New Tabernacle Sermons Part 18

About sixty-five years ago a student at Andover Theological Seminary graduated into the ministry. He had an eloquence and a magnetism which sent him to the front. Nothing could stand before him. But in a few months he was put in an insane asylum, and the physician said tobacco was the cause of the disaster. It was the custom in those days to give a portion of tobacco to every patient in the asylum. Nearly twenty years pa.s.sed along, and that man was walking the floor of his cell in the asylum, when his reason returned, and he saw the situation, and he took the tobacco from his mouth and threw it against the iron gate of the place in which he was confined, and he said: "What brought me here? What keeps me here? Tobacco! tobacco! G.o.d forgive me, G.o.d help me, and I will never use it again." He was fully restored to reason, came forth, preached the Gospel of Christ for some ten years, and then went into everlasting blessedness.

There are ministers of religion now in this country who are dying by inches, and they do not know what is the matter with them. They are being killed by tobacco. They are despoiling their influence through tobacco. They are malodorous with tobacco. I could give one paragraph of history, and that would be my own experience. It took ten cigars to make one sermon, and I got very nervous, and I awakened one day to see what an outrage I was committing upon my health by the use of tobacco.

I was about to change settlement, and a generous tobacconist of Philadelphia told me if I would come to Philadelphia and be his pastor he would give me all the cigars I wanted for nothing all the rest of my life. I halted. I said to myself, "If I smoke more than I ought to now in these war times, and when my salary is small, what would I do if I had gratuitous and unlimited supply?" Then and there, twenty-four years ago, I quit once and forever. It made a new man of me. Much of the time the world looked blue before that, because I was looking through tobacco smoke. Ever since the world has been full of suns.h.i.+ne, and though I have done as much work as any one of my age, G.o.d has blessed me, it seems to me, with the best health that a man ever had.

I say that no minister of religion can afford to smoke. Put in my hand all the money expended by Christian men in Brooklyn for tobacco, and I will support three orphan asylums as well and as grandly as the three great orphan asylums already established. Put into my hand the money spent by the Christians of America for tobacco, and I will clothe, shelter, and feed all the suffering poor of the continent. The American Church gives a million dollars a year for the salvation of the heathen, and American Christians smoke five million dollars' worth of tobacco.

I stand here to-day in the presence of a vast mult.i.tude of young people who are forming their habits. Between seventeen and twenty-five years of age a great many young men get on them habits in the use of tobacco that they never get over. Let me say to all my young friends, you can not afford to smoke, you can not afford to chew. You either take very good tobacco, or you take very cheap tobacco. If it is cheap, I will tell you why it is cheap. It is made of burdock, and lampblack, and sawdust, and colt's-foot, and plantain leaves, and fuller's earth, and salt, and alum, and lime, and a little tobacco, and you can not afford to put such a mess as that in your mouth. But if you use expensive tobacco, do you not think it would be better for you to take that amount of money which you are now expending for this herb, and which you will expend during the course of your life if you keep the habit up, and with it buy a splendid farm and make the afternoon and the evening of your life comfortable?

There are young men whose life is going out inch by inch from cigarettes. Now, do you not think it would be well for you to listen to the testimony of a merchant of New York, who said this: "In early life I smoked six cigars a day at six and a half cents each. They averaged that. I thought to myself one day, I'll just put aside all I consume in cigars and all I would consume if I keep on in the habit, and I'll see what it will come to by compound interest." And he gives this tremendous statistic: "Last July completed thirty-nine years since, by the grace of G.o.d, I was emanc.i.p.ated from the filthy habit, and the saving amounted to the enormous sum of $29,102.03 by compound interest. We lived in the city, but the children, who had learned something of the enjoyment of country life from their annual visits to their grandparents, longed for a home among the green fields. I found a very pleasant place in the country for sale. The cigar money came into requisition, and I found it amounted to a sufficient sum to purchase the place, and it is mine. Now, boys, you take your choice.

Smoking without a home, or a home without smoking." This is common sense as well as religion.

I must say a word to my friends who smoke the best tobacco, and who could stop at any time. What is your Christian influence in this respect? What is your influence upon young men? Do you not think it would be better for you to exercise a little self-denial! People wondered why George Briggs, Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, wore a cravat but no collar. "Oh," they said, "it is an absurd eccentricity." This was the history of the cravat without any collar: For many years before he had been talking with an inebriate, trying to persuade him to give up the habit of drinking and he said to the inebriate, "Your habit is entirely unnecessary." "Ah!" replied the inebriate, "we do a great many things that are not necessary. It isn't necessary that you should have that collar." "Well," said Mr. Briggs, "I'll never wear a collar again if you will stop drinking." "Agreed," said the other.

They joined hands in a pledge that they kept for twenty years--kept until death. That is magnificent. That is Gospel, practical Gospel, worthy of George Briggs, worthy of you. Self-denial for others.

Subtraction from our advantage that there may be an addition to somebody else's advantage.

But what I have said has been chiefly appropriate for men. Now my subject widens and shall be appropriate for both s.e.xes. In all ages of the world there has been a search for some herb or flower that would stimulate lethargy and compose grief. Among the ancient Greeks and Egyptians they found something they called nepenthe, and the Theban women knew how to compound it. If a person should chew a few of those leaves his grief would be immediately whelmed with hilarity. Nepenthe pa.s.sed out from the consideration of the world and then came hasheesh, which is from the Indian hemp. It is manufactured from the flowers at the top. The workman with leathern apparel walks through the field and the exudation of the plants adheres to the leathern garments, and then the man comes out and sc.r.a.pes off this exudation, and it is mixed with aromatics and becomes an intoxicant that has brutalized whole nations.

Its first effect is sight, spectacle glorious and grand beyond all description, but afterward it pulls down body, mind, and soul into anguish.

I knew one of the most brilliant men of our time. His appearance in a newspaper column, or a book, or a magazine was an enchantment. In the course of a half hour he could produce more wit and more valuable information than any man I ever heard talk. But he chewed hasheesh. He first took it out of curiosity to see whether the power said to be attached really existed. He took it. He got under the power of it. He tried to break loose. He put his hand in the c.o.c.katrice's den to see whether it would bite, and he found out to his own undoing. His friends gathered around and tried to save him, but he could not be saved. The father, a minister of the Gospel, prayed with him and counseled him, and out of a comparatively small salary employed the first medical advice of New York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris, London, and Berlin, for he was his only son. No help came. First his body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering. Then his mind gave way and he became a raving maniac. Then his soul went out blaspheming G.o.d into a starless eternity. He died at thirty years of age. Behold the work of accursed hasheesh.

But I must put my emphasis upon the use of opium. It is made from the white poppy. It is not a new discovery. Three hundred years before Christ we read of it; but it was not until the seventh century that it took up its march of death, and, pa.s.sing out of the curative and the medicinal, through smoking and mastication it has become the curse of nations. In 1861 there were imported into this country one hundred and seven thousand pounds of opium. In 1880, nineteen years after, there were imported five hundred and thirty thousand pounds of opium. In 1876 there were in this country two hundred and twenty-five thousand opium-consumers. Now, it is estimated there are in the United States to-day six hundred thousand victims of opium. It is appalling.

We do not know why some families do not get on. There is something mysterious about them. The opium habit is so stealthy, it is so deceitful, and it is so deathful, you can cure a hundred men of strong drink where you can cure one opium-eater.

I have knelt down in this very church by those who were elegant in apparel, and elegant in appearance, and from the depths of their souls and from the depths of my soul, we cried out for G.o.d's rescue. Somehow it did not come. In many a household only the physician and pastor know it--the physician called in for physical relief, the pastor called in for spiritual relief, and they both fail. The physician confesses his defeat, the minister of religion confesses his defeat, for somehow G.o.d does not seem to hear a prayer offered for an opium-eater. His grace is infinite, and I have been told there are cases of reformation. I never saw one. I say this not to wound the feelings of any who may feel this awful grip, but to utter a potent warning that you stand back from that gate of h.e.l.l. Oh, man, oh, woman, tampering with this great evil, have you fallen back on this as a permanent resource because of some physical distress or mental anguish? Better stop. The ecstasies do not pay for the horrors. The Paradise is followed too soon by the Pandemonium. Morphia, a blessing of G.o.d for the relief of sudden pang and of acute dementia, misappropriated and never intended for permanent use.

It is not merely the barbaric fanatics that are taken down by it. Did you ever read De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium-Eater?" He says that during the first ten years the habit handed to him all the keys of Paradise, but it would take something as mighty as De Quincey's pen to describe the consequent horrors. There is nothing that I have ever read about the tortures of the d.a.m.ned that seemed more horrible than those which De Quincey says he suffered. Samuel Taylor Coleridge first conquered the world with his exquisite pen, and then was conquered by opium. The most brilliant, the most eloquent lawyer of the nineteenth century went down under its power, and there is a vast mult.i.tude of men and women--but more women than men--who are going into the dungeon of that awful incarceration.

The worst thing about it is, it takes advantage of one's weakness. De Quincey says: "I got to be an opium-eater on account of my rheumatism." Coleridge says: "I got to be an opium-eater on account of my sleeplessness." For what are you taking it? For G.o.d's sake do not take it long. The wealthiest, the grandest families going down under its power. Twenty-five thousand victims of opium in Chicago.

Twenty-five thousand victims of opium in St. Louis, and, according to that average, seventy-five thousand victims of opium in New York and Brooklyn.

The clerk of a drug store says: "I can tell them when they come in; there is something about their complexion, something about their manner, something about the look of their eyes that shows they are victims." Some in the struggle to get away from it try chloral. Whole tons of chloral manufactured in Germany every year. Baron Liebig says he knows one chemist in Germany who manufactures a half ton of chloral every week. Beware of hydrate of chloral. It is coming on with mighty tread to curse these cities. But I am chiefly under this head speaking of the morphine. The devil of morphia is going to be in this country, in my opinion, mightier than the devil of alcohol. By the power of the Christian pulpit, by the power of the Christianized printing-press, by the power of the Lord G.o.d Almighty, all these evils are going to be extirpated--all, all, and you have a work in regard to that, and I have a work. But what we do we had better do right away. The clock ticks now, and we hear it; after awhile the clock will tick and we will not hear it.

I sat at a country fireside, and I saw the fire kindle and blaze, and go out. I sat long enough at that fireside to get a good many practical reflections, and I said: "That is like human life, that fire on the hearth." We put on the f.a.gots and they blaze up, and out, and on, and the whole room is filled with the light, gay of sparkle, gay of flash, gay of crackle. Emblem of boyhood. Now the fire intensifies.

Now the flame reddens into coals. Now the heat is becoming more and more intense, and the more it is stirred the redder is the coal. Now with one sweep of flame it cleaves the way, and all the hearth glows with the intensity. Emblem of full manhood. Now the coals begin to whiten. Now the heat lessens. Now the flickering shadows die along the wall. Now the f.a.gots fall apart. Now the household hover over the expiring embers. Now the last breath of smoke is lost in the chimney.

The fire is out. Shovel up the white remains. Ashes! Ashes!

WHY ARE SATAN AND SIN PERMITTED?

"Wherefore do the wicked live?"--JOB xxi: 7,

Poor Job! With tusks and horns and hoofs and stings, all the misfortunes of life seemed to come upon him at once. Bankruptcy, bereavement, scandalization, and eruptive disease so irritating that he had to re-enforce his ten finger-nails with pieces of earthenware to scratch himself withal. His wife took the diagnosis of his complaints and prescribed profanity. She thought he would feel better if between the paroxysms of grief and pain he would swear a little.

For each boil a plaster of objurgation.

Probably no man was ever more tempted to take the bad advice than when, at last, Job's three exasperating friends came in, Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad, practically saying to him, "You old sinner, serves you right; you are a hypocrite; what a sight you are! G.o.d has sent these chastis.e.m.e.nts for your wickedness."

The disfigured invalid, putting down the pieces of broken saucer with which he had been rubbing his arms, with swollen eyelids looks up and says to his garrulous friends in substance, "The most wicked people sometimes have the best health and are the most prospered," and then in that connection hurls the question which every man and woman has asked in some juncture of affairs, "Wherefore do the wicked live?"

They build up fortunes that overshadow the earth. They confound all the life-insurance tables on the subject of longevity, dying octogenarians, perhaps nonagenarians, possibly centenarians. Ahab in the palace, Naboth in the cabinet. Unclean Herod on the throne, consecrated Paul twisting ropes for tent-making. Mana.s.seh, the worst of all the kings of Juda, living longer than any of them. While the general rule is the wicked do not live out half their days, there are exceptions where they live on to great age and in a Paradise of beauty and luxuriance, and die with a whole college of physicians expending its skill in trying further prolongation of life, and have a funeral with casket under mountain of calla-lilies, the finest equipages of the city jingling and flas.h.i.+ng into line, the poor, angle-worm of the dust carried out to its hole in the ground with the pomp that might make a spirit from some other world suppose that the Archangel Michael was dead.

Go up among the finest residences of the city, and on some of the door-plates you will find the names of those mightiest for commercial and social iniquity. They are the vampires of society--they are the gorgons of the century. Some of these men have each wheel of their carriage a juggernaut wet with the blood of those sacrificed to their avarice. Some of them are like Caligula, who wished that all the people had only one neck that he might strike it off at one blow. Oh, the slain, the slain! A long procession of usurers and libertines and infamous quacks and legal charlatans and world-grabbing monsters. What apostles.h.i.+p of despoliation! Demons incarnate. Hundreds of men concentering all their energies of body, mind, and soul in one prolonged, ever-intensifying, and unrelenting effort to scald and scarify and blast and consume the world. I do not blame you for asking me the quivering, throbbing, burning, resounding, appalling question of my text, "Wherefore do the wicked live?"

In the first place, they live to demonstrate beyond all controversy the long-suffering patience of G.o.d. You sometimes say, under some great affront, "I will not stand it;" but perhaps you are compelled to stand it. G.o.d, with all the batteries of omnipotence loaded with thunderbolts, stands it century after century. I have no doubt sometimes an angel comes to Him and suggests, "Now is the time to strike." "No," says G.o.d; "wait a year, wait twenty years, wait a century, wait five centuries." What G.o.d does is not so wonderful as what He does not do. He has the reserve corps with which He could strike Mormonism and Mohammedanism and Paganism from the earth in a day. He could take all the fraud in New York on the west side of Broadway and hurl it into the Hudson, and all the fraud on the east side of Broadway and hurl it into the East River in an hour. He understands the combination lock of every dishonest money-safe, and could blow it up quicker than by any earthly explosive. Written all over the earth, written all over history are the words, "Divine forbearance, divine leniency, divine long-suffering."

I wonder that G.o.d did not burn this world up two thousand years ago, scattering its ashes into immensity, its aerolites dropping into other worlds to be kept in their museums as specimens of a defunct planet. People sometimes talk of G.o.d as though He were hasty in His judgments and as though He snapped men up quick. Oh, no! He waited one hundred and twenty years for the people to get into the ark, and warned them all the time--one hundred and twenty years, then the flood came. The Anchor Line gives only a month's announcement of the sailing of the "Circa.s.sia," the White Star Line gives only a month's announcement of the sailing of the "Britannic," the Cunard Line gives only a month's announcement of the sailing of the "Oregon;" but of the sailing of that s.h.i.+p that Noah commanded G.o.d gave one hundred and twenty years' announcement and warning. Patience antediluvian, patience postdiluvian, patience in times Adamic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, Pauline, Lutheran, Whitefieldian. Patience with men and nations. Patience with barbarisms and civilizations. Six thousand years of patience! Overtopping attribute of G.o.d, all of whose attributes are immeasurable. Why do the wicked live? That their overthrow may be the more impressive and climacteric. They must pile up their mischief until all the community shall see it, until the nation shall see it, until all the world shall see it. The higher it goes up the harder it will come down and the grander will be the divine vindication.

G.o.d will not allow sin to sneak out of the world. G.o.d will not allow it merely to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by default because no one appears against it. G.o.d will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on Mount Was.h.i.+ngton and the other on the Himalaya, it would not be any more conspicuous.

About fifteen years ago we had in this country a most ill.u.s.trious instance of how G.o.d lets a man go on in iniquity, so that at the close of the career his overthrow may be the more impressive, full of warning and climacteric. First, an honest chairmaker, then an alderman, then a member of congress, then a supervisor of a city, then school commissioner, then state senator, then commissioner of public works--on and up, stealing thousands of dollars here and thousands of dollars there, until the malfeasance in office overtopped anything the world had ever seen--making the new Court House in New York a monument of munic.i.p.al crime, and rus.h.i.+ng the debt of the city from thirty-six million dollars to ninety-seven millions. Now, he is at the top of millionairedom.

Country-seat terraced and arbored and parterred clear to the water's brink. Horses enough to stock a king's equerry. Grooms and postilions in full rig. Wine cellars enough to make a whole legislature drunk.

New York finances and New York politics in his vest pocket. He winked, and men in high place fell. He lifted his little finger, and ignoramuses took important office. He whispered, and in Albany and Was.h.i.+ngton they said it thundered. Wider and mightier and more baleful his influence, until it seemed as if Pandemonium was to be adjourned to this world, and in the Satanic realm there was to be a change of administration, and Apollyon, who had held dominion so long, should have a successful compet.i.tor.

To bring all to a climax, a wedding came in the house of that man.

Diamonds as large as hickory nuts. A pin of sixty diamonds representing sheaves of wheat. Musicians in a semicircle, half-hidden by a great harp of flowers. s.h.i.+ps of flowers. Forty silver sets, one of them with two hundred and forty pieces. One wedding-dress that cost five thousand dollars. A famous libertine, who owned several Long Island Sound steamboats, and not long before he was shot for his crimes, sent as a wedding present to that house a frosted silver iceberg, with representations of arctic bears walking on icicle-handles and ascending the spoons. Was there ever such a convocation of pictures, bronzes, of bric-a-brac, of grandeurs, social grandeurs? The highest wave of New York splendor rolled into that house and recoiled perhaps never again to rise so high. But just at that time, when all earthly and infernal observation was concentered on that man, eternal justice, impersonated by that wonder of the American bar, Charles O'Connor, got on the track of the offender.

First arraignment, then sentence to twelve years' imprisonment under twelve indictments, then penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, then a lawsuit against him for six million dollars, then incarceration in Ludlow Street jail, then escape to foreign land, to be brought back under the stout grip of the constabulary, then dying of broken heart in a prison cell. G.o.d allowed him to go on in iniquity until all the world saw as never before that "the way of the transgressor is hard,"

and that dishonesty will not declare permanent dividends, and that you had better be an honest chairmaker with a day's wages at a time than a brilliant commissioner of public works, all your pockets crammed with plunder.

What a brilliant figure in history is William the Conqueror, the intimidator of France, of Anjou, of Brittany, victor at Hastings, s.n.a.t.c.hing the crown of England and setting it on his own brow, destroying homesteads that he might have a larger game forest, making a Doomsday Book by which he could keep the whole land under despotic espionage, proclaiming war in revenge for a joke uttered in regard to his obesity. Harvest fields and vineyards going down under the cavalry hoof. Nations horror-struck. But one day while at the apex of all observation he is riding out and the horse put his hoof on a hot cinder, throwing the king so violently against the pommel of the saddle that he dies, his son hastening to England to get the crown before the breath has left his father's body.

The imperial corpse drawn by a cart, most of the attendants leaving it in the street because of a fire alarm that they might go off and see the conflagration. And just as they are going to put his body down in the church which he had built, a man stepping up and saying, "Bishop, the man you praise is a robber. This church stands on my father's homestead. The property on which this church is built is mine. I reclaim my right. In the name of Almighty G.o.d I forbid you to bury the king here, or to cover him with my glebe." "Go up," said the ambition of William the Conqueror. "Go up by conquest, go up by throne, go up in the sight of all nations, go up by cruelties." But one day G.o.d said, "Come down, come down by the way of a miserable death, come down by the way of an ignominious obsequies, come down in the sight of all nations, come clear down, come down forever." And you and I see the same thing on a smaller scale many and many a time--ill.u.s.trations of the fact that G.o.d lets the wicked live that He may make their overthrow the more climacteric.

What is true in regard to sin is true in regard to its author, Satan, called Abaddon, called the Prince of the Power of the Air, called the serpent, called the dragon. It seems to me any intelligent man must admit that there is a commander-in-chief of all evil.

The Persians called him Ahriman, the Hindus called him Siva. He was represented on canvas as a mythological combination of Thor and Cerberus and Pan and Vulcan and other horrible addenda. I do not care what you call him, that monster of evil is abroad, and his one work is destruction. John Milton almost glorified him by witchery of description, but he is the concentration of all meanness and of all despicability. My little child, seven years of age, said to her mother one day, "Why don't G.o.d kill the devil at once, and have done with it?" In less terse phrase we have all asked the same question. The Bible says he is to be imprisoned and he is to be chained down. Why not heave the old miscreant into his dungeon now? Does it not seem as if his volume of infamy were complete? Does it not seem as if the last fifty years would make an appropriate peroration? No; G.o.d will let him go on to the top of all bad endeavor, and then when all the earth and all constellations and galaxies and all the universe are watching, G.o.d will hurl him down with a violence and ghastliness enough to persuade five hundred eternities that a rebellion against G.o.d must perish. G.o.d will not do it by piecemeal, G.o.d will not do it by small skirmish. He will wait until all the troops are ma.s.sed, and then some day when in defiant and confident mood, at the head of his army, this Goliath of h.e.l.l stalks forth, our champion, the son of David, will strike him down, not with smooth stones from the brook, but with fragments from the Rock of Ages. But it will not be done until this giant of evil and his holy antagonist come out within full sight of the two great armies. The tragedy is only postponed to make the overthrow more impressive and climacteric. Do not fret. If G.o.d can afford to wait you can afford to wait. G.o.d's clock of destiny strikes only once in a thousand years. Do not try to measure events by the second-hand on your little time-piece. Sin and Satan go on only that their overthrow may at last be the more terrific, the more impressive, the more resounding, the more climacteric.

Why do the wicked live? In order that they may build up fortresses for righteousness to capture. Have you not noticed that G.o.d harnesses men, bad men, and accomplishes good through them? Witness Cyrus, witness Nebuchadnezzar, witness the fact that the Bastile of oppression was pried open by the bayonets of a bad man. Recently there came to me the fact that a college had been built at the Far West for infidel purposes. There was to be no nonsense of chapel prayers, no Bible reading there. All the professors there were p.r.o.nounced infidels. The college was opened, and the work went on, but, of course, failed. Not long ago a Presbyterian minister was in a bank in that village on purposes of business, and he heard in an adjoining room the board of trustees of that college discussing what they had better do with the inst.i.tution, as it did not get on successfully, and one of the trustees proposed that it be handed over to the Presbyterians, prefacing the word Presbyterians with a very unhappy expletive. The resolutions were pa.s.sed, and that fortress of infidelity has become a fortress of old-fas.h.i.+oned, orthodox religion, the only religion that will be worth a snap of your finger when you come to die or appear in the Day of Judgment. The devil built the college. Righteousness captured it.

In some city there goes up a great club-house--the architecture, the furniture, all the equipment a bedazzlement of wealth. That particular club-house is designed to make gambling and dissipation respectable.

Do not fret. That splendid building will after a while be a free library, or it will be a hospital, or it will be a gallery of pure art. Again and again observatories have been built by infidelity, and the first thing you know they go into the hand of Christian science.

G.o.d said in the Bible that He would put a hook in Sennacherib's nose and pull him down by a way he knew not. And G.o.d has a hook to-day in the nose of every Sennacherib of infidelity and sin, and will drag him about as He will. Marble halls deserted to sinful amus.e.m.e.nts will yet be dedicated for religious a.s.semblage. All these castles of sin are to be captured for G.o.d as we go forth with the battle-shout that Oliver Cromwell rang out at the head of his troops as he rode in on the field of Naseby: "Let G.o.d arise and let His enemies be scattered!" After a great fire in London, amid the ruins there was nothing left but an arch with the name of the architect upon it; and, my friends, whatever else goes down, G.o.d stays up.

Why do the wicked live? That some of them may be monuments of mercy.

So it was with John Newton, so it was with Augustine, perhaps so it was with you. Chieftains of sin to become chieftains of grace. Paul, the apostle, made out of Saul, the persecutor. Baxter, the flaming evangel, made out of Baxter, the blasphemer. Whole squadrons, with streamers of Emmanuel floating from the masthead, though once they were launched from the dry-docks of diabolism. G.o.d lets these wicked men live that He may make jewels out of them for coronets, that He may make tongues of fire out of them for Pentecosts, that He may make warriors out of them for Armageddons, that he may make conquerors out of them for the day when they shall ride at the head of the white-horse host in the grand review of the resurrection.

Why do the wicked live? To make it plain beyond all controversy that there is another place of adjustment. So many of the bad up, so many of the good down. It seems to me that no man can look abroad without saying--no man of common sense, religious or irreligious, can look abroad without saying, "There must be some place where brilliant scoundrelism shall be arrested, where innocence shall get out from under the heel of despotism." Common fairness as well as eternal justice demands it.

We adjourn to the great a.s.sizes, the stupendous injustices of this life. They are not righted here. There must be some place where they will be righted. G.o.d can not afford to omit the judgment day or the reconstruction of conditions. For you can not make me believe that that man stuffed with all abomination, having devoured widows' houses and digested them, looking with basilisk or tigerish eyes upon his fellows, no music so sweet to him as the sound of breaking hearts, is, at death, to get out of the landau at the front door of the sepulcher and pa.s.s right on through to the back door of the sepulcher, and find a celestial turnout waiting for him, so that he can drive tandem right up primrosed hills, one glory riding as lackey ahead, and another glory riding as postilion behind, while that poor woman who supported her invalid husband and her helpless children by taking in was.h.i.+ng and ironing, often putting her hand to her side where the cancerous trouble had already begun, and dropping dead late on Sat.u.r.day night while she was preparing the garments for the Sabbath day, coming afoot to the front door of the sepulcher, shall pa.s.s through to the back door of the sepulcher and find nothing waiting, no one to welcome, no one to tell her the way to the King's gate. I will not believe it.

Solomon was confounded in his day by what he represents as princes afoot and beggars a-horseback, but I tell you there must be a place and a time when the right foot will get into the stirrup. To demonstrate beyond all controversy that there is another place for adjustment, G.o.d lets the wicked live.

Why do the wicked live? For the same reason that He lets us live--to have time for repentance.