it the earth 
 will be overwhelmed. Fires burning from within, out; 
 fires burning from above, down; this earth will be a fur- 
 nace, and then it will be a living coal, and then it will bean 
 expiring ember, and the thick clouds of smoke will lessen 
 and lessen until there will be only a faint vapor curling 
 up from the ruins, and then the very last spark of the 
 earth will go out. And I see two angels meeting each 
 other over the gray pile, and as one flits past, he cries, 
 "Ashes!" and the other, as he sweeps down the immen- 
 sity, will respond, "Ashes!" while all the infinite spaces 
 will echo and re-echo; "Ashes! ashes! ashes!" 
 
 Oh, God forbid that you and I should choose such a 
 mean portion. My fear is, not that you will not see the 
 superiority of Christ to this world, but that, through 
 some dreadful infatuation, you will relegate to the future 
 that which God, and angels, and churches militant and 
 
THE DIET OF ASHES. 
 
 401 
 
 triumphant declare that you ought to do now. My 
 brother, I do not say that you will go out of v this world 
 by the stroke of a horse's hoof, or that you will fall 
 through a hatchway, or that a plank may slip from an 
 insecure scaffolding and dash your life out, or that a bolt 
 may fall on you from an August thunder-storm; but I 
 do say that, in the vast majority of cases, your departure 
 from the world will be wonderfully quick; and I want 
 you to start on the right road before that crisis has 
 plunged. 
 
 A Spaniard, in a burst of temper, slew a Moor. Then 
 the Spaniard leaped over a high wall and met a gardener, 
 and told him the whole story; and the gardener said: "I 
 will make a pledge of confidence with you. Eat this 
 peach and that will be a pledge that I will be your pro- 
 tector to the last." But, oh, the sorrow and surprise of 
 the gardener when he found out that it was his own son 
 that had been slain! Then he came to the Spaniard and 
 said to him: "You were cruel, you ought to die, you 
 slew my son, and yet I took a pledge with you, and I 
 must keep my promise; and so he took the Spaniard to 
 the stables and brought out the swiftest horse. The 
 Spaniard sprang upon it and put many miles between 
 him and the scene of crime, and perfect escape was 
 effected. ' 
 
 We have, by our sins, slain the Son of God. Is there 
 any possibility of our rescue? Oh, yes. God the Father 
 says to us: "You had no business, by your sin, to slay 
 my Son, Jesus; you ought to die, but I have promised 
 you deliverance. I have made you the promise of eter- 
 nal life, and you shall have it. Escape now for thy life.'' 
 And to-night I act merely as the Lord's groom, and I 
 bring you out to the King's stables, and I tell you to be 
 quick and mount, and away. In this plain you perish, 
 
402 
 
 THE DIET OF ASHES. 
 
 but housed in God you live. Oh, you pursued and al- 
 most overtaken one, put on more speed. Eternal salva- 
 tion is the price of your velocity. Fly! fly! lest the 
 black horse outrun the white horse, and the battle-axe 
 shiver the helmet and crash down through the insuffi- 
 cient mail. In this tremendous exigency of your im- 
 mortal spirit beware, lest you prefer ashes to bread! 
 
KEEPING BAD COAIPANY. 
 
 403 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 KEEPING BAD COMPANY. 
 
 A companion of fools shall be destroyed. — Proverbs xiii: 20. 
 
 On the nights of city exploration I found that hardly 
 any young man came to places of dissipation alone. 
 Each one was accompanied. No man goes to ruin alone. 
 He always takes some one else with him. 
 
 " May it please the Court," said a convicted criminal, 
 when asked if he had anything to say before sen- 
 tence of death was passed upon him — " may it please the 
 Court, bad company has been my ruin. I received the 
 blessings of good parents, and, in return, promised to 
 avoid all evil associations. Had I kept my promise, I 
 should have been saved this shame, and been free from 
 the load of guilt that hangs round me like a vulture, 
 threatening to drag me to justice for crimes yet unre- 
 vealed. I, who once moved in the first circles of society, 
 and have been the guest of distinguished public men, 
 am lost, and all through bad company." 
 
 This is but one of the thousand proofs that the com- 
 panion of fools shall be destroyed. It is the invariable 
 rule. There is a well man in the wards of a hospital, 
 where there are a hundred people sick with ship fever, 
 and he will not be so apt to take the disease as a good 
 man would be apt to be smitten with moral distemper, 
 if shut up with iniquitous companions. 
 
 In olden times prisoners were herded together in the 
 same cell, but each one learned the vices of all the cul- 
 prits, so that, instead of being reformed by incarceration, 
 
404 
 
 KEEPING BAD COMPANY. 
 
 the day of liberation turned them out upon society beasts 5 
 not men. 
 
 We may, in our places of business, be compelled to 
 talk to and mingle with bad men; but he who deliber- 
 ately chooses to associate himself with vicious people, is 
 engaged in carrying on a courtship with a Delilah, 
 whose shears will clip off all the locks of his strength, 
 and he will be tripped into perdition. Sin is catching, 
 is infectious, is epidemic. I will let you look over the 
 millions of people now inhabiting the earth, and I chal- 
 lenge you to show me a good man who, after one year, 
 has made choice and consorted with the wicked. A 
 thousand dollars reward for one such instance. I care 
 not how strong your character may be. Associate 
 with horse-thieves, you will become a horse-thief. 
 Clan with burglars, and you will become a burglar. 
 Go among the unclean, and you will become un- 
 clean. Not appreciating the truth of my text, many 
 a young man has been destroyed. He wakes up 
 some morning in the great city, and knows no one ex- 
 cept the persons into whose employ he has entered. 
 
 As he goes into the store all the clerks mark him, 
 measure him, and discuss him. The upright young men 
 of the store wish him well, but perhaps wait for a formal 
 introduction, and even then have some delicacy about 
 inviting him into their associations. But the bad young 
 men of the store at the first opportunity approach and 
 offer their services. They patronize him. They profess 
 to know all about the town. They will take him any- 
 where that he wishes to go — if he will pay the expenses. 
 For if a good young man and a bad young man go to 
 some place where they ought not, the good young man 
 has invariably to pay the charges. At the moment the 
 ticket is to be paid for, or the champagne settled for, the 
 
KEEPING BAD COMPANY. 
 
 405 
 
 bad young man feels around in his pockets and says, " I 
 have forgotten my pocket-book." In forty-eight hours 
 after the yonng man has entered the store the had fellows 
 of the establishment slap him on the shoulder familiarly; 
 and, at his stupidity in taking certain allusions, say, 
 a My young friend, you will have to be broken in;" and 
 they immediately proceed to break him in. Young man, 
 in the name of God I warn you to beware how you 
 let a bad man talk familiarly with you. If such 
 an one slap you on the shoulder familiarly, turn 
 round and give him a withering look, until the wretch 
 crouches in your presence. There is no monstrosity of 
 wickedness that can stand unabashed under the glance of 
 purity and honor. God keeps the lightnings of heaven 
 in his own scabbard, and no human arm can wield them ; 
 but God gives to every young man a lightning that he 
 may use, and that is the lightning of an honest eye. 
 Those who have been close observers of city life will not 
 wonder why I give warning to young men, and say, 
 " Beware of bad company." 
 
 First, I warn you to shun the skeptic — the young man 
 who puts his fingers in his vest and laughs at your old- 
 fashioned religion, and turns over to some mystery of 
 the Bible, and says, " Explain that, my pious friend; 
 explain that." And who says, " Nobody shall scare me; 
 I am not afraid of the future; I used to believe in such 
 things, and so did my father and mother, but I have got 
 over it." Yes, he has got over it; and if you sit in his 
 company a little longer, you will get over it too. With- 
 out presenting one argument against the Christian relig- 
 ion, such men will, by their jeers and scoffs and carica- 
 tures, destroy your respect for that religion, which was 
 the strength of your father in his declining years, and 
 the pillow of your old mother when she lay a-dying. 
 
406 
 
 KEEPING BAD COMPANY. 
 
 Alas! a time will come when that blustering young 
 infidel will have to die, and then his diamond ring will 
 flash no splendor in the eyes of Death, as he stands over 
 the couch, waiting for his soul. Those beautiful locks 
 will be uncombed upon the pillow; and the dying man 
 will sa}^, "I cannot die — I cannot die." Death standing 
 ready beside the couch, says, " You must die; you have 
 only half a minute to live; let me have it right away 
 — yoitr soul."- "No," says the young infidel, "here are 
 my gold rings, and these pictures; take them all." "No," 
 says Death, " What do 1 care for pictures! — your soul." 
 " Stand back," says the dying infidel. "I will not stand 
 back," says Death, " for you have only ten seconds now 
 to live; I want your soul." The dying man says, "Don't 
 breathe that cold air into my face. You crowd me 
 too hard. It is getting dark in the room. O God!" 
 "Hush," says Death; "you said there was no God." 
 "Pray for me," exclaims the expiring infidel. "Too late to 
 pray," says Death; " but three more seconds to live, and 
 I will count them off — one — two — three." He has gone! 
 Where? Where? Carry him out — out, and bury him 
 beside his father and mother, who died while holding 
 fast the Christian religion. They died singing; but the 
 young infidel only said, "Don't breathe that cold air 
 into my face. You crowd me too hard. It is getting 
 dark in the room." 
 
 Again, I urge you to shun the companionship of idlers. 
 There are men hanging around every store, and office 
 and shop, who have nothing to do, or act as if they had 
 not. They are apt to come in when the firm are away, 
 and wish to engage you in conversation while you are 
 engaged in your regular employ men!:. Politely suggest to 
 such persons that you have no time to give them during 
 business hours. Nothing would please them so well as 
 
KEEPING BAD COMPANY. 
 
 407 
 
 to have you renounce your occupation and associate with 
 them. Much of the time they lounge around the doors 
 of engine houses, or after the dining hour stand upon 
 the steps of a fashionable hotel or an elegant restaurant, 
 wishing to give you the idea that that is the place where 
 they dine. But they do not dine there. They are sink- 
 ing down lower and lower, day by day. Neither by day 
 nor by night have anything to do with the idlers. Be- 
 fore j'ou admit a man into your acquaintance ask him 
 politely, "What do you do for a living?" If he says, 
 u Nothing; lam a gentleman," look out for him. He 
 may have a very soft hand, and very faultless apparel, 
 and have a high-sounding family name, but his touch is 
 death. Before you know it, you will in his presence be 
 ashamed of your work dress. Business will become to 
 you drudgery, and after awhile you will lose your place, 
 and afterwards your respectability, and last of all your 
 soul. Idleness is next door to villainy. Thieves, gam- 
 blers, burglars, shop-lifters, and assassins are made from 
 the class who have nothing to do. When the police go 
 to hunt up and arrest a culprit they seldom go to look 
 in at the busy carriage factory, or behind the counter 
 where diligent clerks are employed, but they go among 
 the groups of idlers. The play is going on at the 
 theater, when suddenly there is a scufHein the top gallery. 
 What is it? A policeman has come in, and, leaning over, 
 has tapped on the shoulder of a young man, saying, " I 
 want you, sir." He has not worked during the day, but 
 somehow has raked together a shilling or two to get into 
 the top gallery. lie is an idler. The man on his right 
 hand is an idler, and the man on his left hand is an idler. 
 
 During the past few years there has been a great deal 
 of dullness in business. Young men have complained 
 that they have little to do. If they have nothing else 
 
408 
 
 KEEPING BAD COMPANY. 
 
 to do they can read and improve their minds and heart* 
 These times are not always to continue. Business k> 
 waking up, and the superior knowledge that in this in- 
 terregnum of work you may obtain will be worth fifty 
 thousand dollars of capital. The large fortunes of the 
 next twenty years are having their foundations laid this 
 winter by the young men who are giving themselves to 
 self-improvement. I went into a store in New York 
 and saw five men, all Christians, sitting round, saying that 
 they had nothing to do. It is an outrage for a Christian 
 man to have nothing to do. Let him go out and visit the 
 poor, or distribute tracts, or go and read the Bible to the 
 sick, or take out his New Testament and be making his 
 eternal fortune. Let him go into the back office and 
 pray. 
 
 Shrink back from idleness in yourself and in others, if 
 you would maintain a right position. Good old Ashbel 
 Green, at more than eighty years of age, was found busy 
 writing, and some young man said to him: "Why do 
 you keep busy? It is time for you to rest?" He an- 
 swered: "I keep busy to keep out of mischief." No 
 man is strong enough to be idle. 
 
 Are you fond of pictures? If so I will show you one 
 of the works of an old master. Here it is: "I wenjb by 
 the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man 
 void of understanding; and lo! it was all grown over with 
 thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the 
 stone wall was broken down. Then I saw and considered 
 well. I looked upon it and received instruction. Yet a 
 little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to 
 sleep. So shall thy poverty come as one that traveleth 
 and thy want as an armed man." I don't know of 
 another sentence in the Bible more explosive than that. 
 It first hisses softly, like the fuse of a cannon, and at 
 
KEEPING BAD COMPANY. 
 
 409 
 
 last bursts like a fifty-four pounder. The old proverb 
 was right: "The devil tempts most men, but idlers 
 tempt the devil." 
 
 A young man came to a man of ninety years of age 
 and said to him: "How have you made out to live so 
 long and be bo well?" The old man took the youngster 
 to an orchard, and, pointing to some large trees full of 
 apples, said: " I planted these trees when I was a 
 boy, and do you wonder that now I am permitted to 
 gather the fruit of them?'' We gather in old age what 
 we plant in our youth. Sow to the wind and we reap 
 the whirlwind. Plant in early life the right kind of a 
 Christian character, and you will eat luscious fruit in 
 old age, and gather these harvest apples in eternity. 
 
 Again: I urge you to avoid the perpetual pleasure- 
 seeker. I believe in recreation and amusement. I need 
 it as much as I need bread, and go to my gymnasium 
 with as consciencious a purpose as I go to the Lord's 
 Supper; and all persons of sanguine temperament must 
 have amusement and recreation. God would not have 
 made us with the capacity to laugh if he had not intend- 
 ed us sometimes to indulge it. We will go forth from 
 the festivities of coming holidays better prepared to do 
 our work. God hath hung in sky, and set in wave, and 
 printed on grass many a roundelay; but he who chooses 
 pleasure-seeking for his life work does not understand 
 for what God made him. Our amusements are intended 
 to help us in some earnest mission. The thunder-cloud 
 hath an edge exquisitely purpled, but with voice that 
 jars the earth, it declares, k 'I go to water the green fields." 
 The wild-flowers under the fence are gay, but they 
 say, " We stand here to make room for the wheat-field, 
 and to refresh the husbandmen in their nooning." The 
 stream sparkles and foams, and frolics, and says, " I go 
 
110 
 
 KEEPING BAD COMFANY. 
 
 to baptize the moss. I lave the spots on the trout. I 
 slake the thirst of the bird. I tarn the wheel of the 
 mill. I rock in my crystal cradle muckshaw and water- 
 lily." And so, while the world plays, it works. Look 
 out for the man who always plays and never works. 
 
 You will do well to avoid those whose regular business 
 it is to play ball, skate or go a-boating. All these sports 
 are grand in their places. I never derived so mucn ad- 
 vantage from any ministerial association, as from a min- 
 isterial club that went out to play ball every Saturday 
 afternoon in the outskirts of Philadelphia. These recrea- 
 tions are grand to give us muscle and spirits for our reg- 
 ular toil. I believe in muscular Christianity. A man 
 is often not so near God with a weak stomach as when he 
 has a strong digestion. But shun those who make it their 
 life occupation to sport. There are young men whose 
 industry and usefulness have fallen overboard from the 
 yacht on the Hudson or the Schuylkill. There are men 
 whose business fell through the ice of the skating pond, 
 and has never since been hoard of. There is a beauty in 
 the gliding of a boat, in the song of skates, in the soar- 
 ing of a well-struck ball, and I never see one fly but I 
 involuntarily throw up ray hands to catch it; and, so far 
 from laying an injunction upon ball-playing, or any 
 other innocent sport, I claim them all as belonging of 
 right to those of us who toil in the grand industries of 
 church and state. 
 
 But the life business of pleasure-seeking always makes 
 in the end a criminal or a sot. George Brummel! was 
 smiled upon by all England, and his life was given to 
 pleasure. He danced with peeresses, and swung a round 
 of mirth, and wealth, and applause, until exhausted of 
 purse, and worn out of body, and bankrupt of reputation, 
 and ruined of soul, he begged a biscuit from a grocer, 
 
KEEPING BAD COMPANY. 
 
 ±11 
 
 and declared that he thought a dog's life was better than 
 a man's. 
 
 Such men will crowd around your anvil, or seek to de- 
 coy you off. They will want you to break out in the 
 midst of your busy day to take a ride with them to 
 Coney Island or to Central Park. They will tell you of 
 some people you must see; of some excursion that you 
 must take; of some Sabbath day that you ought to dis- 
 honor. They will tell you of exquisite wines that you 
 must take; of costly operas thaty u must hear* of won- 
 derful dancers that you must see; but before you accept 
 their convoy or their companionship, remember that 
 while at the end of a useful life you may be able to look 
 back to kindnesses done, to honorable work accomplished, 
 to poverty helped, to a good name earned, to Christian 
 influence exerted, to a Savior's cause advanced — these 
 pleasure-seekers on their death-bed have nothing better 
 to review than a torn play-bill, a ticket for the races, an 
 empty tankard, and the cast-out rinds of a carousal; and 
 as in the delirium of their awful death they clutch the 
 goblet, and press it to their lips, the dregs of the cup 
 falling upon their tongue, will begin to hiss and uncoil 
 with the adders of an eternal poison. 
 
 Cast out these men from your company. Do not be 
 intimate with them. Always be polite. There is no 
 demand that you ever sacrifice politeness. A young 
 man accosted a Christian Quaker with, " Old chap, how 
 did you make all your money?" The Quaker re 
 plied, " By dealing in an article that thou mayest deal 
 in if thou wilt — civility" Always be courteous, but at 
 the same time firm. Say no as if you meant it. Have 
 it understood in store, and shop, and street that you will 
 not stand in the companionship of the skeptic, the idle, 
 the pleasure-seeker. 
 
412 
 
 KEEPING BAD COMPANY. 
 
 Rather than enter the companionship of such, accept 
 the invitation to a better feast. The promises of God 
 are the fruits. The harps of heaven are the music. 
 Clusters from the vineyards of God have been pressed 
 into the tankards. The sons and daughters of the Lord 
 Almighty are the guests. While, standing at the ban- 
 quet, to fill the cups and divide the clusters, and com- 
 mand the harps, and welcome the guests, is a daughter 
 of God on whose brow are the blossoms of Paradise, and 
 in whose cheek is the flush of celestial summer. Her 
 name is Religion. 
 
 Her ways are ways of pleasantness, 
 And all her paths are peace.*' 
 
THE PBINCESS IN DISGUISE, 
 
 413 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 THE PRINCESS IN DISGUISE. 
 
 And the Lord said unto Abijak: Behold, the wife of Jeroboam 
 cometh to ask a thing of thee for her son, for he is sick : thus and 
 thus shalt thou say unto her: for it shall be when she coineth in, 
 that she shall feign herself to be another woman. -I. Judges xiv: 5. 
 
 There is a very sick child in Jeroboam's palace in 
 Tirzah. Medicines have failed. Skill is exhausted. 
 Abijah, the young prince, who had already become very 
 popular, must die, unless some supernatural aid be af- 
 forded. Death comes up the palace-stairs and swings 
 open the sick-room of royalty, and stands looking upon 
 the wasted form of the young prince, holding over him 
 a dart with which to strike. Wicked Jeroboam the 
 father has no right to expect Divine interference. He 
 knows if he pleads with the Lord's prophet, he will get 
 nothing but condemnation, and so Jeroboam sends his 
 wife on the tender and solemn mission. She put aside 
 her princely apparel, and puts on the attire of a peasant- 
 woman, and instead of taking gold and gems, as she 
 might have done, as a present to the prophet, she takes 
 only those things which would seem to indicate that she 
 belonged to the peasantry, namely, ten loaves of bread 
 and cracknels, and a cruse of honey. 
 
 Yonder she goes, hooded and disguised, the first woman 
 of all the realm, on foot, unattended, carrying a burden as 
 though she had come out from one of the humblest homes 
 in Tirzah. People carelessly pass her on the road, not 
 knowing that she is the first woman in all the realm, the 
 heiress of a kingdom, and that those who are bespangled 
 
414 
 
 THE PRINCESS IN DISGUISE. 
 
 and robed with royalty are her daily associates. Peter 
 the Great, the Czar of all the Hussias, at work on the dry 
 dock at Saardam, with a sailor's hat and a shipwright's 
 axe, was not more thoroughly disguised than this woman 
 of Tirzah on her way to seek the healing blessing of the 
 prophet in Shiloh. But the Lord's messenger might not 
 thus be deceived. Divinely illumined, although he had 
 lost his physical eyesight — divinely illumined, he sees 
 right through that woman's cheat, and as this great lady 
 enters his door, he accosts her in the words: "Come in, 
 thou wife of Jeroboam. "Why feignest thou thyself to 
 be another? For I am sent to thee with heavy tidings. 
 Get thee to thy house, and when thy feet reach the gate 
 of the city the child shall die." Broken-hearted, the 
 woman goes back to her home, now not so careful to 
 hide her face, or her noble gait and bearing. Her tears 
 fall on the dust of the way, and her mourning fills all the 
 road from Shiloh to Tirzah. What overwhelming grief! 
 for she knows that every step she takes is one heart-beat 
 less in the life of her child. With wonderful precision 
 every word of the prophet is fulfilled. As the woman 
 goes in the gate of the city, the child's life passes out. 
 No sooner have her feet struck the gate, than the pulses 
 of the son cease. The cry of sorrow in the palace is 
 joined by the wailing of a nation, and as this youthful 
 Abijah is carried out to his grave, the land sends up its 
 voice in eulogy of departed virtue, and the air is rent 
 with the lamentation of a kingdom. 
 
 It is with no small or .insi<mifiant idea that this morn- 
 ing I ask you to consider the thrilling story of this dis- 
 guised Princess of Tirzah. 
 
 In the first place, I see that wickedness is disposed to 
 involve others — to make them its dupes, its allies, its 
 scapegoats. Jeroboam wanted to hoodwink the prophet. 
 
THE PRINCESS IN . DISGUISE. 
 
 ±15 
 
 Did lie go himself? No, he sent his wife to do the work. 
 Hers the peril of detection, the hardship of the way, 
 the execution of the plot, while he stayed at home in in- 
 dolence, waiting for his wicked scheme to be carried out. 
 Iniquity, though a brag, is a great coward. It contrives 
 sin, but leaves others to execute it ; it lays the train of 
 gunpowder, but wants somebody else to touch it off; 
 plans the mischief, gets somebody else to work it; in- 
 vents the lie, gets somebody else to circulate it. In 
 nearly all the great plots of wickedness that have been 
 discovered, it has been found out that the instigators of 
 the rapine, or the arson, or the murder, went free, while 
 those who were suborned and inveigled into the crime, 
 clanked the chain and mounted the gallows. Aaron Burr, 
 with a heart unsurpassed for impurity and ambition, 
 plots for the usurpation of the United States Government, 
 but gets off with a little censure and a few threats, while 
 Blennerhasset — sweet-tempered Blennerhasset, learned 
 Blennerhasset — whom he decoyed from his gardens, and 
 vineyards, and laboratories, on the banks of the Ohio, 
 and hoodwinked into his crime, is hurled into prison, and 
 his great fortune is scattered, and his family, brought up 
 in luxury, turned out to die. Benedict Arnold, schem- 
 ing for the surrender of the American forts, and the 
 destruction of the American army, and the overthrow of 
 the American nation, for the betrayal of our cause gets 
 his purse filled with pounds sterling, and becomes a brig- 
 adier-general in the opposing army; while Major Andre, 
 the brave and the brilliant, whom he duped into the con- 
 spiracy, suffers the gibbet on the banks of the Hudson. 
 Nine- tenths of those who are arraigned, incarcerated, 
 and condemned, are merely the satellites of some adroit 
 villain. Ignominious fraud is a juggler, which, by 
 sleight of hand and legerdemain, makes the money it 
 
416 
 
 THE PRINCESS IN DISGUISE. 
 
 stole appear to be in somebody else's pocket. When 
 there is any great wickedness to be achieved, when there 
 is any great prophet to be hoodwinked, Jeroboam, in- 
 stead of going himself, sends his wife to do it. Stand 
 off from imposition and chicanery. Let not vile men 
 employ you for the purpose of carrying < ut their iniqui- 
 ties. 
 
 Again, I learn from this thrilling story of the dis- 
 guised Princess of Tirzah, that royalty sometimes passes 
 in disguise. The frock, the hood, the veil of the coun- 
 try-woman, hid up the majesty of this princess or queen, 
 and as she passed along the road, no one suspected who 
 she was. Yet she was just as much a princess or a 
 queen under the country-woman's garb, as when wear- 
 ing the apparel which flashed through the palace. So 
 God now often puts upon imperial natures a crown, yet 
 we do not discover them. They make no display. They 
 wear no insignia of ro} T alty. They blow no trumpet. 
 They ride in no high places. They elicit no huzza. 
 They quote no foreign language. Eoyalty in mask. A 
 princess in disguise. 
 
 There are kings without the crown, and conquerors 
 without the palm, and empresses without the jewels. 
 That plain woman you passed on the street to-day may 
 be regnant over vast realms of goodness and virtue — a 
 dominion wider than Jeroboam saw from the window of 
 his palace. You look in upon a home of poverty and 
 destitution. No clothes. No fire. No bread. Long 
 story of suffering written on the mother's wasted hand, 
 and on the pale cheeks of the children, and on the empty 
 bread-tray, and on the fireless hearth, and on the broken 
 chair. You would not give a dollar for all the furniture 
 in the house. Yet God, by his grace, may have made 
 that woman a princess or a queen. The overseers of the 
 
THE PRINCESS IN DISGUISE. 
 
 417 
 
 poor talk over her case, and pronounce her a pauper. 
 They know not that God has burnished a coronet for her 
 wrinkled brow, and that there is a throne on which at 
 last she will rest from earthly weariness. Glory veiled! 
 Affluence hidden! Eternal raptures hushed up! Maj- 
 esty in a mask! A princess in disguise! 
 
 I will tell you of a grander disguise. Hear it. The 
 favorite of a great house one day looked out of his pal- 
 ace window and saw men carrying very heavy burdens, 
 and some of them lying at the gate full of sores, and 
 some hobbling on crutches, and heard others bewailing 
 their woe; and he said: "I will put on poor-man's 
 clothes, and I will go down among those destitute ones, 
 and I will be one of them, and I will see what I can do 
 in the way of sympathy and help." The day was set. 
 The lords of the land came to see him off. All who 
 could sing gathered together to give him a parting eong, 
 which shook the hills and woke up the shepherds. The 
 tirst few nights of his life he slept with the ostlers, and 
 drovers, and camel-drivers, for no one knew there was a 
 King in town. He strolled into the house where learned 
 men sat, and amazed them, that one without a doctor's 
 gown should know more about the law than the doctors. 
 He fished with the fisherman. He smote with his own 
 hammer in the carpenter's shop. He ate raw corn out 
 of the field. He fried his own fish on the banks of Gen- 
 essaret. He slept out of doors, because the mountain- 
 eers would not invite him into their cabin. He was 
 howled at by crazy people amid the tombs. He was 
 splashed by the surf of the sea. A pilgrim without a 
 pillow. A sick man without any medicament. A 
 mourner without any sympathetic bosom into which he 
 could pour his tears. Through all that land he passed 
 in disguise. Occasionallv his Divine royalty would flash 
 27 
 
418 
 
 THE PRINCESS IN DISGUISE. 
 
 out, as in the Genessaret storm; as in the red wine at 
 the wedding; as when he freed the shackled demoniacs 
 of Gaddera; as when he swung a whole school of fish 
 into the net of the discouraged boatmen; as when he 
 throbbed life into the wasted arm of the paralytic; but, 
 still, for the most part he passed in disguise. No one 
 saw a king's jewel in his sandal. No one saw a king's 
 robe in his plain coat. They knew not that that shelter- 
 less man owned all the mansions in which the hierarchs 
 of heaven have their habitation. They knew not that he 
 who cried: "I thirst!" poured the Euphrates from his 
 own chalice. They knew not that that hungered man 
 owned all the olive gardens and all the harvests that 
 shook their gold on the hills of Palestine. They knew 
 nut that the worlds that lighted up the Eastern night 
 were only the glittering belt with which he clasped the 
 robes of his glory. They knew not that the ocean lay 
 in the palm of his hand, like a dew-drop in the vase of a 
 lily. They knew not that all the splendors of the noon- 
 day were only the shadow of his throne. They knew 
 not that suns, and moons, and stars, and galaxies, march- 
 ing on for ages in cohorts of light, as compared with 
 Christ's lifetime, were less than the sparkle of a fire-fly 
 on a summer's night. Omnipotence sheathed in a hu- 
 man form! Omniscience hidden in a human eye! Infi- 
 nite love concealed in a human heart! Eternal harmonies 
 subdued into a human voice! Honor cloaked in shame! 
 The crown of universal dominion covered up by a bunch 
 of thorns! The royalty of heaven passing in earthly 
 disguise! 
 
 Again, I learn from this story of the disguised Prin- 
 cess of Tirzah, how people jpat ?nasks on> and how the 
 Lord tears them off. Oh, it must have been terrible 
 when the prophet accosted this woman of Tirzah, and 
 
THE PRINCESS IN DISGUISE. 
 
 419 
 
 said: "Come in, thou wife of Jeroboam. You cannot 
 cheat me. I know who you are. Come in. Why 
 feignest thou to be the wife of another?" It was right 
 for her to seek a cure for her sick son; but it was not 
 right that she should try to hoodwink the prophet. It 
 was a wicked cheat, and God tore off the mask. Some- 
 times we have a right to conceal. There is no need of 
 telling everything. A man is a fool who tells everything 
 he knows. There is a natural pressure to the lips which 
 indicates that sometimes we ought to be silent. But for 
 all double dealing, and Jesuitry, and moral shuffling^ 
 and forgery, and sham, God has nothing but exposure 
 and anathema. He will show up the trap. He will rid- 
 dle the empiricism. He will assault the ambuscade. He 
 will rip up the cheat. I wish I could point out to you 
 some of the charlatans and tricksters that hoodwink, and 
 cajole, and cozen, and hoax society. There is a vast 
 multitude of people over-credulous. They are ready to 
 be deceived. They believe in ghosts; they saw one of 
 them once. They heard strange and unaccountable 
 sounds in a vacant dwelling. Passing a graveyard at 
 night they saw something in white approach and cross 
 the road. In a neighbor's house they heard something 
 that portended a death in the family. They think it is 
 very disastrous to count the carriages at a funeral. They 
 think it is a certain sign of evil if a bat flies into a room 
 on a summer night, or a salt-cellar upsets, or a cricket 
 chirps on the hearth, or if they see the moon over the 
 wrong shoulder. They would not think of beginning 
 any enterprise on Friday, or of going back to the house 
 to get anything after they had once started on a journey. 
 Now, 6uch people arc all ready to be duped. Ignorance 
 comes along in the disguise of medical science, and these 
 are the kind of people that this disguised ignorance first 
 
420 
 
 THE PKIKCESS IN DISGUISE. 
 
 entraps. Oh, the tragedy of the pill-box and the mix- 
 tures that have never been described. It is high time 
 that somebody lifted up his voice against the wholesale 
 butchery of the race. There are so many men who have 
 found the essence of a weed which was plucked in some 
 strange place in the moonshine, that can cure all kinds ot 
 disease, and they cover up the board fences with the ad- 
 vertisements of the "elixirs," and the "pain killers,' 5 
 and the "Indian mixtures," and the supernatural bitters, 
 and the nostrums which are emptying cradles, and filling 
 insane asylums, and choking the cemetery with more 
 bones than it can swallow! And so ears are deafened, 
 and eyes are blinded, and nervous systems are destroyed 
 by "electrical salves," and "instantaneous ointments," 
 and "irresistible cataplasms," and"unfailing disinfect- 
 ants," and the wonders of therapeutics, and the prodigies 
 of pharmacy, and the marvels of chirurgery, enough to 
 stun, electrify, poultice, scarify and kill the whole race 
 Oh, stand off from such impositions. "When ignorance 
 comes to you in the form of medical science — when it 
 comes to you in that or in any other disguise, have noth- 
 ing to do with it. Men prosper by these things, and 
 build up vast fortunes; but after awhile, if they have 
 been practicing on the weaknesses of men and women % 
 the time will come when their prosperity will cease, and 
 their dapple greys will be halted by the angel of the 
 Lord that stood before the ass with drawn sword. In 
 the day of the Lord, there will be a light which will 
 shine through every subterfuge, and thinner than the 
 disguise of the woman of Tirzah will be every earthly 
 imposition, and with a voice louder than that with which 
 the prophet accosted that woman, saying: "Come in, 
 tbou wife of Jeroboam," will he consign to midnight 
 darkness, and doom, and death all two-faced men, and 
 
THE PKINCESS IN DISGUISE. 
 
 jockies, and knaves, and defrauders, and imposters, and 
 charlatans. 
 
 Again, I learn, from this story of the disguised prin- 
 cess of Tirzah, how exact, and, minute, and precise are 
 the Providences of God. The prophet told that woma n 
 that the moment she entered the gate of the city, the 
 child would die. She comes np to the gate of the city, 
 the child's pulses instantly stop. With what wonderful 
 precision that Providence acted. But it was no more 
 certainly true in her life than it is true in your life and 
 mine. Sickness comes, death occurs, the nation is born, 
 despotisms are overthrown at the appointed time. God 
 drives the universe with a stiff rein. Events do not go 
 slipshod. Things do not merely happen so. With God 
 there are no disappointments, no surprises, no accidents. 
 The designs of God are never caught in deshabille. In 
 all the Book of God's Providence there is not one "if." 
 I am far from being a fatalist, but I would be wretched 
 indeed it I did not suppose that God arranges everything 
 that pertains to me and mine; and as when that woman 
 entered the gate of Tirzah and her son died, the provi- 
 dence was minutely arranged, just so minutely and pre- 
 cisely are all the affairs of our life arranged. You may 
 ask me a hundred questions I cannot answer about this 
 theory, nor can any man answer them; but I shall be- 
 lieve until the day of my death that no pang ever seized 
 me but God decides when it shall come and when it shall 
 go, and that I am over-arched by unerring care, and that 
 though the heavens may fall, and the earth may burn, 
 and the judgment may thunder, and eternity may roll, 
 if I am God's child, not so much as a hair shall fall from 
 my head, or a shadow drop on my path, or a sorrow 
 transfix my heart, but to the very last particular it shall 
 be under my Father's arrangement. He bottles our 
 
422 
 
 THE PRINCESS IN DISGUISE. 
 
 tears. He catches our sighs. And to the orphan he will 
 be a father, and to the widow he will be a husband, and 
 to the outcast he will be a home, and to the poorest 
 wretch that to-day crawls out of the ditch of his abom- 
 inations, crying for mercy, he will be an all-pardoning 
 Redeemer. The rocks will turn grey with age, the for- 
 ests will be unmoored in the hurricane, the sun will shut 
 its fiery eyelid, the stars will drop like blasted figs, the 
 sea will heave its last groan and lash itself in expiring 
 agony, the continents will drop like anchors in the deep, 
 the world will wrap itself in sheet of flame and leap on 
 the funeral pyre of the judgment day; but God's love 
 will never die. It shall kindle its suns after all other 
 lights have gone out. It will be a billowing sea after all 
 other oceans have wept themselves away. It will warm 
 itself by the blaze of a consuming world. It will sing 
 while the archangel's trumpet peals and the air is filled 
 with the crash of breaking sepulchers and the rush of 
 the wings of the rising deaxi. ■ 
 
HELP FOB THOSE OFF TKACK. 
 
 423 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 HELP FOR THOSE OFF TRACK. 
 When shall I awake ? I will seek it j~et again. — Proverbs xxiii : 35 
 
 I have thought in the midst of this ^series of sermons 
 which I am preaching, on the night side of city life, it 
 would be well for me to address a sermon of help to the 
 multitude of people who have got on the wrong track. 
 In the nights of my exploration I found a great multi- 
 tude of men who had gone astray, and nothing more im- 
 pressed me than the fact of their great multitude. With 
 an insight into human nature such as no other man ever 
 reached, Solomon, in my text, sketches the mental oper- 
 ations of one who, having stepped aside from the path 
 of rectitude, desires to return. With a wish for some- 
 thing better, he says: "When shall I awake? When 
 shall I come out of this horrid nightmare of iniquity?" 
 But seized upon by uneradicated habit, and forced down 
 hill by his passions, he cries out: "I will seek it yet 
 again. I will try it once more." 
 
 Our libraries are adorned with an elegant literature 
 addressed to young men, pointing out to them all the 
 dangers and perils of life — complete maps of the voyage, 
 showing all the rocks, the quicksands, the shoals. But 
 suppose a man has already made shipwrecks; suppose he 
 is already off the track; suppose he has already gone 
 astray, how is he to get back? That is a field compara- 
 tively untouched. I propose to address myself this 
 morning to such. There are those in this audience who, 
 with every passion of their agonized soul, are ready to 
 
424 
 
 HELP FOJi THOSE OFF TKACK. 
 
 hear such a discussion. They compare themselves with 
 what they were ten years ago, and cry out from the bond- 
 age in which they are incarcerated. Now, if there be any 
 in this house, come with an earnest purpose, yet feeling 
 they are beyond the pale of Christian sympathy, and 
 that the sermon can hardly be expected to address them, 
 then, at this moment, I give them my right hand and 
 call them brother. Look up. There is glorious and 
 triumphant hope for you yet. I sound the trumpet of 
 Gospel deliverance. The church is ready to spread a 
 banquet at your return, and the hierarchs of heaven to 
 fall into line of bannered procession at the news of your 
 emancipation. So far as God may help me, I propose to 
 show what are the obstacles of your return, and then 
 how you are to surmount those obstacles. 
 
 The first difficulty in the way of your return is the 
 force of moral gravitation. Just as there is a natural 
 law which brings down to the earth anything you throw 
 into the air, so there is a corresponding moral gravitation. 
 In other words, it is easier to go down than it is to go up; 
 it is easier to do wrong than it is to do right. Call to 
 mind the comrades of your boyhood days — some of 
 them good, some of them bad. "Which most affected 
 you? Call to mind the anecdotes that you have heard 
 in the last five or ten years — some of them are pure and 
 some of them impure. "Which the more easily sticks to 
 your memory? During the years of your life you have 
 formed certain" courses of conduct — some of them good, 
 some of them bad. To which style of habit did you the 
 more easily yield? Ah! my friends, we have to take but 
 a moment of self-inspection to find out that there is in 
 all our souls a force of moral gravitation. But that 
 gravitation may be resisted. Just as you may pick up 
 from the earth something and hold it in your hand 
 
HELP FOR Tli OSE OFF TRACK. 
 
 425 
 
 toward heaven, just so, by the power of God's grace, a 
 soul fallen may be lifted toward peace, toward pardon, 
 toward heaven. Force of moral gravitation in every one 
 of us, but power in God's grace to overcome that force 
 of moral gravitation. 
 
 The next thing in the way of your return is the power 
 of evil habit. I know there are those who say it is very 
 easy for them to give up evil habits. I do not believe 
 them. Here is a man given to intoxication. He knows 
 it is disgracing his family, destroying his property, 
 ruining him body, mind, and soul. If that man, being 
 an intelligent man and loving his family, could easily 
 give up that habit, would he not do so? The fact that he 
 does not give it up proves it is hard to give it up. It is 
 a very easy thing to sail down stream, the tide carrying 
 you with great force; but suppose you turn the boat up 
 stream, is it so easy then to row it? As long as we yield 
 to the evil inclinations in our hearts, and our bad habits 
 we are sailing down stream; but the moment we try to 
 turn, we put our boat in the rapids just above Niagara, 
 and try to row up stream. Take a man given to the 
 habit of using tobacco, as most of you do! and let him 
 resolve to stop, and he finds it very difficult. Seventeen 
 years ago I quit that habit, and I would as soon dare to 
 put my right hand in the fire as once to indulge in it. 
 Why? Because it was such a terrific struggle to get 
 over it. Now, let a man be advised by his physician 
 to give up the use of tobacco. He goes around not know- 
 ing what to do with himself. He cannot add up a line 
 of figures. He cannot sleep nights. It seems as if the 
 world had turned upside down. He feels his business is 
 going to ruin. Where he was kind and obliging, he is 
 scolding and fretful. The composure that characterized 
 
426 
 
 HELP FOR THOSE OFF TRACK. 
 
 Mm has given way to a fretful restlessness, and he has 
 become a complete fidget. What power is it that has 
 rolled a wave of woe over the earth and shaken a portent 
 in the heavens? He has tried to stop smoking! After 
 a while he says: "I am going to do as I please. The doctor 
 doesn't understand my case. I'm going back to my old 
 habit." And lie returns. Everything assumes its usual 
 composure. His business seems to brighten. The world 
 becomes an attractive place to live in. His children, seeing 
 the difference, hail the return of their father's genial 
 disposition. What wave of color has dashed blue into 
 the sky, and greenness into the mountain foliage, and 
 the glow of sapphire into the sunset? What enchant- 
 ment has lifted a world of beauty and joy on his soul? 
 He has gone back to smoking. Oh! the fact is, as we 
 all know in our own experience, that habit is a task- 
 master; as long as we obey it, it does not chastise us; 
 but let us resist and we find we are to be lashed with 
 scorpion whips, and bound with ship cable, and thrown 
 into the track of bone-breaking Juo-crernauts. During 
 the war of 1812 there was a ship set on fire just above 
 Niagara Falls, and then, cut loose from its moorings, it 
 came on down through the night and tossed over the 
 falls. It was said to have been a scene brilliant beyond 
 all description. Well, there are thousands of men on 
 fire of evil habit, coming down through the rapids and 
 through the awful night of temptation toward the 
 eternal plunge. Oh! how hard it is to arrest them. 
 God only can arrest them. Suppose a man after five, or 
 ten, or twenty years of evil-doing resolves to do right? 
 Why, all the forces of darkness are allied against him. 
 He cannot sleep nights. He gets down on his knees in 
 the midnight and cries, "God help me!" He bites his 
 lip. He grinds his teeth. He clenches his fist in a de- 
 
HELP FOR THOSE OEF TRACK. 
 
 427 
 
 termination to keep his purpose. He dare not look at the 
 bottles in the window of a wine store. It is one long, 
 bitter, exhaustive, hand-to-liand light with enflaraed, tan- 
 talizing, and merciless habit. When he thinks he is entirely 
 free the old inclinations pounce upon him like a pack of 
 hounds with their muzzles tearing away at the flanks of 
 one poor reindeer. In Paris there is a sculptured repre- 
 sentation of Bacchus, the god of revelry. He is riding on a 
 panther at full leap. Oh! how suggestive. Let every one 
 who is speeding on bad ways understand he is not riding 
 a docile and well-broken steed, but he is riding a monster 
 wild and bloodthirsty, going at a death leap. How many 
 there are who resolve on a better life, and say, "When 
 shall I awake?" but, seized on by their old habits, cry, "I 
 will try it once mure; I will seek it yet again!" Years 
 ago, there were some Princeton students who were 
 skating and the ice was very thin, and some one warned 
 the company back from the air-hole, and finally warned 
 them entirely to leave the place. But one young man 
 with bravado, alter all the rest had stopped, cried out, 
 one round more!" He swept around, and went down, 
 and was brought out a corpse. My friends, there are 
 thousands and tens of thousands of men losing their 
 souls in that way. It is the one round more. 
 
 I have also to say that if a man wants to return from 
 evil practices, society repulses him. Desiring to reform, 
 he says: " Now, I will shake off my old associates, and 
 I will find Christian companionship." And he appears 
 at the church door some Sabbath day, and the usher 
 greets him with a look as much as to say, " Why, you 
 here? You are the last man I ever expected to see at 
 church! Come, take this seat right down by the door!" 
 Instead of saying, 4, Good morning ; I am glad you are 
 here. Come; I will give you a first-rate seat, right up 
 
433 
 
 HELP FOR THOSE OFF TRACK. 
 
 by tt&a pulpit." Well, the prodigal, not yet discouraged, 
 enters a prayer meeting, and some Christian man, with 
 more zeal than common sense, says: "Glad to see you; 
 the dying thief was saved, and I suppose there is mercy 
 for you!" The young man, disgusted, chilled, throws 
 himself back on his dignity, resolved he never will enter 
 the house of God again. Perhaps not quite fully dis- 
 couraged about reformation, he sides up by some highly 
 respectable man he used to know, going down the street, 
 and immediately the respectable man has an errand down 
 some other street! Well, the prodigal wishing to return, 
 takes some member of a Christian as ociation by the 
 hand, or tries to. The Christian young man looks at 
 him, looks at the faded apparel and the marks of dissi- 
 pation, and instead of giving him a warm grip of the 
 hand, offers him the tip end of the long fingers of the 
 left hand, which is equal to striking a man in the face. 
 Oh! how few Christian people understand how much 
 force and gospel there is in a good, honest hand-shaking. 
 Sometimes, when you have felt the need of encourage- 
 ment, and some Christian man has taken you heartily 
 by the hand, have you not felt thrilling through every 
 fiber of your body, mind and soul an encouragement 
 that was just what you needed? You do not know any- 
 thing at all about this unless you know when a man 
 tries to return from evil courses of conduct he runs 
 against repulsions innumerable. We say of some man? 
 he lives a block or two from the church, or half a mile 
 from the church. There are people in Brooklyn and 
 >Tew York who live a thousand miles from church. 
 Vast deserts of indifference between them and the house 
 of God. The fact is, we must keep our respectability, 
 though thousands and tens of thousands perish. Christ 
 sat with publicans and sinners. But if there came to the 
 
HELP FOE THOSE OFF TRACK. 
 
 429 
 
 house of God a man with marks of dissipation upon him, 
 people almost threw up their hands in horror, as much 
 as to say, " Isn't it shocking?" How these dainty, fas- 
 tidious Christians in all our churches are going to get 
 into heaven, I don't know, unless they have an especial 
 train of cars, cushioned and upholstered, each one a car 
 to himself! They cannot go with the great herd of pub 
 licans and sinners. Oh! ye who curl your lip of scorn 
 at the fallen, I tell you plainly, it' you had been sur- 
 rounded by the same influences, instead of sitting to-day 
 amid the cultured, and the refined and the Christian, 
 you would have been a crouching wretch in stable or 
 ditch, covered with filth and abomination. It is not be- 
 cause you are naturally any better, but because the 
 mercy of God has protected you. Who are you that, 
 brought up in Christian circles and watched by 
 Christian parentage, you should be so hard on the 
 fallen? 
 
 I think men also are often hindered from return by the 
 fact that churches are too anxious about their mem- 
 bership and too anxious about their denomination, 
 and they rush out when they see a man about to 
 give up his sin and return to God, and ask him how he 
 is going to be baptized, whether by sprinkling or im- 
 mersion, and what kind of church he is going to join. 
 Oh! my friends, it is a poor time to talk about Presbyte- 
 rian catechisms, and Episcopal liturgies, and Methodist 
 love feasts and baptistries to a man that is coining out 
 of the darkness of sin into the glorious light of the gos- 
 «pel. Why, it reminds me of a man drowning in the sea, 
 and a life-boat puts out for him, and the man in the boat 
 says to the man out of the boat, M Now, if I get .you 
 ashore, are yon going to live on my street?" First get 
 him ashore, and then talk about the non-essentials of 
 
430 
 
 HELP FOR THOSE OFF TRACK. 
 
 religion. Who cares what church lie joins, if lie only 
 joins Christ and starts for heaven? Oh! you ought to 
 have, ray brother, an illumined face and a hearty grip for 
 every one that tries to turn from his evil way. Take 
 hold of the same book with him though his dissipations 
 shake the book, re m ember ing that he that converteth a 
 sinner from the error of his ways shall save a soul from 
 death and hide a multitude of sins. 
 
 Now, I have shown you these obstacles because I want 
 you to understand I know all the difficulties in the way; 
 but I am now to tell you how Hannibal may scale the 
 Alps, and how the shackles may be unriveted, and how 
 the paths of virtue foisaken may be regained. First of all, 
 my brother, throw yourself on God. Go to him frankly, 
 and earnestly, and tell him these habits you have, and ask 
 him if there is any help in all the resources of omnipotent 
 love, to give it to you. Do not go with a long rigma- 
 role people call prayer, made up of "ohs," and "aha," 
 and "forever and forever, amens!" Go to God and cry 
 for help! help! help! and if you cannot cry for help, just 
 look and live. I remember, in the late war, I was at 
 Antietam, and I went into the hospitals after the battle 
 and I said to a man, " Where are you hurt?" He made 
 no answer, but held up his arm, swollen and splintered. 
 I saw where he was hurt. The simple fact is, when a 
 man has a wounded soul, all he has to do is to hold it up 
 before a sympathetic Lord and get it healed. Itdoes not 
 take any long prayer. Just hold up the wound. Oh, it 
 is no small thing when a man is nervous, and weak and 
 exhausted, coming from his evil ways, to feel that God 
 puts two omnipotent arms around about him, and says: 
 " Young man, I will stand by you. The mountains may 
 depart, and the hills be removed, but I will never fail 
 you." And then as the soul thinks the news is too good 
 
HELP FOR THOSE OFF TRACK. 
 
 431 
 
 to be true, and cannot believe it, and looks up in God's 
 race, God lifts his right hand and takes an oath, an 
 affidavit, saving: " As I live saith the Lord God, I have 
 no pleasure in the death of him that dieth." Blessed be 
 (x«m1 for such a gospel as this. " Cut the slices thin," 
 said the wife to the husband, "or there will not be 
 enough to go all around for the children; cut the slices 
 thin." Blessed be God there is a full loaf for every one 
 that wants it. Bread enough and to spare. No thin 
 slices at the Lord's table. I remember when the 
 Master Street Hospital, in Philadelphia, was opened 
 during the war, a telegram came saying, "There will be 
 three hundred wounded men to-night; be ready to take 
 care of them;" and from my church there went in some 
 twenty or thirty men and women to look after these poor 
 wounded fellows. As they came, some from one part of 
 the land, some from another, no one asked whether this 
 man was from Oregon, or from Massachusetts, or from 
 Minnesota, or from Xew York. There was a wounded 
 soldier, and the only question was how to take off the 
 rags the most gently, and put on the bandage, and 
 administer the cordiai. And when a soul comes to God, 
 He does not ask where you came from, or what your 
 ancestry was. Healing for all your wounds. Pardon 
 for all your guilt. Comfort for all your troubles. 
 
 Then, also, I counsel you, if you want to get back, to 
 quit all your bad associations. One unholy intimacy 
 will fill your soul with moral distemper. In all the 
 ages of the church there has not been an instance where 
 a man kept one evil associate and was reformed. Among 
 the twelve hundred thousand of the race, not one in- 
 stance. Go home to-day, open your desk, take out letter 
 paper, stamp an envelope, and then write a letter some- 
 thing like this: 
 
432 
 
 HELP FOii THOSE OFF TKACK. 
 
 " My Old Companions: I start this day for heaven. 
 Until I am persuaded you will join me in this, farewell." 
 
 Then sign your name, and send the letter \vith the 
 first post. Give up your bad companions or give up 
 heaven. It is not ten bad companions that destroy a 
 man, nor five bad companions, nor three bad compan- 
 ions, nor two bad companions, but one. What chance is 
 there for that young man I saw along the street, four or 
 five young men with him, halting in front of a grogshop, 
 urging him to go in, he resisting, violently resisting, 
 until after a while they forced him to go in! It was m 
 summer night and the door was left open, and I saw the 
 process. They held him fast, and they put the cup to 
 his lips, and they forced down the strong drink What 
 chance is therefor such a young man? 
 
 I counsel you also, seek Christian advice. Every 
 Christian man is bound to help you. If you find no other 
 human ear willing to listen to your story of struggle, 
 come to meand I will by every sympathy of my heart, and 
 every prayer, and every toil of my hand, stand beside 
 you in the struggle for reformation; and as I hope to 
 have my own sins forgiven and hope to be acquitted at 
 the judgment seat of Christ, I will not betray you. First 
 of all, seek God, then seek Christian counsel. Gather 
 up all the energies of body, mind, and soul, and, appeal- 
 ing to God for success, declare this day everlasting war 
 against all drinking habits, all gaming practices, all 
 houses of sin. Half-and-half work will amount to noth- 
 ing; it must be a Waterloo. Shrink back now and you 
 are lost. Push on, and you are saved. A Spartan gen- 
 eral fell at the very moment of victory, but he dipped 
 his finger in his own blood and wrote on a rock near 
 which he was dying, " Sparta has conquered." Though 
 your struggle to get rid of sin may seem to be' almost 
 
HELP FOR THOSE OFF TRACK. 433 
 
 a death struggle, you can dip your finder in your own 
 blood and write on the Rock of Ages, ''Victory through 
 our Lord Jesus Christ." Oh! what glorious news it 
 would be for some of these young men to send home to 
 their parents in the country these holidays which are 
 coming. They go to the postoffice every day or two to see 
 whether there are any letters from you. How anxious 
 they are to hear! You might send them for a holiday 
 present this season, a book from one of our best publish- 
 ing houses, or a complete wardrohe from the importer's 
 palace — it would not please them half so much as the 
 news you might send home to-morrow that you had 
 given your heart to God. I know how it is in the coun- 
 try. The night comes on. The cattle stand under the 
 rack through which burst the trusses of hay. The 
 horses just having frisked up from the meadow at 
 the nightfall, stand knee-deep in the bright straw that 
 invites them to lie down and rest. Tbe perch of the 
 hovel is full of fowl, their feet warm under the feathers. 
 In tbe old farmhouse at night no candle is lighted, for 
 the flames clap their hands about the great backlog, and 
 shake the shadow of the group up and down the wall. 
 Father and mother sit there for half an hour, saying 
 nothing. I wonder what they are thinking of. After 
 a while the father breaks the silence and says, " Well, I 
 wonder where our boy is in town to-night;" and the 
 mother answers, " In no bad place, I warrant you; we 
 always could trust him when he was home, and since he 
 has been away there have been so many prayers offered 
 for him we can trust him still." Then at eight o'clock — 
 for they retire early in the country — at eight o'clock they 
 kneel down and commend you to that God who watches 
 in country and in town, on the land and on the sea. Some 
 one said to a Grecian general, " What was the proudest 
 28 
 
HELP FOR THOSE OFF TRACK. 
 
 moment in your life?" He thought a moment, and said, 
 u The proudest moment in my life was when I sent word 
 home to my parents that I had gained the victory." And 
 the proudest and most brilliant moment in your life will 
 be the moment when you can send words to your parents 
 in the country that you have conquered your evil habits 
 by the grace of God, and become eternal victor. Oh! 
 despise not parental anxiety. The time will come when 
 you will have neither father nor mother, and you will go 
 around the place where they used to watch yon and find 
 them gone from the house, and gone from the field and 
 gone from the neighborhood. Cry as loud for forgive- 
 ness as you may over the mound in the churchyard, they 
 will not answer. Dead! Dead! And then you will take 
 out the white lock of hair that was cut from your 
 mother's brow just before they buried her, and you will 
 take the cane with which your father used to walk, and 
 you will think and think, and wish that you had done just 
 as they wanted you to, and would give the world if you had 
 never thrust a pang through their dear old hearts. God 
 pity the young man who has brought disgrace on his 
 father's name. God pity the young man who has 
 broken his mother's heart. Better if he had never been 
 born, — better if in the first hour of his life, instead of 
 being laid against the warm bosom of maternal tender- 
 ness, he had been coffined and sepulchred. There is no 
 balm powerful enough to heal the heart of one who has 
 brought parents to a sorrowful grave, and who wanders 
 about through the dismal cemetery, rending the hair and 
 wringing the hands, and crying, "Mother! mother!" 
 Oh! that to-day, by all the memories of the past, and 
 by all the hopes of the future, you would yield your 
 heart to God. May your father's God and your mother's 
 God bo your God forever. 
 
THB5 REPROACHFUL OUTCRY. 
 
 435 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 THE REPROACHFUL OUTCRY. 
 No man cared for my soul. — Psalm cxlii : 4. 
 
 David, the rubicund lad, had become the battle- worn 
 warrior. Three thousand armed men in pursuit of him, 
 he had hidden in the cave of Engedi, near the coast of 
 the Dead Sea. Utterly fagged out with the pursuit, as 
 you have often been worn out with th« trials of life, 
 he sat down and cried out: "Xo man cared for my soul!" 
 
 If you should fall through a hatchway, or slip from a 
 scaffolding, or drop through a skylight, there would be 
 hundreds of people who would come around and pick up 
 your body and carry it to the home or to the hospital. 
 I saw a great crowd of people in the street and I asked: 
 "What is the matter?" and I found out that a poor la- 
 boring man had fallen under sunstroke, and all our eyes 
 were filled with tears at the thought of his distracted 
 wife and his desolated home. We are all sympathetic 
 with physical disaster, but how little sympathy for spir- 
 itual woes. There are men in this house who have come 
 to mid-life who have never yet been once personally ac- 
 costed about their eternal welfare. A great sermon 
 dropped into an audience of hundreds of thousands will 
 do its work; but if this world is ever to be brought to 
 God it will be through little sermons preached to private 
 Christians to an audience of one. The sister's letter 
 postmarked at the village — the word uttered in your 
 hearing, half of smiles and half of tears — the religious 
 postscript to a business letter — the card left at the door 
 
436 
 
 THE REPROACHFUL OUTCRY. 
 
 when you had some kind of trouble — the anxious look ol 
 some one across a church aisle while an earnest sermon 
 was being preached, swung you into the kingdom of 
 God. But there are hundreds of people in this house 
 who will take the word that David used in the past tense, 
 and employ it in the present tense and cry out: "No 
 man cares for my soul !" You feel as you go out day by 
 day in the tng and jostle of life that it is every man for 
 himself. Yon can endure the pressure of commercial 
 affairs, and would consider it almost impertinent for any 
 one to ask you whether you are making or losing money. 
 But there have been times when you would have drawn 
 your cheque for thousands of dollars if some one would 
 only help your soul out of its perplexities. There are 
 questions about your higher destiny that ache, and dis- 
 tract, and agonize you at times. Let no one suppose 
 that because you are busy all day with hardware, or dry- 
 goods, or groceries, or grain, that your thoughts are no 
 longer than your yard-stick, and stop at the brass-headed 
 nails of the store counter. Where you speak once about 
 religious things you think five thousand times. They 
 call you a worldling. You arc not a worldling. Of 
 course you are industrious and keep busy, but you have 
 had your eyes opened to the realities of the next world. 
 You are not a fool. You know better than any one can 
 tell you that a few years at most will wind up your 
 earthly engagements, and that you will take residence in 
 a distant sphere where all your business adroitness would 
 be a superfluity. You sometimes think till your head 
 aches about great religious subjects. I see you going 
 down the street with your eyes fixed on the pavement, 
 oblivious of the passing multitudes, your thoughts gone 
 on eternal expedition. You wonder if the Bible is true, 
 how much of it is literal and how much is figurative, if 
 
THE KEPKOACHFUL OUTCRY. 
 
 437 
 
 Christ be God, if there is anything like retribution, if 
 you are immortal, if a resurrection will ever take place, 
 what the occupation of your departed kindred is, what you 
 will be ten thousand years from now. "With a cultured 
 placidity of countenance you are on fire with agitations 
 of soul. Oh, this solitary anxiety of your whole lifetime. 
 You have sold goods to or bought them from Christian 
 people for ten years, and they have never whispered one 
 word of spiritual counsel. You have passed up and 
 down the aisles of churches with men who knew that you 
 had no hope for heaven, and talked about the weather, 
 and about your physical health, and about everything 
 but that concerning which you most wanted to hear 
 them speak, namely, your everlasting spirit. Time3 
 without number you have felt in your heart, if you have 
 not uttered it with your lips: "No man cares for my 
 soul! , ' 
 
 There have been times when you were especially plia- 
 ble on the great subject of religion. It was so, for 
 instance, after you had lost your property. You had a 
 great many letters blowing you up for being unfortunate. 
 You showed that there had been a concatenation of cir- 
 cumstances and that your insolvency was no fault of 
 yours. Your creditors talked to you as though they 
 would have a hundred cents on a dollar or your life. 
 Protest after protest tumbled in on your desk. Men 
 who used to take your hand with both of theirs and 
 shake it violently, now pass you on the street with an 
 almost imperceptible nod. After six or eight hours of 
 scalding business anxiety you go home, and you shut the 
 door, and throw yourself on the sofa, and you feel in c, 
 state of despair. You wish that some one would come 
 in and break up the gloom. Everything seems to bo 
 against you. The bank against you. Your creditors 
 
43S 
 
 THE REPROACHFUL OUTCRY. 
 
 against you. Your friends, suddenly become critical, 
 against you. All the past against you. All the future 
 against you. You make reproachful outcry: "No man 
 cares for my soul!" 
 
 There was another occasion when all the doors of your 
 heart swung open for sacred influences. A bright 
 light went out in your household. Within three or four 
 days, there were compressed sickness, death, obsequies. 
 You were so lonely that a hundred people coming into 
 the house, did not break up the solitariness. You were 
 almost killed with the domestic calamity. A few for- 
 mal, perfunctory words of consolation were uttered on 
 the stairs before you went to the grave; but you wanted 
 some one to come and talk over the whole matter, and 
 recite the alleviations, and decipher the lessons of the 
 dark bereavement. No one came. Many a time you 
 could not sleep until two or three o'clock in the morning, 
 and then your sleep was a troubled dream, in which was 
 re-enacted all the scene of sickness, and parting, and 
 dissolution. Oh! what days and nights they were! No 
 man seemed to care for your soul. 
 
 There was another occasion when youi heart was very 
 susceptible. There was a great awakening. There were 
 hundreds of people who pressed into the kingdom of 
 God; some of them acquaintances, some business asso- 
 ciates, yes, perhaps some members of your own family 
 were baptized by sprinkling or immersion. Christian 
 people thought of you and they called at your store, but 
 you were out on business! They stopped at your house, 
 you had gone around to spend the evening. They sent 
 a kindly message to you; somehow, by accident, you did 
 not get it. The life boat of the Gospel swept through 
 the surf and everybody seemed to get in but you. Every- 
 thing seemed to escape you. One touch of personal 
 
THE liEPIiOAGHFUL OUTOKY. 
 
 439 
 
 sympathy would have pushed you into the kingdom of 
 God. When on communion-day, your friends went in 
 and your sons and daughters went into the church, you 
 buried your face in your handkerchief and sobbed: "Why 
 am I left ouU Everybody seems to get saved but me. 
 No man cares for my soul." 
 
 Hearken to a revelation I have to make. It is a start- 
 ling statement. It will so surprise you that I must 
 prove it as I go on. Instead of this total indifference 
 all about you, in regard to your soul, I have, to-night, to 
 tell you that heaven, earth, and hell are after your im- 
 mortal spirit. Earth to cheat it. Hell to destroy it. 
 Heaven to redeem it. Although you may be a stranger 
 to the thousands of Christians in this house, their faces 
 would glow and their hearts would bound if they saw 
 you make one step heavenward. So intricate and far- 
 reaching is this web of sympathy that I could by one 
 word rouse a great many prayers in your behalf. No 
 one care for your soul! Why one signal of distress on 
 your part, would thrill this audience with holy excite- 
 ment. If a boat in New York harbor should get in 
 distress, from the men-of-war, and from the sloops, and 
 from the steamers, the flying paddles would pull to the 
 rescue. And if to-night, you would lift one signal of 
 distress, all these voyagers of eternity would bear down 
 , k ward you and bring you relief. But no. You are like 
 a ship on tire at sea. They keep the hatches down, and 
 the captain is frenzied, and he gives orders that no one 
 hail the passing ships. He says: "I shall either land 
 this vessel in Hamburg, or on the bottom of the ocean, 
 and I don't care which." Yonder is a ship of the White 
 Star Line passing. Yonder one of the National Line. 
 Yonder one of the Cunard Line. Yonder one of the 
 Inman Line. -But they know not there is any calamity 
 
-HO 
 
 THE REPBOA.CHFUL OUTCKY. 
 
 happening on that one vessel. Oh! if the captain would 
 only put his trumpet to his lip, and cry out: "Lower 
 your boats! Bear down this way! We are burning 
 up! Fire! Fire!" No. No. No signal is given. If 
 that vessel perishes, having hailed no one, whose fault 
 will it be? Will it be the fault of the ship that hid its 
 calamity, or will it be the fault of the vessels that, pass- 
 ing on the high seas, would have been glad to furnish 
 relief, if it had been only asked? In other words, my 
 brother, if you miss heaven, it will be 'your own fault. 
 I could to-night bring a thousand souls who would kneel 
 beside you and not get up until your sins are pardoned 
 and your sorrows assuaged. 
 
 No one care for your soul! Why in all the ages there 
 have been men whose entire business was soul-saving. 
 In this work, Munson went down under the knives of the 
 cannibals whom he had come to save, and liobert Mc- 
 Cheyne preached himself to death by thirty years of age, 
 and John Bunyan was thrown into a dungeon in Bed- 
 fordshire, and Jehudi Ashman endured all the malarias 
 of the African jungle, and there are hundreds and thou- 
 sands of Christian men and women now who are pray- 
 ing, toiling, preaching, living, dying to save souls. 
 
 No one care for your soul! Have you heard how 
 Christ feels about it? I know it was only live or six miles 
 from Bethlehem to Calvary — the birth-place and the > 
 death-place of Christ — but who can tell how many miles 
 it was from the throne to the manger? How many 
 miles down, how many miles back again? The place of 
 his departure was the focus of all splendor and pomp. 
 All the thrones facing his throne. His name the chorus 
 in every song, and the inscription on every banner. His 
 landing-place a cattle-pen, malodorous with unwashed 
 brutes, and dogs growling in and out of the stable. Born 
 
THE REPROACHFUL OUTCRY. 
 
 441 
 
 of a weary mother who had journeyed eighty miles in 
 severe unhealth that she might find the right place for 
 the Lord's nativity— born, not as other princes, under 
 the flash of a chandelier, but under a lantern swung by 
 a rope to the roof of the barn. In that place Christ 
 started to save you. Your name, your face, your time ? 
 your eternity, in Christ's mind. Sometimes traveling 
 on mule's back to escape old Herod's massacre, some- 
 times attempting nervous sleep on the chilly hill-side, 
 sometimes earning his breakfast by the carpentry of a 
 plough. In Quarantania the stones of the field, by their 
 shape and color, looking like the loaves of bread, tantal- 
 izing his hunger. Yet all the time keeping on after you. 
 With drenched coat treading the surf of Genessaret. 
 Ilowied after by a blood-thirsty mob. Denounced as a 
 drunkard. Mourning over a doomed city, while others 
 shouted at the site of the shimmering towers. All the 
 time coming on and coming on to save vou. Indicted 
 
 o ft 
 
 as being a traitor against government, perjured witnesses 
 swearing their souls away to ensure his butchery. 
 Flogged, spit on, slapped in the face, and then hoisted 
 on rough lumber, in the sight of earth, and heaven, and 
 hell, to purchase your eternal emancipation. From the 
 first infant step to the last step of manhood on the sharp 
 spike of Calvary, a journey for you. Oh, how he cared 
 tor your soul! By dolorous arithmetic add up the stable, 
 the wintry tempest, the midnight dampness, the absti- 
 nence of forty days from food, the brutal Sanhedrim, the 
 heights of Golgotha, across which all the hatreds of earth, 
 and all the furies of hell, charged with their bayonets, 
 and then dare to say again that no one cares for your soul. 
 
 A young man might as well go off from home and 
 give his father and mother no intimation as to where he 
 has gone, and, crossing the seas, sitting down in some 
 
442 
 
 THE REPROACHFUL OUTCRY. 
 
 foreign country, cold, sick, and hungry, and lonely, say- 
 ing: "My father and mother don't care anything about 
 me." Do not care anything about him! Why, that 
 father's hair has turned grey since his son went off. He 
 has written to all the consuls in the foreign ports, asking 
 ahout that son. Does not the mother care anything 
 about him? He has broken her heart. She has never 
 smiled since he went away. All day long, and almost 
 all night, she keeps asking: "Where is he? Where can 
 he be?" lie is the first thought in her prayer and the 
 last thought in her prayer — the first thought in the 
 morning and the last at night. She says: "O God, bring 
 back my boy; I must see him again before I die. Where 
 is he! I must see him before I die!" Oh, do not his 
 father and mother care for him? You go away from 
 your Heavenly Father, and you think he does not care 
 for you because you will not even read the letters by 
 which he invites you to come back, while all heaven is 
 waiting, and waiting, and waiting for you to return. A 
 young man said to his father: "I am going off; I will 
 write to you at the end of seven years and tell you where 
 I am." Nine years have passed along since that son 
 went away, and, for the last two years, the father has 
 been going to the depot in the village, on the arrival of 
 every train, and when he hears the whistle in the dis- 
 tance he is thrilled with excitement, and he waits until 
 all the passengers have come out, and then he waits 
 until the train has gone clear out of sight again, and 
 then he goes home, hastening back to the next train; 
 and he will be at every train until that son comes 
 back, unless the son waits until the father be dead. Bur, 
 oh, the greater patience of God. He has been waiting 
 for you, not seven years, not nine years, but, for some of 
 you, twenty years, thirty years, forty years, fifty years — 
 
THE REPROACHFUL OUTCRY. 
 
 443 
 
 waiting, calling — waiting, calling, until nothing but om- 
 nipotent patience could have endured it. O my brother, 
 do not take the sentiment of my text as your sentiment. 
 We do care for your soul. I care for it. For that rea- 
 son I give up all other themes and take this call of grace. 
 1 would like to-night to marshal a great host of invita- 
 tions all around about you, and then command them to 
 close up until it would be impossible for your soul to 
 escape from the gracious environment. I have tried 
 something of this religion. I know something of its 
 peace, something of its good cheer, something of its 
 glorious anticipations, and I commend it to you. Oh, 
 come in by Christ, the good old way. Crowd all this 
 path to heaven to-night with immortals. Why are you 
 down Jhere in the wilderness? Do you like husks better 
 than bread? Do you like troughs better than chalices? 
 Do you like fiends better than angels? Do you like hell 
 better than heaven? Oh, come in by Christ, the living 
 way. 
 
 A few Sabbath nights ago, a young man appeared in 
 this room at the end of the platform, and he said to me: 
 U I have just come off the sea." I said: "When did you 
 arrive?" Said he: "I came into port this afternoon. I 
 was in a great ' blow' off Cape Hatteras this last week, 
 and I thought that I might as well go to heaven as to 
 hell. I thought the ship would sink; but, sir, I uever 
 very seriously thought about my soul until to-night." 
 I said to him: "Do you feel that Christ is able and wil- 
 ling to save you?" "Oh, yes," he replied, "I do." 
 "Well," I said; "Now are you willing to come and be 
 saved by him?" "I am," he said. "Well, will you now, 
 in the prayer we are about to offer, give yourself to God 
 for time and eternity ?" "I will," he said. Then we knelt 
 in prayer, and after we had got through praying, he told 
 
THE REPROACHFUL OUTCRY. 
 
 me that the great transformation had taken place. 1 
 could not doubt it. He is on the sea to-night. I do not 
 know what other port he may gain or lose, but I think 
 he will gain the harbor of heaven. 
 
 "Star of peace, beam o'er the billow, 
 Bless the soul that sighs for Thee ; 
 Bless the sailor's lonely pillow, 
 Far, far at sea." 
 
 It was sudden conversion with him that night. Oh 
 that it might be sudden conversion with you to-night. 
 God can save you in one moment as well as he can in a 
 century. There are sudden deaths, sudden calamities, 
 sudden losses. "Why not sudden deliverances? God's 
 Spirit is infinite in speed. He comes here with omnipo- 
 tent power, and he is ready here and now, instantaneously 
 and for ever, to save your soul. I believe that a multi- 
 tude of you will to-night come to God. I feel you are 
 coming, and you will bring your families and your friends 
 with you. They have heard in heaven already of the 
 step you are about to take. The news has been cried 
 along the golden streets, and has rung out from the 
 towers: U A soul saved! A soul saved!" But there is 
 some one here to-night who will reject this Gospel. He 
 will stay out of the kingdom of God himself. He will 
 keep his family and his friends out. It is a dreadful 
 thing for a man just to plant himself in the way of life, 
 then keep back his children, keep back his companion 
 in life, keep back his business partners — refuse to go 
 into heaven himself, and refuse to let others go in. To- 
 night I have set before you life and death, and there are 
 some here who have chosen death, and this sermon, and 
 the call of God's Holy Spirit, so far as their rescue ie 
 concerned, is a failure. 
 
THE REPROACHFUL OUTCRY. 445 
 
 A young man, at the close of a religious service, was 
 asked to decide the matter of his soul's salvation. He 
 said: *<I will not do it to-night." Well, the Christian 
 man kept talking with him, and he said: "I insist that 
 to-night, you either take God or reject Him." "Well," 
 said the young man, "if you put it in that way, I will 
 reject him. There now, the matter's settled." On his 
 way home on horseback, he knew not that a tree had 
 fallen aslant the road, and he was going at full speed, 
 and he struck the obstacle and dropped lifeless. That 
 night his Christian mother heard the riderless horse 
 plunging about the barn, and mistrusting something 
 terrible was the matter, she went out and came to the 
 place where her son lay, and she cried out: "O Henry, 
 dead and not a Christian. O my son! my son! dead 
 and not a Christian. O Hen it, Henry, dead and not 
 a Christian." God keep us from such a catastrophe! 
 
THE VACANT CHAIR. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 THE VACANT CHAIR. 
 
 Thou shalt be missed, because thy seat will be empty. — I. Sam. xx : 18. 
 
 Set on the table the cutlery and the chased silver- ware 
 of the palace, for King Saul will give a state dinner to- 
 day. A distinguished place is kept at the table for his 
 son-in-law, a celebrated warrior, David by name. ' The 
 guests, jeweled and plumed, come in and take their 
 places. When people are invited to a king's banquet, 
 they are very apt to go. But before the covers are lifted 
 from the feast, Saul looks around and finds a vacant seat 
 at the table. He says within himself, or perhaps audi- 
 bly, "What does this mean? Where is my son-in-law? 
 Where is David the great warrior? I invited him, I 
 expected him. What! a vacant chair at a king's ban- 
 quet!" The fact was that David, the warrior, had been 
 seated for the last time at his father-in-law's table. The 
 day before Jonathan, had coaxed David to go and occupy 
 that .place at the table, saying to David, in the words of 
 my text, "Thou shalt be missed, because thy seat will be 
 empty." The prediction was fulfilled. David was missed. 
 His seat was empty. That one vacant chair spoke louder 
 than all the occupied chairs at the banquet. In almost 
 every house the articles of furniture take a living per- 
 sonality. That picture — a stranger would not see any- 
 thing remarkable either in its design or execution, but 
 it is more to you than all the pictures of the Louvre and 
 the Luxembourg. You remember who bought it, and 
 who admired it. And that hymn-book — you remember 
 
THE VACANT CHAIR. 447 
 
 who sang out of it. And that cradle — you remember 
 who rocked it. And that Bible — you remember who 
 read out of it. And that bed — you remember wjio slept 
 in it. And that room — you remember who died in it. 
 But there is nothing in all your house so eloquent and 
 so mighty voiced as the vacant chair. I suppose that 
 before Saul and his guests got up from this banquet 
 there was a great clatter of wine-pitchers, but all that 
 racket was drowned out by the voice that came up from the 
 vacant chair at the table. Millions have gazed and wept 
 at John Quincy Adams's vacant chair in the House of 
 Representatives, and at Mr. Wilson's vacant chair in the 
 vice-presidency, and at Henry Clay's vacant chair in the 
 American Senate, and at Prince Albert's vacant chair in 
 Windsor Castle, and at Thiers's vacant chair in the 
 councils of the French nation; but all these chairs are 
 unimportant to yon as compared with the vacant chairs 
 in your own household. Have these chairs any lessons 
 for us to learn? Are we any better men and women than 
 when they first addressed us? 
 
 First, I point out to you the father's vacant chair. 
 Old men always like to sit in the same place and in the 
 same chair. They somehow feel more at home, and some- 
 times when you are in their place and they come into the 
 room, you jump up suddenly and say, "Here, father, here's 
 your chair." The probability is it is an armchair, for he 
 is not so strong as he once was, and he needs a little up- 
 holding. His hair is a little frosty, his gums a little 
 depressed, for in his early days there was not much den- 
 tistry. Perhaps a cane chair and old-fashioned apparel, 
 for though you may have suggested some improvement, 
 father does not want any of your nonsense. Grandfather 
 never had much admiration for new-fangled notions. I 
 sat at the table of one of ray parishioners in a former 
 
THE VACANT CHAIR. 
 
 congregation; an aged man was at the table, and his Bon 
 was presiding, and the father somewhat abruptly ad- 
 dressed the son and said: "My son, don't now try to 
 show off because the minister is here!" Your father 
 never liked any new customs or manners; lie preferred 
 the old way of doing things, and he never looked so 
 happy as when, with his eyes closed, he sat in the arm- 
 chair in the corner. From wrinkled brow to the tip of 
 the slippers, what placidity I The wave of the past years 
 of his life broke at the foot of that chair. Perhaps, 
 sometimes, he was a little impatient, and sometimes told 
 the same story twice; but over that old chair how many 
 blessed memories hover! I hope you did not crowd that 
 old chair, and that it did not get very much in the way. 
 Sometimes the old man's chair gets very much in the 
 way, especially if he has been so unwise as to make over 
 all his property to his children, with the understanding 
 that they are to take care of him. I have seen in such 
 cases children crowd the old man's chair to the door, and 
 then crowd it clear into the street, and then crowd it 
 into the poor-house, and keep on crowding it until the 
 old man fell out of it into his grave. But your father's 
 chair was a sacred place. The children used to climb up 
 on the rungs of it for a goocl-night kiss, and the longer 
 he stayed the better you liked it. But that chair has 
 been vacant now for some time. The furniture dealer 
 would not give you fifty cents for it, but it is a throne of 
 influence in your domestic circle. I saw in the French 
 palace, and in the throne room, the chair that Napoleon 
 used to occupy. It was a beautiful chair, but the most 
 significant part of it was the letter "N," embroidered 
 into the back of the chair in purple and gold. And your 
 father's old chair sits in the throne room of your heart, 
 and your affections have embroidered into the back of 
 
THE VACANT CHAIR. 
 
 449 
 
 that chair in purple and gold the letter "F." Have all 
 the prayers of that old chair been answered? Have all 
 the counsels of that old chair been practiced? Speak 
 out! old arm chair. History tells us of an old man 
 whose three sons were victors in the Olympic games, 
 and when they came back, these three sons, with their 
 garlands and put them on the father's brow, the old man 
 was so rejoiced at the victories of his three children that 
 he fell dead in their arms. And are you, O man, going 
 to bring a wreath of joy and Christian usefulness, and 
 put it on to your father's brow, or on the vacant chair, 
 or on the memory of the one departed? Speak out! old 
 arm chair. With reference to your father, the words of 
 my text have been fulfilled: "Thou shalt be missed, be- 
 cause thy seat will be empty." 
 
 I go a little further on in your house, and I find the 
 mother's chair. It is very apt to be a rocking chair. 
 She had so many cares and troubles to soothe that it 
 must have rockers. I remember it well. It was an old 
 chair, and the rockers were almost worn out, for I was 
 the youngest, and the chair had rocked the whole family. 
 It made a creaking noise as it moved; but there was music 
 in the sound. It was just high enough to allow us ehiL 
 dren to put our heads into her lap. That was the bank 
 where we deposited all our hurts and worries. Ah! 
 what a chair that was. It was different from the father's 
 chair; it was entirely different. You ask me how? I 
 cannot tell; but we all felt it was different. Perhaps 
 there was about this chair more gentleness, more 
 tenderness, more grief when we had done wrong. 
 When we were wayward, father scolded, but mother 
 cried. It was a very wakeful chair. In the sick days 
 of children, other chairs could not keep awake ; that 
 chair always kept awake — -kept easily awake. That 
 29 
 
450 
 
 THE VACANT CHAIR. 
 
 chair knew all the old lullabies and all those wordless 
 songs which mothers sing to their sick children — songs 
 in which all pity and compassion and sympathetic influ- 
 ences are combined. That old chair has stopped rock- 
 ing for a good many years. It may be set up in the loft 
 or the garret, but it holds a queenly power yet. When 
 at midnight you went into that grog-shop to get the in- 
 toxicating draught, did you not hear a voice that said: 
 "My son, why go in there?" And louder than the bois- 
 terous encore of the theatre, a voice saying, "My son, 
 what do you here?" And when you went into the house 
 of sin, a voice saying, "What would your mother do if 
 she knew you were here?" And you were provoked 
 with yourself, and you charged yourself with superstition 
 and fanaticism, and your head got hot with your own 
 thoughts, and you went home and you went to bed, and 
 no sooner had you touched the bed than a voice said: 
 "What! a prayerless pillow? Man, what is the matter?" 
 This: You are too near your mother's rocking chair. 
 "Oh, pshaw!" you say. "There's nothing in that; I'm 
 five hundred miles off from where I was born ; I'm three 
 thousand miles off from the church whose bell was the 
 first music I ever heard." I cannot help that: you are 
 too near your mother's rocking chair. "Oh," you say, 
 "there can't be anything in that; that chair has been va- 
 cant a great while." I cannot help that; it is all the 
 mightier for that; it is omnipotent, that vacant mother's 
 chair. It whispers; it speaks; it weeps; it carols; it 
 mourns; it prays; it warns; it thunders. A young 
 man went off and broke his mother's heart, and while 
 he was away from home his mother died, and the tele- 
 graph brought the son, and he came into the room where 
 she lay and looked upon her face, and he cried out: "Oh, 
 mother! mother! what your life could not do your death 
 
THE VACANT CHAIR. 
 
 451 
 
 shall effect. This moment I give my heart to God.'' 
 And he kept his promise. Another victory for the va- 
 cant chair. With reference to your mother, the words 
 of my text were fulfilled: "Thou shalt be missed, be- 
 cause thy seat will be empty." 
 
 I go on a little further; I come to the invalid's chair. 
 What! How long have you been sick? "0! I have 
 been sick ten, twenty, thirty years." Is it possible? 
 What a story of endurance! There are in many families 
 of my congregation these invalids' chairs. The occu- 
 pants of them think they are doing no good in the world; 
 but that invalid's chair is the mighty pulpit from which 
 they have been preaching, all these years, trust in God. 
 One day last July, on an island just off from Sandusky, 
 Ohio, I preached, and there was a great throng of peo- 
 ple there; but the throng did not impress me so much 
 as the spectacle of just one face-j-the face of an invalid 
 who was wheeled in on her chair. I said to her after- 
 wards, "Madam, how long have you been prostrated?" 
 for she was lying flat in the chair. "Oh!" she replied, 
 "I have been this way fifteen years." 1 said, "Do you 
 suffer very much?" "Oh, yes, she said, "I suffer very 
 much; I suffer all the time; part of the time I was 
 blind. I always suffer.'* "Well," I said, "can you 
 keep your courage up?" "Oh, } r es," she said, "I am 
 happy, very happy indeed." Her face showed it. She 
 looked the happiest of anyone on the ground. Oh! 
 what a means of grace to the world, these invalid chairs. 
 On that field of human suffering the grace of God gets 
 its victory. Edward Payson the invalid, and Richard 
 Baxter the invalid, and Robert Hall the invalid, and the 
 ten thousand of whom the world has never heard, but of 
 whom all heaven is cognizant. The most conspicuous 
 thing on earth for God's eye and the eye of angels to 
 
±52 
 
 THE VACANT CHAIR. 
 
 rest on is not a throne of earthly power, but it is the in- 
 valid's chair. Oh! these men and women who are al- 
 ways suffering but never complaining — these victims of 
 spinal disease and neuralgic torture and rheumatic excru- 
 ciation will answer to the roll-call of the martyrs and rise 
 to the martyr's throne, and will wave the martyr's palm. 
 Bnt when one of these invalid's chairs becomes vacant, 
 how suggestive it is! No more bolstering up of the 
 weary head. No more changing from side to side to get 
 an easy position. No more use of the bandage and the 
 cataplasm and the prescription. That invalid's chair 
 may be folded up, or taken apart, or set away, but it will 
 never lose its queenly power; it will always preach of 
 trust in God and cheerful submission. Suffering all 
 ended now. With respect to that invalid the words of 
 my text have been fulfilled: "Thou shalt be missed, be- 
 cause thy seat will be empty." 
 
 I pass on, and I find one more vacant chair. It is a 
 high chair. It is the child's chair. If that chair be oc- 
 cupied, I think it is the most potent chair in all the 
 household. All the chairs wait on it; all the chairs are 
 turned toward it.. It means more than David's chair at 
 Saul's banquet. At any rate, it makes more racket. 
 That is a strange house that can be dull with a child in 
 it. How that child breaks up the hard worldliness of 
 the place, and keeps you young to sixty, seventy, and 
 eighty years of age! If you have no child of your own, 
 adopt one; it will open heaven to your soul. It will pay 
 its way. Its crowing in the morning will give the day a 
 cheerful starting, and its glee at night will give the day 
 a cheerful close. You do not like children? Then you 
 had better stay out of heaven, for there are ?o many 
 there they would fairly make you crazy! Only about 
 five hundred millions of them! The old crusty Phari- 
 
THE VACANT CHAIK. 
 
 453 
 
 sees told the mothers to keep the children away from 
 Christ. "You bother him," they said; "you trouble 
 the Master." Trouble him! He has tilled heaven with 
 that kind of trouble. A pioneer in California says that 
 for the first year or two after his residence in Sierra Ne- 
 vada county there was not a single child in all the reach 
 of a hundred miles. But the Fourth of July came, and 
 the miners were gathered together, and they were cele- 
 brating the Fourth with oration and poem and a boister- 
 ous brass band; and while the band was playing an 
 infant's voice was heard crying, and all the miners were 
 startled, and the swarthy men began to think of their 
 homes on the eastern coast, and of their wives and chil- 
 dren far away, and their hearts were thrilled with home- 
 sickness as they heard the babe cry. But the music 
 went on, and the child cried louder and louder, and the 
 brass band played louder and louder, trying to drown 
 out the infantile interruption, when a swarthy miner, 
 the tears roiling down his face, got up and shook his fist, 
 and said: ''Stop that noisy band and give the baby a 
 chance." Oh! there was pathos in it, as well as good 
 cheer in it. There is nothing to arouse and melt and 
 subdue the soul like a child's voice. But when it 
 goes away from you, the high chair becomes a higher chair, 
 and there is desolation all about you. I cannot speak 
 from experience, thank God; but in three-fourths of the 
 homes of my congregation there is a vacant high chair. 
 Somehow you never get over it. There is no one to put 
 to bed at night; no oue to ask strange questions about 
 God and heaven. Oh, what is the use of that high chair? 
 It is to call you higher. What a drawing upward it must 
 be to have children in heaven! And then it is such a 
 preventative against sin. If a father is going away into 
 sin, he leaves his living children with their mother; but 
 
454 
 
 THE VACANT CHAIR. 
 
 if a father is going away into sin, what is he going to 
 do with his dead children floating about him and hover- 
 ing over his every wayward step. Oh, speak out, vacant 
 high chair, and say: "Father, come back from sin; 
 mother, come back from worldliness. I am watching 
 you. I am waiting for you." With respect to your 
 child, the words of my text have been fulfilled: "Thou 
 shalt be missed, because thy seat will be empty." 
 
 My hearers, I have gathered up the voices of your de- 
 parted friends this morning, and tried to intone them 
 into one invitation upward. I set in array all the vacant 
 chairs of your homes and of your social circle, and I bid 
 them cry out this morning: "Time is short. Eternity 
 is near. Take my Savior. Be at peace with my God. 
 Come up where I am. We lived together on earth; come, 
 let us live together in heaven." We answer that invita- 
 tion. We come. Keep a seat for us as Saul kept a seat 
 t'or David, but that seat shall not be empty. I have been 
 very earnest this morning, because I realize the fact that 
 the day will come when the pastor's chair will be empty. 
 From this point, how often have I looked off into your 
 friendly faces. I have seen a great many beautiful and 
 thrilling sights, but never anything to equal what I have 
 witnessed when in this chair. I have looked off and seen 
 you rise for the doxology. Seated in this chair, some- 
 times I have greatly rejoiced at seeing multitudes come 
 to God, and then, again, I have trembled for fear men 
 would reject the Gospel. I wonder what this chair will 
 testily when I have left it for the last time? Will it tell 
 of a useful life, of an earnest ministry, of a pure Gospel? 
 God grant it may. The most powerful sermon that is 
 ever preached is by the vacant chair of a pastor the Sab^ 
 bath after he has been carried away from it. And oh I 
 when we are all through with this world, and we have 
 
THE VACANT CHAIR. 
 
 455 
 
 shaken hands all around for the last time, and all our 
 chairs in the home circle and in the outside world shall 
 be vacant, may we be worshiping God in that place 
 from which we shall go out no more for ever. I thank 
 God there will be no vacant chairs in heaven. 
 
456 
 
 OUB AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXXVII. 
 
 OUR AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 The streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in 
 the streets thereof. — Zechariah viii : 5. 
 
 With this one stroke of the pencil the prophet puts 
 upon canvas the safety and the glee of the world's cities 
 after they have been gospelized. When Christian peo- 
 ple shall have had the courage to look upon the sins of 
 the city, and the courage to apply the gospel to those 
 sins, then will come the time when so entirely free from 
 ruffianism and vagabondism will all the streets of all the 
 cities be, that the children, without any protection of 
 police, or any parental anxiety, shall fly kite and play 
 ball anywhere. ''The streets of the cities shall be full of 
 boys and girls playing in the streets thereof." But be- 
 fore that time, oh, how much expurgation. I have 
 laughed for six weeks to see some of the American clergy 
 running about with their hands full of court-plaster to 
 cover up the sins that I have been probing. A little 
 green court-plaster for this, a little white court-plaster 
 for that, a little blue court-plaster for something else. 
 Ah! my friends, court-plaster can cover up, but it can- 
 not cure. Not saying what my theory is in regard to 
 the treatment of physical disease, in morals I am an allo- 
 pathist, and I believe in giving a good stout dose to 
 throw the. ulcers to the surface, and then put on the salve 
 of the old-fashioned gospel which Christ mixed to cure 
 Bartimeus's blind eyes, and the young man who had fits, 
 and the ten lepers, and the miseries of all generations. 
 
 There is no man on earth who has more exhilarant 
 
OUE AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 457 
 
 hope in regard to the moral condition and prosperity of 
 our great American cities, but that hope is not based on 
 apology or covering up, but upon exploration, exposure 
 and Almighty medicament. After as thorough an ex- 
 amination as was possible, I come to tell you what I 
 consider to be the moral condition of this country, as 
 inferred from "Washington, the city of official power; 
 Boston, the city of culture; Philadelphia, the city of 
 beautiful order; Chicago, the city of miraculous growth; 
 New York, the city of commercial supremacy; Brook- 
 lyn, the city of homes; and soon, only stopping next 
 Sunday to have a few words with my critics in regard 
 to what is the mission of a minister of the gospel. As 
 the cities go, so goes the land. "Who has moral barome- 
 ter mighty enough to tell the influence of Cincinnati 
 upon Ohio, or of Baltimore upon Maryland, or of Charles- 
 ton upon South Carolina, or of New Orleans upon Louis- 
 iana, or of Louisville upon Kentucky, or of San Francisco 
 upon California? Let me feel the puise of the cities, and 
 I will tell you the pulse of the land. God gives to every 
 city, as to every individual, a mission. As our physical 
 and mental characteristics show what our personal sphere 
 is, so topographical and historical facts show the mission 
 of a city. Every city comes to be known for certain 
 characteristics: Babylon for pride, Sparta for military 
 prowess, Dresden for pictures, Home for pontifical rule, 
 Venice for architecture in ruins, Glasgow for shipbuild- 
 ing. Edinburgh for learning, and London for being the 
 mightiest metropolis of the world. Our American cities, 
 of course, are younger, and therefore their characteris- 
 tics are not so easily defined; but I think I have struck 
 the right word in designation of each. "Wrapped up 
 and interlocked with the welfare and the very existence 
 of this nation stands the city of "Washington, on the 
 
45S 
 
 OCR AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 Potomac — planted there by way of compromise. At the 
 dining-table of Alexander Hamilton it was decided that 
 if the South would agree that the National Government 
 should assume the State debts, then the North would 
 agree to have the capital on the Potomac instead of on 
 the .Delaware. So the capital went from Annapolis to 
 Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to Trenton, and 
 from Trenton to New York, and then passed from New 
 York to the Potomac, where it will stay until within a 
 centu?y it shall be planted on the banks of the Missis- 
 sippi, or the Missouri, just as soon as the nation shall 
 find cat from the law of national growth that it is better 
 to h&ve the hub of a wheel at the center rather than at 
 the rim of the tire. "Well," you say, "what's all that 
 to me? J You have just as much to do with the city of 
 Washington as your heart has to do with your body. 
 Washington is the heart of the nation. If it send out 
 gcod blood, good national health. If it send out bad 
 blood, bad national sickness. It is to me one of the most 
 fascinating cities in the world, and I believe I shall show 
 you before I get through that it has come to a higher 
 condition of morality than it has ever before reached. 
 It is a city of palaces. He who has seen the Treasury 
 buildings, and the National Post-office, and the Capitol, 
 and the departments of State, has seen the grandest tri- 
 umphs of masonry, architecture, painting, and sculpture. 
 I put the eight panels of the bronze door of the Capitol 
 against the door of the Church of Madeleine, at Paris. 
 
 You talk about the works of the old masters. Go to 
 Washington and see the works of the new masters: 
 Leutz's ''Westward Ho," Brumidi's frescoes, Green- 
 ough's Washington, Crawford's statue of Freedom. I 
 put the white marble mountain of magnificence in which 
 our Congress assembles against the Tuilleries and the 
 
OUR AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 459 
 
 Parliament-houses of London. It is a city laid out more 
 grandly than any city in the land. Mr. Ellicott by as- 
 tronomical observations running the great boulevards 
 from north to south, and from east to west. Every inch 
 of its Pennsylvania avenue historical with the footsteps 
 of Webster, and Clay, and Jackson, and Calhoun, and 
 Washington. Hundreds of thousands of people along 
 those streets vociferating at the inaugurations. Streets 
 along which Charles Sumner moved out toward Mount 
 Auburn, and Abraham Lincoln toward Springfield, the 
 bells of the nation tolling at the obsequies, and the or- 
 gans of the continent throbbing with the Dead March. 
 City of huzza and requiem. City of patriotism and de- 
 bauchery. City of national sacrifice and back pay. City 
 of Senatorial dignity and corrupt lobby. City of Eman- 
 cipation Proclamation and Credit Mobilier. City of the 
 best men and the worst. City of Washington. Now, 
 I have watched that city when Congress was in session? 
 and when Congress was away. The morals of the city 
 are fifty per cent better when Congress is away. Then, 
 at that time, piety becomes more dominant. It is one 
 of the woes of this country that so many national legis- 
 lators leave their famiiies at home. These distinguished 
 men coming to Washington show the need of domestic 
 snpervisal. A man entirely absent from elevated female 
 society is naturally a bear. Men are better at home than 
 they are away from home. It is said that even ministers 
 of the gospel during vacation sometimes go to the Sara- 
 toga horse-races. It is said that some members of Con- 
 gress, faithful to their religious duties during vacation, 
 during term time give the vacation to their religion. 
 There are iniquities in Washington, however, not asso- 
 ciated with office — iniquities that stay all the year round. 
 Flenty of drinking establishments, plenty of hells of 
 
460 
 
 OUR AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 infamy, and the police in their attempts to keep order 
 do not get as much encouragement as they ought from 
 the courts and churches. On Christmas Day ten men 
 in contest on Pennsylvania avenue, one of them shot 
 dead, others bruised and mangled, the culprits brought 
 before the District Attorney and let go. The sins ram- 
 pant in New York and Brooklyn rampant in Washing- 
 ton. Two thousand dramshops and grocery stores and 
 apothecary shops where they sell strong drink — two 
 thousand in Washington. Twelve thousand nine hun- 
 dred and eighty-three arrests during last year. Over 
 four thousand people in that city who neither read nor 
 write. One hundred and twenty thousand dollars of 
 stolen property captured by the police last year. All this 
 suggestive to every intelligent mind. Washington w T ants 
 more police. The beat of each policeman in Washing- 
 ton and Georgetown is on an average ten miles. Only 
 nine mounted police. in that vast city, which has rushed 
 up in population and more than doubled in nine years — 
 rushing up from 61,000 to 131,000. But oh! what an 
 improvement since the day when the most flourishing 
 liquor establishments were under the National Capitol, 
 and Congressmen and Senators went there to get inspi- 
 ration before they made their speeches, and went there- 
 to get recuperation afterward. Thanks to Henry Wilson 
 and a few men like him for the overthrow of that abom- 
 ination. During the war there were one hundred gam- 
 bling-houses in the city of Washington; there were over 
 five hundred professional gamblers there. One gambling- 
 house boasted that in one year it had cleared over half a 
 million of dollars. During one session of Congress the 
 keeper of a gambling-house went to the Sergeant-at- 
 Arms at the Capitol and presented an order for the 
 greater part of the salary of many of the members, who 
 
OUR AMERICAN CITIES. 461 
 
 had lost so heavily at the faro- table that they had thus 
 to mortgage their salaries; and if now, when there are 
 about twenty gambling-houses remaining in the city of 
 Washington, you should go, you would find in those 
 places clerks of departments, bouk-keepers, confidential 
 and private secretaries; and if you should go to some of 
 the more expensive establishments, near Pennsylvania 
 avenue and Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets, you would 
 find in tjiose gambling-houses members of Congress,, 
 officers of the army, gentlemen distinguished all the 
 land over. It seems to me that the reporters of Wash- 
 ington are not as wide awake as our reporters or they 
 would crive to the different States of the Union the 
 names of the places where some of their great represen- 
 tatives in Congress are accustomed to spend their even- 
 ings. But what a vast improvement in the morals of 
 that city! Dueling abolished. No more clubbing of 
 Senators for opposite opinion. Mr. Covode, of Pennsyl- 
 vania, no more brandishes a weapon over the head of 
 Barksdale of Mississippi. Grow and Heitt no more 
 take each other by the throat. Griswold no more pounds 
 Lyon, Lyon snatching the tongs and striking back until 
 the two members in a scuffle roll on the floor of the great 
 American Congress. Owl there has been a vast im- 
 provement. Is it not a matter of great congratulation 
 that there are to-day more thoroughly Christian men at 
 the heads of departments of State in Washington than 
 at any time since the foundation of the Government, and 
 that the Queen of American society, by her simplicity 
 of wardrobe in the White House, has put condemnation 
 upon that extravagance of wardrobe which well-nigh 
 shipwrecked some other administrations, and by the 
 banishment of the wine-cup from State dinners has 
 shown to people in this country in high position that 
 
462 
 
 OUR AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 people may be jolly and yet be sober? Whatever may 
 be your opinion in regard to the politics of the Presiden- 
 tial mansion — and I know there is a great difference of 
 opinion among you — I have to tell you that there lias 
 never been a purer White House, less rum and tobacco, 
 more Methodist hymn-books, or a higher style of per- 
 sonal morality than to-day. 
 
 I came back from my observations of the city of 
 Washington impressed with two or three things. And 
 first, while I would not have the question of a man's 
 being a Christian or not a Christian brought into the 
 political contest, I do demand that every man sent to 
 Washington, or to any other place of authority, be a 
 man of good morals. Will you send a blasphemer, as 
 you have sometimes? Blasphemy is an indictable of- 
 fense against the State. Will you send to Washington 
 a man to make laws who breaks laws? Will you send 
 an atheist? How can he swear to support the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States when there is no solemnity in 
 an oath if there be no God? Will you send a man who 
 indulges in games of chance, whether the amount be 
 $500 or five cents? No. Gambling is denounced by 
 the statute of every State. Will you send a libertine? 
 Then you insult every family in the United States. Be- 
 fore you send a man to your City Hall, or your State 
 Legislature, or to your national council, go through him 
 with a lighted candle and find if he swear, if he lie, if 
 he cheat, if he dishonor the family relation, if he keep 
 bad company. If he does let him stay at home. Scratch 
 his name off your ticket with the blackest ink, and put 
 on a blot after. How dare yon send such a man to a 
 Congress where John Quincy Adams died, or to a Sen- 
 ate Chamber where Theodore Frelinghuysen sat, his face 
 illumined with charity and heaven? No religious test, 
 
OUR AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 463 
 
 bat a moral test, is demanded for every ballot-box m the 
 city, State, and national elections. Years ago some men 
 were sent to Congress — and I am sorry to say there are 
 some of them left — who were walking charnel-houses. 
 Nothing but a grave-digger's spade could free the world 
 from their corruption. Some of them died of delirium 
 tremens, and in a brothel. After they had been dead a 
 little while, some member, for the purpose of giving a 
 stone-cutter a lucrative job, moved that a large sum of 
 city, State, or national funds be appropriated for build- 
 ing a monument. ."Now, I have no objections to such a 
 monument to such a man if you put on it the right kind 
 of epitaph and uncover it in the right way. Let the un- 
 covering of that monument be when an August thun- 
 der-storm is approaching. Let the blocks of marble of 
 that monument be cut in the shape of the ivory "chips" 
 in which the deceased patriot used to gamble. On the 
 four corners of the pedestal of the monument, cut in 
 marble, let there be wine-cup, flask, decanter, demijohn. 
 Then gather around for the dedication of this monument 
 the fragments of families whom he despoiled, and let 
 them come, and on each block of marble let them drop 
 a bitter tear; and then when the blackest fold of that 
 August thunder-storm has wrapped the top of the mon- 
 ument in darkness, and when some man* high in church 
 or State, recreant to the truth, stands there delivering 
 the eulogium, let the black cloud open and a bolt strike 
 into dust the monumental infamy with a thunder which 
 shall make all our American capitals quake with the 
 reverberation. "The name of the wicked shall rot." 
 
 Again: I came back from Washington with the im- 
 pression that we need a great national religion. I do 
 not mean a religion controlled by State officials, but I 
 mean a religion dictated by a nation gospelized. I mean 
 
464 
 
 OUR AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 a religion mighty enough to control the morals of a na- 
 tion. Old politicians will not be reformed. The under-' 
 takers must hurry up the funerals in these cases of polit- 
 ical mortification. They will never be any better, those 
 men. But gospelize the voters and then you will have 
 gospelized officers of government. The pivot on which 
 this nation turns is the ballot-box. Set that pivot on 
 the Rock of Ages. There is only one being who can 
 save this nation, and that is God. We talk a great deal 
 about putting the name of God more thoroughly into 
 the Constitution of the United States. Ah! my friends, 
 it is not God in the Constitution that we want; it is God 
 in the hearts of the people. That test is going to come, 
 if not in our time, then in the time of our children. 
 There has been a good deal of discussion of late as to 
 whether the battle of Lookout Mountain was really 
 fought above the clouds. General Grant says no. Gen- 
 eral Hooker says yes. We will not go into that discus- 
 sion; but I tell you at the very battle in this country 
 for ninety-eight years has been fought above the clouds, 
 God and angels on our side. First came the war of the 
 American revolution. That was the birth-throe that ush- 
 ered this nation into life. Then came the war of 1S12. That 
 was the infantile disease through which every child must 
 go. Then came the war of 1S61. That was the great 
 typhoid which was to revolutionize the national s} T stem; 
 and when this nation resumed specie payments, that was 
 the settlement of the doctor's bill I Now let the nation 
 march on in its grand career. Lord God of Bunker 
 Hill, out of the trenches of Gettysburg, so long 
 leading us with pillar of fire by night, give us the pillar 
 of cloud by day. Lord God of Joshua, bring down the 
 walls of opposition to this nation, at the blast of the 
 Gospel trumpet. Lord God of Daniel, move around 
 
OUE AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 465 
 
 about us amid the leonine despotisms that growl for our 
 destruction. Lord God of our fathers, make us worthy 
 descendants of a brave ancestry. Lord God of our chil- 
 dren, bring forth from the cradles of the rising genera- 
 tion a race to do better than we, when our hand and 
 voice are still. Then let all. the rivers of this land flow- 
 ing into the gulf, or into the Atlantic and Pacific seas, 
 be rivers of salvation, and all the mountains, Olivets of 
 truth and Pisgahs of prospect, and the mists rising from 
 the lakes will be the incense of holy praise, and our cities 
 will be so thoroughly evangelized that boys and girls, 
 according to the teaching of my text, will be found play- 
 ing in the streets thereof. 
 
 I learn once more, from my observation in the city of 
 Washington, that worldly greatness is a very transitory 
 and unsatisfactory thing. Great men, I noticed in 
 Washington, are great only a little while. The majority 
 of those men whom you saw there ten or fifteen years 
 ago are either in the grave or in political disgrace. How 
 rapidly the wheel turns! Call the roll of Jefferson's 
 Cabinet. Dead. Call the roll of Madison's Cabinet. 
 Dead. Call the roll of Monroe's Cabinet. Dead. Call 
 the roll of Pierce's Cabinet. Dead. Of Abraham Lin- 
 coln's Cabinet, if I remember right, all dead but one, 
 and he as good as dead. Call the roll of Grant's Cabi- 
 net. One or more of them worse than dead. The Con- 
 gressional burying-ground in the city of Washington 
 has one hundred and sixty cenotaphs planted in honor of 
 members who died while in office; but they are only 
 suggestive of a vaster congress departed. What is polit- 
 ical honor in this country? As far as I can judge, it is 
 the privilege of being away from home amid temptations 
 that have slain the mightiest, bored to death by office- 
 seekers, assaulted by meanest acrimony, and kicked into 
 
OUa AMERICAN CITIES. 
 
 obscurity with your health gone when your time is ouf. 
 One of the Senators of the United States dying: in Flat- 
 bush Hospital, idiotic from his dissipations. One mem- 
 ber of Congress I saw, years ago, seated drunk on the 
 curbstone in Philadelphia,, his wife- trying to coax him 
 home. A Congressman from itfew York, years ago, on 
 a cold day, picked out of the Potomac; into which he had 
 dropped through his intoxication, the only time when he 
 iv r came so near losing his life by too much cold water. 
 Delaware had i Senator whose -chief characteristic was, 
 he was always drunk. Illinois had a Senator celebrated 
 in the same direction. Oh! my friends — and I say this 
 especially to the young men in my^audience — there are 
 so many temptations coming around all political honors, 
 that before you seek them you had better see whether 
 your morals are incorruptible. And I also point out to 
 yon the tact that American politics are most unfair to 
 the most faithful and self-sacrificing men. I will never 
 orgive American politics for the fact that it slew Hor- 
 ace Greeley. This country never saw a better patriot. 
 Sis whole life given to reform, making a magnificent 
 record for his country, all his deeds of self-sacrifice and 
 his brilliant,, intellectual achievements forgotten in one 
 hour. There came a time when he felt that he,, better 
 than any other man in the Presidential chair, could adjust 
 the difficulties between the sections, and while he was 
 talking about the 3Forth and the South "clasping hands 
 across the bloody chasm," American politics pushed him 
 into it. When American politics did that, it committed 
 the greatest outrage of the century and proved itself 
 ruilty of patricide in the tact that it murdered a father 
 and of regicide in the tact that it slew a kinir. Oh! 
 young men,- look not for the honors of this world: look 
 only for the honors that come from Grod. They never 
 
mtoxkate. They itever dedgaj. Cmwm, farm** . w.- - 
 torn, tiwunwm — wUt yom We ihemt Dad j«w erer 
 hear Wimmm Km Knax. dag "The Uet ChaMP That 
 wmg h tm a d ed am this heaa&M WetL Scnaa*; <Mae *sut aut 
 a <w w^sua in reverie, finger* wandering amrmg 
 the key*, when dm tom^^ed a dk*d </f ift&uiife tweetoetf 
 that serot all W s&wE v3lto»t3©g with, e&mfort and wHk 
 yey. Bnt $te kept ffaflt lift therd of pmie ©filly a mio- 
 not White *3be pfl&yed fbe lort it, aad for year* dm 
 Mfjkt if* that fotit ek»d <of wiiftt*ic, tat ftmuad ft Mfc 
 Bat awe day *he tftibfiM hmd^ in a better e<w&©itry<, — 
 In heaven, wwm% itbe immtretey <vf tike coved* — the would 
 get again flat tot ebord. If yea have hesml F^reme 
 Bke Emm dag "The JsM CVM," yum* am am die, 
 vrgan o» the other Me aeefrtnymym^ thm yon have 
 fortatrd something most nsemorablle* Owr f sr«tt parentte in 
 I'&md'ise had happiness far n little while, sod then in i btod 
 it Men tare gone searehm^ ait tbflMyb tone and ap- 
 pbn#e nod riebe* and enaoiuanenl, 'Wait found ft not I® 
 all tine age* it ha* eluded their gra*p. It i* ithe left 
 ebord, B!le**ed be God, in Chriit, <wr p*atf# we fnd 
 again* that wbkb we mM find fiowbere eflm He h the 
 float chord lommL The xjmtyhmy begins 'here nm'A ow 
 earrow *, wbieh we mast have emnforted, asA ouj dm f 
 which we mwet hare *3*Sn; hut it wUl emae to it* 
 mightiest name m the day when ike 'Wto of the etet^ 
 nai onhestra ahaJX he&n to awing, and we §k&^ Wse 1st- 
 
 fc^dj hury&. TUi will tie tU iott cj^ri Ioujucl 
 
468 
 
 HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
 
 HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 To every man his work. — Mark xiii : 34. 
 
 There are now in the world one thousand three hun- 
 dred and seventy-seven millions of people, and conse- 
 quently there are one thousand three hundred and sev- 
 enty-seven million fields of usefulness. No individual 
 can do the work of any one else. If a man neglect his 
 work it is undone for ever. "To every man his work." 
 You may not know that this is a double aniversary. It 
 is nearly ten years since I became pastor of this church. 
 Besides that, last Wednesday, January 7th, I was 47 
 years of age. This being a double aniversary, }^ou will not 
 be surprised if my sermon this morning is autobiograph- 
 ical. I started life in an old-fashioned Christian family, 
 where they had prayers morning and night, and always ( 
 asked a blessing at the table; and there was no excep- 
 tion to the rule, for, if my father was sick or away, my 
 mother led, and while sometimes, when my father led, 
 we found it hard to repress childish restlessness, there 
 was something in the tones of my mother, and there was 
 something in the tears which always choked her utter- 
 ance before she got through with the prayer, that was 
 irresistible. The fact is, that mothers get their hearts so 
 wound around their children that when they think of 
 their future, and the trials and temptations to which they 
 may be subjected, they cannot control their emotions as 
 easily as men do. While he had a very sympathetic nature, 
 I never saw my father cry but once, and that was when 
 
HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 469 
 
 they put the lid over my mother. Her hair was white 
 as the snow, and her face was very much wrinkled, for 
 she had worked very hard for us all and had had many 
 sicknesses and bereavements. I do not know how she 
 appeared to the world, nor what artists may have thought 
 of her features; but to us she was perfectly beautiful. 
 There were twelve of us children, but six of them are in 
 heaven. I started for the legal profession with an admi- 
 ration for it which has never cooled, for I cannot now 
 walk along by a court-house, or hear an attorney address 
 a jury, without having all my pulses accelerated and my 
 enthusiasm aroused. I cannot express my admiration 
 for a profession adorned with the names of Marshall, 
 and Story, and Kent, and Rufus Choate, and John Mc- 
 Lean. But God converted my soul and put me into the 
 ministry by a variety of circumstances, shutting me up 
 to that glorious profession. And what a work it is! I 
 thank God every day for the honor of being associated 
 with what I consider the most elevated, educated, re- 
 fined, and consecrated band of men on this planet — the 
 Christian ministry of America. I know, I think, about 
 five thousand of them personally, and they are as near 
 perfection as human nature ever gets to be. Some of 
 them on starvation salaries, and with worn health and 
 amid ten thousand disadvantages, trying to bring com- 
 fort and pardon to the race. 1 am proud to have my 
 name on the roll with them, though my name may be 
 at the very bottom of the roll, and am willing to be their 
 servant for Jesus's sake. But we all have a work. "To 
 every man his work." I will not hide the fact that it 
 has been the chief ambition of my ministry to apply a 
 religion six thousand years old to the present day — a re- 
 ligion of four thousand years B. C. to 1869 and 1879 
 A. D. So I went to work to find the oldest religion I 
 
4:70 
 
 HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 could see. I sought for it in my Bible, and I found it 
 -ii the Garden of Eden, wher,e the serpent's head is prom- 
 ised a bruising by the heel of Christ. I said, "That is 
 the religion," and I went to work to see what kind of 
 men that religion made, and I found Joshua, and Moses, 
 and Paul, and John the Evangelist, and John Bunyan, 
 and John Wesley, and John Summerfield, and five hun- 
 dred other Johns as good or approximate. I said: "Ah! 
 that is the religion I want to preach — the Edenic relig- 
 ion that bruises the serpent's head." That is what I 
 have been trying to do. The serpent's head must be 
 bruised. I hate him. I never see his head but I throw 
 something at it. That is what I have been trying to do 
 during these courses of sermons, to bruise the serpent's 
 head, and every time I bruised him he hissed, and the 
 harder I bruised him the harder he hissed. You never 
 trod on a serpent but he hissed. But I trod on him with 
 only one foot. Before I get through I shall tread on 
 him with both feet. If God will help me I shall bruise 
 the oppression and the fraud and the impurity coiled up 
 amid our great cities. Come now, God helping me, I 
 declare a war of twenty-five years against iniquity and 
 for Christ, if God will let me live so long. To this con- 
 flict I bring every muscle of my body, every faculty of 
 ray mind, every passion of my soul. Between here and 
 my bed in Greenwood there shall not be an inch of re- 
 treat, or indifference, or of compromise. After I am 
 dead, I ask of the world and of the church only one thing 
 — not for a marble slab, not for a draped chair, not for a 
 long funeral procession, not for a flattering ovation. A 
 plain box in a plain wagon will be enough, if the elders 
 of the church will stand here and say that I never com- 
 promised with evil, and always presented Christ to the 
 people. Then let Father Pearson, if he be still alive, 
 
J IOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 471 
 
 pronounce the benediction, and the mourners go home. 
 I do not forget that my style of preaching and my work 
 in general have been sometimes severely criticised by 
 some of my clerical brethren. It has come to be under- 
 stood that at installations and at dedications I shall be 
 assailed. I have sometimes said to prominent men in 
 my church, u Go down to such and such an installation, 
 and hear them excoriate Talmage." And they go, and 
 they are always gratified! I have heard that sometimes 
 in Brooklyn, when an audience gets dull through lack of 
 ventilation in the church, the pastor will look over to- 
 ward Brooklyn Tabernacle and say something that will 
 wake all the people up, and they will hunch each other 
 and sa}% "That's Talmage!" You see, there are some 
 ministers who want me to do just the way they do; and, 
 as I cannot see my duty in their direction, they some- 
 times call me all sorts of names. Some of them call me 
 one thing, and some call me another thing; but I think 
 the three words that are most glibly used in this connec- 
 tion are "mountebanks," "sensationalism," "buffoonery," 
 and a variety of phrases showing that some of my dear 
 clerical brethren are not happy. Now, I have the ad- 
 vantage of all such critical brethren in the fact that I 
 never assault them though they assault me. The dea 
 souls! I wish them all the good I can think of — large 
 audiences, $15,000 salaries, and houses full of children, 
 and heaven to boot! I rub my hands all over their heads 
 in benediction. You never heard me say one word 
 against any Christian worker, and you never will. The 
 fact is, that I am so busy in assaulting the powers of 
 darkness that I have no time to stop and stab any of my 
 own regiment in the back. Now, there are two ways in 
 which I might answer some of the critical clergy. I 
 might answer them by the same bitterness and acrimony 
 
472 
 
 HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 and caricature with which some of them have assaulted . 
 me; but would that advance our holy religion? Do you 
 not know that there is nothing that so prejudices people 
 against Christianity as to see ministers fighting? It 
 takes two to make a battle, so I will let them go on. It 
 relieves them and does not hurt me! I suppose that in 
 the war of words I might be their equal, for nobody has 
 ever charged me with lack of vocabulary! But then, you 
 plainly see that if I assaulted them with the same bit- 
 terness with which they assaulted me, no good cause 
 would be advanced. There is another way, and that is 
 by giving them kindly, loving, and brotherly advice. 
 u Ah!" you say, "that's the way; that's the Christian 
 way." Then I advise my critical brethren of the clergy 
 to remember what every layman knows, whether in the 
 church or in the world, that you never build yourself up 
 by trying tp pull anybody else down. You see, my 
 dear critical brethren — and I hope the audience will 
 make no response to what I am saying — you see, my dear 
 critical brethren, you fail in two respects when you try 
 to do that; first, you do not build yourselves up, and 
 secondly, you do not pull anybody else down. Show me 
 the case in five hundred years where any pulpit, or any 
 church, has been built up by bombarding some other 
 pulpit. The fact is, we have an immense membership 
 in this church, and they are all my personal friends. 
 Then, we have a great many regular attendants who are 
 not church members, and a great many occasional attend- 
 ants, from all parts of the land, and these peo.pl e know 
 that I never give any bad advice in this place, and that 
 I always give good advice, and that God by conversion 
 saves as many souls in this church every year as he saves 
 in any other church. Now, my dear critical brethren of 
 the clergy, why assault all these homes throughout the 
 
HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 473 
 
 wor.d? When you assault me, you assault them. Be- 
 side that, u to every man his work." I wish you all 
 prosperity, critical brethren. You, for instance, are 
 metaphysical. May you succeed in driving people into 
 heaven by raising a great fog on earth. You are se- 
 verely logical. Hook the people into glory by the horns 
 of a dilemma. You are anecdotal. Charm the people 
 to truth by capital stories well told. You are illustra- 
 tive. Twist all the flowers of the field and all the stars 
 of heaven into your serin on. You are classical. Wield 
 the club of Hercules for the truth, and make Parnassus 
 bow to Calvary. Your work is not so much in the pul- 
 pit as from house to house, by pastoral visitation. The 
 Lord go with you as you go to take tea with the old 
 ladies, and hold the children on your lap and tell them 
 how much they look like their father and mother! Stay 
 all the afternoon and evening, and if it is a damp night 
 stay all night! All prosperity to you in this pastoral 
 work, and may yon by that means get the whole family 
 into the kingdom of God. You will reach people I 
 never will reach, and I will reach people you never will 
 reach. Go ahead. In every possible way, my dear crit- 
 ical brethren of the clergy, will I help you. If yoii 
 have anything going on in your church — lecture, con- 
 cert, religious meeting — send me the notice and I will 
 read it here with complimentary remarks, and when you 
 call me a hard name I will call you a blessed fellow, and 
 when you throw a brickbat at me, an ecclesiastical brick- 
 bat, then I will pour holy oil on your head until it runs 
 clear down on your coat collar! There is nothing that 
 so invigorates and inspires me as the opportunity to say 
 pleasant things about my clerical brethren. God pros- 
 per you, my critical brethren of the ministry, and put a 
 blessing on your head, and a blessing in your shoe, and 
 
474 
 
 HOW MINIS'! E LiS AftE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 a blessing in your gown — if you wear one — and a bless- 
 ing before you, and a blessing behind you, and a blessing 
 under you, and a blessing on the top of you, so that you 
 cannot get out until you mount into heaven, where I ap- 
 point a meeting with you on the north side of the river, 
 under the Tree of Life, to talk over the honor we had on 
 earth of working each one in his own way. " To every 
 man his work." We ought to be an example, my criti- 
 cal brethren, to other occupations. How often we hear 
 lawyers talking against lawyers, and doctors talking 
 against doctors, and merchants talking against mer- 
 chants. You would hardly go into a store on one side 
 of the street to get a merchant's opinion of a merchant 
 on the other side of the street in the same line of busi- 
 ness. We ought, in the ministry, to be examples to all 
 other occupations. If we have spites and jealousies, let 
 us hide them forever. If we have not enough divine 
 grace to do it, let common worldly prudence dictate. 
 
 But during these ten years in which I have preached 
 to you, I have not only received the criticism of the 
 world, but I have often received its misrepresentation, 
 and I do not suppose any man of any *ige escapes if he 
 be trying to do a particular w T orkfor God and the church, 
 It was said that Eowland Hill advertised he would on 
 the following Sabbath make a pair of shoes in his pul- 
 pit, in the presence of his audience, and that he came 
 into the pulpit with a pair of boots and a knife, and hav- 
 ing shied off the top of the boots, presented the pair of 
 shoes. It was said that Whiten* eld was preaching one 
 summer day, and a fly buzzed around his head, and he 
 said, ' k The sinner will be destroyed as certainly as I 
 catch that fly." He clutched at the fly and missed it. 
 The story goes that then he said that after all perhaps 
 the sinner might escape through salvation! Twenty 
 
HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 475 
 
 years ago the pictorials of London were full of pictures 
 of Charles Spurgeon, astride the rail of the pulpit, 
 riding down in the presence of the audience to show how 
 easy it was to go into sin; and then the pictorials repre- 
 sented him as climbing up the railing of the pulpit to 
 show how hard it was to get to heaven. Mr. Beecher 
 was said to have entered his pulpit one warm day, and, 
 wiping the perspiration from his forehead, to have said, 
 "It's hot!" with an expletive more emphatic than devo- 
 tional! Lies! Lies! All of them lies. No minister of 
 the gospel escapes. Certainly I have not escaped! A 
 few years ago, when I was living in Philadelphia, I came 
 on to unite in holy marriage Dr. Boynton, the eloquent 
 geological lecturer, with a lady of New York. I solem- 
 nized the marriage ceremony in the parlors of the Fifth 
 Avenue Hotel. The couple made their wedding excur- 
 sion in a balloon that left Central Park within the pres- 
 ence of five thousand people. When I got back to 
 Philadelphia I saw in the papers that I had disgraced 
 the holy ordinance of marriage by performing it a mile 
 high, above the earth, in a balloon! And there are thou- 
 sands of people to this day who believe that I solem- 
 nized fchat marriage above the clouds. About eight or 
 nine years ago, in our chapel, at a Christmas festival one 
 week night, amid six or eight hundred children roaring 
 happy, with candies and oranges and corn-balls, and with 
 the representation of a star in Christmas greens right 
 before me, I said: "Boys, I feel like a morning star." 
 It so happened that that phrase is to be found in a negro 
 song, and two days afterwards it appeared over the name 
 of a man who said he was "a member of a neighboring 
 church," that I had the previous Sunday night, in my 
 pulpit, quoted two or three verses from "Shoo Fly!" 
 And, moreover, it went on to say that we sang that every 
 
476 
 
 HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 Sunday in our Sunday-school! And as it was supposed 
 that "a member of a neighboring church" would not 
 lie, grave editorials appeared in the prominent newspa- 
 pers deploring the fact that the pulpit should be so des- 
 ecrated, and that the Sabbath-schools of this country 
 seemed to be going to ruin. Some years ago, in the 
 New York Independent, I wrote an article denouncing 
 the exclusiveness of churches, and making a plea for the 
 working classes. In the midst of that article there were 
 two ironical sentences, in which I expressed the disgust 
 which some people have for anybody that works for a 
 living. Some enemy took those two ironical sentences 
 and sent them all around the world as my sentiments of 
 disgust with the working classes, and a popular maga- 
 zine of the country, taking those two ironical sentences 
 as a text, went on to say that I preached every Sunday 
 with kid gloves and swallowtail coat (!), and that I ought 
 to remember that if I ever got to heaven I should have 
 to be associated with the working classes, and be with 
 the fisherman apostles, and Paul, the tent-maker. To 
 this very day, I get letters from all parts of the earth 
 containing little newspaper scraps, saying, "Did yon 
 really say that? How is it possible you can so h%te the 
 working classes? How can you make that accord with 
 the words of sympathy you have recently been uttering 
 in behalf of their sorrows?'' A few years ago I preached 
 a series of sermons here on good and bad amusements. 
 There appeared a sermon as mine, denouncing all amuse- 
 ments, representing that all actors, play-actors, and ac- 
 tresses were dissolute without any exception, and that 
 all theatrical places were indecent, and that every man 
 who went to a theater lost his soul, and that it was wron« 
 even to go to a zoological garden, and a sin to look at a 
 zebra. I never preached one word of the sermon. Ever}* 
 
HOW MINISTERS AKE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 477 
 
 word of that sermon was written in a printing office, by 
 a man who had never seen me, or seen Brooklyn Taber- 
 nacle — every word of it except the text, and that he got 
 by sending to- another printing office. In the State of 
 Maine a religious paper has a letter from a clergyman 
 who says that I came into this pulpit on Sabbath 
 morning with Indian dress, feathers on my head, and 
 scalping-knife in my hand, and that the pulpit was 
 appropriately adorned with arrows, and Indian blank- 
 ets, and buffalo-skins; and the clergyman, in that letter, 
 goes on, with tears, to ask, "What is the world com- 
 ing to?" and asks if ecclesiastical authority somehow 
 cannot be evoked to stop such an outrage. Why do 
 I state these things? To stop them? Oh, no. But 
 for public information. I do not want to stop them. 
 They make things spicy! Beside that, my enemies do 
 more for me than ray friends can. I long ago learned 
 to harness the falsehood and abuse of the world for 
 Christian service. I thought it would be a great privi- 
 lege if I could preach the gospel through the secular 
 press beyond these two cities. The secular press of these 
 two cities, as a matter of good neighborhood and of 
 home news, have more than done me justice; and I thank 
 them for it. If they put the gospel as I preach it in 
 their reportorial columns, I should be very mean and 
 ungrateful if I objected to anything in the editorial col- 
 uras. I have felt if this world is ever brought to God, 
 it will be by the printing press; and while I have for 
 many years been allowed the privilege of preaching the 
 gospel through the religious press all around the world, 
 I wanted to preach the gospel through the secular press 
 beyond these cities, to people who do not go to church 
 and who dislike churches. My enemies have given me 
 the chance. They have told such monstrous lies about 
 
478 
 
 HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 this pulpit and about this church that they have made 
 all the world curious to know what really is said here 
 They have opened the way before me everywhere, in all 
 the cities of this land, so that now the best, the most 
 conscientious, and the most leading papers of the coun- 
 try allow me, week by week, to preach repentance and 
 Christ to the people. And first of ail, now, I thank the 
 secular press of these two cities for their kindness, and 
 after that I publicly thank — for I shall never have any 
 opportunity of doing so save this — the Boston Herald, 
 the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Philadelphia Press, the 
 Times of Philadelphia, the Albany Argus, the Inter- 
 Ocean of Chicago, the Advance of Chicago, the Courier 
 Journal of Louisville, the Times-Journal of St. Louis, 
 the Dispatch of Pittsburg, the Reading Eagle, Penn- 
 sylvania; the Henrietta Journal, of Texas; the Evangel 
 of San Francisco, the Telegraph of St. John, Canada; 
 the Guardian of Toronto, Canada; the Christian Her. 
 aid of Glasgow, Scotland; the Christian Age of Lon- 
 don, the Christian Globe of London, the Oldham 
 Chronicle of Manchester, England; the Liverpool, 
 Protestant, the Southern Cross of Melbourne, Austra- 
 lia; Town and Country of Sidney, Australia; the Words 
 of Grace, of Sidney, Australia, and many others, all 
 around the world. And I want to tell you that when I 
 was called here to take this place, while I received the 
 call from nineteen people, my enemies now give me the op- 
 portunity every week of preaching the gospel to between 
 seven and eight million souls. They have made the cu- 
 riosity to see and hear what I would say, and then the 
 leading, the honorable newspapers of the country have 
 gratified that curiosity. Go on, mine enemies! If you 
 can afford it in your soul I can. So God makes the 
 wrath of men to praise him, and while I thank my 
 friends I thank my enemies. 
 
TLOW MIKiSTJSUS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 479 
 
 But, while the falsehoods to which I have referred 
 may somewhat have stirred your humor, there is a false- 
 hood which strikes a different key, for it invades the 
 sanctity of my home; and, when I tell the story, the fair- 
 minded men and women and children of the land will 
 be indignant. I will read it, so that if any one may 
 want to copy it they can afterward. ("Reading from 
 manuscript.) It has been stated over and over again in 
 private circles, and in newspapers hinted, until tens of 
 thousands of people have heard the report, that sixteen 
 or seventeen years ago I went sailing on the Schuylkill 
 river with my wife and her sister (who was my sister in- 
 law); that the boat capsized, and that having the oppor- 
 tunity of saving either my wife or her sister, I let my 
 wife drown and saved her sister, I marrying her in sixty 
 days I I propose to nail that infamous lie on the fore- 
 head of every villain, man or woman, who shall utter it 
 again, and to invoke the law to help me. One beautiful 
 morning, my own sister by blood relation, Sarah Tal- 
 mage Whiteknack, and her daughter Mary, being on a 
 visit to us in Philadelphia, I proposed that we go to 
 Fairmount Park and make it pleasant for them. With 
 my wife and my only daughter — she being a little child 
 — and my sister Sarah and her daughter, I started for 
 Fairmount. Having just moved to Philadelphia, I was 
 ignorant of the topography of the suburbs. Passing 
 along by the river, 1 saw a boat and proposed a row. I 
 hired the boat and we got in, and not knowing anything 
 of the dam across the river, and unwarned by the keeper 
 of the boat of any danger, I pulled straight for the brink, 
 suspecting nothing until we saw some one wildly waving 
 on the shore as though there were danger. I looked back, 
 and lo! we were already in the current of the dam. 
 With a terror that you cannot imagine I tried to back 
 
4S0 
 
 1I0W MINISTERS ARE LIED AUOUT. 
 
 the boat, but in vain. We went over. The boat cap- 
 sized. My wife instantly disappeared and was drawn 
 under the dam, from which her body was not brought 
 until days after; I, not able to swim a stroke, hanging 
 on the bottom of the boat, my niece hanging on to me, 
 my sister Sarah clinging to the other side of the boat. 
 A boat from shore rescued us. After an hour of effort 
 to resuscitate my child, who was nine-tenths dead — and 
 I can see her blackened body yet, rolling over the barrel, 
 such as is used for restoring the drowned — she breathed 
 again. A carriage came up, and leaving my wife in the 
 bottom of the Schuylkill river, and with my little girl 
 in semi-unconsciousness, and blood issuing from nostril 
 and lip, wrapped in a shawl, on my lap, and with my 
 sister Sarah and her child in the carriage, we rode to our 
 desolated home. Since the world was created a more 
 ghastly and agonizing calamity never happened. And 
 that is the scene over which some ministers of the gos- 
 pel, and men and women pretending to be decent, have 
 made sport. My present wife was not within a hundred 
 miles of the place. So far from being sisters, the two 
 were entire strangers. They never heard of each other, 
 and not until nine months after that tragedy on the 
 Schuylkill did I even know of the existence of my pres- 
 ent wife. Nine months after that calamity on the 
 Schuylkill, she was introduced to me b} T my brother, her 
 pastor, Rev. Goyn Talmage, now of Paramus, New Jer- 
 sey. My first wife's name was Mary R. Avery, a mem- 
 ber of the Reformed Church on Harrison street, South 
 Brooklyn, where there are many hundreds of people who 
 could tell the story. My present wife, I sa} r , was not 
 within a hundred miles of the spot. Her name was 
 Susie Whittemore, and she was a member of the church 
 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where multitudes could tell he 
 
HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 4S1 
 
 story. With multitudes of people on the bank of the 
 Schuylkill who witnessed my landing on that awful day 
 of calamity, and hundreds of people within half an hour's 
 walk of this place who knew Mary Avery, and hundreds 
 of people in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who knew my pres- 
 ent wife, Susie Whittemore — what do you think, hus- 
 bands and wives, fathers and mothers, editors and 
 reporters, of a lie like that manufactured out of the 
 whole cloth? I never have spoken of this subject before, 
 and 1 never shall again; but I give fair notice that, if 
 any two responsible witnesses will give me the name of 
 any responsible person after this affirming this slander, 
 I will pay the informant §100, and I will put upon the 
 criminal vagabond, the loathsome and accursed wretch 
 who utters it, the full force of the law. 
 
 But while I have thus referred to falsehoods and crit- 
 icisms, I want to tell you that in the upturned faces of 
 my congregation, and in the sympathy of a church al- 
 ways indulgent, and in the perpetual blessing ol' God, 
 my ten years here in Brooklyn have been a rapture. 
 Now, as to- the future — for 1 am preaching my anniver- 
 sary sermon — as to the future, I want to be of more 
 service. My ideas of a sermon have all changed. My 
 entire theology has condensed into one word, and that a 
 word of four letters, and that word is "help." Before I 
 select my text, when I come to this pulpit, when I rise 
 to preach, the one thought is: How shall 1 help the peo- 
 ple? And this coming year I mean, if God will give 
 me his spirit, to help young men. They have an awful 
 struggle, and I want to put my arm through their arm 
 with a tight grip, such as an older brother has a right to 
 give a younger brother, and I want to help them through. 
 Many of them have magnificent promise and hope. 1 
 am going to cheer them on up the steps of usefulness 
 31 
 
iS2 
 
 HOW MINISTERS ARE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 and lienor. God help the young men! I get letters 
 every week from somebody in the country, saying: "My 
 son has gone to the city; he is in such a bank, or store, 
 or shop. Will you look after him? He was a good boy 
 at home, but there are many temptations in the city. 
 Pray for him, and counsel him." I want to help the 
 old. They begin to feel in the way; they begin to feel 
 neglected, perhaps. I want at the edge of the snow- 
 bank of old age, to show them the crocus. I want to 
 put in their hands the staff and the rod of the gospel. 
 God bless your gray hairs. I want to help these wives 
 and mothers in the struggle of housekeeping, and in the 
 training of their children for God and for heaven. I 
 want to preach a gospel as appropriate to Martha as to 
 Mary. God help the martyrs of the kitchen, and the 
 martyrs of the drawing-room, and the martyrs of the 
 nursery, and the martyrs of the sewing-machine. I 
 want to help merchants; whether the times are good or 
 bad, they have a struggle. I want to preach a sermon 
 that will last them all the week; when they have notes 
 to pay, and no money to pay them with; when they are 
 abused and assaulted. I want to give them a gospel as 
 appropriate for Wall street, and Broadway, and Chest- 
 nut street, and State street, as for the communion table. 
 I want to help dissipated men who are trying to reform. 
 Instead of coming to them with a patronizing air that 
 seems to say, "How high I am up, and how low you are 
 down," I want to come to them with a manner which 
 seems to say, "If I had been in the same kind of temp- 
 tation 1 would have done worse." I have more interest 
 in the lost sheep that bleats on the mountain than in the 
 ninety-nine sheep asleep in the fold. 1 want to help the 
 bereft. Oh! they are all around us. It seems as if the 
 cry of orphanage and childlessness and widowhood would 
 
HOW MINISTBES ABE LIED ABOUT. 
 
 *513 
 
 never end. Only last Wednesday we carried out a beau- 
 tiful girl of twenty years. Fond parents could not cure her. 
 Doctors could not cure her. Oceanic voyage to Europe 
 could not cure her. She went out over that road over 
 which so many of your loved ones have gone. Oh! we 
 want comfort. This is a world of graves. God makes 
 me the sun of consolation to the troubled. Help for 
 one. Help for all. Help now. "While thip moment the 
 sun rides mid heaven, may the eternal noon of God's 
 pardon and comfort flood your soul. 
 
 I was reading this morning, that when Richard Baxter 
 was preaching on a certain occasion in England, the 
 shock of arms was heard in the distance. Twenty-five 
 thousand men were in combat, but he went on preaching, 
 and the audience sat and listened though they knew that 
 a great conflict was raging. While I preach this morn- 
 ing, I know there is a mightier contest — all heaven and 
 hell in battle array, contending for the mastery of youi 
 immortal spirit. Who shall have it? 
 
 TMr&y pagea are here added to correct omission let pegiag the Ulastr&ttoae. 
 
514 SENSATION VEIiSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 SENSATION VEIISUS STAGNATION. 
 
 There arose no small stir about that way. — Acts xix : 23. 
 
 What was the matter? Paul had been preaching some 
 sermons that seemed to upset everything. People won- 
 dered what he would do next. What is that great bon- 
 fire in the streets of Ephesus? Why, Paul has been 
 preaching against the iniquities of the day until the 
 people have brought out nine thousand dollars' 
 worth of bad books and tumbled them into the fire. 
 There seemed to be no end to his impertinence, for now 
 he is assaulting the Temple of Diana, a building twice 
 as large as St. Paul's Cathedral, London; its roof sup- 
 ported by columns of green jasper; its sculptured altars 
 of Praxiteles; its paintings Parthasius, and its audi- 
 ence-room capable of holding fifty thousand idolaters. 
 In the month of May, when there were a great many 
 strangers in the city, come there to buy medallion rep- 
 resentations of that temple, Paul is thundering against 
 it, until he completely ruins the stock of trinkets and 
 spoils the medallion business, and the merchants gather 
 together in a great indignation mass-meeting to denounce 
 him, and say this thing must stop. Never before or 
 since was there such a sensation. Paul was the great 
 disturber of the day. He went to Iconium, and made 
 a sensation. He went to Corinth, and made a sensation. 
 He went to Jerusalem, and made a sensation. In other 
 wcrds, wherever he went, "there was no small stir about 
 that way." 
 
SEDATION VERSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 What is a sensation? Noah Webster says it is "an 
 excited state of thought or feeling," and I cannot see 
 anything more valuable than that, if the excitement of 
 thought and feeling be in the right direction. But as 
 the word ''conservatism" has been twisted from its noble 
 sense to mean a stupid do-nothingism, and as "liberal- 
 ism" has been twisted from meaning generous treatment 
 of opinions of others to mean a surrender of Christian- 
 ity, so the word "sensation" has sometimes been twisted 
 to mean everything erratic and reprehensible. But this 
 I do declare: No one ever accomplished any good for 
 church or State without exciting a sensation. Sensation 
 is life. Stagnation is death. When sometimes I have 
 been charged with making a sensation 1 have taken it as 
 complimentary, and I have wished that the charge were 
 more thoroughly true, and I promise, if God will help 
 me, in the future I will make it more accurate! 
 
 I go on in this anniversary discourse, begun last Sab- 
 bath, and to-day speak to you chiefly of sensation versus 
 stagnation. When I was a layman, worshiping in the 
 pews, I noticed that religion was very often associated 
 with dullness. I noticed in political conventions where 
 the Governor of the State was to be nominated, all the 
 people were wideawake; but when they came into relig- 
 ious assemblages where Christ was to get coronation, 
 many were somnolent. I saw that in assemblages where 
 financial questions were being discussed people were all 
 attention; but when, in religious assemblages, the ques- 
 tion was whether men should be forever mansioned or 
 forever pauperized, there was but little, ilertness. I noticed 
 in the court-room that when one man was on trial for 
 his life, there was agitation and enthusiasm; but when 
 in religious assemblage the eternal life of five hundred 
 was being discussed, then there was somnolence. I 
 
516 
 
 SENSATION VERSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 noticed what every layman notices and remarks, thai 
 there is something radically wrong in the church of God 
 at this day. In our boyhood days we tried every kind 
 of art to keep awake in church. We ate caraway-seed, 
 and cloves, and cinnamon, and held up one foot until it 
 began to ache, and pinched ourselves until we were black 
 and blue, or got stimulus from an older brother who 
 stuck us with a pin, or saw the reproving look of some 
 older sister that filled us with a sense of self-abnegation, 
 until we looked up to the elders' and deacons' pew in 
 the old Dutch church, and saw the seven sleepers (!) 
 these consecrated men having lost their hold at the end 
 of the second head of the discourse, and then we felt 
 encouraged to think that, after all, there might be some 
 chance for us when such very good men got asleep. 
 What is the use of hiding the fact that there is more 
 sleeping done in the churches than in any other kind of 
 buildings? Many of our churches are great Sunday dor- 
 mitories. Men who are troubled at home with insomnia 
 and cannot sleep on the pillow at night, find in churches 
 sometimes the needed anodyne. What morphine and 
 chloral and pillow of hops cannot do, sometimes the ser- 
 mon and the long prayer accomplish. Said the old 
 Puritan clergyman, "And now, to be brief, eight- 
 eenthly !" Oh, how many arts to appear awake in church ! 
 You have seen men put their heads down on the pew in 
 front, pretending they are overcome with emotion, when 
 they are really overcome with drowsiness. I tell you if 
 we do not keep our audiences awake, it is the fault of us, 
 the clergy, and not the fault of the people. An old 
 Scotch minister, preaching, saw one of his hearers sound 
 asleep, and he said: "Donald, wake up; if you can't 
 keep awake in any other way, take a pinch of snuff.'' 
 "Ah!" said Donald, "Doctor, put the pinch of snuff in 
 
SENSATION VERSUS STAGNATION. 517 
 
 the sermon V With all the artillery of eternity at hand 
 if a man cannot keep his audience awake, it is because 
 he has missed his calling. When men keep taking out 
 their watches during religious services, it is evidence of 
 the fact that they are bored. What would you think of 
 a man at a banquet taking out his watch every few mo- 
 ments to see how soon he could stop eating a cream 
 meringue? The gospel is a banquet, and our populations 
 are starving for it, and their souls must have something 
 to eat, and they have no patience with an entertainment 
 which is all made up of napkin-ring, finger-bowl, and 
 red tape. I put the complaint that the people do not 
 like to come to church where it belongs. I say to the 
 young men who are entering the ministry, if you want 
 an audience, do as Paul did in my text — make a big 
 stir. "There arose no small stir about that way." Men 
 want help. Give them help, and they will come again. 
 What do they care about the conventionalities of relig- 
 ion. How much of your Latin do they understand? 
 What do they know about those sesquipedalion words 
 that crawl through vour senses like thousand-levered 
 worms? They know that your chief 'anxiety is lest you 
 lose your place in your notes. They know it is all a 
 matter of calculation that the soap-lock curl comes down 
 half way on your forehead, so that at the right moment 
 you may brush it away with a hand delicate and dia- 
 monded. What do they care about your Arian contro- 
 versy, when the controversy with them is how they can 
 pay a note of §500 with $200, and how they can get 
 comfort for the child they buried yesterday in Green- 
 wood. I judge other people by myself. I cannot keep 
 awake in a religious service where there is no practicality. 
 I went into a beautiful church for worship. I sat down. 
 The church was not only beautiful, but the singing was 
 
518 
 
 BEN SAITOH VERSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 beautiful, the sermon was beautiful, the organ was bean* 
 tifnl, the minister was beautiful; but there came over me 
 a spirit of somnolence, and I made manful resistance, 
 and after a while I said to my companions, "No use, I 
 can hold out no longer, 99 and I put my head down on 
 the pew in front, and had one of the most refreshing 
 slumbers in all my life! I committed no sin. The man 
 who stood there for three-quarters of an hour with posies, 
 and didactics heavy as lead, was the criminal. As long 
 us we stick to the mere technicalities of religion in our 
 churches, a few people may come because it has been 
 eternally decreed that they should come; but the great 
 masses of the people will not come any more than they 
 would come and sit down in an ice-house, or accept an 
 invitation to spend an evening in the vault of a cemetery. 
 My friends, the great battle in this country is to be 
 fought, not between Christianity and infidelity, but it is i 
 to be fought between honest Christian sensation and pu- 
 trid stagnation. Let the churches of God wake up, hoist 
 their banners, blow the trumpet, give the battle-shout, 
 and in twenty years the earth will be the Lord's. It is 
 high time we brought up the cavalry. The big guns are 
 stuck in the mud. The <*reat danger for the church of 
 God in this day is not sensation, but stagnation. Sensa- 
 tion is life. Stagnation is death. As I told you in the 
 beginning of this discourse last Sabbath, that my fii>t 
 resolution had been to preach a religion six thousand 
 years old appropriate to the present time, so I now tell 
 you, in the second place, that it has been my resolution, 
 God helping me, never to be dull. There is something 
 in our health, there is something in our lack of ventilation 
 that makes us dull. The reason that ministers are the most 
 merciless critics in all the world is not because their 
 hearts are any worse, but because so many of them are 
 
SENSATION VEKSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 519 
 
 troubled with indigestion. The entire draft ifl on the 
 nervous system, and much of their life is a sedentary 
 life, and it is almost impossible for some of them to keep 
 well. TThen I was editor of a religious newspaper and 
 a book came in that I thought ought to be cut to pieces, 
 I always handed it over to a clerical critic who had the 
 worst dyspepsia, and he always cut it to pieces, and cut 
 it to pieces enough. Let us, however, whatever the 
 state of our health be, always fight against dullness, 
 whether in the pew or in the pulpit — whether in the 
 Sunday-school or in the prayer-meeting, and for that 
 reason let us marshal all our faculties. It we have log- 
 ical faculty, harness that. If imagination, harness that. 
 If humor, harness that. If physical exuberance, liar, 
 ness that. There is not anything that is available, in a 
 parlor, or on a lecturing platform, in the art of persuading 
 people to right feeling and right action that is not ap- 
 propriate for the pulpit. I shall before long preach a 
 sermon on the sarcasm of the Bible. Elijah used it. 
 Paul used it Christ used it. If a man say a thing in 
 church merely to make people laugh, he is reprehensi- 
 ble; but if he say a thing so strikingly true that people 
 do laugh, that is another thing. I do not care whether 
 they cry, or laugh, or hiss, or applaud, or get up and go 
 out, or what they do, if they only quit sin and with fleet 
 foot start for heaven. For this purpose we must ransack 
 the mineral, the botanical, the agricultural, the aesthetic, 
 the scientific, the poetic, the literary, the historical, the 
 astronomical worlds for illustration. If we cannot get 
 anything better than two flints, we must smite them 
 together and strike fire. In vain the gold chasing on 
 the hilt of the sword, if the edge of it is not sharp 
 enough to cut. In vain the $100 rod and reel from Cou- 
 roy's, with fly of gold pheasant or gray drake, if we 
 
520 
 
 SENSATION VERSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 cannot eaten anything. In vain the expense of the 
 collegiate and theological education of seven or ten 
 years, if we get hopelessly buried in our own armor 
 During the last war I was chaplain for a few weeks in a 
 Pennsylvania regiment, and I was told one day that there 
 was a cavalryman sick and wounded, and perhaps dying, 
 in a barn four or five miles away. I walked over to see 
 if I could be of any service to him. He asked me to 
 take his horse, which was suffering from lack of atten- 
 tion, and his entire equipment np to headquarters at 
 Hagerstown. I consented, but knew not what I was un- 
 dertaking, for I had on and around me on the horse a 
 heavy sword, a carbine, pistols, saddle-bags, and a great 
 man}?' other things I knew not the names of, and I was 
 so overloaded I had to go on a slow walk and hold fast 
 to the pommel of the McClellan saddle, and when I got 
 half way up to headquarters the girth broke, and I went 
 off, and it was a great job to get loaded up again. In 
 the woods all around about there were stragglers from 
 the Confederate army, but they did not seem at all af- 
 frighted at my warlike appearance! When I rode up to 
 the encampment, and the boys gave three cheers for the 
 chaplain who had been so brave as to capture a horse, 
 my embarrassment exceeded my exhilaration. But I 
 was then in the condition in which a multitude of us are 
 in the ministry to-day — loaded up with equipment 
 enough to slay Apollyon, yet we cannot wield it, and we 
 go along on a slow walk, afraid that our system of di- 
 dactic theology will fall off on one side, or our church his- 
 tory or homiletics will fall off on the other side — carefully 
 guarding to keep our theology right side up, while Da- 
 vid felled Goliath with a shepherd-boy's sling, and 
 Shamgar slew six hundred men with an ox-goad. I be- 
 lieve in the day of eternity it will be found out that some 
 
SENSATION VERSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 521 
 
 backwoods Methodist minister who never had but three 
 months' education in his life, but set all the prairies on 
 fire with zeal for God, and in the summer preached to 
 his audience in his shirt sleeves, will be found to have 
 done more for the race than some of us who have 
 all the titles of the schools, and who wrap around us the 
 gowns and the bands and the surplices, which are not 
 enough to keep us from freezing to death in an ecclesias- 
 ticism twenty degrees below zero! 
 
 But I go further, and tell you in this anniversary ser- 
 mon that in the decade through which we have passed I 
 have tried to carry out the resolution of never ex-plain- 
 ing to you what I do not understand myself. I believe 
 in God's sovereignty and man's free agency. Harmo- 
 nize them I cannot. I believe God is one, and yet in 
 three persons. How that can be I know not. I believe 
 that Christ had in his nature the divine and the human. 
 How they were interjoined I cannot explain. For years 
 I tried to explain these things, but I found that the 
 greatest undertaking of my life was to make other peo- 
 ple understand that which was beyond my comprehen- 
 sion. Sometimes when I had preached on the subject 
 and hoped that it was plainer to the people than it was 
 to myself, and pronounced the benediction, some plain 
 man at the foot of the pulpit would ask me a question 
 which would confound me, and I would have to tell him 
 I would see him some other time! Now, there are some 
 things that I do know. Sin is wrong; that I know. 
 Christ came to help us out of it; that I know. Christ 
 has a sympathy compared with which fatherly and moth- 
 erly compassion is cruelty; that I know. His grace is 
 mighty for mightiest calamity; that I know. The re- 
 ligion of Jesus Christ kindles in the soul great expecta- 
 tions amounting to a supernatural glee; that I know. 
 
522 
 
 SENSATION VERSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 That religion is a sedative to soothe all nervous per turba- 
 tion, that is a stimulus to arouse inertia, that it pulls up 
 by the root the red dahlia of war, and plants instead 
 thereof the white lily of peace; that I know. That it 
 hangs around the dying couch of the Christian the saf- 
 fron, and orange, and purple clouds of a heavenly sunrise, 
 and swings back the gates of glory so wide that they 
 shiver the gates of the sepulcher; that I know. Now, 
 knowing these things beyond all controversy, knowing 
 them beyond all mistake, knowing them from my own 
 experience, or from my own observation, what is the use 
 of my taking your precious time and my precious time 
 in telling you what I do not know? We had a great fire at 
 my house the other day. I burned up five hundred man- 
 uscript sermons, for when I began to preach I wrote out 
 all my sermons, word for word. In those sermons that 
 I burned up I explained all the mysteries of religion, 
 and the doctrine of election was as clear as a Scotch 
 mist or a San Francisco fog. As I stood by the kitchen 
 fire where these manuscripts were burning, I really 
 thought they threw out more warmth than they had 
 ever thrown out before! Really, the best thing you can 
 do with any style of Christian work that has not warmth 
 in it is to burn it. The pulpit and the church ought to 
 be a great fireplace around which the people, benumbed 
 of the cold world, can come and warm their entire na- 
 ture. Stir up the fire around the great back-log and 
 bring all the chairs up closer. There is a severe irony 
 in the usual term descriptive of a minister's notes. when 
 they are called a minister's skeleton. Cold statements 
 of truth are skeletons that weed round them the warmth, 
 the life, and the eternal sympathy of Christ's gospel. 
 There is nothing in romance or novel so enchanting as 
 the religion of Christ, if you see it fairly* but put it 
 
SENSATION VERSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 523 
 
 down on the dissecting-table of sharp analysis a.'id rip 
 its heart out, and you have made it loathsome and a 
 corpse. 
 
 Again, my dear people, in this decade in which it has 
 been my happiness to administer to you, it has been my 
 resolution to smite sin wherever I see it, reckless of the 
 consequences. The reason sin triumphs in this country 
 is because we do not call it by the right name. Minis- 
 ters of the gospel were intended to be the Lord's 
 artillerymen, and to fire away at iniquity wherever they 
 see it, and let other people provide the ambulances. 
 What has been the cause of the excitement over the 
 sermons I have been preach ing for the last three or four 
 months? Because they were awfully true. You see a 
 group of dogs fighting on the commons, and you throw 
 a stone at them. Which one howls? The one that is 
 hit. The worst sign of the times is that the public 
 make so many ministers hush up. You might as well 
 try to stop Asiatic cholera, or yellow fever at Grenada 
 and New Orleans, by saying nothing about them. In 
 order that I might take straig liter aim at iniquity, I 
 went and explored the dark places of our cities. The 
 common sense of the church and of the State approved 
 what I had done. Any man's common sense, if he 
 allowed his common sense to come up, said: " You can 
 not forcibly assault iniquity until you see it." But 
 there were some who did not like the way. They 
 thought I ought to have gone down on Brooklyn Heights, 
 and loaded my gun with blank cartridges, and then 
 aimed over at the Fourth ward, New York, and then 
 turned my head the other way, and shut my eyes and 
 pulled the trigger, and then started for South Bush wick! 
 Because I did not do that way there were some minis- 
 ters almost frantic about my exploration of city life. 
 
524 
 
 SENSATION VERSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 They believed in the exploration of Africa by Stanley, 
 and the exploration of the heart of the North American 
 continent by Fremont, but were afraid of the explora- 
 tion of worse heathenism within five minutes of the City 
 Hall of Brooklyn and within five minutes of Broadway, 
 New York. To hear some of my dear brethren talk, you 
 would have supposed I had been the first clergyman that 
 had ever made an exploration of underground life in our 
 great cities. Why I could call off the names of scores 
 of ministers and evangelists in the country who have 
 made the same tour. The police who took me around 
 those nights told me thev had taken them around on the 
 same rounds. I could make a big disturbance, if I had 
 the heart, in a great many churches in Brooklyn and 
 New York; but I never make any disturbance! The 
 difference between my exploration and the exploration 
 of these other dear brethren was, that they said nothing 
 about it, except among ministerial brethren, while I 
 uttered it in the hearing of my people, announcing the 
 thunders of the Lord God Almighty against the crimes 
 and warning the young men of this country to look out. 
 The bar of God will decide which was the better plan — 
 to look at iniquity and say nothing about it, or to look at 
 iniquity and give the warning, not only so far as I may 
 reach from this platform, but through these journalists, 
 whom I shall, to the day of my death, thank for their 
 kindness. I preached some years ago in this place, 
 about the average American theater, and the people all 
 over said: u Why, you are talking about the theater, the 
 historical theater as it was two or three hundred years 
 ago; if you want to see the theater as it is now, or know 
 about it, go and look for yourself." I saw there was 
 force in the criticism, and I tell you if ever I treat those 
 subjects again I shall first personally make a tour of the 
 
SENSATION VERSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 525 
 
 theaters, and I shall see who is there and I shall see 
 what kind of'plays they have. Iam done looking through 
 other people's spectacles! God has given me two first, 
 rate eyes, and I am going to use them. But whether I de- 
 nounce sin, or commend Christ to you, my dear congre- 
 gation, I will always choose the most startling and 
 arousing theme I can find, and bring to it the most start- 
 ling and arousing illustrations I can think of, trying to 
 produce the most startling and arousing results, willing, 
 if I can save men, to be called by all the world a 
 sensationalist. In this great lawsuit between Sin, Sen- 
 sation the plaintiff, versus Stagnation, the defendant, I 
 appear as attorney for the plaintiff. 
 
 But once more and this will close these anniversary 
 thoughts which I have been presenting for two Sabbaths. 
 I have tried to present to you a religion which would not 
 leave a man in the lurch. 'What was the trouble with 
 those trains that came out from Chicago, a week ago 
 last Thursday? They started out beautifully and swiftly, 
 but they came to the snow-banks and stopped, and the 
 trains were disbanded. Oh! my friends, we want to get 
 on a through train. We do not want a religion which 
 takes us smoothly through this life, merely for a few 
 miles on earth, and then puts us out at the snow-bank of 
 a cheerless grave. No! You may take that train. I will 
 not take it. I will start on a highway where the marble 
 of the tomb is only the mile-stone on a road always 
 brightening and improving. "Come with us and we 
 will do you good; for the Lord hath promised concern- 
 ing Israel." I have told the men who feel themselves to 
 be the worst, that Christ died for them, and they have 
 come. And now this morning, I want you all to join 
 me on this path to heaven. It is all tracked up. Exam- 
 ine these tracks in the dust of the road. Ah! those are 
 
526 SENSATION VERSUS STAGNATION. 
 
 little feet that have been tracking the road. Have you 
 lost children? They went up this way. I see their 
 tracks on the road. But here there are larger footsteps 
 but footsteps that were very short — very short steps, as 
 though they were the steps of the aged. Is your father 
 gone? Is your mother gone? They went up this way. 
 And behold! in the track of the road I see the mark of 
 a foot that was bare, and a scar in the hollow of the 
 foot. Oh! it was the footstep of a wounded Christ. 
 This is the way — walk ye in it.